MishMash

The vanity press, now free

It seems the bottom just fell out of the vanity publishing market. There is now a print on demand service which charges no up front fee: lulu.com.

Server nightmares

Geek-speak warning.

Ouch, yesterday was painful. As I mentioned in the last post, the server which runs the FloodRiskNet web site and more besides died. I spent almost all day (from morning coffee time when I rebooted the server until eight in the evening when it next booted successfully from its hard drive) panicking, running up and down stairs with various rescue CDs in the hope that one of them would provide me with some useful tools for tracing and fixing the problem.

The symptom: The machine would start, the boot loader would run, the kernel would load, and then it would freeze just after printing

Freeing unused kernel memory: 130Kb

With the help of Google, I found out that this is the point at which init starts. Init is the first process started on a Unix box once the kernel is running. It took a while from that discovery until the penny dropped that this probably meant that there was an incompatibilty between the kernel, which was old, and init, which was relatively new because I was keeping the system software up to date.

The kernel was old because I am using the XFS filesystem, and have only recently gotten round to working out how to build patched kernel packages in Debian. Since the stock kernels do not include XFS support, I couldn't upgrade the kernel along with the rest of the system using the standard kernel packages, and I was always intending to work out how to build one but not getting round to it.

I might have found out earlier that there was a problem but for the fact that it isn't necessary to reboot Linux for much. It continued running quite happily through several upgrades, but, I presume, although init was upgraded it was never restarted, so the new version wasn't tested. It was therefore only when I rebooted that the problem manifested itself.

Once I'd tracked down the cause of the problem, the fix was relatively easy, although it necessitated a bit more learning of the workings of GNU/Linux. In particular I was very glad that I'd heard of chroot some time, because if I hadn't I still wouldn't have a working server. With it I was able to boot using a rescue CD, mount the hard drives from the system in the correct configuration, and then chroot to the system's normal root directory. That allowed me to use the system package management facilities to install the new kernel package that I'd prepared (copied over on a 1680Kb formatted floppy — that took a while too, because I only have old and dodgy floppies lying around).

That done, it booted right up no problem. And I did a little dance, which was fine because it was 8 o'clock and no one was there to see me.

The moral of the story is probably don't put things like kernel maintenance off. Hmmm.

A twist in the tale is that I forgot that shutting down a system booted from a rescue disk wouldn't unmount any filesystems which had been manually mounted. This meant that at some point the system XFS filesystems were unceremoniously turned off. Now XFS is a journaling filesystem. The whole point of using it was reliability; if the system is turned off without unmounting the filesystems, then there is a journal on the disk which can be replayed. There is a much lower chance of corruption. Rather upsettingly, I ended up having to run xfs_repair and force it to fix one of the filesystems because it was damaged in a way which meant it wouldn't mount (and therefore couldn't replay the log). Precisely the situation I was trying to avoid by using XFS.

Artificial Intelligence? Pah.

Long ago Dad introduced me to a quote, which he believes to have been first uttered by a head of the AI group at the University of Edinburgh.

Artificial it may be, Intelligence it most certainly isn't. [Source unknown]

I have in the past found Google to be quite effective at locating sources of quotes for me. In this case it is of no assistance whatsoever. If anyone has any leads on this, I'd love to know. If not, you heard it here first.

Spread your wings and fly, little meme.

Bonsai Broadband

Via stecay at the Semantic Blogging Demonstrator:

Tiscali is to offer broadband net access at the same price as dial-up. [BBC: Broadband at the price of dial-up]

According to the BBC, Ian Fogg of Jupiter Research who are "broadband analysts" (ohforgoodnesssake) said, "The cut-back speed does not really offer the full broadband experience that customers expect."

Yet again (and this from "broadband analysts") people fail to see that always on, and not getting in the way of the telephone is a huge advantage of broadband, as big or bigger than the bandwidth for a large number of people. Me, I can use the bandwidth, but if I hadn't already decided that the value was there for me (splitting costs with my housemate) in existing broadband offerings, I'd be grabbing Tiscali's hand off on this.

As stecay says, the KPMG analysis seems much closer the mark.

