Mingleton Town Hall mayors' gallery ;-)

Today's blog entry is for my Scottish blogfriend Haggiswurst, who may recognize the theme.

Once upon a time there was a town hall in Scotland - representative of many buerocrappy offices, both in the private and public sector - known as Mingleton Town Hall. It has been made famous - nay, infamous - by my blogfriend Haggiswurst, who has told us many a frustrated tale of the incompetence reigning therein. The feudal management heirarchy attempts to emulate the feudal structures of the great clans of Scotland, even going so far as to copy the portrait gallery idea of the clan chiefs in their castles. My secret hielan' spy - a junior single-handed staff polisher (sic!) - managed to take this photo of the Mingleton Mayors' Gallery in its full glory. The missing names and descriptive texts can only be translated from the Gaelic with the help of a Rosetta Stone ;-)

This one's for you, Desk Monkey, think of it as a Broon's cartoon ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 30th August 2005 at 06:30 CEST permalink Email

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Annual model aircraft flight show in Haaren

Just Pix today, no text. Click on the thumbnails to see the enlargements.

I don't even want to think of all the man-hours and all the money these guys put into their toys...

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 28th August 2005 at 06:28 CEST permalink Email

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Your mails this week and an educational rant.

John (UK) and Babsy (NZ) complain that Tuesday's blog article on RAID failures was 'too techie', and would I please get back to my rants, which are things they enjoy reading most. And I thought it was a rant too, about technically incompetent salesmen? (i.e. with a lack of education).

Back on the 10th of August I was ranting about educational deficits, one of my more frequent rant subjects. Several of you from the UK sent me links about the state of school education there :-

• A-levels 'cause for celebration'. UK Education minister Lord Adonis defends A-level exams against accusations they are being "dumbed down". I think he meant cerebration ;-)
• School leavers 'lacking three Rs'. The UK education system is failing to ensure enough school leavers master the "three R's", a new study suggests.
• Calls for A-levels to be tougher. The government faces calls to make A-levels harder amid predictions of a record number of top grades this year.
• Science and languages exam plea. Science and foreign languages must become more popular, the director general of the CBI warns.
• Thousands learn their GCSE grades. Teenagers are getting their GCSE results - but industrialists say even the brightest lack basic skills :-(
• Advanced exam too tough. Half the attempts at advanced level exams aimed at the brightest candidates ended in failure.
• Students count multiple A grades. There are numerous individual stories of sparkling successes among this year's A-level results.
• Background Info for the non-English : The schools system in England.

Several years ago the education authorities here in Germany were badly surprised by schoolchildren's mediocre performance in the PISA tests. These enable international comparisons. A concerted effort was made, especially in Maths and the Sciences, which resulted in significant improvements. Looking at the lower deciles, it can be seen that primary classes here have poor performance when there is a high proportion of children of immigrants. There appears to be a language problem. If the children have a poor command of the (new, to them) language, then it is difficult to teach them. So now we focus on language classes for the immigrant parents, for pre-school kindergarten children and primary school immigrant children. We'll see how it goes.

It is my observation that schoolchildren nowadays have a poorer grasp e.g. of maths than we did decades ago. Maths teaching needs to made more entertaining. Also, students are taking easier classes, e.g. philosophy rather than physics. This may account for better grades. I could rant at length about some US colleges who acquire athletic students to play basketball, said persons then taking useless courses in 'underwater basketweaving' etc, but I'll save you the tirade :-)
Here in Germany, the Butterfly of Chaos has landed even in elementary spelling classes :-(

Cuore (Bavaria) has this photo of the terrible flooding in the alpine valley regions of Austria, Switzerland and Bavaria. His town (Garmisch-Partenkirchen) was an island on Tuesday, some of the rivers are 20 to 30 feet above their normal levels, dams breaking, lakes overflowing etc! The politicians are no help either; Edmund Stoiber - president of Bavaria - just emitting his usual Stoiber's verbal diarrhea instead of changing the Bavarian building zone regulations to stop people building up the riversides and getting flooded out every couple of years :-(

Jenny (currently in Ibiza) reminded me of when Dubya, pissed off at the French, changed the name 'french fries' to 'freedom fries'. She sent me this map , which predates that though, and illustrates the lousy US education standards. Tip : look for France on this US map of Yurp.

Apropos Dubya, Jenny, did you know that he has appointed a personal friend (William R. Timken) as ambassador in Berlin? Qualifications? None. William R. Timken cannot even speak German :-(

Talking of maps, I just looked to see who is reading this blog right now (at the time of writing). Wow, you blogreaders are all over the place! Welcome to the most recent ten of you, from Bombay (Maharashtra), Benguet (Phillipines), Kepnica (Opole), Halle (Sachsen-Anhalt), Nunhem (Limberg), Barcelona (Cataluna), Haryana, Milan (Lombardia), Karaibrahim (Antalya), and Helsinki (Finland) . The dearth of Americans is due to the fact they are all still sleeping, methinks :-) Albeit, I must admit to having to consult an atlas to see where some of these exotic places are :-)
The monthly blog-stats are stable, showing the weekly cycles with a drop-off each weekend.

