I’ve just turned on the telly in preparation for the new series of “Have I Got News For You?” and there’s a sitcom on, “After You’ve Gone.”

Now, I’m sure I recognise the ground floor house/living room set… it the same one as used in “Two Point Four Children” about 15 years ago. Not only that but it’s VERY similar to the one used in the series “Sykes” in the early 1970s. I wonder if it is a merely redressed set from the dawn of BBC TV comedy.

That’s what I call TV heritage. Maybe someone should get it listed. 🙂

Those of you on a long phone line will no doubt be frustrated by the speed of your ADSL Max link. With my ~50db attenuation I was getting between 2Mbps and (on a good day) 2.5Mbps with my Draytek router and it wasn’t that stable at that.

When I visited my friends Chris and Meriel Gore down in Cornwall over the summer they showed me the bargin that they’d come across. They have a much longer phone line than I have and about 70db of attenuation and are, according to BT, too far away from the exchange to get ADSL. However, somehow, they persuaded BT and Demon Internet to install ADSL on their line. Having been able to get only about 0.5Mbps on their line and that being flaky they had put a lot of research into routers with long line ability.. and they found that the 2wire BT2700HG router was the bee’s knees. Not only this, but because BT are giving them away to business customers who usually want to use their own equipment they were commonplace on eBay. Now, with tricking the router into not phoning back to BT for login details (which is very simple) they’re getting about 1.5Mbps with a rock steady connection. (See this “The Scream” forum thread for details on the firmware.)

So, a couple of weeks ago, having got fed up with the Draytek’s lack of line stability, I made the jump and bought a couple of the boxes.

The result? Well, I now have an ADSL connection which is rock steady and reliably syncs at 3.5Mbps and sometimes will sync at 4.5Mbps (though it can’t hold this over-night, though it tries hard to do so even telling me that it’s keeping the line up with a signal to noise ratio margin of -2!).

One caveat, however, if you’re using Linux and want to use WPA for your wireless encryption go for the older model with a single SSID (i.e. non-BT Fusion capable) with the SBC firmware as the Linux WPA stuff hates the newer WPA2 capable firmware.

I’ve been playing Warbook, an added application on the Facebook site and it has shown to be a good parallel with a forest ecology in some respects. Here’s why I think that:

In a mature forest the large trees take so many of the resources that at ground level hardly anything can grow. Seeds that germinate just can’t get enough energy to survive. It is only when a large tree falls that the opportunity exists for the seedlings to scramble for the new space and grow.

In Warbook the “energy” a player has is determined by their income which is generated by their free land (which they have to buy) with some addition from mines (which take free land). This land resource can be scavenged by other players who can attack other players. The player being attacked can defend using their army, which they also have to buy and upgrade. The problem for the “germinating” new players is that before you can buy and keep enough land to generate enough wealth to flourish in the game and build to the point where you can attack other players (there’s a minimum size of land holding you have to have before you can attack) you have to be able to build up a large enough army with a high enough defence strength to hold onto that land. Of course, for those who got into the game early the number of attackers was far fewer and the level of attack strength for those attackers was far lower than later in the game.

The point is that now it’s almost impossible for any new players to build up the resources needed. Larger players are “harvesting” the land resources of these new players with armies which are so powerful that there is no way the new players can defend against them and both their land and their armies are being depleated at a rate far higher than they can afford to replenish them. Just like the large trees in a forest suppressing the undergrowth. The difference with Warbook, however, is that the “big trees” aren’t restricted in their area of influence and can (and do) sap the energy of any and all opposition. It doesn’t matter, therefore, if one “big tree” dies as no space is made in the ecosystem to give  an opportunity for the saplings to develop. In other words, the game rules are fully biased in favour of early adopters and new players are essentially excluded. There are no niches in the ecosystem for such players to inhabit.

For me, the game is both interesting (in an academic sense) and highly frustrating (‘cos I can’t get to the point where I can even play effectively). Oh well. 🙂

Now, let me say this first; ZFS seems like a wonderful thing. In fact, it is wonderful except for a couple of things, which makes it totally undeployable for our new server. Actually, let’s put this another way. One thing makes it impossible because the ZFS way of doing things is mutually exclusive with the way our system (and probably a huge number of other legacy systems) works.

