ContentedLife

It was a beautiful day so I headed back in time to go out on the bike. Bought it a couple of weeks ago, having not ridden for 10 years. Taken it out twice so far, just far enough to raise some concerns that it’s the wrong bike for me, wondering if I should try to return it or sell it before it gets dirty. But had to go out.

Bought and fitted a gel saddle, which is a big improvement over the rock solid one it came with, and had a most refreshing excursion of 8 miles or so over Upton Heath and around Beacon Hill. Enough to realise I do want to change it (and of course it’s dirty now). It doesn’t cope with sand, and there’s a lot of sandy heaths around here. It’s inexplicably heavy, and there seem to be a lot of gates that it has to be lifted over. Want something a tad more agile… but I’m just happy to have rediscovered cycling. I love it. I love for the first time having a bike that can (sand notwithstanding) cope with tracks as well as roads. Now, what if instead of merely coping, it excelled…

The car shuddered and juddered and wheezed its way along the final half mile to Sarah’s. I flipped the bonnet and gave the throttle cable a gentle pull to see if it was doing the same “little puff of white smoke from the engine block” thing it had done on the return from Nottingham. Ah yes, there it is. And hakk hakk karf, oh, there’s a HUGE cloud of acrid white smoke just come out of the exhaust. Never had that before. I don’t know much about engine mechanics, but I reckon that might not be a good sign.

I had been planning on going to Earthdance this weekend, but started going off the idea when I found out it was at the Scala, and for other random reasons. But had no alternative option. Then news emerged of a house party in Soton. Much better, I love house parties.

Of course it was nothing like my expectations. Ali was supposed to be coming, but didn’t. Tom didn’t originally sound keen on the idea but came along and seemed to enjoy it. Manitou (a free party crew) had done a full-on UV decor and soundsystem job in the lounge, to the extent that it really felt more like a club than a house party, especially with beer on tap and a nitrous dispensary. Outside that room, other rooms were at capacity and giving off cliquey vibes by the time we arrived. Didn’t feel comfortable trying to infiltrate there… maybe I just wasn’t in a conversational mood (wasn’t wearing a crystal). So it was fine, I spent most of the night in the club room dancing, drinking, and chatting a bit, with occasional rests in the hammock on the “beach” (it was a beach party — they’d shipped in a load of sand and a paddling pool) but mostly dancing.

There was one other person who was on the same kind of dancing vibe as me, really feeling it, and for much of the evening we danced together, moved around each other, made lots of friendly eye contact… didn’t touch and didn’t talk, because there was no need. The smiles and movement and aura of mutual respect said it all. Trying to talk to her would’ve just felt so wrong. That may be the first time I’ve honoured that feeling, instead of letting some inner voice which isn’t even me tell me that I “should” talk to someone in that situation, and then beat myself up for not doing it.

Overall had an excellent time. Left about 5am, got to sleep about 6, up at 11 with the barest of hangovers, considering. Had wine, mostly. Not ideal from a plastic pint glass (it’s all they had), but that may actually have got me drinking more slowly, carefully… However, Montana Sauvignon is waaay too sweet/fruity, and Jacob’s Creek Sem/Ch, which used to be my staple, I find quite unpleasant these days. Changing taste in wine seems strangely fundamental, like it tracks more deep-level changes. White’s not doing it for me, yet cheap Chilean red is going down nicely… and not only did I find myself able to drink Donna’s rosé without retching, I voluntarily had a second glass. Don’t worry, it’s a long way from there to being a committed pinkdrinker (that could be a nice euphemism… or not…).

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the road lest the mud ruin her clothes.

“Come on, girl” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud and put her down safely on the other side. The monks then continued on their way.

Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he could no longer restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and attractive ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”

“I put the girl down back there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”

— traditional Zen koan

The past year for me has been about letting go of attachments. It’s not until you do this that you realise how many there are. People, places, objects, knowledge, experiences, expectations, the past, the future. Fortunately they are all manifestations of the same underlying pathology – the ego-mind. One technique is helping me overcome them all, and it’s very simple. It just needs practice. And the ego finds all sorts of reasons to avoid practicing.

The big one I’m wedged at presently is the past. I am no longer traumatized by “bad” past events. But the above koan makes an important point – it can be just as dangerous to dwell on pleasant past experiences as unpleasant ones. There is no difference; you are still not present, and scratching around in your memories for a reason to feel good Now produces only a fading echo of positive emotion that soon gives way to blues because you are no longer in that situation. It also allows the ego to continue investing situations with the power to “make you feel good” or “make you feel bad”; if situations have that power, You don’t.

It’s only quite recently that I discovered I had the choice to feel good (or bad) irrespective of my situation. Having realised that, you may think, it’s easy to choose to feel good. Oh no. The ego intervenes. It throws a tantrum. It does everything in its power to stop that choice being made. At times it can be tough to remember that I have more power than it.

It was easier being a Christian. You don’t need to be powerful, in fact the more weak and feeble you are, the better, the more you need God to come and save you from Satan. You are absolved from any responsibility for your own life. And God is more powerful than Satan, so will win the war in the end, even if he seems to be losing most of the battles. It’s all part of the plan.

Without that safety net, you need to find your own source of power. I had to go through some dark, dark times to realise just how much I needed a light. And then my wife walked away to show me that no-one, nothing outside of myself, could be depended on. I and I alone had to find my power, and in so doing, become whole. This is my quest.

I’ve been using BackupPC to take offsite backups of all my machines over the network for over a year. It seemed to work well enough and, it seemed, would always email me if it hadn’t been able to backup a certain machine for a few days.