For some reason - I forget which ;-) - Leonev (RU) and I were conversing not about increasing knowledge (education) but about decreasing knowledge (Alzheimer etc). So we discussed that great little book Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes and then (nec)romantically progressed onto the subject of death. Or as Terry Pratchett would put it, DEATH.
Of which there were several worth my and my blogreaders' remembrance recently :-

• Dr Robert Moog. Synthesiser pioneer Dr Robert Moog, who inspired bands such as the Beach Boys, died aged 71 this week.
• Remembering Jerry Garcia (Grateful Dead). Thanks to Frank Paynter for the heads-up.
• William Wallace. The 700th anniversary of the death of William Wallace is being marked with a series of events across the UK, Scotland in particular of course. ("Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled, Scots wham Bruce hae efta led..."). Braveheart, to the movie-goers.
• Albert Mangelsdorf, trombonist. He of the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble.
• J. Peasmold Gruntfuttock, a Round-the-Horne original, at age 40. Rest in peas :-)

Of course, some of the obituaries you read are pretentious twaddle :-( And talking of pretentious writing, I encounted this bit of coloured-prose in the UK's Telegraph Magazine, under the header "Fleur and Francis Kelly renovate their Somersetshire farmhouse" :- "Fleur's personal colour chart for the house encompasses "dried bay leaves" for the hall, "young bay leaves" for a bedroom, "egg yolk from a free-range chicken fed on plenty of maize" for the studio and back kitchen and "the grey of Somerset Levels white lias" (lias being a kind of fossilised stone) in a sitting room. But Francis has his own colour references: "He'll use the 18th-century name - for example, Brunswick Green."

So I send this pretentious Brit text to my favourite expert on web colours, Robin Kirkey (DC,USA), who even came up with a guess at the colours! She replied "ROFL! Well, I couldn't resist...see attached. Perhaps I should add the complement or analogous colors and post it on my site as "The Fleur and Francis Kelly Palette". ;)"

^* Footnote : That's latin for "If you can read this, you're (over)educated" ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 26th August 2005 at 06:26 CEST permalink Email

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The downside of RAID - Part 2

Back on the 7th August I told you the tale of the failure of an entry-level RAID-1 system, and promised to wrap up later with a more complex case. So today I'm going to tell you about the failure(s) of a larger RAID-5 system. Maybe someone, somewhere, somewhen, can benefit from reading the tale told here, even if only by thinking-through his/her own RAID system.

In larger RAID systems, most users go for a RAID-5 configuration as the "best" compromise between reliability and cost. So lets look at a RAID-5 schematic, to understand what is happening.

The picture on the left shows us a 4-disc RAID-5 system. Three discs may be thought of as containing data and the fourth disc containing the parity sums of the first 3 data discs,
e.g. P₀ = A₀ XOR B₀ XOR C₀. This is known as a 3+1 system.
For efficiency reasons the 'parity' blocks are rotated cyclically between the four drives though.

Additionally the system may have a hot-spare standby disc in the cabinet to reduce the MTTR (mean time to repair) in the event of a disc failure. Such an additional disc plays no role in the normal workings of the RAID-5 array though.

Most users also apply 'striping' to their files as suggested in the picture on the right shown above (a 4+1 system). This means that sequential blocks of a file will be placed (in stripes) onto different physical drives (see picture), enabling parallel access to such blocks. There are disadvantages to striping however, especially if the applications do mostly serial access (e.g. Video streaming, music etc). Indeed, Henry Newman has written, I quote: "Striping : Many file systems use a volume manager to stripe the data across all of the devices in the file system. This defeats any potential for sequential allocation on each of the blocks on the individual disks in a LUN (logical Unit) and therefore on the read-ahead cache on the RAID. It should be noted that a number of file systems have added round-robin allocation as an additional allocation method. Most Linux volume manager and file systems that are combined with volume managers do not support round-robin allocation, which means that most Linux I/O will not use the RAID cache efficiently" :-(

In our case-study the oily-salesman we remember from my 7th August article had sold the customer an FSC S80 entry-level RAID box and configured it with striping although the customers main applications were video-playback and editing :-( The customer was using the 7 discs as a 6 disc +1 hot-spare system, although 5+2 might have been more suitable as we shall see later. The FSC S80 cabinet provides redundant power supplies with redundant and hot-spare fans.

Data Recovery Ltd (UK) write "In spite of being considered highly fault-tolerant, RAID's however DO FAIL due to component failure (including hard drives and controller cards), operating and application corruption and, most common, simple human error, leaving your data ... severely corrupted".

Tony Lawrence blogged :- "A failed RAID-5 is more dangerous than a non-raid single drive machine.

For one thing, you have more drives, so therefore automatically more probability of failure. Second, you have more drive activity because of seeking to get parity info, so more heat and stress. Finally, if another drive does fail, ... you need to go for EXPERT reconstruction!"

Example: This customer had 15 discs. Assuming a MTBF (mean time between failures) of a disc of 5 years, then he can expect a disc failure every 4 months (=5/15 years). And no, the oily-salesman hadn't explained this to the customer who thought he was getting a MORE reliable system. Nor had he explained to the customer that he should replace discs before their expected end-of-life.

PC GUIDE explains :- "RAID-5 solutions provide the ability for the system to continue even one of the drives in the array has failed. However, when this occurs, performance is negatively affected; the array is said to be operating in a degraded state when this happens. In a striped array with parity, performance is degraded due to the loss of a drive and the need to regenerate its lost information from the parity data, on the fly, as data is read back from the array. This process is called rebuilding. A striped array with parity must have the entire contents of the replacement drive replaced by determining new parity information (and/or replacement data calculated from parity information) for all the data on the good drives. Clearly, these procedures are going to be time-consuming and also relatively slow - they can take several hours. During this time, the array will function properly, but its performance will be greatly diminished." [My emphases].

