Heating an old house (by alaric)

Sarah feels the cold keenly, while I can usually just put on some more warm clothes to deal with British winters. But even I was finding it hard to work in my home office when the temperature went below ten Celcius; fingerless gloves still let me type, but numb fingers increase my error rate, and the pain is distracting.

Part of the problem was that our house is draughty. There were a lot of gaps in the window and door frames, through which daylight could be seen; when it was windy and rainy at the same time, the wind blew rain in through the frame of the large window in my office.

So step one was to fix these. The large office window, it turns out, is somewhat curved, so when my brother in law was visiting, we screwed extra handles to it, pulled it properly closed with levers wedged in the handles, then did up the bolts at top and bottom to force it to stay in shape, which fixed a large source of draughts.

Then I want around a few other choice places, adding draught excluder strips where I could.

Next challenge was to increase the heat. We had only one real source of heat in the house, a wood/coal burning stove at one end of the house. Since it's a long thin house, this was little help for me in my office, right at the opposite end - but it didn't even make enough heat to keep Sarah happy sitting next to it, so she would often use the expensive electric fan heater to keep her temperature up, much to my concern (for if we can't pay the electricity bill, things will quickly become rather unpleasant).

Now, the grate in this fire was rather small compared to the size of the fire itself. The grate had only sides and a front, so had to be pushed back against the firebricks in order to not spill coal out. This meant that air coming in through the vents would tend to rise over the fire and up the chimney, taking heat away without imparting much oxygen to it. Even then, it would slowly wriggle forwards over time, spilling ash and coal down behind, until it came too far forwards for the ash shovel to be pushed underneath it, meaning the fire would choke itself. But as it moved forward, the effective volume fire increased, with a notable improvement in the heat output - even though the fire at the back would be starved of air from beneath, as it sat on a bed of ashes.

While rummaging through piles of random bits of metal lurking about the place from when we moved in, though, I found an iron grating that I suspected might be able to fit in behind the existing grate, enlarging it. Sure enough, it did - and it fitted so perfectly well that I suspect it was actually meant for it. Suddenly it was possible to have a large bed of coal in the fire, with air coming in through the vents from underneath it and being drawn up through; this led to an awesome increase in heat. However, it led back to the same old problem - we now didn't have room to get the ash shovel in underneath to take ash away. And so the fire would slowly choke itself with ash.

So I ordered two metres of 25mm square hot-rolled mild steel from Hindleys, my favourite home-engineering supply house. When it arrived I used my angle grinder to chop off two lengths of the stuff, then used them as spacers on either side of the grate to lift it up an extra inch.

And now the fire's awesome. I can easily get it so hot that it becomes mildly terrifying, an angry yellow glow emanating from the air vents as it roars away, the radiated heat unpleasant to be too near. A few days ago, it actually melted the plastic crates we store our newspaper and kindling in, purely by radiation.

But it's still rather cold in my office.

So we decided to spend some money on the problem, as it was in danger of harming my work. I went down to John Stayte Services, a local purveyor of awesome things. We buy our coal from them, but they also sell propane, butane, related accessories such as heaters and Sievert torches, workwear, and animal feed. To my delight, they had a deal on; a shipment of gas heaters had been damaged due to the shipping container being broken into by illegal immigrants who built a home on top of them for the duration of the voyage... so they were selling a slightly dented heater, along with a cylinder of butane, for £89 when normally a heater alone would cost more than that (and a gas cylinder £50 or so as an initial outlay).

I set it up in my office, lit it... and over the next few hours, the temperature rose from ten degrees to about twenty, with me correspondingly shedding layers of clothing. Since then I've been running the heater on low power, and the temperature's stayed around seventeen degrees; with the stones of the building having been warmed up, it's now not taking much heat to keep it nice and warm.

And so, I can proudly state, for the first time since we moved in, it's actually warm enough at home that we are turning down heat sources so as not to be too hot!

A new laptop (by alaric)

To my great displeasure, my shiny MacBook Pro was stolen from the office in London!

