Mothering Sunday – The Outing (by sarah)

Mothers Day was lovely - I received three cards! One from Jean with a painted cat upon it 🙂 One from Mary with a very similar felt tip pen cat, glittery stickers showing things like camp fires and tents, and lots of scribble, and one from Alaric saying thankyou for making my dream family 🙂

(this was why I was in bed - I was awoken by child and baby clambering onto me with a cry of Happy Mothers Day Mummy!)

Al's one had a sad little side note in it about the fact that I have not got the life he promised I me i.e. the one I was working on when we met and got married - the science stuff but that he would never stop trying to make me happy.

I love him and the kids and PhD's can wait - not that I now think I have the attention span for one! I love projects that take 3-6 months! But that is something to dwell on later in life.

Anyway - we were going to go to the church but I looked on line and they seemed to only be doing Lent stuff and not a mothering sunday service and there was a large class breakage which needed cleaning up by which point it would have been to late anyway.

So we headed out to Gloucester and walked to the Cathedral to have a look at The Open West - which is an art display/instillation. I am still writing poetry and flash fiction from the pieces they had there as part of the Crucible exhibition.

We wondered round, building itself is awe inspiring and the evening song was on so singing echoed with sunlight hapazadly filtering in through the stained glass. Mary crawled around exstatically and Jean got excited everytime she found a new piece of art.

It did feel a bit invasive though as basically there were people lighting candles to pray and stuff and we were wondering around gawking at stuff. The cloisters and that were also closed so we didn't get to see it all which is a shame as I don't think I'll be able to get back there before it closes 🙁 But Jean did buy me a set of the prints for Mothers Day (with money borrowed from me) - she wanted some of the images too!

I was a little disappointed at the quality of the prints and of the photography itself if I am honest - but it will still serve as lovely writing and art material for me to work from. And hey Jeany desperatly wanted to buy it for me 🙂

I think my favourite piece was the Inside Out - a gold scaly umbilical cord - I took video of it as I found the light effect so enchanting.

Jean's was the video of people kissing under water.

Alaric liked the light and glass sculpture that looked like a neuron.

Mary - the steps of the Cathedral itself 🙂

We were going to go to the tea rooms and me knit but they were closed by the time we finished, and the ice cream parlour we were going to visit doesn't open on Sundays it turns out. But we found lush ice cream in BBs down by the shopping centre and then went in search of cheesy chips.

We went to the Aviator at Staverton but alas - it is apparently the busiest day of the year for them so they were bookings only and complete set menus! So we went to Sam's Pizza and Kabab House and I had a Kabab which is rare indeed, Al had a curry and Jean chips which she shared with Mary whilst we watched the sunset at Burrow Wake Viewing Point.

It was a lovely day.

Here be more photos!

This reminds me of an episode of Ulysses 31

A Welsh Poet In Japan (by sarah)

Ok so this Dudette who I keep bumping into at poetry things at Wychwood, The Cheltenham Science Festival (Slam the Atom), Art Tournament and the like is in Japan sharing Welsh culture in the form of a modern telling of traditional welsh stories!

She is from Cardiff (if I remember correctly) which always makes me homesick for ASDAs (long story). Anyway she has some funding for the trip provided by the Japanese but it doesn't cover everything - so she has a site were you can sponsor her (she's called Mab Jones by the way). Here be the site - go and bung it a tenner - there isn't alot of time left to do so! (3 days I think).

Now I have used far too many curvy brackety things that people tell me aren't brackets so I think it is time to stop writing!

Server upgrade (by alaric)

I host a heap of web sites (including this blog), email domains, source control repositories, mailing lists, and various other things (such as one of the official Chicken Scheme egg mirrors, a Jabber server, and an IRC server with bots). I do this with a combination of dedicated server hardware which I hire space, power, and connectivity for in London for the primary stuff, and a virtual private server in California for backup services and rapid DNS lookups from the USA.

This is a costly hobby, but it gives us a platform upon which to do interesting things, and lets me help other people out with free hosting; as I need to put in the time and money to run the infrastructure anyway, the spare capacity on it is essentially free.