If the system is not one that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the administrator will often prefer to wait until after hours to rebuild the array, thereby avoiding the performance hit associated with the rebuild, but exposing himself to a double-crash risk during this delay!
Additionally, most administrators will want to ensure that they have a current backup before the rebuild takes place and this backup not only places an additional load on the system, but runs more slowly itself, because of the performance degradation of the failed RAID.

To make it worse, some gung-ho employees come in early because they got behind in their work due to the performance degradation the day before, thus slowing the backup even more. So the time lost before the rebuild even starts may get longer. RAID-safe percentage = MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR). So that in our example here the RAID is unsafe nearly 2% of the time.

Now lets look at the RAID-5 rebuild itself. We read in the data from the good disks (6-1=5 in our example) and write them out again to the same disks plus the hot spare( = 6 discs). Most RAIDs read in a stripe before writing the same stripe out, one stripe each time. This customer had 146 GB discs in the S80. So he had to read in 730 GB and write out 846 GB, thus moving over 1.5 Terabytes of data. The oily-salesman hadn't explained this properly, nor how long it would take. Even at 100% efficiency there is only 400MB/s of bandwidth available, which is over an hour. Since the customer is trying to run a normal service during the rebuild he may only allocate 10 to 20% of the performance to the rebuild, which thus takes 5 to 10 hours. This is in addition to the time needed to back up 730 GB of data at performance-degraded backup speeds plus the delay caused by waiting for the night-shift or (even worse) the weekend! That adds up to a long time to have application performance degradation and exposure to another disk failure.

Quoting from Data Recovery Ltd, UK :-

• IRON RULE 1 : Once you’ve swapped a failed drive or switched drives to increase capacity, if the system does not properly rebuild/re-initialise the first time, STOP and call a data recovery expert!
• IRON RULE 2 : Before taking any repair or maintenance action on your RAID, perform a back-up.
• IRON RULE 3 : DO NOT rely on automated, scheduled back-up protocols. Even a few hours or days since your last scheduled back-up could result in the loss of critical data if your RAID is not recoverable.
• IRON RULE 4 : ALWAYS verify the availability of backed-up data before performing maintenance on a RAID.
• IRON RULE 5 : The recovery process requires 2-3 times the data storage capacity of your RAID. You may need to recover from the clones at the data recovery expert's site.

Wrapping up this tale, this customer had money left at the end-of-budget period and so wanted to double his disc capacity. The RAID controller only had a built-in upgrade feature to add one disc at a time. So the customer went from 6 (+ 1 hot spare) to 15 (+ 1 hot spare) by rebuilding adding one disc at a time, then doing a backup, repeat 9 times. It took him three weeks during which he was lucky that no disc failed. Of course he now has an MTBF of only 2 months and has doubled the time that both a backup and the rebuild takes. He could have saved time and money by talking to someone other than the oilily suave salesman. I wonder if he's budgeted to replace the first set of discs at their end-of-estimated-lives? And why didn't he go for 14 + 2 hot spares? or twice 6 +1 hot spare? And did he check if his UPS can still cope? I'll bet not :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 23rd August 2005 at 06:23 CEST permalink Email

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Saturday morning me - with my new Dad in his hammock. Just after this photo was taken he got out of the hammock, so I jumped in. My, what a surprise! All my paws went through holes in the netting and I was stuck, suspended on my belly, all four legs hanging out the bottom, looking like a completely stupid prat! Of course Dad rushed to rescue me before Mom could take a photo, so I guess HE was the STUpid prat after all :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 21st August 2005 at 06:21 CEST permalink Email

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Synergy stuff

Sorry folks, but blogging has been sparse since we got our new young and brave pup. Until she is house-trained we basically have duty-shi(f)ts with her, to ensure she doesn't crap in the house, not to mince words :-) However, on thursday the weather picked up and we could spend the day out in the garden, so I had off-shi(f)t time to write this little entry and on-shi(f)t time manuring the garden. Synergy! I'm just glad she's a pure-bred English Bulldog and not a Breakfast Director, who have been known to table a motion ;-)

About 15 years ago the company I worked for, Nixdorf, was taken over by Siemens, gestating into Siemens-Nixdorf Informationsystems. One of the favourite words of some top management (breakfast directors) was 'synergy', supposedly getting the best out of both corporate cultures :-)
I think I can hear my blog-friend Haggiswurst - a thousand miles away in Scotland - laughing hysterically as he reads that word, given the things he blogs about Mingleton Town Hall burocracy :-) Be that as it may, I think I've found the ultimate (sic!) synergetic corporate merge, a driving school combined with a funeral parlour! (see photo).
Could you really trust your driving instructor? ;-) Can you imagine rolling up for your driving test in a black hearse that has only a first gear and can only roll along at 4 mph? Sound the horn and a dirge begins? Learning to drive is a grave matter indeed nowadays ;-)

However, Thomas Hauschild ( Doctor C42) managed to top this by pointing me to an amusing article in the German weekly political magazine Der Spiegel which I excerpt for you here :-

Apparently there is a pizza chain in New Zealand ('down below' as seen from here ;-) called HELL, with over 40 franchises throughout the country. They have recently been running an ad campaign using Dubyas conterface, two posters are shown above. The city fathers in Auckland are pissed off, but can do nothing to stop the ad campaign. If you look carefully at the HELLish posters, you can see that the nationwide telephone number even includes the area code 666. Subtle fun :-)

Being a Bushwhacker, I just love the synergy of their combining a corporate message "Want a hot Pizza? go to Hell!" with a political statement :-) Way to go, you Hell-raisers!

