T O T K a t - 2 0 0 6

Gum initiative

All around Wimbledon there are boards tied to sign and lamp posts. They advocate sticking your used chewing gum to them instead of dropping it on the floor. Sounds like a bloody good idea to me. And a lot of them already have a non-trivial number of gum-wads stuck to them. If it reduces the amount of the stuff on the pavement it'll be good. And it has to, really. There are far more gum boards than litter bins and kids love sticking gum to posters it seems.

Mmm full skirts

I appear to be having something of a girly moment. I bought a new skirt from Kew last night. It's full-length, mid-blue (teal), machine washable (yay!) cotton with a full cotton lining. And it comes right down to my ankles. And there are acres and acres of material that swish around my boots when I walk.

(normal service may be resumed when I snap out of it... or not)

Books

I just spent £60 on books.

Yum.

I don't have any space on my bookshelves.

Bah.

It's not like I can just go and buy another Billy because I'm hoping to move house at some point this year so should avoid buying big things (well, anything at all but books are a necessity, not a luxury!). So. Bah.

Woohoo! (Lords overturns stupid verdict)

The House of Lords overturned the Court of Appeal's verdict, that a school which had already bent over backwards to be as inclusive as possible about crazy foreign dress "requirements" had been unlawful in excluding a pupil for failing to adhere to their uniform policy.

The school had a uniform policy which allowed (the 79% of the pupils at the school who are) Muslims (and anyone else for that matter, I think) to wear shalwar kameez to cover themselves sufficiently modestly. But the girl insisted that that was insufficient for the demands of her religion. The religion of tolerance and equality.

Well, ya know what? The uniform policy was made explicit and clear before her parents sent her to that school. At any point they could have chosen to send her somewhere else. But no. They had to create a problem for a school they should have been lauding for their inclusiveness.

Mix06 - iMP demo (on Vista)

It's probably Vista that makes the interface quite so slinky but... the iMP ([BBC]interactive Media Player) demo that Ashley Highfield presented at Mix06 looked pretty nice (it starts about 5.5 minutes into the video). A heck of a lot better than the first iMP trial I was on. For this demo, the media was probably already on the PC as there was no wait to get hold of it.

The initial trial iMP client was pretty ugly, to be honest. And difficult to search and navigate, as well as fragile - exact versions of Media Player were required, I forgot and upgraded my Media Player installation and thus ended the iMP trial for me. Bad encoding for the daily news and weather video clips didn't help, the audio quality was often pretty ropey and clipped.

This flashy new iMP client appears to be much sleeker, ergonomic and usable. As one person in the office put it earlier today "it's tacky". I think what he meant was that the mass consumer would like the knobs, bells and whistles. Personally, I think it looks very much like a Microsoft-ised Apple-like interface but that could be to do with Vista more than anything else.

One bit of co-incidence is that a couple of days before Ashley must have flown out for Mix06 was the first time I've actually seen him in the office. Admittedly, I don't often pass by his desk (ohyes, even for him it is the open plan office) but it's always been empty before. I've seen the Marks (Thompson and Byford) umpteen times around the place.

Encouraging more responsible driving

It looks like the government is starting to do something I've wished they would do for a while. A section of motorway is getting one lane designated for multiple-occupancy vehicles. This is great news.

I kinda wish that had been initiated a long time ago. A work-colleague and I used to car share when I was working at Nortel(Periphonics) which not only cut the cost of travel for us, it meant we were using less fuel and there was less wear and tear on our cars. OK so we had to get up a little earlier to pick each other up/be picked up, but the benefits were clear. The shame was that the journey time was slightly longer due to going a bit out of the way at each end to pick up and drop off. Had there been designated multiple-occupancy vehicle lanes in place the extra time might have been offset by the lower congestion.

Still, apart from not being too sure that actually building an extra lane where there exist 3 or 4 lanes already is a fantastic idea, it's generally good news and I hope more of it happens.

Newphone!

My new phone has arrived, despite Nokia saying that it is only "coming soon" in the UK.

It's very Fashion. But I don't care. It's cute, free and has better (advertised) battery life than my current phone.

No No No!

I really wish "educationalists", rampant fluffy liberals, psychobabbleists and general meddlers would stop pissing about with education.

If you taught kids only the things they were interested in, you'd end up with a majority of school leavers who couldn't spell (oh hang on... er...), couldn't add up (well, OK, you got me there too), didn't have a clue about any other language than English (again, you've got me), had no idea about any scientific (science is evil and should be feared!) principles at all (OK, you're winning by a mile now), but could tell you about ghetto rap fashion, what a healthy-balanced diet is (but not necessarily follow one), how to design a Playstation advert... in short, no useful building blocks and basic understanding of the tools required to learn skills for life and working life of any sort.