The most demanding part is server upgrades. Periodically, I buy a new physical server, install it with all the software it will need, put it alongside the current hardware in the data centre, and transfer the data and settings across and configure everything that needs configuring on the new server until it works just like the old, then switch them over. I do this when the current hardware is getting full or overloaded or unreliable or just plain out of date, as I don't trust in-place updates of the core system software - it's too easy to end up with NOTHING working.

However, this has been overdue for several years. I bought the new hardware (this time, with a contribution from my biggest user of disk space!) nearly two years ago, and installed it in the rack nearly a year ago, but only yesterday did I get the chance to spend a day sitting next to it in London coaxing it into readiness then doing the final switch over...

It didn't go entirely to plan, of course. I'd previously written a script that used rsync to copy all the user data over; the first time I ran it it copied everything, then subsequent runs only had to copy the differences. The idea was that I would have less down time while I copied the data from the old server to the new (which has to happen with both servers offline, so that nothing can change during the copying process) if there was only the final changes to copy. However, I realised that the accounts of my biggest user of disk space weren't covered by my script as they had been slightly hacked to accomodate their growth.

And the whole process of moving the software configuration was made more complex by the fact that I had previously been running two servers in a kind of symbiotic cluster, in order to meet the load with the hardware of the time. Nowadays 64-bit multi-core behemoths with gigabytes of RAM are cheaply available and well supported by NetBSD, so everything can be done on one box. This is a much simpler setup, but it means that I had to undo the complexity of the previous setup when transferring everything across!

I ran into a few other unexpected problems, too; I noticed that the clock on the new server was terribly wrong, despite it running NTP. I did a manual ntpdate, and then just in case, another to check that it was now only a few millisecond out - but it was already half a second out again! It quickly became apparent that the clock was ticking about one second in every two seconds of real time...

Looking in the output of sysctl -a, it became apparent that I had a choice of time counter sources: it was using the TSC, but I also had an HPET, a clock interrupt, an APIC clock, and the good old 8254; my machine was brimming with alternate clocks. I tried switching to the HPET with sysctl -w kern.timecounter.hardware=hpet0 and suddenly time was running as expected. I popped that in /etc/sysctl.conf so it would come back on reboots, resynched the clocks, and everything's been fine since. I can only presume that the kernel was reading the CPU clock speed wrong, or some kind of dynamic clock scaling is happening, so that the (CPU-based) TSC wasn't having its ticks converted to seconds properly.

I had a big setback with the email setup, as NetBSD comes with Postfix as part of the base system but I wanted a more recent version from packages, but I ended up getting tangled with what version was being run in various situations and what configuration file was being used, which took a while to sort out. And then of course there's Mailman, the mailing list server software, which is complicated by needing write access to its filesystem-based state when run from the mail system (for incoming mail) or the Web server (for the web interface), so uses lots of setgid binaries and group-writable files and the like, and so always takes a lot of fiddling to get working properly.

But... I did it. And so, having completed my tax returns earlier this year (which is what freed up the time to prepare for and do this mission), I have now gotten rid of all the major obligations that have been hanging over me for the past few years.

I still need to visit London again - I've left the old servers running alongside the new in case I missed any files that need to be transferred; I'll give people a chance to check I've not missed any of their stuff before remotely powering them down (to save electricity, which I pay for) and coming in to take them (to free up the space). But that's relatively easy!

The End of NSEW (by sarah)

So we have reached the end of National Science and Engineering Week - I have had fun following things on twitter and the like - but also seriously talking to gallery owners about putting on a Science Art Exhibition for next year.

I would also like to see more local event - I could find nothing in my area - maybe I was looking in the wrong places. We were going to go down to London to join in some stuff there but due to car braking down Alaric couldn't take me and the girls with him to London (he had to go in anyway on the train to replace our servers!).

Another thing is that I hadn't realised how many science poems I have! There are all the ones from this years World Poetry Writing Month challenge for a start - I'd focused on science and nature poetry written from New Scientist and National Geographic prompts.

So next year I plan to release the full Ballads of the Scientifica - book, CD and science art post cards.

Tomorrow will be the last day to get your free down load of what is already there.

Higgs Boson Anthology (by sarah)

I thought I would just re-high light this collection of which I am part with my poems Where Are You?

The Higgs Boson Anthology

Here is a spoken version of the poem: