Entries from September 2003 ↓

Today I started to play with my new
Dell servers. They are /so/ cool, although they are a bit noisy with all the fans blowing.

I’ve never had a Xeon machine before, and until today I thought hyper-threading was just some new Intel buzzword. Then 4 penguins appeared! A quick [!cat /proc/cpuinfo] revealed 4 CPUs, despite a previous visual inspection of the machine (and the invoice) detecting only 2.

So, it seems Intel have been quite smart. Instead of (or as well as) trying to make their instruction pipelines move faster, they are feeding two at a time into the Xeon. This wasn’t a new idea, but parallelism like this often required programs to know about it before they could use it. With /hyper-threading/ a single Xeon pretends that it is 2 different processors, and Linux already knows how to use extra processors.

When configuring and compiling Linux I discovered that I should enable ACPI to enumerate the processors correctly. I was going to enable it anyway, but I thought I should mention it in case you weren’t.

Ten years ago I was a fanatical Emacs user. I knew it was so much more than just a text editor. I laughed at vi users, because vi was really a joke.

But vi improved over the years, and eventually I left Emacs and choose Vim as my preferred editor. Vim isn’t as powerful or elegant as Emacs (and for beginners, it has a much steeper learning curve), but it was better at two things I really wanted: syntax highlighting and Unicode support.

Emacs had syntax highlighting; it’s called /font lock/. Emacs also has a very smart automatic indentation system that is better than the one in Vim. But the font locking and auto-indenting are much slower in Emacs than they are in Vim. If I were an Emacs user now, I suppose I wouldn’t switch because my machine are so much faster than they were. So, I thought I would try Emacs again, and maybe switch back.

But the Unicode support I wanted wasn’t there. I don’t want anything too strange: I just want to be able to type some Japanese in UTF-8, but Emacs doesn’t like it. So it looks like I’ll be a Vim user for quite a while longer.

Today I tried to open a current account for a local users group, and I discovered that most of the banks suck.

I assume that the *Northern Bank* sucks, as I was advised not to go near it at all.

The *Nationwide* didn’t suck: they were friendly and clueful, but unfortunately none of their accounts were actually suitable.

Of the banks I tried, the *First Trust* is the worst. In the first branch, nobody spoke to me at all. I tried another branch where someone did try to help, but quickly admitted that he had no idea how to open an account for a society, and he might phone me next week if he found out.

The *HSBC* also didn’t know what to do, but they were a bit faster and more polite.

The *Bank of Ireland* did know about suitable accounts, and told me what I needed to do, but they seemed to want me to just go away, so I did.

The *Ulster Bank* were awkward, but they tried to help, answered questions, and gave me the forms I needed. They were the least sucky.

The day was saved by the *Alliance & Leicester*, who were helpful, friendly, answered all my questions, and gave me a glossy /Clubs and Societies/ brochure with all the details and forms. They were the only bank who seemed pleased that I wanted an account with them, so they can have it.

It seems I don’t need to bother calculating the odds for the Fibonacci straight, since Marc told Jeremy at “Love and Casino War, who knows what he’s doing and worked out the odds.

Jeremy obviously has much more poker experience, so I agree that ranking fib-straights and fib-straight flushes the same as normal straights and straight flushes would be the most practical way to play them, but I think it would be more /interesting/ to play them in a class of their own, especially as a fib-straight is better than a full house and a fib-straight flush is better than a straight flush. I suppose we really need people to play it both ways and give some feedback.

BT emailed me today to let me know that they are bringing ADSL to Whitehead. The expected activation date is 2003-01-07, but I’m hoping we’ll have it by Christmas.

So, it’s time to intensify my quest for an ISP. I know what I want, so I tried the ADSLGuide advanced search.

Leonardo Fibonacci was an amazing mathematician. His greatest achievement was introducing the western world to decimal number system. I’m not sure if I should be grateful for this. There is no doubt that decimal is better than the Roman numeral system it replaced, but the choice of 10 as the base is not optimal except for counting on your fingers. Fibonacci himself seemed to prefer base 60, but I don’t think that would be a good default either. Hackers would prefer 8 or 16. For everyday use, 12 would be much better than 10.

Fibonacci, though, is not famous for decimal numbers: he just popularised them; they had been used in India and Arabia long before he found them. He is famous for a eponymous sequence of numbers.

The *Fibonacci sequence* starts with 0 and 1. Subsequent values are obtained by adding the previous two values, so the first 10 values are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34. Patterns from the Fibonacci sequence occur in nature, and the related /golden section/ is interesting too.

I was watching to Karen, Marc, and Tony play poker this afternoon. Tony mentioned a *Fibonacci straight*, probably in an effort to fleece Marc out of his money. I think it’s a great idea, and we should include it in all poker games. To do that, we need to know what it is and where it lives on the poker ladder.

A *Fibonacci straight* is a hand of 5 cards forming a subsequence of the Fibonacci sequence. So, in poker there would be three such straights: A, A, 2, 3, 5; A, 2, 3, 5, 8; 2, 3, 5, 8, K. The latter two can occur in /flush/ form too.

I haven’t had a chance to calculate all the odds yet, but a Fibonacci straight is higher than a normal straight.

I have previously documented my search for a /perfect/ window manager. I now believe that my search is over: for the last 3 months I have been using pekwm, and I think it’s great.

It had good keyboard control, but recently it was modified to include excellent keyboard control. In addition to all the expected window manager features, it also has tabbed windows, which are not as common a feature as they should be.

It’s not an official Debian package (yet) but the source contains all the debian config information, so a dpkg-buildpackage it all that’s required to make your own.