[tech] mermaid more stable?

[James Devenish]

Nick,

On Wed, Sep 20, 2000 at 06:45:51PM +0800, Nick Bannon wrote:
> I've tried getting many webpages from http://mermaid/ and python
> mandelbrot sets... but I can't get mermaid to die. Did you have
> anything which can reproduce mermaid's faults, 

Overclocking and overheating seems to work.

As I mentioned at the meeting, various parts of tetex (specifically the
mktex* utilities) and xfig delivered reproducable SIGFPE faults during
the period of instability just before you slowed it down. You also
reported that kernel compilations failed, plus whatever tasks wheel have
mentioned. As I'm sure you are aware, eventaully random errors also occur. 
For example, vim suddenly died once while I was happily inserting text.
(And no, I wasn't trying to enter floating point character codes.)

It was kinda funny when clicking on the polygon tool took down xifg.
However I was not amused when vim died and didn't leave behind a swap
file. Doh!