Technicalities
[Chalky] 'Morning.
The 'sand box', and I'm sure that Rosie and others can explain it better than I, is a box full of sand or grit of some kind or other. In olden days steam engines used the contents of such, as and when necessary, to increase the friction between wheels and rails. This was effected by dribbling the contents of the sand box onto the rails in front or over the driving wheels. Naturally (and obviously) you are far too young to have seen or heard this highly technological process in action.
The 'sand box', and I'm sure that Rosie and others can explain it better than I, is a box full of sand or grit of some kind or other. In olden days steam engines used the contents of such, as and when necessary, to increase the friction between wheels and rails. This was effected by dribbling the contents of the sand box onto the rails in front or over the driving wheels. Naturally (and obviously) you are far too young to have seen or heard this highly technological process in action.
I'll tell you the real purpose later. As a clue: Have you ever owned a cat?
(Dujon) Ah! Things are now clearer because I didn't know you drove a steam engine. Even I don't do that. Sand is useful and may have prevented this, the slip to end all slips. Click on the bottom recording, marked "60532". The quality is rather poor. The loco slips a bit on starting (quite usual) but the mayhem begins after 1m 50s. After another 15 seconds or so you can hear the water being carried over to the cylinders, which caused the real damage. All 3 connecting rods and the coupling rods and valve gear were bent so that was the end of that little day out. Why didn't the driver just shut off steam? He couldn't. The big handle wouldn't move against the huge volume of steam and water going through the main valve. He had about one second and missed it. No more driving for him, at least of that loco, which cost £80,000 to repair.
Patience
At the risk of seeming insensitive given pen's recent difficulties, I've finally been offered a permanent position at Edinburgh Uni. Woo!
A bit of a long and torturous story this one... back in July, I was offered a similar position in Manchester, but there were various reasons why we didn't want to move back then - not least the fact that we'd bought a flat in Edinburgh exactly one week previously. Turning that offer down was one of the trickiest decisions I'd ever made. Anyway, the gamble paid off in the end, and I'm now very relieved and pleased.
[Rosie] That was an interesting sound recording. I don't really know all that much about steam engines (I had to look up what water being carried over to the cylinders meant) but it's quite an impressive sound. Were you actually present when it happened?
Hurrah!
[rab] excellent - good news, congratualtions. And I'm fine - I got offered less money for working to a higher target, but with bigger bonuses than I was on before once I got beyond the target. And it was done without consultation, that was all... I could have sued, I was told, but I think it would look dreadful on a CV. And I will change, eventually, but I will leap, I will not be pushed. And I have a hot date tonight so frankly, i don't care any more. :o)
Congratulations rab! And to pen, if that's a sufficiently positive outcome to warrant it. Did you get them to make things better than they were trying to?
[Rosie] Thanks for the link. The sounds bring back a few memories. £80,000! The mind boggles. I used to be a keen 'train spotter' as a youngster but the interest waned when girls and cars came along. I had a relative who was a signalman. Occasionally my elder brother and myself would visit him at work in his signal box. Exciting times for a lad.
[rab and penelope] Congratulations on your results. Great news.
[rab and penelope] Congratulations on your results. Great news.
(Darren) There's only about a quarter of an inch clearance when the piston is right at the end of its stroke and any excess water either knocks the cylinder cover off or bends the connecting rod. Major damage. There are drain cocks which are often opened for the first few puffs when an engine starts out and they blow huge quantities of wet steam ahead of the engine, ruining photos but very necessary. I wasn't there for that recording. I've seen loads of engines slipping on starting but quickly brought under control. It's a rather fearsome sound for a small boy a few feet away on the end of a platform, or for anyone, come to that. (pen) If you're happy so am I. Nothing worse than work worries even they are now behind me.
(Dujon) The wheels only stopped spinning because the valve gear got bent and no longer allowed steam into the cylinders at the right time, rather like a car with a bent camshaft. Interesting that right at the end of the recording the safety valves lift. I'm surprised there was any fire left given the tremendous pull of the exhaust on it. What a mess! I gave up collecting numbers very early but have never lost interest, you could say, but as you imply, there is much else in life.
