Stacey Marshall's Weblog: Stac, Stace, ace - blog space

BATS latest production of The Music Man is now underway at the Haymarket Theatre in Basingstoke and running through to Saturday 22nd.

Both of my girls, Emily and Alice, are in the show performing together on alternating nights. I'm looking forward to seeing it on Friday as I've heard that this is another excellent performance by BATS.

The show features the signature song ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’. The story sees 'Professor' Harold Hill, a con man, whose scam is to convince parents he can teach their musically disinclined children to play instruments. He takes pre-orders for musical instruments and promises to form a band, when he promptly skips town and moves onto the next before he is found out. Harold arrives at River City, Iowa, where he meets their townspeople and therein the fun starts.

ublog test

Peter tagged me! I'm like the school boy who, while lining up in the playground to play one game, is suddenly rushed upon and touched in a fleeting moment to the cheer of "tag" as the ascendant races off. I liked playing tag, though I always preferred "Stuck in the mud" (apparently known as Freeze Tag in some places).

So, five things you may not already know about me....

1. Thinking that I may have had a very minor dairy intolerance I gave up eating dairy produce in my early twenties. Obviously this means no Milk, Cheese or Chocolate. But that's only the half of it. Wey solids and powder are found in an amazing host of foods like biscuits, cakes and crackers. And all those really nice things like cakes (did I say that already), custard, pastries, and a whole lot more.... I'm not sure the diet had much effect on my Asthma, but I sure did put on the pounds once I came off of it (I have subsequently lost that weight, with help from the Hackers Diet) and my bicycles. I was certainly glad to no longer be having water on my morning cereal.

2. This may not be so surprising to those paying close attention to my blog... OK, so its a surprise to you all! I used to be cleaner at Express Dairies. It helped me save up for the road "racing" bicycle that I still ride to this day. My section included a small hall with a free milk dispenser which was always in a real slimy and smelly state come the evening (people, be considerate with your unwanted beverages). I still remember with joy the first time I used the floor polishing machine. It whizzed around taking me with it and wrapping me around with the power cord. Took a few times to tame it, but it was always fun.

3. Somewhat like Clingan at school I was interested in long distance running. I used to take part in the cross country race each year and for sports day entered the 1500m and 5km race. Though I never took it seriously, I just seemed to have a lot of stamina. These days I really don't enjoy running and much prefer to be on my bike where my stamina still sees me through..

4. I was in a Secondary School (high-school) production of "My Fair Lady". I was in the chorus and several non-speaking parts including a chimney sweep and ballroom dancer. I enjoyed every moment of it, especially learning the waltz (shame I don't remember it now). I dare say it's those memories why I encourage my girls to take up the thespian joys that they have. Mind, they can sing unlike myself.

5. On the theme of Musicals, my favorites all time is the film "The Slipper and the Rose", staring Richard Chamberlain and Gemma Craven. It is in my opinion the best adaptation of the Cinderella Story. My favorite bit is when the fairy god mother, played by Annette Crosbie, exclaims "I know, I'll borrow time!" (or something to that effect) which for me explained why the magic had to be withdrawn at midnight. So why don't the slippers disappear? Well that magic clearly wasn't borrowed

So, Jonathan, your it!

Stace

My Brother phoned me earlier asking where it was that I went on Vacation last year, the place that was on a fun park, with a pool and zoo? Where it was really good for young families?

Well, it was one of two places: one has a Safari park on site and the other claimed to have the longest water slide within its multi fun-pool complex in Europe. We went to both places with Eurocamp, which is very easy to get to from the South of England in the car.

Hilvarenbeek Beekse Berg.

Also known as Speelland where we have been twice.

Situated on a Safari park and children's amusement park. Has small swimming pool and large lake with boats and several petting zoos, a very large site that is lovely to cycle about. In the evening we cycled up to a little known vieing point and watched the Zebras and Giraffes. It's also affiliated with a fun-pool in town (not far away).