The main bugbear is what the ZFS development team laughably call quotas. They aren’t quotas, they are merely filesystem size restraints. To get around this the developers use the “let them eat cake” mantra, “creating filesystems is easy” so create a new filesystem for each user, with a “quota” on it. This is the ZFS way.

Unfortunately, this causes a number of problems (above the fact that there’s no soft quota). Firstly, no instead of having only a few filesystems mounted you have “system mounts + number of users” mounted filesystems, which makes df a pain to use. Secondly, there’s no way of having a shared directory structure with individual users having separate file quotas within it. But finally, and this is the critical problem, each user’s home directory is now a separate NFS share.

At first look that final point doesn’t seem to be much of a worry until you look at the implications that brings. To cope with a distributed system with a large number of users the only managable way of handling NFS mounts is via an automounter. The only alternative would be to have an fstab/vfstab file holding every filesystem any user might want. In the past this has been no problem at all, for all your user home directories on a server you could just export the parent directory holding all the user home directories and put a line “users -rw,intr myserver:/disks/users” and it would work happily.

Now, with each user having a separate filesystem this breaks. The automounter will mount the parent filesystem as before but all you will see are the stub directories ready for the ZFS daughter filesystems to mount onto and there’s no way of consolidating the ZFS filesystem tree into one NFS share or rules in automount map files to be able to do sub-directory mounting.

Of course, the ZFS developers would argue that you should change the layout of your automounted filesystems to fit with the new scheme. This would mean that users’ home directories would appear directly below /home, say.

The problem here is one of legacy code, which you’ll find throughout the academic, and probably commercial world. Basically, there’s a lot of user generated code which has hard coded paths so any new system has to replicate what has gone before. (The current system here has automount map entries which map new disks to the names of old disks on machines long gone, e.g. /home/eeyore_data/ )

The ZFS developers don’t seem to see real-world problems, or maybe they don’t WANT to see them as it would make thier lives more complicated. It’s far easier to be arrogant and use the “let them eat cake” approach rather than engineer a real solution to the problem, such as actually programming a true quota system.

As it is, it seems that for our new fileserver I’m going to have to back off from ZFS and use the old software device concatenation with UFS on top, which is a right pain and not very resilient.

This morning my plan for the day consisted of lots of house work. However, having seen the weather I thought “Blow it! Who knows when there’s going to be anouth nice, warm day this year. I’m off for a drive.”

Having wondered where to go I had the idea of driving over to Ampthill Great Park and having my lunch sat looking over the Great Ouse valley towards Bedford and then having a wander around the village I grew up in. So off I toddled.

It’s amazing to me that I left there a quarter of a century ago. A time ten years longer than the period I actually lived there, but seemingly nowhere near as long. I still remember talking to Andrew Walpole on his drive in preparation for a bike ride as if it were yesterday. The brain’s a curious thing.

Anyway, back to today…

The weather did cloud over on the way, but I didn’t let that spoil things. It was still warm enough, though it did make the light levels a pain for photography. Anyway, as I said, I had a picnic on Ampthill Great Park (so called because it is a royal park, just as Winsor Great Park, though there are no royal buildings left).

The park is the location of Ampthill Castle, one of the places Catherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII’s first wife, was placed after the divorce. In honor of this, a local member of the gentry had a memorial erected in the 18th Century.

After lunch I drove over to Houghton Conquest and parked outside the Post Office which, to my surprise, was actually open on a Sunday. That’s very much a change from the “old days.” The main changes within the village over the time since I left have mostly been the addition of new housing estates. One largish one filled in the area between the High Street and the Bedford Road, which runs perpendicularly to it. The other two estates replace the two dairy farms, which used to be owned and run by the London Brick Company. The farm down Rectory Lane had been derelict for years and the last time I remember cattle being milked there was in the early 1970s.

I took about half an hour’s wander around the village before getting back to my car and driving home. A far more interesting day than doing housework! 🙂

As usual for an August bank holiday, my parents are up from Cornwall.

My Dad was obviously a little on the bored side on Friday as, while I was at work, he attacked my back garden, cutting the grass and tidying the borders. All the sorts of things I’ve not had time to do since I got back from holiday. He also attacked the budlia. By the time I’d got home more than half of it had been “pruned.”

