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Even the letters of "normal" people can provide an insite in the times they lived in or to make them more human

Then my hard drive died !

Two hours later, after changing the HD, reinstalling the OS and some Apps, I contacted him again. He hadn't kept a copy. So the FAQ sits still until I get more questions...

Check out my site for past trips to Dome C. Note that it will be the first winterover at Dome C ever, with 8 french and 8 italians.

Can't post much more right now as my connection's been hit by lightning...

[...] a chemist [...]

they found the exact ideal temperature and humidity to cook an egg

this engineering book about cooking is just a cook book about cooking and not real science

PS: my recipe book (warning, 6Mb and all in french)

I also found The Disturbing Search Requests Page - gleaned from some guy's referrer logs

I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there who'd LOVE to have something like this on their resume.

I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there who'd LOVE to have something like this on their resume.

I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there who'd LOVE to have something like this on their resume.

When my research group decided to build one, I was incharge, opted for OpenMosix and after a tweaking period worked really well. Now with the various bootable CDs with OpenMosix (PlumpOS, BCCD, Quantian, ClusterKNOPPIX...), tests and upgrades are done by just pressing reset !

Of course with clusters your mileage may vary.

Used an old HP vectra for an afternoon outside at Dome C, High Antarctic Plateau (temperature -47C). No ill effect noticed.

Used an old HP vectra for an afternoon outside at Dome C, High Antarctic Plateau (temperature -47C). No ill effect noticed.

Used an old HP vectra for an afternoon outside at Dome C, High Antarctic Plateau (temperature -47C). No ill effect noticed.

I don't say that to put myself forward, but to give an example of how pros should work in that case. As hired contractors. Not as artists with a god given talent.

I couldn't find an easier job, so I just signed up for the first winter over at Dome C on the high Antarctic Plateau, only 550km from Vostok. On the program of the fun will be: reaching ground level with a 3200m ice core (they are almost there), temperatures of -84C in winter and lots more. Unlike Vostok, Dome C doesn't have a lake underneath. I'll try to keep my site updated.

I couldn't find an easier job, so I just signed up for the first winter over at Dome C on the high Antarctic Plateau, only 550km from Vostok. On the program of the fun will be: reaching ground level with a 3200m ice core (they are almost there), temperatures of -84C in winter and lots more. Unlike Vostok, Dome C doesn't have a lake underneath. I'll try to keep my site updated.

I couldn't find an easier job, so I just signed up for the first winter over at Dome C on the high Antarctic Plateau, only 550km from Vostok. On the program of the fun will be: reaching ground level with a 3200m ice core (they are almost there), temperatures of -84C in winter and lots more. Unlike Vostok, Dome C doesn't have a lake underneath. I'll try to keep my site updated.

Let me give you another example. I interviewed for a job as a computer scientist to work on advanced cluster architectures. In Nice, probably the most expensive city in France. The salary for 10 years experience in that field was a ridiculous 17000 Euros, with still taxes to pay off that. I was making 3 times that in the US last year. For this once I told them to shove it, but do I really have a choice ? You do make more waiting tables.

The equipment is shipped in strong crates inside large containers. 3 months at see, 3 weeks dragged behind monster Caterpillars to reach the scientific station deep on the high Antarctic Plateau.

So when I get there months later, I start setting everything up. The HP laserjet printer comes up with weird LEDs lit up. Nonsensical messages on the LCD. None of it is in the manual. I try to troubleshoot by sending PCL commands direct to the printer port. Nonsense. Finally I open it up and find...

...the mummy of a tiny tiny mouse, droppings all over the inside, all the inner cables and some of the electronics eaten up... Must have been a long trip for one lonely mouse.

For more reading about living and working in Antartica...
...also take a look at my site. I spent a winter and 3 summers at Dumont d'Urville, probably the windiest place on Earth; and 2 summer campaigns at the new continental station of Dome C.
And right now I'm pondering whether or not to sign up for the 1st winterover down there. Temperature below -80C guaranteed...

