10 Years Ago…. (by sarah)

Ten years ago today Alaric got to the train station and thought "you know what I don't want to go to work today, my pregnant wife is very sick and in that hospital just there, I'll go and see her instead". This was an unusual thought for him, as it was he mostly worked from home and only went in once a week for meetings.

It was bizar behaviour on his part but something I am so glad he did. He held my hand as I sat on machines that monitored my vitals and then he went to get my breakfast. I think I fell asleep, something was going on, nurses were running past the door, Alaric came and with a nurse helped get me to the breakfast room with it's TV.

He explained a bomb had gone off, we watched the news as it unfolded with a sickening sense of relief, Alaric could have, should have been on that train. Then the panic as we realised that it wasn't one attack but several - that it was hitting routes we knew. I tried to phone my friends and family who worked in London. Unsurprisingly the networks were jammed - in hindsight we should have been leaving the phones for emergency stuff but we weren't thinking we just wanted to check everyone was safe.

Our Drs started to disappear as they left to help or be medical stand by, my parents turned up thinking they were going to have to tell their very ill very pregnant daughter that her husband was missing on one of the blown up routes. They had been trying to phone him, none of the phones were working.

They were angry with him in that way you get angry when a child didn't come when you called, and you imagine the worst. Then he got hugged. And then the maternity ward began to break down. They say there is no stress induced pregnancy but woman after woman came in with blood pressure problems or in labour or both. The ward filled, there were women on trollies in the corridor - we were not on the labour ward but one woman ended up in the advance stages of having her baby in the maternity ward with me. They pulled the curtains round her bed, she was calling for her husband - her parents didn't know where he was, he had not done an Alaric, he was either dead, injuried or stranded in a motionaless London.

There was not enough beds or staff and bloody foot prints appeared and stayed on the floor. I was bewildered.

After much trying we got hold of as many friends and family as we could, checking they were all ok. More than one had had a near miss, were sitting still in London, sitting on steps crying or telling me how eeri it was with all the traffic stopped, with the hush, and with everyone being kind. London is normally a free for all, pushing, rushing, ignoring the press of humanity but that wasn't what was happening. Everyone was milling, quiet and in shock, everyone knew they were the lucky ones.

Everyone had been expecting the attack since 7/11 in the US, in truth London commuters had been being a bit nicer to each other since that point all fearing that this day was coming. If your train was delayed by more than ten minutes and you had no reception but someone else did - they would lend you their phone to phone and say you were alive. This affect multiplied on the day, I did not really register the stories at the time - I was too ill and mainly wanted to know that the people I cared about were fine.

That is not saying that I had no feelings for those who weren't, it was horrific but I needed to know my friends were fine.

When he got home Alaric found we'd been added to shout outs, it was before the days of social media but we did have blogs and mailing lists and everyone was checking that we were ok. People were worried.

My friends and family were lucky, but mum's friend son - not so much. He's alive due to the carriage he got in but bar the shock of the actual explosion and minor injuries he then had to be escorted past the carnage. Last I heard he still hadn't gone back to work, not all the scars were physical ones, not all of them could heal.

Much later on I realised that it had been even more of a close call for our little family, if I had not been ill and in hospital then we could all have been on the train. It's a strange twist of fate and one that wedges inside me, that me almost dying potentially saved all three of our lives. I say potentially because we might have been late or delayed or I might have weed myself on the way to the station or a million other things, but all of those things are nothing but grace as was me being so ill Alaric felt justified in not going to work that morning.

Terrorism is a horrendous thing, life taking for political gain, for power, religion, to make a point, to drive the wedge... murder is the only name for it.

It was muslims that time but it followed a tradition of London bombs. Someone asked me how I could still travel on the tube into London - the answer, "The RIA didn't stop us, oil disputes in the 70's did not stop my mother, hell she even had her bank hijacked, so why let this lot?". They weren't all muslims like the RIA were not all the Irish, the point of the bombings was to divide, to make an us and them, sadly with some people they succeeded and that is sad. Muslims were killed on the trains and buses, muslim doctors came and aided people straight away - before anyone really knew what they were dealing with, weather those drs were putting their own lives at risk or not.

