Back in August 2008, at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, the big buzzword was "Cloud Computing". It's a neat concept, but after a week of hearing folks talk about "in the cloud", I was about at the end of my rope.

If you try to unmount a partition and get a message like this: # umount /media/usbdisk/ umount: /media/usbdisk: device is busy use the lsof command to find out what programs are using what files:

Once upon a time, one computer was all you needed. All of your documents lived on that computer, or a stack of floppies or CD-Roms nearby, and nowhere else. Those days are gone, much like the one-car, one-TV, and one-iPod days.

One of the comments to my last post about adjusting the fan speed on your NVidia graphics card was that what was needed was a script to adjust the speed based on the temperature. The script presented here does just that.

Earlier this year I discovered Jonatan Liljedahl's AlgoScore, a Csound-based program for sound and music composition. Alas, at that time I was unable to run AlgoScore on the machines here at Studio Dave. My builds of Csound use double-precision numerics, and AlgoScore was not compatible with that build option. However, Jonatan recently took another look at the problem, resolved it (with a little help from Victor Lazzarini and other friends on the Csound Developers mail-list), and I can now compile and run AlgoScore with double-precision Csound.

Google phrase searches can produce results that seem like random answers to a Rorschach test—only more amusing. Here are the top results (on a day in July 2008) for “The Internet is like...”: “a vast uncataloged library” “a vagina” “Joey Bishop” “a series of tubes”