Flow of things
A very long time has passed since I last posted anything. In that time, I’ve done an ass ton (metric, in imperial that’d be approximately 45/64th’s of one quarter cup liquid ounce of.. inches?) of work, been to Switzerland and back, had my son start elementary school, and various other bits and bobs. Maybe that’s why? Anyway, I’ll start rambling off things that come to mind.
So I went to Switzerland, Geneva to be more exact. And to be even more exact, I visited CERN! The inner geek in me is still excited. That place is, to put it bluntly, amazing. We started by checking in at the visitor center, where we got our badges. I took the opportunity (at the recommendation of one of our hosts), to visit the gift shop and pick up a t-shirt and coffee mug. The mug has the four component formulas for, well, everything important, i.e. the Standard Model Lagrangian. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I’m pretty sure I couldn’t. The t-shirt I can explain. Not only was it made somewhere in Asia, but it also has on it the original Tim Berners Lee proposal for the world wide web. The back has his boss’s comment “Vague, but exciting”, on it. Both items are in frequent use.
At CERN, I visited the control room for ATLAS, one of the experiments using the large hadron collider. The LHC itself was being upgraded to allow for higher energy level collisions in the future. Pity we couldn’t visit the actual detector, or see the actual uhm.. tube where the particles travel in a circle before hitting each other every once in a while. We also visited the computer center. As a computer guy, I was pretty darn impressed. The amount of hardware that’s in there is staggering, and the connections to the outside world are even more impressive. I was told there wasn’t “much” science going on, and still the aggregate bandwidth of connections to and from the facility and to research facilities around the world was at over 7 GiB, with over 200 000 running jobs. They told us it gets to around 13-15 GiB when there’s a real buzz. There was a nifty touch screen in the lobby of the computer center, built around google earth, that you could spin around to see the different connections around the globe. Finland’s share? A meager 0,3% of the computing being done. Meh. The lobby also had some display cases with various old hardware: old modems, fiber optics, hard drives and so on.
Geneva was a nice place in general. The climate was nice, the views spectacular and the people generally very nice. I had that same nagging feeling that I had in Paris in 07, where the French speaking people were just acting.. weird. We had a waiter that was muttering something under his breath the whole time he was serving us. There was that same air of arrogance and displeasure at having to speak English. The hotel was a refreshing exception (as it was in Paris), and I can easily recommend it for anyone looking for a reasonably priced hotel in Geneva. We stayed at, *drumroll* the Hotel de Geneve! Located at 1, pl. Isaac Mercier, Geneva 1201, Switzerland, it seemed to be a fairly central location. It was a short 10 minute walk from the train station, and not far from the river for instance.
On our second day, we took the train to Lausanne. I had perch. Nice expensive looking place by the shores of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva). The train ride was maybe an hour, or a little less and very smooth. Saw an Aston Martin Vanquish drive by. The whole place seemed to be in a perpetual slow motion, and somehow at ease or at rest. Didn’t really see much of the city, we just had lunch, but what little I saw was nice.
The journey back was eventless, if it wasn’t for the small incident at the airfield in Geneva. We were taken to our plane (an Embraer 190) by bus, and had to wait outside the plane for a considerable amount of time as the idiots piled into the plane (how hard is it to just find your place, and stow your luggage?). While waiting, I figured I’d take a few pictures. I took a picture of one of my traveling companions, with the plane in the background, and then turned around to take a picture of the scenic mountains that basically surround the whole place. At this point, one of the yellow vested… whatever she was, told me to put the phone away. No pictures! Put it your bag! I told her there were no signs posted anywhere that I couldn’t take a picture, but she would have none of it, and I yielded, putting my phone in my pocket.
Now, I am aware that standing on the tarmac, there is in theory a risk that something will happen that requires my attention. On the other hand, if a plan lands on us, I doubt I would have time to do some kind of Die Hard-type jump to safety, phone or no phone. There were also no spinning propellers that I could accidentally walk into. I think there was even a small roped fence thing preventing us from wandering onto the runway or other areas around the plane.
I was not given any reason for why I couldn’t take a picture. This always irks me. If there is no sign prohibiting photography, or an announcement, and I have used my common sense to assess that taking a picture does not pose a risk to my or anyone elses health, I’m going to take pictures. I have no reason to fight with airport people. They are doing their job. I still fail to see how my photography could cause any harm. Also note, the queue into the plane was *not* moving, so I was not holding up the plane, telling everyone “hold on, I need to tweet this shit!”.
“Is this not a reasonable place to park?”
Enough about travel again! Seems I can’t get enough of it. Later this year, though, I’m flying over to Edinburgh, which might be the place to be now that they are voting for independence! I might get a chance to visit the newest independent country in the world. Or maybe not, in case the No-vote is the winner. The vote might be today?
On the hardware side of life, I’ve been doing some upgrades for my backup and storage infrastructure. For local onsite backups, I now have an Iomega IX2-200 (cloud edition), with twin 3TB Western Digital Red drives, in RAID1. It’s not the newest or the fastest NAS out there, but it works. On my main workstation I have replaced the previous 2x1TB RAID1 set with a 2x2TB RAID1 set. Just added one terabyte. I now have a bunch of spare 1TB disks, which will probably be incorporated into a FreeNAS build I’m working on. I had some issues trying it out earlier this month, but I think it was just Samba misbehaving. It would disconnect in the middle of a file transfer, and tell me the path is not accessible. According to FreeNAS, things were a-ok. It’s not like I’m a FreeNAS guru or anything, so I’ll have to put in more hours to that build to get it working. It might end up being up to 8x1TB. Currently I have only 8GB of RAM (ECC, though), but I’ll probably want to upgrade that to at least 16, maybe even 32. The thing is, that means I have to get a different motherboard, processor and.. Oh well.