84 – Revisit Met Museum
Went while I was at Hadoop World (pic is actually the Natural History museum but what the hell)

During my recent Africa Trip:
24 – Swim with sharks

33 – Safari
Visited Addo Elephant Park during my recent South Africa Trip

34 – Vinyard tour
I visited the boekenhoutskloof vinyard in Franschhoek South Africa

I’ll do a full write-up of the Africa Trip soon, it was amazing.

So now out of the 101 I have done 24 with 18 on track and only 300 days to go! Need to get a shift on and tick off as much as I can.

The dayzeroproject site is back up, I am on there as thattommyhall

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(picture from Wikipedia)

We did it ultralight, using kit I have blogged about before. My mate Ben got well into expedition planning mode and prepared an optimal food mix for the trip and introduced us to SCROGIN (Sultanas Chocolate Raisons Orange Ginger Imagination Nuts) and ANZAC biscuits (his lovely other half is a kiwi).

I was pleased to fit it all in a 30L sack, made the walking much easier than it might have been.

As I had just been in Lisbon for a stag do the weekend before I was not feeling 100% when we got the sleeper to Inverness on the Monday night but we arrived somewhat fresh and started walking immediatly. The sleeper is really nice and I would deffinatly recommend it over flying if you need an early start in Scotland, see ScotRail. By the end of Tuesday we had got most of the way to Invermoriston (nearly 30 miles) but were all exhausted. We wildcamped with some stunning views.

The Wednesday we walked to Fort Augustus and decided to take a B&B for the night as non of us had slept well and our legs and feet were killing. We were fortunate enough to stay at Old Pier House which was lovely and we got moving again on the Thursday with much more enthusiasm than we ended the day before.

Thursday night we got past laggan and camped at a campsite on the north of Loch Lochy.

Friday was an epic day, taking in the 2 munros ( Meall na Teanga and Sròn a’ Choire Ghairbh and walking about 25 miles then (we thought) finishing the walk.

We had actually just reached Neptune’s Staircase and we wound up bivvying at the start line of Maggies Monster Bike and Hike. We must have looked quite odd…

We spent the first few hours of the Saturday finishing it off and arriving at Fort William where we ate the biggest amount of food we could.

A great hike with 2 great guys and as it is a UK long distance path it is another of my 101 goals in 1001 days days ticked off

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Completed – 16
1, Teetotalitarianism for 3 months
2, Cheeseless for 3 months
9, Read GEB
11, Reread all Dennett books
15, Proofread for Project Guttenburg
48, Create a Backblaze storage pod
53, Make Jam
66, Via Feratta in Italy
78, Learn to use Emacs
I suppose you can never fully learn it but I do use it for my development now
82, Visit Egypt
83, Re-visit Louvre
85, Visit Pergamon Museum
86, Give Carrie a British Museum Tour
92, Read “An Ode Less Travelled“, do the exercises (but not share them!)
Read it while in Egypt.
97, Be 1/3 through in 2010
100, Set success criteria / progression metrics for each goal

On Track – 16
5, Lose 2 stone
10, Write book reviews for each book I read
Where I havent yet I have added a task to rememberthemilk to do so
13, Release 303 books on bookcrossing.com
88 available here, let me know if you like any and I will post them to you.
19,Blog on average once a week
50, Move 10 people to FreeAgent
68, Complete Pimsleur German
Changed from Spanish as I now live with a lovely German lady.
72, Read “Winning Ways”
read 1/2 of part 1 (of 4)
74, Read AI: A Modern Approach
75, Watch SICP, do exercises from book
Started a book club in work, seems to have stalled but I’ll start banging the drum again now I’ve settled in my new house.
76, Do on average 1 Project Euler problem per week
77, Complete “Real World Haskell”
88, Go to the theatre on average once a month
Way ahead on this, started a monthly theatre club but we managed to schedule a dozen things for the first few months of 2011
91, Memorise 10 poems
Not quite settled on the 10 but between listening to Jorge Louis Borges, This Craft Of Verse and The Ode Less Travelled I have quite a list to choose from.
95, Pay off all credit cards
96, Let loans run course and dont get any more
101, Do 100 day updates
This is one right

Behind – 4
8, Read all the VSIs
12, Read all PG Wodehouse
81, Watch all TTC Art history DVDs
90, See all world heritage sites in the UK

