Heating an old house (by alaric)

Sarah feels the cold keenly, while I can usually just put on some more warm clothes to deal with British winters. But even I was finding it hard to work in my home office when the temperature went below ten Celcius; fingerless gloves still let me type, but numb fingers increase my error rate, and the pain is distracting.

Part of the problem was that our house is draughty. There were a lot of gaps in the window and door frames, through which daylight could be seen; when it was windy and rainy at the same time, the wind blew rain in through the frame of the large window in my office.

So step one was to fix these. The large office window, it turns out, is somewhat curved, so when my brother in law was visiting, we screwed extra handles to it, pulled it properly closed with levers wedged in the handles, then did up the bolts at top and bottom to force it to stay in shape, which fixed a large source of draughts.

Then I want around a few other choice places, adding draught excluder strips where I could.

Next challenge was to increase the heat. We had only one real source of heat in the house, a wood/coal burning stove at one end of the house. Since it's a long thin house, this was little help for me in my office, right at the opposite end - but it didn't even make enough heat to keep Sarah happy sitting next to it, so she would often use the expensive electric fan heater to keep her temperature up, much to my concern (for if we can't pay the electricity bill, things will quickly become rather unpleasant).

Now, the grate in this fire was rather small compared to the size of the fire itself. The grate had only sides and a front, so had to be pushed back against the firebricks in order to not spill coal out. This meant that air coming in through the vents would tend to rise over the fire and up the chimney, taking heat away without imparting much oxygen to it. Even then, it would slowly wriggle forwards over time, spilling ash and coal down behind, until it came too far forwards for the ash shovel to be pushed underneath it, meaning the fire would choke itself. But as it moved forward, the effective volume fire increased, with a notable improvement in the heat output - even though the fire at the back would be starved of air from beneath, as it sat on a bed of ashes.

While rummaging through piles of random bits of metal lurking about the place from when we moved in, though, I found an iron grating that I suspected might be able to fit in behind the existing grate, enlarging it. Sure enough, it did - and it fitted so perfectly well that I suspect it was actually meant for it. Suddenly it was possible to have a large bed of coal in the fire, with air coming in through the vents from underneath it and being drawn up through; this led to an awesome increase in heat. However, it led back to the same old problem - we now didn't have room to get the ash shovel in underneath to take ash away. And so the fire would slowly choke itself with ash.

So I ordered two metres of 25mm square hot-rolled mild steel from Hindleys, my favourite home-engineering supply house. When it arrived I used my angle grinder to chop off two lengths of the stuff, then used them as spacers on either side of the grate to lift it up an extra inch.

And now the fire's awesome. I can easily get it so hot that it becomes mildly terrifying, an angry yellow glow emanating from the air vents as it roars away, the radiated heat unpleasant to be too near. A few days ago, it actually melted the plastic crates we store our newspaper and kindling in, purely by radiation.

But it's still rather cold in my office.

So we decided to spend some money on the problem, as it was in danger of harming my work. I went down to John Stayte Services, a local purveyor of awesome things. We buy our coal from them, but they also sell propane, butane, related accessories such as heaters and Sievert torches, workwear, and animal feed. To my delight, they had a deal on; a shipment of gas heaters had been damaged due to the shipping container being broken into by illegal immigrants who built a home on top of them for the duration of the voyage... so they were selling a slightly dented heater, along with a cylinder of butane, for £89 when normally a heater alone would cost more than that (and a gas cylinder £50 or so as an initial outlay).

I set it up in my office, lit it... and over the next few hours, the temperature rose from ten degrees to about twenty, with me correspondingly shedding layers of clothing. Since then I've been running the heater on low power, and the temperature's stayed around seventeen degrees; with the stones of the building having been warmed up, it's now not taking much heat to keep it nice and warm.

And so, I can proudly state, for the first time since we moved in, it's actually warm enough at home that we are turning down heat sources so as not to be too hot!

A new laptop (by alaric)

To my great displeasure, my shiny MacBook Pro was stolen from the office in London!

So, I grabbed our finance guy and we went down to the nearest laptop shop and picked up the cheapest thing they had in the shop that would meet my needs: a Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv7.

The first step was replacing Windows 7 with something. As I knew I might have some teething troubles with getting NetBSD installed, so might need to return to Windows to get online, I shrank the Win7 partition down so I could run it dual-boot rather than nuking the whole thing. However, it was worse than I feared - the NetBSD install CD wouldn't even boot - the boot loader came up, then complained it couldn't read the kernel.

