"I vant to be alone" Cheese on toast

This'll clear out the tubes, it's a possible hangover tonic, potential swine flu preventative, uncertain cure for black death and an underarm deoderant to repel snakes.

Required ingredients:
Mature Cheddar cheese
1 Onion
English Mustard
1 large garlic clove per slice of bread
Bread, unsliced wholemeal

On no account ever use an ingredient labelled 'mild' unless it is a beer, and you like that sort of thing.

I go for two slices of bread. Cut using a bread knife, if you are feeling a bit 'under the weather' then be careful with that part, no point in losing a finger or two, and don't used sliced white bread for goodness sake!

Toast your slices on one side, turn over and apply thin layer of English mustard to each. Place your not too thinly sliced onion on top, break the onion slices in to rings first. Put your mature Cheddar cheese on top of the onion, either slab slices or grated. Pop back under the grill.

When the cheese is over midway through cooking, partially to well melted on top, crush a large garlic clove on to each slice. That's a clove per slice of bread. You can use more if you really want to be alone for a while longer. If using a garlic crusher make sure the last of the stuff stuck in the crusher goes on top of the cheese too.

Put back under the grill and cook for a short while, don't cook too long or the garlic will become bitter, longer and it will burn.

Eat it. You should also have a large cup of tea as well. Best make a pot.

I don't get hangovers, I obviously don't drink enough, but this works for me, I've never had Lassa fever, Bilharzia or Beriberi, I'm not sure it is down this revitalising snack, but you never know.

Stink the unstinkable "because the answer is often behind you, behind you, behind you", and in a few hours...

Twit-tastic

A few Twitter moments of the past week.

Doing an early upgrade one morning and tweeting generally about the task in hand, I mentioned iSCSI timeouts, and within the blink of an eye @scevans in California replied to me regarding iSCSI. If i'd been having trouble there would have been a sounding board on hand, as it was we had a chat about the iSCSI implementation on a couple of OS's.

Looking for information on the Gartner website regarding outsourcing I was disappointed to find the latest blog directly referring to the subject was from 2004. I made a minor grumble about this. In an instant @jeffman from Gartner was on the case protecting his company's reputation, he found a few links for me and explained that the Blogs are now organised under analyst rather than topic. Personally I would find an index of topics to be more useful, nevertheless, this is good, on-the-ball stuff, and is/was very helpful.

While browsing the Triumph Motorcycles website I was getting miffed by the number of flash and fancy graphic related failures and broken links. I had a minor grumble about this (honestly I'm not a grumbler but this sounds like a theme developing!) Quick as a flash Mr Beelzebub himself responded (@beezly) to tell me how much he liked the website and that it worked for him, I know this is just a ploy on his part and that he is after a discount from Mr Triumph, fanbois huh!

Even with a signal to noise ratio as low as mine (I can often be the person that put the twit in Twitter) there are plenty of good moments when following (not in a religious sense) a diverse pool of people.

Basic curry in a hurry - Parsnip, prince of roots

Serves two people.

Ingredients:
vegetable oil
3 medium sized onions.
5 parsnips, not the largest, just under medium sized.
2 chillies, a green one and a red one
ground cumin
ground coriander
turmeric
6 medium sized cloves of garlic.
dried chillies
tomato puree
black pepper
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
1 tin of chick peas in water unsalted
red lentils
1 teaspoon of sugar
A big pan
A big wooden spoon

Some rice
Another big pan

Method:
This will take about an hour.

18:17 (0 minutes)
Put your oil in a large pan on a low heat, enough oil to almost completely cover the onions you are shortly going to put in the pan.

Chop your onion. Chuck a bit of onion in to check whether the oil is hot enough yet, a gentle sizzle should do it. If hot enough put all of your onion in and turn up the heat slightly and cook the onions slowly. Scrub, brush, top and tail, or do whatever you do to parsnips before cooking, then cut them in half so you have a short stubby bit and a thin bit of parsnip. Split the parsnip halves in two along their lengths, if cooking for a longer time than here don't bother cutting in half but just split the parsnips along their length.

The onions should be on their way to being translucent now, add the parsnips and stir around making sure they are covered in oil. I fed the cats at this moment so leave cooking for however long that took, a couple of minutes perhaps. Chop your chillies and add them.

18:30 (13 minutes)
Crush and add the cloves of garlic, give it a good stir, I listened to The Now Show at this point, add cumin, coriander, turmeric and dried chillies, this probably worked out at a couple of rounded teaspoons of each apart from the chillies which were level teaspoons, stir it up. These were the only spices in the cupboard, fenugreek, cardamom and ginger would have been good additions.

After a couple of minutes add about two tablespoons of tomato puree, give it a good stir, grind in some black pepper. Let this cook for a couple more minutes and then add the tin of chopped tomatoes, stir in then add the tin of chick peas including the water. Turn up the heat slightly, give a good stir.