Dunrell - Wassenaar

Dunrell is also situated on an amusement park. We likened it to Thorpe park here. This park would perhaps suit older children as it has some additional activities (High ropes, toboggan and age limit rides). But it also has lots for the younger members of the family, including a playground with the equipment playgrounds had when we were kids. Like the Witches Hat, Two storey high slides,large swings, Helter-skelter; all of which we no longer seem to have in the UK these days . But every day you just have to go to the fun pool which is nice and warm and has so many fun slides... It might just be the best in Europe. I believe our fees covered entry for 2 hours in the pool (at 11am) when we were there.

Both places are not far from Efteling (though Speelland is nearest) which the girls loved.

Check it out... Stace

Following the Inheritence tax petition I received some feed back from the Prime Ministers Office. I didn't expect that, wish I could say the same for the response.

I've been sent a link to a petition entitled Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.  Which as a person who cycles to work every day wont affect me financially daily.  However I do own a car and thus would be effected should this particular scheme go ahead.  However the detail of the petition, limited as it is,  asks to "forget about road pricing and concentrate on improving our roads to reduce congestion" which I'm not sure I fully agree on.

What ever the solution is it must be fair and apply to all, including visitors to our great country.   Fuel tax does not affect most vehicles arriving in our country as they fill up before they get here and these same vehicles are not going to be fitted with fancy gadgets to charge them.  So how about this: Put a toll on the entry for all vehicles without a UK tax disc?  There could be an exit toll too, depending on the mileage or time.  Of course I'd expect other countries to follow suit thus levying  an extra charge on us when traveling from our shores.

With the current price of the housing market in England I feel that the "petition the Prime Minister to Abolish inheritance tax" is a more worthy cause at this time.

Other petitions exist, and you can even create your own.

I was forwarded by Jonathan to the History Matters One day in History link. I have included below my un-abridge entry, which alas was over the 3999 character limit. Enjoy:

A Day In History

My wife, Kirsty, and I awoke to Sara Kennedy on Radio 2 at 6:50am. We listened to Sara’s voice as she read out the headlines from today’s news papers; I don’t read a news paper my self as they have too much sensationalism and gossip to be worth the while in my opinion. We don’t lie listening in a slumber for to long, no Terry Wogan for us today. As Kirsty, a primary school teacher, is working as a class room assistant at Portesbery School, a special needs school, for the first time today.

Kirsty leaves the house at around 7:50. Emily, my eldest daughter leaves for Secondary school at 8:20 and I take my youngest daughter, Alice, to school by bicycle at 8:25am. It’s exactly a mile away and takes around 5 minutes to cycle there. I returned home to work rather than going in to the office today.

I work in Computing, I’m a senior software engineer for Sun Microsystems, specialising in naming protocols such as DNS (Domain Name system), LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and NIS (Network Information Protocol). In brief I diagnose issues and where necessary provide corrective actions, advice and or address the issue in the source code.

At home I work on a Sun Blade 150, a SPARC based processor designed by Sun. On which I run the current in-development version of the Solaris Operating Environment. I keep the system up-to-date with the latest development release using Live-Upgrade, which allows me to upgrade one disc partition while continuing to work on another one. This was the first thing I did today, before breakfast and making the pack-lunches I resumed Solaris, started a secure shell connection to the office, mounted the relevant NFS partition and started the upgrade process, luupgrade to build 50 of Nevada.

After returning from the school run (well, cycle) I started the online chat tool, Gaim, and email client, Thunderbird, and proceeded to wade through todays email. On average it takes two hours to work through the email. It’s a mixture of technical questions, bug updates, resource notifications, test results, third party developments, new projects, announcements… and much more. Email is the preferred communication tool and as such is revisited throughout the day. Almost everything is done electronically; I rarely receive post at work.