Changing – 5
Lots of the work related ones dont make sense any more now that I have gone full time and moved into development so I am making the following changes.
43, Visit the rijksmuseum (was Get CCNP)
44, Visit The Uffizi in Florence (was Get CCEE)
45, Give blood every 20 weeks (was Get MCITP – Enterprise Admin)
46, Listen to Radio 4 / British Museum – A History of the World in 100 Objects and view each of them (was Get VCAP)
The above are all taken from a mate who just did his own 101 list.
47, Make a Munro bagging site in Rails (was Say to a recruiter “I dont work ” and turn down work)

Planning – 12
60, Hike on average once a month
61, Do a UK long distance path
67, Do another alpine 4000m peak
62, Do a big hike in Europe
64, Climb a continental highest mountain
33, Safari
20, Organise a big bash for my 30th
The fitness aspect of these goals is where I am behind the most (though I am still a stone lighter than when I started) so I am concentrating the next six months on these goals, ending with summiting kilimanjaro for my 30th then returning to a big party.
35, Visit 5 Michelin 3* restaurants
37, Visit porto
Will go with Petra in the spring
84, Revisit Met Museum
A good mate has just moved to NYC so this should happen as soon as he is settled.
89, Return to the Theatre by the lake
My first trip with Petra was to here and we loved it. Will be going in the spring.
94, Go to Edinburgh festival
Will go at the beginning of August.

Not Started – 48
3, Do a marathon
4, Do a triathlon
6, Attend martial arts classes for 3 months
7, Write an artice for Plus new writers
14, Read a short story for librivox
16, Send Dennett a letter
17, Send Dawkins a letter
18, Read Joyce
21, Read GTD
22, Spend 3 months in another country
23, Organise all my DVDs
24, Swim with sharks
25, Paraglide
26, Learn to play bongos
27, Skydive
28, Drive Offroad
29, Do a banger rally
30, Have a track day
31, Hire the whole of Salvos Salumeria for an evening
32, Bungee Jump
34, Vinyard tour
36, See Northern Lights
38, Take dad to an opera
39, Take Mum, Dad and Carrie to the Welsh Mountain Zoo
40, Do 1000 things in London
41, Do a standup comedy course
42, Visit Japan
49, Work only 100 days in a year
51, Investigate Visa situation for Australia
52, Investigate Visa situation for US
54, Grow mushrooms
55, Paint a water colour
56, Make beer
57, Make wine
58, Cook a 4 course meal for 20 friends
59, Do a photography course
63, Attend NIM
69, Learn to dance
70, Learn to play golf
71, Learn 10 magic tricks
73, Make a Dots and Boxes program
79, Raise £5005 for charity
80, Talk about Free Software at a school
87, Go on wine tasting course
93, Go to Melbourne Comedy Festival
99, Have a completion party
65, Volunteer for the mountain bothys association
98, Have done 2/3 by day 666

I am quite heartened by the progress to be honest, considering that I spent half of last year working outside the UK, now things are settling down I should be able to churn through them faster.

If you want to join in on some, let me know!

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Just a brief outline:

Work: Started the year down in Kent working on a XenApp deployment on VMware at the beginning of the year, then over in Dubai building a VMware View solution, went to Libya and built the corporate infrastructure for their biggest telco, spent 2 months working on INGs next gen datacentre in the Hague and ended in London for Forward working on merging USwitch’s infrastructure after the acquisition.
While this was fun, I got fatigued with traveling and living out of a suitcase and was very happy to settle down a bit in London (which I think is the greatest city in the world) and work for a great company which I am very pleased and proud to say I have joined permanently. It is exciting to work somewhere using so much great tech and with so many sound people (with huge brains).

Jollys: I managed to go to Russia, visiting Moscow and St Petersburg (OK, that was Dec 2009 but what the hell), the Czech Republic, Italy, go to Oklahoma for a friends wedding followed by a visit to two ancestral puebloan sites, Berlin, Paris, Vegas and Egypt. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to have done all this and am still a bit amazed at just how much happened.