Terrorists don't really care who they kill, who they injure or maim, that's kind of the point of the bombs. Ever wondered why we don't have metal bins anymore?

Anyway that is all besides the point. Today there are people remembering loved ones who should but aren't still here and no amount of photos shown on international TV is going to heal the wholes in those families. Later today I am going to light ten candles - one for each year, for the yawning chasm of pain, for those who were lost and those that still bare the scars.

DNS issues today (by alaric)

Gah! This morning, my alerting system texted me to say that love (the primary server) can't talk to ihibehu (the backup server in the USA). A quick looked confirmed that we seemed to have some kind of routing loop in level3's network, which was therefore returning "TTL exceeded" to pings. I could connect to ihibehu OK from another network, confirming that it was just a local routing spat of some kind. I shrugged and moved on with life.

However, people started complaining they couldn't resolve DNS for stuff I host, so I had another look. love and ihibehu are both DNS servers (they go by the name of ns0.warhead.org.uk and ns1.warhead.org.uk in that role), and if one is unreachable, then the other should be contacted, so all should have been fine. However, it turned out that the IP address for ns0.warhead.org.uk was still pointing to its old location (and love don't live there anymore), so ns0.warhead.org.uk wasn't "working"; and so for the people whose route to ihibehu went via the routing problem, ns1.warhead.org.uk wasn't working as well.

Oops! One tricky aspect of distributed fault-tolerant systems is that sometimes part of them fails and you don't realise because all the user-visible stuff silently fails over. Therefore, you need to test things below the failover layer to make sure they work individually. Although I check both DNS servers are up, I wasn't checking that the "glue records" mapping the nameserver names to IPs pointed to the right place...

But I clearly remembered sending in the request to the registrar to change the glue record for ns0.warhead.org.uk when I moved it, didn't I? I checked my emails and, yes, I'd send that request, but with all the other stuff I was dealing with in the migration, I never chased it up. And lo, nestled among my spam emails was a response from the registrar, reminding me that I still had access to the interface to do it myself (The registrar used to be me, but I passed that mantle on to somebody else), and suggesting I do so. So it had never gotten done.

"No time like the present, then," I thought, and set out to send in the request, only to find that I don't still have access to the interface, because it also needs a password which I removed from my password databases when I passed control of the registry interface over. Doh!

So I've re-requested that the registrar does it for me. Thankfully, the routing loop has healed up and all is working again while I wait for that to happen. And I'm going to write a test for my glue records being correct into my monitoring system, because that was just sloppy!

Concussion Update (by sarah)

Just a quick update - I have improved drastically, went to the Drs yesterday and he is pleased with with the fact I can plan knit and colour in even though I can't follow patterns or do my own drawing. Writing still hurts, reading still hurts and gives me virtigo.

I am bored but hey I'm felting like a fiend, I made wings - they glow. I am not up to using the image uploader yet - I'm barely using the camera and the quality of pictures taking is shocking.

This will all just take time but it should be a full recovery - I have fine motor skills back and no longer slur - speech is still slower than normal but as I was a fast talker this is only evident to people who know me. I also take a while to answer some things or think of the word - it's weird but I do normally get there. Sadly this also means I solve problems several hours after they needed solving - I am not used to not being able to see ways to solve/get around/sort things out.

I am very behind on work, I dread to think about how many emails I have. I am taking it easy and waiting for my brain to sort itself for another 4-6 weeks depending on headaches, I am going to the clinic about the polyp/lumps in my sinuses in August, I am getting sorted. I am enjoying colouring in but it takes forever, writing this is taking for ever and is harder than I could have thought.

I am still very tired and need to get away from noise as I start to have trouble processing information and sensory import. I've not been able to watch TV or films or fair ground rides or highly patterned clothing. I sleep and get dizzy but this is now a lot less than it was.

Feeling thick would be a good discription and the reading writing stuff is the way I remember it from infant school - I used to get vertigo then - that was the dyslexia - is it that now? Has the concussion made that worse? I am distracted but can now keep hold of my phone - I've completely lost my keys though but then not really allowed out on my own anyway :/

I think I've fucked up part of my career again at least temporarily and I am hacked off about that.