My plan for today was to investigate an issue with the DNS resolver; a software library which translates names to Internet Protocol addresses. The latest changes caused one or two other software applications to fail horribly. By which I mean an uncontrolled fault causing the operating system to stop the process and create a memory dump (core file), otherwise known as a crash. Thus I needed to analyse why Solaris seems to be mostly seeing this issue, look for other possible faulty applications (as not all are seeing this issue) and investigate if any changes could be made to the resolver to help guard against these faulty applications from crashing.

At lunch I cycled up to the local plumber merchants in search of a smaller u-bend. At the plumbers they have a knack for making one feel rather small if not inadequate; I’m not a plumber and am not sure if different size u-bends are available… I have been replacing our on-suit bathroom over some months and needed a different u-bend to fit the bidet; as the one I took off the other bidet would not fit in the space causing the bidet to be raised off the floor! Turned out that a standard bidet u-bend has a shorter neck for this very reason and I returned home triumphant.

Alas while I was away my Virtual Private Network tunnel to the office had gone down, reset, and vanished! Not a big issue, nothing is lost by this as I use a combination of software which is well suited for working in different locations. Namely, screen: for managing remote terminal sessions. And GNUEmacs: for file management, editing, text formatting, source code management, searching, just about everything else.

In the afternoon I worked some more on the libresolv issue. Documented my findings in the Change Request database , changed some libresolv source code which would prevent one of the crash scenarios and started the business of cross compiling for testing and verification.

Emily returned home around 2:40pm and began her homework by herself. I cycled back to school and collected Alice on my bike around 3:05pm. By 3:30 I was back in front of the terminal considering how I might address some of the issues that I had discovered today. I signed off just after 6pm, when I noticed that my live upgrade had stalled…. The secure shell (SSH) which I had NFS mounted the disc over would have been reset when the VPN tunnel was lost earlier. So rather than suspend the machine I invoked a new SSH session, NFS automatically recovered and subsequently live upgrade continued.

I joined my family for dinner and discussed my wife’s day at the special needs school. Seems she enjoyed it and is looking forward to working there again.

In the evening, around 7pm, I set off for a night time cycle with Jonathan and Keith, colleagues from work. We cycled up the Basingstoke Canal from Fleet towards Farnborough and headed in to the woods surrounding Tweseldown race course. We cycled around in the dark looking for single track routes, finding what we thought was one and then getting lost in trees and bushes. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and despite the number of brambles we encountered we all avoided a puncture. When I returned home I found that we were ridding in an area called Outridden Hill!

I returned home around 9:30pm and watched the final half hour of the excellent new BBC drama called “The Amazing Mrs Pritcahard”.

Before bed I returned to the computer, the live upgrade had completed. I selected the new OS and powered off the system; ‘init 5’.

Went sailing for the first time this weekend with some of my old Pr1me Computer colleagues. We set sail from Lymington on Saturday morning and tacked and gybed through the Solent eventually harboring in Cowes. On Sunday we returned to Lymington via Yarmouth where we stopped for lunch before using the headsail to carry us almost directly across with a couple of tacks for fun, and one to take us off a collision course with a ferry. I had so much fun I'm now considering following it up with a Competent Crew course.

Went to a BBQ on Sunday where I was immediately introduced to someone I just knew looked familiar, and so I just said so and without pausing for breath suggested that perhaps it was the Schools summer BBQ?...

Turns out I see him daily in my kitchen and living room as he is Darren Bett the BBC weather man

Today Kirsty and I went down to our local PC World store to look at the computers they have to offer if we go ahead with the Sun Backed Government scheme. We had looked on-line and in some computer magazines (waste of money they were) and had decided that we wanted: AMD Athlon 3400+ or Intel Pentium 4, 1Gb Memory, 160GB hard disk, DVD-RW Dual layer, etc. So we're looking around the store at all the various PC's and see the ADVENT T9306 which fits what we came looking for... When from behind this powerful PC an Apple iMac in the row behind catches our eye as it is playing a slide show of crazy photos. We approach the iMac and see our selves as comic book characters! Brilliant! The IMac has a camera on the front and shoppers are taking weird photos of them selves using the Photo Booth application and leaving them for all else to see. I have never used a Mac myself but have seen others with them and have been shown a thing or two. So I start showing Kirsty who say's, can we get one of these?

