I will be in Pittsburgh from 9/16 to 9/20. Amber won't be able to make it because she has other commitments. I'm going to be giving a talk titled Inside Intel® CoreTM Nehalem Microarchitecture and I will be pronouncing every single ® and TM there is. The talk is going to be on Friday, September 19, at noon in Hamerschlag Hall room 1112. I intend to provide pizza.

I am definitely coming to Carnegie Mellon for 9/17-9/19. I'm not sure when I'll leave, possibly 9/20. I will be giving a short talk about the Nehalem microarchitecture to the ECE Department while I'm in town in addition to working the TOC. The time for the talk is still being worked out, so I will post that as soon as I'm able.

Nothing is settled yet, but it seems likely that I will be visiting Carnegie Mellon around September 18 of this year. Amber will probably accompany me. We will be seeking cheesesteaks.

Check this space for more information as dates firm up.

Part 1 (several weeks ago)
Space is empty. In the future, human beings have conquered space and found nothing but inanimate matter: no intelligent aliens, no extraterrestial life, not even space pond scum. Space is so big that humanity is spread far and wide, like Little House On The Prairie. The scene is a space station. It is a combination of a homestead and a start-up company, with a family unit plus several hired hands with a share of the mineral wealth they are extracting from some lonely claim. The station itself is in the shape of a ring, a shape forced upon them by the unstable fuel they use which must be continuously circulated in the ring. The living quarters are concentrated in one large clump at the "bottom" of the ring.

A burst of unknown radiation.

Later, the space station begins subtly to malfunction. Things that should be inanimate instead demonstrate consciousness and will. Later, manifestations of this will make themselves known to the station's crew. It has taken a familiar form and spins beguiling tales and fabrications, but surely and inexorably the crew is being driven to isolate themselves, first from the outside world, then from certain sections of the space station, and finally from each other. A courageous member of the family attempts to save them all by penetrating the parts of the space station that the will had rendered off limits only to discover the living quarters and supplies have been turned into grey goo. It is clear the humans are to be eliminated as soon as the station has the ability to ensure the outcome of the battle. The humans force the final battle early. The station and all the people aboard it are destroyed in an accidental explosion.

Part 2 (last night)
In the recent past, many reports of independent space stations vanishing have begun to circulate around the frontier. There are never distress calls or any clues as to what happened. No attacks have been reported, but the disappearances make everyone tense. The members of one particular station attempting to conduct a routine trade run discovered another station mostly destroyed except for part of its ring. The station had recently been blown up. Analysis of the ring fragment indicates that the unstable fuel was contaminated, something any well run station would never allow to happen. Did the owners of this station become sloppy? But what of the others? They return to their own station, full of questions.

A burst of unknown radiation.

Aboard this station are Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander Harris, myself and my family, and one man from my office. Soon, the family dog acquires intelligence and the ability to speak. It's unclear what significance to attach to the radiation burst. Is it the transmission of a soul into the dumb matter of the station? Is it a cover for the delivery of a small payload of real matter? Is it extraterrestrial? Could it be the Great Filter? In a bit of dramatic irony, I, the narrator and POV, am aware of the eventual outcome of this station, doomed as all the others have been as the consciousness will do anything to prevent knowledge of its existence from leaking out into the universe, including destroying itself and fleeing to another location and trying over, but I, the person and character aboard the station, am unable to take action on this information. It is clear to POV me that the will is able to persuade small bits of matter to accumulate in intelligent ways; it can bootstrap nanotechnological assemblers. At first, it treads carefully because it can only process a few grams of matter, but as time goes on it can convert more and more and acquires more and more control.

The family dog warns us that something is now living in our storage areas. The thing has accidentally given the dog the gift of speech, and with its newfound insight the dog can tell that the thing is hostile to all aboard the station. Our dog cautions us not to antagonize the thing or even make it aware of our presence, so we hide ourselves whenever the dog warns us of its arrival. It takes the form of a girl, or perhaps really the ghost of a girl. What could it be, and what does it want? The engineer from my office is ship's engineer (a characterization pun?) and he is struck by a terrible notion. Bypassing the security safeguards with a virtuoso display of technical prowess and raw dexterity, he accesses the fuel source in the local loop of the ring, a feat which should be impossible from our cramped location. The fuel is contaminated, exactly the same way as the ring fragment we discovered was. We are doomed, living in a space station rigged to explode with a hostile entity holding the trigger.

We take the news hard, Xander most of all. Buffy advocates fighting the entity, while my mother pleads for appeasement. The dog facilitates this discussion, trying to come up with new attacks or concessions. I sidle over to Xander to try to cheer him up. I tell him that if he's really feeling down, he could always try to leave, get help, call in the Navy. I tell him the Navy would probably let him come back on the rescue mission, after all, because he's a Navy man (in my dream space Xander was turned into a Navy officer for Halloween, not a commando army guy). The idea of an escape attempt appeals to his suicidal train of thought. We're doomed, so why not go out with a bang?