There is still a bump, a phyiscal ouchy lump that sits there in my hair and the whole area hurts if I laugh but hey I've started to laugh, I take a while to get jokes but I was often slow at that and then laugh and laugh once I got it but this is more so than that.

The girls have mostly been brilliant and poor Al... well he's been the hero once more. I dry brushed my hair for the first time today as lump was still bleeding/weeping before - I am a frizz ball but it's stinging so I don't wont to put serum or anything on the hair and I learnt at the weekend that putting my hair up can pull on the lump area - not nice.

I am getting there - thanks for the well wishes an d patience and help.

Ugarit 2.0 released (by alaric)

Unless I messed up the release process, Ugarit version 2.0 is now available from the Chicken Scheme egg repository.

What does this mean to you, dear reader? Not a huge amount; you can go and read the release notes at the bottom of the Ugarit documentation page for the fine detail. But, to summarise:

• The beginnings of archival mode! As well as storing chains of snapshots of a filesystem, as Ugarit has always done (generally to be used as a versioned backup system), Ugarit vaults can now also store "archives", which are groups of files or directory trees identified by arbitary metadata, such as "This is the song 'Ooofarno' by 'Bobby and the Beaters', which is track 11 out of 12 from the 'Fishes In The Sea' album", or "This is a photo of Aunt Mavis taken at 13:58 on the 3rd of August, 2020, at Uncle Bob's 100th birthday party", or "This is a PDF of a paper by Donald Knuth on ternary numbers, called 'Simplified Arithmetic in Base Three'". You can then find things by searching on this metadata, which is much, much, nicer than creating trees of directories to organise all your stuff into. The user interface for getting things in and out of archives is still a bit minimal - but I have plans to fix that.

• The way tags are stored has changed. Ugarit 2.0 will read vaults created by prior versions happily, but when it writes to a vault, it'll write new-format tags (which have type information as well as a pointer to something), which old versions of Ugarit won't be very pleased to find.

• We now store a "metadata block" in every vault, pointed to by a hidden tag (we didn't used to be able to hide tags, so old versions of Ugarit will show you a funny tag, and complain if you try and do anything with it, as it's a new-format tag). This stores a vault format version number, so we can better handle incompatible changes to the vault format going forward; and as it's hashed and encrypted like any other block, it means you'll get an instant error if you try and connect to a vault using the wrong hashing and encryption settings, rather than bizarre errors further down the line.

• We've made it possible to store large logs in the vault. When we do a snapshot or an archive import or something, we keep a log of warnings and recoverable errors that cropped up while doing so. This is stored as a file attached directly to the snapshot or import object, so it can be arbitrarily large.

• Added log.sexpr and properties.sexpr files in the explore-mode interface, inside every snapshot or archive import object, which let you access the log and the metadata. These are files you can extract, or you can look at them with the new cat command.

• Added a cat command in the explore-mode user interface to dump a file to the screen for viewing.

• Added a client-side cache of snapshots and imports, which significantly speeds up the exploration of backup histories and archive metadata. Optionally, you can make the cache persist between sessions, otherwise it's made afresh for every explore session.

• As well as the existing ability to fork a tag into two tags that share the same history (applicable both to snapshot tags and archive tags), added the ability to merge two tags into one, melding the two histories into one. This includes some exciting logic to combine those histories for display in explore mode!

• Added a new sqlite backend, which provides a storage inside a single file, managed by sqlite. I wrote it to make testing easier, but it's a useful storage backend in its own right!

• Tidied up the Ugarit internals, splitting the core up into a load of separate modules. This makes development easier for me, and means nothing to users.

So what's next? I want to improve the usability of archive mode - right now, it's quite easy to import a bunch of files, but you have to hand-edit a text file to provide metadata beyond what it can automatically extract (currently just basic file information, plus whatever it can extract from ID3 tags and Ogg metadata); and then you can explore the history of the archive (as a series of imports) through the explore interface, or use a command-line tool to search for files, and then extract them or stream them to standard output.

What I want is:

• A shiny (web-based?) UI for searching the archive, seeing thumbnails of images, and the ability to download files with a single click or to perform bulk editing operations on metadata with ease and panache.

• A music player, that lets me pick music from an archive to queue, or to be given an arbitrary search criteria to find music to random-play, playing direct from the archive.

