Freesteel Blog » 2013 » December

Thursday, December 19th, 2013 at 12:29 pm - - Whipping

kilk4

It was getting rather full of electronic accretions that kept me awake at night. The server disks had been moved four years ago with everything left intact. It would have been easier to have renewed it another year, but I decided that it’s best to do this sort of spring cleaning when things were quiet.

Back when you had to buy computing resources by the barrel, you had to throw a big on-going party to use up all the resources. But nowadays you can buy it by the glass, which means each project can go into a separate container, which makes each one cleaner and easier to retire. It’s a nightmare when they are all in the same box and start depending on each other in unpredictable ways. The apache httpconfig file in there was a disaster area.

So many projects get started. And so many lie around half finished.

Here’s the Eulogy.

@symroe: @frabcus you’re killing seagrass??
@frabcus: Eulogy #1: Ah http://seagrass.goatchurch.org.uk/ it was nice sysadmining you all these last 8 years.
@frabcus: Eulogy #2: You did so much – in the early days running codeabode (a version control hosting thing with @rufuspollock) and
@frabcus: Eulogy #3: and parlparse (powers @theyworkforyou, @publicwhip) while it looked like @dodspeople might support it, and so many years since
@symroe: @frabcus just logged in to seagrass (for the last time), and found a copy of ‘MP fight!’ in my home directory!
@frabcus: Eulogy #4: For a while you were popular: with caving software and blogs and SaveParliament and Think Twice conference
@philipjohn: @frabcus Yay Save Parliament #memories
@frabcus: Eulogy #5: Changing the world around you with the move of ethereal bits in the electric dark of a new information age
@frabcus: Eulogy #6: Later you were the first place to have direct links to United Nations documents (UNDemocracy) and crowd-sourced election leaflets
@frabcus: Eulogy #7: All the while, tirelessly helping millions find out how their MPs voted, with PublicWhip and its @theyworkforyou feeding API
@symroe: @frabcus you missed out the first scraperwiki on seagrass!
@frabcus: Eulogy #8: Your hardware changed, you moved to Manchester. Yet stil your heart was the same, your systems Debian stable, your RAID monitored
@frabcus: Eulogy #9: In your twilight years all gradually left. Abstraction, commodification, the cloud in the real sense of IaaS. And your services
@kindofwater: @frabcus Thought about how we now just delete servers in the cloud. They have no personality. Total immateriality.
@kindofwater: @frabcus When I used to work at the University of Kent we turned off an ancient Sun server with similar ceremony.
@frabcus: Eulogy #10: Gradually left early adopter – either dieing, or entering mainstream to grown up servers.
@frabcus: Eulogy #11: And now finally, your paymaster sees no point in your bills. The energy of controlling you dispersed. You must go.
@frabcus: Eulogy #12: Put down like an old cat, when really you are at the prime of life. Your vhosts gradually erased, email directed from you.
@frabcus: Eulogy #13: The clock ticking on the last DNS entry pointing to your port.
@londonlime: @frabcus this one made me well up! 🙁
@frabcus: Eulogy #14: Ah seagrass, times were good. To the server afterlife – reformatted and reincarnated, like an @Mythic_Beasts you will rise again
@Floppy: @frabcus I’m humbled to be part of that story. It was truly a hero among servers. #seagrass

Monday, December 16th, 2013 at 11:53 am - - Whipping

More important than charity work (aka filling in for the failures of political governance), there’s volunteer work for the electoral system. For some reason society believes that the business of placing options on the ballot sheet and publicizing what they mean is not something that needs to be done systematically and professionally, like, say, collecting the garbage.

So here we are at 6am on the morning of Thursday 5 December collecting our batches of get out the vote leaflets from the Green Party candidate who has been working this city council Riverside Ward for years.

Here’s the leaflet:

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Tuesday, December 10th, 2013 at 6:40 pm - - Adaptive

Of course, I could be going down another blind channel. But for the moment it looks like it is getting closer as I progressively fiddle with the search algorithm and allow it to pick the exit points from each cell and not stick to the mid-point of each edge.

astarnetwork
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