Dishwasher Blues

Well our trusty Miele G572 dishwasher packed up the other day, it's an old mechanical one in that it has the tick tick ticking of the rotary dial which times all the events....

The first thing we noticed was that we put a load in the dishwasher and four hours later it was still on the same portion of the clean cycle... stuck forever..... endlessly rinsing....which wasn't really a problem because all we had to do was come in and click it over after about 15 minutes and it carried on....However......

Then we noticed that the element blew quite silently and it no longer heated the water.... so we gracefully retired it, the cost of parts exceeded what it was worth...... sadly.

We then proceeded to wash manually in the sink again.... we soon lost interest

I had a look at the timer unit in a last ditch attempt to bring it back to life.... but it is a completely sealed unit,  in that I'd have to destroy the case to get into it, because of the pop rivets holding it together .....I did the usual drenched it in circuit cleaner but I think it's work was done and having washed dishes since 1988 until 2012 which is 24 years .....  it had shuffled off to the retro dishwasher showroom of the sky when it was shiny and new and full of promise.......24 years really  isn't bad going for a dish washer......

So we've splashed out on a new one, well new ish.... I refuse to pay for brand new, it simply isn't worth it.... So we have Ebay'ed a rather nice Indesit model which is only a year or two old and looks to be in extremely good nick......and a bargain for £40 !!! we will run that one into the ground....Although I doubt it will last 24 years.... they don't make them like that any more I'm afraid......

either way a result !!!

Ubuntu vs Debian

I've deserted the Ubuntu flavoured fold of Linux for Debian.... Now as you may know Ubuntu is based on Debian, so the learning curve for me is a very shallow one, and it's true that Debian is less friendly than Ubuntu... But I simply didn't like the direction Ubuntu was taking their distro... I'm not a fan of the Unity desktop, it's too simplistic and for me isn't customisable enough to make the transition. Neither do I like Gnome 3......Call me a stick in the mud but I happen to like Gnome 2.xx I can make it do what I want it to with very little effort.... I understand the changes Ubuntu are making, they want to tap into the mobile market, but for me it's a step too far....

So I have installed Debian 6.0.4 (Squeeze) and I'm very happy with it, it does have its quirks but fortunately I've been using Linux for so long now the fixes are minor and easy to implement, the end result is a desktop which is very similar to Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) but with all the bells and whistles of Compiz.....So I'm a happy bunny again :)

But that is the beauty of Linux, if a distribution brings out an "upgrade/release" you don't like, you can stick to your old version until they stop supporting it, then jump ship..... Like I have..... I tried Mint but it's nowhere near as polished as Ubuntu or Debian....

Of course as development continues I will eventually be forced out of Gnome 2.xx but I'd like to put that moment off for as long as possible :) 

Big Brother is a reality

The NSA (National Security Agency) in the United States are currently building a massive data centre in Utah.... it's going under the bland name of "The Utah Datacentre"  it will be opened  and ready for business in 2013

Here's a few facts about the place.

• it's going to need 65 Megawatts to run it
• It has the capability to run for 3 days without power on it's own generators
• it also has 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep the servers cool
• Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.
• Water storage and pumping able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day
• Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.

Just to give you an idea 25,000 square foot of floor space is a building 2322 Sq/metres and there will be four of these huge buildings just for the storage of racks and racks of servers, overall the entire data centre will occupy one million square feet OR that is 22 football pitches (English pitches).

I quote from Wired  

"Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate"

It will be able to store a Yottabyte of data . To put that in context a Yottabyte is equal to one septillion (one long scale quadrillion or 1024) bytes (one quadrillion gigabytes). and if that number is too big to get your head around according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) basically a massive amount of data.

So it's no mere coincidence that "The Utah Datacentre" will have the ability to store a Yottabyte it will need that as a buffer to catch everything then sift the interesting stuff.....

It's a massive task and the NSA not happy with tapping into where the big fat fibre optic pipes hit their shorelines from "the rest of the world"  and listening in to all the many satellites that provided data and voice circuits over America.... No that would only give them international traffic coming into the United States....They went one step further and have tapped into the switches that sit in every city giving them access to ALL internal homeland communications. They have even hinted that they are able to break strong encryption.....the program goes under the name of Stellar Wind

I suppose the only way you could prove that is if you sent a PGP encrypted email to an American friend stating that you were going to bomb such and such a place on such and such a day, then turn up at the airport in the United States and see if you're arrested.... However that acid test might not be understood by the US courts system and you "could" spend a lot of time in jail, So I don't recommend it...... but at least you'd know if they could break PGP ..... In fact it wouldn't surprise me if this blog has been flagged for inspection considering I've uttered the words America and bomb on the same domain/blog....

The level of paranoia in America is almost tangible, whilst I admire good security and countermeasures to keep the baddies at bay, tapping into the entire internet and listening in to whatever they like is taking things a bit far in my book.

The story was broken a few years ago but now this "well known" secret program has been sort of "legalised" and they can openly tap every single person who uses a phone / computer. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network Mr Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

Still think you're having a private conversation ?

Paranoia gone mad.........