Centenary Camp, and coats of many pockets (by alaric)

We've had a busy weekend running the Cranham contingent at the district Centenary Camp.

One highlight for me was finding the Cubs all scrabbling about searching their pockets for small change and whispering conspiratorially. "Akela, Akela!" they said when I approached. "You've got to buy this badge we found in the camp shop! It says Akela and it has a wolf and it'd look really good on you!"

So I let them excitedly drag me to the shop tent, where they pointed out this badge and looked me expectantly. I presume (from the conversation I walked into) they'd been trying to see if they could buy it for me between themselves, but had failed to raise the pound required, so I bought it myself, much to their delight.

I've surmised that having it sewn on in time for our next meeting (Wednesday) might mean a lot to them, so I've stayed up tonight attaching it to my coat-of-many-pockets 🙂

Now, I used to be famous for wearing coats of many pockets, stuffed with first aid equipment, compass, and the like. I gave up the practice due to fears that the weight distribution wasn't doing my back any good, and moved to a belt of many pouches instead, but that finally died a death, so after a terrifying period of wandering around not equipped for an unexpected nuclear strike, my brother in law and his girlfriend bought me a new coat of many pockets for my birthday. So I'm back to wearing coats of many pockets, except this time I'm not going to load it up so far!

A design for a Scheme web application framework (by alaric)

While sitting on a train yesterday, I typed up some thoughts...

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Invader! (by alaric)

When I arrived back at home from dropping Jean and Sarah off in Cheltenham, I was greeted by Helium as I got out of the van. She was rubbing against my ankles and all the usual "Please let me in!" cat behaviour.

But as I approached our front door, I saw another cat run away and dart into the stable. It was the tabby and white one we sometimes see.

Intrigued, I went into the stable, with Helium still following me. All was quiet in there, but the other cat could be hiding anywhere amongst all the furniture, boxes, buckets and gardening tools, so I stood quiet and still for a few minutes. Helium sniffed at the floor a bit, but otherwise just kept rubbing against me, until we both heard a small noise from behind a pile of boxes; her head snapped round and her ears pricked up. She quietly advanced on the place, then she froze, and her back slowly rose into an arch. There was a few seconds of stalemate, then the cat bolted out of hiding. Helium leapt to attack and the other cat tried to jump over her so she only caught its legs, resulting in them both sprawling on the floor, but then the invader was up and away, leaping for the open window. Helium caught up and grabbed its hind legs as it scrabbled through the gap, clawing and biting, but then it squeezed through and was off, Helium in hot pursuit.

I caught up with her in the garden, standing in the middle of the lawn, head raised and ears pricked, scanning the bushes suspiciously, having successfully repelled the invader.

Fault tolerant Web hosting (by alaric)

As Sarah reminded me, I should blog my article:

Fault-tolerant Web hosting on a shoestring

24-core CPU (by alaric)

Hurrah:

SEAforthâ„¢-24A Embedded Array Processor

I'd been hoping something would come of this since I first came across the original design.

I still think much more RAM is needed, though. As it stands it'd be great for processing most kinds of streamed data, where you don't need to store much context, but for more general purpose applications, much more RAM is required, and with a high-bandwidth link to the processors that need it, too...