2016 — 28 August: Sunday
Yesterday evening's late viewing1 promised to tell me 10 things I never knew about tsunamis. By the 20-minute point it had told me nothing new. Basically, if you:
- shake the sea bed vigorously with an earthquake, perhaps thrusting up a new 40-foot cliff or two, or
- drop enough large rocks simultaneously down an underwater mountain range in an underwater rockfall, or
- drop enough large rocks simultaneously into the sea from an island in the middle of a deep ocean mountain range, or
- drop into the sea from space a large object like a rock "the size of Manhattan"...
... you get ripples. Water being essentially incompressible, these spread out from the point of origin. And pile up on shorelines as the wave front slows in shallower water while its trailing edge catches up. The ripples do not stop neatly at the beach. Chaos ensues.
Unawash with facts, and fed up with the low rate at which they were coming in, I gave up.
Tea is top of my agenda, followed by a spot of breakfast.
I'm now serving 'molehole' pages...
... internally by the built-in Python "SimpleHTTPServer" function. I'm tickled by its unfussy simplicity, its lack of need for configuration (contrast with lighttpd, here) and not least by its default address:
Nary a ripple to report. It may well be memory-hungry and inefficient for all I know, but for my purposes — on a fast PC that barely breaks into a shuffle, let alone a trot — it couldn't be easier.
I don't visit...
... Lesley Hall's wonderful site as often as I should, but always unearth a gem such as this when I do:
Having convinced myself...
... that the dreadful piano improvisations on BBC Radio 3 were some bastard variation on a Bach Partita I happen to like, I was astonished to discover that I was actually being played "Improvisation in the form of a Theme and Three Variations on 'Someone to watch over me'" (another tune I happen to like, and prefer to hear without too much mucking about) loosely (very loosely) originating, that is, with Gershwin.
This week's guest on "Private Passions" is the chap (Steve Silberman) who wrote "Neurotribes" (the fat book on autism) I read a while back. He has inspired me to dig out some of my Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie music.
I have a highly...
... pseudoscientific process by which I select a book to browse. This one — containing, as it does, a rich stew of US guvmint buzzwords — will, I suspect...
... again depress me (mostly by its lack of need for any substantial revisions in the 20 years since I last looked at it). Here's its definition of "Reality":
A nightmare, unbelievable during waking hours.
Just for fun...
... after my late lunch I decided to see how well my i5 NUC2 takes to webserving in addition to being Chief Cook and Media Player around Technology Towers. My last attempt to get 'lighttpd' running on the NUC was completely uncapped by success, but I now have this minimalist approach to web servers. So I:
- copied my external 'molehole' website files on to a dinky "My Passport" external USB3 drive in a folder named "webfiles",
- walked over to the NUC and plumbed it in,
- walked back to BlackBeast (gotta get all the exercise, after all),
- fired up a NoMachine remote desktop session to use the NUC's desktop,
- navigated to, and fired up a terminal session in, the "webfiles" directory of the USB3 drive,
- confirmed Mint 18 already includes a Python environment by default,
- kicked off the SimpleHTTPServer in "webfiles",
- pointed my BlackBeast web browser at the NUC's address (in this case, 192.168.1.76) but still using port 8000
... and up popped 'molehole' without troubling the flow of my music (also from the NUC).
I'd hoped to run the server from the appropriate file folder on my cheap'n'cheerful "My Cloud" NAS (which is busy being a Samba file server) but the option to open a terminal there is stubbornly greyed out. It would have cut out the "My Passport" drive. Doubtless it's either a share issue, a permissions issue, or to stop me from doing my head in and/or doing some damage to this device after it's been carefully locked down by the Western Digital elves.
The NoMachine elves grab for themselves the "Control/C" combination, which means a slightly more brutal termination process than I usually use. No matter; I've proved the basic principle works.