A Bloody Tail of Blades and Teeth (by sarah)

As some people already know we are currently staying in Hammersmith with Andy Bennet and it was in his kitchen that the grizzly horror story begain.

He was cooking us dinner and I was feeding Jean I wasn't paying attention whilst feeding her a piece of thinly sliced italian sausage a sharpe pain shot through me and a started Jean sat back looking worried. She had accidently bitten the tip of my finger, and her sharpe little teeth had scraped off some of the skin next to the nail and was proceeding to bleed annoyingly. We then established that Andy and no plasters and settled for holding it with a wetwhip cleaning pad thing.

There was then a conversation about Andys food processor and the fact that the blade he was using to make the pesto was uber uber sharpe and was kept in its plastic casing still becuase it was that sharpe. He make the pesto with no trouble or injury but then he decided to wash it up so it wasn't lurking around being dangerous. I'm afriad I was chatting to him and hence distracted him whilst he was drying it resulting in one sliced finger. He pressed it shut in the hope that it would start bleeding which we thought had worked until it come to dishing the food up when the strain of being moved about must have been to much for it.

Two peoples blood in the kitchen in one night! Good job the only other person eating was Al (besides there wasnt actually much blood and non of it got into the food).

A Flaffle Disappointment (by sarah)

I discovered a new food that was YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY last week - me and Alaric were taken to Goldersgreen for dinner and there we discovered the delight of flaffles in a sort of cross between a pitta bread and tortia with some with some really nice humous and other sort of aubagine dip thing.

So yesturday imagine my joy when looking for food for me an Jean I come across a chickpea flaffle, in a medaterrian style flatebread in the first I came across that I could get into easily with the pushchiar (Happened to be a Starbucks so things werent exactly cheap!). Now I knew it wouldn't be as good but I was severlly disappointed with it so now I'm thinking I have two options - a) hunt around for the best flaffle there is or... b) find out how to make them myself and get good at it? Oh well looks like it'll be about ten yrs before I get the yummy again 🙁

Still the flaffle tasted very familiar to me which has been puzzling me since I first tasted (Well actually since the second time I tasted it as the first time I'd accidently got Alarics and therefore could taste nothing but chillis!). I think it is a taste remaniscant of something that my nan used to make but I really don't have a clue.

I'm also awear that I have probably spelt stuff wrong as I'm running on phonetics here!

Moff! (by alaric)

We picked Jean up on Saturday, and she's staying with us again now. Since we have the van, we can manage her and her stuff, even though we're still staying with friends in London...

Apparently when she saw the van appear outside Sarah's parents' house, she was all excited and was asking if we were there, since she associates the van with us, then was sad that we weren't. But we turned up a bit later!

However, we were puzzled that, when she disapproved of something (an inedible stone or stalk inside a bit of fruit, for example) she's scowl and shout "Moff! Moff!"...

But then Sarah's parents explained that Jean had been upset by a big moth that had landed on her foot and scared her, and ever since then, anything nasty has been referred to as "Moff" 🙂

Nice Bank, Bad Bank (by sarah)

We came back to the Bajery for a day to sort out the insurance stuff and oick up post and what have you - now I had warned the bank Lloyds that money would be going in late but they are still being mean and I now have a £74 account in the arease fine becuase obviously I hadn't got the warning letters becuase we aren't at home becuase of all the flood stuff 🙁

Then to the credit card bills - Barclay really nice - we realise you may have been affectected by flooding don't worry if you missed the last payment and don't worry about this one either we will not fine you. MBNA nice too don't worry if you missed the last payment due to adverse weather conditions (I'm paraphrasing by the way) - excilant - great - fantastic - I think I did pay the last bills but the thats really nice of them. Then back to good old Lloyds - who recon that I didnt pay the last bill (I definatly sent a cheque off for the last bill I recieved but then I suppose one might have been part of the big soggy after the flood and I wasnt really thinking too far ahead at the time.) and rar rar rar - pay now you swine dog - type letter.

Yes they should have all been payed on time and things but I had warned the bank we were flooded 🙁 It just seems so bizar that the other two are being so nice about things. I'm now going to have to spend a large fraction of the day phoning people up to try and sort this out especially as vodafone arent exactly being helpful either - but thats another story (p.s. as many have noticed my phones been cut off and I'm having a few problems getting it back mainly due to the bank trouble and stupid people in the shops).

Yeah ok I do realise that most of this is my own fualt for not having been on the ball enough-sigh.

Replicated data (by alaric)

The project I'm currently working on is to build a replicated database; and, of course, this gets me thinking about TUNGSTEN, my own replicated database design.

Now, a fully-replicated database like the one I'm writing works by multicasting write operations to every node, so that each node has a copy of the entire database. This means that you can increase your read capacity by just adding more nodes and spreading the work between them. Each node can read its local database independently of the others, so there's no inherent limit to how many reads the cluster as a whole can do in one second. As long as you have unbounded money and space to keep adding more nodes.

However, since writes get multicast to every node, there comes a point at which your write load is the highest the weakest node in the system can keep up with. Adding more nodes doesn't help, since every write still happens on every node. The cluster as a whole has a maximum write capacity, regardless of the number of nodes.

So this system will do for now, but the next big bit of work on it will be to increase the write capacity - by partitioning the data set.

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