So now I'm looking at MS and Apples web site and wondering what is the best for my families computing needs.

Stace

The Department for Transport might have said something about their intent a little sooner, I just disposed of ours.

I imagine a number of teenagers will be hoping that the following bit from the DoTs car seats FAQ is not upheld by the law: “ booster seats - for children 15 kgs to 25 yrs”...

Stace

Sun UK is this year offering employees the oppertunity to make use of two goverment backed schemes, Cycle To Work and Home Computing initiatives. With the cycle to work scheme it seems I could buy a new bicycle with what amounts to a 40% saving. While the PC scheme saves me about 30% off a PC from PC World. But both of these schemes are really 'rentals' which may provide an option at the end to purchase. This last fact I have difficulties with as I don't normally buy with hire-purchase or gamble.

Still, as I like a good bargain I have been looking around virtual and physical shops and even bought some magazines to help me decide if I want to buy into these schemes or not. Of course I already cycle to work and thus have a bicycle and I also own a few PCs. But I'd like to get an off-road bike with disc-brakes and a new fast PC to play DOOM 3 .

While searching for PCs and bikes I came across rectifi search which not only strives to offer you relevant results and to help you find what you are looking for, it also shares ideas on how to reduce pollution and help the lives of those in the developing world. Further more they donate 92% of their advertising revenue to charity.

Right, on with the perusal...

Stace

It's the silly things in life that are so aggravating. Like why some Internet registers don't provide canonical names for their web services.

What I'm saying is that when Tim Berners-Lee first coined the phrase World-Wide Web in the 1990s I do not believe he meant us to make an initialism 'www' out of it and prefix it on to every machine name that provides http services. After all 'http' servers listening on default http port 80 do not need the 'www.' prefix. Its only use is to distinguish the server from other servers in the same domain. But then most commonly listed InterNIC servers are world-wide web service providers. Yes I know that their are other services such as ftp, news and mail.

Mainly all the 'www.' prefix does is cause us a linguistic headache due to the Pronunciation of "www".

My browser 'firefox' has a half backed notion that if I press control+enter after entering the URI it will prepend 'www.' and append '.com'. But that simply leaves me wanting when I wanted a UK domain!

Still some Internet registrations insist that you provide the 'www.' portion as they have not registered the 'www' as a canonical-name (cname) to their company name

In short, its not www.sun.com, its sun.com. But if you really like typing the extra characters then why not try http://www.sun.com:80/

Stace

For the new year I thought that I'd try and keep this blog a bit more up-to date. So far not so good then.

Kirsty and I have decided that we would like to update our on-suit bathroom at home and have thus spent a lot of time going to Bathroom stores, looking at Bathroom web sites and browsing catalogues. Looking at the prices certainly makes me think that technology isn't so over priced after all.

Talking of technology, for Christmas I got a Cat Eye TL-LD1000 rear light which has 10 high powered LEDs. I must say it is rather good. Only when I got home tonight it was very dim! I must take a gander at the manual.

My father-in-law got me large box of assorted wine , thanks George. He also sent me a gift of two months free rental from LOVEFiLM. The idea being that you tell them what DVDs you'd like to watch and they send you a couple. When you have watched them, send them back and they will send some more from your list. Today the first two DVDs arrived... I was a little disappointed to see that out of the 32 DVD's I had listed they have not sent me anyone of them. And one that they did send me I have seen. So tonight I spent an hour or so 'rating' films that I have seen. Trouble is I have seen thousands and have rated but a few... I have prioritized my list and so we will see if lOVEFiLM can Deliver. If not I seem Amazon, Tesco and a host of others offer similar schemes.

At work I have mainly spent the last few days reading snoop files of DNS traces and improving snoop so that it can decode EDNS records.