Doc C42 rides a big bike too, currently his English lady (a Triumph Daytona 900 Super III ) is waiting for a new carb-sync rod, so he'll miss me at the classic races in Schotten on sunday. Pity, 'cos I always like to meet my blog-readers, it takes some of the impersonality out of blogging :-)

Another big-bike rider (BMW) and blog-reading friend in the UK Carl Rose went to the Ace for the first time last week and points us to the Ace Cafe Reunion Run 2005. Carl was the first to send a correct answer to sunday's SuDoKu puzzle too. Well done lad :-)

Tessa Steer had her big-C OP successfully, congratulations Tessa!

Fellow crypto-geek Dirk Rijmenants sent three suggestions to add to sunday's parts-list meme :-

• a, aback, abandon, abandonment, abase, abash, abet, abatement, abbey, abbot, abdicate
• Head, head, head, head, motor, remote control
• lock, wood, ratchet, teeth, pawl, axle, lid, switch, lamp, battery, wire, key, letter, cable, jack, disc, ring, notch, contact, alphabet, reflector.....

CAMilo (now in SFO) sent 2 more ideas to add to my August 1^st 'always-on-camera' meme :-

• On the uses for a camera, the typical picture taking at a conference, but with a twist: you can always take a pic of the person you met and, after that, their business card, so you have a reference on the person and the event at which you both met. This is possible only on certain informal situations, but is workable.
• On trips, events, parties and the like, you have a document with a date and a place, so you can always have a) an alibi, b) a memory of the event.
  And always carry a big (memory) stick.

Finally, I looked to see if there were any synergies with other domain endings bearing my name. Parallel to www.savory.de there are also .org, .net, .com, .info, and .us ; but apart from a private site in Plano, Texas they are all seemingly just domain name resellers, hoping to make a quick $.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 19th August 2005 at 06:19 CEST permalink Email

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SuDoku Sunday and the parts-list meme

Su Doku is a japanese puzzle name; 'Su' means 'number' and 'Doku' means 'single' if I remember correctly. You are to fill in the blank squares with digits in the range 1 through 9. But each row of 9 squares must contain each digit 1..9 only once each. The same applies to each column and to each 3-by-3 sub-square. I advise that you use a pencil and a rubber. American blogreaders may prefer to use a pencil and an eraser ;-)

This kind of puzzle is fairly new here in Germany and I enjoy doing them; a pleasant change from the usual crosswords and number-sum games. I'm told that the first such puzzle appeared in a New York puzzle magazine in 1970, so I've been missing some brain-training, which I definitely need; mental agility needs to be retained. Answers by Email please.

Down at the pub the other night we were playing another kind of game, based on Henry Reed's famous soldiering poem Naming of Parts. The question-poser thinks of an (obscure?) object and names one part after another. The rest of the players try to guess (one guess at a time) what the whole object is, based merely on the names of its parts. The question-poser gets a point for every part named without the rest being able to guess the name of the object. A free pint if you can name ALL the parts without anyone guessing the object correctly :-)
Example :

• Part : Propeller - Guess Airplane? - Wrong.
• Parts : Propeller, Rudder - Guess Ship? - Wrong.
• Parts : Propeller, Rudder, Warhead - Guess Torpedo? - Right; 2 points.

As the evening wore on, the objects got more sophisticated : try this one for size :
Complete parts-list : Grip, Stem, Snath, Ring, Tang, Heel, Beard, Chine, Toe.
I got nine points and a free pint for that one :-) Give up ? Click here for the answer.

Now send me your (complete) parts-list. I'll blog them here and we'll see if your object is guessed.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 14th August 2005 at 06:14 CEST permalink Email

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Frieda fans and other Friday feedback

Good news first : Mandarin Meg now has her head screwed on the right way and is well on the way to recovery :-) Now let's all concentrate our good wishes on Tessa who will have her OP this coming week. Thanks too, to all the dog-blog fans who mailed our new puppy Frieda, including : Red Zora, Highlander, Christina, Olaf, Laubfrosch, Martin, Dieter, Andrea, Silverbeetle, Krabbel, Haggiswurst, Andreas, Chris, Karin, Meg , Erich and Sabine, and Xenia.

Anna Pashen (on Saudi Kings) is annoyed at the cost of running her car (oil price hikes), and is looking for a smaller car. She wrote : "...It doesn't need to be particularly fast, or powerful. It just needs to be transport...". So I suggested a bicycle, but she added : "...Yes, and they are good for your health - or at least once they were. Now bikes are known as instant-death here though. Each year in this city (Brisbane, AUS) a few cyclists get hit and killed or permanently hospitalised by 4WDs - the very symbol of success that every soccer mum MUST HAVE. One happened just up the road from here, they never caught the driver and the victim is in a vegetative state. Very few people are game to use bikes here as a result. Decent bike paths with safety barriers would probably improve things!"

Crypto-geek Matt R, who writes a Wiki thread about cryptographic museums, wrote : "Thanks for the extra info on the HNF; I've added it to the short page to the wiki on the HNF museum :
http://tourism.wikicities.com/wiki/Heinz_Nixdorf_Museums_Forum .
HNF had an article on it published in Cryptologia by Louis Kruh, apparently. There should be a copy in my library, I'll have to go look it up."