Well, I have had an idea to, in the future, attack the bush and remove it as it had become rather too large for the garden, about 20 foot in diameter and a similar height. This was now just an opportunity to remove it now. So, over the weekend we attacked it further and by yesterday evening the site where the bush once was contained merely a stump. However, the rest of the garden was filled with bush.

So, this morning, after taking some of the larger lumps to the tip, sorry recycling centre, we popped into B&Q and I bought a garden shredder/chipper. Well, it took us about 3 hours constant work to reduce a garden sized pile of twigs, limbs and leaves into a medium sized pile of chippings. The Mountfield shredder was definitely a good buy as it chompped through quite large bows with little difficulty… well other than one which had a knot in it, which pulled part of the chute down into cutter and took me about 20 minutes to extract. Still, the chute didn’t get damaged too greatly and it was relatively easily put back in place.

Anyway, it’s late afternoon and it’s time for a bit of a rest.

Pondering the popularity of the somewhat primitive and random “Pirates” application whilst cycling into work this morning I came to the conclusion that this system would be the (almost) ideal interface for a MUD.

Let’s have a look at the reasons:

• Early MUDs such as AberMUD have a restricted command set, drop down selection boxes can handle these. There are only a few items per location also, so this could easily be handled in a web format.
• MUDs are multi-user, so is a facebook application.
• MUDs allow user-to-user interaction in  a game-space, ideal for all those slackers using facebook.

The problems I forsee, however, are these:

• Getting full interactivity during fighting or users “say”ing things.
• Finding the people with the right skills to do the coding. Goodness knows, I don’t have them. I’m guessing that you need someone with a good knowledge of efficient coding in PHP for the front-end and possibly the back-end as well. I’ve not looked at the facebook SDK.

So, any of you old guard want to port the original AberMUD to Web 2.0? *grin*

I’ve just been outside watching the sky looking for the meteors.

Yes, there are some, not that many though at the moment, far fewer than the estimated two per minute. Curiously as many, if not more, are coming from the south rather than radiating from Perceus.

The sky at the moment is very clear. Clear enough that even on the outskirts of Oxford, if you find a dark corner and allow your eyes to adjust you can make out the ghostly form of the milky way. Though my viewing wasn’t helped by a neighbour at the back turning on his porch light “so that he could sit in his deckchair to look at the meteors.” (And no, I didn’t think that a 100watt bulb would help his viewing pleasure either.)

Anyway, I’m too tired to look any longer, so I’m off to bed.

This weekend Em, Jerry drove down from Bolton to visit along with little Laura and Amy.

It’s been a lovely, if exhausting, weekend. The exhaustion was really to do with the visit, merely mild insomnia or at least interrupted sleep due to the weather being a bit too warm at night for my taste.

Friday evening was a nice, quiet chatter, after the copious pizza, that is. 🙂

Seeing as the weather forecast for Saturday’s weather looked good a picnic was planned. Grim and Holly were able to come over from Godalming for the day so we all met up at the Harcourt Arboretum just down the road. What I hadn’t known was that this weekend there was a Forest Festival event going on at which there was wood working, home-made food, working horses and, most importantly, farm fresh ice cream. Yum!

Annnnyway…. the picnic was lovely. We almost ate all the humongous pile of food, including the army of gingerbread men bought in Sainsbury’s, but there was still enough left over for the evening meal. It was also fun watching Laura being chased around by a younger suiter who was wearing football kit and wanted to play with Grim’s flying ring. Anyway, much fun was had by all.

Today was slightly less eventful with only a trip to Sainsbury’s (for more food), a delicious lunch croned by an apple and blackberry crumple made by Em using blackberries from my bramble, all eaten out on the back meadow within feet of the blackberry bush. That only left a quick journey to the park to run down the batteries of the little girls before it was time for the good-byes.

I was really lovely to see them all agian and to see that little Amy had now grown up so much and was a real person now. It’s been almost 18 months since I last saw them, about a third of Amy’s life. Hopefully we’ll all meet up again rather sooner than that in the future.

The weather was quite devious, having started sunny and inviting. However, soon enough the cloud rolled in and by mid-afternoon the drizzle had started.

As for events of the day, other than a trip out to Truro, which was curtailed by the weather, I didn’t do a great deal. Due to the lack of anything else to do I continued re-playing Half-Life. (Yes, I did get beyond “Blast Pit” but I’m not looking forward to the part where you have to jump over/under trip-wire bombs which is not too far in the future.)