This year, E may well have given me the coolest birthday present of all time: New legs.
Once mastered, they enable you to jump higher and run faster than ought to be physically possible. Still working on the whole mastery thing. 🙂
These shots show myself and my brother taking turns at teetering around the back yard.
These are cool enough to warrant a lengthy article, but they are also very simple… once I point out how cool they are, I’m not sure there’s much left to say.
This somewhat ugly chandelier adorns the ceiling of our lounge room. Before you ask, we rent, we didn’t choose it that way.
I only just realised: there’s a very long and perverse story in this banal light fitting:
It’s meant to imitate a crystal chandelier, but it’s mostly glass.
Parts of it (the arms) are meant to imitate glass, but are in fact plastic.
It’s meant to imitate an array of candles, but it is electric.
Because it emulates candles, it has non-functional cups around the simulated-candle light globe sockets to catch non-existent candle wax.
It’s decorated with shapings which imitate flowers, grapes or tears, and bunchings of fabric, all in glass or plastic.
Its globe sockets are deliberately tiny, both hearkening to an older standard and attempting to enforce a reduced total wattage.
The globe sockets deliver 50Hz 240volt AC power to what is expected to be five incandescent filament bulbs in the range of 15 to 40watts each, but each globe now contains its own tiny regulated transformer which provides power suited to a cold fluorescent coil, bunched and spiraled to imitate the shape of an incandescent globe.
The globes are in turn a specialized variety of fluorescent imitation-incandescent globe, tailored to fit this obscure size and shape of socket. They consume less wattage than was ever intended for the light fitting, but produce more light…
Every part of this light is trying to imitate at least one other thing, if not several things, recursively, some of them thousands of years old. I wonder what else I’ve missed…?
A number of people will have heard me make mention of a legendary figure named Boinga Bob (Bob Prudhoe), a man of brilliance, eccentricity and several really cool houses.
For those of you who have not believed, or have only partly believed, I just hit upon an answer which may or may not convince you somewhat. If one googles “Boinga Bob”, the second hit, at time of writing, is this YouTube video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X34HiAq5_s
(The first hit is to a TV show site called “World’s Most Extreme Homes” where an episode covers some other, presumably even cooler house of Bob’s which I have never seen).
To add to this, I did a little google-mapping, in search of the remarkable tower from which I had the good fortune to watch the tall ships sail into Port Phillip Bay for the beginning of the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations. This too, is (or was) a house of the elusive Bob:
A strange and legendary guy. If others have had encounters with the Bob more recent than my own (i.e. in the last fifteen years), let me know in the comments.
Stats-Porn for those of you who find such things as fascinating as I do:
Motorcyclist Exposure on Victorian Roads (RSD 457), VicRoads – Final Report, May 2008
I have interest, (a) because I’m in the target demographic, and (b) because I contributed to this survey, all three rounds (through being a NetRider member).
Insights range from the chilling:
Approximately one-fifth (21%) of (unique) respondents (n=1095) reported that they had been in a serious motorcycle accident – one that required hospitalisation – at some point in their motorcycling careers. This figure did not vary across waves.
…to the amusing:
Gender differences in type of (main) motorcycle owned are evident. Some statistically significant differences can be noted; females were three times more likely to own a scooter as males, while males were more than twice as likely to ride a tourer. Females were also significantly more likely to ride a naked bike.
This post brought to you by boredom, panadeine, caffeine and the letter SUGARRRRR!
Updated 16/09: As Heffa points out in the comments, the survey URL was fscked. Grr.
I have always meant to write a post explaining why I run Trouble. Today though, SarahG of DevProg fame sent me a single image which elegantly explains my reasons. Behold:
This is really just a sketch of an idea, but it rang so many different bells the moment it came to me, I thought I should share it…
I won’t turn this into a linkfest. If you want to see the kind of fearmongering I’m talking about, google anti-terrorism campaigns, anti-photography hysteria and anti-vaccination freaking action groups. Harder to search for, you could look at race/class/religious-hate baiting, since time immemorial. Look at the most vacuous pure-negative elements of every political campaign. Look at advertising of all kinds, bent on instilling, for example, a Howard-Hughes-esque obsession with hygiene.
As matters stand, we have legal barriers to false advertising. Advertisers do their best to leak around the edges, but the most blatant kinds of falsehood can be met with a legal rebuff.