Another fellow crypto-geek, Dirk Rijmenants, has taken up blogging and wrote : "After stumbling on your great blog and enjoying many of your posts, I got interested in the phenomenon of blogging. So, I decided to waste some time figuring out how things work (actually pretty simple) and have started my own blog." Go take a look folks; Oh, and Matt R has a crypto-blog too.

Dave MacLeod (a Canadian living in Korea) and I have been having a conversation about alternatives to Esperanto. Let me share his major points and links : "...I was thinking of learning Esperanto back in April but after a few days of study I found out about the language Ido, a modified version of Esperanto made back in the 1910s, without the diacritics, adjectival agreement, accusative case, and a somewhat different way of creating vocabulary. Still 80% the same as Esperanto though. I'm also drawn to Interlingua..."

Dave also gives us the following links :-

• http://io.wikipedia.org
• http://ia.wikipedia.org
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
• www.interlingua.com

Several of you wrote about my education rant on Wednesday. Jock , writing from Bonnie Scotland, points out that exam scores in Scotland are improving. Jeb, writing from the US, points out that Decades of the South's school reform pay off. An anonymous physics student from the University of Jena points out that they have put 49 of Einstein's original papers online. In German, of course. Still on the theme of stupid politicians, Madeleine Begun Kane blogged a neat limerick about Bolton, Novak and Bush. And Jenny points out that it's not just the politicians, sometimes it's the cops too, or a mixture of both : she points to a page about the crappy arrests of the week.

Leonev teases me about my failing memory (I'm 61) and points me to an article in "Accelerating Times". Scroll down there, he says, and read Preventing Alzheimer's: The Eight-Step Plan.

Fellow pilot Pete wrote from the UK about spotting Crop Circles from the air (e.g. in Wessex).

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 12th August 2005 at 06:12 CEST permalink Email

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Relatively stupid politicians :-(

We all know that the US Prez, the Rev. Dubya of the Church of Latter Day Morons, is a bit underequipped at the top. But his State Department is too, it seems. At a recent meeting and press conference with his best - and maybe soon only - ally (Tony B-liar of the UK), Dubya managed to fly the UK flag (the Union flag) upside down as can be seen on the photo on the left. Just to minimise his ignorance a little - if at all possible - and that of Condi Rice , I have a web page explaining how to fly the Union flag the right way up. Go read it, Mistuh all-hat-and-no-cattle!

And now a local tale about the dumb politicians of the state of Baden-Württemberg here in Germany. This year is Einstein Centenary year, so they celebrated 100 years of Special Relativity with a poster explaining time-dilation. But got it wrong! They claimed a train or jet passenger would read a book faster because of the time-dilation due to their speed. Wrong! That passenger's watch dilates at the same rate as his reading, so he takes exactly as long subjectively to read his book. And from the point of view of the ground-based static reader, he would take even longer!

When scientists pointed out the error, the PR men did not simply correct it, but printed a new poster "celebrating 100 years of Special Relativity". It claimed that the higher you get, the slower you see your watch going. Wrong! A mountain climber on their states' highest hill (the Feldberg) perceives time to flow at the same rate as if he had stayed at home in the valley. And time dilation as a function of height is not even Special Relativity either, it's General Relativity, which came along much later and so we cannot celebrate 100 years of it this year :-( Oh, and they got the height of their own highest hilltop wrong too! Three errors on one poster "correcting" their 1^st try!

As Jürgen Ehlers, ex-director of the Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics has pointed out, these stupid politicians spent 27,000 Euros on this failed PR action. For a mere 1% of that sum they could have had any impoverished physics student check their facts for them before they printed the posters! But that's what happens when you put MBAs (Moron Bean Accountants) in charge instead of people with a modicum of education! And then they wonder why their schoolchildren's PISA results are so bad! O tempora, O mores!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 10th August 2005 at 06:10 CEST permalink Email

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Our new English Bulldog pup arrives :-)

Ladies and gentleman (and gay blogreaders), may I present Goomba's Happy Miss Frieda, 9 weeks old, who accompanied my wife all the way from Pennsylvania (USA) yesterday and is already reorganising our lives and 'redecorating' the household :-) Fan mail to the usual address please :)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 9th August 2005 at 06:09 CEST permalink Email

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The Downside of RAID , Part 1

Once upon a time - not too many years ago - there was a small businessman. Not Short Tony, it was the business that was small. He ran his pawn shop using a card index system. When eBay started up he branched out into selling (used) goods via eBay. Hence he acquired a computer as cheaply as possible from a local oily-and-ignorant PC salesman and put all his data on it. After a year or so, his disc crashed, and thereby hangs a tale ...

The oily-but-profit-oriented PC salesman told our computer-newbie hero that he needed RAID discs and sold him a pair of 72GB discs and a HW RAID controller all of which were stuffed tightly into his existing small PC chassis. The oily salesman told him that the discs were mirrored (see sketch on left) in what is known as RAID-1. This means that the OS 'sees' one logical volume but that the HW RAID-controller mirrors the data from disc 1 onto disc 2. The HW RAID-controller writes the same data to both discs (so writing is slower than with a single disc) but reads data from whatever disc is more lightly loaded (so reading is faster). The oily salesman had told him that thus he had a backup copy of all of his data, so if a disc failed again, his data would not be lost. As a consequence of being told his data were safe, our hero did not back up his data to tape or DVD etc . . .

In the meantime our hero's business expanded rapidly and the local oily-and-ignorant PC salesman sold him a dozen terminals which all shared the MS database on that single PC.

The load on the PC's database increased and the response times of the application tripled (response times are inversely proportional to the %-age load, in this case the disc was the bottleneck).