The juice
When is a power cut not a power cut? When they restore the connection at about half the normal voltage. Very dim orangey lights, computer won't start (but monitor OK), TV but no video, kettle wouldn't boil ether let alone water, old Acorn computer OK but not the monitor, strangely. They'd got the full voltage next door but Mrs-next-door-but-one (in her curlers) had the same problem as had an old lady walking her dog. Obviously one of the phases was faulty but I thought you got the full whack or nothing. It seems you may not.
long absence
Hello, all. Some of you may remember me from long ago, on other servers. A strange thing happened recently. I discovered that, having moved from Sydney to Edinburgh, and not having played MC for years on account of a Thesis, I happened by complete accident to end up working down the corridor from rab. What do you know? Well, probably that MC is responsible for effects that are not quite normal, for one.
Oddness
...and when "kt" appeared I had this very odd feeling that we'd met before (although it was only virtually, and - I think - under a different moniker). Anyhoo, welcome back!
I recognize that moniker
[kt] Welcome back.
[kt] Hello, I'd wondered where you'd gotten to (having met you in Sydney, if you're who I think you are!). Enjoy Edinburgh!
[Rosie] It used to happen all the time in India (and probably still does). Just shrug and say "Volt is down" like the locals did.
[Rosie] The phenomenon is referred to as a 'brown out' - at least here it is. The description is obvious when you think about the affect on your light globes. In the last house I owned I had two phases connected and, on a number of occasions, could have full voltage and current available on some internal circuits and not on others. This of course also applied to total power cuts where only one phase was down. The reason for the variation in equipment functions is simply that some items will run on a range of, say, 180 volts to 260 volts while others need the full pressure (usually 230V +).
(flerdle) It's the first time I've ever seen it, and there were power cuts galore when I was a small child (say late 40's). The voltage here is allowed by statute to vary 10% (up 4 and down 6) but this was down 50%, at a guess. (Dujon) Can't be that, because everyone here is on single phase except industrial premises which have all 3. There were 2 more cuts early this evening. When the first (over an hour) ended it came back on (full voltage) for less than a minute, just enough time to put the candles out before going off again for another 40 minutes or so. Loud, pointed and profane were my exclamations to no-one in particular.
ex-kt
[rab] That's right, I'd forgotten that I changed from kt to Kathryn. That's how long ago it was.
Hi, flerdle! Sorry I dropped out of contact for a while there. Are you still in the middle east? Edinburgh's rather nice, actually, with more sun than I had imagined.
And hello Simons Mith also. It's amazing how stable the MC community is...
Hi, flerdle! Sorry I dropped out of contact for a while there. Are you still in the middle east? Edinburgh's rather nice, actually, with more sun than I had imagined.
And hello Simons Mith also. It's amazing how stable the MC community is...
[kathryn] Welcome back - I'm an irregular visitor myself these days.
doin' the continental shuffle
[kathryn] No, am now in Melbourne, and thesising too, fool that I am. But Melbourne is very pleasant.
Thesis mightier than the sword
Incredible the %age of MCers who have done or are doing theses. I have no plans to go within a million miles of one meself, but have a lot of respect for those who have the inclination.
Stability
(kathryn) Collectively, maybe.
[ISP] Ten years after my undergrad degree, I'm doing an MA. Think I might be ready to do the big one in another ten years! :)
Education Education Education
[Projoy] Well, I worked five years between school and Uni, then another eight between BA and MSc, now I'm (avoiding) studying for my Oracle exams. Doing very well - been avoiding studying for two and a half years and counting.
Wibble flib
Stable?? Us?