Not good.

So I burnt an ISO of Arch Linux, which is the closest to BSD in the Linux world. No good, either - GRUB loaded, and couldn't load the Linux kernel. I downloaded the boot.kernel.org nano-ISO (which then boots over HTTP from a central server) and that booted OK; but many of the Linux installers I tried died of kernel panics during booting. I wondered if the difference was that boot.kernel.org had an ISOLINUIX-based installer rather than GRUB; googling for this, I found out that GRUB sometimes has trouble with some CD drives, and as such, Arch Linux came with the option of an ISOLINUX-based installer CD. So I burnt a copy of that, and pow, it worked!

I installed Arch Linux, but only in a small partition, still intending to try and install NetBSD via non-CDROM means at some point. I soon had X up, and all was quite well, apart from the fact that my wireless Ethernet module (a Broadcom 4315) didn't work. I found a driver and installed it, and then it was recognised, but it still refused to actually do any wifi. Bah humbug.

On a hunch, I re-downloaded the NetBSD installer ISO and burnt a new CD of it... and it worked, this time! Having wasted most of a week trying to get the first one booting then messing with Linux distros. So I left my Arch partition in place (in case I needed it for anything), and set up NetBSD. Got X working again, copied across the home directory I'd made under Arch rather than redoing my dotfiles, and was happy. Except that NetBSD also didn't like my wireless interface, and it had trouble with the ACPI too, so I can't read my battery status or do a suspend properly. I've found a NetBSD driver for Broadcom devices but I've yet to get it to compile (I think it was developed mainly for the macppc port, or I've just not applied the patch properly). When I get my kernel source tree compiling again I'll have a new kernel that also has verbose ACPI debug messages, which will probably help.

I get Xen working, though; it was painless now that NetBSD's boot loader can do multiboot kernels, meaning I didn't need to mess with GRUB; I just installed the xen tools, and a xen kernel, and a NetBSD/xen kernel, then added the following line to /boot.cfg:

  menu=Xen with 1GiB for dom0:load /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0 console=pc;multiboot /xen.gz dom0_mem=1024M

...and rebooted into a Xen dom0. Setting up some Linux domUs for my work has been more exciting: I downloaded Debian filesystem images and a kernel from stacklet.com, but when I bring it up, Debian complains it can't bring up the Xen virtual network interface - and that it's getting lots of disk errors on the Xen virtual block device (although it can actually read the filesystem without any trouble whatsoever). This may not be helped by the fact that the kernel I downloaded doesn't seem to match the /lib/modules directory in the filesystem image, alas. More work is required.

Still, I'm happy to be back on an X workstation. I liked my Mac, but I was feeling hankerings for open source software, and minimalism. I'm running dwm, dmenu, and remind, joined together with awesome shell scripts. I do miss the intergrated personal-information-management tools in Mac OS X; I want to brew up my own database of people/todos/events/etc in some Prolog dialect (eventually replacing remind), so I can express all the relationships between things that I want ("There is an all-day event on date X called 'Y's birthday' if there is a person P with name Y whose birthday has the same day and month as X", sort of thing) - it'd be nice if it could integrate with Thunderbird's address book, so I may have a look at the format of that (or look into a script to sync it to/from an LDAP directory).

Motivation (by alaric)

When I started working, long ago in 1998 at Internet Vision, motivation wasn't a problem: work was something I did to cheer myself up. This held when I moved over to Frontwire; but when the company abandoned its offices, sacked all of my department apart from me, and I had to work from home back in 2002 or 2003 or so (IIRC), I started to find it hard to get up and start working in the mornings; I realised that working on problems with other people was more of a motivation for me than the fear of being reprimanded for not getting enough work done!

Well, I left that company before long, and freelanced for a while, then got together with some others and formed a company, GenieDB. I can now combine the best of both worlds; I can work from home, in my own environment, while being in contact with my colleagues in our company IRC channel, and working together on problems. I find it hardest when we're all working on unrelated projects, so there's little daily sharing of issues and triumphs, but the level of de-motivation I feel then is small fry compared to how it was when I worked alone!

Nonetheless, since my Frontwire days, various other stresses have appeared in my life, so my base level of motivation is nowhere near what it once was. Carefully managing my morale in order to keep my head above water is an important concern.