Life: I have always thought their was an embarrassment of riches when I look at the great people I get to call my friends, I don’t get to see any of them enough and no amount is too much. Thanks to you all, I always say you are what makes the universe great for me, you conspire to make it so even though you don’t all know one another. The biggest change this year was finding someone patient enough to pair up with me full time, thanks Petra – I love you. We are moving in together soon and I look forward to having a permanent home in the greatest city in the world, with a spare room – please come visit!. Thanks to my family too, we had some bad news in 2010 but you all dealt with it with the usual aplomb, you are all ace.

Resolutions There is no new resolutions for 2010, I will be reporting on the 101 goals in 1001 days soon.

2011: Looks set to be the best year ever, thanks in advance for helping make it so

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You know you are a huge geek when you take as much space for books as clothes.

The trip was ace, a week on the M/S Hamees, Stopping at:
Valley of the Kings
Temple of Queen Hatshepsut
The Colossi of Memnon
Edfu Temple

Kom Ombo, which I had not heard of but has some extraordinarily vibrant original colour remaining

Abu Simbel

Karnak Temple

Luxor Temple (we had the place to ourselves at night, it was amazing)

5 Nights in Movenpick El Gouna on the Red Sea and 2 nights in the Nile Palace

It was incredibly relaxing, nice to be incommunicado for 2 weeks and catch up on some reading and just mince around the beach. I managed to read Godel Escher Bach at last and also ticked off The Ode Less Travelled from my 101 Goals. It was weird not having my phone to distract me in spare moments, making me daydream more and think about people and events I have not thought about it ages, I should do it more often.

Pictures are on flickr

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Im particularly excited about Abu Simbel,, The Red Chapel of Hatshepsut, Temple of Amenhotep III among tons of others.

Also I am very much looking forward to No Phone and No Computers for the whole trip, the longest I will have been without either for for a good few years. I am taking the chance to catch up on some reading and take a break, I will have my Kindle with loads of books on it but am taking The Dots-and-boxes Game: Sophisticated Child’s Play (one of my 101 goals is to make a dots and boxes program), Gödel, Escher, Bach (another 101, started 3 times and never finished and it has intrigued me since my first year in university) and Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays. Pen’n'paper geekery for the win!

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Completed
66 – Via Feratta in Italy
85 – Visit Pergamon Museum
1 – Teetotalitarianism for 3 months
2 – Cheeseless for 3 months
11 -Reread all Dennett books
15 -Proofread for Project Guttenburg
53 – Make Jam
86 – Give Carrie a British Museum Tour
48 – Create a Backblaze storage pod
100 Set success criteria / progression metrics for each goal

Changing
18 – Read epic literature
A bit vague (in spite of meta-goal 100) and I have loads of reading goals so im changing it to “Read Joyce”, in particular:

• Dubliners
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Ulysses
• Finnegans Wake

26 -Scuba
My ears are bad, I worry this may destroy them, not settled on a replacement goal yet.

Sustained Effort – On Track
19 – Blog on average once a week
50 – Move 10 people to FreeAgent
68 – Complete Pimsleur Spanish
88 – Go to the theatre on average once a month
95 – Pay off all credit cards
96 – Let loans run course and dont get any more
101 – Do 100 day updates
5 – Lose 2 stone
13 – Release 303 books on bookcrossing.com
76 -Do on average 1 Project Euler problem per week

Sustained Effort – Behind
8 – Read all the VSIs
12 – Read all PG Wodehouse
60 – Hike on average once a month
79 – Raise £5005 for charity
81 – Watch all TTC Art history DVDs
90 – See all world heritage sites in the UK

In Progress
91 – Memorise 10 poems
92 – Read “An Ode Less Travelled”, do the exercises (but not share them!)
72 – Read “Winning Ways”
75 – Watch SICP, do exercises from book

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I found some audio of some wonderful lectures on poetry he gave at Harvard in the late 60s. The interesting thing about them is that he composes them from memory as he was blind by that point. He demonstrates the breadth of his reading with examples from Middle German, Old Norse, Spanish and English, tracing down the sources of some of the quotes was quite a challenge as they come thick and fast during the lectures. I have listened to them a lot and he has become like an old friend, I can hear his voice when I read his essays or stories.

My two favorite quotes are:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.

Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
“Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.”

From The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald and

“Great wine like blood from Burgundy,
Cloaks like the clouds from Tyre,
And marble like solid moonlight,
And gold like frozen fire.