For more reading about living and working in Antartica...
...also take a look at my site. I spent a winter and 3 summers at Dumont d'Urville, probably the windiest place on Earth; and 2 summer campaigns at the new continental station of Dome C.
And right now I'm pondering whether or not to sign up for the 1st winterover down there. Temperature below -80C guaranteed...

And for the dark conditions get a TRIPOD. Don't use sensitive film. Yes, I have been in Zion.

After 2 years spent in Antarctica, what about a penguin cake ?

After 2 years spent in Antarctica, what about a penguin cake ?

Customs typically doesn't tax unregulated personal-use items up to a certain value

And the way the taxes are computed is revolting: they 'estimate' the price of the item, tax it 33% and apply a 'work tax' on the previous total. You end up paying about 50% tax.

The 'personal use' rule you talk about is different. I just used it after moving from the US to Europe and shipping all my personal possessions. It took a bit of paperwork: certificate of temporary exportation, attestation of residency change from a consulate and some more. Good luck trying to explain that one to the airport customs officer who's just asking about those 3 laptops and 5 digital cameras in your pack...!

Alexandre PUKALL published a free list of more than 10 thousand recipes about a decade ago. It's available in various forms on the Net. My take on it is an easy to search windows help file (.chm) (use xchm in Linux), but take it easy with my server as it's 7Mb (and it's all in French).

I also learnt about Quantian right after I finished building my 24 processor cluster

But how can you work with one of those ? You can surf the web but that's about all. You cannot write to NTFS partitions, so that precludes their use on a Windows machine as an alternate OS. If you can't save files it's useless as far as I can tell.

Please, please, disprove me.

Was twice at Dome C in the center of Antarctica, living in a tent at -40deg temperatures (in summer) and doing hardware and software data acquisitions. Once they didn't give me the right kind of hardware and I ended up for an afternoon my a trusty HP Vectra outside to reprogram an eprom that couldn't be moved. Here's a picture.

Was twice at Dome C in the center of Antarctica, living in a tent at -40deg temperatures (in summer) and doing hardware and software data acquisitions. Once they didn't give me the right kind of hardware and I ended up for an afternoon my a trusty HP Vectra outside to reprogram an eprom that couldn't be moved. Here's a picture.

Actually, his homebuilt RV-4 was Linux powered and Tux decided to meet up with Adelie on the way. :)

> As a strike team leader for a mountain search and rescue team, I'll tell you that without HAM radio, our job would be just plain impossible in many situations

I'd like to believe that, unfortunately my wife's climbing party was once swept in a rockfall. She called for hours with her radio, could reach several HAM operators, but nobody believed her or would call a rescue. Finally 2 hours later one did. It would have been faster if she walked back to Chamonix. One of the guys still can't walk properly 10 years later.

For all I care those frequencies should be put to much better use.

And I don't take useless radios when I go climbing

Hey, I know those guys... They took some of my copyrighted wallpaper images, removed my logos, and resold them on CDs. Assholes.

Dancing with landsharks is never a good idea. As I said "Justice is a vending machine that only takes $10 000 coins, usually a lot of them. And sometimes the chocolate bar still gets stuck." (So one picked that up for their quotes page, cool!)

Yes. I sell some images online, and I use a quite serious external payment system that makes several additional checks. All the orders I get from strange countries (Afghanistan, anywhere in Africa...) never get confirmed.

Just to illustrate to the discussion: two high-res images of (normal) ligthning above my condo: 1 and 2

Just to illustrate to the discussion: two high-res images of (normal) ligthning above my condo: 1 and 2

Antec is much better. Heavier too.

He! I had a good example of that a couple weeks ago. I built a cluster of 12 PCs with 2 AMD Athlon 2400+ each, running OpenMosix. I had tested it in small chunks so I knew it could run. I moved everything over to the final destination, a 3000VA UPS, and invited my boss to come throw the switch.

It started perfectly and I started demonstrating the power of 30Gflops of AMD CPU working together: I started a script to run 24 instances of Seti@Home.

