Mostly Harmless

I’m going to attempt to capture video of the wily Leap Second later this afternoon (Midnight UTC, which is in about 7 1/2 hours).

I’m hoping that my Mac will show a 60th second or at least bounce back forward a second. I’m prepping Snapz Pro X and a shell script for the momentous… moment.

Update: Victory!

I was expecting to admit defeat this morning but I checked the log on my other Mac and found this:

$ grep -A 3 59:58 logging.txt
--
Thu Jan  1 13:59:58 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 13:59:59 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 14:00:00 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 14:00:01 UTC 2009
--
Thu Jan  1 14:59:58 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 14:59:59 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 15:00:01 UTC 2009
Thu Jan  1 15:00:02 UTC 2009


At 9 a.m. local time, 3 p.m. UTC, the seconds jumped from 59 to 01 — and no, I didn’t just hack a line out of the log file.

I made some video captures of the Date & Time preference pane (nee control panel) yesterday but they were for naught. I tried Midnight UTC and Midnight CST but no dice.

I only caught the transition because I have a shell script logging time every hour on two different machines. My Mac Pro slept from 1:30 a.m. ’til 7:30 a.m. so I don’t know if it was supposed to jump ahead somewhere in that range. My MacBook Pro appeared to be in sync with the other Mac when I checked at 9:25 a.m. (I woke it up at 9:19 a.m.), but at 9:32 a.m. I got a +0.905406 second time adjustment. That is most likely the accumulated drift while it was sleeping for 8 hours, however. I don’t see any system.log entries on either machine that specifically mention a leap second… perhaps I’ll try it with debugging turned on in ntpd next time. (quell excitement)

For the intrepid non-programmers among you, here is a script:

#!/bin/sh
sleep 45
for i in {1..30}
do
date -u >> $HOME/logging.txt
sleep 1
done

Run that in cron at 59 past the hour to get a 30-second window around the hourly transitions. i.e.:

59 * * * * $HOME/timelog.sh

The trickiest part about this whole thing was actually getting “cron” going on my Mac running Leopard. Everything runs in launchd nowadays. I tried running the script that way first (use Lingon) but it was running at the wrong interval for some reason. I had to manually create a crontab file at /usr/lib/cron/tabs/<username> so “cron” would start (via launchd, of course).

In the end, barely worth the effort, but I captured the wily Leap Second.  And they all said I was crazy…

Ok, so I had a moderately large post written up on how magical the keyboard is and how I somehow keep dropping off of Wi-Fi and into EDGE hell, potentially because I have a hidden ssid on my network. But then I meandered off to check e-mail and load a different page in another window and this page reloaded (i.e. blank) when I came back to it.

So that sucked a little.

Time to save a draft.

Also time to go to bed perhaps.

Posted from my iPhone. Word!

Update: So I just realized that my Wi-Fi router isn’t configured to give out DHCP adresses so I had a completely bogus IP address, which explains why the iPhone kept failing over to EDGE. It’s all fine now.

Every time my refrigerator stops making that awful racket (noisy compressor) the apartment is plunged into “quiet.”

In the olden days — last month — I wouldn’t notice that because the equally noisy fans in my Mac would take up the slack. It was an ongoing duel between the compressor and the turbo fans on the accelerator in my Mac. The fans ran full-speed all the time as far as I could tell.

Then one day my father bought a new iMac, which was faster than my Mac, and I couldn’t stand for that. (Also I’d been waiting to get a new Mac for a long time and it seemed like it’d be a while before the next batch of machines came out.)

Now I have a spiffy new Mac Pro with four, count ‘em: four, 2.6 GHz processors. It’s a good thing I bought a new monitor too because those 4 CPU meters take up lots of space. (Not that I really need the meters running because nothing seems to tax the CPUs much at all. They’re flat-lined most of the time. It’s nice to have some extra oomph. I do encode some video once in a while, but that seems to be limited by the disk.)

One of the very nice things about it is how tremendously quiet it is. The fridge compressor is not running now so all I hear is my typing on the keyboard, the cars driving by outside, and the faintest whisper of noise from the computer. It’s so quiet that my SPL meter can’t measure it.

When I walk into the room I wonder “damn, is it even on?” — and it is. It’s just that quiet. Nice.

Because I’m aware of the stupid fridge running all of the time I bought a Kill-A-Watt electric meter to figure out how much electricity it’s sucking up. It’s a couple of amps when it’s running and virtually nothing when it’s not, unless you open the door and the light comes on (apparently that’s a 40-watt bulb). I worked out the numbers and it’s costing me about $60 a year, which is probably on the high-side but isn’t enough to concern myself with.

The majority of the power sucking in the apartment comes from somewhere else: the stove, all the computer equipment, and DVRs. They’re all just a lot less noisy about it.

I haven’t gotten around to testing the computer equipment and DVRs with the Kill-A-Watt. There’s just a scary number of power cords under the desk… for approximately 20 devices (yikes). It really is hard to say what is powered from where. I could just yank the main power cord quickly and plug it in, I’ve got two UPSes for all of the important stuff — they come in handy when the circuit breaker pops.

That’s another reason to use the Kill-A-Watt — to let me know how close to the edge I am on that 15-amp circuit that runs 1/3 of the apartment.