Well, it has been an interesting few months, in brief:

• 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

It’s a bit late but I have just gone through and numbered my 101 goals in 1001 days. As per meta-goal 101, here are success criteria for each.

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!

I was just over at a good friends in Leeds and mentioned my 101 goals and needing to tick some off and if he could help me make some jam sometime.

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.

I saw The 39 Steps at the Criterion Theatre on Saturday. It is an interesting little theatre underground in Picadilly Circus with quite a history

The show itself was great, really playful with the staging and the 4th wall. They used Shadow Play for the mountaintop chase and biplane crash, lots of funny scene changes and played with theatrical conventions (though at times it was a bit slapstick). A weak point were a few references to other Hitchcock movies (though I loved the cameo as that was much more subtle)

I remember that I meant to blog a while ago about the best bit of theatre I’ve seen in a while, an adaptation of my favourite PG Wodehouse book, Summer Lightning. It was at the Theatre By The Lake in Keswick and was absolutely amazing, they are a really superb regional theatre and I hope to see a whole run by them as one of my 101 goals in 1001 days.

I also went to see The Caretaker recently at Trafalgar Studios, a strangly cosy venue for Pinter. It started in Liverpool at the Everyman and I was sad to have missed it but they seem to have maintained momentum with it, Jonathan Pryce is really excellent and well supported by a great cast.

I did catch the recent translation of Medea by Tom Paulin in Liverpool. I love the Northern Broadsides, they are among the best Shakespeare I have seen when they did the Wars of the Roses a few years ago so it was good to see them do something else.

I have just got around to setting up my new Aspire Revo R3600 NVidia ION based media centre PC.

Why the Revo? The NVidia ION GPU is quite compelling, HDMI out and good (though non-free) drivers in Linux. The only downside is that it does not have an optical device, you may want the Asrock ION 330 instead (I plan on getting a PS3 anyway)

Install Ubuntu I went for Ubuntu Netbook Remix, installed from USB using the USB Startup Disk Creator. In advanced settings in the BIOS, switch off the annoying RevoBoot nonsense.

Correcting TV overscan My TV did not accept the default HDMI out as it cut off the edges of the screen due to Overscan. Some TVs seem to be able to control if they do this for HDMI input (which is ideal and is outlined here for a newer Sony TV)

In order to do it for mine I needed to update the drivers from NVidia and apply the following fix on startup (94 works for my Sony TV, you can retrieve it from the nvidia-settings app) [sourcecode] nvidia-settings -a OverscanCompensation[DFP-0]=94 [/sourcecode]

Tweaking GStreamer Buffers Run gconf-editor and set apps/totem/buffer-size (I did 30s from the default of 3)

Add Medibuntu Repositories See here for how (I install all the codecs)

Setting up pulseaudio In Sound Preferences, in Hardware set the profile to “Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output” To allow using the media PC as a remote sink you need to install prereqs on source and target PCs [sourcecode] sudo apt-get install padevchooser pulseaudio-module-zeroconf [/sourcecode] Set output sink to be the media PC (called “media” in my case) and test It is a bit choppy sometimes, I’m looking at it still… Install XBMC This used to be the XboxMediaCentre and has been jazzed up and ported to Linux/Windows, see here for how to install from the Ubuntu 9.10 PPA archive (site down, see cache for now)

Next? Will be getting a surround sound system with a HDMI switch built in and some DLNA/UPnP speakers for around the flat.

I’ve just uploaded this to bookcrossing.com , if you want it - get in touch. I said I would start to do brief reviews for all the books I read (especially as I intend to release most of them on bookcrossing) so here is this one (also on goodreads.com)

Dan Dennett is one author who has genuinely changed my view of the word. Till I read a wonderful short piece by him called “Where am I?” I had written off philosophy and took the view “if you want to know how the mind works, ask a neuroscientist”. Dan is remarkably lucid on philosophy of mind, free will and evolution. He is both an “intellectual plumber” –doing that work that the best philosophers do, patching leaks in peoples thinking– and a great communicator - understanding, consolidating and enthusiastically passing on knowledge in a field not his main expertise (not that you would notice without him owning up frequently).

This is the second in a sequence: Consciousness Explained, Darwins Dangerous Idea and Freedom Evolves. These, along with his earlier works Elbow Room and The Intentional Stance are a superbly compelling explanation of how we come to have free will without any mysterian views about how special consciousness in the species Homo Sapien Sapien must be and accepting that we live in a deterministic universe.

This book in particular is a very good survey of modern evolutionary theory, not the ideal first book but great if you are familiar with the topic. He is a believer in the neo-darwinian synthesis perhaps best espoused by Richard Dawkins. He takes as his central metaphor the difference between cranes (just doing some lifting obeying the laws of physics, however complex they are) and sky hooks (magical lifting devices that do not permit/require explanation). Along the way he rebuts Stephen Jay Gould’s attempts to cast himself as the leader of some revolution or other in biology, Roger Penroses misuse of Godels theorem to link two mysteries together (quantum indeterminacy and consciousness) and does a defence of a meme-based approach to culture. All in all a superb, if somewhat challenging, book.

As an aside, one of the really great things about Dennett is the range and number of citations. He must read nearly all of the relevant literature and makes wonderful use of literary and philosophical references as well - it was a Dennett reference that first brought Jorge Luis Borges to my attention and encouraged me to learn more about David Hume.

A superb book, I recommend it for all with some familiarity with the theory of evolution in it’s modern form who are ready to explore some of its subtleties and prepare themselves for Freedom Evolves.

Well, I went and launched a site to get some ideas down for getting some Backblaze Storage Pods in the EU and what to do in the software stack to get robust file and block level storage ontop of those bricks.

It is over at http://ukblazers.com, a blog and a wiki.

Someone else had started around the same time so there is a discussion group for people interested in taking the design forward. My priority at the moment is to test the port multipliers in FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, get solid pricing for the case and get a consortium of serious people to make a purchase of them in bulk.

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.

[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

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.