Project

I’m realising that my project is close being due for submission. I only have about a month left and I still haven’t finished. I’m not too worried as I think I can devote lots of time to it now, but it’s still going to be not quite as thorough as I had hoped initially.

I’m thinking that the PhD might have to wait for another year. I don’t feel that I have either the idea fully formed enough to apply to the best places nor the financial stability to take three years out of work. It will depend on what happens to Christina and me in the next few months. Christina heard today that she might pick up a contract at C&W! That would be interesting.

I hope to find the inspiration to get the project finished properly and written up well enough that I can hope to have a paper published from it. I think the idea deserves it, but I need to push it in the right direction.

Ireland

We have just returned from a wonderful trip to Ireland last week. We drove to Bristol on Sunday night and then to Fishgard on the Monday morning. Across the sea to Rosslare and then three hours drive to Limerick later we were in Lorraine's and Ivan’s with their lovely children Art and Louise. We spent a fantastic few days with them ; had a great boat ride on Lough Derg, met my uncle and visited family graves I have never seen before and also had time to drive up to Spanish Point and the Cliffs of Moher on the Clare coast.

We then travelled over to Dublin to see Lisa and Mal and had a splendid day with them in Sandymount. Had a few pints in O’Reilly’s bar in Sandymount and generally enjoyed Dublin’s south side. After that we sailed back to Holyhead, over to spend a night with Julia and Mike and then back via lunch with Mum and Dave in Doncaster.

The weather throughout has been astounding. Sunny every day and warm too.

All in all it was a great trip. The boys had a super time on boats, at the beach and just hanging out. We enjoyed seeing friends and also I was especially moved to meet up with uncle Peter and see the family connections in Limerick.

I hope we will make Ireland a regular visit since it’s close enough and a truly beautiful country.

I even hope to pick up some Irish – at least enough to be able to pronounce Laois properly!

foaf

I have spent a quite unproductive, but pleasing couple of days. Christina has taken the children to Whitstable and left me to concentrate on tidying up the study and doing my project. I’m working slowly through both, but enjoying the time by myself to do whatever I want. I have set up my music studio (such that it is!), but I’m having problems with the hardware. I don’t think I’ll buy Line6 again! I managed to record some stuff last night though and it’s more promising that it was previously.

I thought about the perpetuity question raised the other day. Why does the data need to be online and stored centrally? Presumably in the future every computing device will be online and therefore anything plugged in to those devices will be online and accessible too. Each household will have it’s own web presence complete with a web server of sorts. I can imagine that each person from history will have their own FOAF rdf database (simply a text file of XML data). These can be several KB large so would be extremely portable and transferable. These foaf files would be stored on any medium and transferred as necessary. They are self-explanatory since they would uniquely identify an individual from the name and date of birth data. They can be extended to include all sorts of other data and as the Semantic Web expands I think these will become even more important.

I think this would quite elegantly solve the problem I foresee regarding perpetuity. The main problem is with the domain that the file is served from. Currently mine comes from a domain I pay for and manage – oreilly.me.uk. This could expire if I don’t renew it and therefore the link to my foaf person will disappear. However, as long as the file exists (even on a USB thumb stick!) then the important data will exist. It might be up to individual families to manage these data, similarly to how they might manage a descendant’s grave.

A better solution would be for government to host these tiny files in perpetuity. To serve a 1KB file for 70,000,000 people (about the UK’s population) would require a 70GB drive. This can be picked up for about £30 these days. It’s not a question of cost, but more of organisation. Let’s see….

See mine here: http://cliff.oreilly.me.uk/foaf_cliff.rdf.

Summer Fete

I had a good day today. Up early-ish at 7, but went back to bed and slept in until 9! I had to rush around to pack the car with the Splat The Rat and High Striker to take to the fete. I helped set up for a few hours (lots of gazebo fiddling and table moving) and eventually at 1pm the Fete started.

The High Striker lasted about an hour before the brutish children bashed it to bits! Looks like it’ll need some extensive rework. The Splat The Rat lasted much better and will probably see life next year without any work.

Christina, Max and Finn showed up for a couple of hours in the middle and I was lucky enough to spend some time walking around and enjoying the sights.

I helped clean up too. This was mostly carrying tables and chairs and generally helping with gazeboes again (this time helped by gravity). Also the free beer helped immensely!

All in all it was a grand day. I helped the school, the boys had fun and I certainly caught the sun – I’m beetroot-like, but it feels good!

High Striker and perpetuity

Today has been a busy one. I spent most of the morning putting the finishing touches to the High Striker and Splat The Rat I’ve been making for Max’s school summer fete tomorrow. The Splat the Rat was quite easy (cheap boards cable-tied to a ladder and then painted), but the High Striker has been tricky. It’s only this morning that I was confident that it was going to work at all. The mechanism has been tough to perfect. I always knew I wanted to have some kind of pivot as the main mechanism, but getting it to work with the bits and bobs I had lying around the shed was hard. Eventually Christina had the great idea of moving the mechanism higher and that proved to be the turning point. The last problem of the wire snapping was solved by using a plastic piece under the Bob (my term for the metal bar that actually moves and hits the bell) rather than a metal one. Max is able to hit the bell fairly easily and this was the aim all along: for any child at the school to have the ability to hit the bell. It was never going to be very fair to set it up to be too hard. I’m sure the dings will be ringing out all afternoon tomorrow!

Christina also helped out greatly by fabricating a “rat” for the Splat the Rat game. She used an old sock of Max’s and a little sewing later and we have a small rat to use!

I’ve been thinking recently about how to set up an information source online that has reasonable perpetuity. The issue of what happens to our online presence after we die has not been raised often since not many of the pioneers of the internet and WWW have died yet! What do I mean by perpetuity anyway?! Would 100 years be enough time to hold someone’s important data online for? 200? 1000? These numbers seem ridiculous: like there’ll even be an internet by then.

So is this question pointless? I don’t think so. It may be that some data is actually not useful outside of the sphere it was intended for, e.g. someone’s blog or personal web site. What about, however, a specific piece of research or data related to something that can be used by future generations? Shouldn’t that be maintained? Presumably if it’s useful enough it would be maintained by the future generations that can use it, but I expect there to be exceptions. I might like my great-great-grandchildren to read this blog. Will it still be available to them in 50 years? Presumably, if the host maintains its presence, and that is entirely up to the shareholders! Surely there’s money to be made from someone setting up a company that does this? Call it Humanity Server, maintain it as long as possible (barring war, famine etc) and charge advertising and it would make money over time, but perhaps revenue generation over 100 years isn’t feasible!

I don’t think this problem will be solved until our species has a longer-term plan and that won’t happen until we have some things like energy security and WMD-destruction.

In the meantime I’m looking for a way to keep my data online for as long as I can. Perhaps I should look at a read-only, moon-based, solar-powered, open-source data server? How much would that cost?

About time

It certainly is about time I picked up with this blog again. Various things have kept me from it, but with each passing day I feel an opportunity is missed to write about the two beautiful boys growing up with me.