I just setup NFS automounting on OS X, I feel odd.

After a couple years of construction, the light rail in Charlotte is operational.  I should take a ride…

(now that that's over with, how about some 485 widening?)

I've been using the Nokia Sports Tracker for awhile, now.  Turns out, they recently turned it into an online service, and integrated it with Google Maps.  As of right now, I'm one of three people using it in the United States, which is interesting and kinda neat.  Here's a link to a "live" test walk of mine.

The Eseries blog entry was what initially clued me into the new beta version.

Either my laptop is having hot flashes, or ACPI is playing games with me.

I was ripping and encoding some music earlier this evening, when my laptop suddenly shut down.  As I was out of the room at the time, I figured it was yet another kernel or hardware bug, and didn't look through /var/log until it did it again not even ten minutes later:

Nov 24 19:41:23 kernel: ACPI: Critical trip point
Nov 24 19:41:23 kernel: Critical temperature reached (93 C), shutting down.
Nov 24 19:41:23 acpid: received event "thermal_zone THM0 000000f0 00000001"
Nov 24 19:41:23 acpid: notifying client 6182[0:0]
Nov 24 19:41:23 acpid: executing action "/etc/acpi/default.sh thermal_zone THM0 000000f0 00000001"
Nov 24 19:41:23 logger: ACPI event unhandled: thermal_zone THM0 000000f0 00000001
Nov 24 19:41:23 acpid: action exited with status 0
Nov 24 19:41:23 acpid: completed event "thermal_zone THM0 000000f0 00000001"
Nov 24 19:41:24 acpid: received event "processor CPU 00000080 00000006"
Nov 24 19:41:24 acpid: notifying client 6182[0:0]
Nov 24 19:41:24 acpid: executing action "/etc/acpi/default.sh processor CPU 00000080 00000006"
Nov 24 19:41:24 shutdown[7868]: shutting down for system halt

First off, I'm not even sure if the thermal readings are accurate.  Sure the unit was warm to the touch, but 93 celsius in the core?  That is very hot.

I rebooted and attempted to rip and encode for the third time, this time disabling acpid, but running a watch on /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/*.  Under normal conditions w/the ondemand cpufreq governer, ACPI reports the following:

<setting not supported>
<polling disabled>
state:                   ok
temperature:             49 C
critical (S5):           93 C
passive:                 89 C: tc1=5 tc2=4 tsp=600 devices= CPU

Note the "passive" line at the bottom.  The ACPI documentation seems to indicate that this is the point when OSPM modulates the CPU clock in order to cool it down.  In actuality, when watching the statistics under high load, CPU temperature continually oscillates between 81 and 90 celsius, with the period being somewhere between 10 and 15 seconds.

This still leaves me with a few unanswered questions:

1. How long does the clock modulation last, or does it wait for a safe temperature (say.. 81?) before it returns the clock to its original frequency?
2. What is the clock modulation delay, when a critical threshold is reached?

With regard to the second question, I'm thinking there may be no delay in the OSPM reaction.  When doing a watch -n0, which actually runs the command every 0.1 sec, on the ACPI statistics, it looked like the temperature was being read every two or three seconds.  So, it's possible that the CPU temperature may have risen at a rate larger than 4-5 degrees/sec, and so the OS saw the temperature go from 88 to 93 instantaneously.  I suppose the shutdown (S5) reaction took precedence over any type of clock modulation.

Anyway, I'll add my laptop to MRTG when I get home, and plot CPU temperature.  I still think 93 celsius is bogus, to begin with.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving holiday, and ate turkey or whatever…

We had a small (but good!) meal, consisting of turkey, onion pie, stuffing, potatos, cranberry something-or-other, and a cross between lemon meringue and key lime pie.  Since it was only five of us (parents and grandparents) this year, we opted for just a turkey breast.  It ended up being one of the best pieces of turkey I've had in awhile.

After dinner, someone had the bright idea (maybe it was me?) to head to the beach, even though it was getting dark.

I took almost a dozen photos of the following scene, but only one or two came out, since I didn't have my tripod at hand:

Tomorrow it's out to the malls for shopping, or not?  I've recently changed my mind, and might just poke around Amazon, instead, hoping that family members have filled out their wish lists.

I've finally done it, the ultimate cookie made with four Winter Oreo cookies:

Here's a shot of it in-progress:

The final product:

The red creme beats down the previous attempt by my former roommate, don't you agree?

I am assuming that CONFIG_NO_HZ is the cuplrit here, but I'm not sure.

A little over a week ago, I upgraded nonce, my dedicated server in Tampa, FL, to Linux 2.6.22 (the linux-image-2.6.12-1-686 package provided in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution).  There are just a few changes from the old kernel, 2.6.18, one of which is dynaticks (CONFIG_NO_HZ), a patch that allows the kernel to only create timer ticks when needed.  It's supposed to improve power consumption and efficiency, which translates as lower CPU utilization (to me, at least).

A little background is required, first.  nonce, an Intel Celeron 2.0GHz-powered i386 box with 512MiB of RAM and a 100Mb Internet connection, runs the testing distribution of Debian GNU/Linux.  It acts as a public NTP server (pool.ntp.org), SMTP/IMAPS server for prolixium.com (and a few others), DNS server, OpenVPN tunnel aggregator, and Quake 4 server.  Other than having quite a bit in memory at any given time, it's not a very loaded box.  CPU usage typically sits around 8-10%.

After upgrading to 2.6.22, it was apparent that CPU usage had risen dramatically, to around 35-38% when idle.  Shutting down the Quake 4 server returns the CPU load to around 5%, so it's definitely the culprit, but why?

I suspect that the q4ded binary is just poorly-coded.  The load average has risen, too, as has the average CPU temperature.  It's certainly not a measurement anomaly.

For a good time, try this typing test.  I managed to get the following on the Apple wireless keyboard:

You type 527 characters per minute
You have 97 correct words and
you have 5 wrong words

I'm sure you can do better.