I wonder if broadband analysts breath such a rarified atmosphere, moving in we've-had-broadband-for-years circles all the time, that the only type of customer for broadband they can imagine are the ones who have bought into it already?

The downside of this? There's less to share.

Tablet farce

The Register draws attention to the poor performance of Tablet PCs.

With Tablets failing to attract many 'corridor warriors' and premium pricing making them highly uncompetitive in market awash with bargain notebooks, vendors continue to find making money an uphill battle. Under a million will be sold this year, less than five per cent of the global notebook market, with HP the leader. [Andrew Orlowski]

In other words, a technology which is desperately needed by all sorts of people is being destroyed by greed and lack of imagination. The hardware manufacturers must take some blame, too: a Tablet by its very nature must be held in the hand while writing on the screen. They need to be thin, light, with long battery life. They aren't laptops, so why try to make them compete on power with laptops?

Laptop with 3D display

The Sharp Actius RD3D is the world's first autostereo 3D notebook. Sharp Corporation's TFT 3D LCD technology makes it possible to view eye-popping 3D images without special glasses. [Sharp Systems, via Gizmodo]

Want.

I have no use for it whatsoever.

Want.

Grid nonsense

David Reid is babbling about the grid at BBC News, and seems to have swallowed the Grid advocates fund-raising spin whole:

the Grid, the name given to the international network of supercomputers that promises to revolutionise not just the way we use the internet, but computing itself.

Once the Grid is up and running anyone hooked up to it will have all the programs, power and storage they could dream of.

Drivel, absolute drivel. People don't do computation. Finding, sharing, and managing information is what people do with computers. Grid related developments may be taken up in more general server software and prove valuable, but teh Grid itself will be of use to a select group of people. The vast majority of computer users don't care a fig for all that power and storage.

New photovoltaics: how good really?

This news about solar panels sounds interesting, but totally misses the important information. Cost of everything, value of nothing, and all that.

What is the total energy content of the panels? For a long time, the real problem with photovoltaics was that they took more energy to produce than they generated in their lifetime, I understand. What are the environmental impacts of the manufacturing process? Similarly, photovoltaics have traditionally included heavy metals; risky manufacturing and disposal difficulties combine to damage the value proposition yet further.

Of course, some of these things will be reflected in the price, and a dramatic price drop suggests that there have been dramatic improvements. But give us the interesting numbers, for goodness sake.

Multi-Modal Meeting Manager (M4)

Funny that this came up this morning, as today's job is summrising a meeting that took place three weeks ago. OK, OK, I should have done it straight away, but I want to have had one of these.

From Cordis:

The IST-funded Multi-Modal Meeting Manager (M4) project will demonstrate a prototype system that can automatically analyse a meeting in terms of both its structure and content. The system enables an archive of suitable-analysed meetings to be browsed in terms of, for example, who said what during multi-party conversations, what was stated during the various phases (presentations, action lists, summaries, etc.), and more.

This ties back into the discussion about metadata collection [Earl Mardle]. If I could push an annotated archive of FloodRiskNet meetings out onto the web almost as soon as the meeting was over, well, that would be quite cool.

Of course, at the last FloodRiskNet meeting, we split into four groups, so we'd have needed four of these. Prohibitively expensive at the moment, I suspect.

E-paper, and real e-books

Now, I described this to Dad a week or so ago, and I went and didn't blog it. Hey ho, this idea wasn't going to make me rich. Earl Mardle:

I think most of all that we will end up with something that loooks, and feels, like a small paperback book. These were developed because they are an excellent way to carry and consume information. Retaining their form, including their flexibility, will make sense, but they will have a wireless connection to download and update your personal news service, receive your mail, and your marked and graded essay, your liesure library and you textbooks, all of them, stored in the spine and available at instantly.

It needs to go a step further. I need to be able to annotate the things in that e-book, to drop them into categories, and all with a "pen", not with a keyboard. At the very least I need to be able to run through incoming news, and mark the few things that I actually want to do something with so that when I sit down at a "real" computer they, and only they, are all there.

I suppose you could build touch screens into oversized covers, so whichever page you turn to, you have virtual scholars margins to write in.