Teleidoscope

Tue, May 20, 2008

My Joke

Posted at 8:29 pm MDT to Technology

This is not my joke because I made it up -- I originally heard it during a filk session at a World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago about 20 years ago.

It is my joke because it is the only joke I know where I can reliably remember both the setup and the punchline.

---

One day an electrical engineer (EE) died and went to hell. And the devil took him down the hall and opened a door and said, "This is where you will be."

And the EE went into the room and looked around. It was a huge room, full of acres of lab tables full of state of the art -- no beyond state of the art -- test and diagnostic equipment. And along one side were racks and racks full of every kind of spare part imaginable.

The EE turned to the devil and said, "But, I don't understand! This is an EE's dream. Just look at all this stuff! This is an EE's dream!"

But the devil just smiled and answered, "You don't understand. The problem ... is intermittent."

permanent link || trackback || 0 comments || Add a comment

Upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 continued

Posted at 4:57 pm MDT to Technology

Last night the wifi was working fine with a 2.6.22 kernel, which is what I was running vmware on top of all day yesterday.

This morning neither the wifi nor vmware would work with 2.6.22.

After two hours of thrashing I hauled the laptop into my computer room and set up a cabled ether net connection. When I rebooted, the wifi came up too.

Arggh. Having something work for no known reason is only slightly less annoying than having something not work for no known reason.

I got vmware working (with only NATed internet, not the bridging I was able to use with Ubuntu 7.10) and spent the day in the computer room. With the 4 fans in the big server a few feet from my ear.

Now I have come out to the living room, and the wifi is still working after a reboot. I wonder if whatever is going on is partially temperature dependent.

I wonder what will work or not work tomorrow. I'm not going to change anything in this laptop's configuration this evening.

In the meantime, I'm going to get vmware working on the new laptop, which has completely opensource wifi drivers. I'm still having tool chain problems. VMware server is now happy with gcc4.3, but the client piece seems to want a library from 4.0, which I don't think is even available for Ubuntu.

permanent link || trackback || 0 comments || Add a comment