Ramble for March 30th This page is under construction. I would like to take a minute to praise Linux. I am amazed what my Linux box "skug" can take. I have (and have had) 50 to 60 windows open around the clock... spread across 5 virtual desktops at a resolution of 1600x1200, all 5 are full, and multi-layered. I have netscape windows, nedit windows, console windows, the GIMP, star office, and possibly more open. I have telnets to three different linux boxes open, two of them very active. I am running most of this stuff remotely. The computer has been up for almost 33 days without a reboot now, and except for today when I attempted to run 2 GL sessions at once (which seems to be a bad thing), I have not even had to do so much as restart Xwindows (the computer didn't crash, Xwindows just died). This completely blows any other OS out of the water that I have ever used, and I have used both Mac OS and Windows quite a bit. To add to this perhaps amazing feat of Linux, I have been running seti@home non-stop all these 33 days, and I have run very processor intensive GL for hours on top of that, and everything else. Also, I am running this all on an overclocked (by 25%) processor, with 160 megs of RAM, which is almost always used up 100%, yet this thing never has to use swap space. Which I can see from the Xosview that has been running for weeks, flawlessly, right next to licq and the Xosview showing "skud," my other Linux box. The compiling for this project as well as the AI muscle work has been done remotely on my other Linux box. Its a dual celeron, but unfortunately its motherboard is a little flaky, and so it crashes every few weeks. Other than that, though, this setup is really nice for this project because I am able to offload all of the AI-number crunching and leave the graphics to gobble up everything on my terminal computer. That is another thing you can't do with windows or mac OS. This remote-running nature of Linux allows me to do things like run this project at full speed while working on this webpage, as I am doing now, with minimal slowdown and maximum processing. Between these two boxes, the system load hovers around 6 (about half due to seti) when I am running the project, and would go higher should I ever find a good place to use both of skud's processors. At this very moment, I am running and re-running the project looking for an intermittent error I've been seeing, and I can hardly even tell and difference in performance doing other things. This is not to say that I couldn't use more processing power, however. Maximum performance would be achieved if I was able to use skud as my terminal and get another, faster dual for the grunt work. Unfortunately, I do not find it acceptable for a terminal box to crash, ever, and so skud's motherboard rules it out. Perhaps I could get two new duals... no wait, I can't afford to do that. Bummer. 400mhz to 450mhz Xeons are getting so cheap I could actually make a computer based on two of those for $2000, complete system. I really like the super-cashes on those chips, but who knows what'll happen. Anyway, enough of that.