Keeping kindling dry

I, along with a great number of people I know, now posses a 3rd generation Kindle. It seems Amazon have found a feature set and price point which makes this device a winning solution.

I did look at a huge number of alternatives like the Sony PRS600 and others but they were all more expensive than the £110 for the Kindle and did not have enough features to make a compelling argument for spending more.

Yes it has DRM. Yes it "only" supports PDF, MOBI and mp3. Yes it will not win any style or usability awards. But I went into this eyes open the device is "good enough".

The device lets me read books from a reasonable display. The integration with amazon.com is so seamless it poses a serious danger to my bank account. I should expand on that last point :-) Amazon have got the whole spending money for a book thing executed so well that you do not think twice about a couple of pounds here and there, this soon adds up. I have set myself a rigid budget.

My main complaints are really just niggles:

• Another different USB connector! Wahh, I thought everyone had agreed on mini USB? seems that I now have to have yet another lead for micro USB


• The commercial book selection is a bit limited and missing a surprising number of popular titles. Some of this appears to be the publishers and authors simply clinging to their old business model. I fear some of them might not survive and early indications are they are behaving like the music industry did...Guys you are selling an infinite good a scarcity model is going to fail!


• The price of some of the books is absurd...they are asking hardback prices for the electronic edition! Seriously? how on earth can that possibly be justified? I can see that a hardback book with its print run could cost £5 per physical item (going from hulu print on demand prices as a worst case) plus shipping and stocking fees. So how can you possibly justify charging the same price for a pile of bits where none of that applies? Also the pile of bits cannot be lent or sold, not impressed.


• eBook formatting is generally dreadful. I do not know who is mastering these books but they need to do a better job. If they tried to pull this in the physical editions they would get a seriously large number of returns.


• I still have to pay for whispernet delivery fees even though, because its the wi-fi model, I am providing the bandwidth myself. I can see that differentiating between 3G and wi-fi delivery is a bit hard for them though.

However my one and only real complaint with the offering as a whole is the astronomical asking price for the leather cover. The cover is currently 25% of the price of the kindle itself! (£30 cover £110 kindle) which is just silly. It is a pretty nice cover and the clever clip attachment means it does offer an integrated solution to protecting your kindle, but not £30 nice.

So my lovely wife (her kindle was bought with the cover) made me a sock for mine. This is great for casual round the house usage to stop me scuffing the screen but was a bit lightweight for protecting the kindle when out and about.

One day last week I had an idea. I would make my own protective cover by crafting something I had wanted to do for ages. And the (unoriginal I am sure) project of a hollowed out book for housing my kindle was implemented.

A quick Google later and I had a set of plausible instructions to follow. I used possibly the most out of date book ever (published 1981) on electronic test equipment, partly because it was a ex library sell off book which cost 10pence back in 1995 but mainly because it was the right size to just enclose the kindle without adding to much size.

I learnt a couple of things doing this:

• Do not let your pva (white) glue mix get too runny, you want it fluid enough to be easily absorbed but not watery - this is important because otherwise the paper absorbs too much water and crinkles
• Do not use a book where the binding has gone bad already and select a "clean" book. The spine of this book was yellowed and cracking before I started. This means the book spine simply cracks open at the hollowed out bit and it is very obvious.
• Work out where the "solid" part at the back is going to be and treat that separately so you get a nice solid base at the back of the hole. In mine its not all stuck together and is a bit wavy. Do be sure you left enough depth for the kindle though.
• Take your time and be careful with the glue, it is amazing how obvious even a simple splash of glue in the wrong place is. Use a small brush for this a paint brush is fast but sloppy.
• Measure carefully and cut only a few pages at a time, it takes a bit longer but looks much better. Also I did not drill the corners of my hole which means they are a little scruffy.
• Use the sharpest thinnest knife you can, this really helps. I started with a small stanley knife but switching to my hobby scalpel gave much better results.
• If you have some, use woodworking clamps to clamp a bit of timber (I had some offcuts of shelving) around the book to compress it while the glue dries. Do not clamp the spine if you can avoid it. This method ensures:
  1. Heavy things do not fall off the book while it dries.
  2. An even strong pressure is applied.
  3. The book does not warp or bend while the glue dries

All in all I kinda like the results and I think I will try again with a more modern book where the spine is not so broken to begin with.

