Life as a Physicist

You thought a thief was what it took to get me down? Naw. ATLAS software will do the trick!

I don’t remember being that frustrated with a computer in years. I’m pretty good at computers - I can usually debug what is going on and bend them to my will. But not lately, it looks like. Either I’m loosing my touch, or things have reached a whole new order of magnitude in complexity.

Here is what I was trying to do: check out some software from the source code repository, make a few minor modifications, compile, and then send the code off to run in a big processing center in the cloud (pathena/panda at BNL). When it works it is a beautiful thing!

I tried to accomplish this thing at three different computing centers around the world: SLAC, LYON, and Marseille. For different reasons it failed at each one - that was what was so frustrating. Each place had its unique problem that was a show stopper. I wasted a whole day.

What can a guy do? Well, it is France, so we went out for a long lunch with wine (where I found out I wasn’t the only one that was having troubles). In the end, however, I went to bed. This morning, at least, at once site, everything worked all the way through. I’m scared to try the other sites…

I expressed some surprise that someone came over and finger printed our apartment after the break-in. In fact, the police have been amazingly efficient here. I’m back at the lab today and talking with my friends they all want to know what it is like: they have never heard of finger printing for a break in. A common comment: “was a murder involved?”

In other news, the repairs have made more of a mess than the actual burglary. The thief hit the front door so hard to break the lock that it isn’t hanging the same way. So last night the lock smith and I sanded off parts of the door to get it to close ok again. What a mess. And 1.5 year old kids are very curious about wood-dust.

My old one, a Casio 8 megapixel, was in fine shape. But what good is a camera that has been stolen???

Yes, I’ve had my Marseille moment. I have no idea how the twerps did it, but they got through a solid steel door (more than a 1/2 in thick) with steel pins in the door frame designed to prevent exactly the kind of forced entry the fellow used. Totally busted the lock.

We live on the 5th floor. They did this sometime during the day, so they had full run on the place. And they took their time. Looked at almost everything here. All the cubards were opened, papers rifled through. What did they take? My nice Sony HD3 camcorder, my casio, $100 bucks, and a few others small things. I guess they were just looking for things that would fit in their pocket.

At the moment this is mostly a real pain. While I’m angry about loosing the Sony I still really like it (it was $700 when I originally got it). The Casio I’ve been unhappy with for a while. $100 US dollars? At the current exchange rate what is that? About 10 euros or something!? But the pain is the locksmith. Staying home several days in a row, etc.

The police were something else. They came over the same night to fill in a report. Then the next day, today, another group dropped by and finger printed my whole place. There was fine black dust everywhere. Mostly you can wipe this stuff up with a dry cloth. But not off any Apple Computer box. Whatever those white boxes are made of hold onto that soot very tightly. I knew there was a flaw in Apple’s products!!

But he left lots of stuff. A few small pocket drives (worth about 100 euros each), a computer (which wouldn’t have fit in the pocket) and some other stuff. Very odd.

At any rate. It has been nice staying home. I got out to a nice place for lunch instead of the Luminy cafeteria.

Oh, and my flickr account is going to be quiet until I replace that camera — which may be Christmas time!

I forgot it was Thanksgiving weekend! Living here in France it is hard to keep track of all the French holidays (the lab I work at is close a lot). But, apparently, it is even harder to keep track of the US ones! I figured it out when I dialed into a weekly meeting back in the US and there was no one there!

Happy Thanksgiving for those of you that celebrate it! I miss my turkey and cranberry sauce.

When we write code we always do it in an ideal situation. Single machine. Small amounts of input data. We then expect it to work well when we through multi-gigabyte data sets at it, or have it run on multiple computers. I see evidence of this all the time in both commercial and custom software. Especially GRID software.

The thing I would like to see more of in the way we code is graceful failure. For example, if you have to make an entry in a database in a machine that is half way around the world, the chances are pretty good that it will be down, or some bit of the Internet between you and it will be down. Plan for it! That will make you and your user’s life so much easier: if you do then either a) the data won’t be lost forever, or it won’t require you to, by-hand, add the data to the database every time.

I also don’t get these statements that we are connected to the internet all the time! Sure, about 90% of the time our portables or desktop computers are. But that other 10% of the time there are network outages, congestion, firewall issues. Code we write has to be ready for this sort of thing!

This is not easy. I see large corporations and dedicated open source projects get this sort of thing wrong all the time. Heck, I helped design and code up a distributed system that needs >95% up time and I still find issues where I didn’t design this in from the start (the D0 DAQ system). But one can do a lot!

The real problem is that there aren’t enough people to implement the features we need. Sometimes I wonder if delivering a limited system that worked would be better than a big system that has bugs.

P.S. If you couldn’t tell, I’ve spent a pretty frustrating several days dealing with code that doesn’t look like it was designed with this in mind!

I arrived back in Paris yesterday from the USA. That part was easy (thank you, for once, United). Getting from Paris to Marseille came close to being a disaster because of the strike. The easy train to take was the 1:30pm from the airport - direct to Marseille. Unfortunately, they had no idea if it would run. However, they did know that the 1:40 one from downtown Paris was running. The only trick left then was to get to downtown Paris. I waited over an hour and a half for the Air France bus to arrive at the airport. I gave up when I found out that it was taking over 3 hours to drive to downtown! That is normally a 45 minute trip in heavy traffic.

Fortunately, by the time I figured that out, they knew that the direct train from the airport was going to run, so I switched. Waited outside in the cold and the drizzle for nothing. As I said, if that is the worst I am affected by this strike… that isn’t too much!

The train ride was the slowest I’d ever been on - it was like being back in the USA. There were periods where the TGV was running no faster than running speed. It normally runs at about 186 mph!

BTW, I sat opposite this Finish guy. He had more technology that I did. He seemed to spend the whole train ride trying to get all of his various devices to work with each other. Is there some anti-correlation between number of tools and amount of work you get done? On the same topic, check out this post - it made me laugh out loud (I’ve had the same problems in my house).

At least, I think that is how most Americans hear the question.

I’ve seen this happen twice now. When you walk into a French restaurant and you are on your own, they will sometimes ask “Vous-etes seul?” - “are you alone?” is the literal translation. The first time I saw the bad reaction was in Marseille. The fellow paused, clearly annoyed at the question, and said (in English)  “Tonight, I am alone.” with strong emphasis on the “tonight” - as if to imply that he wasn’t normally alone and this was a temporary situation. The second time was just the other night when I was eating in Paris (seul). The reaction was very similar. It is as if the American guy takes it as a failure that he is alone and couldn’t find a friend or a date.

Of course, the question is much more benign than that, but the subtly is lost in the translation. They are just trying to figure out how many table settings to put at your table…

As far as I know, the strike is underway. From my trip to the Paris airport, however, you would never have known it. I was a short walk from the Air France airport shuttle near Monteparnasse. It left right on time, and was only about half full. The second pick up point for that bus is Gare de Lyon — it took about 30 minutes to get there; not out of reason for Paris morning traffic. The trip to the Charles de Gaul airport took about 40 minutes — almost the same that it takes on the train. At no place did I see any traffic gridlock, which everyone was predicting (oh, the horror stories).

I’m happy, but a little disappointed in the sense I expected to have an adventure. Of course, there is such a thing as too much adventure, and I still have 2 flights and a 2 hour drive ahead of me…

And the flight to here, Davis, California, was pretty easy too. Just very very long! Good night!

When Paula and I lived here for two months two years ago we lived in the Cours Julian, right behind this bar. We’d eat out a lot in those days (the Euro was weak, not the dollar back in 2005!), and we’d always start with a beer or a glass of wine sitting outside at this bar. Ever since we’ve been here, every time we walk by, we look. Paula spotted them cleaning tables once — but we’ve never seen them open. And to this day the outdoor tables remain outside, locked up.

Sadly, Paula spotted the sign above the entrance missing (that big blank spot) just the other day. I’m afraid there will be no more waiting. What a shame!

Well, I’ve been caught in one strike. But that was in Italy. Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll have my first real French Strike experience. Technically, no one is going on strike until tomorrow night, around 8pm. Unfortunately, university students have decided to try to block the train stations tomorrow. No one knows how effective they will be, or if any stations will actually be closed. Thus my carefully laid plans to arrive in Paris tomorrow before the start of the strike…

It gets better. I return to France next Monday. I figured that was enough time for the strike to play itself out. Turns out that all public sector administrative assistants will be going on strike next Tuesday - and the SNCF folks are planning on joining them in a huge rally. So now I have no clue what I’ll do when I get back to France. Of course, it is all uncertain and no one knows what will really happen. At the very least it should be entertaining.

I hope my credit card can buy me out of getting stuck in Paris. Not that Paris is a bad place to be stuck. Hmm…. Hold those horses a minute…

I also found out a bit more about what is motivating the strike. I’ll try to write about that in the next few days. From a USA perspective it is odd.