Xander leaves the room perfunctorily, without mentioning his plan or destination. The dog becomes angry and alarmed. Too late I realize what Xander had evidently known all along: the family dog is not on our side. It is an agent or extension of the entity, part of the same seductive will that was trying to persuade us not to take decisive action until it was too late. The dog leaves. POV me sees Xander walking across a space bridge, like on the Death Star, but before he can the station blows it up. Xander rolls to temporary safety and stands to challenge the entity, Heston-like. He yells at it to stop blowing up the station and just kill him.

Perhaps the will has a sense of fair play. Perhaps it had been planning to alter its tactics all along. Perhaps it had become intemperate and incautious after so many failures. But it responds the way Xander wants.

Skeletons attack Xander. First one, then two, now many. Skeleton is too substantial a term, for these are the merest wisps of skeletons, the minimum amount of matter needed to have two legs and two arms. Xander destroys the first few easily as they are made of almost nothing, but the next have guns taken from our small arms locker. Xander, too, has a gun, and he is a better shot! During the ensuring firefight, Xander forces his way to a branch in the corridor. Right is the direction of the station's interstellar ship and left is a smaller hallway to a maintenance hatch. Skeletons pour out of the right corridor and from behind. Xander busts into the clot of skeletons, taking many hits, and the remaining skeletons behind him boil into the right corridor. He is buying time for the others to take action through his Ardeth Bay suicide maneuver, but what can they do from behind the broken space bridge? No, he's back from the dead, exactly like Ardeth Bay, because the dash down the right side was a ruse. An explosion goes off in the right corrider as Xander tosses a tiny grenade into the room destroying skeletons both fore and aft. He sprints down the left hallway and out the maintenance hatch he goes.

Of course, there's a small rover used to perform maintenance on the exterior of the ring! Xander gives it the gas and accelerates out from the station, just ahead of the explosion which the entity sets off. Is the station completely gone, or did the entity perform a controlled blast in case Xander did escape and it needed all the strength it could find? Am I, my family, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the guy from my office dead? Will Xander have survivor's guilt? What is this entity, and how will humanity fight it off? Can we? These answers will have to wait for another night.

It has been two and a half years for me, and we're still not there yet. But the spring Intel Developer Forum did include a few updates on the Nehalem project which I've been working on in the "non-core" area. The very brief summary of the article is Intel will launch a new microprocessor code-named Nehalem later this year. I've been working on the all-new areas of Nehalem since I changed jobs a while ago. The IDF reporter says, "The data-transfer rate to memory is four times that of the current quad-core Xeon."

I feel pretty good about this.

Amber is in the middle of a four course sequence on quantitative analysis using statistical methods. Let me say that I haven't the foggiest clue what the material she is studying is about, because it goes very far beyond the tiny little bit of statistics I know. The natural consequence of this is Amber has spent a lot of time studying these past few months, and will be doing so for the foreseeable future. The upshot is we're watching less TV. Based on this reduction in use and Comcast's poor service, we decided to ditch Comcast and get DSL.

In this brave new cable-free world, we've found that by far the best way to indulge in a bit of television is to stream it from the network's websites. We've increased our iTunes purchases as well, but not our Netflix plan.

Additionally, I have had more time to play some Eve. And to write about playing some Eve, I suppose.

About a month ago, I celebrated the first ever birthday of one of my online roleplaying game characters. Why have I subscribed to Eve for a year when nothing else could hold my interest for that long? It is a combination of the casual player friendly game mechanics and the player-driven game world.

Eve characters learn new skills while you're offline. I can't stress that enough. If I don't feel like longing in to play the game for two weeks, I don't feel like I've hopelessly gimped my character. Even better, when I leave for vacation or get very busy at work, the next time I log in my character can do something new every time. Furthermore, it is very easy to set up your character's ships so you can play for just fifteen minutes if you don't have the time for a longer session. Eve Online does a great job of making the game fun to play whether you have hours or just minutes.

The sandbox nature of the Eve universe means the gameplay is always changing. I joined a 0.0 PvP outfit about three months ago. In that time, the corp has changed its focus from small scale pew-pew with a frigate focus to larger 50 vs. 50 ship battles with capital ships at stake. There's always a new ship to buy or a new role to fill.

To read stories about my recent PvP exploits in Eve, please keep checking my thread about 0.0 fights. You might also be interested in some of my amusing older adventures as a pirate. Lastly, if this type of thing interests you, check out my threads on Eve happenings and creating a new character in Eve. New Eve characters are substantially more powerful and useful in PvP than new characters in certain other games I could mention. I really can't stop recommending this game to everyone.

Amber has been accepted to the community psychology Ph.D. program at Portland State University. She'll be studying with Dr. Keith Kaufman. We're both really excited. She starts in the fall.

Restoring the forum was slightly more work than I anticipated, but it went pretty smoothly all told. The main problem was I had been running a rather old version of phpBB (2.0.17) and the new version I installed was 2.0.21. There were some database field changes between the two versions. Anyway, I hacked up the restore file and everything's back in place. I didn't have a more recent backup than August 13. Oh, well. And the way I did it I managed to reset the topic and post count for Bulletin Board. Oh, well. Other than that, everything is back to the way it was, only now I'm on dreamhost.com and paying less than half as much per month for more storage and bandwidth. If you find a problem, please tell me.

