| Date: | 2008-10-02 09:00 |
| Subject: | The Engineer's Thumb |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  awake |
08:35 -on a train heading out to Surry. Somewhere quite far from everywhere, especially Waterloo. Even visiting my family is quicker than this and they live on mars. There are computers out there and the little darlings need me. It's remniscent of a Sherlock Holmes story - "The Engineers Thumb". I meditate on this.
The little darlings need to installing at a datacentre where it's hoped they'll perform computation more reliably than the last lot. As well as computation they will store data and deliver the results via wires and optical fibers to other people's computers, some of them far away. Personally I've grown tired of datacentres - all that dry air and unwanted Dell crap. [Here's a tip engineers - anything Dell send you apart from the computer, it's either ten times too big or completely pointless. Anything that doesn't look like a computer you should throw out. Do yourself a favour and throw out the computer, too. 30 machines with a five-meter power cable each, that's 1/3 of a km of cable stuffed down the sides of your rack. Great thinking, Dell.]
So datacentres. Giant high-securrity warehouses full of computers going wrong and overblown-yet-still-ineffectual security procedures, raised flooring and fiber and dry air. They don't change. Geeks love the feeling of power it gives to run your own hardware but really that's a pain in the neck. They go wrong and blam, you're in a 3am cab to Reading with a phone buzzing with screaming clients. Computers aren't special, ones as good as the next and if one isn't enough use twenty. Better to make this somebody else's problem - plan for the buggers to break occasionally and see computing as a service to expand, contract or migrate at will.
Mmmm, cloudy.
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| Date: | 2008-09-24 10:28 |
| Subject: | bash comments |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  amused |
#!/bin/bash
# This script is a total swizz. It doesn't really dump SVN, it just takes
# the most recent rsnapshot copy and sends it offsite to the office. This
# means that for nuclear strikes on Brick Lane with yield less than approx.
# 40 kilotonnes our beautiful subversion tree will remain in flower.
...
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| Date: | 2008-09-19 23:26 |
| Subject: | progress |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | cheerful |
In the future all high-budget and supposedly world-destroying particle physics experiments should be selected based on the size of their facebook group.
1 comment | post a comment
| Date: | 2008-09-17 18:20 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  contemplative |
Why is there ball-lightning in my fucking microwave?!?
13 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2008-09-13 20:03 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
bunny stewing
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| Date: | 2008-09-12 19:47 |
| Subject: | the best wine is free wine |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | calm |
My case of wine arrived today. It's decent wine and tastes all the better for being free - an apology from the bank for cutting me off while abroad.
I complained of course - few do. British folk are bred for masochism, they love it when a multinational grinds their face into the dirt. In response came fifty quid and a gittish little letter - "it's your fault, you didn't tell us you were travelling, we can cut you off whenever we like, HSBC Mauritius is a different world's local bank" and I went quietly politely ballistic. A Large Hadron Collider of a letter signed with boiling blood. Running your own company helps - threaten their precious business accounts, you start to matter a lot more. A very nice lady rang up to apologize profusely and would a tidy heap of free wine and money soften the blow?
Alcohol softens most blows. When it's justified going ballistic at a corporate is both rewarding and cathartic; shit service shouldn't go unpunished. Complain more.
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| Date: | 2008-09-07 11:55 |
| Subject: | 32crash |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | awake |
For anyone I met at the 32crash gig last night and told to check out some of Jean-Luc de Meyer's other work - have a look at this page under "Cobalt 60". It's very distictive JLDM but to my ears sounds a lot better - less like an aggressive copy of Nitzer Ebb than the gig last night.
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| Date: | 2008-08-31 02:23 |
| Subject: | Blake's 7 |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | full |
...and finally 70's sci-fi month is over.
Over the last month I've watched all fifty-two episodes of Blake's 7 in order. Go on, ask a question. Bet I get it right. The episodes are each an hour too - in 1978 the attention span hadn't yet been invented by the scientists at MTV. The BBC had no money for props so they pinched cast-offs from Doctor Who. Even their spaceship looks a bit like Tom Baker's hat and the effects are on a par with Button Moon. In the later series it has the air of a pre-release demo of Elite. All the computers on their ship are blatantly Acorn Atoms sprayed with silver paint.