So, I grabbed our finance guy and we went down to the nearest laptop shop and picked up the cheapest thing they had in the shop that would meet my needs: a Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv7.

The first step was replacing Windows 7 with something. As I knew I might have some teething troubles with getting NetBSD installed, so might need to return to Windows to get online, I shrank the Win7 partition down so I could run it dual-boot rather than nuking the whole thing. However, it was worse than I feared - the NetBSD install CD wouldn't even boot - the boot loader came up, then complained it couldn't read the kernel.

Not good.

So I burnt an ISO of Arch Linux, which is the closest to BSD in the Linux world. No good, either - GRUB loaded, and couldn't load the Linux kernel. I downloaded the boot.kernel.org nano-ISO (which then boots over HTTP from a central server) and that booted OK; but many of the Linux installers I tried died of kernel panics during booting. I wondered if the difference was that boot.kernel.org had an ISOLINUIX-based installer rather than GRUB; googling for this, I found out that GRUB sometimes has trouble with some CD drives, and as such, Arch Linux came with the option of an ISOLINUX-based installer CD. So I burnt a copy of that, and pow, it worked!

I installed Arch Linux, but only in a small partition, still intending to try and install NetBSD via non-CDROM means at some point. I soon had X up, and all was quite well, apart from the fact that my wireless Ethernet module (a Broadcom 4315) didn't work. I found a driver and installed it, and then it was recognised, but it still refused to actually do any wifi. Bah humbug.

On a hunch, I re-downloaded the NetBSD installer ISO and burnt a new CD of it... and it worked, this time! Having wasted most of a week trying to get the first one booting then messing with Linux distros. So I left my Arch partition in place (in case I needed it for anything), and set up NetBSD. Got X working again, copied across the home directory I'd made under Arch rather than redoing my dotfiles, and was happy. Except that NetBSD also didn't like my wireless interface, and it had trouble with the ACPI too, so I can't read my battery status or do a suspend properly. I've found a NetBSD driver for Broadcom devices but I've yet to get it to compile (I think it was developed mainly for the macppc port, or I've just not applied the patch properly). When I get my kernel source tree compiling again I'll have a new kernel that also has verbose ACPI debug messages, which will probably help.

I get Xen working, though; it was painless now that NetBSD's boot loader can do multiboot kernels, meaning I didn't need to mess with GRUB; I just installed the xen tools, and a xen kernel, and a NetBSD/xen kernel, then added the following line to /boot.cfg:

  menu=Xen with 1GiB for dom0:load /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0 console=pc;multiboot /xen.gz dom0_mem=1024M

...and rebooted into a Xen dom0. Setting up some Linux domUs for my work has been more exciting: I downloaded Debian filesystem images and a kernel from stacklet.com, but when I bring it up, Debian complains it can't bring up the Xen virtual network interface - and that it's getting lots of disk errors on the Xen virtual block device (although it can actually read the filesystem without any trouble whatsoever). This may not be helped by the fact that the kernel I downloaded doesn't seem to match the /lib/modules directory in the filesystem image, alas. More work is required.

Still, I'm happy to be back on an X workstation. I liked my Mac, but I was feeling hankerings for open source software, and minimalism. I'm running dwm, dmenu, and remind, joined together with awesome shell scripts. I do miss the intergrated personal-information-management tools in Mac OS X; I want to brew up my own database of people/todos/events/etc in some Prolog dialect (eventually replacing remind), so I can express all the relationships between things that I want ("There is an all-day event on date X called 'Y's birthday' if there is a person P with name Y whose birthday has the same day and month as X", sort of thing) - it'd be nice if it could integrate with Thunderbird's address book, so I may have a look at the format of that (or look into a script to sync it to/from an LDAP directory).

Drugs, Science and Freedom of Speech (by sarah)

I have the feeling this is going to be a long and involved rant were I may well side track myself, so hold onto your hats and here we go!

Last week Alaric told me of a Daily Mail article that had made him angry and sad and all the rest of it because of the plain stupid reporting of it. The representation of scientists alone is cringe worthy let alone the sensationalism of it. The misunderstanding that is going on between science and the public at the moment is a subject dear to my heart and the source of many of my rants as many of you know.

