Tuesday February 24, 2009

Is one hand enough?

Today I learnt that their had been complaints that children have been traumatised by the appearance of a CBBC presenter who only has one hand. I understand if a child sees someone like this that they might be upset but it is up to all of us to educate children about this stuff. We so often hear about racial, political, gender and all the other discriminations but the disabled always seem to be at the bottom of peoples interest in solving these problems.

I had thought we had moved on a step or two after the success of our people in the Olympics but perhaps we have not come far enough. I cannot find any links on this story either.

Greenways - Open after five and five

After five million pounds and five years Agatha Christie's house in Devon Greenways is open for visitors again. The National Trust have done fantastic job based upon the shots I saw on Breakfast TV this morning. There are plenty of her belongings and there is also a "Greenways" edition of all her books on display. I am sure the house will be very popular.

Monday February 23, 2009

Eight out of ten for Heathrow's T5

It was with some trepidation that we found out we were flying to Rome from Heathrow's T5. We parked in the T5 long stay car park that was closer to T1/T2/T3 than T5 but the bus did not take us long to wizz us to T5. As you walk in it has an amazing feeling of space. The superstructure is visible and adds volumes to the interior appearance. We were unable to check in as we arrived being to early - I don't know why they do that. So we had a coffee in one of the cafe's which was not badly priced. I would say there is not much in this part of the airport and not many seats. Clearly it is up to the traveler to do a decent job of his timing or face the consequences. Eventually we checked in and went through to the gate. Here there were more seats and shops etc to visit. The interior is quite nicely finished unlike other BAA airports that look so down at heel the day after being built. My only critisism is that the toilets don't have many toilets and here the interior finish was already looking tired.

The shock was when get to the gate we ended up going on a bus to the plane! Have they not built enough gates for BA? You could see an satellite terminal in the same design being built and there is a secondary one already in place. I hope the use of a bus is only until they finish off the building works.

On the way back after the usual Heathrow stacking delays we were told the plane's Aux engine was not working so there would be a delay in getting to the stand. But we were then told after another delay a tracking device had not worked adding to the original delay. It is funny BA never complains when things go wrong at Heathrow. Virgin usually have a good go at the standards of service when problems occur.

While waiting the building in the dark seems like a large electric filament bulb the filament being the superstructure visible from the outside through the glass envelope. Going through Passport control was fine - after a long walk with no moving walkways from the gate. At baggage pickup - a usual Heathrow disaster the problem was ours as we waited by reclaim eight and should have been at ten. When after ten minutes we walked to ten our bags were there. The courtesy bus arrived minutes after we got the its stop and soon had us back to our car.

Friday February 20, 2009

How many users can you get on a lab box ?

Virtualisation holds much promise for me as a lab manager. In the lab we are taking two approaches. The exciting thing is the speed at which this technology is advancing - it is honestly difficult to keep up! Here is one of our solutions.

In our environment an engineer books a server, loads his OS of choice and and additional software and tries to reproduce the customer problem he is having. The engineer may want extra hardware added like a fibre card and associated storage. In that case - for now virtualisation is not for them. Of course there is a 'delay' waiting for the OS to install because you do not know what has been done to the OS the previous user left behind. We are taking a T5240 server with 64gb of memory and using LDOMS. You define a control domain and use enough internal disks to make a ZFS pool which will be used for the LDOMS boot disks. In our case the control domain has eight VCPU's, a decent amount of memory and so on. We then define a set of identical LDOMS. Each LDOM is given two 'blank' ZFS volumes that the LDOM sees as internal boot disks. The engineer can then install/configure the OS however they wish. We give them two disks so they can do mirroring, upgrades etc. Then using ZFS snapshots/clones each LDOM has another disk with say Solaris10U6 on it which we can then 'refresh' back to a known good clean state after the engineer finishes with it. The neat thing is of course there is no install time to wait for.

All the consoles of these LDOMS are available to users and it just feels like any lab box. We don't give engineers access to the control domain as they might end up messing up their/other folks LDOMS. We do have to provide an ability to reset LDOMS as if the engineer does a 'init 5' the LDOM will be off until it can be started by a priviledged user.

The trick of course is to get engineers to use this instead of traditional machines. We can eliminate several large servers like V880 saving space, power and cooling. We will have to keep some of these servers for product support and their smaller brothers like the V240 for when engineers want cards inserted as I mentioned above. At the moment we are quite careful on the loading of LDOM's on a server we are only using half the VCPU's/memory of the box. One my next posting on Lab Virtualisaton I will talk about the second solution we are using.

Thursday February 19, 2009

Katie Melua

I knew this female artists name, had possibly heard a track or two but I got to hear her music properly on a flight where she was playing at a concert somewhere in Germany. So I went out and bought Piece by Piece as that had a lot of the tracks featured in the concert. It was an instant hit. She has a wonderful unstrained singing voice as velvety as a glass of Chilean Merlot red wine. She does a few cover versions but her own stuff is the best. The catchy "Halfway up the Hindu Kush" is excellent and hard to get that tune out of your head. She is actually from Georgia and then moved to Northern Ireland and some of her music is influenced by her time in both countries. Her latest album Picture has taken a little big longer for me to appreciate her other cd's were more immediate. For reasons only known to her she did a concert 303 metres under the sea and holds the record for the deepest concert...

Wednesday February 18, 2009

Mobile madness

I do not know who invented the mobile phone but although the device is a very useful object I fear my fellow human beings behaviour when using them is driving me to distraction...

Using the phone when moving. This includes walking, cycling, driving. Human beings cannot do two things at once and using a mobile phone while in motion is a recipe for disaster.