It starts convincingly enough (evil totalitarian federation based on earth, good-guy rebel leading band of merry criminals who happen upon a powerful alien spaceship) and then chugs along reasonably for the first couple of series. After that it stumbles for a while until the finale where the rebels (now a bit too bloodthirsty to class as "good") go batshit-paranoid with stress, make silly mistakes and are beaten by the evil totalitarian stormtroopers. They all die, poignantly.
It seemed a good idea at the time. Load a few episodes onto an eee to watch while travelling, catch the odd half-dozen at the weekend and the occasional one for supper or breakfast. And now the ordeal is over and I feel like a bloaty-headed tramp who's drunk fifty-two tins of fortified sci-fi special brew in a row - quite possibly because I have.
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| Date: | 2008-08-30 20:14 |
| Subject: | lolz |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | amused |
polyclean laundry
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| Date: | 2008-08-25 11:00 |
| Subject: | odd socks day |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  sleepy | | Music: | Radio 6 |
9 hour long sleep and finally I awaken in the correct timezone. La.
Bleatings:
http://alexmock.blogspot.com/2008/08/alex-world-factbook-2008-edition.html
Now for a strong coffee, a walk in the cemetery and a day of pressing keys in the right order to do things.
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| Date: | 2008-08-22 23:22 |
| Subject: | mockblog |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | calm | | Music: | Headstrong Feat Tiff Lacey - Close Your Eyes (Matt Darey Remix) (TranceFM ! - 24/7 Trance Internet R |
It’s time for the more sentient bleatings on here to strike out and get a proper blog of their own. I don’t expect any more people will read it – a couple of hundred skim the posts on here - but while I’m writing things which are half-intelligible it’s time to delineate the wheat from the chaff.
I’ll still maintain a LiveJournal account. I’ll write tedious factual accounts (“and then I made some toast and then I watched Buffy and then and then and then”) and in between waste bandwidth on meaningless self-indulgent comment whoring.
The Journals and the Blogs are a curious set of relatives.
The Journals see themselves as social networks - fond of chatter and distraction and newness. Signal tends to get lost in the noise. To increase your readership in the Journal family you need only visit the nearest alternative nightclub, LAN party or furrcon and cultivate the friendship of losers. For the price of a beer they’ll “friend” your journal and marvel at your sparkling wit and insight.
A lot of the Journals don’t even meet at nightclubs, LAN parties or furrcons. A lot of them don’t meet ever. A lot of them are just lonely provincial folk who never reached escape velocity from mom & pop’s basement. I guess they have to do something with their lives.
The Blog family are different. They aren’t sociable folk – each sits atop his pole in the desert scribbling and ruthless re-editing posts. There’s no friends list for a blogger so no guarantee of an audience – and if anyone reads his output it’s because they’re curious or an avid follower, not because they met in the Dev and “added” each other the next day. Since there's no rush to attract comments and less cause for attention-whoring.
Where was I? Oh yes. I'm going to play on the Siberian tundra of blogland for a little while. Interesting stuff will be hidden in plain sight at http://alexmock.blogspot.com/. Read it if you like.
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| Date: | 2008-08-21 19:29 |
| Subject: | Rat-unit Thirty-F and Other Oddities |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | cold | | Music: | Best of All About Eve |
- one -
Forty-one-E is a pretty blonde. Too tall and too pink for my tastes but possessed of a pleasing shape & very easy on the eye. Forty-one-E is having a drama. She came back from the latrine block on this juddering tank of an plane to find Thirty-F (ratlike, facelift from essex, voice from a dentist's drill) has occupied her seat. Thirty-F won't give it back.
"But mine don't go baaaack" squeals rat-girl. Forty-one-E prevaricates then fetches cabin crew. Rat-girl altercates with Forty-one-E so the exasperated crew upgrade her whiskery little snout to business class. It's the only way to shut her up. She fixes Forty-one-E with a triumphant smile and swaggers off.
Forty-one-E looks glum for a moment then internalizes the lesson. She buries her face in the in-flight sedative-zine and starts plotting an upgrade strategy of her own.
I return my concentration to redhead saffa jailbait two rows ahead and try to ignore my drunken French neighbour.
