The Worm Has Turned, Yeti Mothers and Other Despotic Adventures of Cats (by sarah)

Minni is always beating up He, always hunting her, specifically seeking her out to have a go. She corners the poor thing and holds her hostage for hours (if we dont realise whats going on). Minni tolerates H though, who she is quiet happy to sit on the bed next to. We've been musing that this may well be becuase H tends to trail Minni and still try to be friends, being the stupider of the kittens she doesnt get the message when Minni hisses at her. We think that perhapse H has somehow managed to endear herself to Minni in doing this puppy dog act.

However, the kittens are getting bigger and He is bright and a bit bigger than H and is getting fed up with Minni always pouncing her. I came down stairs to see a sleeping Minni being stalked by He! He then proceeded to attack Minni - It was interesting as He isnt quiet as big as Minni but is definatly braver and bolder. Poor Minni now sometimes waits for her food until the kittens have finished eating. Though she has uped her crumpy sneak attacks on both of them, in the hope they will go away.

Minni also watches the kittens play fight each other with avid interest - we think she's hoping one will kill the other as they have a tendency to come running if the others mewing - ie if Minni pounces one the other (well He not H who is a bit hippy) will come charging in to say her sister! We didnt think cats where supposed to have these types of relationships!

On a nother not the cats all love the Yeti outfit, I left it on the settee after we had washed it, Minni likes it so much she refused to take up her normal place on the bed last night! The kittens seem to think its Missy their mother, they really where trying to feed from it! It was really cute to watch. Missy is almost all white with just a few black spots so we think the kittens see the white fur and think Mummy! The fur though course to us would probably the same coursness as a mother cats fur is to a new born. They adore it, I vetoed Als suggestion of him sleeping in the outfit so that cats will come and pur on him. I said if he does that I'll cut nipple holes in it! He quailed and has decided to put the suit away. Though I am thinking of sorting out a fury off cut for them to sit on as they really do love the stuff!

Appart from that me and Al were getting a bit worried about He as she hadnt come in for her dinner or breakfast. We where just beginning to get concerned when she turned up. Babara then came round and asked if we'd missed He yesturday, I said yes we where just getting worried when she turned up. She then demanded to know why we hadnt told her the cat was missing for over 24 hrs! a) shes a cat and she does that sort of thing and b) we hadnt realised due to running off for training courses and what have you that she had been missing for that long. The poor thing had been locked in the garage!

Oh well shes safe now. I had assumed she was out hunting the cows in the fields! On the plus side she is now being very keen to be around us and be stroked 🙂

More on the Bussard Fusor (by alaric)

As I mentioned before, Dr. Bussard is claiming to have solved the secret of fusion power generation - but now here's him giving a talk to Google about it!

UPDATE: Link fixed...

Plague! (by sarah)

We have been down with the 'plague' ie bad colds for the last two weeks - its not been good - Jean the first to be ill is just about over it, I the second to catch it am still feeling really grotty though better than the three days I spent in bed, now Al is sickening and has had to drink large quantities of cough mixture 🙁 He gets sinus stuff bad so we have all the joys of post nasal drips with him - not good.

Just thought I'd best blog as I havent for ages!

I've also currently got an acting up pelvis - sigh - its clicking painfully agian. Its my own fault I slipped over last week at the capfire - but like away from the fire and inbetween groups - it was a bit embarrasssing as I couldnt get up and the elderly camp warden and Al dressed as a Yeti found me and helped me up. I was carrying my coffee at the time, so that was split on me and was ouchy hot as the mark on my finger testified the next day!

I also fell out of the van yesturday as I thought our back tire was on fire (long story) this added to cold and damp (I dont care that Al says its warm!) has been a bit of a pain 🙁

Anyway enough of the maoning and self pity - hopefully I'll be back on form with the posts soon!

The Eye Of Horus (by alaric)

As I mentioned in passing before, I've been writing my own server status monitoring package, The Eye Of Horus, because I wanted to better monitor my own servers.

Well, I installed it today, both to get started with some actual monitoring and to try it out in a real environment before releasing it properly, and the first thing I found was that the load on my primary server was high. As in, around 5. And a bit of digging revealed that it was Postfix being kept busy - delivering spam.

So I upgraded postfix on it, and my backup mail server, to the most recent version in pkgsrc, and added a bunch of SMTP-level anti spam checks to take the load off of spamassassin - and pow, system load has dropped to reasonable levels again.

The Eye Of Horus has saved the day already!

It's not yet as featureful as Nagios, but it's a better architecture, so it's easier to configure and has potential to overtake Nagios in the feature stakes. I've written an optional module for it to log statistics (load average, disk space, etc) to RRDtool databases, and hooks into the Web status display CGI to allow it to link to graphs produced from RRDtool, which is pretty nice.

Merging BitTorrent and HTTP (by alaric)

I've been kicking an idea around for a while now, so I thought I'd blog it, rather than just sit on it then feel frustrated when somebody else has it and gets RICH and FAMOUS and POPULAR...

Basically, BitTorrent makes publishing large files on the Web much less of a burden on the server than HTTP. If I put a 10MB file up on an HTTP server and give out the URL, everyone who fetches the file will transfer 10MB from my server. The same 10MB, over and over again.

If, however, I run a BitTorrent seed on my 10MB file, connecting to a tracker server, and give people the .torrent file describing my file and naming the tracker, then people with BitTorrent clients can connect to the tracker and find a list of connected clients with parts of that file (initially, just my seed client), and start fetching chunks of the file from them. As soon as a few people are downloading my file at once, they can actually start sharing chunks between themselves - my seed sends a chunk to one client, then my seed and that client are both available to send chunks to more clients. This reduces the load on my server a LOT, and thus reduces the cost of publishing large files.

Lovely stuff.

However, it's complex. Rather than dump a file in a directory on my web server and give out the URL, I have to run a tracker server, create a .torrent file, run a seed client, and distribute the .torrent file (perhaps by copying it to a directory on a web server and giving out the resulting URL).

It strikes me that one could probably write an extension to HTTP, implemented by an Apache module, that:

1. If a GET request for a file comes in with a special header stating that the client supports it, then engaging this special behaviour. Otherwise, sending the file as normal. The server may be configured to send the file as normal if its size is below a certain limit, too.
2. Have a tracker built into the server. I think the tracker protocol is HTTP anyway?
3. If one does not already exist, automatically generating a .torrent for the file, naming itself as the server, and sending that as the response body

Then clients/web browsers that support it could then automatically fetch static files using BitTorrent, from servers that support it, while still maintaining perfect backwards compatibility between mixtures of old and new servers and clients, and without needing any extra admin effort (beyond perhaps installing and enabling the Apache module).

As far as I can tell, it'd be better than Web Seeding.