Monday! Well, there wasn’t that much really going on. A box had far too little disk space. After talking with some other folks, I figured out how we could reclaim at least a few percent of that space without causing any problems. We should be good for another month or two, we hope. (Our servers don’t have photogenic tabby cats inside them, though.)

On lunch break, I saw a post Kari had made on Facebook, where she said she had to deal with a whopping amount of data on dead trees. She says that dealing with ~200 pages of data on dead trees is actually more efficient than dealing with the same data in an electronic format. I wonder how that could be. (Well, they might’ve used MS Word with no rational markup of any sort to store the data, which would be difficult to deal with, but still doable with appropriately deranged Perl scripting. . . .) I’ve learned how to use various Unix tools to filter out extraneous stuff from huge masses of data, leaving only the things a human really needs to look at. I’m not sure how you’d do that with dead trees, though. I’m sure Kari’s using some sort of pattern-matching to determine which parts of the dead trees are important and which aren’t, but she didn’t go into details about that.

A bug in kded4 can eat 100% of one CPU. Bleah. I just noticed this last night. It’s sort of annoying, but manually killing the runaway process seems to work.