Jean typing (by alaric)

Jean had fun in nursery yesturday. They're doing a Chinese new year theme, so she was talking excitedly about "Chinese New Ear" all the way home and breaking the nice little hat she'd made.

Sarah had to go to a meeting, so Jean and I had the evening to ourselves. Since I'm often away in London, I wanted to make a treat of this for Jean, so I cooked her pasta (her favourite) and we watched some film together, but then she said she wanted to type on my laptop, so we gave it a go.

I asked her to choose words, then I showed her the letters to spell them out. I was glad to see that she naturally pressed the keys properly, rather than holding them down as many people do. She got quite into this, especially when I started feeding her typings to the speech synthesiser. I turned on caps lock after a while so the on-screen letters would look the same as the ones on the keys. She tried a few nonsense words of her own as well as ones I spelt out for her, too. Here's what she typed:

mummy
jean
orange
CATS
SO3Y7LZG33XV7BNKZ
DINOSAUR
HELLO
JEAN
7NL.
G.XZJOPV
GF.N

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

Stress (by sarah)

Well last week I had to go and tell college I didn't have enough money for the tuition fees and what actually was going on here - this wasn't pleasant but they said to carry on anyway for now and to sort out doing my minni project.

For this project I have to choose one of the listed subjects talk to the supervisor, keep a log book of meetings etc.... collect the data, learn about the analytical technic and then do a 7000 word write up (oh and background reading) and an oral presintation including a powerpoint presintation.

They handed out the topics before Christmas and said choose over christmas and talk to the supervisor after christmas or if you are really keen you can do it before Christmas. We handed in our second 3000 word essay (On carbonado diamonds in my case) pretty much on the last day of term.

I then wasn't sure if I was going to be allowed to stay and we only went back on Monday last week. I tried to go and see the supervisor last week but he wasn't in his office except when I was actually heading to the lecture - he wasn't in it before hand and he wasn't there afterwards.

So I came in early to see him today and the other girl from my course was in there with him - this was fine we had discuessed it and I knew she was going for the project too. I had even checked with the course coordinator that two people could do the same project.

The other girl only does planetary stuff and as it was the only planetary project I felt she should have first dibs at it.

So I had stealed myself for being told no, but thought there was a good chance of a yes as I had checked the previous week. What I wasn't expecting was to be told that its too late to be starting the projects and that they should have been started a month ago! Which would have actually been Christmas >:(

I was already feeling out of sorts and this was a blow. I went back to the classroom and one of the others asked me how I was - I couldn't speak I just shook my head.

Then Nesha asked me how it had gone and I told her what had just been said. She was upset that she'd pipped me to the post by 10 minutes but I told it was ok - turns out he told her off too :/ She gave me half her chocolate bar which was nice and made me feel alot better.

It was the being told off that I had issue with - I was prepared not to get the project and as a geologist I have more options open to me than her. (She did both moon essays).

Anyway I had just finished explaining what other project I would go for when one of the guys came in and said he'd had to change direction as the project he was going to do the data wouldn't be avaliable until just before the deadline. He'd chosen my second choice - I think an expletative left my lips but he said that he'd just checked with the course coordinator and she'd said that two on a project was fine - sigh.

I had had a stressful morning anyway with the fact that Barbara came in when we were trying to get out of the house (late as usual) and gave me information about a guy to use for scouts but she said II had to phone him before 12 as she said I would and it was 11 already adn I was trying to get to Stroud for my train.

Anyway I tried to phone and it was a wrong number :/

And I knew that it would all end up some how being my fualt that I hadn't contacted him before noon :/ I phoned Al and left an answer phone message and later on he tried to find Barbara but she was out.

This and money worries and the genrally feeling that the world is coming to an end and winter just isn't going away ment that during my actual lecture which was really interesting (Geochronology) I was asking my normal barral load of questions but with a difference.

My stutters back.

It was so bad the lecture was having to finish my sentances for me 🙁

I think it must be stress.

Tony Hart :( (by sarah)

It turns out Tony Hart has died aged 83, as without him the Wiggly Pets would never have existed I felt it only right to do a post about him over on Salaric Craft. 🙁

It would have been nice to actually meet him.

Bizarlly this and watching the old Wind in the Willows with Jean has made me want to annamate the Wiggly Pets once more. I remember speaking to a BBC bod about it a couple of years ago but then never heared anything about it and then that thing on CBBC appeared which looks similiar so I think they must have already had that in the pipe line :/

Oh well went I get some spare time (next millenia at this rate) I will animate them myself - I have a few other things I would love to turn into animations too! And as always being me they cover a broad range of tecnics that are probably now redundent with modern pooter power which makes me all the more excited as maybe I can just muck about on the pooter and get something that looks right.

Not right now though - far to much stuff to do:/

RIP Tony and thankyou.

Muddy Jean (by sarah)

Why oh why did I ever get Jean white mittens? Jean likes going over and helping Barbara with her housework and laying the fire etc... then they turn up and I put Jean in coat, boots, hat etc... and they wonder off to do various things in the garden.

Then between 15 and 45 minutes later a very muddy Jean invariably comes back into the house having to jump for the door handle.

This day I had her mittens freashly dry from having gotten the stains from last time out. Her pink coat was still drying but there is a nice long navey blue one which Violet gave us. Jean went out in that and her hat and mittens.

She returns with mud all up the back of the coat and the blackest pair of mittens I have ever seen - 'my glubs are wet mummy!'

And so they are back in the wash leaving me scrabbling for another pair were she hasn't lost one of them :/ I am reminded of Beatrix Potter to be honest - well she is three and I'm sending her out side were there is mud - mud how does it get into her hair?