Life as a Physicist

I’ve been living on borrowed time. My big home machine’s system disk has been making “chirping” noises for the last several months. And quite nicely, my OS (yes, Vista) warned me before that that the disk was heading towards the dustbin when it started receiving SMART events from the drive. This weekend it finally got bad enough that it caused timeouts and system crashes.

Did you know, that in the time it takes to build less than 100 source files in the ATLAS software system you can:

• Shut down your (already totally backed-up) computer
• Open it up, remove the old hard drive, replace it with a new hard drive
• Boot on a USB key containing Vista
• Tell it to start restoring the computer from the backup
• Get a glass of orange juice

and the build wasn’t quite finished yet. I was going to say “that was easy!” but then I realized that racing against an ATLAS software build isn’t exactly a badge of merit.

I wonder if the multi-core future will fix this slow-build problem? I can use more than one core to do my builds, but everyone has told me not to do it because dependencies aren’t tracked correctly and you’ll end up with a mess.