• A way to pick photos and assemble them into galleries, which are then publicly visible through a Web interface. Sarah wants to be able to put sequences of photos together, as well as individual photos that don't form parts of sequences, into multiple albums, for her blog publishing stuff (which is often quite image-heavy). The current image publishing framework I threw together for her years ago is a bit limiting now, and quite clunky to use.

• A mountable filesystem that lets me access archives, either in a generic manner (with auto-generated directories for every property, and every value of that property, containing all files with that value of that property) or with customised directory layouts (such as presenting my music collection as /music/ARTIST/ALBUM/NUMBER:TITLE.EXTENSION, with all the capitalised bits generated from the metadata). I'd like to do this by adding this to the explore mode virtual filesystem, and then having that mountable.

Concussion (by alaric)

For all of the time I've known her, Sarah has been poorly. When we first met, she was being investigated for a bowel problem, and she also suffered shoulder pain from a bike accident when she was a teenager. When she was pregnant with our first child, she had an exciting array of complications, and took many years to recover from the experience; she had mobility issues and pain due to a separated pelvis, lacked energy, had reduced sensation in her legs, and so on. The second pregnancy was nowhere near as bad, but Sarah still bled for months afterwards due to problems with her womb lining.

However, some months ago, while trying to lose weight, she cut wheat from her diet; and a load of niggling health problems she had reduced significantly, while her energy levels rose. She suddenly found it easier to lose weight, and things were looking pretty rosy.

However, this meant that she wasn't certain of her limits any more. Last Sunday, she was dancing, and found that she could now dance hard, and didn't need to keep stopping and resting; until she was suddenly dizzy, and stumbled backwards off of the nice soft grass and onto a concrete path, where she fell over backwards and hit her head hard on the ground.

I didn't see it happen; I was looking the other way, but Jean called out to me, and I saw Sarah lying on her back. She was instantly surrounded by people, and a paramedic was at hand almost immediately, so other than providing my cloak as a blanket, my role was reduced to holding her hand and helping Jean to pack up our things so we could leave.

This led to a thrilling trip in an ambulance with her neck immobilised, and several hours in A&E being examined and X-rayed.

Thankfully, this revealed that she had no structural damage to her spine or skull, so she could be released from the collar and head restraints, and sent home.

Jean was a star throughout; she rode in the ambulance, with Sarah's glasses and phone and medication, while I followed in the car, and helped the ambulance staff by verifying the truth of questions they asked Sarah to check her memory function. She didn't panic, even though it was clearly stressful for her, and did all the right things.

On Monday, Sarah mainly slept. On Tuesday, my father and stepmother visited, and we had a day out; Sarah was still speaking slowly and having short-term memory problems (forgetting where she put things, mainly). But on Wednesday she was struggling, with her speech slurring and often struggling to remember words for things, so she spoke haltingly. So we took her back to A&E, where she was given a CT scan, which thankfully confirmed that she didn't have any bleeding inside her skull (which would have been bad news). So she was let out again, and told to come back if she wasn't better in another week and a half.

At the time of writing, a week after the accident, she still has difficulty concentrating for long conversations, and can't concentrate on reading or watching TV or anything like that for more than a few minutes at a time. If she tries, she starts to struggle to think clearly at all, and her speech worsens. I've not kept track, but she sleeps through the night and probably spends at least a quarter of the day napping, and has to restrict her waking hours to mentally non-taxing tasks. Loud noises cause her pain, and I've been having to work from home to keep an eye on her and to keep Mary from bothering her.

So, it looks like she has Post-concussion Syndrome; this means she may be better in a few weeks - or may well be like this for years. Apparently about one in ten people still have symptoms after a year.

Her personality is intact, and her memories all seem to still exist; she just has to take her time to find them, which makes conversation difficult at times. But she can't do any of the things she loves to do, because sustained concentration renders her zombie-like within minutes. Unless that clears up, her career in writing, crafts workshops, and science communication will be over. I feel reasonably confident I can leave her looking after herself at home now, but she won't cope on days when Mary is not at nursery, so if things don't improve my job may become awkward until Mary starts at school in September, too.

So, for the time being, all we can do is hope it gets better!