Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

A number of people will have heard me make mention of a legendary figure named Boinga Bob (Bob Prudhoe), a man of brilliance, eccentricity and several really cool houses.

For those of you who have not believed, or have only partly believed, I just hit upon an answer which may or may not convince you somewhat. If one googles “Boinga Bob”, the second hit, at time of writing, is this YouTube video:

(The first hit is to a TV show site called “World’s Most Extreme Homes” where an episode covers some other, presumably even cooler house of Bob’s which I have never seen).

To add to this, I did a little google-mapping, in search of the remarkable tower from which I had the good fortune to watch the tall ships sail into Port Phillip Bay for the beginning of the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations. This too, is (or was) a house of the elusive Bob:

A strange and legendary guy. If others have had encounters with the Bob more recent than my own (i.e. in the last fifteen years), let me know in the comments.

We got snowed on last night!

At the road-stop at Ballan:

Subsequently (taken with out-the-window-blurrycam) police and slithering cars on the western highway:

_*SN0W !!!11!!1!*_:

It was exceedingly nifty, and probably a Good Thing(tm) that E was driving.

WARNING: Ultra-geeky sysadmin nerdishness follows. Tune out now if the phrase “random sustained throughput” doesn’t seize your attention.

I just came across the Texas Memory RamSan-440, and found it to be kinda silly. It’s a NAND (new-style flash) RAID array which will do “600,000 IOPS, 4,500MB/sec random sustained external throughput and latency under 15-microseconds” at a price of (USD) $150,000 for a 256GB model.

This seemed so ridiculous at first sight that I immediately wrote up and costed the problem of doing the same thing My Way. This is what I ended up with:

The ThorneSAN is a 4RU box, probably built in the chassis of some existing 12-slot RAID doohickey. It contains:

•  A small RAIDed SATA disk array. Say 2x320GB disks in an R1 setup.
• Some bleedingly fast NICs, probably Fibre Channel.
• Lots of 4GB domestic-grade RAM modules. Say a hundred, for starters.
• Some very very fast RAID/NAS smarts (Note: this could potentially just be a fastish PC).
• An internal UPS. Maybe two, for redundancy. Should provide power for the device’s maximum load for long enough to write to every byte of the built-in hard drives and shut them down cleanly.

You put all that RAM into specially made banks of ten modules each, each of which goes in a drive-slot, so that you can pull them out to replace faulted modules. The RAM can be addressed at full speed through multiple conventional PC northbridge controllers. Because it’s domestic grade, you address it with its own internal RAID logic, to handle sporadic errors.

On boot, the device reads the contents of the RAID-1 disk pair into the huge memory RAID disk. Thereafter, all NAS operations are performed against this disk. The machine maintains its own table of ‘dirty’ blocks which have changed since they were written to the hard drives, and writes them back asynchronously. The async part is important: The hard drive is allowed to fall behind, including falling so far behind that the entire RAM disk is ‘dirty’. That’s what the UPS is for: in the event of a power failure, you should always have enough time to write all unsaved changes to HDD.

For argument’s sake, I’ve worked this out based on CPL’s price for 4GB DDR2 PC2-5300 modules: $105, and an estimate of $4500 for the controllers, chassis, and SATA disk pair. These memory modules should be able to comfortably sustain a read-write bandwidth of 2.5GB/s, so a ten-controller RAID array of them should make 20,000GB/s, with seek times under one microsecond (plus any interconnect overhead).

I’d expect this device to cost about $15,000.

…so in the end, I’m left puzzling: Where do Texas Memory piss away the other $135,000? And moreover, why NAND? What is flash memory gaining them here?

Last night my sleep was weirdly disturbed, the kind of sleep where it seems like one never actually goes to sleep, with plenty of muzzy uncomfortable memories of cracking an eye open to see the alarm clock saying something disturbing. I must have slept somewhat, because I was quite chipper when I actually got up.

The problem wasn’t the seeming insomnia though, it was the recurring stop-start nightmare:

Brain Transplants (including a small amount of spinal cord and the eyeballs) are commonplace. The surgical technology to do such a transplant has become so widespread, and so simplified, that some very scantily qualified ‘surgeons’ can perform it.

After the surgery, the only way to tell a ‘transplant recipient’ from the body-donor is that their eyes may look different, and may be quite inflamed and sick-looking due to being an imperfect fit in the new body’s sockets. The skull incision is hidden almost immediately by a slick plastic surgery technique.

