Latest Tribulations

I have a post about setting up my server partially completed, but that will have to wait for the time being.

My primary desktop has become unreliable. I snapped a power supply cable, and needed to replace it anyway on account of the PS fan failing (very noisy, and I thought it might be causing overheating). After doing so, I installed my new optical drive (works great; very speedy), and my new hard drive (delightfully capacious), however my computer restarts every couple days. Going through the syslog, it reports that it reached the critical temperature (120ºC). I keep Folding@Home running in the background, so lm-sensors usually reports that my CPU's are running around 55º. I wrote a quick script to log the output of sensors to watch it overheating, and maybe figure out why. lm-sensors reports that there is no over-heating going on. So a)lm-sensors isn't watching the proper sensor, b)the temperature is going from 55º to 120º in less than 8 seconds (my sampling interval window), or c)Linux is getting a bad signal.

I don't know whether to hope for c or not. I'm still running my first Linux installation on this setup (a fact of which I am proud), I think, so it's probably due to be scorched and replaced soon. I'm making do with Windows XP x64 for the time being, with Folding@Home running to try to keep the CPU usage high. We'll see if it's a Linux-only thing.

Perhaps Windows is more reliable (I've critically crippled it less), but it's so much less powerful and accessible I would still choose unstable Linux over it.

Statement of Purpose

I am wishing more and more for a somewhat more sophisticated blogging platform than my (long-standing, scattered, and poorly maintained general blog on LiveJournal, so I have decided to attempt a somewhat more directed blog, here.

I intend to focus on interesting aspects of technology that I discover and to document my progress through things I am learning, programs/applets/tricks I develop, and where I want to focus myself.

I work at a small technology company in Kanata, ON, where I am given a great deal of freedom (at my last performance evaluation, a fellow laughingly called it "more and more rope to hang yourself with") to explore technologies and concepts that may be applicable to our product.  As a result, over the last six months, I've learned a tonne about TCP/IP, practicalities of Linux kernel modules, web testing automation (specifically with Selenium), shell and interface scripting (Bash, TCL/Expect), and most recently, Android development.

I would like to get further into Android developement so that I can properly create an app of my own (I don't know what I'd do, yet). (Spitballing: Programming job listings, to allow people to get (and maybe bid) on small programming projects, in the $10-$100 threshold. Birth control facilitation alarm which rings three weeks out of four.)

I want to learn about the benefits of, and caveats to custom kernel development (speed? versatility? vulnerability? stability?).

I have a cipher solver project that has been sitting on a shelf for ages.

I have been developing some desktop widgets for gDesklets. These are starting to reach a fairly polished level on the user front, but they rely heavily on the execCommand control rather than a better-designed control which might be able to access things more efficiently. Also, they need to be stylistically synchronized in the preferences interface.

I'm going to overhaul some of my Linux documentation on my existing blog so that it's up to date and better organized.

I'm sure these priorities will shift over the lifetime of this blog, however I hope it will be a lot of fun.