Pile of Dross

Crikey, its been a while.

I’m sitting here waiting for my preload of Half-Life Episode 2 and Portal to complete. (BTW as I’ve been a sucker and bought the Orange box, that means I’ll shortly have HL2 and HL2 Episode 1 codes to give away, so if anyone want them let me know). I’ve managed to wangle my way onto a workshop in Edinburgh in Mid November. In other sort of work stuff, my boss has said that he doesn’t mind me getting an Apple as a work laptop, which is great except what do I do with this iBook? And do I wait for Leopard?

Laws of system adminning

As soon as you’ve understood the procedure for one upgrade a superceding upgrade will come out.

As soon as you’ve finished an extended downtime for one of your critical systems for which any downtime is frowned upon, a software update will come out for it.

Hmm,

On the same day that my parents turn up for their visit, I’ve been invited to a BBQ at a colleague’s house. Half of me thinks that asking if my parents can come is a great way to get them out of the flat - which is a bit small for 3 people frankly; the other half is running screaming for the hills at the potential for social catastrophe, and that it surely counts as cruel and unusual punishment to inflict my parents on people whose only crime is to work in the same place as me.

Hmm.

Today I got :

• My payslip showing that I’m getting my 12 months of backdated payrise + sweetner for it taking so long = an extra 400ukp this month
• A key to the housing estate bike shed(s)

Coincidence?

Now I’m wondering if I can make it to Oxford and back to look at bikes on Saturday before being stoned as a heretic for not being in front of a tv at 3pm or whenever it is.

17,000 files sitting on the tape,
17,000 files sitting on the tape,
and if the tape should accidentally snap…
There’ll be 0 files sitting on the tape.

*Sigh*
Reliable storage = oxymoron

60,000 files sitting on the RAID 5 array,
60,000 files sitting on the RAID 5 array,
And if 2 hard disks should accidently fail….
There’ll be no files sitting on the RAID 5 Array.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Grid searches for avian flu cure

Shock! Grid actually useful! So that’s what that BioMed Data Challenge was all about. With all of the focus on the Large Hadron Collider experiments, its easy to forget about the small VOs (Virtual Organisations) that are actually doing real science on the LCG grid, rather than just gearing up for 2007/8

So I now have a Logitech Quickcam attached to my work PC for participating in videoconferences. And after some small adjustments (Hmm, having my colleagues’ mobile phone numbers, written on the whiteboard behind me, in shot probably isn’t a good idea) its now working.
I’m not sure this is a particularly good idea though - I’m (you may have noticed) not the most loquacious of folks and a lot of my emotional communication is non-verbal: facial expressions mainly. I’ve got the image capture window open while I’m reading e-mail and I really start scowling and staring wide-eyed when confronted by gross stupidity.

Also, I really need a haircut.

So after week 2, the best approach to achieving 150MB/s/day is to be on holiday for 4 days and not touch anything.

RAL T1 SC4 Status - GridPPwiki

So week 1 of SC4. Result: Hmm.

2 disk servers broken, expected rate not achieved, possible network bottleneck found. Pretty par for the course really. Its been a frustating week - not knowing whether our inability to achieve the rate we achieved in SC3 is due to some regression on our side or CERN’s (Probably both to some extent I think) but is the rate we’re achieving sufficently good that we should perseve with our current transfer method rather than switch to one which promises more effective use of resources but is less well tested and understood than the current one? The network issue was escpecially aggravating - there’s only one person in our team who really understands the network layout - its a closed book to the rest of us - especially when the 3 people who work in the office who’s whiteboard has the only diagram of the network, are out. And the disk servers? Well they’ve been standing idle for about month and then we started hitting them with instantaneous heavy transfer rates not really surprising they fell over.