The Goldfish Chronicles

Lego Indy.

Though not our toybox for a bit - under a budget.

I’ve just finished what I’m, at this late date, going to call my best read of the year - Spider Robinson’s unfinished Heinlein - Variable Star.

For a long time I resisted buying it - I’ve felt no urge to buy For Us, The Living, Heinlein’s long lost first novel, as the description never impressed me. Similarly, I suspect there are a couple of books from his later years that I’ve never read - the Lazurus crossover stuff always left me feeling cheapened. So, I ignored this book too as it was too likely to disappoint - and who needs that?

However, I regularly walk into a bookshop to touch real books and usually depress myself that there is nothing to read. Said depression has been solved recently by doing it less often and refusing to buy hardbacks except in very, very few cases (Pratchett, Feist, Salvatore - and even then sometimes not for the latter two). After a period of famine, this is paying dividends. I picked up 3 books I was half interested in reading, and Variable Star was one of them. Why not I thought, fresh from declaration that Moon is a Harsh Mistress was Heinlein’s best book and shame to realize that I didn’t have it and instead just read my Dad’s each time I’m there (thanks for the present Steve ).

Then it sat on the overloaded ‘to-read’ cast iron shelf of the bakers rack. The others were read, but Variable Star was not picked up. Again fear held my hand. Why ruin things? Maybe I should re-read Moon first now that I own it - even though I read it barely 3 months ago. Fortunately a virus saved the day. I spent Christmas ill with flu and with the energy of a newborn fawn I decided to rest on the bed and read something. Variable Star was easiest to hand, and my other actively reading book (as opposed to the large pile of started so I’ll finish someday) makes for dry reading.

I was hooked.

Extremely hooked. Exhausted, but hooked. I felt 10. I snuck as many moments as I could to read, ignoring my barely healthier wife and demanding 3 year old whenever I could. I’ve never read a Spider Robinson book as far as I know [though probably have read short stories], and this felt so natural. I’m quite happy I’ve not read one as it meant I got to experience this book the right way, and can now go off and read some of his books, thinking of this primarily as a Heinlein and not a Robinson. Enjoying this as much as I could, and not hurting any enjoyment I might get from his books.

I don’t want to talk about the plot too much, or the background as it would ruin things somewhat. There were a couple of bits that irritated me - Spider uses the verb google twice; which I don’t believe there’s much to suggest will exist that far in the future. It’s fine in cyberpunk set now or in a decade, but felt very odd in the far future. The book also lurched a bit towards the end; but having finished it I’ll definitely forgive Spider that for it’s something that other Heinlein books are guilty of anyway. Deus ex Machina - a phrase that makes me feel like a fraud because all I know about literature is the classic ‘I know what I like’.

That’s all I’ve got in the way of negative. This is a book that as a Heinlein would probably take second place in my mental ordering; just slightly behind Moon because of the rushed ending and a fair way ahead of Stranger and Starship Troopers. It has the same value Moon has of not being as short or shallow as Heinlein’s other “Juveniles”, and not being as overly long or disagreeably deep as Heinlein’s later works. It’s the “just right” of fiction.

So… best book of the year; and I suspect if I were to go back to being 10 and putting all my books in my favourite order, this one would be one of the few books in the last decade to walk its way into the top 30.

Minor note that people with an XO should check out the GCompris educational games. Nathan seemed to like them, though they feel more like a reaction to those cheapie Windows 95 ‘educational’ CDs you can get at the supermarket than completely behind the Mindstorms idea.

Go here to find your list of installable apps for the XO. Go there from the XO and you can do a simple install. Said install seemed to work, though was a bit fluffy. The icons are all the same for the individual GCompris apps, only half showed up immediately and the other half after a reboot, and they changed their position in the ‘dock’ after said reboot.

Tried this Apple Muffin recipe today - not too bad, though we’ve the urge to add oats and some more brown sugar. They’re a bit bland and anaemic.

Amongst the flurry of boxes that have been showing up in the last few days (Atlantic shipping sucks, so Christmas is supplied by Amazon) there was a box today that contained a nice little green and white number. OLPC’s XO to be precise.

At last - hardware that doesn’t waste time on a manual Plug. Battery. Device. Battery shaped hole in Device. You don’t need a degree in Lego to guess what to do.

Then you spend a while trying to open the damn thing. Degree in sofa/stairs manipulation later, it’s open and you’re ready to go. Power button. Nice loading image. Started.

Question: What’s your name?