Luckily, I made a breakthrough some months ago; for some reason or other I had to be up much earlier than usual, so was up at 8am one day. When I had dealt with the business that required the early morning, it was about 9am, and I didn't need to start work until 10am - so I used the extra hour to go and tinker with stuff in my workshop. It was good. Having had an early morning I was tired that night and fell asleep easily, and having had an hour of "me time", I didn't have my usual restless urge to go and do something fun rather than going to bed.

And I forgot to turn the alarm clock back to its usual time. So the next morning I awoke again at 8am. Except this time, having been to sleep earlier, I wasn't dog tired. So I got up and enjoyed two hours of me-time before starting work.

I was hooked.

Previously, I would wake up knowing I had to get out of bed, get Jean ready for preschool, deliver her there, then start working, spend my lunch break mowing the lawn or other domestic tasks, eat at my desk, work until it was time to go and collect Jean, bring her back, cook dinner, take Jean to bed, then try and catch up on domestic matters (while tired) before going to bed and having trouble sleeping. This not being a particularly delightful prospect, I would often lie in bed far too long, cherishing the ability to just lie there and think, knowing that getting up meant stepping onto a virtual treadmill.

But now I was waking up at eight in the morning, and positively leaping out of bed at the thought of going and doing something fun. I made a rule that, from 8am to 10am, I'd do whatever I wanted; I wouldn't accept requests. I'd get to my desk at 10am, lively and happy. I'd be more tired in the evenings (that extra two hours didn't come out of nowhere), but much less depressed, so I'd get the domestic stuff done sooner and end up spending more time with Sarah once Jean was in bed, then be off to bed in good time as I was getting tired.

My two hours in the morning even gave me time to do things like having showers, which I had previously had to try and fit elsewhere in the day, often ending up going several days overdue!

Even when I'm in London, I woke up at 8am and spent two hours pottering about on my laptop, or going for a walk.

Now that Jean's started school, it's not quite so good - I have to be up at 7:30am to start helping Sarah to get her up, and fed, and dressed, and leave the house at 8:15am to get Jean to the school for 8:45am, but then I'm back home at 9am for an hour of my own before starting work at 10am; I still find it hard to get out of bed knowing I have to do the school run before I can do fun things, and I don't fancy getting out of bed at 6:30am for an hour to myself before doing that 🙂 When Sarah's healthier she might be able to cope with the school run on her own, though, so it might improve yet; she doesn't seem to benefit from starting the day with her own time as much as I do, so that might be a fair trade.

We'll see!

Ladybirds (by alaric)

Sitting at my desk working, I found a spider in my hair. So I went and opened the window to put it out.

This is, the big office window's not been opened for a while. As I opened it, lots of stuff rained down on me. And when I looked I realised I was covered in ladybirds.

Seems they're attempting to hibernate in the gap between the window and the frame - except now they're all disturbed. So I shook them off of me, and left them to collect together so I can decide what to do with them.

I took some pictures as they started forming good clusters:

But there's plenty more than that still making their way into the clusters... and I opened the other side of the window as they were crawling into the gap from the inside (and I don't want them inside), which caused a whole load more to shower down.

Wish me luck.

The UK MoD Manual of Security has been leaked (by alaric)

The UK MoD Manual of Security has appeared on WikiLeaks.

I'm not certain this is a good thing, to be honest... the intelligence services are renowned for overstepping their mark, and I'm sure the sections on dealing with investigative journalists and the like will be useful to those who fight against that kind of thing, but I suspect the bits about dealing with foreign intelligence agencies would probably have best been kept secret. Still, the cat is out of the bag, so perhaps it's no bad thing if the MoD are forced to have a total security audit and overhaul their manual 🙂

I've not managed to download it - WikiLeaks servers seem to be rather busy - but the front page does have some interesting snippets from the sections about visitors to China and Russia, discussing the kinds of things the local intelligence agencies do to try and extract Western commercial and military secrets.

This has some interesting bearing on the growing tendency to outsource software development tasks to developing countries. I know a lot of this work does go to China, and so we can probably assume that any intellectual property made available to developers in China is probably scrutinised by their security services and passed on to Chinese companies that may be able to benefit from it.

In the depths of my career history, I once worked on a software system that was to be used in a Government project to protect the nation's "critical national infrastructure"; and I gather that another part of the system was outsourced to an Indian development team. I'm not sure if the client was actually made aware of this, but at the time, I felt concerned that national security might be threatened by this.