Et tu, Cthulhu

Right. I’ve written a little script for Cacti, and I’m going to use it to show Telmex just what I mean by “intermittent DSL downtime”.

The orange bars indicate service outage. Every time this happens, my IP changes as an additional bonus. This has been going on since I got the subscription months ago, and despite numerous complaints and their seemingly sincere attempts at fixing the problem, nothing has changed. Pity me.

Update: I made the trivial script available. It takes one input (host to ping) and returns two outputs (avg latency and loss %).

Federico and I had one of our long, meandering discussions today, touching on a range of topics. One of the things we’ve been talking about recently is how to get beginners interested in the fundamentals of computing, including how said fundamentals should be taught, and how to enable exploration. We agreed that since the 80s, computers have become easier to use (for mundane tasks), but in many instances also harder to program.

For instance, one of the exciting things we could do when we were kids was make the computer draw pixels on the screen. When you learn how to do this, the possibilities for further exploration are endless (no I’m not coming out to play, I’m pushing pixels!). Maybe you’d show off your first wicked graphics hack (random pixel spray #5) to your dad, and he’d go “oooh,” and reward you with a floppy disk on which to save it. After a while, and with some help, you’d be exploring curves, fractals, automata or perhaps a Snake clone of some sort. Eventually you’d grow up and be excited about serious shit.

So how would you go about doing that today, on a PC running GNU/Linux? The answer is, you need to learn an API. If you’re lucky, someone will set you up with a sandbox, or you’ll run into SVGALib and get it to work on your graphics adapter. If you’re unlucky, you’ll try to do it with a GUI toolkit - and fail. Case in point, GtkDrawingArea takes some figuring out. You must be a very motivated beginner if you’re ever going to see your pixel using that.

Now, for fun-loving hackers who somehow do manage to produce pixels and such, I have a book recommendation; it’s called The Magic Machine, and is a gold mine of fun hacks, based on a column in Scientific American from back when it didn’t suck quite as much. Ignore the title and cheesy cover - the book introduces topics like fractals, artificial life and text processing (including markov chaining) in a way that makes for easy implementation, but without being tied to any specific architecture, technology or knowledge base. I lost my copy somewhere between Fredrikstad, Norway and Xalapa, Mexico, but I remember it as one of the books that got me excited about programming. Technology books like XML in a Nutshell don’t do that.

Got a new boiler installed today. This one is automatic, so we now have hot water on demand - which means I can stumble out of bed and directly into the shower, instead of getting dressed, stumbling outside, fiddling with flammable gas supply, stumbling back inside, staring at my desk for 20 minutes, undressing, showering and remembering to turn the boiler back off. Quite an improvement.

Telmex has been dicking around with my precious Internet all day. After weeks of different technicians demanding I cycle the modem’s power, replace my filters, replace most of my phone cabling (which I, out of sheer desperation, let them do), &c, they’ve been slowly arriving at the conclusion I suggested to begin with: Something’s wrong at the central.

I’ve been patient, letting them do their thing by the book, remembering that if 1) you fail to listen to an engineer and 2) something bad happens, you may be subject to 3) additional screwage, even if 1) and 2) are unrelated.

The central may apparently take another couple of days to fix. To their credit, though, this hasn’t cost me a thing apart from my copious spare time.

Elves are overrated.

Entish

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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