18:36 (19 minutes)
Add two handfuls of red lentils. Keep it on a slow simmer while stiring occasionally to prevent stickage. There about 40 minutes cooking time left.

18:43 (26 minutes)
Cook some rice. Marcus Brigstocke having a bit of a rant about political apathy. Put a pan of water on the heat, lots of water as the rice should be able to move freely while cooking. When the water is just about to boil put your rice in, I used Basmati rice, enough for two people. One stir with a wooden spoon should be enough to stop the rice sticking, don't boil the water but keep it simmering. After about 6 or 7 minutes retrieve some rice on your spoon and check for consistency, to bite it should still be reasonably firm in the middle but soft externally. Take it off the heat and run cold water through to stop the rice cooking, this also rinses the rice. Once cold, drain but leave the rice in the pan for later.

The rice will have a kettle of boiling water poured on it later to heat it through before serving, this reduces the possibility of a last minute flap and potentially overcooking the rice.

19:05 (48 minutes)
About 5 to 10 minutes before serving add half a teaspoon of coriander, of cumin and a teaspoon of sugar. If you have Garam Masala add that instead of the cumin and coriander

19:10 (53 minutes)
Get the kettle on for the rice, once boiled pour the water on the rice and leave for about 2 minutes.

Get the plates and cutlery ready.

Get the mango chutney out.

19:15 (58 minutes)
Serve it up. I didn't add any salt, you may wish too. The parsnips should have absorbed the flavours, the longer the cooking period the better the parnips will taste, there is no need to hurry this.

All vegetable offcuts were put aside for the compost, 'stir it up' references, copyright Bob Marley.

Cloud Computing and the Virtualised Datacentre

VMware event at Old Trafford Theater of Dreams (TM)

Piled over to Manchester from Sheffield on the train to attend a day of sessions on Cloud Computing and the Virtualised Datacentre. I expected we would get the tram to the ground but major maintenance work was being carried out on the tram infrastrucutre in the city centre - they have a replacement bus service on to St Peter's Square but it is as quick to walk. This added a little delay, as well as mysterious stops every minute or so along route, taking lessons from the tube I expect!

We missed the first few minutes of the keynote speech but it was general background stuff, there were lots of references to computing in the cloud, internal and external clouds.

Three sessions were to run simultaneously during each session block, we split up and took a session each. Not all sessions were repeated through the day.


The first session I attended was on storage, this focussed on EMC and how they were ahead of other storage vendors in tying in to the new vStorage API framework available for vendoirs to hook in to vSphere. No surprise really that as EMC own VMware, but Netapp and other vendors either already have or will be working on those areas too. The EMC capabilities will be typical of the sort of stuff coming - Netapp already have have rapid cloning and other functionality that is triggered from the VI Client using the new API. Thin provisioning from the VMware side (not required if you are already doing it at the storage side), sVmotion that can be done within the storage array rather than via an ESX host, recovering VMs from native storage snapshots (rather than VM snaps) from
within the VI CLient, storage tiering, where storage can be moved from expensive disk to less expensive disk, nice stuff like that.


The second session attended was a very good one from Cisco. Lots of interesting stuff albeit with a cheesy video about the infrastructure 'tribes', the Networking, Storage, and Server tribes and how as virtualisation encompasses all these areas there is now a fourth tribe, and the potential for disharmony - I don't think we've had any of that but as I occupy three of those roles I'm not about to own up to disagreeing with myself;-)

Much was said about putting the network team back in control of the networking, right down to the virtual switch in ESX - something that has been the department of the Virtual Environment admin until now. This is a good thing, there should be a consistency in how switches are managed even when virtual. New technology (vNetwork in VMware which is built on by Cisco soft/hardware) allows a distributed vSwitch to be created, this means port/machine policies, statistics, rules and the like follow the virtual machine when the machine is migrated. There are other ways of picking up some of these statistics by monitoring each VM directly, something we do now, but the fine level of control normally available to Network Admins has been missing. An example of one of these levels of control is security. Currently all VMs attached to the same vSwitches can communicate with each other unhindered as when talking to each other over the same vSwitch traffic is never sent out to the managed LAN, in many environments this is not desirable and there may be requirements that machines are walled off in various ways.

The VMware environment needs to be running at least Enterprise Plus to be able to use this new technology. There is a Cisco Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) that exists as a VM that controls the DistributedvSwitch. The Nexus 1000v is the Cusco hardware that sits out in a rack provides ports that create an extended ethernet in to the virtual environment, as physical hosts are added to the virtual environment they automatically pick up the distributed vSwitch configuration.