Hmm... I waited ten years between under-gradding and post-gradding, and have now resolved to study nothing but happy things that interest me, which is mostly food, conservation, art and historical stuff, not science or authoring. If all goes to plan, I'm off to Rotterdam next month to work for a day on a conserved windmill. And also to see a very nice man who happens to be the Miller. :o)
Well then, enjoy your Miller time :-)
[Rosie] Dad was an industrial electronics guru during that period. The reason for the power cuts was to avoid brown outs according to him. The national grid had been so badly compromised during WWII that power was in short supply. It was deemed safer to cut the power altogether than tolerate a severe voltage drop. They used to sound sirens around ten minutes before the power cuts in the local factories apparently, so that the machine shops could shut down gracefully. The good old days.
[blamelewis] hello!
[flerdle] Melbourne is indeed pleasant, despite lacking a proper harbour.
[ISP] There may well be a connection between people who put themselves through a thesis and people who take pleasure in playing a game like MC. An unusual relationship with reality could well be one of them.
[pen] How about the science of food (e.g. courtesy of Harold McGee)? That's definitely a happy thing!
[flerdle] Melbourne is indeed pleasant, despite lacking a proper harbour.
[ISP] There may well be a connection between people who put themselves through a thesis and people who take pleasure in playing a game like MC. An unusual relationship with reality could well be one of them.
[pen] How about the science of food (e.g. courtesy of Harold McGee)? That's definitely a happy thing!
[penelope] Watch out for clog-wearing mice in that windmill. The staircases are infested with them from all accounts.
post-grad? sounds hard to me
I did have a plan last year to take an A-level every year for the next ten years. I think I've missed the deadline to enter for French this year, so maybe I'll start the mission next year and do two (to catch up). The plan is that if someone says to my daughter when she's 18, "oh, I've got 7 A-levels", she can reply, "well, my dad's got 14." The only extra proviso for this is that I don't attend any lessons/lectures in order to gain the qualifications - I'll rely on reading what the syllabus is, and a bit of common sense in terms of background reading. And, yes I've checked, there are still exam boards that do not require coursework :-)
The juice
(SM) Mine must have been a purely local problem due to malfunctioning switches or transformers and not insufficient supply. This was just one phase down or out over about a square mile.
clogged up
[Sierra Mike] I have my own clogs for stamping on said mice - they came as a present from the Miller last weekend. Luckily they were filled with chocolate as a sweetener...
Miller
Hope there's good ventilation, in case he's 
Windy.
Windy.yes, yes, I know...
[IS,P!] Hmmph. He's a Dutch Miller. Have you got a pic of one of those?
[Darren] Still, he does well, considering he died 15 years ago.
I thought he seemed a bit quiet. Just my luck :o(
HELLO MORNIVERSE! I'M NIGHTS BLESSED!
AND I'VE SCARED EVERYONE OFF, IT SEEMS! CHORTLE CHORTLE!
not me
Hello nights. It takes a bit more than emboldened shouting to scare me off! How are you? I've got a post holiday cold. Grump.
Where is everyone today? Not very chatty? Cheer up. Its almost the weekend!
Nothing at all
Hello all. It's a long time since I've been in here. Very smart.
Mouth full
Sorry Lib - I was enjoying a bacon sandwich...
[UK] I'd have thought you'd have a bit of a sore head!
[Lib] Well, fortunately it hadn't been cooked too fiercely. But getting the grease out of my hair is going to be a bind...
It doesn't matter how sh*tty the week has been , Friday always lifts the mood, doesn't it? Anyone know of any nice jobs going for someone bossy, intelligent and good at news writing? CV available on request. And The Dutch Miller is coming over again next weekend, :o)
Oh, and a lovely bit of spamming, which is a natural glow-worm or something: "ON fenugreek do maladroit.."
[pen] I think the next line is "beware the Jabberwock, my son!"
Morniverse seems slow today, or am I just toooooooo bored at work?
(UK) Not just today, either. The place seems infected with a kind of ennui. It'll pass, no doubt.
[Rosie] Well, I was hoping that someone might guess my AVMA before I left the office today, as I may well not be back online until Monday morning.
It's always very slow on Fridays. In fact I recall it being even less busy last Friday. Not that I check in here obsessively the whole time, of course.
Saturday was a non-starter.
