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Monitor a Linux Box With Machine Generated Music
mcappel writes "Linux and Unix admins are familiar with vmstat and top, which are visual tools displaying the health of a computer. chordStats adds a new interface to a system monitoring setup — information passed through tone, timbre, and harmony. IBM's Nathan Harrington, who wrote Knock Some Commands Into Your Laptop, created a simple Perl script to send note events to FluidSynth that forces various system events to be interpreted as a part of a harmonious interval, and looks at options for enhancing a musical system monitor."
Anyone have any audio files of this to give us an idea of what it sounds like?
This guy's the limit!
Google loaded this at one of it's datacenters!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...someone made a program to "audiolize" system load as raindrops. Couldn't see the point back then, can't see it now.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
A much more useful instrument would be a microphone (or emf, rpm sensor) on the fans and some software coupled to that that predicts when the fan is about to fail. Also maybe for hard drives. I know sofware is used in cash machines that tracks the activities of the transducers and actuators, then sends a "fix me" notification to HQ, often many hours before a mechanical failure becomes serious enough to disable the machine; and that has been very successful.
That depends on your definition of 'sound':
No, it doesn't make a sound.
Yes, it does make a sound.
Back in the "old" days, we had techs that could tell you the error/fault that had occurred by the sound pattern produced by the line printers. To the very last one, they were upset/angry when the printers where replaced with quieter versions as this now meant they had to look up from playing solitaire/day trading to actually look if there were any significant events.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
These concepts remind me of an old Novell "bouncing ball" screensaver. The ball had a "tail" that grew in length as the load on the server increased.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
There was a very popular sci-fi russian book by I.Efremov called Andromeda Cloud that had a starship that had controls that played music sounds and if some data reading from sensors went into potentially dangerous area or even close, it would weave an ominous-sounding chime into the usual sound, and if data readings go further into danger area, the 'bad' chime would become louder.
One of the best books of sci fi in my opinion.
It's a bit heavy on communistic ideals, though. It had to be at the time, to get published. It's amazing that he was able to make it interesting, despite that.
The story is of a star travel to another close alien civilization that suddenly went quiet. They discover that it had a nuclear war, if I remember right. On the way back they crash into a planet of an iron star after they lose too much fuel trying to go around it.
The book is very hard sci-fi..
Some of the soviet themes was that they find a hidden cave on Earth that was built as a cache of achievements of dying western powers, and it's stocked with hundreds of luxury cars. Cars are no longer used on earth, though, and everybody thinks it's a very dumb idea to have them as public transport is amazingly advanced at the time. They also think it's very dumb of the people who built the cave to be so haughty as to think that what they built will amaze and astonish everyone who might discover it, where as in fact it all looks very silly to them (and they wished more art creations were preserved instead of hundreds of cars).
The author also wrote a lot about the East, traveled there much, in the Himalayas and the Tibet, he wrote about things like Yoga and a bit about religion, ancient India, he also wrote some historical-fictional books about Ancient Greeks and Egypt. Almost all of his stuff was top-notch.
The sci fi books are one of the very few examples from 50s that don't seem dated at all. In that sense he reminds me of Heinlein, strangely enough..
...when you could stick an AM radio on top of the GA16/440, tune the radio to the far end of the band and listen to your programs compile. You could tell when it was sorting it's symbol table, was very melodic.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear