I completed 670 tasks (that were enough effort to put them on my tasklist), about 2 tasks a day. I received (and read) 20555 emails (after filtering mailinglists and spam!), about 56 emails/day, I sent 5688 emails, about 16 emails/day. Way too many, it’s already consuming a significant fraction of my time! I flew a total of approximately 95.000 miles (~176.000 km), which made me travel at an average speed of 17.4 km/h over the year. I feel bad for the caused carbon footprint but this means that I also spent at least 300 hours (about 12 days) in planes (this is a lower bound estimate). Oh well! I hope 2012 gets quieter .

They were also neither patted down nor searched. So I asked about that. The agent replied “Flight crews on duty never go through the scanner.”. First, I asked how they know that they’re flight crews (cf. “Catch me if you can”). Well, apparently a uniform and some form of plastic badge is ok (no list or barcode or anything). I didn’t get a reply to my question “why” (especially if there was no line!) .

I guess people dressed up in uniforms with some form of airline ID are much more trustworthy than other fellow travelers. Also, this may be some for of admitting that those scanners are affecting people’s health. Well well.

Even the hpc-ch blog and Inside-IT.ch reported on it.

The ETH Board has appointed the following individuals as professors: Torsten Hoefler [...], currently Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, USA, as Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Computational Science. Torsten Hoefler is internationally regarded as one of the leading young scientists in the field of high-performance computing. At the University of Illinois, he is currently involved in the development of one of the world’s most efficient supercomputers. His research interests focus on system design, programming and efficiency analysis. Torsten Hoefler will provide the Department of Computer Science, the research focus “Scientific Computing and Simulation” and the CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre) with important stimuli. [...]


11:50:20 up 919 days, 19:21, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.10, 0.08
[Mon Aug 29 11:50:20] htor@benten:~


One can make some conclusions:

• 919 days no power outage (the server is hanging off a normal outlet)
• there were numerous network outages during this time
• the software raid also went on a rampage and halted the system for half a day (but came back afterwards)
• 919 days no kernel upgrade (I don’t know of any remote exploits for the running kernel, I won’t tell the version though )
• the hardware (including the disks which make a strange sound since about a year) is rather robust (given that I got the machine from the department’s “dumpster”). The HDs will probably die once they stop spinning .

In the meantime, there was also another news article about the conference: EETimes. Unfortunately, I’m slightly mis-quoted but it’s not that bad (but who would built a 17-d Torus, not sure where this came from ).

Thanks Jeff!