Retro Optimization

posted by robert
Aug 22

Welcome, I bring you yet another mostly late post with the usual haphazard disconnect between subjects.

We had an election. A great chance to see the democratic process in action, or is it more like democratic theatre? There is a lot going on behind the scenes that I’m sure we’re not aware of, and this time around I didn’t have the time to pay a lot of attention to the polices of each party. This time however we did have a nicely IT related issue on the table. Labor wanting to build the NBN and implement the clean feed filter, vs the Liberal/National coalition opting out for mostly more of the same as we already have hybrid adsl/wireless/satellite mixture (wtf – cos they aren’t at all similar) rolled out by private enterprises (so nothing new at all). Alas thinking the NBN is a great idea, but there’s no point building it if you’re just going to slow it all down (not to mention the high likelihood of the filter being ineffective and easy to circumvent). As per usual, the two parties both appear to me as poor options to vote for. Nothing new there. Of course one or the other will get in due to the preferential voting system we use. But it is our right as registered voters to participate in this indirect game of “who wants to be Australia’s prime minster” or is it more like Big Brother were we vote out the ones we like the least? Now you see why I said theatre.

I was in Queensland a bit lately for work. Overall it’s an odd place. Subway had rectangular swiss cheese, the weather was nice and a little humid. People were friendly and Optus still sucked. It was a cross between a slower pace of work, and a flat out mad sprint to get everything done in the allotted time. At least it was a change and got me out of the office a bit. We had to define a new term, “Mastercheffy” which was to describe various restaurants who were trying a bit too hard, mixing too many flavours and just being over the top. I actually found it hard to find simple food, everywhere was gourmet and being a coastal town, it was all seafood centric. Overall I was pleased with what I managed to achieve, though not 100% of what was set out, I managed to overcome most of the obstacles that appeared. The people in the office have a sort of enthusiastic energy about themselves which is great to be around. Everyone is friendly and inclusive. A stark contrast to the sterile hospital feeling that the Perth office has where you’re just waiting for someone to stab you in the back with a katana when you’re not looking.

Bike riding, oh yes that’s something I do too. Turns out this whole Timor exercise is being rather expensive. A visit to the travel doctor to get stabbed multiple times for various exotic illnesses and stock up on tablets to solve many of the obviously expected dietary related issues resulted in a large charge to my credit card which a tiny amount apparently is covered by Medicare, and an even smaller amount by private health insurance. Being away meant less riding, and cold weather combined with lack of good sleep meant I’ve been riding less than I should. I’m not totally concerned about the Timor thing now, it’s probably going to be all gravel track of varying quality, and I’ve ironed out the bike setup now. The roadie is getting less use though, commuting on the mountain bike will do that I guess. I’m sure when the weather improves it’ll be back on like nothing happened. I also signed up for the Tour De Freedom 1000, so that’s on again for sure. I’m sure you’d like to sponsor me for this event. *grin*
Windows XP is no more for me. I got annoyed by windows again, this time from it suddenly BSODing and failing to boot, so I rebooted to linux and haven’t gone back since. It’s been grinding me down more and more as times gone on, mainly due to it’s inability to manage memory correctly. At least there’s chrome for linux, and it’s faster than the windows build on the same hardware, mix in proper memory management and it’s heaps faster. Though flash is less stable, and very slow. Swings and roundabouts. At least with NFS permissions inherit properly from Solaris. Overall a net positive then.

iiNet changed their plans again, now there is totally no point doing the upgrade/downgrade trick, it’s still viable on the home2-home4 plans however there’s a big got-cha. Even if you could download 1000gb a month you’d need to do 800gb of that (quota change from 2 to 4) as quick as possible, past experience shows you could probably do 100-130gb a day easily, however keeping that up for 6-8 days straight, not to mention balancing 400gb of that into 1am-9am timeslot would be complicated. Not impossible, but complicated. All for what, well if you were to upgrade for 8 days and downgrade again, you’d save less than $10 (factoring in the downgrade fee of course). So it’s not worth the effort. If you were to want/need to download a large amount of data, you’d probably upgrade for 2 months straight at least to make it worth while before downgrading again. Uploads are now counted too, but as a Usenet user (peer to peer is so 1999 (send help if I ever go back on IRC)) it looks like the volume uploaded while downloading is roughly 2%. So for every 1000meg down, you upload maybe 20meg. Not bad, considering I’ve now got twice the quota I had before for the same money. Also scary is I’m now on the second bottom plan, and the bottom one is probably for people who only check the email once a week. Amazing how times have changed.