One day, the inevitable happened and one of the RAID discs died. Normal service continued, after all that is what RAID is all about, - business as usual - and the oily PC salesman was called to find out what to do about the red lamp blinking on one disc. Said oily-but-profit-oriented PC salesman sold him another disc (even managing to get the same type and size, although it's hard to find SCSI-3 drives off the shelf nowadays!) and sent a serviceman, who just about had a heart attack on hearing that our hero had made no backups for 18 months, indeed he owned no tape drive, because the oily-and-ignorant PC salesman had said the data were safe because they were 'backed up' on the mirrored drive. So the serviceman returned to his depot and brought along a 'shoebox' tape drive of his own and backed up our heros data (phew!). Of course he'd stopped the database running whilst doing so, much to our hero's annoyance.

After replacing the dead disc with a new one, the DB base was restarted so that our hero's business could continue. However, the RAID needed to be 'rebuilt'. This means that ALL the data from the healthy disc needed to be copied to the virginal new disc.

To do the rebuild, most RAID controllers read in a stripe, then write out that same stripe one stripe at a time. So if no other accesses were happening you would have at most about 400 MB/sec of bandwidth to read and write the stripes, implying 3 minutes to read the disc and 6 to write it at 100% usage. However our hero's database was running at 66% load (response time tripled, remember), so at most 33% remained available for the rebuild. In practice only half of this is used, so the load factor is around 85%.

This imples that the response times are now 6 times as long, i.e our hero's DB performance degrades by a factor of two (or more) whilst the rebuild is taking place. The rebuild itself (at 16% efficiency) takes 6 times as long as the optimum value, in this (single disc!) case about an hour. Of course the local oily-and-ignorant PC salesman had explained none of this to our hero, who was correspondingly pissed off.

As it happened, our hero and I met that evening for the first time in the pub, where he was pouring his heart out about all these woes to all who would listen. So, for a free pint I listened, and promised to pop in to take a look at his setup at the weekend. It turned out that he had everything on that one (mirrored) large disc! First off I explained the difference between backing up the data and mirroring it. I got him to spend some money on a tape robot and explained to him how to do weekend total backups and daily incremental ones. That done, I looked at where the high disc load was coming from. Of course he had the database, the database logfiles, the OS and the OS swapfiles all on the same (large) drive. I explained that if he split these across 4 smaller spindles (drives) the load would be decreased so much that he could at least halve his response times if not reduce them by almost that factor three, thus allowing more business to be done, and faster too, for more customer satisfaction :-)

Whilst doing this, he should think about having redundant fans and redundant power supplies - i.e. doing RAID 'properly' - which impled a new chassis. After we'd gone through the exercise of costing the loss of business due to being offline (possibly for several days), our hero has finally invested in a new server, a RAID box with a hot-spare disc, redundant fans and power supplies, the tape robot and an UPS (uninterruptable power supply). I also showed him how to calculate expected service times so he is budgeting for a replacement system after 4 years now. Needless to say, he is NOT buying his new gear from the oily-and-ignorant PC salesman ;-)

I'll be telling you about a more complex case in a later blog entry; don't go away.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 7th August 2005 at 08:07 CEST permalink Email

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Your Feedback and Comments this week

As usual on a Friday, your feedback and comments this week were all right on target, getting in the Gold :-)

Jewish friend Eli, responds to my Yiddishe Screensaver of July 23rd with a devilish note: "The Number of the Beast (666), which X-ians fear so much, when written in Hebrew numerals, looks like WWW. What does this tell us about the Internet?" ;-)

Mandarin Meg is in hospital for surgery this week; she wrote "The last time I checked into surgery they asked 'Religion?'. I said 'none'. The woman replied in a confirmatory tone 'You are a nun?' :-)". Get well soon, Meg, we're all with you in spirit! Mine's a single malt :-) Bloggeress Tessa Steer is fighting the big C, her OP is next week, so let's think of her too.

Meg's remark reminds me of those immigration forms we furriners have to fill out for the US. There is a single field for Religion. Assume someone writes 'Bhuddist'. Then what pisses me off is that the next field 'Date of Birth' only has room for a single entry! Religious discrimination before you've even gotten into the gawdam country! ;-)

Several of you liked Monday's article Ready to Shoot, about uses of ever-ready digicams. Here are some suggestions you sent, which I should embed in the original list:

• Jenny, who often spent ages looking for her car in those huge parking houses and underground parking basements, now just takes a snapshot of the number of her parking slot and can then find her car easily after returning there sometime the same evening.
• Wolfgang, who is an enthusiastic angler, turns on the date-and-timestamp on his digicam to snap his catches, then returns them to the water. That way he has the bragging rights, but the fish live on :-)
• Anonymous likes to drive fast on the Autobahn here in Germany. Here we are supposed to drive in the rightmost lane(s) if at all possible, using the left lane for overtaking only. However, some inconsiderate b*st*rds block the left lane, preventing others from overtaking (it is forbidden to overtake on the right outside urban limits). So he turns on the date-and-timestamp (and the flash OFF) of his phone-cam, snaps the offending left-lane hoggers ( and zooms on their number-plates in a second shot), voice-comments the location, and reports them to the police in real time via phone-mail!
• Sergei, who is a dentist, zooms into the patient's mouth, snaps, and then can show the patient what the problem is (on the camera's screen) much better than via a mirror. Methinks : presumably a gynacologist or a proctologist could use Sergei's idea too ;-)
• Robin Kirkey uses her digicam to record nice colours she sees en-route. She can then sample the colours and use them in her website design. This idea is so good, I've included her detailed HOW-TO description below.