I let my subscription to my old webhost expire as a motivation to find a new one. It wasn't too successful as I haven't signed up for one and they booted me off the old host. I think I'm going to go with the one sackofbob recommended. Hopefully I'll have everything settled within a week. Approximately two weeks of blather on Mohtalim will be lost to the aether; the rest I have backed up.

I have been completely obsessed with Eve Online for the past few months. Eve is very good MMORPG. I like many aspects of the game, but what keeps me paying the monthly fee is the class-less module-based ship design. Finding new combinations of guns and shields and tracking computers and all the other glorious modules is just endlessly fascinating. It stimulates some of the same neurons that really like fitting ships for specific roles in Stars!.

Amber's uncle Parker visited us in April.

Also, we moved apartments about two months ago. Our new place has nice hardwood floors.

But never mind all that, I have to plan my Eve skill training for the next three months!

I bought myself a Nokia 770 for my birthday to replace my aging Sidekick Color. I got fed up with playing Nethack and started to port Troubles of Middle Earth to the platform. This is not as taxing as it sounds, as Angband is already available for both GTK and ARM. I have already progressed to the point where I can play a game of ToME compiled for the Maemo SDK using Scratchbox. The problem is I have to use my PC keyboard, as I cannot figure out how to engage the text input without creating a useless text widget. Several people have solved this problem in their ports, but I am no closer to figuring it out after going through the available source code. I am currently waiting for someone on the developer mailing list to take pity on me.

An alternative would be to use a mouse-driven version of Angband, similar to GTK2Hack. No such game exists, as far as I can tell. There's Iso-Angband which uses SDL (available for Maemo!), but Iso-Angband is still alpha without art for everything in the game and also makes no claims about mouse support, anyway.

Starting Monday, I will no longer be working on the Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor on 65nm Technology (otherwise known as the Cedar Mill, Presler, and Dempsey family of processors). Instead, I'm transfering to a new position as a platform architect working on a next-next-generation architecture for Intel. I think this will be a good change for me professionally and I'm looking forward to it. I'm still living in Portland and working in Hillsboro, so nothing much will change there. I'm hoping the new job will feature more of what I enjoyed about my old job (modeling and microarchitecture) and less of what I could do without (maintenance).

I was going through my server logs and I noticed a fair number of 404s. These were almost entirely due to my decision to eliminate the "~jdpearce" from all my URLs midway through the life of Jonathan.Pearce.Name, without providing any redirection. In an effort to correct this, I fixed all the links in my old news updates. Let me know if you find a dead link.

Another 404 was due to a server crash. Thanks to archive.org, I recovered the text. I think this article about spam filtering is interesting primarily for its historical value. I wrote it shortly after I read Paul Graham's A Plan for Spam. Nowadays, of course, everyone and their ISP uses Bayesian filtering.

I had an idea for maintaining a persistent online game world using a "worse is better" approach. The result is a conception of a distributed persistent online game world that should scale better than any MMORPG seen to date.

Amber and I just got back from Tennessee on Sunday. Amber was a bridesmaid in her cousin Kelly's wedding. We had a great time and wish Kelly and Robert all the best. I took a few pictures during the reception. Apparently I occasionally forgot that there was no light, but some of the pictures turned out good. Perhaps I'll try to fix some of the better dark ones later.

Amber and I have moved to a new townhouse. The old apartment was turning into condominiums. We did not want to buy it. The new place is down by the Willamette River, near the marina. They're building a condos between us and the river, but for the moment we have a river view from our living room. I'll put up a picture once we have cleared all the boxes out.

We won't miss the old place. Goodbye, cigarette-smoking guys with the floor-shaking bass who moved in below us. Adios, whoever keeps leaving pet feces by the elevator. Take care, lousy management company. Hello, shiny new apartment.

"Man," I thought in my internal expository monologue, "it sure is difficult to find a free space strategy game that I want to play. If only there were some kind of list of all the available free space strategy games..."

I've been a dual booter for years because I like Linux but want to play computer games. I decided recently I wasn't going to let games be my excuse to keep Windows around any more. I dived into installing and playing Linux games and surprised myself at how easy it was.

Sorry if you've been trying to access my website, but as you can see I've been having problems. I've upgraded Mohtalim to the latest version to prevent further debilitating attacks. My account has been reinstated, and the situation appears normal. Please email me if you find anything out of the ordinary.

Someone exploited a bug in phpBB on Mohtalim last night, presumably for the purposes of spam. Whatever the reason, the effect was to increase the load on my web server to the point that the server admin noticed. He took down Mohtalim to stop the exploit. I am working to resolve the problem with my admin.

I can't access my website. I can't even ssh in. When I learn more I will make another update.

My good friend and old high school pal Mark Weathers wrote to tell me about his website last year, but I never did remember to link to it. Now it's on the Links page with the rest of my friends' sites.