There was an article in the paper a day or two ago about how boring and irksome working life has become even for people in well-paid professional jobs, what with vast amounts of form-filling and other pointless paperwork, meetings, meetings about meetings etc, etc. The way this place livens up during working hours shows how true that is.
working time directive
The local authority I (used to) work for transferred our dept to Capita at the begining of Feb. I have had to drastically cut back to a minimum amount of browsing during work time. Before there was a woolly policy about internet use. However, my new employer begins their internet use and email policy with the phrase "You have no right to privacy"
I'm glad that my Brian Blessed impression didn't freak EVERYONE out. I'm well, thanks. Final semester. Argh. And I've been getting some lovely poetry in my spam too. But even better is the amount of recipes I get for Spam, being a GMail user.
Crapita
(Inkspot) In that case don't do any more work than you absolutely have to. I hope at least you've retained your salary level.
MCIOS went down at 2.54 am today.
For about 5 minutes. You'd think a guy could take a server down for maintenance at 3 am in the user base's time zone.
FWIW, the timestamps on old moves from the first half of 1998 are now correct.
(Dan) Thanks for your efforts, as ever. Like Michael Howard, I am a creature of the night.
Harrumph
No problem, I didn't mean it the way it probably sounded. Anyway I've just noticed that this so-called asiago cheese I've been munching on was made in Wisconsin. Now a bit of research shows that asiago is Denominazione di Origine Protetta, so they shouldn't be calling it that and I'd be surprised if they could even sell it in the EU under that name. Still, it's a good cheese, but now I have to go and find the real thing so I know the difference.
BTW, I'm off to New Mexico for a week, so this may be the last you hear from me till next Monday. The server will almost surely fall over in about 2-3 hours time. Expect reboots only during office hours in New Zealand. ttfn.
Read on its own, that last message really really looks like rab's part of some international espionage.
[Tuj] What? You mean you're not... one of us?
SHHH!
It is very dark for the time of year.
Incidentally, I'm staying in room 404 which I'm having difficulty locating, for some reason.
[rab] Have you tried leaving the hotel and then coming back in again?
[rab] or trying an alternative door?
[Rab] Clear out all your cash, I guess in the hotel bar...
8 words game
I tried to translate Nights' post with an online translat-y-thing and it came up with "Ave druse! I ÷óñòâóþ as i no clever"
...although ÷óñòâóþ was actually an untranslated russian word, not nonsense.
That's actually pretty close to the mark. It reads "Hello friends! I rather think I'm not clever."
As indeed I appear not to be. Plans for the weekend, anyone?
I'm going to a masquerade ball! Very exciting. What are you up to?
Doing a workshop with actors, for which the freshly-written script still hasn't arrived from the States as yet! Also, writing a sample song from Lolita! - the musical as a college exercise.
Weekend plans
Working. What else? Not getting enough done, though. :-(
doing absolutely nothing
.. well - nothing worth mentioning. It's kinda nice. :-)
housework until this evening, then I shall be waiting for a certain Dutch Windy Miller to step off the plane :o)
My weekend is taken up with work - beer festival time again, this time only 16 beers, but plent y flive music keeping us entertained. Dunnno how I'm going to get up for 6am delivery tomorrow morning, but i'll cross that bridge later. For now,I need to write a quiz by 9pm.
[rab] New elopement menu?
I spent the weekend in the library, emerging only on Saturday night to get extremely drunk extremely quickly. It's coursework season in sunny Bath, and we are all working hard to meet arbitrary deadlines, smoking for all we're worth and drinking ourselves into the ground every Saturday night in a vain attempt to flee the horrific situation we find ourselves in once again. Also, why does everyone else in this library, all five floors of it, seem to be a complete idiot? Just asking. Is Library Rage something admissible in court?
I think I'm a bit depressed.
I think I'm a bit depressed.
[IS,P!] Yes, that sounds like just the thing that Niall would think of.
Pardon me, unplanned outage at mcios. I called the data center about another issue and they asked me if it was okay to physically move the server, and I told them to go ahead. It will, I hope, be out for less than an hour.
