Mrs Westmoreland

I was in her last year of teaching at Harrison in 1984, died in 2010:

http://announce.jpress.co.uk/portsmouth-news-group/obituary/7709547

I can vaguely remember her saying she was retiring that year as we left to move up to senior school.  Of course to 10/11 year olds it means nothing, but I'm glad she had a long retirement.

Book read: The Establishment by Owen Jones

Film: Star Wars: The Force Awakens Directed by J J Abrams

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2488496/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Film: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 Directed by Francis Lawrence

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1951265/

Film: Persepolis directed by Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808417/

Kick Off Nostalgia

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2015/12/kick-off-2-world-cup-competitive-esports-25-year-old-amiga-game/

Film: The English Patient directed by Anthony Minghella

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116209/

Typical Cisco acquisition fail

Good article on a $415M acquisition failure of Whiptail storage arrays.  Has all the hallmarks of a typical acquisition by them, failure to integrate, management infighting, founders and key employees leave, and the investment gets written off:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/whipped_tails_acquisition_angst_and_attrition

Java vulnerabilities in popular library

Interesting article on java library security problems:

http://foxglovesecurity.com/2015/11/06/what-do-weblogic-websphere-jboss-jenkins-opennms-and-your-application-have-in-common-this-vulnerability/

Film: The Martian directed by Ridley Scott

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3659388/

Book read: The Martian by Andy Weir

With the release of the Ridley Scott film, this book was republished and I picked it up to try and get back into reading some science fiction.

My last science fiction was an Iain Banks novel which was a clever book but a difficult read.

The Martian is a breath of fresh air compared to that.  The story is of an astronaut left for dead on Mars who has to work out how to survive long enough for rescue.   The chapters comprise of limited horizon problem solving to try and extend his survival window, all based on believable science and calculations.

There are also some good chapters of the rescue mission planning back on Earth, where Weir captures the "united front" portrayed to the outside world, versus the "internal politics" of the inner NASA management.

I read it in a few days which usually is a good sign of a good read.

Cisco CEO articles

Some good articles on the new Cisco CEO - and a sharp analysis of IoT and the obsession with doing things faster for no obvious benefit.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06/cisco_robbins_keynote/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/11/pitchforks_torches_and_awful_quotes/

Elon Musk - Mars awaits, when can you go?

I cannot be the only person who cannot wait until this guy disappears to Mars, this type of comment from him just makes me think of that great day:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-10/09/elon-musk-apple-tesla-graveyard

He sounds must be very difficult to work for, support abusive employment  and spend all day riding on the back of the achievements of others!

Graphing calculator article

Interesting article about graphing calulators used in American maths teaching:

http://mic.com/articles/125829/your-old-texas-instruments-graphing-calculator-still-costs-a-fortune-heres-why

Which also mentions a app like replacement:

https://www.desmos.com/

Film: Un Flic Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067900/

Book read: Captain Cook by Frank Mclynn

Since visiting Australia I've wanted to read more about Captain Cook.  I bought this book as a Christmas present which I then got lent to read.  At first I was daunted by the size of the book ~400 pages of very small print.

But it is very readable, despite the mixed reviews on Amazon over accuracy.   It goes through all of Cook's voyages and seems to have a balanced view of the effects of western contact with the remote island societies (on balance not beneficial - despite Cook's good intentions).

The feats of navigation stand out, in the late 1700s before longitude could be measured accurately.  There is some discussion about Cook being "lucky" never to have truly seen harsh 100ft waves but that seems a little unfair.  However the author lists other such loses that may have been due to these waves and that they are more common that originally thought - being powerful enough to take out a modern cruise liner.

Film: Biutiful Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1164999/

Building GDB for debugging on ARM

I needed a way to run a remote gdb session on an ARM system from an Linux PC.

Useful link:

https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/BuildingCrossGDBandGDBserver

Building gdb from source, configure with:

./configure --target=arm-linux-gnueabi

make 

This leads to a gdb binary that runs on the host Linux PC but has an ARM target 

architecture.

Similarly a gdbserver can be built for the target machine with:

./configure --host=arm-linux-gnueabi

make 

On the target system we run gdbserver:

gdbserver :8888 

Note this can be a stripped binary.

On the host PC we run gdb:

file 

target remote :port

cont

Book read: Harrier by Johnathan Glancey

BBC fires 1000 people

Interesting article on the BBC seeing a shortfall of licence payers because of the availability of iPlayer and other online media.

