trochee

caracola starts a discussion that includes the statement "ASL has no sign for tact". This statement struck me as suspiciously snowclone-ish, and I'm curious if anybody might know about such a sign in ASL.

Some of my friends here might have resources that have more information. Any ideas of where to look? Anybody know the sign?

To complete my jargon and topic list: social networks (how), sign language (what), and snowclones (why)!

I've been less than thrilled with Sunbird, the Mozilla-suite calendaring program.

It works okay, but it doesn't seem to be robustly supported. (In November 05, they released 0.3 alpha, after nearly a year of silence.)

The key features I'm looking for are:

1. the ability to sync against webDAV calendars, such as the one at iCal Exchange, which I currently use. It's not enough to pull them down, it has to be able to push local edits up too.
2. The ability to subscribe to multiple calendars -- I keep separate calendarfiles for my lab, my classes, and my personal time. But I'd like to look at them all in the same place.

Sunbird currently does both these critical pieces, yet I'd like to get away from it.

Any recommendations?

Update: looks like the Mozilla Calendar extension to Firefox manages to avoid the biggest Sunbird problems -- namely, that it isn't packaged for Debian or Ubuntu. And I can get Firefox to work just about everywhere.

I don't have cable, or a land telephone at home these days. I've kinda liked it that way. When I feel like vegetating, I read a book or listen to the radio. But I wouldn't mind watching movies (or television shows) I liked, especially if I don't have to go to the video store and pick them out -- the work of doing the selection at that moment when i want to vegetate has been a barrier. And I have some money to do it, especially since I'm not paying for cable, or phone, or internet at home.

So I like the idea of Netflix, where I can add movies-i-want-to-see to some online queue that magically (and for a small fee) drops movies-I-said-I-wanted (or TV-I-said-I-wanted) in my mailbox, so they're there when I vegetate. $18 per month seems quite reasonable, actually.

But firinel and marnanel have been having real trouble with them recently, and somebody said they were teamed up with Walmart these days (ick!) -- so are there any other competitors in this business? or does Netflix have the market locked up with a patent?

for the geeks who may be reading:

Does anybody know anything about grid computing? Our lab has been limping along for years with pmake, but it's really not scaling well. We're looking into moving to another system of grid computing to make it easier to work with -- ideally a CPU-scavenging architecture.

Our current favorite (well, my current favorite) seems to be Condor, with the Sun Grid Engine being a second runner-up. PBS (no, not PBS) has also been suggested, but I'm not at all convinced about its support -- it seems to have moved to closed-source.

My question for any of you: have you used any of these? Was it difficult? Would you recommend it? We have an unwieldy cluster of some 200 nodes (with ~300 CPUs among them) and a small number of master fileservers that share a common NFS space. It would be neat to include some of the features of the Condor supersystem, but that's not really critical. What is critical is that we need to move our lab to a system that is supported by somebody outside our lab: we're a speech lab, not a parallel computing lab. We don't have the time or expertise to build clever parallel computing architectures. We'd love to leave it to the experts -- and to be able to file a bug that other people will get their degrees by fixing.

Any advice? Quite honestly, I'm not really expecting any responses, but who knows who's paying attention out there? Who's doing high-throughput, parallel computing on many nodes? evan? xaosenkosmos? (evan, don't say "google filesystem", unless they want to share with us! )