(Dan) It was alright at midnight (GMT). Thanks again.
[Rosie] Who's GMT?
I am.
[GMT] Do you have the time?
As it happens, I may well have ..
Leaning
Well, I've got the inclination...
[GMT] Not for much longer!
It's just struck me that as a Mornington Crescent server, we have no game of MC running. Anyone interested? I'd like to give the new 2007 ruleset a go as it's shortly to be published...
2007beta
[nights] Blimey, that's a bit radical, innit? MC on an MC website? Not sure I can cope. Besides, I've barely got used to HP2000. Do they think they've sorted the new version's DRM issues now, eh?
[SM] Last I heard, most of the national MC bodies had ratified it, with the exceptions of Monaco and East Cornwall. And I think the DRM nightmare will be with us for a while - last I heard, they were trying to make sure you only striled three times, then all your podumes would be deleted without warning. Perhaps better to wait a bit, hm?
Three striles and you're out
All your podume are belong to us.
shiny new things
I'd play the 2007 ruleset. Though my copy hasn't arrived from Amazon so I may make some bad moves (but I'm no stranger to that to be honest!).
Mornington Crescent on the front cover of The Times today (somewhat gratuitously).
Aigh!!
Where is MCiOS?? Or rather, where are all the games? The archive is also empty. I tried to create a new game and got Giant Ant Error. Is it time to panic??
It was there before 9.00AM this morning then it suddenly disappeared in the middle of my move! I guess its been hacked again.
MCiOS
Bloody hell! If anyone's got Dan's e-mail, give him a shout, quick!
MCiOS
It has rather shrunk.. I hope the games haven't been lost!
I've sent Dan a message about it already. 9:30 am in London is 2:30 am in Portland though, so I don't suppose he's up and about.
Yes, the middle of the night problem. We'll just have to wait. Hope it's ok...
MC in The Times
[Tuj] Did you guess the ruleset?
[Kim] No, do tell ;)
Ah. Very odd. I'll take a look.
Well done, Dan - no idea what you did, but you fixed it! :-)
It may be a serious problem. Stay tuned.
It's not behaving very well. I've asked the crew at the facility to cycle the power. I have last night's nightly backup here -- it's automatically fetched on a schedule, so nothing will be lost. But as I say, there may be a hardware problem so things might be iffy for a while.
Okay, it's going to be out of service for a while, as in multiple days, I think. I'm going to need to reconfigure my mail to point somewhere else, too. Very annoying.
(thank you, rab, for allowing me to use your server as a bulletin board.)
[Dan] Nae worries. As you know, I've hardware problems of my own.
BTW if anyone wants to email me -- though I'll be pointing my usual email at another server within a day or so -- there's always my last name at gmail dot com. Normally I don't check it very often but I'm using it now.
Get Well Soon MCiOS!
MCiOS thanks you. It would only take a moment to restart it at my home server and point the domain name at it (though it'd be a day or so before that change propagated through the intarweb), but the site gets a LOT of hits, including various kinds of attacks, and it would be a bad idea to inflict that on my home router for several reasons. Anyway, I'm going to have the machine professionally serviced, which will probably bring us into next week. This feels weird. It hasn't been down for more than a few hours since I launched it. I may give up on this colocation lark and go back to a virtual server of some kind; there are better and easier options for rapid failover when you do it that way.
[Dan] Indeed, there can't have been many days since last century when I didn't at least check in and look around at MCiOS. Still, I'm viewing it as a test of character!
Yeah, I still find myself typing "p" into the address bar as a shortcut to MCiOS. ("d" goes to Orange, "r" goes to here. Obvious reasons. But I'm so used to those shortcuts, if I use another computer it knocks me sideways for a minute.)
[Darren] Same with me! Except I use "pa", "du" and "ra".
shortcuts
How do you do that then? I just got 'em in me favourites.
shortcuts
Sounds like do-re-mi.
Do-re-mi
Nono, do is domaintools.com, re is resource-zone.com and mi is usually nothing, but right now it's mikael.jansson.be/rydis.html.