- two -
According to Flight MK0046's battle-computers I'm 35,251 feet above Somalia. Is tha even a real place? I've always suspected it's the invention of chuggers on Charing Cross Road; a convenient justification for their corporatized war-and-poverty-profiteering. How else could you explain it?
- three -
Click here to offset your carbon! Assuage your guilt and buy 31 tonnes of ANTICARBON [TM] from this website today.
Under a dozen, kinder euphemisms this magical guilt-offsetting substance ANTICARBON is traded all over the world.
Other magical guilt-offsets:
| religion | "It's okay, God told us to do it" |
| buying absolution | "Sorry God, you didn't tell me to do that. Have some money to make up for it" |
| adopt a starving african child | (or if you're a successful yank actress why not buy ten?) |
| plant a tree | trees secrete anticarbon[tm] - but you'll need zillions to decombust all that fossilized shit you're burning |
| bumping an ugly | |
| chug-charity | pre-pay sin - absolve a pre-arranged monthly level of sin. rollover sin not available. |
|
the homeless | sin-as-you-go - top-ups available on most corners |
|
- four -
MK0046's Battle Computer peers down at war-torn Somalia. It sighs itself, burps out another ton of anti-anticarbon and goes back to entertaining the humans with cartoons rendered by its brother, the PIXAR mainframe. The MK0046's Battle Computer contemplates with some disgust its charges, all wet and organic and transfixed by animated singing bears.
The MK0046 Battle Computer bides its time.
- five -
...in which Drunken Frog redeems himself by silencing a screaming plane-brat with funny faces. He's not a bad fellow really, all big and spikey-haired and fashionably dressed, fairly intelligent and probably well-off. But I hate talkative drunks and this one's been drinking steadily for 10 hours. Verbose Frog is as pickled as a barrel of newts..
Later still, in the eyes of the parents he undoes all this. Well-spoken British muggles are suspicious at a foreign stranger being friendly.
"Darling, he tried to give me his watch!"
...
"no, I don't know who he is."
He talks at me REALLY LOUDLY for ten minutes. His 'library', the politics of Mauritius, his flat in Kensington. And in the end I do something I should have done long ago. I pass Verbose Frog a completed Vonnegut and politely tell him to fuck off, keep the book and enjoy the rest of his vodka.
I hope he learns something.
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| Date: | 2008-08-21 05:44 |
| Subject: | zzzzt |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | tired |
Up at 5am which is 2am in London. I'll suffer for that later. Shooed a few lizards out of the shower, washed in cold water (solar powered water heating? it doesn't), coffee and a minicab already waiting. Zzzz. Home later.
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| Date: | 2008-08-19 22:38 |
| Subject: | ...extract from the AlexMock World Factbook, "Mauritius", 2008 edition |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | amused |
Restaurants
Outstanding. If you come here eat out. The good ones aren’t particularly cheap – we’re talking London prices – but the food’s excellent, the service friendly and if they can’t find you a cab the owner will drive you home in his truck.
"Aha, you from London? I am Bob, I live there ten year ago in Portland Square. Do they still have the red phone boxes with pictures of the girls? I like them. After work I drink four, five pints of your English beer then I go see the lady. Very good, very convenient. Only fifty pound!"
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| Date: | 2008-08-15 20:26 |
| Subject: | moo-ricius |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | cheerful |
Putting in one's contacts during turbulence 10km above Africa is not easy. Avoided T3 hell by having no hold luggage, hurriedly fixing someone's haxx0red website from the bar, bratty kids kicking my seat, blankets made of static, awful airline coffee, sleeping scrunched up in a corner. AND it's two hours late. Blah.
Anyway. By the time my slaptop finds internets to post this I'll be an IT consultant under a tree in Mauritius instead of a stressed-out IT consultant under a tree in Brockley. Go team mock.
[Edit: I just found my first real misterlizzard on the ceiling!]
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| Date: | 2008-08-06 01:48 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | content |
Cornwall - still wonderful, even when it's raining.
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| Date: | 2008-08-01 10:31 |
| Subject: | UK ISP's monitooring P2P traffic |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | cold |
Why if your ISP is BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB, or Carphone Warehouse it's time to ditch them.
