- 10:00am: Finish the fourth coat of varnish on a bit of furniture we're varnishing.
- 10:30am: Start hand-mixing a 25kg sack of cement+sand mortar with water
- 10:45am: Start hacking stones out of the rubble pile with a pickaxe, and mortaring then into place in the wall I'm building
- 11:30am: Using the pickaxe, dig out the low points of our compacted stone and mud parking area (you can easily find the low points, after a rainy night they're lakes), and then apply the pickaxe to the rubble heap again to loosen up hardcore and shovel it into the holes, as an interim fix to the pooling-water problem.
- 12:30am: Go and have breakfast with wife and child
- 01:00pm: Head off to investigate a nearby builder's merchant type place, to see if their cement is cheaper than B&Qs, and to consider gravel to cover the parking area in, and to generally mooch around.
- 02:00pm: Head down to the excellent John Stayte Services to pick up 80kg of coal, then swing by Tescos for a few essentials and to stop so Sarah can have a coffee
- 03:30pm: Get home, put Jean to bed for a nap, and make and eat lunch
- 05:30pm: Rush out, realising we're late for the district Cub and Scout swimming gala.
- 09:00pm: Get home, put Jean to bed since she's tired and teething
- 09:30pm: Deal with laundry, and add some more varnish to the furniture
- 09:45pm: Cook and eat dinner
- 11:00pm: Wash up, bank the fire so it'll stay lit overnight, load the dishwasher, etc.
- 11:45pm: Blog about it all.
- 12:00pm: Put away huge piles of laundry so we can get to our bed and sleep in it.
- 01:40am: Finish putting away laundry. Get into bed. Start attempting to sleep.
I need an extra weekendend to recover from my weekends!
Recently, a feeling has started to appear in my life that's been missing for many years...
When I was a kid, I often felt geek exhilaration. All I had to do was sit with a notepad and think for a while and I'd come up with a design for something cool. Now, the kind of thing that interests me is infrastructure - I've always been more interested in designing, say, a game engine than in writing an actual game. So I'd sit down and pluck a random problem from the air and design an infrastructure for solving it. And then I'd feel excited about the lovely potential of this infrastructure.
Alas, this happened at a much higher rate than I could ever implement these things, so I had a sources directory laden with unfinished projects. But it was still fun.
Anyway, with age and responsibility and work and bills and stress this happened less and less; I still got to invent infrastructures, since it's part of my job, but I'd only get to design one every month or so at best. Five minutes of fun, then a month of implementation. And the problems I was trying to solve were relatively boring, and the solutions required often constrained to just solve the immediate needs of the users for the next year or so, rather than a sparkling generic platform upon which anything could be built for ever more.
But recently, for some reason, it's started returning.
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I've just finished upgrading the database services on love, my hosting server cluster... Phew. I started at 11pm, and it's now 2:30am. Much time spend shepharding the upgrade process. But we now have nice recent mysql and postgresql installations!
Well, at long last, I'm finally getting paid to mess around with the kinds of things I find REALLY interesting - a task which, at the moment, involves setting up shared memory and semaphores between processes for some high-speed shared cache action. Sort of like PostgreSQL does.
Anyway, I've found a few quirks of Mac OS X's System V IPC setup that I thought I'd best share.
ipcs should be setuid or setgid or something. It grovels in kernel memory to find out what IPC objects exist and their state, but when run as a normal user, it doesn't have permissions to do so and fails silently; ipcs always returns that nothing's allocated, while ipcs -T reports garbage values.
Talking of ipcs -T, the IPC system limits are (as usual) set via sysctls. But if you try and change them, they refuse to alter. It turns out that you can set them, but only once - the first time this set of sysctls is written to the kernel, it sets up its internal data structures and considers the sysctls read-only thereafter until the next boot.
You have been warned.
I'm reporting the former at least to Apple as a bug...
Since I've been getting our home network a bit better organised lately, the home server is now actually accessible from both the wired and wireless networks (and could be accessible from the outside, too, once I've sorted out suitable security measures), so it's high time I started making use of it.
The first thing I've done has been to set up a home Wiki. There's various bits of information that Sarah and I share, but that one or the other of us is 'in charge of' depending on whose computer it lives, so rather than putting a bunch of text files on the shared file server area, it seems logical to do it with a Wiki.
I'd been wanting to research the current state of the art in Wiki software anywhere; the only other Wiki I run, the ARMuC Wiki, runs on UseMod, which I've never grown to love properly.
Anyway, my researches led me to PmWiki, and I'm quite sold on it - it's written in PHP so doesn't require CGIs, and it has a software design philosophy that I agree with; a simple core with modular extensibility.
So we now have a Sutton's Mill Intranet for our domestic odds and ends. And with a little bit of simple plugin writing, the home page lists the status of important household sensors - currently just the incoming mains voltage and frequency (we get a lot of mains power problems out here!) and the battery backup system status, but hopefully soon to include external temperatures too.
We're using the Wiki to store our monthly budget, our goals for each month (chosen at the New Year), our template shopping list of things we need to check we have sufficient stocks of, and our list of favourite recipies (since we have a habit of forgetting them, then one day going "Blimey! I've not cooked that lovely Thai turmeric rice in months!"), and we'll shove more stuff in as we come up with it - basically, from now on, whenever one of us has to go and look something up for the other, we'll Wiki it for posterity.
Alaric | alaric | 
Sat 3rd Mar 2007 11:56 pm | 
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