Al Hoang

I’ve posted some thoughts on “Growing Into and Out of Technology”. Interesting trends. Some people that get technical burn out or just don’t want to deal with certain aspects of it. My first reaction was to respond ‘You are copping out’. However, on reflection I shouldn’t say much since I really don’t want to know how:

• All the nitty gritties of how my car works. I just want it to get me somewhere
• All the particular details and myriad of possibilities into finance. I just want to make sure I’m not in debt.
• All the details and interactions for how a seedless watermelon is grown. I just want to enjoy eating it and know it’s not poisonous

There’s a lot to know in this world. Sometimes you can only focus on some parts of it. So perhaps the people that got burnt out have a point. They want to be doing other things with their computers, not doing things to the computer so they can just have a running computer system.

Sheesh. The WindowServer just bit the dust on my PowerBook. That was the weirdest experience. I wonder how many other people have watched their WindowServer die on them. First, I’m typing then I see the little swirling circle at the bottom of the screen as if the computer is about to reboot. Then the screen goes blue and then I’m watching as the Desktop slowly rebuilds itself sans all of my running apps. Wonderful. Then again I’ve had similar situations with Windows doing the exact same thing when Explorer just dies and needs to be kickstarted back to life.

For the geek inclined here is a log courtesy of /var/log/system.log:

Jul 25 11:43:39 basho crashdump: Crash report written to: /Users//Library/Logs/CrashReporter/WindowServer.crash.log
Jul 25 11:43:39 basho WindowServer[167]: Received fatal signal (11) at PC 0×90004288; exiting
Jul 25 11:43:39 basho mach_kernel: IOHIDSystem: doKickEventConsumer msg_send returned 268435459
Jul 25 11:43:39 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: task_set_exception_ports() failed: (os/kern) invalid argument
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho crashdump: Crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/???.crash.log
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: exception_raise() failed forwarding exception: (os/kern) invalid argument
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: newport: 2803 originalport: b07 thread: ffffffff task: a1b exception: 1
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: mach_msg() reply failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: task_set_exception_ports() failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho crashdump: Crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/???.crash.log
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: exception_raise() failed forwarding exception: (os/kern) invalid argument
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: newport: 2803 originalport: b07 thread: ffffffff task: ffffffff exception: 1
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: mach_msg() reply failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: task_set_exception_ports() failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Jul 25 11:43:44 basho crashdump: Crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/???.crash.log

I have to agree with the poster of this link. The word ‘rightsizing’ in regards to cutting down numbers of employees at a corporation is really amusing. If you ask me rightsizing would be something like closing the salary gap between the absolute top management and the lowest paid employee. But that’s just my opinion.

Seems JPL has a Solar System Simulator Website. Some of the pictures in the Art Section are really neat. I’ll have to spend more time exploring the site.

Kudos “Celsius1414″ for pointing the link out!