The Digital Dispossessed

The Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives analogy by Marc Prensky is getting a bit of an airing at the moment. It ties in to the media scare stories about web 2.0 technologies altering how young adults brains might be wired up – I get an image of a cosmic determinist electrician using a crack team of programmers to long-windedly restructure human thought processes without recourse to the roll of synapse solder.

As a person that by fact of age would come under the umbrella of Digital Immigrant I am not convinced by the analogy, ok I haven't read the two part series in depth and I could easily fall in to the category of old nay-sayer and stick in the mud when in actuality I would like to have an open mind and take a positive view.Prensky. Part1 Part2

The things I don't particularly like about the analogy are that the term Digital Immigrant seems intentionally to carry a pejorative feel of having old-fashioned ways rather than that of an immigrant enriching a culture by bringing new ideas. This is probably more of an example of the clunky nature of this analogy and how it has been used in the media. The other thing I find wrong is that it ignores the idea that all we are talking about fundamentally is technology, and that as each generation ages then it is not unusual that a proportion of that population has difficulty adapting to and using newer technologies.

Prensky refers to an example of a Digital Immigrant having an odd or thick accent demonstrated by, for example, printing out emails. Nice to know the Digital Natives don't have much need for something with a history dating back to the 15^th Century, I'll be turning off those heavy power consuming servers that deal with the print queues, spooling, jobs and release stations next week! Ok the machines are virtualised and not so hungry and some departments still insist on receiving double spaced printed work, yet other organisations, the Open University and others prefer to handle electronically submitted work. But there are plenty of Digital Natives printing out websites, emails and PDF documents, what went wrong?

Also it is not always apparent when using new technologies that not all our information is there. A lot of people may not use the immediate and at hand research tools of the internet and search engines, but a lot of us do use them as a first line of investigation – yet it is still only one line of research. How much use is the internet for providing the meta-data that is presented with print media, the annotations scrawled in the margins (not only by the likes of Fermat or Joe Orton), physical feel, size, binding, and other elements that make up an object like a book, a journal, a newspaper or other types of printed documents? How sad would it be to lose those extra quantifiers of context. In some cases the physical object is the subject of study.  But I have heard of Digital Natives turning up at libraries only willing to read a document if it is in electronic format, if the document only exists in paper format the student will shrug and say they can't be bothered. In what other areas do we decide that resources are of no use if it presents a mild inconvenience to use them – after learning to drive I would still use the upstairs loo even if there isn't a well lit dual carriageway leading to it. If physical documents aren't used they may be disposed of, depriving potential researchers of resources even if they have been digitised in a high quality format (which is not always the case, grainy reproductions of images and badly scanned pages).

I know that the analogy is really about young students and new ways of thinking, but I don't think that the new ways of thinking belong exclusively to the young. My main grumble about the analogy is not Marc Prensky's use of it but the way it is used in the media. The media informs us that we are one or the other, it provides a nice dualist argument to be lined up for a five minute filler piece which helps to get the Daily Mail readers large intestine clear before the morning commute. A couple of talking heads are lined up with their diametrically opposed arguments and allowed to let rip until there is no more time available as we have to move on to the weather report. The disappointment heard in the voice of the interviewer on the occasions that the supposed adversaries agree with each other is a joy I mark with a gold avatar in my online calendar.

I am biased, I feel peeved because I'm no snake hipped teenager, my winning smile is now a lop-sided smirk and I have to work harder to keep from standing still, but I like technology and I love learning about the new ideas and opportunities it can reveal. But what happens is I turn in to a fundarantelist with a half-cocked, semi-baked argument and start wondering about the massive number of people out there that are the Digital Dispossessed.The ill educated, disabled, elderly and poor are the people that are likely to have had little or no contact with the new media and technologies. Whether they are on a council estate in this city, or in a low-tech nation washing gold from semiconductors with acid in the open air, they don't get much of a mention in this technology and education debate.

Here's Bob with the weather...

The Electronic Charleston – backup thoughts 1

The dance we do when we apply old ideas to new technology.

A current task is investigating new backup methods for our systems and data, looking at how we should approach maintaining backup for the purposes of recovery of data. Data may need to be recovered in the event of data loss due to disaster affecting machine rooms, individual machine disk failures or major failure of the SAN.

Some questions that have been tossed around are:

Why are we backing data up?

Are we doing it this way because we have always done it this way?

Now we have new technologies should we be doing it differently?

Are there other technologies we could be using?

Some background.

The first line of protection is the resilience of the systems themselves, all machines are running some form of raid, either raid 1, 5 or 6. This protects against disk loss, in the case of raid 5 a single disk loss can be survived, with raid 1 it may be a single disk or more that can be survived depending on the configuration and which disks in the raid set fail, with dual parity raid 6 two disks can be lost.

