A bunch of hot air…
So my MythTV box, Roosevelt, is an ultra-quiet Dell Dimension 5150. That’s actually how it got it’s name. When I first got it and turned it on I thought it was broken because it didn’t make ANY noise. I recently found out, however, that it’s only as quiet as the system load you throw at it.
<begin EXTREMELY geeky stuff> (scroll down for more non-geek stuff)
I have a nightly cron-job running on it that creates updates my local Debian mirror. Only I don’t use any of the standard tools for the job, I use a home-brew script (sidmirror.pl) that I wrote years ago. (As a side note, if I ever revive my “Geek Page” under WP, I’ll start putting up the tarballs again.) One of the things that the program does is compare every single file in the local tree against a list of current packages as extracted from the mirror’s Packages file.
The only catch is that the loop that does the check is AWFUL. I mean, REALLY REALLY REALLY awful. To the tune of:
foreach (@allLocalFiles) {
foreach $item (@packagesFiles) {
if ($item ne $_) {
push(@deleteFiles, $_);
}
}
}
The actual code is slightly different, but not by much. The loops are really that bad.
</end EXTREMELY geeky stuff>
So, needless to say, this burns a LOT of CPU time. So much, in fact, that the normally quiet little Dell turns into a raging ball of hot-winded fury. As soon as all of the fans kick in I get the feeling that my apartment is about to be blown up by a nuclear device which is charging up as I sit there, paralyzed.
This goes on for a few minutes, and then, as suddenly as it started, the noise stops. The fans start whirring down and within a few seconds I’m in near-perfect silence again. It’s freaky, in a way… as though the Dell is saying to me, “You managed to escape this time, human… but some day… some day soon… oh yes… it’s coming…”. Lets just hope that “it” isn’t a creepy clown or some such… or, if it is, that it’s a QUIET creepy clown.