“Smells that a man might swill in a cup,
Stones that a man might eat,
And the great smooth women like ivory
That the Turks sell in the street.”

from G. K. Chesterton’s The Ballad Of The White Horse (which was actually the first poem of this length I have ever read, I got it on my kindle from Project Gutenberg)

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We also went to see Checkpoint Charlie museum, a museum of international nonviolent protest (obviously focused mainly on the GDR and the wall it backed onto for years). I was very moved by it, particularly the thoughts and aspirations of normal people, it is far too simplistic to just think of Germany at that time of just millions of Nazis who just lost a war. I love to think I would have the physical bravery to resist such a regime but have never been tested.
The mayor of Berlin calling out to the allied nations during the Berlin air lift

“You peoples of the world, you people of America, of England, of France, look on this city, and recognize that this city, this people, must not be abandoned — cannot be abandoned!”

Seeing how people tried to escape, risking their lives to try and get to the west and live our kind of lifestyle (which is not without its problems) was interesting.
There was exhibits on Ghandi and the rest of Eastern Europe and the fight against opression and it was clear everywhere that people improve their situation and that of others by orgainising and demanding change. As lots of my friends are now from Eastern Europe I am fascinated about how they experienced the fall of communism in their countries. I am a bit quick to dismiss the G8 protesters, people protesting the Iraq war or whatever sometimes, I think I use the fact the world is complex and situations subtle as an excuse for inaction and came away with a desire to direct some of my skills and energies to making even a small difference. I am unsure what it will be though, toying with a few ideas at the moment.

Another highlight was the Reichstag, in particular taking the trip up to the dome. The queue takes too long but the once you are up it is the best view of Berlin and it is wonderful to be so close to the Norman Foster designed cupola.

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Not much movement really….

The Good:-
66 – Via Ferrata in Italy
I go on Friday, cant wait.

82 – Visit Egypt
I go in October for 2 weeks, 1 week cruise – 1 week sun and as much archaeology as I can get!

94 – Go to Edinburgh festival
Will fly over for a weekend in Aug, let me know if you are interested in joining

28 – Drive Offroad
Going back to Dubai in December when it cools off, will be driving a mates Hummer in the desert.

75 – Watch SICP, do exercises from book
Did half when visiting Germany from Den Haag a few weeks ago, mind bending but wonderful stuff.

72 – Read “Winning Ways”
Inspired by Martin Gardners death, I did half of the first book when I had some downtime in Manchester. First bit of new Maths in ages and it felt great. See Games of No Chance for more fun.

8 – Read all the VSIs
Read Vikings, Human Prehistory, Memory, Archaeology, Evolution, maybe more – i need to get tactical and create a master list.

13 – Release 303 books on bookcrossing.com
Tasked my long suffering mother with labeling them all, need to teach her how to register them then release them. Still need to sort out the Crossing Zone in Liverpool too.

48 – Create a backblaze storage pod
They are getting made soon, due on the 28th

The Bad:-
5 – Lose 2 stone
Got half way Jan/Feb, might have taken a step back living away again… Correctable though!

19 – Blog on average once a week
Way off, need to blog furiously to catch up.

The Almost Had:-
22 – Spend 3 months in another country
Spent two in Holland (Den Haag / The Hague) working for ING.

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• Went to Libya to work for a big telco
• Went to Oklahoma for a mates wedding then drove 2000 miles (or rather, made my girlfriend drive 2000 miles as I lost my driving licence…), visited 5 states and two national parks to see ancestral pueblo people sites
• Moved to Den Haag (The Hague) for 2 months to work on INGs Next-Gen data center
• About to move to Camden for the next bit of work

Not much movement on 101 goals, planned Egypt in October and Via Ferrata next week. Behind on learning goals though have done half of SICP in one mind bending train journey!

I kind of feel my life has been on hold the last 6 weeks I have been in Holland and am really looking forward to being back in the UK (though perhaps could have done with more of a break in between)

Expect more jollys to get planned before the end of the year (VMworld, Citrix Synergy, War Horse, Japan and Edinburgh all sounding fun at the moment), perhaps I’ll find time to blog about some of the cool shit at the NGDC and my US trip.