In the case of raid 1 and 5 the system is no longer resistant to failure once a disk has failed and the system will continue to be at heightened risk until the failed disk has been replaced and the data has been rebuilt on the replaced disk. This window of risk during disk failure and rebuilding is why many SAN systems use variants of raid 6, given the probability of a second disk failure during the risk period, the risk being increased the more disks there are in the raid array. Other components can fail, an array controller may decide to invert all the bits being written or add or subtract bits randomly or play tunes using the disk read/write heads, all of which may leave the data in an unusable state. These things may randomly bite us on the backside, the hope is that those problems are discovered quickly.

The second line of protection is mirroring data between sites, typically only available to data stored on the SAN. If one of the machine rooms gets vapourised by an alien death ray we can mount the mirrored data on spare or less used hardware at the second site, data is categorised with different priorities and the higher priority data will be higher on the list to be returned to service.

Tape backup is not a level of protection in the sense above but is a method for storing data from a reasonably recent time that may need to be recovered in the event of the first levels of protection failing, or in the event that data has been deleted for whatever reason and which is now needed. The current terminology for the reasonable amount of time since the last backup is the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), or how much data loss can be tolerated. In practice with backup tape this is usually the previous nights backup, if the data is lost at any point up to the next backup being written we can roll back to data from last night from tape, so the RPO is 24 hours.

There is an assumption that the backup has been successful. Not just from the point of view of the backup completion notice announcing a success, but that the tape write head isn't misaligned and not writing bogus data, that the tape drive was operating correctly, the tape cassette is intact and the tape hasn't been chewed by tape weevils or been stretched or that the tension is correct, that the tape has historically been stored upright rather than side on, the fire safe has been kept at the correct temperature and humidity, and perhaps any number of other things that I am completely unaware of.

One option available that moves away from direct backup to tape, is to use the tape backup concept but using virtual tape and virtual tape drives configured on a disk array or Virtual Tape Library (VTL). There are benefits in that existing backup software can be used, but the idea is the one that gives me the Electronic Charleston heebie-jeebies, there are better ways of using backup to disk rather than using a hammer to drive home a screw. But VTL won't be ruled out and it will be looked at fairly, my opinions may not be valid not an unlikely occurrence.

Cloud Computing

So what is it?

The term is mentioned at work, in meetings, documents and general conversation. It turns up in all the IT magazines, on IT websites, and I've seen pie charts with a breakdown of prospective spending on it.

It's referred to so often that a person can feel a fool for not understanding it - How come I've missed the definition document!

Is it an application delivery model? i.e. Software as a Service (SaaS).

Is it an internet delivered, web application and service building mechanism? i.e. Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Is it storage delivery or a repository for your data?

As there isn't a definition I expect we have to wait and see what the big companies claiming to be using Cloud Computing are doing with it to get a feel, but there's no substitute for definitions and standards.

I don't know what it is but I get the impression that it is a pool of flexible, on-demand resource, to be used for whatever purpose by an organisation. And how vague is that!

Richard Stallman isn't keen.

Yadda, yadda, yadda

I'm feeling buried under a mountain of information. Pile would be a more correct term and crap would be the other more correct term.

As an IT worker I expect I sit in front of a computer more than most people I expect, it is an extension of my physical being, if a question crops up - how did they build Bishops Rock lighthouse? (with great difficulty!) Bishops Rock
- then Google is at the fingertips and some sort of answer might not be too far away. If the question is work related it may be a more difficult matter to find information, many search-term variations and syntax may be needed to narrow down or exclude data. The answer may not be there, and often isn't. With experience comes greater knowledge of how to construct search terminology, but still some answers may never be found. I'm still looking for some Big Bill Broonzy tabs after nearly 15 years of internet searching, and yes I know after that amount of time I should have tabbed it myself! Guitar Tab.

As an aside there used to be a few good sites with good quality guitar tab, no adverts, no circular link clicking and a selection of thousands of songs but they were issued with heavy handed cease and desist notices from the music industry. Most of the sites existing now are vehicles for adverts and carry little content.

Back to the information crud mound. I receive emails filled with rubbish, not spam or junk mail but the sort of chain letter garbage forwarded by friends and colleagues. I received one today, the intention of which was to show what a cushy number inmates of our prisons have. Taking 30 seconds to look this up on our friend Google I find is an Austrian prison where clearly they take a more humane approach with their penal system. Prison hoax slayed

What I should do is delete these types of posts but I feel as though I should respond, I sometimes do respond by sending a link to a site that debunks whatever myth is being peddled. But what I don't understand is why people can't take 30seconds out of their life to check something rather than believe any old crap that someone tells them. If someone forwards something on it becomes a representation of their opinion, even if it isn't actually their opinion. But then perhaps they are buried under a pile of crap too and their discriminatory faculties are put on hold for the sake of a cheap laugh or because something appeals to their sense of injustice whether correct or not.

Mutter, grumble!