Robin Kirkey wrote : "See a color you like when you're out on the street or in nature and think you'd like to use that color in your web site or blog? Take a picture. Transfer the picture to your computer, open in Photoshop or other graphic application and use the eyedropper tool (click with the tool over the area of color you like) to sample the color from the photograph. It will appear as your foreground color. If necessary, you can then "tweak" the color by opening the Color Picker by clicking on that foreground color. Use any of the four methods available (the RGB, HSL, LAB or CMYK sliders) in the Color Picker to make small adjustments until your color suits your taste. From the Color Picker window, you will also be able to make note of the HEX code of the color. While sampling, you can select (from the tool bar) a point sample (just the pixel directly under the d ropper tip), or a 3 or 5 pixel average.

While not perfect, it will give you a good approximation that is far easier to begin your color quest with than trying to remember the color you saw and "eyeball it" in your graphic program! (Note: Photoshop also has a Color Sample Tool that is contained in the Dropper Tool's fly-out. It is a bit more sophisticated as it allows for the placement of multiple points from which to sample a color. See the Help file (gasp!) for further information on this tool.

You may need to use the Zoom tool and zoom in REAL close (where you can see the individual pixels). If the camera has saved the file as a .jpg, the compression algorithm that the format uses literally tosses out pixels (and therefore color information). What looks to our eye to be a solid block of color is often made up of varying shades and tints of that color. So to get a really good sampling of the color you want, zooming first can help you to pick out the 'perfect pixel'."

Peter Harris pointed me to a classified AI job opening yesterday. The US DOD wants a machine to listen to foreign phones, catch any suspicious content and translate in real time. I have a friend at the NSA who does that for a living, Peter, wouldn't want to put him out of work, would we :-) How did you know to wake me, Peter? Did you read one of the AI textbooks I wrote about 20 years ago? But they were mostly at an introductory level and unclassified.

Back in the late 80s we worked here on an AI project "translating telephone". Japanese, German and English (not the limited american subset ;-). We had government and EU grants and academic/industry teams. Nevertheless our AI could only work in real time in restricted knowledge domains (e.g. Hotel Bookings) and the knowledge base was very brittle with hard edges so it did not fail-soft very well. Our piece (WISBER) of the project was to generate text and speech from knowledge representations. Three of my team wrote a book about that partial project ['Wissensbasierte Textgenerierung' by Jablonski, Rau and Ritzke, ISBN 3-87808-677-6, published by Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 1990, 233pp.] Doug Lenat had a large DARPA-funded(?) project in the US trying to encode 'common sense', CYC, but that's flopped as well, IMHO. Natural language understanding and translation is a difficult problem still today. About the only real progress was with Dictation SW which is now commercially available cheaply and quite good (I use Dragon). Some mobile phones and vending machines have voice I/O, but they are VERY limited domains of discourse, thus avoiding the wider problems.

Whilst on the subject of languages, I read that DJ Kunar is blogging in Esperanto. That's another language I'd like to learn, next winter's project maybe :-) Of course, my voice-rec SW can't cope with Esperanto and this German keyboard doesn't have those accents :-(

Andrew Weir and friends are building a Wikipaedia in Scots, Bob Fairnie tell me. Contributions from fellow Scots are requested :- "Kennin o yer interest in Scots and yer sterlin efforts tae promote it, A thocht that ye micht want ti ken aboot a Scots encyclopedia project that haes newly stertit. It's pairt o the Wikipedia project an can be funnd at http://sco.wikipedia.org/

Wikipedia is a free internet encyclopedia. It's pit thegither sae that oniebodie can read or edit it, stert thair ain airticles, an wirk thegither tae ettle efter biggin the lairgest wab resoorce for wittins in the warld. The English version aareadies haes mair nor 600,000 airticles, an the versions in ither leids bring that total tae 1.6 million airticles.

Gin ye wad like ti help us mak the Scots Wikipedia growe, aither in yer ain name or anonymously, we'd be gratefu for onie time an effort that ye micht be able tae spare aither ti screive stuff yersel or ti tell ither Scots spaekers aboot it."

Finally, and in time for tomorrow's 60th anniversary, please go read the Voice of the Hibakusha.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 5th August 2005 at 05:05 CEST permalink Email

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Saudi Kings : Death of the Oil ?

Yesterday it was reported that King Fahd of Saudi Arabia (Bin Laden's breeding place) has died aged 84. Crown-prince Abdullah will be his successor. Abdullah is already aged 81 himself and no friend of the USA. Nevertheless, let us hope that his will be a stable government despite UBL, because we still need the oil :-) Let me quote a passage from an article by Michael Klare here. Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency", a book Dubya (and Bliar etc) should read instead of 'My pet goat'.

"The moment that Saudi [oil] production goes into permanent decline in the not-too-distant future, the Petroleum Age as we know it will draw to a close. Oil will still be available on international markets, but not in the abundance to which we have become accustomed and not at a price that many of us will be able to afford. Transportation, and everything it affects - virtually the entire world economy - will be much more costly. The cost of food will also rise, as modern agriculture relies to an extraordinary extent on petroleum products for tilling, harvesting, protecting, processing and delivery. Many other products made with petroleum - paints, plastics, lubricants, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and so forth - will also prove far more costly. Under(sic!) these circumstances, a global economic contraction appears nearly inevitable". [emphasis mine]

The whole article is to be found here.
There's a photo of the cover of Klare's book 'Blood and Oil' on my right sidebar this month.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 2nd August 2005 at 06:02 CEST permalink Email

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Ready to shoot : Always on camera

For those of us with gradually degrading short-term memories, a digicam is a useful accessory, provided we always have a digicam with us. I'd like my blogreaders to get into this habit too, so today I'm going to list some of the uses for an ever-present digicam, or - even better - a camphone (mobile phone with 'hi-res' camera integrated).