Being away from home for a week I had a bit of tv watching to catch up on. I must admit Warehouse 13 is really growing on me. The whole concept of retro steampunk-esq old advanced tech is neat. Roll in some Eureka style time travel stories and you might end up with some accidental retro optimization.

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Today is the first day of the rest of my life – step one

posted by robert
Jul 14

The time has come to do what I’ve been saying for along time. Anyone who knows me probably won’t believe me because I’ve been saying it for so long. But the time is now. If you don’t know me, you won’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Sweet justice isn’t it. Stay tuned.

A while ago I was going to put my fairly large post up about the internet filtering stuff, but I couldn’t quite complete my argument for my point of view without seeming to support dodgy stuff. So instead I’ll just link to it’s time to tell mum because that’s got the same point of view put up way better.

So the Menzies classic was fun. Somehow I managed to get second place in the D grade Criterium and actually won money. About 8-10 minutes in I got frustrated with being blocked and kept mostly at the back of the group by the other riders and somehow managed to find enough energy to not only pass one or two, but to pass the whole pack, and launch off towards the break away where Matt was at the time. That little manoeuvre nearly burnt me out so a lap or 2 of recovery behind Matt and we went to work on it. After quite a few laps Matt was dropping back and somehow I managed to stay out there, solo, chasing after the leader, for what seemed like an eternity. Another rider managed to escape the pack and bridge to Matt and then eventually to me, she passed me for a lap or 2 which gave me a much needed rest but I was able to regain second place. Between us it was a sprint finish for second/third and I managed a 1 second lead by the official timings, but it was surely less and wasn’t much more than a bike length or so. The data logged off the Garmin was amazing, apart from it lapping on the up and back not just the up of the course. Note: Average HR: 186 bpm for nearly 29 minutes. Wot tha !

The following day was the actual Menzies classic race. Basically a 132km sprint. We left Kalgoorlie on the bus with a wet forecast and someone on the bus said they’d done the ride 15 times and it had never rained. That clearly jinxed it, because from at least half way to Menzies it was wet, and it was raining in Menzies on arrival, and didn’t stop while we were there. The gutters were flowing and there were pools of water in the road. It was cold and wet. So we spent an hour or so sitting on the bus to keep warm and out of the rain, before setting off at 10am. Thoughts running through my mind over the first 5 km where along the lines of what the hell have I done, why am I here, what am I doing and so on. Before the official start on the neutral section lead out, we got splashed with red mud (Kalgoorlie White as its known) all over our glasses, computers and what was clean team kit. I don’t exactly remember when it stopped raining and when I stopped being cold (fingertips especially), but by about 30km out we were working quite well as a group, cruising at about 40km/hr. The pace granularly slowed slightly as we went and it bumped up about 5km/hr back to 40 around the time C grade caught us at about the 75km mark. When B grade caught us at about the 95km mark the speed jumped again. From when C caught us, I was just able to hang on the back, and with B it was even harder. The group was surging to try to shake us off, and it very nearly succeeded, but with the slow downs between various inclines (there’s no hills out there) we were able to grab the tail of the group again. If it wasn’t for a guy crashing into a road sign about 1-2 km from the finish I would have been in the first main pack across the line, instead I was about 10 seconds behind. Still I was 39th across the line, and 16th for D grade. Not bad for a first go. Matt managed to win one of the interim sprints and got cash for that too. I’ve got no doubt that this would have made a nice bump to my average speed for the year. Averaging over 40km/hr for 132km is no easy task. So for what started out with me in a never again mood I finished quite pleased and will return next year to try to improve my result.

Now for an iinet support update. Reporting a no dial tone fault resulted in it being resolved for less than 5 days before the fault reoccurred. Of course I was not informed when it was fixed; we wouldn’t want to communicate with the customer after all. Logged the fault again, and after a few more phone calls they were able to fix it on the second go however the Telstra tech booked for 8-12 arrived after 12 and took quite a while to trace the fault and fix it. Epic fail, but it is iinet.