Now obviously I have already hit upon two subjects there worthy of their own essays or posts or what ever it is I tend to write.

But basically the main concern I have is for the independence of scienctists to actually have freedom to share their research results and opinions.

When I woke up this morning the radio was playing and the news started and what I heard frankly scared me. If scientists in an independent advisory body can not give impartial advise to the government and let their views be known to the general public and all of the public by mass media, this means then they are not independent and their results can not be trusted; they just become a tool of the governing body and the People lose a degree of freedom.

And yes I know that I'm sounding like a fanatic communist with the insertion of People there but think about this - we all of us are the people and if we are not careful we will end up in an apathetic totalitarian state, which is where we appear to be heading.

I may well be over-reacting but apathy is the biggest danger to a nation's freedom. Think on and look up how the Nazi's got into power in Germany. Think upon these things and see why I feel that in order to keep our nation somewhere that I am allowed to utter my thoughts out loud without fear of persecution I have to state my beliefs publically and fight in the only way I have (other than voting) for our rights as a nation as a people.

Ok, so what actually is my issue?

Professor David Nutt was sacked as chairman for the Drugs Advisory Council - why?

Because it would appear that he said things and wrote a paper that the government didn't agree with. But he was part of an advisory body which is supposed to be independent of the government. Why does it matter if the advisory body is independent? Especially if funded by government money - you'd think that it should be controlled right?

Wrong - for research into many many things, especially stuff that has a direct influence on the way a society behaves, then it is important that the research and investigations are carried out seperately from the government in order not to 'lead' the research. You can severely skew results by accident or on purpose by designing bad experiments - this is done by having a fixed idea of what the result 'should' be and so you exclude the things that might throw a spanner in the works. You study closed groups with no outliers and controls; you do many things that subtly skew and distort the actual system your trying to portray.

And the more complex a system you're studying, the easier it is to do this.

Society is a very complex system.

Then there is the matter that if a government, through power hunger or benign intent, decided a society should behave in a certain manner which may or may not be what's best for the society or what it wants. If the advisory bodies are 'controlled' by the government then they will give the government the answers they want to hear, often with deleterious effects.

Again, look at the science of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia - yes they achieved great things but they stunted their own technological developments and their 'industries' grew only at the expense of human life.

These things may seem the distant past now but History and its study are needed to spot these patterns to stop the same things happening over and over.

Ok so what about this Nutt dude and what he said - the government want to crack down on drugs he pointed out that there was more damage being done by things like alchohol. Which is correct.

The Daily Mail for one went off alarmingly over this calling Nutt a drug tzar and completely missing the fact that, yes, alcohol causes more damage than drugs.

This surely is a well known fact - ask the doctors and A&E nurses about drunks, ask social severces about the beaten and battered children.

Look at Edwardian times - when Opium was still readily avalible - it was Gin that had the police concern, Gin that turned mothers into baby killers so they could sell the cloths to buy... more Gin.

Now I am not denying that drugs and alcohol go together; in fact they are very much links mainly because, like it or not, alcohol is a DRUG - oooo controversial but it is. It alters our perceptions, our moods and our inhibitions, it makes us vulnerable and dangerous.

It is a big factor in many rape cases, and violent acts on the street and in the home, it takes up a lot of the precious ambulance time (don't believe me? check out this ambulence drivers blog). It leads to fitting if too much is consumed - I know I had to deal with more than one person in this state.

It can even lead to hallucinations though that is obviously in the extreme.

In the sort of quantieties most of us are consuming it in this country there are long term health effects and most of them bad - most of them leading to a lot of the costs placed on our struggling NHS.

Kidney, Liver, heart etc... are all affected by it. The toxins that give you a hangover are drying out your brain (I'm serious the fluid in the 'ventricles' of the brain shrinks due to the dehydration caused by the alcohol - this is one of the factors leading to the headaches).