Tom

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Health
1 – Teetotalitarianism for 3 months
Don’t drink for 3 months
COMPLETED (Jan, Feb, March – cheated a bit and drank while out of the country. They are my goals though so my rules )

2 – Cheeseless for 3 month
No cheese for 3 months
COMPLETED (Jan, Feb, March)

3 – Do a marathon

4 – Do a triathlon

5 – Lose 2 stone
In progress, lost 1st during teetotalitarianism

6 – Attend martial arts classes for 3 months

Literature
7 – Write an artice for Plus new writers

8 – Read all the VSIs
A wonderful series from Oxford University Press, introductions to many different topics. There are ~200 so I need to read one every five days or so, I am a bit behind at the moment

9 – Read Godel Escher Bach
I’ve started it 3 times but never got to the end, read I am a strange loop recently and made me want to return to this intellectual tour de force and finish it..

10 – Write book reviews for each book I read
Up to date so far.

11 – Reread all Dennett books
“all” = the trilogy of Darwins Dangerous Idea, Conciousness Explained and Freedom Evolves
Just finished Freedom Evolves, reviewed DDI here.

12 – Read all PG Wodehouse
There are ~100, so need to do 1 every 10 days or so, a bit behind at the moment.

13 – Release 303 books on bookcrossing.com
Started, may also have started a crossing zone in Liverpool

14 – Read a short story for librivox

15 – Proofread for Project Guttenburg
COMPLETED

16 – Send Dan Dennett a letter
17 – Send Richard Dawkins a letter
Both among my favourite authors and really shaped my view on the world. I want to write them a letter of thanks.

18 – Read epic literature
Not decided on the exact list yet.

Personal
19 – Blog on average once a week
On track

20 – Organise a big bash for my 30th
Going to be called TomFest, should be a good buzz.

21 – Read GTD
Need to get organised at some point, maybe this will help

22 – Spend 3 months in another country

23 – Organise all my DVDs

Jolly
24 – Swim with sharks

25 – Paraglide

26 – Scuba

27 – Skydive

28 – Drive Offroad

29 – Do a banger rally
Something like this

30 – Have a track day

31 – Hire the whole of Salvos Salumeria for an evening

32 – Bungee Jump

33 – Safari

34 – Vinyard tour

35 – Visit 5 Michelin 3* restaurants

36 – See Northern Lights

37 – Visit porto

38 – Take dad to an opera

39 – Take Mum, Dad and Carrie to the Welsh Mountain Zoo

40 – Do 1000 things in London
This may get dropped but I want to program all the items in the 1000 things to do in London book into a scheduling program and try and do them in as little time as possible (will need a fair bit of cash but I recon it would be a great adventure). Ill publish the itinery online and my location in realtime and give myself over to the route finding algorithm for as long as it takes.

41 – Do a standup comedy course

42 – Visit Japan

Work
43 – Get CCEE

44 – Get CCNP

45 – Get MCITP – Enterprise Admin

46 – Get VCDX

47 – Say to a recruiter “I dont work MonthName” and turn down work
Nearly did this in March but did a week in Dubai.

48 – Create a Backblaze storage pod
Work progressing nicely at UKblazers

49 – Work only 100 days in a year
Ambitious but worth a try, fits well with the goal of staying in another country for 3 months.

50 – Move 10 people to FreeAgent
My accountancy software, really good. Got 3 people on their at the moment.

51 – Investigate Visa situation for Australia
52 – Investigate Visa situation for US
Would be nice to work in Aus or the US, need to see what the situation is like for contractors from the UK.

Crafty
53 – Make Jam
COMPLETED (well I did Lemon Curd)

54 – Grow mushrooms

55 – Paint a water colour

56 – Make beer

57 – Make wine

58 – Cook a 4 course meal for 20 friends

59 – Do a photography course

Outdoors
60 – Hike on average once a month
Behind as I twisted my ankle in the Czech Republic, have trips planned for may, june, july

61 – Do a UK long distance path

62 – Do a big hike in Europe

63 – Attend Nehru Institute of Mountaineering
This is the course I had to retreat from last year as I was not fit enough.

64 – Climb a continental highest mountain
Prob means Aconcagua or Kilimanjaro

65 – Volunteer for the Mountain Bothies Association
Great society maintaining free shelters in Scotland

66 – Via Ferratain Italy
Went last year but want to go again.

67 – Do another alpine 4000m peak
Did Allalinhorn a few years ago. I think I have it in me to do another.

