Aaargh!

When I did backups last week I had some problems. I started out using a different machine from the usual one -- I was trying to get backups off of my main workstation -- and things were going very strangely, so I shut it down (forcibly, since it seemed to be hung) and moved the drive back to my workstation. There were a couple of anomalies, but things seemed to go OK. This morning (I do backups every Sunday morning) I decided to run a file-system check.

The results were not encouraging. There were a whole bunch of inodes with bogus block pointers. Weird. Ended up with about 152MB of debris in lost+found. Not good. I ran backups for this week and everything proceeded normally. My best guess is that the IDE controller on the old machine I was trying to use last week had problems with large disks. That, or it was just having problems. Or there might be problems with the drive -- hard to tell.

Bottom line: Dumb bear. If I'd run fsck last week before the second attempt, there probably wouldn't have been nearly as much corruption. This week's backups are probably OK, but many older ones almost certainly have problems. I need to rewrite my backup scripts to run fsck first.

"If it's worth doing...

...it's worth doing with power tools." My cow-orker DocBug as quoted in hackaday's article on liquid nitrogen ice cream.

Blue Ball Machine

OK, I'm late with this. And I don't usually fall for flash animations. But I'm really fond of the sort of kinetic sculpture that involves interesting things happening to marbles, billiard balls, or whatever. So if you don't mind, I'm going to go back to staring at The Blue Ball Machine for a while.

Something to cheer you up

on those days when you think things couldn't possibly be worse at work, jhubert presents Bossthulhu.

(From slothman)

Turing's Cathedral

From O'Reilly Radar comes a link to Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson, based on a talk he recently gave at Google.

My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral -- not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

... plus a nice little twist at the end that I won't spoil for you: go read it yourself. George and his father Freeman Dyson are both on my "buy on sight" list, and with good reason.