That's got to be an application for Web 3.0. Opening a webpage by whistling a merry tune.
Sign
Another reboot required this morning. I shall try and move to a different host this week.
I thought I couldn't get in last night.
The Tube
For those who are able to access it - tonight [Sunday] sees a series of programmes on BBC TV 4 beginning at 2100, which are all related to the London Underground. Includes the 'Design Classics' prog about the LU map.
[rab] With server farms you tend to get what you pay for -- decent reliable dedicated servers run at least a hundred a month in dollars and not very much less in pounds. If you want to pay a lot less than that and want top quality hardware and good service, you might consider a Xen host instead. The decent providers use very good hardware and they maintain it with a lot of care because if it goes down, more customers are affected than just you. And you can't tell the difference in terms of availability and performance; if anything it'll be much better than a cheap colo because most of the time the (often very muscular) CPU is way underutilized. You never get less than the share you're paying for and more often than not you get much more when you need it. And it's spectacularly easy to fail over to another machine -- a good provider will be able to switch you to new hardware in a matter of minutes if smoke starts pouring out of the box you're on. Frankly I'm seriously considering going back to that my self, mainly for that last reason.
Some links
xensource's list and hostingfu's. Both list UK providers, though you have to scroll down to find them in the latter.
Oh, for three years I ran mcios and several other sites, both http and https, an SMTP server, a jabber server with several transports, mysql, pop3 and imap, the homebrew chat server of course and a variety of other services that came and went over the years ... all in 64MB instance of User Mode Linux; a poor man's Xen. It was a little swappy but completely responsive and reliable. It was on good hardware though. A 256M Xen host would be an Aston Martin by comparison.
[Dan] Thanks for that - I was considering a 128MB Xen Vps but was slightly concerned it might not be up to the job of serving this site, which gets something like 5k hits a day.
[rab] How about hosting in Edinburgh? Though you'd probably want to traceroute them to find out if it's really close to you in terms of network hops; I'm three miles but 12 hops and 85ms from mine because of a lack of local peering between carriers, but your situation is likely to be different. Very low latency could be handy for maintenance; you could just mount drives remotely.
(Though it's not clear from their site that they offer Xen in their Embra facility, you'd have to phone to find out. And I'm not vouching for them as a provider -- I know nothing about them.)
[Dan] That company was on my shortlist of two. Haven't got round to emailing them yet, but I'll ask if they host Xen in (or, if my hunch as to the actual location is correct, near) Edinburgh.
128 should be fine. I run an identical setup at home on 128MB Xen server, and by far the biggest memory hog is mysql. Here's the memory footprint, 12 days since the last reboot:
dan@flint:~$ free total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 131252 110836 20416 0 4632 38480
-/+ buffers/cache: 67724 63528
Swap: 131064 2228 128836
Those are pretty healthy numbers -- just enough swapping to indicate that it doesn't have more memory than it needs, without being significant.
Yikes, looks like you're discarding newlines. Okay, look in the chat game on mcios.
Whoops, had forgotten there would be instances where white-space would be significant. Hmm, looks like I need a PRE-tag handler.
But thanks for that info - as you (probably) know this thing hangs off a mysql database and although I've tried to minimise the number of queries needed to display any particular page, when it comes down to it you've still got to through a few Mb of tables around.
s/through/throw/. Another thing I want to add is a "whoops" feature that lets you correct typos in your previous move.
Typos
The Banter Page (this page) is wider than the others at the moment, so I have to scroll right to get to the 'up' and 'next' options.
Although it might revert when Dan's post has disappeared offscreen.
Ah, it doesn't do that on Firefox.
I wouldn't object if you modified or replaced it.
BTW, the web host for xtrahost.net appears to be located in the Scotland facility, if node names are anything to go by. I'd be tempted to relocate there myself and damn the exchange rate, but unfortunately I get 160ms ping times to it from my colo and 200ms from my home. That's fine for web stuff but I'd be unhappy with shell access and any other activity involving lots of small round trips.