My finger was still on the [Enter] key when there was a loud Boom!, the UPS blew up and the whole room went dark. My boss: "Nice demo !"

...it clears all the shit out of the brain. And it's certainly a lot more healthy than watching baseball on TV. And of course photography to remember it all. Part of my website is freeware, another part is climbing pictures and I won't say what the rest is...

...it clears all the shit out of the brain. And it's certainly a lot more healthy than watching baseball on TV. And of course photography to remember it all. Part of my website is freeware, another part is climbing pictures and I won't say what the rest is...

...it clears all the shit out of the brain. And it's certainly a lot more healthy than watching baseball on TV. And of course photography to remember it all. Part of my website is freeware, another part is climbing pictures and I won't say what the rest is...

...it clears all the shit out of the brain. And it's certainly a lot more healthy than watching baseball on TV. And of course photography to remember it all. Part of my website is freeware, another part is climbing pictures and I won't say what the rest is...

Well, I was in that car in front of him, so that doesn't apply to me, does it ? BTW, that sucked for a honeymoon ending :-(

More (?) seriously, another drawback of that system is that the radar is on the front of the car. Your eyes are much higher. If there's a stopped car / big rock behind a hill, your eyes will see it a lot before the radar.

So I read online, whatever I found that was up to date and settled on the satisfying OpenMosix and... it works ! :-)

While testing equipment destined to go to Antarctica, a big tank (~100 liters) of liquid nitrogen blew up right above me (the necessary exhaust must have clogged). Everybody else in the room ran for their life but I was behind lots of wires and heavy equipment, trapped in a cloud of opaque white fumes. The liquid poured on my head, through my clothing... Weird sensation but not bad.

Then things got weird when small explosions, like firecrackers, started all over the ground: the tiles were breaking due to the cold. Fortunately I was wearing security shoes and could feel my feet okay, even though I couldn't see shit. After about a minute of standing still the cloud dissipated and the cow-workers looked cautiously through the door to see if I was still alive... Hey, thanks, guys !

While researching cluster software for my current project, I read some whitepapers showing the differences between Plan 9, Beowulf, Mosix and others. I recommend that read.

...for my personal penguin page. Yes, I did coding and hardware butchering down in Antarctica for about 2 years.

[...] you need your software to be cluster-aware

This is true for Beowulf clusters where you need to use libraries like PVM or MPI, but not so with OpenMosix, which is what makes it so interesting and simple to use. It makes your cluster act like one giant SMP machine. If you start many jobs they migrate to whatever node is not busy and distributes the load. Not all software can migrate but most can.

I just setup a 24 CPU OpenMosix cluster, and besides the fact that the UPS melted when my boss first turned it on yesterday, it works great... ;-)

Some of my notes are online and I'm working on adding more.

So the most usefool... ooops I mean useful tools were:

• The MSDN which contains the entire Microsoft Knowledge base, all versions of all MS operating systems, patches and more (yes, it's $$$ but well worth it in that case).
• A serial cable and a floppy of the old (circa '95) DOS based Norton Commander. You can remotely access files with the serial cable.
• A bunch of compilers which might not be needed in your case
• And lately I'd add a CD of Knoppix for a quick system test.

In Antarctica, 1997. I had two rugged military laptops (Kontron) for data acquisition and an HP Vectra desktop for use indoors. One of the laptops video fried when a snow machine started a few feet from it and the other didn't have the right connectors. I had to program an eprom on some equipment outside and just put the Vectra+Monitor on a box. For 4 hours at -45C and it worked fine. I even have a picture. So it's not because there's a thicker case around a motherboard that it makes it more reliable...

In Antarctica, 1997. I had two rugged military laptops (Kontron) for data acquisition and an HP Vectra desktop for use indoors. One of the laptops video fried when a snow machine started a few feet from it and the other didn't have the right connectors. I had to program an eprom on some equipment outside and just put the Vectra+Monitor on a box. For 4 hours at -45C and it worked fine. I even have a picture. So it's not because there's a thicker case around a motherboard that it makes it more reliable...

InMarSat is a relatively new