At the same time, it’s extremely simple to keep a removed brain ‘alive’ in a jar of special oxygenated brain-nutrient solution. The brain in these circumstances has no sensory connections but vision, and that only straight ahead. You can see out of the jar, and you can think, and that’s it.

So, want a new body? All you need to do is persuade someone to swap, or to sign a statement agreeing that they want to be placed in a jar.

This isn’t (for some reason) about longevity or eternal youth, as much as it’s about the ultimate identity theft, the ultimate voyeurism, the ultimate sibling rivalry…

For the full effect, I’ll re-cast it with you, as I saw it:

Your partner comes home acting strangely one day. Their mannerisms are all wrong, and they keep staring at you with a really odd expression. They seem a little uncoordinated.

Slowly the reason for this dawns on you. You don’t know who the new person is, but for a long time they refuse to admit their crime, laughing off questions about where your partner is, and what state they’re in;
“I’m right here!”

Then your sibling comes to visit. You’re quite sure that they’re still the same person they always were, but they’re acting strangely too: they keep trying to get you by yourself, and they won’t show you what they’ve got in their hand. Your memory lapses: one moment you’re walking down a corridor, your sibling behind you, the next you feel numb and cold. You can see a dirty little room which has been pressed into service as a ‘surgery’. Beyond the glass you can see yourself, looking back in, with bloodshot eyes, lips moving but no sound coming out, that you can hear. In fact, it’s perfectly silent.

After a while, the other you leaves, in the company of someone you don’t recognise. They turn off the light, leaving only dim sunlight seeping in through some curtains.

Hours pass.  Days.  Weeks.
All you can do is watch, and think. You can’t even sleep.

Eventually, person who has your body comes back. They’re with the person who has your partner’s body. They both look terribly sick, grey and wasted, their eyes rimmed with flakes of dried blood.

One of them laughs bitterly, then holds up a notepad, one hand-written page at a time, on which they explain to you: The ‘surgeons’ have a secret. When they take your money, they fail to mention that the anti-rejection drugs only work for a month or so, at best. Then rejection slowly kills the new brain and the ‘donor’ body, in a massively painful way, over the course of several days.

They have come here to die, and all you can do is watch.

This takes several days.

…

Your partner comes home acting strangely one day….

E was somewhat disturbed when I woke her up to ask if she was the real one.

Supposedly, this is the Internet Age. As near as I can tell, this means that a lot of people are spending an increasing fraction of their lives online, reliant on Teh Intarwebz for their virtual existence.

Today’s big thought: If people are living their lives online, the ‘conditions’ of their local part of ‘online’ (as well as the parts they’re travelling to) might be of interest. Things like:

• How high is the general tide of traffic at the moment?
• How much of it is encrypted?
• What sort of breakdown of types of stuff is out there today?
• Is it spamming today?
• What are today’s virus warnings?
• What ‘roads’ are closed, or expected to close, today?

You get the idea.

I’d pay handsomely for a service like this, if it were sufficiently widespread, independent and authoritative. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, especially since I so very little on the internet that’s actually sensitive to things like lag or selective shaping. I know people are interested because I see so much of this kind of stuff cropping up in the popular internet press, in a delayed, ad-hoc, patchy sort of way. What I don’t see is anyone making a serious widespread effort to synthesize it.

How would you do it? Methinks your hypothetical service would need a few bits and pieces:

1. Deals with the relevant agencies. There are already virus-monitoring and spam-analysis groups out there making a stab at this. Their input would be vital, at least to start with.
2. Lots of probes. Take a carefully built fast packet-sniffer/counter (careful not to breach privacy!) with open, publicly reviewed specifications. Make thousands of them, and pay every backbone operator on the planet to whack one on their main feed. These are your weather stations.
3. Analysts, both salaried ‘editors’ and freelance ‘reporters’. The black-hat (and grey-hat) community will always know their bit of ‘net better than anyone else. Sure, you can’t use their data, or acknowledge their methods, but their tips and insights are worth money. So long as you can reliably protect their anonymity, you can be certain that those insights are for sale.
4. Anchors and Producers. The Cory Doctorows of this world seem to have the knack of writing copy that people want to read. Google, for example, seem to have the knack of getting data to the people who want it, the way they want it. If you want your internet weather report to be read/seen/heard, you will need these things.

As usual, I hereby disavow all rights to this idea. If you want it, I will happily support your claim to have thought of it first.