Coming to terms

Yesterday was not a great day. One of the family's cats died.

Molly, for that was her name, came to us the week Melodie and I moved into our first house together. September 15th 2000, in the middle of the fuel protests which were raging at the time, we hired a van and moved in.

Most people would have considered that enough for one week! We happened to be in Halifax on the Sunday afternoon at the supermarket and decided to visit the RSPCA because somehow we decided what our new home needed was a cat.

On that day a decade ago we saw Molly and Lucy, a pair of cats who needed a new home as their previous owners had a baby who was allergic to them. I still recall them skulking at the back of their cage in the cattery, Lucy who was reluctant to come down of a perch to be petted and Molly looking generally unhappy. No-one else wanted this misfit pair because they were already both over 5 years old, the warden despairing of ever finding them a home.

Of course they were obviously the right animals for us! ;-) So by the end of the week we had taken them home. Molly immediately showed how things were going to be by shredding her way out of the RSPCA provided double walled cardboard carrier. To the day she died she detested being placed inside a carrier, funny that.

By the end of the year, when the snow came, the cats ruled the house and we were all happy together.

Little did we realise that soon in the summer of 2001 there would be another arrival to the family.

The arrival of our first child in June 2001 was a complete change in all our lives but we all managed to settle back into a routine. Although the banishment of the cats from upstairs remained a point of disagreement for a long time.

As Alex grew up the cats learned that feeding times for Alex could result in all manner of things falling from above. Soon Alex was mobile which resulted in different lessons on cats being sharp objects if not treated with respect. In February 2003 our family grew once more with the arrival of Joshua. The cats, now used to infants, took this in their stride.

While still about day to day the cats are not captured on camera so often form this point on.

Over the forthcoming months they ensured they were out of reach of the newborn and the precocious toddler.

By the time of Joshuas first birthday in 2004 Molly had taken to hiding "out of the way" as much as possible but remained as affectionate as ever.

As the children grew up and life progressed Molly became ever more at home and developed the odd aggravating trait like taking clean washing off airers and dragging it out the window, through the cat flap and upstairs so she could sleep on it!

She still enjoyed participating in claiming boxes and defending them vigorously though!

The kids took on the job of feeding the cats which made their bond closer ensuring they were greeted by happy cats sitting lookout as they came home from school each day.

Molly continued to be a good companion and an infuriating self centred animal like all good cats.

Then on Tuesday evening our Neighbour knocked on our front door. They gave us the news that one of our cats had been run over and taken to the Vet. I immediately went to the back door and called and shook the treat box.

Lucy came running, but molly did not. We rang the vets who confirmed they had molly (we had them electronically tagged back in Halifax) and that they advised we did not come and see her until they had chance to asses her and deal with the shock.

As the days progressed her prognosis improved and then sank. She had a broken jaw, broken teeth, a dislocated hip, extensive bruising and something was definitely wrong with her kidney function.

Thursday evening the whole family went to see her and she purred and seemed happy to see us, she looked as bad as I feared though and somehow I knew there and then that this was probably goodbye. The children stroked her and petted her for a while and we left with an odd sadness, oh and to the sound of molly trying to gouge the veterinary nurse.

Yesterday she was due to have surgery to fix her jaw and hip...Alas when she was anaesthetised and x-rayed once more it became evident the hip was not just dislocated but her femur was fractured and there was additional damage. So just after midday came the call to ask what we wanted to do. The vet could attempt the repairs but due to her age and the other complications it was probably futile. So with heavy heart we agreed the best thing was not to revive her and she died a short time later.

I shall miss her morning greetings, her demands for attention, her sleeping in odd places and her companionship. I keep calling for her at meal times forgetting she will never come. I think Lucy is upset too, after spending their lives together her friend is gone and I cannot explain that to her.

So that is the end of Molly, a good cat.

Compiling!

When I am writing software sometimes XKCD is accurate!

Alas I can only fully participate in that activity when the boys get home from school.

The rest of the time I have to make do with other distractions.

I am currently participating in a "higher" speed broadband trial (I already have a 50Mbit service). This appears to involve the drastic step of remotely reconfiguring my Cable Modem :-)

In the last week there has been the odd request from the trial organisers to test throughput using various website based testing applications. These applications seem completely unable to cope with these 50Mbit+ connections and the results are as unreliable as expected.