Sending texts that no sense at all [sic]. It seems even easier to send text messages that make no sense especially if single letters are substituted for words like 'r u'.

After a plane lands at an airport the sound of all the phones in the plane being turned on as their owners reconnect to the real world to tell their friends and relatives they have landed and they will be home by ...

Some people seem to think the world needs to witness their conversations with their friends as they discuss marital and other problems. Or even worse discussing in public what happened last night during a rather hectic night on the town..

Someones phone beeping or ringing during a meeting that is quickly followed by an apology..

People who leaving their mobiles in the office while they pop out - the phone then rings and never gets answered. Meanwhile it is annoying everyone in the immediate area..

Another thing that annoys me is when people insist on using their phone when they are in a noisy environment, have a weak signal or when their battery is low. I don't know why they don't wait until they can rectify these problems - all you can hear is a garbled message that you cannot understand.

Now you have read this score yourself. One point for each of the above you admit you do on a regular basis. If you score zero - I am sorry you are lying - try again. Anything under four indicates an average user of a mobile phone. Anything above five means you need help - leave your mobile at home for a few days every week to wean yourself off it.

Tuesday February 17, 2009

A zoo full of stars..

As reported on BBC Breakfast today a website where Joe public can help sort through the billions of galaxies identifying their shapes has been revamped. The site looks fantastic and to me it is a great human based cloud computing initiative. It has also drawn in people who had no interest in this subject and got them learning more about our universe.

No kissing in Warrnington..

After the Warrington station was refurbished, Virgin Rail with their tongue's firmly in the cheeks put up signs banning kissing on the station platform. The idea is that people kissing each other blocked the platform and were delaying trains. To allow passionate couples to still have their parting or welcoming kiss an area has been designated the kissing zone. Only in the UK...

Have you seen this monument?

Just re-opened after extensive repairs this monument celebrates the rebirth of London after the great fire of 1666. It stands not far from where the fire started. Christopher Wren played a part in its design. But I had never heard of it until I saw the BBC local news item on it. The BBC have setup a gallery of pictures taken after the restoration. What I suppose we are going to hope is that London will rise like a phoenix as it did after this monument was built after our recent troubles in the financial sector, the restoration being a catalyst to that recovery...

Monday February 16, 2009

The Victorians - in pictures.

Promising new series started last night on BBC1. It is by the news journalist Jeremy Paxman often seen on Newsnight and as the quiz master on University Challenge. The series is about the Victorian era but he brings paintings into the program showing how the pictures reflected that era. Last night was about cities that were created in the Victorian age. He rightly shows that most of the pictures painted then showed off how good things were but ignored the squalor, poverty which were prevalent in those times. Some artists were brave enough to paint the bad side of this era. Unlike other historical shows he does not try and do the whole program solo but meets people who can explain more about the time and show off some of the marvels of the age. London's sewers were built in those times and still serve us well today. More on the series here

Sunday February 15, 2009

The start of the year...

Before I start to talk about work on the allotment for this year, a quick look back at last year. We still have several rows of leeks in the ground which did well - but a few of them did go to seed which means in the leek you get a hard central core which renders the leek is useless even in soup. The potatoes are all eaten, the garlic nearly so but we have loads of onions hanging in the garage ( I grow around three hundred per year..) . The carrots I stored in compost in the greenhouse have survived well but we have nearly finished eating all them too.

I did set some garlic in the allotment last November but not many of them came up. Now things are warming up after the snow and cold snap I have set this years shallots and I bought and set some more garlic to replace the ones that did not appear.

Before the winter I got a trailer load of manure which has now been dug into the first allotment I have - luckily I did it before the bad weather set in. I also put some around the raspberry canes. Incidently those canes did really well with three varieties we had berries from August until November.

I will need to clear the leeks before April when the onion sets will go in. By then other seeds like carrots will need sowing. I had great carrots last year but they got badly affected by carrot fly. sowing the carrots by onions is said to put off the carrot fly or covering with a light fleece perhaps. Perhaps you have our own tips for avoiding carrot fly ?

This weekend I also sowed this years leeks in a heated tray in the greenhouse. The only problem apart from the hard cores on some of them is the damping off of the seedlings. This is caused I think by a fungus and to avoid it you should clean the seed tray well and use fresh compost.

Until things warm up even more and dry out a bit there will not be any further activity.

Friday February 13, 2009

Senna back on track?

Honda may be close to a deal to appear in the 2009 F1 season. According to this story. The funding is coming from Brazil so Bruno Senna would expect to be driving alongside Jenson Button. The deal if made would also have them using Mercedes Benz engines. Lets hope the deal has/will be done.

Did it work?

Another interesting news item last night . It was all about truancy and that the fact that parents can be jailed for persistant non attendance by their children to schools. Of course the news item showed one family where it did work and one where it did not make any difference. The problem is that despite this attempt to impact truancy figures they are still rising and even the minister involved in this considers the jailing of parents is not perhaps having the desired effect...

A right Royal welcome...

As reported on last nights news despite the credit crunch HRH has given her website a makeover. I wonder who hosts it and how many times someone has tried to hack into it? Anyway the news item made it clear that one would not be replying to email, writing weblogs or attending instant messaging rooms. I would love to see Prince Phillip in a IM room. Now that would be worth waiting for...

Thursday February 12, 2009

Languages in Schools..

On Breakfast TV this morning it was reported the take up of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish is growing big time in our schools. A desire by parents for their children to learn more about their culture is one reason but the second reason is that it has been shown that children who take up languages end up with higher IQ's and do better in schools. Years ago while on holiday in Wales we were in a town flooded with kids out of school over lunchtime. They were all speaking Welsh. I loved it. The only trouble is us poor English feel a bit left out.