Yesterday I discovered that it has not done a successful backup of one of my machines since March! I just suddenly noticed on the status screen that instead of a table of 8 backups (2 full and 6 incr), only 3 were shown — 2 full, both dating back to March, and 1 “partial” from the day before yesterday. Looking at the logs I see this:


2006-07-24 06:00:05 full backup started for directory /data/work; updating partial 678
2006-07-24 06:20:28 full backup started for directory /home; updating partial 678
2006-07-24 06:20:34 Got fatal error during xfer (fileListReceive failed)
2006-07-24 06:20:39 Backup aborted (fileListReceive failed)
2006-07-24 06:20:39 Saved partial dump 678


Exactly the same thing has been happening every day for the past 4 months. Backuppc didn’t email to tell me. It’s email system was definitely working because during that time it did mail me about a machine that was offline for a while. So it appears it doesn’t bother to send mail to notify you of a failed backup!

I had no idea what might be causing this. It just started out of the blue, having worked flawlessly before March. It only affected one machine. The configuration had not changed. It always failed on /home but was apparently ok with /data/work.

Something weird in /home? To find out, I set tar loose on it:

$ cd /home; tar cf - . >/dev/null
tar: ./jammin/.gxine/socket: socket ignored
tar: ./jammin/.kde/kdeinit-\:0: socket ignored
tar: ./sarah/.totem.sarah: socket ignored
tar: ./sarah/.xine/session.0: socket ignored
$

Surely not. Surely it couldn’t be something as trivial as a couple of stale socket files causing my backup to fail? Well, I’m not using any of those programs, so I deleted the sockets, and told backuppc to start a full backup. What do you know — it worked.

So is it that it doesn’t like sockets? Or has the poor thing got confused by the funny characters in the filename of that KDE one? I’ll test this out at a later date when my backups have recovered.

There are three major failings by BackupPC here. One, failing over a simple socket or dodgy filename, and not giving much clue why. The second, not bothering to email when a backup fails halfway through. But most concerning of all is that it kept trying to add to the same partial backup, instead of starting a new one — so I no longer have 2 weeks’ worth of incrementals even for the part of the backup that succeeded. Every day, yesterday’s backup was being overwritten by today’s. If I needed to recover a version of a file in /data/work from 2 days ago, I couldn’t. That sucks.

This has made me realise something. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?. Why am I relying on *one* backup solution? It’s a SPOF, and it has quite spectacularly F’d. I still want to find out why, and ideally fix it, but I’m also going to start setting up something else alongside. Since backuppc is server-driven, the alternative should be client-driven. All recommendations welcome. The two major requirements are that it must support ssh, and be bandwidth-efficient because I’m backing up over ADSL.
All the client machines run Linux.

You probably haven’t heard of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. Sounds boring doesn’t it? Far from it.

This bill, if passed, gives almost unlimited powers to Ministers to change the law without the involvement of parliament. And since the bill doesn’t exclude itself from this amazing power, whatever restrictions it contains could be removed by ministerial order. In other words, it would enable the government of the day to do anything, without any of that tedious business of democracy getting in the way.

When you consider it alongside the Mass Surveillance System* currently being set up, the curtailment of the right to protest, and the possibility of indefinite detention without trial on the basis of security service “intelligence” (despite the very obvious failure of such “intelligence” in Iraq), can you see what is happening here? Most people can’t. If you can, please help to spread the word before it’s too late.

This is not just about this government. It’s about whether you want every future government, elected or not, to have such far-reaching powers, which take automatic precedence over your freedom. Do they really need to create all the tools of a totalitarian state just to fight terrorism? It wasn’t necessary to do so in the days of the IRA bombing campaign. Why now?

* The Mass Surveillance System comprises, amongst other things, ID Cards and especially the National Identity Register; Childrens Act Register; CCTV on every street (but violent crime continues to rise); numberplate recognition systems that will track your vehicle everywhere in the name of “congestion charging”; unprecedented powers for the security services to spy on British citizens, including MPs. It is the repealment of human rights and justice safeguards that we have had for centuries, like the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead there is now a presumption that all citizens might be up to no good and must be kept under surveillance at all times.

Further Reading about the Bill:

• The Bill itself
• Summary at murky.org and their previous article.
• Spyblog’s take on it
• Clifford Chance client brief (PDF) – if anyone tries to claim that the bill’s powers have been overhyped by bloggers, refer them to this.

Thanks to No2ID for alerting me to this.

Look at the state of this… the URL itself I mean, not the page it points to:
http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/rma/eppi-ibdrp/hrs-ceh/6/RMA-CGR_e.asp

Can you imagine trying to dictate this to someone over the phone, or read it out on the radio? Reckon you can memorise it? If you saw it in your history list would you remember what the page was about?

URLs should be:

• designed for people, not computers and not filesystems;
• as short as possible (maintaining hierarchy only as necessary);
• as meaningful as possible — using words, dates, standard reference numbers, or whatever will make sense to your users, not a bunch of abbreviations;
• single case, not a mixture of lower and upper case;
• persistent (cool URIs don’t change), and therefore designed with persistence in mind. A URL is more likely to persist if it is sensible and economical in the first place!

URLs should not:

• include implementation details (.asp) and language preferences (_e), both of which can be handled transparently by content negotiation;
• use unnecessary punctuation. Some punctuation is ok, but four dashes scattered throughout the URL is too many.

Ideally, it should also always be possible to remove the trailing part of a path to obtain an index document for that level. If that’s not the case (which it isn’t for this one), it’s a probable sign that you have more levels of hierarchy than you actually need.