London in the Snow (by sarah)

It was still snowing this morning and things are set to continue - I was panicked as Jean is in the office with us and I had work plus college planned for today but as it turns out college is now closed becuase of the snow.

Dad was going to come over and help out with Jean so that I could get some work done but all the trains he needs are closed :/

The local shop here had its deliveries this morning but are pretty much sold out of things like milk as no one can get to a super market.

Still me and Jean have had a pleasant day.

She slept in and then played in the bedroom for most of the morning, we read Aladine (which apparently every one else could hear including all of the funny voices I was doing for each character!), she then had a bath and a story that I have written her called Baa Baa Blue Sheep - she actually joins in with this one which is something I haven't seen with any other story yet. Then we had some food - pesto with pasta which is one of her favourites.

It was then time to go outside and play. Of course not having planned this we have no snow boots, gloves, hats etc... so we had to do Daddy sock glubs - both me and Jean sported these lovely fashion accessories.

Unfortunatly this did leave daddy with no thick socks to wear whilst helping build a baby snow man or snow jean and in the consequent snowball fight he and Jean had.

He went back in to work and me and Jean made a giant snowball. I only stopped as my back was starting to hurt.

We then turned it into a Daddy snowman.

We considered making snow angles but decided it was too cold and wet - Jean annouced it would make her bumbum cold wet.

Instead we wrote JEAN in the snow with foot prints and Jean played snow football lots.

It started snowing again so we went in for hot chocolate and watched a film together. We then went for a walk to take pictures and get Jean a treat piece of cake for having to be quiet in the office and becuase she has a bloody noise from falling over at the weekend and becuase she is missing home and wanted to play in the snow with Barbara - I was thinking about this too, thinking about the sledge and stuff - but never mind.

On route we found icicles on the traffic lights

Here are some other photos we took on our walk - I tried to get Jean to pose for a lovely Narnia shot but she got scared of the slippery slop and worried about a dog eating the snow!

Jean vetoed all the cafes on the way up the road saying she wanted different cake shops and then vetoed them all on the way back down the hill until we got back to the origonal one I had suggested which she decided was acceptable.

They didn't didn't have any chocolate cake left only apple pie - Jean was dispondant until she tasted the apple pie which she shared with me. The cafe hadn't recieved its dialy order and so was out of quiet a few things.

It was then I heared that all the buses were stopped too.

Here are some of the arty shots we took:

By the time mummy and Tigger had 'ice-skated' home, the trains home to Gloucestershire were turning around at Reading and me and Al discuessed weather to attempt the roads - the roads around here are under a blanket of snow until you reach the A1 and checking out possible routes home we decided it was safest to stay here again. Barbara informed us that if we did come home not to drive into our valley but to park in the village and walk down.

My main concern is that there is no heating on in the house and the cats are outside - I left a message asking Barbara to turn a heater on downstairs and rescue my seedlings from the window sills and let the cats in.

Jean got very excited about the snow - there are more pictures but I feel that this post is getting a bit picture heavey so will do another post!

It’s Snowing, they’re Cooking, Others are Moving and We’re Stuck (by sarah)

We appear to be stranded in London, the van which is being used by a friend to move the contents of his flat to a smaller flat is still not back with us plus it is snowing.

Snowing and Al is tired.

My Scouts also had their Ready Steady Cook today which they won! Wish I could have been there to see it:/

Well done Scouts!

Ugarit: initial beta (by alaric)

I'm pleased to announce the release of the first beta release of Ugarit, a backup/archival system based around content-addressed storage, written in Chicken Scheme.

This initial release supports archives stored in the filesystem, including on remote servers via NFS and other such protocols. Future versions plan support for storage of archives in S3 or on remote hosts via SFTP/SSH, and a pluggable storage backend system allows for many other forms of archive to be created.

Ugarit provides efficient snapshots and restores, without requiring intelligence of its storage. Anything that works roughly like a filesystem can be used as a Ugarit backend, and it is designed to minimise the size of data sent to the archive, in order to reduce transfer and storage costs on services like S3, and snapshot time.

I've tested it on various test filesystems, ranging from a contrived example with all sorts of funny things like FIFOs and devices in, up to 500MB of /usr/pkgsrc and >2GB of /usr. I'm going to see if I can borrow some big hardware at work to test it on some many-hundreds-of-gigabytes filesystems as well, to see if I can find any scaling issues, and I'm currently putting it into place as my personal backup system. However, this is still beta software, so please be careful and test your backups!

For details and installation instructions, see the Ugarit project page.

Future developments planned include:

• File modification time caching, reducing the time taken to identify changed files to snapshot.
• Encrypted archives.
• Replicated archives, supporting both fault-tolerance over multiple archives and local caching, where extractions are serviced from a local archive, but if the local archive is lost (even just partially), a remote archive can provide the missing data.
• More storage backends
• FUSE support, so you can browse your archive as a read-only filesystem

Deaf, dumb and blind (by alaric)

The scene: I'm happily working away in London. Sarah is at home, and finds that the Internet connection is down. So she resets the wifi AP and the router and so on, but it doesn't get better. So she rings me.

I can't ping the router from afar, and a traceroute ends at an address that I don't think looks like the last hop before the ADSL link from memory, so I file a ticket with the ISP and get on with work.

But there's no reply to the ticket, so I ring, and sit in a queue, which eventually hangs me up.

So I google and find:

186k, Elite Internet, Mailbox Internet Services Go Bust?

Ah. Apparently my broadband ISP has become one with the Force. So Sarah can't get any work done at home, and I'll have to figure something out so that I can get some work done when I go home, and we'll need to join the queue for a MAC code to migrate to a new broadband provider, which we'll have to choose. And I doubt we'll get back any of the money - we paid a year in advance...

Bleargh...

Post Christmas Dinner (by sarah)

Today we went to my brother David and his girlfriend Michelles house for a post christmas/new year lunch. There was lots of chopped peppers which Jean woofed down, homous and pizza!!! We were in hevean.

Then there were gifts, we handed over Jeans tea towel with her drawing on plus some bits I'd made. They did something similar and we got an old copy of one of their films as it was in a box set one of them had got for Christmas - this seems a sensible way of doing things to me. They've been having a few issues due to the credit crunch in that David lost his nice manager job just after they had sighned on the morgage. He is now temping at just about anything.

We had a lovely time, mum and dad had got them stuff for the new house which included a gravey boat - most of the pictures I took seem to contain it or David playing with it :/ Oh and yay!!!! I have a camera again!!!! Mum and Dad bought it as a joint birthday and christmas presant and it is twice the resolution of the old one though I am currently running on its internal memory which is a whole 10 pictures :/

But yay!!!! and here are the picks including lots of cute Jean ones and yes she's in her chinese outfit again. Unfortunatly last night we watched KungFu Panda so she now keeps hitting people 🙁

I had to take arty shots I just couldn't resist - sorry!