Learning
68 – Complete Pimsleur Spanish
Was going to put “Learn Spanish” but wanted it to be less vague. There are 90 parts and I’m at 15 now.

69 – Learn to dance
Hehe. Not sure what style I’m going to attempt to learn, fairly sure I’ll never be great at it but it might be fun to try.

70 – Learn to play golf

71 – Learn 10 magic tricks

72 – Read “Winning Ways”
A wonderful book on Game Theory in 4 volumes.

Programming
73 – Make a Dots and Boxes program
A university friend made a program to play the game and won a computer Olympiad with it, I’d like to get something together myself

74 – Read AI: A Modern Approach
3rd Edition of the leading AI text.

75 – Watch SICP, do exercises from book
Famous course, until very recently MITs into to programming, uses the scheme dialect of LISP

76 – Do on average 1 Project Euler problem per week
I am behind with this but should be able to catch up.

77 – Complete “Real World Haskell”

78 – Learn to use Emacs

Charity
79 – Raise £5005 for charity

80 – Talk about Free Software at a school

Culture
81 – Watch all TTC Art history DVDs
11 of them, easily done.

82 – Visit Egypt

83 – Revisit Louvre

84 – Revisit Met Museum in New York

85 – Visit Pergamon Museum in Berlin
I am really excited about the Ishtar Gate

86 – Give Carrie a British Museum Tour
COMPLETED

87 – Go on wine tasting course

88 – Go to the theatre on average once a month
Well and truely on track, watching 2 things this week alone.

89 – See a whole run at the theatre by the lake

90 – See all world heritage sites in the UK
There are 28, so about 1 per month.

91 – Memorise 10 poems
Ive not selected the 10 yet but will probably include:
* On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
* Jabberwocky
* She Walks in Beauty
* Inclusiveness
* Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
* If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso
* The Raven
* The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

92 – Read “The Ode Less Travelled“, do the exercises (but not share them!)
A fun intro to poetry that does not hide the jargon, I blogged about it a while a go but got distracted and never finished the book or did the exercises. I promise not to share any of the poems I write!

93 – Go to Melbourne Comedy Festival

94 – Go to Edinburgh festival

Wealth
95 – Pay off all credit cards
On track to be debt free at day 1001

96 – Let loans run course and dont get any more
Done

Metagoals
97 – Be 1/3 through in 2010
A bit behind.

98 – Have done 2/3 by day 666

99 – Have a completion party

100 – Set success criteria / progression metrics for each goal
COMPLETED

101 – Do 100 day updates
This is the first!

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We got straight down to making lemon curd (not a jam, but my goals – my rules) and it was seriously yummer, recipe below.

Lemon Curd

4 medium-sized lemons
100g (4oz) butter
1/2kg (1lb) sugar
4 beaten eggs

• Scrub Lemons, grate rinds, squeeze out juice
• Place juice and rind in double saucepan over low heat and slowly add sugar and butter.
• Cook, stirring, until all the butter and sugar melt
• Add eggs and cook, stirring, untill the curd is thick enough to coat a spoon.
• Pour into small jars and seal with waxed disks or paraffin wax.
• Cover and store in cupboard for one month, fridge for 3 months, freezer for 9 months.

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]]> http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/04/15/making-lemon-curd/feed/ 1 http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/01/22/cultral-adventures/ http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/01/22/cultral-adventures/#comments Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:14:44 +0000 tom http://www.thattommyhall.com/?p=123 The last two weekends I have traveled across to London from Faversham to see friends and visit a few museums.

During the weekend of 9/10th I met up with my sister in the British Museum and showed her around (one of my 101 goals ticked off in the process). I was very pleased to finally see the flood tablets I had read about a lot (in brief – a pre-biblical flood narrative dating back to Sumeria that is part of the epic of Gilgamesh that the Genesis writers seem to have borrowed from). Also mid last year a metal-detectorist found the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, it has been named “The Staffordshire Horde” and is on display there while they catalog it.

On the Sunday we went to the National Gallery and saw The Sacred Made Real a wonderful display of Spanish polychromatic wooden sculpture. It is the best exhibit I have seen in ages and finishes this weekend, go and see it if you can. It is interesting to see sculpture in colour as we are so used to classical and neo-classical sculpture being the very austere white. Interestingly greco-roman sculpture would originally have been painted anyway so the neo-classicists were harking back to something that never really existed.