To address this the trial organisers asked us to time downloading of a gigabyte file from one of their servers. I was surprised to discover that it took over 350 seconds to download the example file giving a less than stellar 3Megabyte/second rate.

So I used some "compiling" time today to look at what was going on. Firstly I went looking for an iperf like tool for http. Turns out there isn't one which came as a bit of a surprise...oh well with a little help from my friends I came up with

curl -o /dev/null http://target.domain/1GB.bin 2>&1 | tr "\r" "\n" |awk '{print $12 }' >test1.dat

Which gets a file with a "Current transfer speed" for each second of the transfer. Well ok so lets do the transfer a few times and collect the output so we have a reasonable data set.

So we have a pile of numbers...not terribly useful, lets visualise them! to the gnuplot mobile!

We need a gnuplot script something like say this:

set terminal png nocrop enhanced font arial 8 size 1024,600 xffffff

set output 'xfer.png'

set style data linespoints

set title "1Gigabyte file transfer throughput"

set ylabel "Throughput in Kilobytes per second"

set y2label "Speed in Megabits per second"

set xlabel "Seconds of transfer"

set ytics 1024

set y2tics ("10" 1220, "20" 2441, "50" 6102, "100" 12204)

set grid noxtics y2tics

set yrange [0:13000]

set datafile missing "-"

plot 'test1.dat' using 1 title 'Test1', \

'test2.dat' using 1 title 'Test2', \

'test3.dat' using 1 title 'Test3'

Once run through gnuplot I extracted a lovely graph which shows a couple of things.

Mainly that even with a nice fat downstream you are unlikely to realise the maximum throughput very often even from a server on your ISP local network.

On the other hand I now have a way to examine throughput of downloads ;-)

I like driving in my car. It is not quite a Jaguar

I work from home, this is a good thing. I benefit from a 20 metre commute, comfortable working environment and generally low carbon lifestyle.

Except on Wednesdays, on Wednesday I have to get up early and go to the office, this is not usually too much of a chore and takes around 90 minutes each way.

Today was different, I made a small five minute diversion to collect a colleague to whom I was giving a lift and then due to a little problem near the M6/M61 junction spent a fun filled three hours sitting in traffic crawling along the M56. At least I had company instead of being on my own.

Before I did the return journey I decided to check the traffic news sites. Oh dear now the M60 was stuffed, I altered the route and only had to queue on the M56 for twenty minutes or so. I dropped my colleague off at his place (avoiding the worst bits of the M62/M66 junctions by use of a rather convoluted back route) and proceeded to queue on the M62 for a while for no apparent reason.

Basically I have spent almost seven hours in the car today to do a 150 miles or a little over 20 miles per hour average. I was just going to rant about the dreadful lack of any redundancy or resilience in the UK road system which often grinds to a complete and utter halt if there is a single failure.

However a different thought has wandered across my travel weary mind. It has occurred to me that this average speed is faster than anyone could reasonably expect to do this trip for the majority of human existence.

In 1810 and indeed for all time before, your best possible speed by good horse, for 150 miles, would have been two days (and your horse would have probably been very poorly afterwards) This assumes your horse could do the 75miles (120km) each way in times consistent with modern world endurance trials... across a mountain range! Yes the Pennines are only tiny but even so!

A hundred years later, in 1910, the British railway network was nearing its zenith in most measurable terms. The influence across the north of England was profound and pushed the industrial revolution ever faster towards its climax before the first world war. Even at this point in time my best reading of the available timetables says I would have needed to change trains four times each way, purchased eight separate tickets from six different companies and taken around nine hours to make the journey allowing for hanging around on platforms.

Another fifty years on, in 1960, the trans-pennine car journey would have been on poorly maintained trunk routes through the decaying cores of the declining post-industrial northern cities. The route would probably have involved the A646, A59 or the A58 which at this time were not the well maintained (if slightly shabby) roads of today but instead were dangerous twisty and, from the looks of the archive photographs, positively heaving with traffic. On these pre-motorway strips of tarmac the 150 mile round trip would have taken in excess of seven hours (even today's mapping systems suggest over four and a half hours would be needed)

So instead of being frustrated that my commute took an extended period today I have instead decided that I shall enjoy the fact it was faster and certainly more comfortable than at any time in the past. Well that and I need to get the cars air-conditioning fixed ;-)

The turmoil of an entropy key release.