I lied and gave my son’s. He’s too young to read right now, so he’ll never know.

Request: Choose the colour for your logo!

Or rather, keep clicking on the logo until you like the two-tone colour. After a while I found the purple/yellow combo I wanted, to match the purple/yellow logo on the back of the laptop. I’m very happy about that by the way - my Kick Off team wore purple/yellow, my CM* custom teams wear purple/yellow (with gold/black as the away kit) and a hacky bit of code I did in Delphi years ago was Purplepad, a dumb Notepad clone with the massive value add of a purple background and yellow text. So - very happy with the colour.

Eventually said son noticed what I was doing and wanted into the action. So I showed him the paint program (too hard), showed him the TurtleArt (pretty rainbow) and got him to hold the laptop (too heavy). So it’s all mine! Though for some reason the green toy like demeanor has him believing that in fact it’s not all mine and is his computer. It’s going to take some sweet talking to explain that it’s not the ideal device for his Flash and DOS games; though I do plan to poke a bit to see if I can get a DOS emulator to work.

Mostly - I’m looking forward to pushing myself into some Python programming, using TurtleArt as a teaching tool along with the Lego Mindstorms software and just having fun.

Biggest dissapointment - no solar panel/hand crank power system; but in Sunny Seattle with dodgy carpals, that’s probably a blessing.

Nicely timed:

-bash-3.00$ ls
-bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory
-bash-3.00$ pwd
/home/henri
-bash-3.00$ cd
-bash-3.00$ ls
-bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory
-bash-3.00$ free
-bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory
-bash-3.00$ top
Segmentation fault

Ah, the quality that is a GoDaddy server.

This is a somewhat tongue in cheek, somewhat serious idea that has been hovering in the back of my head for a while.

Let’s take a population of Omnians. I’ll begin with Pratchett’s Small Gods theorem that there are two types of people within that population, sheep and goats. Sheep must be herded, while goats must be lead.

Let’s create a matrix:

So, given your population of people - if you herd them, you end up with Happy Sheep and Cats, and if you lead them you will end up with Lost Sheep and Happy Goats. So, to link to the title, if you are Cat Herding, then it probably means your population is largely goat-like and you should start leading.

My next assertion is that Lost Sheep and Cats are equally dangerous; you either have a clueless baabaa out of their depth, or you have a loose cannonball bouncing around. Both of them are quite likely not going the way you desire.

This would suggest that managing groups of people takes the following steps:

1) Identify your sheep/goat ratio.
2) Identify your preferred method - leading or herding.
3) 1 and 2 shows you if you need a people/culture change.
4) Based on pain of using your less preferred method, and the pain of a change, decide how you will manage.

A side effect you will probably see is that your population will tend towards your chosen method. I imagine the correct answer to this tomfoolery is to create herding silos for sheep and leadership silos for goats, and watch both types of Omnian become productive and useful.

This random thought brought to you by ‘Too Much Ice Cream’, and ‘I should really read the Starfish and the Spider - there it’s on my wishlist’.

Lastly, a link to SliceHost; a virtual hoster whom I am already extemely happy with.

BrianM put me onto them, and I was able to migrate from GoDaddy extremely quickly. Given that GoDaddy have told me I have to upgrade my virtual server there to the latest RHEL (a process which involves wiping my virtual server and getting a new one), there was no value at all in staying. In fact, even less. Their upgrade process means I’ll have downtime.

SliceHost seem very good - low price, but done so by setting things up in a smart way and not because they’re throwing other products at the customer. This allows SliceHost to offer a good product and not a crappy half-arsed one. I even signed up for the backup at $5 a month. It’s good (complete copy of the server x 3; all GoDaddy seemed to offer was an FTP target), but is lacking one essential feature of a backup to me - being accessible from the server so I can just pull files off of it. Least I’ve not seen how yet - you never know.

Still, it’s at the right price. I’m prepared to pay that much more to be able to roll back easily if something goes wrong. I can turn the server off upstairs which does backups and JIRA for osjava.org (if I migrate that back online) and save money on the power bill.

Here’s hoping they continue to impress.

Another item of conversation today (Carrie was showing me the * Idol in the UK in which someone sings Nessun Dorma) was 1990 and why choosing Nessun Dorma is always a greatly received song in the UK (or is it an English thing?).

Here’s a superb article about why it’s got its own special place in our culture.

As it often does, Jet Set Willy came up in conversation today. For those who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, watch this video from the Yanks can’t wank series.