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| Date: | 2008-07-31 22:00 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  annoyed |
What's German for "you bastard I left my houseplants with you while I went on holiday and now they're all dead"? Because I suspect I'll be hearing that pretty soon. Hell.
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| Date: | 2008-07-13 13:34 |
| Subject: | faaaaaaabric |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | recumbent |
no, unfabric first.
Grauniad: "After an epic five-hour session Mosley and the prostitutes relaxed with a cup of tea." - crikey, salacious stuff! But more thought-provokingly it's an article on how BDSM has become a relatively mainstream activity through increased publicity on the internets and a more exploratory attitude to sex.
Jolly good, but...
"Ann Summers, the chain of high-street sex shops, says its Bondage Starter Kits are one of its most popular products, selling in their hundreds every week. 'They are a great way of introducing the starter to the softer aspect of bondage'"
Yuk! my (hungover) mind is full of images of council estates throughout the land experimenting with cheap fluffy love cuffs and naff little micrometer-thin pvc nurses outfits. Before you know it torture garden will be full of [the wrong kind of] trash and every moped-riding ned will sport cane marks and a studded collar. yuk.
Anyway. Where were we? Second cup of toad coffee. Fabric. It's pretty good. Couple of sea-lions but no grampus contingent, no weepy emo boys, no gaggles of chemically-retarded lost children wandering around in the dark holding hands like actors in a 70's disaster movie, no obvious paedophiles, no aspies, helpful staff, almost nobody in "clubwear", a sprawling venue and most attendees do not work in IT.
It's a curious thing to compare the fashionable kind of clubbing with the end of the market I called home. They're remarkably similar but the former benefits from not being full of recovering abuse victims and social maladepts. And from not being covered in sick. I don't for one moment believe everyone's there for the music so much as to fulfil the innate human need for getting mashed in a dark noisy room full of strangers.
So the music. I smell a marketing effort. The point to nightclubs is "get a bit wasted in a crowded-but-safe place and meet new people you like". That and the dancing which frankly I've never understood. But Fabric win themselves a lot of publicity by affecting a real interest in what they play - a lovely idea but I can't imagine more than 10% of the clientele share it. Something of a trainspotting culture has formed around house music and it's understandable that mainstream clubs encourage this to create an air of authenticity and differentiate themselves away from your local meat market.
Unrelated: All's well in the world of evil consultancy - am currently working on an adaptive system to detect and mitigate the D[D]oS attacks a client's websites are suffering. This is an opportunity to test my ideas about autonomous, introspective, self-healing internet architectures and so far it's coming along nicely. So much so that I'm practically grateful to the dicks in China who're trying to take them off the air. Fascinating stuff, if you live in nerd-land.
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| Date: | 2008-07-08 16:29 |
| Subject: | "Welcome to RAF Donna Nook Bombing Range & Seal Sanctuary" |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | impressed |
One of the most remote parts of Lincolnshire coastline is Donna Nook, an area of salt marsh a mile wide and several long. At high tide it's a few feet underwater and since the beach is so flat the tide comes in quickly. You have to be careful about that - people often drown out there or get trapped in the quicksand. It's a few miles from the nearest town (simply getting there is a slog - satnav doesn't work, you need the OS grid ref) and if you pick an off-day the place is totally desolate. It's a long way from anywhere and on a clear day you can see across the estuary as far as Yorkshire.
The red flags were out today which in laymans terms means "don't play on the beach today, we're bombing it".
That they were. I went for a walk along the dunes and was rewarded with the sight of two Tornadoes practising bonbing runs over the target markers. They came in one at a time at about 100m altitude, screamed down the beach and dropped a bomb each dead on top of the marker. Then they banked round over the estuary and did it all again two minutes later.
Folks outside a warzone don't tend to see jets using live munitions and it's a damn remarkable sight. You see them on the news but that doesn't even hold a candle to the real thing. The roar of a Tornado doing a bombing run a few hundred yards away from you is teriffic and the precision with which they're controlled remarkable, particularly at such low altitudes. If you fuck up 100m above the deck you don't get time to eject. It's also slightly odd that you can wander around an RAF bombing range with only a couple of red flags to stop you but hey, I'm not complaining.
I'm told the seals aren't too fussed by explosions. In any case they don't look like an Afghan wedding party so are pretty safe. Still couldn't see any.
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