Obviously, you can shoot those non-posed action snapshots, precise to the millisecond, like the 'shaken, not stirred' dog, or grandpa's birthday surprise. But there are lots of everyday uses, especially for the girls going shopping:-)

1. Claims :
   1. Rallyists, motorcyclists, mountain-bikers , hikers and mountain climbers use the digicam to document (via street-sign photos etc) having achieved certain feats, reached certain places etc. Bragging rights, but documented :-)
   2. Photograph your valuable possessions for the insurance, just in case they are later stolen.
   3. If you have a traffic accident, photograph the damage to both parties, take snaps of the right-of-way situation and 'shoot' the persons involved :-)
2. Data Transfer : Use the digicam chip as a data transport medium when visiting friends, customers etc. It doesn't have to be photos, try MP3s, spreadsheets, Outlook calenders, address books etc.
3. For the Girls :
   1. Girls take their camphone into the dressing-cabins in stores, try various clothes on, and mail the photos to their best (girl?-)friends for real-time advice on what to buy.
   2. See another woman on the street, in the mall etc, whose fashion sense you like? take a snapshot, so you can try the same style elements yourself!
   3. No mirror in your handbag and need to check your makeup etc? Just take a snap and look at the camera's screen. Similarly, you can check your hairstyle from the rear. Stocking seams straight? Hold the camera behind you and take a leg shot.
4. Medical :
   1. If you get bitten, say by a spider or a snake, take a photo of it before calling the emergency services. Specialists can then identify it and the venom and counter-serum much more easily.
   2. Track your fitness progress in the gym by photographing the training devices' readout screens.
   3. If you think a possibly cancerous spot on your skin is growing slowly, take photos at intervalls (all on the same scale or with ruler in the shot), date them and show them to your (skin) doctor next time you're there.
5. Navigation :
   1. In a strange city? Photograph the symbolic subway maps so that you can plan a route even when not in the subway. You will need to zoom-and-pan your shot though, to read the text on that tiny camera screen. Afraid of getting lost on the return walk through a strange town? At each turn-off photograph where you came from. Then, 50 yards after each turning, look back and photograph the turn-off.
   2. Arriving at a train station, bus station, airport etc? Shoot the timetable plan for the trip home, then you can always judge when is a suitable time to head for the station for the trip home. When reading your shot, zoom-and-pan to read it.
   3. Inviting guests? Shoot the street plan and mail it with the invitation.
   4. A hike in the woods along a (badly-marked?) route? Shoot the posterboard overview at the start of the hike first. When reading your shot, zoom-and-pan to read the map.
6. Repairs :
   1. Check if the remote control is working by photographing it (and the TV end too); the otherwise invisible IR lamp should show up as a blue colour on your digicam.
   2. Repairing complicated (electrical) equipment? Take a photo of the device's innards before you start, and maybe every significant step of the procedure ('Where does THAT screw go?).
   3. Need a spare part whose number you don't know? take a close up shot and one showing its surrounding location and email both to the manufacturer of the device. Chances are he'll be able to identify the part. If the device has a serial number plaque, shoot that too.
   4. Wiring a house? Shoot the wiring before you close up the walls. Same for the plumbing.
   5. Archive your BIOS settings by photographing the screen before you change any BIOS settings.
7. Ripping :
   1. Friends giving you an analog slide show? Stand next to the projector, turn OFF your flash, and photograph the screen.
   2. LPs to CDs : photograph the LP cover and make a CD-cover from the photo.
8. Shopping :
   1. If you can't read the small-print price label in a shop window article, just zoom in on it with the digicam and read it easily :-)
   2. See a poster for an interesting concert and want to note the details (place,time,stars, prices, phone numbers, addresses etc)? Just snap the poster.
   3. Comparing prices? photograph the items and their price tags (and the shop name when you leave). Compare prices in peace later.
   4. Shopping for furniture and/or carpets etc? Take a photo of the goods in the shop then shoot your room at home and photoshop the store furniture and/or carpets into the room photo, to see what it looks like. You may want to include a ruler or tape measure into the photos to get the scale exactly right.
   5. Need purchasing permission from your boss? Shoot the item in the store together with price and data tags and mail it to him for an immediate OK.
   6. Potentially interesting book in the bookstore? Just photograph the cover for later reference.
   7. Great dining out with a fine wine? Shoot the label and order a crate from your wine dealer later.
9. Unknowns :
   1. In the (doctor's) waiting room and read a great recipe in a magazine? You no longer need to tear out the page furtively, just shoot the recipe.
   2. See a plant you like ? Shoot it and ask your local florist to get one for you, by showing him the photo. Children ask about an unknown flower? Shoot it and look it up back home. Ditto is they ask about birds etc.
   3. See a crime being committed? take a (non-flash) photo. Just like this ;-)

This list excerpted and translated from a photostrip in Focus magazine.
Got any more digicam/camphone suggestions? Just mail them to me for credited inclusion here.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 1st August 2005 at 06:01 CEST permalink Email

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