So splitting science lessons (and thus syllabus) by sex because girls like learning about exercise, diet and the rainforest and boys like blowing things up, is just bloody stupid. For example if they only ever got taught the "softer" bits of science, how will girls ever find out that, actually, the physics of turbulence can be drawn upon in designing sexier-looking cars (or aeroplanes), or that writing some code to solve six simultaneous partial differential equations will tell them some interesting things about diffusion profiles in material (fabric and construction) and maybe help to innovate in fashion design, or that coming up with a wonder-drug for Cancer is all well and good but if there's no industrial-scale way of producing the drugs there's not a lot of point? And that's aside from the sexual stereotyping; boys do technical things, go to war, invent things, go out to work, and girls help people, nurture people, indulge in self-sacrifice and stay at home to look after the husband and kids.

Go back. Make sure that English (language), Maths, 2 Sciences (or combined), a modern language and an art or humanity are mandatory. Sprinkle your extras on top of that and you have a child with a balanced enough education. Stop pandering to "but maths is boooooo-riiiiing" and make sure that the basics are there. Once kids are mature enough, they can make more informed choices on whether they are interested in pursuing various subjects or not (it rarely happens before the age of 15 or so) but until then, for god's sake give them the basic tools. And stop it with the sodding sexual stereotyping.

Tesco upset by stupid people?

Apparently there are people buying Computers for Schools vouchers on eBay. For more than they are worth to the schools. Tesco are upset by this maybe because they perceive a loss of revenue somehow? Is it that people are using them to buy and sell eBay rating?

Censorship?

I may not agree that you should "blog" about anything you like regardless of the sensitivities of others, the confidentiality of the information or how it may affect your relationship with your friends, family or employer, but the new blogging guidelines published by the Met. Police on the matter do rather smack of censorship to me.

Monday Monday...

It's Monday.

Things haven't been too bad so far.

The tube was only completley hideous for the 5-6 minutes I had to wait to get onto the Victoria Line at Victoria this morning.

At least my phone works, though. (I don't have a Motorola Razr)

Accessibility

Referring back to an old post my site still passes Cynthia's test. However, my style sheet is a mess (I have optimisations ready to roll, but need time to unpick the current mess to apply them), I couldn't guarantee that every image has alt text (but I've got to be close to 100% coverage there) and there are some deprecated elements in there. So sue me.

Pretty good new drama

Waterloo Road. Really quite good it was. Thankfully TiVo was on BBC1 when I came to it about 1/2 way through so I watched it (and the final Hotel Babylon of the series) time-slipped.

New Hustle starts tonight too.

Poor little consumer router

It turns out I'd wrongly blamed a power cut that never happened on my loss of home machine. In fact, it was my poor little 3Com wifi enabled router which had got its knickers in a twist and needed a restart. Still, it generally behaves really really nicely, as does its little brother the 3Com wifi travel router which provides TiVo with its connectivity. I think I've only had to power cycle the big one twice and the little one never. They Just Work (FSVO"justwork"that seemed to involve a lot of pain to get the little one to do the right thing initially).

Annoying

So J and I got a couple of UPSes at a bargain price. J set his up and sorted out proper shut-down sequences etc. Mine got to my house a couple of days ago and have I plugged it in yet? No. Of course not. (Mostly because I need to re-think where to locate machines so that the right ones can benefit from it without too many trailing wires).

There was a power cut earlier this afternoon. And now my Ultra5 is down hard (probably sat part-booted, waiting for an fsck). Given how short the power outage was, having just plugged the damned UPS in would have saved me there.

*sigh*

Guess what I'll be doing tonight?

Finally got around to it

I've updated my Nagios notes to add in v2.0. There are enough differences for people(me) to be annoyed with the 1.3 notes not working for 2.0 that it was necessary to update them.

On a related note, Nagios appears to be cropping up all over the building now. Various other groups appear to have discovered it, installed it and one has even put the tactical overview for theirs on a 30" plasma screen.

And mine... mine is veeeery pretty still:-

Whipped latencies (Nagios)

So I was having problems with Nagios 2.0 stopping bothering to check on services and not re-scheduling the checks for times in the future (and looking at NagiosExchange, it seems to be a problem that a few people are having). But now I have it whipped. I think. Well, it's stabilised now after some minor tweaking on Wednesday afternoon, then again on Friday.

