I have been working really hard of late and have decided to block book a load of long weekends this summer and get outdoors a bit. I have been thinking about doing a long distance path for ages and have decided to do one in early August, probably the West Highland Way. It is 95 miles and I reckon I can walk 20 a day so should be able to fit it in if I take a Friday and a Monday off work. I have just gone shopping for some kit so I can do it as lightweight (and brutal) as possible, and so got my gadget fix at the same time. This is ambitious as I have done nearly nothing for almost 3 years, but fuck it. I am in Snowdonia next week and will see just how bad my fitness is and the next six weeks I will do as much prep as I can.
From Alpkit.com, a great store selling direct from the factory at low cost.
Hunka Bivy, £30
Gourdon 30L Watertight Rucksac, £20
I wish they had the Wee Airic mat in stock, but i got a thermarest one instead (cost 3 times as much!)
Wee Airic, £17.50
From golite.com:
Ultralite Poncho/Tarp, £26
JetBoil, £46. Been thinking about one of these for a while, very efficient use of the gas, boils real quick and stows in the 1L pot.
If p is the perimeter of a right angle triangle with integral length sides, {a,b,c}, there are exactly three solutions for p = 120.
{20,48,52}, {24,45,51}, {30,40,50}
For which value of p < 1000, is the number of solutions maximised?
When I first heard about ZFS and its features, I was intrigued by a comment by Bill More about the possibility of having a database or other app directly consume the DMU that ZFS uses for filesystems or volumes. After I did a spot of research when editing the ZFS page on Wikipedia I noticed the “Last Word In Filesystems” pdf has been updated since I last looked, here are the 2 pages that excited me. With Suns recent acquisition of MySQL and lustre we seem to have arrived there now. Lustre support is excellent as it solves the only failing of ZFS, that it is not clustered.
After me banging on for a year about how cool ZFS is, my boss is finally convinced and wants to get a Thumper (or 2). Depending on budgetary constraints we may be getting a couple of these to implement a warm backup solution for our current data and about 5 years worth from now (they are 24Tb each)
48 Drives in a 4U rackmount for 20k, great value and unbeatable storage density.
You may think “trips abroad for kids, great” , if you are more cynical you may think “heads choose the kids, not sure I like that”.
Let us do some arithmetic, 100 kids for 6 weeks each for £1.4M.
£1400000/100 = £14,000 per child
£14000/6 = £2′333 per week
Assuming a 40 hour working week, £58/hour
Of course its not that simple, the kids clearly don’t get all the money as if they had a 6 week job. I think a few marketeers in the UK, all the necessary admin by the British Council will do away with some of the money too, but I can’t imagine any way this is good value for the country or any organisation involved (I am not cynical enough to suggest that for the BC the point is to administer it.)
Hows about giving 1000 kids £1000 spend in a country of their choice, you could get them to bid for the money and report back with diaries and photos etc. All the £500’s the government paid into child trust funds for children with low-income parents could become a good jolly fund for them when they hit 18, or they could get driving lessons and a car - not a bad deal, particularly if their folks contribute anything else to the fund along the way. That or 18th birthday parties become 5 day benders in estates around Britain.
As some of you may know I am unusually interested in filesystems. After sending John a link about HAMMER, a new FreeBSD clustered FS and joking about starting a tomFS project, his reply offered some help deciding on features it should have and marketing it.
tomfs can process a huge number of operations in parallel, just not necessarily the operations it should be processing, and it might get bored with some of them and forget about them sometimes.
tomfs stores redundant copies of anything it detects as documentaries or spoken word.
tomfs is very easy to port - a couple of bottles should do.
Cracked me up.
PS: Only perhaps 5 of my friends would get this, but I know at least 3 of them read this so no bother.
I walked all over New York yesterday, went along the east side all the way to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum. The place is amazing. Not quite as good as the British Museum in my view but still a great place, perhaps the architecture is better, I wish I had longer in there.
Macbeth was amazing, same director who did The Tempest that I saw in Stratford. It had very sinister nurses as the witches and Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth was incredibly erotic. Patrick Stewart was not great actually, his monologues - particularly the dagger speech - were not as good as hers. Go here and here for 2 more detailed reviews.