Suppose, in the same vein, we could take legal action against someone who made a sustained effort to provoke a fearful reaction, without being able to substantiate their claims? Suppose there was a government body whose role was to pursue this kind of crime, warn people, and take action against the heedless.
Would this be a good thing? It seems to me that this would fix a huge number of problems, while being a relatively easy thing to measure and police. I’m sure there must be a catch… or why aren’t we already doing it?
On the down side:
…Still. *grumble*
On the up-side:
We got snowed on last night!
At the road-stop at Ballan:
Subsequently (taken with out-the-window-blurrycam) police and slithering cars on the western highway:
_*SN0W !!!11!!1!*_:
It was exceedingly nifty, and probably a Good Thing(tm) that E was driving.
O ye technical types (I can’t think of a better way to ask a bunch of sane technical people a hairy question than blogging it) how hard would it be to cram a high-bitrate, bi-directional signal into an ordinary stretch of train track? The length of said track could be tens of kilometers (metropolitan), or hundreds (rural, interstate)
The thing is, it would be truly sweet to have viable wi-fi broadband on the train, be it metropolitan commuter trains, or rural ones. To do this, one first needs to build a nice stable data pipe between a ground-based point-of-presence, and one or more big heavy chunks of rolling-stock per train which periodically vanish under the earth (or at least dive into deep trenches). After brief thought, the obvious answer is that there’s already a colossal pile of pre-existing cabling in the form of the tracks and overhead power cables (where electrified). Indeed, this is already used for signalling purposes and ‘train detection’.
The question is: can you cram 100Mbps (say) over it without lots of (expensive) new relays and repeaters? Can you do so without screwing up the existing system? etc.
Any insights/suggestions/links, anyone?
WARNING: Ultra-geeky sysadmin nerdishness follows. Tune out now if the phrase “random sustained throughput” doesn’t seize your attention.
I just came across the Texas Memory RamSan-440, and found it to be kinda silly. It’s a NAND (new-style flash) RAID array which will do “600,000 IOPS, 4,500MB/sec random sustained external throughput and latency under 15-microseconds” at a price of (USD) $150,000 for a 256GB model.
This seemed so ridiculous at first sight that I immediately wrote up and costed the problem of doing the same thing My Way. This is what I ended up with:
The ThorneSAN is a 4RU box, probably built in the chassis of some existing 12-slot RAID doohickey. It contains:
- A small RAIDed SATA disk array. Say 2x320GB disks in an R1 setup.
- Some bleedingly fast NICs, probably Fibre Channel.
- Lots of 4GB domestic-grade RAM modules. Say a hundred, for starters.
- Some very very fast RAID/NAS smarts (Note: this could potentially just be a fastish PC).
- An internal UPS. Maybe two, for redundancy. Should provide power for the device’s maximum load for long enough to write to every byte of the built-in hard drives and shut them down cleanly.
You put all that RAM into specially made banks of ten modules each, each of which goes in a drive-slot, so that you can pull them out to replace faulted modules. The RAM can be addressed at full speed through multiple conventional PC northbridge controllers. Because it’s domestic grade, you address it with its own internal RAID logic, to handle sporadic errors.
On boot, the device reads the contents of the RAID-1 disk pair into the huge memory RAID disk. Thereafter, all NAS operations are performed against this disk. The machine maintains its own table of ‘dirty’ blocks which have changed since they were written to the hard drives, and writes them back asynchronously. The async part is important: The hard drive is allowed to fall behind, including falling so far behind that the entire RAM disk is ‘dirty’. That’s what the UPS is for: in the event of a power failure, you should always have enough time to write all unsaved changes to HDD.
For argument’s sake, I’ve worked this out based on CPL’s price for 4GB DDR2 PC2-5300 modules: $105, and an estimate of $4500 for the controllers, chassis, and SATA disk pair. These memory modules should be able to comfortably sustain a read-write bandwidth of 2.5GB/s, so a ten-controller RAID array of them should make 20,000GB/s, with seek times under one microsecond (plus any interconnect overhead).
I’d expect this device to cost about $15,000.
…so in the end, I’m left puzzling: Where do Texas Memory piss away the other $135,000? And moreover, why NAND? What is flash memory gaining them here?