Last week we released 1.1.3 of the Entropy Key software. Poor Daniel struggled for days to get this out the door but finally he managed to build all the various debs, rpms and tars for the supported platforms and Rob got it all uploaded and announced.

The release is kinda strange in that it was the first in which the main changes were for performance. OK there is an improvement to resilience in the face of failed re-keying which some users were seeing in high load situations, but that high load was (in some cases) being caused by the daemon itself.

The process was mainly driven by one of our users, Nix, who was experiencing ekeyd using "too much" CPU on his system.

Of course on our servers during testing ekeyd it had used around a percent of CPU, certainly nothing that flagged as a problem in our own use (yes we eat our own dogfood ;-) Alas for this user on a 500MHz geode it was guzzling down 10% of his CPU which was clearly unacceptable.

This user however instead of guessing what the problem might be or simply leaving it up to us did something about it. He instrumented ekeyd, located the garbage collector tuning parameters as being incorrectly set and supplied a patch. Did he stop there? no! he then went on to profile the code further and clean up the hotspots. This resulted in ekeyd falling to less than 1% of the runtime of his system.

By reducing the CPU usage of ekeyd to this level it became more apparent where a previously reported bug was coming from, which enabled me to address it.

I know sometimes I complain about Open Source software but at times like this it makes me happy that we released the ekeyd software freely. This is how its supposed to be! Everyone working to make better software and benefiting together.

It has not just been on this occasion either, throughout the last year since our very first 1.0 release there has been helpful and useful feedback, patches from several users and even the odd thankyou mail. This project then has been a positive Open Source experience and I look forward to another constructive year maintaining this software.

You shall go to the ball!

Contrary to my last post I was able to attend the Debian UK BBQ at the weekend. My wonderful wife ditched me at Portsmouth station with permission to go play with my friends ;-)

Perhaps a bit more explanation is warranted about that last statement! We travelled back from France last Saturday. We were on the 12:15 (CET) ferry so had to be awake and on the road for the five hour France drive at "oh my gosh its early" time. The crossing to Portsmouth was slow as it was very choppy and we were leaving the Port at 15:30 at which point Melodie was good enough to let me go play with my friends while she drove home.

I did have the "fun" of doing the Portsmouth->London->Cambridge trip on UK public transport but it went pretty smoothly. Walking from Cambridge station to the BBQ location was a bit dumb, next time I am taking a cab!

The BBQ was excellent fun and big thanks for Steve for holding it again. Its always fun to meet the usual suspects. We also got to set a new occupancy record at Steves house Saturday night and discovered that certain members of Debian UK snore rather loudly (I think at one point we could measure it on the Richter scale).

Back home now of course. Work is the same as when I left so no change there and the Boys first day back at school seems to have gone smoothly too.

Sunny Brittany

Alas I did not go to Debconf 10 which looked like everyone had a blast, congratulations to the organisers. Nor will I be able to attend the traditional Steve McIntyre BBQ at the weekend, hope everyone has fun.

On the other hand I have managed to take a family holiday in sunny Brittany...

OK perhaps sunny is pushing it, we did have several nice days last week which we spent on the Le Pouldu plages but this week has been more challenging.

Fortunately the camp site where we are staying has reasonable bandwidth so I can continue to waste time online.

This has given me time to look at some Debian packaging. Specifically the mingw32-runtime packages. Their maintainer seems to be unwilling to allow an updated version to be uploaded despite there being numerous upstream releases since the last packaged release in 2007.

The packaging manual makes it clear that hijacking is not permitted and I discover my desire for having a huge, unhelpful argument about maintaining a package is non existent.

I guess when I have my updated packages available I will maybe announce them but its not the same. I guess this is one of those problems with being a Debian maintainer, we all have to rub along even with decisions we disagree with. Hmm thought I had more to say on the subject ...perhaps next time.

Anyway must go and entertain the kids for an hour or two, maybe go to the beach in the rain, hell they cannot get any soggier ;-)