I'm back in Lake Jackson, back in Texas, I just got to see my girlfriend for 5ish days, and get to see her again in a week :) I'm going to stop writing on this blog, but I'm planning on moving all of this over to Mr. Linux since I am taking this computer back to Baylor with me in a week. I would like to thank you for reading and keeping up with me this summer, I had a blast working at Argonne and learned a whole lot. On my new website this blog will be archived so it can be enjoyed (or laughed at) for the next good while. "No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow." -- Lin Yutang |
Systems Administration: Improving Efficiency. CARL MEHNER (Baylor University, Waco, TX, 76798) CRAIG STACEY (Argonne National Lab, Argonne, IL 60439). Working as a system administrator over many computer systems is a challenging problem; the best way to ease the problem of managing these systems is to use different scripts or programs to shorten the amount of time spent doing procedural tasks that are often repeated. Web applications coupled with high-level scripting languages are advantageous solutions for administrators to increase work efficiency. An existing system for creating and managing user accounts has exceeded the assumptions of usage set forth in its planning. The goal is to create new version of this project using existing ideas, amplify extensibility, and adding new features to further increase efficiency and utility. Using PHP, Perl, and Python scripting languages interfacing with a MySQL database, a web application to manage user accounts that is extensible and supportive of multiple computing environments can be created. Completed, this system will allow for clear, straightforward, and more efficient management of user accounts over our computing systems. Presentation |
Today I played around with Liquid Nitrogen! YAY! It was really fun stuff, we made a superconductor using yttrium-barium-cupric-oxide and demonstrated the Meissner Effect. Here's a picture of me and the super conductor.
Here's a little recipe I invented using leftover stuff durring lunch today! Carl's Creative Chocolate Confection - 1 pkg Cream Cheese
- 1 bag Dark/Milk Chocoate Chips
- Hazelnut liquore
- Sugar
- Flour
Melt chips and cheese in a double bolier, drip in hazelnut stuff, add some sugar (whatever ammount looks good), add some flour (howmuchever you want) Server warm. |
So my Chicagoland friend from Baylor came into the lab day before yesterday for a little tour, I showed him around and let him see the sites. We found the super secrete entrance to the center of the APS. After the tour, and I use that word lightly, was done we went to a great little restaurant that serves hamburgers for two dollars every Tuesday. Ever wonder why buildings don't have an even number of stairs in between each flight but do have an even number between each floor? I wish more staircases were like the ECS building at Baylor where you can take them two at a time and not have a wasted stair at the beginning or end. There's someone in California that keeps checking my blog, a bunch, who are you California? Send me an email or somthin'. Today for lunch I went to White Castle it was interesting, and pretty good. They have the tiniest hamburgers so most people get a good number of them. Here's a picture of what you can do with the boxes they come in. The second picture up there is me riding a bike through the machine room here (that's BlueGene/L on the left) The next picture is the view I had a few weekends ago of the city of Chicago from the John Hancock Center. Pretty nice huh? The next one is me takin' a nap on the one of the shelves in the buildspace where we store the old computer parts. |
Well, as you may notice, I've added a countdown to my webpage that is counting down the moments until I step foot off the plane and into the arms of Amber. Can't Wait! I've only got 4 more days of work left (hopefully I'll finish everything by then) I've still got a script or two to finish up and a buncha paperwork for the DEP that I'll need to have finished up and turned in by Friday. |
Welp, pretty sure I got all of that program running correctly, at least that part of it. The beauty of it is, the part I wrote in python can be run from the command line, or from another program that I wrote that interfaces with a mySQL database that is changed from a php webapp that I added functionality to. So, there's really three layers of 'run-ability' for this feature. I'm also working on another project that should be pretty simple but apparently isn't. I think I'm just going about it the wrong way and if I change my angle on it it will work better. Comcast seems to be getting better. No more cable outages or anything (at least none that have effected me). I still need to backup my blog database... |
Well this past weekend was pretty fun, I went to the Art Institute and saw a buncha paintings that I've been wanting to see for quite a while. The Saturate with the pointillism and the lakes and umbrellas, the painting of the street in Paris, Van Gogh's self portrait (which I expected to see in Nederland not the US), and a painting that could be something for Art to make fun of (it's all black instead of all white). This week I've torn apart another supercomputer and ripped fiber cabling up outta the floor (which is kinda like Baylor's ECS lab on the 1st floor (with the tiles that you can pull up and have a foot or so of space underneath)). Today I worked on a regular expression that I still can't figure out, because python is really crazy, I need to learn some more about this stuff, quickly. I'll spend tomorrow during lunch reading about it I think. Bleu cheese stuffed olives are good. |
Yesterday, we cleaned up the Big Machine Room (BMR) downstairs and found some pretty cool old stuff. There were enough cable down there to stretch around the world (more or less...) There was a ton of old stuff down there that was completely un-useful to anything that "normal" people use in computing anymore, so all of that stuff went down the drain. I think it would've looked really cool to plaster a wall with all the circuit boards that we tossed, geeky, but cool. This weekend I'll be goin' to Chicago; I think I want to go see the Art Institute downtown. |
So, remember that old joke with the punchline of Jesus Saves? Well, I sure wish Carl saved. Because he just deleted his entire blog. All of it's gone, blotto, bloged out. I still have the times and the titles, but thats all folks. I'm going to write a script to start doing backups. nite. ADDED LATER: I'd like to thank google's cashed pages for saving my blog, I was able to recover most of my blog through Google's backups |
This post stolen by gnomes |