Failure to move with the times, the charter renewal will surely have to cover how they are funded or what they can make money on.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2015/07/bbc-axes-1000-jobs-due-to-growing-popularity-of-online-video-streaming/

Type 45 review

I have always wanted to find time to read a national audit office report particularly on our defence industry.  They are surprisingly accessible this one is about the Type 45:

http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/0809295.pdf

Building any sort of warship is an expensive exercise and the NAO are looking at cost overruns and how they could be mitigated.  The government is always looking to secure "hi-tech" jobs as well as provide a capability.  They generally achieve both but at greater cost.

These are really expensive warships, and Britain only ended up buying 6 of the planned 12.  Each ship is just over £1bn.  This buys the UK a "state of the art" air defence capability.

Some of the claims feel a little over stretched, a lot of the time making you feel the need to know that one ship is more capable then many Type 42 put together.

The problem lies in that with two aircraft carriers on the way, only one would be able to be at sea with 2 or 3 Type 45's as escort.  We've bought an expensive capability and too little of it to be useful for our constrained budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_45_destroyer#Propulsion

Film: Jurassic World Directed by Colin Trevorrow

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369610/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

This film was better than expected.  Within the confines of an action movie were some interesting themes of corporate soulnessess, American ways of life, and tired theme park culture.

Plus good action shots too and not a neat happy ending.

Film: Being John Malkovich Directed by Spike Jonze

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120601/

Fermi Paradox

Great video on the Fermi paradox on youtube:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc

Interesting Ultimate Articles/Blog

A short history of the elusive stampers:

http://www.filfre.net/2014/01/the-legend-of-ultimate-play-the-game/

A reverse engineering blog:
http://www.livewiredesign.co.uk/?tag=/Stampers#sthash.CYvkcv1C.dpbs

Studio interview with Sagan, Hawking, Clarke

Great piece of history here a television interview from 1988 with Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Arthur C Clarke.  The interviewer is Mangus Magnusson who asks some great questions about modern science, and existence of god.

One fascinating piece is Arthur C Clarke demonstrating the Mandlebrot set on a high end Amiga computer.  I spent some time recently writing my own generator as an exercise in Qt programming.  Clarke loading the pre-generated images (which apparently took 12 hours or more) worked as fast as my program generating it on the fly.

That is a great observation of modern computing power, and not my programming skills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQQAv5svkk

Recovering an encrypted LVM drive from another system

I had an SSD begin to fail on my laptop.  The symptoms were interesting, a md5um of a large tar file began to produce inconsistent results.

My backups were a little basic on my laptop - so I replaced my SSD and went through this procedure to recover what I could from a SATA disk caddy with the SSD attached.

1.  fdisk /dev/sdb to determine the LVM partition (/dev/sdb5 say).
2.  Decrypt the partition ready for mounting:

          cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb5 recover-disk

3.  vgscan to find the current volumes available
4.  lvdisplay to find the volumes we can say (vg-mint/root say).
5.  Mount the LVM partition:
       
     mount /dev/vg-mint/root /mnt/other-disk

6.  Now the drive is mounted, and we can copy data off (hopefully!)

Useful link:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=940904

Useful linux wireless commands

Here are some useful linux wireless commands:

Query wireless devices enable/disable

rfkill list
rfkill unblock <0>

To check details and driver info

lshw -class network

Starting up wireless on the command line

Create a wpa_supplicant file (maybe using wpa_gui):

#Generated by wpa_gui
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

network={
    ssid="your ssid"
    psk="your passphrase"
    proto=RSN
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    pairwise=TKIP
    auth_alg=OPEN
}

Now run wpa_supplicant to setup the connection:

wpa_supplicant -B -iwlan0 -c./wpa_supplicant.conf -Dwext

And dhclient wlan0 to get an ipaddress.

Simplified wireless command line

# Enable the interface
ip link set wlan0 up

# Scan for networks
iw dev wlan0 scan

# Run supplicant
wpa_supplicant -D nl80211,wext -i wlan0 -c <(wpa_passphrase SSID KEY)

# Assign IP address
ip addr add 192.168.0.10/24 dev wlan0

# OR dhclient
dhclient wlan0

 

Series: Mad Men Series 6 directed by Matthew Weiner

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804503/episodes?season=6&ref_=tt_eps_sn_6

Film: Layer Cake directed by Matthew Vaughn

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375912/synopsis?ref_=tt_stry_pl

Film: Charlie Wilson's War directed by Mike Nichols

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472062/?ref_=nm_flmg_prd_31

Articles on compromised carriers

These are old articles but give an interesting overview on the poor decision making for the sake of British jobs when it comes to defence.  Yes we really are building aircraft carriers where we will never be able to afford a full complement of planes!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06/defence_committee_carrier_badness/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/10/f35_u_turn_idiocy/

David Cameron was stating that we have the fifth largest defence budget in the world.  It does us no good when we get such terrible value for money!  Companies like BAe have the gun to the head of the government over defence jobs and extract the maximum amount of money for it.  We often end up with over priced equipment that is years late.