And people often take it with other drugs - now this leads to an interesting point - it was thought that there was such a thing as a 'gateway' drug. This being a drug that leads the user into wanting to try different and 'harder' drugs - they thought it was cannibis. They did research and found that it was infact nicotine.

And were do we find nicotine? Oh cigerettes - those over the counter cancer sticks - yes those ones. It is them that get people hooked onto the concept of trying harder drugs.

So tell me way with all the medical research alcohol and cigerrettes are legal with their HUGE cost to the NHS and legal system when cannibis and the like aren't?

Becuase they are socially acceptable? Even though one scars your lungs and kills the poeple around you and the other leads to more anti-social and dangerous behavoiour?

When I worked at the Student Union I expected to see drug use - I expected to see badness arise from it - but you know apart from a sad incident of someone using Rohipnal on a student (this ended in long involved things with the police - the person preyed on students generally freshers) the main issue was alcolhol.

To the point that even before the government intervened there where things in place to try and encourage sensible drinking and even a mini bus service to stop people walking home on their own in states where they would have been easy prey.

Especially if mixed with sporting events the alcohol could result in things getting quite hairy especially when you're a 5ft female in the first place - but I was good at defusing potential situations and I had my radio and back up.

Now we had police and bouncer license people come in and give us lectures of drugs proceedures - ie if you suspect or see them - how the bars license could get taken away etc.... So it was something I was watching for.

Now this all sounds like I am saying "ban the drinks, ban the smoking" and though I am glad that bars are now non smoking becuase I don't really want lung fulls of smoke and I was having resperatory problems when I was working every night, I do not think these things should be banned.

And you know I don't think the drugs should be banned either. I will state at this point that I don't take drugs and I don't smoke and I rarely drink so why am I pro-drug?

Becuase if you push something underground you give it into the hands of the crime lords - you hand our youth over to some really very dangerous people.

You drive more people to experiment because its illegal, because its taboo and they are young (or having a mid-life crisis) and they want to 'rebel'. If its not illegal I believe less of them would take the drugs or even smoke in the first place.

If there are places they can pick up safely manufactured drugs that aren't cut with fertilizer and that have easilly seen strengths, the number of over doses and deaths by toxic substances would go down. The amount of crime to find the money to buy the drugs or secure favour with the 'pimp' would decrease. It would be out in the open.

It would be safe and boring.

Drive it underground and you have prohibition america, you have gangster rule, you make everyone a criminal just by association - if you know of something going on and don't tell the authorities you're a criminal. The Police themselves become criminals under this system leading to harsh punishments and divided loyalities - this opens the route to constitutional corruption and more cans of worms than I care to write about.

So...

Why all the hoohar over a scientist stating what I thought had been known for decades now?

Would it be something to do with taxation on the socially 'acceptable' drugs?

Would it be because we are slowely losing our freedoms in this country and the mass population don't seem to have noticed? Well who can blame them - they are working hard and slogging out a life and the big picture is rarely put in the news - instead they are getting bitesize pieces of information that on their own look perfectly harmless but there is a very scary trend and when I first came across it I didn't believe that it would lead to the loss of liberty. I now fear it will.

In what I term my 'year out', the one between Uni and getting married when I was working for Alaric's step mother, the Student Union and classifying meteorites at the Natural History Museum I discovered why my fiance's parents where moving out of the country.

The reason - certain laws had been passed which Lynne considered to be against our freedom of speach - these where mixed up with the new anti-terrorist laws.

Having been raised in South Africa and having parents who where imprisioned as anti-Apartheid freedom fighters she had a unique out look on the laws being passed. It was, she said, the beginning of a slippery slope and she could not live in a country that was heading that way.

I thought at the time she was over reacting, though I saw her point. But as I have watched things decay in this country I am really actually getting quite scared and worried about it.

Mix in the restrictions on freedom, our crumbling social systems and the dumbing down in the education system and I want to cry.

Half of the issue here isn't just the freedom of speech it is the general publics mis-understanding and fear of science. And publications like the Daily Mail don't help making people think science is this scary cold subject with little bearing on real life.

