mindlace

OK I’m older now much older than I was when I was young. It’s been fun going around the sun. Hope to see you all here next time.

I’m almost older now and some people have been asking me what they should get me. I like immaterial gifts like calling me and/or letting me know you forgive me for one of my many transgressions; you could also let me know you want to hang out with me on or near the 22nd and I’ll let you know what I’m doing.

If you want to get me something material I have an amazon wishlist that is pretty well-sorted, and I just deleted all the stuff off of it I’ve already bought.

I am also, of course, interested in surprises. Thanks for caring about my birthday!

So I’m working on a steampunk-ish game that occurs in a gas giant – usual “colonization effort gone bad, descendants with primitive tech” sort of situation, except these folk actually have to stay afloat lest they be crushed to death by the pressure.

• Humans can live at up to 60bar for at least a week; presumably, if you didn’t need to decompress them, they could live much longer.
• Pressurizing quickly without changing the percentage oxygen is a recipe for dizziness, convulsion, and death.
• Long term exposure to high pressure can cause bone death. Not clear whether this is on account of the lower % oxygen necessary or on account of the subjects being de/repressurized.
• The clouds in a gas giant are quite possibly much akin to the atmosphere above 18th century london; full of soot, tarry particles, and metallized hydrocarbons. This is apparently on account of convection, precipitation, and evaporation, and ofc works better the hotter the gas giant.
• Deeper layers (and potentially different bands) would see the precipitation of some pretty spiffy molecules, including diamond, apparently; good reason to risk your life “diving”.
• While I have yet to find a really good excuse for a layer or band of CO2 enriched atmosphere, were there to be one, it could be much akin to venus’ atmosphere, including the sulfuric acid clouds. Soot filled sulfuric acid clouds sounds lovely, doesn’t it?
• Looking into diving bells, I realized that if the colony ship was a big (think km in diameter) concave bell-shape (used to catch the light from solar-system based lasers until the Bussard ramjet can take over) then when the ship has to “land” in the the gas giant, it can serve as a giant diving bell containing enough O2 enriched atmosphere for a small city. Since the rocket nozzle would have to withstand hydrogen plasma accelerated to nearly the speed of light, it would be robust against at least a few bar of pressure.
• Since victorian tech is not too good with the whole membrane thing, the kind of Scuba-style apparatus you’d need to hang out outside is kind of off-limits. If I posit some sort of mutualist parasite that provides O2 in exchange for nutrients, then I have an easy way of differentiating the “working class” from the elites who get to live in a controlled atmosphere their whole lives – it makes the infected literally “outsiders”.

After a very tumultuous month involving lots of financial uncertainty, I landed a job with the most excellent Acquia, where I expect to work helping Drupal become the preeminent open-source CMS/ social software platform. I also have just been able to get back on the wagon with my psychopharmacology so my sketchiness should decline markedly. Thanks for the patience folks around me have been able to muster, and here’s hoping that the rest of the summer is relatively smooth sailing. 

I had a marvelous weekend after a fairly heavy week, thanks to the lovely and talented Sue. We saw Boston crush (and be crushed by) some opposing teams in the refined sport of roller derby , which I confess may become the first sport I follow religiously. Though seeing it reminded me that I should take the time to experience more women’s sports. Aside from that, we watched more Carnivàle, which continues to be amazing (and creepy). If I lust after the Devil’s attire and deep, sonorous voice, does that make me evil?Sue really brightens my world, and is an incredibly fun human to spend time with.

Ok, maybe not earth-shattering. My main client, BostonNOW, went belly up two weeks ago, right before my planned vacation. After some scrambling, I’ve found some other consulting work, and am actively looking at w2-style employment options.

Vacation was nice – I learned a lot about a relationship that is important to me as well as learning a good deal about the kind of opportunities available in the SF Bay Area and my relative fitness thereto. There’s a couple of pending things in that area; more news when I have it.

The aforementioned consulting work is pretty awesome- it’s basically a project I’ve wanted to build myself, but someone else is paying me (sadly, this means that most of it is work-for-hire).

Because I lost a week of billed work in addition to the week I lost from being on vacation, I’m in a bit of scramble-mode to catch up with the bills. So if I’m terse or distracted for the next two weeks, just remember, it’s not you, it’s my creditors.

I’ve switched over to using google (via google apps) for my email, so I should be less of a sketchy mofo when communicating with me via email now that I don’t have to deal with 10k spam every day.

Still have to get around to updating this blog to 2.5 – I think I’m going to cross-grade to some hosted thingy at that time. I already tried crossgrading to wordpress.com but they require that they be the MX for whichever domain you point at them- which means either this thing moves to e.g. log.mindlace.net or I find another provider.

Every time I hang out with that kid I come out of it feeling rejuvenated and with a renewed faith in our ability to bring some measure of sanity to this benighted ball of rock. Plus he’s pretty hot.

I’m very spoiled by the virtual interface feature of Linux, and routinely have quite a few IP addresses associated with one virtual interface.

I’m building a cluster now, where all the machines have only private interfaces save one; obviously, I’d like the internal machines to be able to do their own updating, etc.

So I need to put in some sort of NAT. The problem is, iptables doesn’t recognize virtual interfaces, so you can’t NAT using the source/dest interface as your trigger. So here, then, is the simplest way I’ve found to set up SNAT on a virtual interface, assuming all your IP addresses are on eth0 and you are using a 10 network (in the example, 10.23.0.x) as your internal network:


cat 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING -d !10.23.0.0/24 -j MASQUERADE


And yes, she qualifies.

All geeks in movies have a bunch of windows with text scrolling by regardless of what they’re doing. Therefore, one’s “hollywood geek quotient” is determined by how much scrollage is on one’s desktop.My current hollywood geek quotient is “high”.