Leaving some stones unturned

My laptop and I have been everywhere in our 5+ years together. It has served me well; and I have brought it through the valley of the shadow of death several times already. But this past month it has looked like this quite a few times. The hard disk crashed in March, and once the thrill of cracking open a tiny laptop had faded, merely replacing the disk didn't seem interesting enough: I had to make some ... improvements. So I spent some time researching alternatives to traditional disks. The potential for geek cred was high: solid-state flash memory -- sturdy, silent, and speedy -- is coming of age, and this was an opportunity to join the (non-mechanical) future of data storage.

Real solid state storage is still a bit pricey; but I'd read that high-end camera cards could do just as well for a good bit less money. So I ordered a Lexar Pro 300x and an adapter from some place in Hong Kong. When the new gear finally arrived, I plugged it in and reassembled everything, booted up and was poised to shout "Yes! I am eenveencible!"... but the laptop couldn't even see the card. Turns out Lexar "cheats" slightly on the interface standard. OK; I ordered a SanDisk Extreme IV card. Another week's wait; more dismantling and reassembly; this one the laptop could see ... but only as a removable disk, unsuitable for an operating system. I ordered a Kingston Ultimate card: same story, no matter how many obscure boot permutations I tried or how much trivia I learned, late into the night, about flash memory, data interfaces, or Linux filesystem details.

Fortunately I'll get most of my money back on eBay. Those cards weren't all that cheap.

In the meantime, I've been running the laptop without a disk, using a Linux LiveCD for (in-memory) software and a USB stick for storage. This is a precarious existence: if the machine ever fails to wake from sleep, or the battery runs down, I lose all my preferences, security updates, and bookmarks -- not to mention any work I haven't explicitly saved. It's the "Memento" laptop.

There is a fourth kind of camera card that (I read) would definitely work. But it eventually dawned on me that this was turning out to be a poor return on my time; and that the knowledge I was acquiring was increasingly specialized, decreasingly useful, and quickly becoming obsolete anyway. So, I've conceded defeat: a mechanical hard disk will arrive in a few days. Old wine for old wineskins. Actually I didn't really give up; it was a deliberate choice to leave some stones unturned. So, what was supposed to be another tale of fearless ingenuity -- eclectic research overturning conventional limitations -- turned into a lesson about the diminishing returns on knowledge and mastery. "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?(*)" The pursuit of cleverness can be addictive, crowding out much better things -- rest, family, friendships, peace, charity, etc. -- and must be surrendered like every other entanglement if I'm at all serious about seeking "the most excellent way."

(*) Interesting: Bono's writing NYT op-eds now. His piece yesterday ("It's 2009. Do you know where your soul is?") riffs on this same challenge of Jesus.

Sunday night reflections

If anyone's wondering whether I did, in fact, sink since the latest signs of life here: there was a good bit of flailing and panic but I finally found some buoyancy and I'm still kicking. One of these days I'll write about that -- but tonight I think I'll shrug off the duty I usually feel to summarize all that's happened. That would be a chore -- thus at odds with my working definition of Sabbath rest.

Instead, I just want to capture one of those rare moments when the kitchen table is clear enough that the laptop doesn't stick, the floor is clean enough that my footsteps don't crunch, and a great weekend is coming to a close. Saturday was an unusually productive day; maintenance of this large, ragged property is endless but it felt good to restore some partial sense of civilization to it. I never get to every part of the yard that needs attention, but I do think I'm a little further along than I was last year at this time... And while running errands that afternoon, I stumbled across a yard sale with a used extension ladder and a seller willing to deliver it. So, now I can reach things like the motion-sensing light 19 feet up that burned out in 2006 -- or the small forest that's thriving up there in the gutters.

This (Sunday) morning I took the older two boys to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D -- their first PG film! It was loud, immersive, and fun even though the tone is a bit coarse (the president addresses an older man with glasses merely as "Nerd") and only the comely 50-foot-minus-1-inch woman sees much character development. (Big surprise: not everything measures up to WALL-E!) But it was plenty enough to impress two young minds: we've been hearing references to the movie all day. (And in case you're wondering: those 3D polarizing glasses are one-size-fits-all. You thought they looked goofy on adult-sized heads?) ... Sunday afternoon with my church, we read Mark 2, talked about paralysis and community healing, and painted prayer flags. I'm not sure who slipped young Timo the one tube of real acrylic paint in place of the kid-friendly washable stuff; fortunately we caught him in time before too many things got indelibly pink... It was fun helping him make handprints -- he makes such tiny ones.

Sink or swim

For several years until last fall, my role at NASA had consisted of advocacy and advisory support: ostensibly helping programs and projects share their information systems more effectively through standards and interoperable designs. But over the years, this activity (not easy to explain in a soundbite) grew increasingly murky in purpose and scope; long story; the program came to a halt; and after a few amorphous months I've now begun a challenging project of my own design, building Web access to climate models running on supercomputers. It's nice to be doing something of substance, and easy to describe -- perhaps for the first time in years. However, this is a new field; actually several new fields; and I'm just an IT guy. Worse: for several years, I've been an architect / advisory IT guy who never had to write or debug a single line of code. So I'm having to exercise several atrophied sectors of my brain, and to learn (always by yesterday) reams of new stuff about numerical models, supercomputers, and how the latter run the former. I've spent hours reading about global and regional atmospheric simulations; the algorithmic and statistical basis for such models; the workflow infrastructures in which they run; and the deeper meaning of a whole new set of acronyms. A lot of the scientific code (fluid dynamics, etc.) is written in Fortran so I've even poked into some of that (though I hope to leave the Fortran as-is. I last used the language in 1983 and haven't missed it). Every so often my brain fills up (a la Gary Larson) and to quell the quiet panic I have to stand up and walk the halls for a few minutes. And sometimes the reading trail reaches an obvious dead end. For example:

ifeffit: An interactive program for XAFS analysis

IFEFFIT is an interactive program for XAFS analysis. It combines the high-quality analysis algorithms of AUTOBK and FEFFIT with graphical display of XAFS data and general data manipulation.

IFEFFIT comes as a command-line program, but the underlying functionality is available as a programming library. The IFEFFIT library can be used from C, Fortran, Tcl, Perl, and Python. This allows a variety of user interfaces (both graphical and non-graphical) to be written around IFEFFIT. Currently, three graphical user interfaces: G.I.FEFFIT, ATHENA/ARTEMIS, and SIXPACK are built on the underlying IFEFFIT library. IFEFFIT and all three GUIs are under active development, but are fairly well tested and ready for use.

On reading this effectively useless documentation the other day, I laughed out loud, realizing that I was living another Larson cartoon. When I don't even understand the terms necessary to explain the one I'm looking up, ... perhaps I've skidded off the learning curve. Time to find some pavement and try again. When it's not terrifying, it's great fun.