Previously, it would be nice and quick, with low latencies for about a day, then the latency would rocket to 100 seconds until I did a reload. Now it appears to be staying around 2-6 seconds, but I'm keeping an eye out for the value creeping slowly upwards (which I think might be happening, hard to tell at the moment).

I've got 922 services at the moment (on a Dell 850, running Solaris 10, with Nagios 2.0(stable)). I was seeing a reasonable number of orphaned checks building up, so set the check_for_orphaned_services directive[0] to 1. I also reduced a couple of timeout values so that Nagios stopped wasting time on checks which were bound to fail:-

service_check_timeout=30 [1]
host_check_timeout=30 [2]
event_handler_timeout=30 [3]
notification_timeout=60 [4] [6]

On top of that, I made sure that Nagios wasn't wasting time with status information quite so much:-

aggregate_status_updates=1 [5]

Given that the load on the machine doesn't appear to go over 0.50, I've allowed infinite concurrent services checks now, increased from 400, but that appears to be making no difference at all. And I left the reaper frequency at 10 seconds.

Now the checks are being re-scheduled for times in the future, and the latencies have stopped running away quite so dramatically.

[0] - check_for_orphaned_services

Format: check_for_orphaned_services=<0/1>
Example: check_for_orphaned_services=0

This option allows you to enable or disable checks for orphaned service checks. Orphaned service checks are checks which ahve been executed and have been removed from the event queue, but have not had any results reported in a long time. Since no results have come back in for the service, it is not rescheduled in the event queue. This can cause service checks to stop being executed. Normally it is very rare for this to happen - it might happen if an external user or process killed off the process that was being used to execute a service check. If this option is enabled and Nagios finds that results for a particular service check have not come back, it will log an error message and reschedule the service check. If you start seeing service checks that never seem to get rescheduled, enable this option and see if you notice any log messages about orphaned services.

* 0 = Don't check for orphaned service checks (default)
* 1 = Check for orphaned service checks

[1] - service_check_timeout

format: service_check_timeout=
Example: service_check_timeout=60 (default)
This is the maximum number of seconds that Nagios will allow service checks to run. If checks exceed this limit, they are killed and a CRITICAL state is returned. A timeout error will also be logged.

There is often widespread confusion as to what this option really does. It is meant to be used as a last ditch mechanism to kill off plugins which are misbehaving and not exiting in a timely manner. It should be set to something high (like 60 seconds or more), so that each service check normally finishes executing within this time limit. If a service check runs longer than this limit, Nagios will kill it off thinking it is a runaway processes. (applies to all of these directives)

[2] - host_check_timeout

Format: host_check_timeout=
Example: host_check_timeout=60 (default)
This is the maximum number of seconds that Nagios will allow host checks to run. If checks exceed this limit, they are killed and a CRITICAL state is returned and the host will be assumed to be DOWN. A timeout error will also be logged.

[3] - event_handler_timeout

Format: event_handler_timeout=
Example: event_handler_timeout=60 (default)
This is the maximum number of seconds that Nagios will allow event handlers to be run. If an event handler exceeds this time limit it will be killed and a warning will be logged.

[4] - notification_timeout

Format: notification_timeout=
Example: notification_timeout=60 (default)
This is the maximum number of seconds that Nagios will allow notification commands to be run. If a notification command exceeds this time limit it will be killed and a warning will be logged.

[5] - aggregate_status_updates

Format: aggregate_status_updates=<0/1>
Example: aggregate_status_updates=1

This option determines whether or not Nagios will aggregate updates of host, service, and program status data. If you do not enable this option, status data is updated every time a host or service checks occurs. This can result in high CPU loads and file I/O if you are monitoring a lot of services. If you want Nagios to only update status data (in the status file) every few seconds (as determined by the status_update_interval option), enable this option. If you want immediate updates, disable it. I would highly recommend using aggregated updates (even at short intervals) unless you have good reason not to. Values are as follows:

* 0 = Disable aggregated updates
* 1 = Enabled aggregated updates (default)

[6] - you really don't want notifications to time out because you really do want to be notified of Bad Things happening, so I've left this at the default 60 seconds.

Digital switchover

...comes sooner than you might think.

Beer Circus

Didn't stay long as I'm still very tired from yesterday's 03:25 waking up to go get on a plane. But this place does lots of good beer.

Teh cute

This so has to be done for a party...

Stolen from here:- www.markwang.com. If you are the owner of the original image and object to my stealage or would prefer me to host the click-through image here to save your bandwidth, please let me know and I'll take it down/sort it out.