Slave driving

Was a bit weird at work today, as I was all ranty and stuff to various people, not doing any work, but making sure that the work got done. I can definitely feel a difference in how well things are going now compared to this morning, though, so I guess I did have some effect...

Got a haircut. I like it.

Went with ayria to the Home Depot, mainly to get her a solid stick for her sliding window/door at her place, so that she can ventilate a bit and not cook. I hope she'll be able to sleep better this way. She got some lumber for a project of hers too, pretty crazy! I just realized now that I forgot to measure the size of the holes in my Ivar shelves (I want to get dowels as built-in book-ends), oops.

Went to help iangurudata and kyn_mad_arabe move in, accidentally dragging along ayria, due to poor planning on my part (who would have thought?). Nice place they've got themselves, the only things I have to say is that it's a bit far away from the metro (but not too bad with the bus) and it's on the third floor (but has a nice view in the back).

Through some amazingly good planning, I also turned out to have only eaten a grilled cheese this morning at around 10am. I headed over to the 24h Metro (on Côte-des-Neiges) at 11pm, raided the place and made myself some crappy, but warm and at home food. Put some Belle Gueule Pilsner on top, chatting with some of the good people online, and I was in heaven.

Heat Management 101

I hear a lot of whining around me about heat and how it's killing them, while I tend to scoff at them often. Okay, some people (like azrhey!) just have weird bodies and simply do better, but I'm no heat-invulnerable superman. Just as I take some precautions in the winter to stay warm, I take some precautions to stay cool in the summer.

Have a heat budget. Find out what gives out heat in your living quarters, and try to avoid them. You can't really turn off your fridge, but you can make sandwiches and salad more often rather than use the stove or even the microwave (and that's probably more appropriate anyway). Do you really need that computer running at all time? That monitor? Incandescent lighting is also pretty bad, be it conventional or halogen.

Never just open the windows. Only open them if it is cooler outside (in the evening and through the night, most commonly). If you do open the window, consider basic aerodynamic, try to have about the same surface area of window open at two opposed sides of your apartment (you also need to get rid of that hot air to leave space for the cool air!). If you use a fan, find out the natural direction the air flows and set it up in the same way, rather than having it fight nature.

Avoid the sun, both in your apartment and outside. Leave your (preferably white and rather opaque) blinds closed, other than what's needed to let air in or out if the window is open. When you walk around, walk on the side of the street that's in the shade. If possible, when you stop at a street corner waiting for cars, stop in the shadow of something, anything (like a traffic light). It helps more than you think.

Don't be afraid of sweat. It's your body's temperature control system, don't screw it up by wiping yourself or trying to get rid of it (other than by drying). Less clothing helps here, because clothes tend to absorb the sweat and have it dry away from your skin, mostly foiling the system. It works rather simply: to evaporate water, it takes energy, in the form of heat. The sweat takes away heat to evaporate.

If you're not sweaty or wet, a fan doesn't help (it doesn't cool you much and it puts out heat!). Heat transfer between your body and air is not that effective, it's the sweat that makes it really good.

That makes the only two uses of fans to be either blowing on a sweaty/wet person, or pumping air to/from the outside with the windows open. In neither of these cases are the oscillating modes useful, in my opinion.

The evaporation process is slower when the air is more humid. A dehumidifier can be useful, but in bad cases, I have had excellent result with a home-grown setup using a salad bowl, water with ice, cookie tins (the flat metallic things you use to cook cookies) and a fan pointed at the setup. Can bring humidity down by as much as 20% in a small room, if done right.

Our skin is mostly only sensitive to differential of temperature. Meaning that we can tell if something is warmer or cooler than us, but not much else. When you take a shower, you'll feel better right then by being in the water (body to water heat transfer is rather effective), but make sure you feel the water is cool, do not just set it to be comfortable. You don't have to give yourself hypothermia either, you just have to feel it being cool.

When you take cool showers, cool off you head much. Somehow, this makes a big difference, much like wearing a hat in winter makes your whole body appear warmer.

Do not be afraid of sweat, but be very afraid of dehydratation. When you feel really icky when it's hot, it's most likely because you're getting dehydrated. You sweat a lot, so you have to drink a lot. Be careful what you drink too, alcohol is a diuretic for example, and water that you pee isn't going to go in your sweat. Just drinking a lot of water (a couple of liters per day, I'd say) will keep you feeling much better and will make the difference between suffering in the heat wave and scoffing at those suffering!

There are some well known tricks, like going to the shopping mall (or other places where they have A/C), but this doesn't help with sleeping well at night, for example.

Although, in conclusion, I still think Primus said it best.

Disgusted

A bit of a technical post, since my other diary is currently broken (yay for computers).

Reiserfs is terrible. I don't know much about the design, but the style of the code leaves much to be desired.

You remember how doing fread() and fwrite() of structures to disk is a bad idea? Well, that's exactly how the reiserfs superblock is written, including a bunch of pointer members. Wow, stylin'.

The journal flushing algorithm is recursive. Recursive. In the kernel. It has a 4k stack now. Running out of stack will make it panic. Hope you don't have too many transaction piling up between two scheduling of the reiserfs journal flushing thread (people who know me also know what I think of threads).

Is this serious? Jebus, I need a drink.