The Tour de France is on again, and to make sure I didn’t miss any of it, I setup a quick mythtv box. Using the PlayTV usb dual HD tuner on Fedora 13 was remarkably easy, and the box is running mostly ok. I still heavily dislike the overly complicated application that myth has become, to me it’s gone down the same bad road that poopnuke and so on did. Way too many modular features of varying quality. Poopnukes issue was poorly (insecurely) written modules and overly complicated design to support these modules. On the surface myth looks the same. Perhaps I’ll dig deeper; really all I want is a basic PVR (record, watch, schedule, EPG etc) and local media playback (video, music). Local – none of this DLNA bullshit, just plain NFS mounts from my NAS box. Really I don’t even care much about the PVR bit, it’s a nice to have. First off I’d ditch all this BS about weather, applications and so on. Reminds me of an old African saying my Dad told me; The more you have; the move problems you have.

I’m still watching a fair bit of TV too. Curb Your Enthusiasm has grown on me. New seasons of Eureka and Warehouse 13 have started; I’m yet to start watching either. Top Gear is awesome as usual. I’m slowly working my way through Treme, it’s good, but hard to explain why. I’m hoping it comes together towards the season end like The Wire did.

Oh one last thing. I made the team for the Tour de Timor. So I went out and bought a mountain bike for riding on dirt. Only taken it out a few times so far, and it feels like driving a big rig or a boat. I’m trying to come up with a suitably nautical name. Something like the SS Wally.

PS: word of the year so far, by a very long shot is: Credenza.

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More random ponderings

posted by robert
May 30

There’s just too much going on right now to put a real post together, so this will have to do.

On a trip to find out about some fixie wheels I bought a track bike. Much hilarity will surely ensue. Riding it on the paths and road around my house is both awesome and totally scary at the same time. I need practice, lots of practice.

So I signed up for the Menzies Classic this year. It’ll be my first real cycling race and I’m doing the Criterium too, so we’ll see how that goes. The 130km sprint should be a good laugh for sure. I’ve heard some rumours going around that the Tour De Timor will be on again and if that’s the case, and work’s going to do the same sponsorship thing they did last year, I’ll sign up, buy a mountain bike and have a go.

I saw an amusing and thought provoking comment on a news article regarding how the power company is allowed to cut off people in hardship. It was along the lines of how the gap between the “haves” and “have nots” is widening (rich and poor etc) and wondering how far it will go, perhaps back to medieval times with lords and serfs. I hadn’t really thought much about that before, but with the costs of what everyone assumes is a necessity going up around us for various reasons; it’s surely going to leave people behind. I’d previously thought about it when wondering what kind of people use pay phones at night after seeing someone in one near an IGA not far from where I lived, once off it seems ok, but regularly and it got me thinking about it. At the time I realised that if you don’t make lots of calls, why pay $20-30 a month every month for the privilege of having a phone. Yes privilege. Not everyone can justify that in their budget, and when you consider a prepaid mobile with no credit can still accept calls for up to a year after the credit expires (maybe more, depending on the last recharge value, network etc), why spend a fixed amount per month which could easily be done without. Now electricity is another matter. Without that, people are using candles or gas lanterns for lighting. Hopefully they have gas cooking and hot water too otherwise they are really left behind by modern society. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for user pays though, and if you can’t pay for power then they shouldn’t have to supply you with it, it’s just a pity that the lack of competition leads to poor management and cost overruns which then get passed onto the customer. With the price of gas so low, it makes me wonder how viable a small scale gas turbine would be (combined with inverter/charger to cope with peak loads). Purely from a science point of view, capital wise it’d be a cost overrun, but it could be an interesting diversion.

Speaking of diversions, I’ve been watching Life, it’s really good, pity it got canned. I also picked up Warehouse 13 after hearing of a possible cross over episode with the next season of Eureka. So far it seems ok.

Things that aren’t ok, still include my iinet connection. Since the fault which the call centre couldn’t resolve my throughput has been way down, 50% down, with no change in sync speed. No amount of modem and cable swapping, router swapping or speed profile adjusting makes any difference. Sync speed is basically the same as ever, but throughput is way down, even from their ftp. I would call the call centre but after the last attempt I’m half scared that they’ll not only waste an hour of my time but they’ll slow it down further. I’m convinced it’s their generic “port rebuild” solution which caused it but the shaved monkey on the end of the line can only press the button. Maybe the answer is to just switch ISP’s, after all there is no reason for customer loyalty. None at all. FAIL.

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