Actually, it IS the chicken.  Kim made cornish game hens for dinner and they were sooo good.  My mom made them every once in a while as we were growing up and I always loved them.  Despite having never even eaten one before a couple months ago, let alone cooking one, Kim served up a mean couple of little chickens tonight  : )

On the way home tonight as I drove across the Liberty Bridge, I saw a coal barge in the river.  They carry what look like open-topped railroad car containers full of coal, and they sit really low in the water.  The engine is in the back -- if it’s even attached at all, that is; I think the little boat just pushes the huge raft of coal-cars from behind.

It’s fairly common to see one of these barges during the day, but I’ve never seen one moving at night before.  It was really cool to see, because it was coming towards the bridge I was on, and it had two very bright spotlights on the top of the boat (at the rear of the whole operation) and they were shooting light forward, but not straight forward, rather off to the sides a little.  I guess the combination of its extremely slow speed and massive capacity and the lights beaming through the fog made it seem really neat.

I then saw two teenage girls walking down the dark street, and this is around 1 AM.  I thought that that doesn’t seem like a very good idea, but it’s actually fairly common around here.  I wondered about where Pittsburgh stands in those "safest cities" surveys that you hear about every once in a while.  And then I thought, releasing those surveys is actually pretty dumb, because what better way for a criminal to decide where to set up his operations than the cities whose citizens aren’t careful because their city is ranked very safe?

As I typed that last line, one of those freakish zillion-leggers zipped through my peripheral vision.  I smashed him to bits though, don’t worry.

On Saturday, Maria got a cute new kitten which she named Milo.  Sadly, Louie was just taken to the SPCA because he couldn’t stop going to the bathroom on the carpets  : (

Yesterday on the drive home, I took some sunset photos which I rather like.  And during that photo session I snapped my camera’s 10,000th photo.

And today, NoDivisions.com had its 100,000th visitor.  It was a Windows XP / IE6 user from the ISP gwi.net, who found my site by searching for netgear wg111 linux on Google.  He only stayed for one minute though, so it’s unlikely he’ll see this message to claim his prize  : )

Kim and I visited a charming place called Hells Hollow yesterday.  No, really.  And yes, the fact that there is no apostrophe does drive me crazy.

Kim’s current photo of the day is really neato and mystifying.  Yesterday’s is awesome too.  Come to think of it, so are these two sciencey ones.  And did I mention this one of the Pittsburgh skyline?

Maybe you should just go see all of ’em.  Warning, extremely cute pet photos are hiding behind that link!

Kim’s laptop died the other day.  The hard disk and all its data were fine though, and since the system runs Linux, the obvious solution is to just put the disk into another computer.

The laptop was a Pentium III, and the "new" (old) computer into which the disk is going is a Pentium II.  This would be no problem, except that in the system’s /etc/make.conf file (this is Gentoo) I was using CFLAGS="-march=pentium3".

In the new system, the disk booted fine and everything, services started, I could log in, networking worked, etc.  But X wouldn’t run; it died with a "signal 4" error -- illegal instruction/operation.  Same for GCC.  I realized that the software was trying to use PIII tricks that the PII didn’t have.

If only I had chosen my CFLAGS more carefully:

These -m options are defined for the i386 and x86-64 family of computers:

-mcpu=cpu-type

Tune to cpu-type everything applicable about the generated code, except for the ABI and the set of available instructions. The choices for cpu-type are i386, i486, i586, i686, pentium, pentium-mmx, pentiumpro, pentium2, pentium3, pentium4, k6, k6-2, k6-3, athlon, athlon-tbird, athlon-4, athlon-xp and athlon-mp.

While picking a specific cpu-type will schedule things appropriately for that particular chip, the compiler will not generate any code that does not run on the i386 without the -march=cpu-type option being used. i586 is equivalent to pentium and i686 is equivalent to pentiumpro. k6 and athlon are the AMD chips as opposed to the Intel ones.

-march=cpu-type

Generate instructions for the machine type cpu-type. The choices for cpu-type are the same as for -mcpu. Moreover, specifying -march=cpu-type implies -mcpu=cpu-type.

So -march gives you the heaviest optimization and thus the best performance, but at the cost of portability.  Programs compiled with -march=pentium3 that take advantage of the PIII’s advanced features won’t run on the PII.  But -mcpu on the other hand will "tune" the compilation to the target CPU, while still maintaining full i386 compatibility.  I could take this PIII-optimized operating system and drop it into a PII box and it would run without me needing to recompile anything.

Looks like this ol’ 333 MHz Pentium II will be spending the next few days building a lot of software...

I stumbled onto your website while getting a copy of eponym and I thought I would take the time to thank you for sharing your work.

Best Regards from Melbourne.
Roger

A few weeks ago I switched our Linux systems to wireless network cards.  Since wifi on Linux is still a big pain to get working, I wrote up a couple of start-to-finish HOWTOs in the hopes that others might find them useful.

Wireless success: Netgear WG311, madwifi, wpa_supplicant Wireless USB success: Netgear WG111, ndiswrapper, WPA

If you’ve got a wireless network card but aren’t having the best reception, make sure to give the WiFi Spray a try.

On an unrelated note, in case you weren’t sure that Steve Ballmer was completely insane, here’s more proof.