This is not the case, science and technology permeate our society in lots of ways people don't realise. But I am starting to come across people with A levels and AS in science subjects who know nothing of what 'science' is and have been turned away from science by the way it has been portrayed. With changes that have sneaked into the curriculum (and I don't by they way think all the changes are bad and I like some of them but...) the essence of science, of analysising of creative thinking - infact of thinking at all, and not just being good at recalling facts, is being lost.

We have a country built on the legacy of the Victorian scientists and engineers and we are raising a generation whose school education is stiffling their thinking and creativity. This makes was an easily manipulated population but doesn't bode well for future economic and global political success of the nation as a whole. And where do we think the Drs and nurses come from? And the teachers?

Nor does it bode well for the idividuals who would be creative champions - and I believe creativity is above science and art and that to do either you need creativity. My hope is that the internet and our struggling libaries will curb this trend but they will probably only make a dent.

As I have said before - whilst I can speak out about the ills of society that I percieve, I will. On the radio this morning the Drugs commision are basically all resigning but as one of them pointed out - the resignation was announced by the home office before they'd actually carried out the threat and sent the letters or announced themselves, and this was after a meeting where they were being told the government wasn't interfering and that they wanted a relationship of trust - how can you trust something that does that?

I welcome opinions by the way so feel free to leave a comment 🙂 and wow thats over 2000 words :/

The UK MoD Manual of Security has been leaked (by alaric)

The UK MoD Manual of Security has appeared on WikiLeaks.

I'm not certain this is a good thing, to be honest... the intelligence services are renowned for overstepping their mark, and I'm sure the sections on dealing with investigative journalists and the like will be useful to those who fight against that kind of thing, but I suspect the bits about dealing with foreign intelligence agencies would probably have best been kept secret. Still, the cat is out of the bag, so perhaps it's no bad thing if the MoD are forced to have a total security audit and overhaul their manual 🙂

I've not managed to download it - WikiLeaks servers seem to be rather busy - but the front page does have some interesting snippets from the sections about visitors to China and Russia, discussing the kinds of things the local intelligence agencies do to try and extract Western commercial and military secrets.

This has some interesting bearing on the growing tendency to outsource software development tasks to developing countries. I know a lot of this work does go to China, and so we can probably assume that any intellectual property made available to developers in China is probably scrutinised by their security services and passed on to Chinese companies that may be able to benefit from it.

In the depths of my career history, I once worked on a software system that was to be used in a Government project to protect the nation's "critical national infrastructure"; and I gather that another part of the system was outsourced to an Indian development team. I'm not sure if the client was actually made aware of this, but at the time, I felt concerned that national security might be threatened by this.

Why are networks so hard to build? (by alaric)

One of my sidelines is network management.

Often, the problem is this: you have a bunch of sites, each with zero or more external connections out to the wider Internet (or to people who you provide an Internet connection to), and each with zero or more computers that need some level of network connection (be they servers or workstations). Each computer needs to be able to talk to some subset of the other computers, and maybe able to talk to computers out on the Internet or some other external network, and maybe computers on the Internet or some other external network are able to talk to it. And computers may be on public IP addresses, or on a private IP address; in the latter case, if it can talk to other external networks there needs to have a public IP address (possibly shared with others) that its connections are NATed from, and if incoming connections are allowed, there must be a public IP to which those connections are sent to be "forwarded" into the private IP. We can think of those NAT/forwarding public IPs as "virtual IPs", which don't correspond to a physical computer, but seem to by way of some form of port/address translation.

Also, each computer or external network connection needs some level of reliability. Some have low requirements, and we can happily tolerate perhaps up to a day of outage per year; that's mere 99.7% uptime. The fabled "five nines uptime", 99.999%, equates to a maximum of about 30 minutes of downtime a year. And that downtime isn't just used up by equipment failures; if your network's requirements grow and you need to upgrade things to provide more capacity, you might need some downtime to replace and reconfigure things.

In other words, the problem domain is already complex. But the fun's just starting.

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