The next weekend I stayed in Richmond for a friends birthday and we popped to the V&A on saturday and well just wow. I only spent an hour there but it is amazing that London has (at least) 3 really world class museums, it is on par with the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum Of Art – really fabulous, I will return soon.

On the Sunday I went and looked at the Beatles to Bowie exhibition of 60′s photography, which was pretty good, then returned to Faversham.

All in all good fun in the greatest city in the world.

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]]> http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/01/22/cultral-adventures/feed/ 0 http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/01/05/building-a-backblaze-storage-pod/ http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/01/05/building-a-backblaze-storage-pod/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:41:38 +0000 tom http://www.thattommyhall.com/?p=107 [edit]You can buy BackBlaze pods now at OpenStorageSystems [/edit]

A while ago I saw the Backblaze storage pod and was impressed.



Like many others I thought:

• I want one
• Wouldn’t it work great with ZFS
• The hardware sucks

Building one

I used to make and sell storage servers using Linux a while ago with media streaming software and easy setup (before all the ready-rolled ones came out) so the software side is not a major challenge. Backblaze have released a template for the cases and a list of other components and coincidentally a good friend is a Mechanical Design Engineer and can work on it for me. The cost for the cases drops precipitously if you buy in bulk and he is looking at making it able to be stored flat and easily assembled by folding edges together so I will take the plunge and buy a load, if anyone wants to get hold of some, please get in touch.

ZFS

As soon as you see so many disks in a case like that, it’s hard not to think of Sun’s Thumper and ZFS.



I’ve blogged about ZFS before and given talks on it. With so many disks to fail (either noisily or silently)  data loss is inevitable (and worse – you may not even be alerted), ZFS would solve this (or at least ensure you know about it). BackBlaze use custom application logic to work around this, using TomCat and HTTPS.

It’s Not Highly Available

A chap at Sun has a critique here that is totally spot on and he makes a few great points about subtle changes to Sun’s design to accommodate vibration, noise and electromagnetic radiation. In so many ways the hardware is inadequate and does not have the uptime characteristics of a device in Suns range. That said though an individual device from Sun is not as HA as, say, an EMC SAN (with mirrored write cache, dual SPs etc) as it too relies mostly on commodity hardware. For FiveNines availability you need to decide what you are doing to protect against device failure anyway, the BackBlaze devices just fail faster – that’s your trade-off.

It wont be fast

That is largely a feature of the disks and the controllers; you could get a better motherboard, disks and faster controllers, perhaps eschew the port multipliers too, if performance is a problem. A very cool new feature of ZFS (L2ARC / Hybrid Storage Pools) allows for using SSD as a second level cache, that would help. In linux dm-cache (or here)  could probably achieve something similar.

How can you make it HA?

This is really another blog (and a few weeks work hacking out the ideas), but I can think of several ways of doing what BackBlaze do in their software stack to export files (via NFS, SMB or other protocol) or block devices (ATAoE, iSCSI, NBD etc) in a robust manner.

• ZFS
• Lustre
• GlustreFS
• Clustered Samba (or here)
• DFS
• pNFS
• RAID1 / NBD
• DRBD
• sheepdog
• HDFS
• Hammer ?

I have ordered some of the port multipliers, got my friend working on the case and will buy the sundry bits over the next few days.

This is one of my101 goals

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]]> http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/01/05/building-a-backblaze-storage-pod/feed/ 5 http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/01/03/101-goals-in-1001-days/ http://www.thattommyhall.com/2010/01/03/101-goals-in-1001-days/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:01:28 +0000 tom http://www.thattommyhall.com/?p=98 I have decided on a kind of hyper-resolution for the new year, 101 goals in 1001 days.
I have a mindmap of the ones I have settled on so far and have started working on some of them already.

To follow (allowing me to tick off some of the meta-goals):

Success criteria for each
Divide them up into “Sustained Effort”, “1-off” and “Requires Break” to make sure I don’t overextend myself. I plan on taking roughly quarterly 1 or 2 week breaks to try and do these tasks. For the sustained ones I need progress metrics, am I on track to complete in the time given?

The actual 101 things!
Need to settle on the actual 101 things, most are on there but it’s still a bit fluid.

As one of my goals is to blog more, you should be hearing more from me in 2010.

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