So then it turned monday again. Today has been relatively unproductive since I still havn't gotten into any high gears. Hopefully, that will not be a problem tomorrow since I have a job interview quite early.

What I've been toying with today is various DNS visualizations. My first feeble attempts made me realize that I'm about 1GB RAM and 1GHz of CPU too short, but I think I've managed to overcome that now and the visualization software only eats about 547 MB RAM. Of course, that's for a limited map of about 900 nodes and corresponding edges.

The software outputs its information as Postscript files, which is generally nice except when they contain 900 nodes and corresponding edges. Ghostscript failed miserably and Gimp took two hours and then crashed telling me that it was "unable to seek to tile location on disk". It took the rest of my desktop with it too.

After sorting out those problems I spent a few hours investigating some statistical algorithms and methods and realised just how little math I attended at the university. Had I spent about two years more there I would likely be able to whip up some much faster algorithms for the work I'm trying to do. Right now I'm substituting fast algorithms for plenty of CPU time.

Somewhat related, I got around to setting up a home directory for me on my AFS server, so I can now push things into AFS space. I also have a tool that basically just takes a command, pushes information about it over to another machine and executes the command when there is CPU time available and then mails me when it's done. This helps in theory those long tedious waits for things to finish and I can crash my desktop to my hearts delight without affecting those runs.

This was in theory. In practice, I do them on my desktop machine anyway since the only other available machine is a 486dx33 with a constant load of about 6 or 7 since it's also doing other tasks. Of course, it doesn't really help that the machine in question has 48 MB RAM in total, and the things I want to do need more than ten times that much.

In unrelated news, my girlfriend was delighted today as she received her first SirCam virus in Spanish. Personally, I've been spared most spam today which I think is a first for a long, long time. I didn't escape the spam from the postal office though and I had to sort through a pile of paper until I found a notice from my bank telling me about a deposit to my account. Now I need to get to the post office tomorrow to drop off another load of Penguin Mints.