"And as we walked along the beaches of Normandy..."

...We came to Juno, Omaha and Gold
And whispered a prayer for the boys
Who'd said goodbye to it all

Sixty-two years ago today, the one of my two grandfathers whom I knew personally was not on Omaha Beach, or on Gold, Sword, Juno or Utah.  He was serving in the 8th Army, then engaged in the liberation of Italy, having helped to drive the Axis powers out of North Africa under the command of General Montgomery.  (He may actually have still been in a military hospital on D-Day, or he may have been at Messina; I don't know for sure.)

Ironically, this was not my Italian grandfather.  He wasn't in Normandy on D-Day either.  He was in Thailand, in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, building a bridge over the Kwai river to complete the rail link to Burma, where he and many others had been captured while serving under General Stilwell.

It was said of them and their contemporaries that they were "the Greatest Generation".  And whether they came ashore on the beaches of Normandy, or parachuted in ahead of the invasion, or were already in combat elsewhere in the world, in Europe, in the Far East, in Scandinavia, even on the Eastern Front, they did their part.  And when they were done, most of them came home and set out to rebuild what needed rebuilding, and to build a better world from the one they had.

They served and asked no reward.  They gave willingly, and did not count the cost.  Many of them never came home again, and some of those who did found they had to liberate their own hometowns from the greedy and corrupt who had taken control in their absence.  So they did that, too.  And then they went back to their homes and their lives, asking no special privileges or thanks.

A lot has happened since then.  You will hear many opinions on whether we have maintained their legacy, improved upon it, or let it wither by the wayside.  I personally think there's truth in all three viewpoints.

But never forget that the world today would be a very different place had not those men stormed ashore from fragile landing craft in the teeth of barbed wire, storms of machinegun fire, mortars and artillery, advancing through tank traps and mines against prepared positions, backed up by tanks inferior to those of their enemy, often driven by untrained replacement crews thrown together on the spot, but all determined that they weren't going home until the job was done, and that their job would not be done until the atrocities of the SS and Gestapo came to an end, until the death camps were liberated, until Europe was once again free.

And never forget that freedom is NOT free, nor liberty easy.

Now THIS is personal flight

You're looking at a strap-on rigid "stealth wing" made of graphite fiber, developed by German company ESG, and slated to be used by elite special forces in addition to a parachute.  Instead of a HALO insertion within a few miles of the target, an infiltration team equipped with the mono-wing could be dropped by a high-altitude transport aircraft as far as 120 miles from their target, gliding to the target area at 220mph carrying up to 200lb of equipment and weapons before opening a parachute for the final landing.  The mono-wing is completely silent, and extremely difficult to detect on radar.

ESG is even considering powered versions that could extend the range still further.  They're talking small turbojets, but for daytime use, I have to wonder how much thrust you could get from a ducted fan powered by photovoltaic panels on the upper surface of the wing.  How about strapping on a wing to fly to the office?  If this tech reaches the public sector, I can see streamlined racing wings, high-aspect-ratio soaring wings, maybe relay races of winged athletes, or a new generation of team games played a thousand feet in the air.  Last year you toured the Grand Canyon by boat; maybe five years from now, you'll be able to tour it from the air, under your own personal set of wings.

The one question I have is whether there's a way to land one of these things without using a parachute.  Logic says you should be able to pull up just above the ground and progressively increase your angle of attack, bleeding off speed until you stall, but the article doesn't mention what the mono-wing's stalling speed is.  Perhaps a more lightly-loaded civilian version with wider span and less sweep might stall at a low enough speed to let you land at a run.

Linkage from koyote

Six, six, six

As most of you probably already know, many of the credulous and superstitious have their panties all in a wad today because it's June 6, 2006, which can be written as 6/6/6.  OH NOES!!!1!  The Number of the Beast!!!  Maybe something really bad is going to happen.  Or maybe it's a sign of the End Times.

Unless, of course, you follow the Julian calendar, in which case it's May 24.  Or the Celtic, or Jewish, or Islamic, or Mayan, or Chinese, or ....  Well, enough of that silliness.

Now, wait a minute.  Back up a step.  What was that about the Number of the Beast?  Robert Anson Heinlein's protagonist in The Number of the Beast, both an engineer and an n-dimensional geometer, proposed that the transcribers of the Bible had misunderstood, and the number being cited was not six hundred, threescore and six, but rather an attempt to represent six to the power six to the power six (a rather larger number, some 36,306 digits in length).  This, he suggested, was the number of possible continua accessible if one postulated that space-time actually possessed six dimensions, which we can refer to as x, y, z, t, tau, teh, and that one could select any four of these six to use as three spatial dimensions and one temporal, and then step along the remaining two axes incrementally, one new continuum per integer quantum step.

Based on this theory he built what he referred to as a continua craft, the unforgettable Gay Deceiver, whereupon the whole group went haring off exploring the continua and stumbling into various other universes, including that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith's Lensman universe.

OK, now we're starting to get somewhere.  So, here we go:

Picture this.  By chance, mysterious provenance, the honest sweat of your genius brow, or the benificence of some n-dimensional geometer from who knows where, you have possession for a while of a continua craft much like Gay Deceiver.  You can make three, but ONLY three, trips to other continua -- any continua you like.  If you've ever read about it in fiction or in scientific speculation, assume that somewhere, at some point along some chosen combination of axes, it exists.

So....

• Where would you go?  Would you stay there?

• Who, or what, would you take there?

• If you didn't stay, then who or what would you bring back?

Fun with backups, for some values of fun

"I've had fun, and this is not it!"

"Sometimes you have fun, sometimes the fun has you."

Backups are one of those things that are boring and unexciting, except when they're not.

I ran full backups today.  This is basically a quite painless process, between Bacula and an LTO1 tape drive, though it does mean spending quite a while sitting and waiting around with high system load while eight machines get backed up.  (One of these days I should probably move the bacula server from babylon5 to minbar.)  It was painless and uneventful right up until the point that the InnoDB ibdata1 file filled up the /opt partition, which -- naturally -- came minutes before completing the last backup.

Of course, when the partition filled, squid died, which caused me some parallel puzzlement until I figured out what had happened.  I had to purge the incomplete full backups I'd just run, dump all the databases to an ASCII file, stop MySQL, move the old database files out of the way, then restart MySQL and recreate the databases from the dump, meanwhile hunting around trying to figure out why LogJam had stopped working (the answer of course being that curl could no longer talk to squid).

Aside from the large waste of time, here's the bad part of this:  This process recovered something like 600MB of disk space.  /opt/mysql/var/ibdata1 had grown to around 1.1Gb, and over half of it was wasted space.

This shouldn't happen, but it's a design flaw of InnoBase.  InnoDB has a lot of advantages over MyISAM, but it has one rather nasty vice, which is that it is very bad about reclaiming unused or freed space.  The ibdata files grow monotonically over time, and there's no way to compact them except by dumping, deleting, re-creating and reloading.  There is no tool or function within the database engine that will compact a database and shrink the file, and that's Bad.

Oracle recently acquired Innobase, in response to which MySQL has announced their intention to develop their own database engine.  Hopefully, it will offer the technical advantages of InnoDB but with a more robust compaction/vacuuming capability.