Film: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel directed by John Madden

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2555736/

UK Afghan war effort commeration

If there is one thing I would rather this country do less well in it is pointless pagentary and state occasion such as this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31866944

I would sacrifice this to have a better, more capable, and cost effective defence, or better run public services.

So I'm sure no expense was spared here - unlike in the under funded Afghan operation.  Our general inability to run the operation in the early days has led to distrust from America - who we don't like to admit had to bail us out on some of the operation.

The sight of war criminal Blair and defence penny pinching Brown sitting next to each other just sickened me.  Brown is famously supposed to have balked at a request for more budget for the Afghan campaign by saying "we already spend a huge amount - why can't we fight two wars at once".

I also find it ridiculous that any political debate on defence spending always starts of praising our service men and women, without addressing the disgraceful way money is wasted on the budget.  For £36bn we do not get much bang for our buck.

Much of this is the political interference and companies like BAe having politicians over a barrel with the threat of job reductions if costs are not met in full.  We end up building expensive aircraft carriers with compromised designs with massive cost over runs - all in the name of protecting high skilled jobs at great expense.

HSBC - way too big to fail

A bit harsh but the parliamentary special committee requesting that the Rona Fairhead non executive director at the time of the HSBC tax evasion should be fired from her current job at the BBC Trust.

It was good to see these people being asked "what did you think the big bucks were for" and asking them to accept some responsibility.

But it also showed that the bank was just too big to be managed hierarchically - and no management structure could have stopped this.  Therefore it needs to be a smaller organisation.

Odds on Rifkind getting into the Lords?

I think it will probably still happen - he did not come across at all well in the dispatches programme.  Claiming as an MP that he is "self-employed" and that £67k was too small a salary to live on, hence the need to take on consultancies work.

Type 26 initial investment announced

Initial investment announced for Type 26.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-31554494

Always interesting to see how this works, in some ways BAE have the government over a barrel - in order to safeguard British jobs.  So the question of is this the most effective capability often comes a distant second.

As with the Type 45 I expect the eventual number of ships will be much reduced as costs spiral (as they are bound to on a complex project which are often optimistically budgeted).

Government bribes for older people

In the past few years successive UK government have had policies skewed toward older people (for older people read "active voters").

So things like:

1. Winter fuel allowance
2. Free bus travel
3. Free TV licence for over 75
4. NS&I pensioner bonds with market beating interest rates

All with no means testing.  This leaves younger people (read "unlikely to vote") struggling for things like living wage, help with travel costs, expensive childcare, and a housing crisis.

It is not fair and the bribery with tax payers money has to stop!

See related article - estimated cost £3bn:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31580520

Film: Jack Reacher directed by Christopher McQuarrie

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790724/

Book: Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

I saw the film imitation game before christmas.  A good film but it felt like it mainly covered Turing from the war years.  So I bought the book as I wanted to find out more about him.

It is a large book, but very readable.  It covers Turing's early years very well and you get a good impression of what shaped him.  Both the public school/Cambridge system, the tragic death of his school friend Christopher Morcom, and his repressed homosexuality.

Of course the war and the cracking of enigma is a large part of the book.  The last part of the book is the birth of computing and Turing's vision of what computers could do (despite being surrounded by early computers which were primitive to say the least).

The book covers right up to his tragic death, presumed suicide and also gives a good social coverage of Britain at that time.

Film: Invictus Directed by Clint Eastwood

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1057500/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Film: Ex Machina Directed by Alex Garland

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/

Really good, minimalist film about a reclusive social media CEO who has been perfecting human like AI in his remote home.

An employee "wins" a trip to go out to his retreat and gets to see his creation.  He is completely amazed and is given the chance to meet the AI and see if they can pass the Turing test.

But it is all downhill from there.  The CEO character has many flaws one of which is wanting to be treated like a "regular" guy, but when he is he then gets upset and angry.

The AI is haunting, and is playing it's own game intent on escape.  One of the really good scenes are the power failures it induces in the building so it can speak to the employee "truthfully" about the CEO and his intentions.

A really good film and thought provoking too.

Film: Black Book directed by Paul Verhoeven

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389557/

Film: Dredd directed by Pete Travis

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343727/

Film: After Life directed by Hirokazu Koreeda

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165078/

Film: Napoleon Dynamite directed by Jared Hess

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374900/

Film: Memento directed by Christopher Nolan

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/

Film: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Directed by Peter Jackson

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2310332/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Film: The Counterfeiters Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0813547/