More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • To The Eastern Road

    Some pictures from the “other side” of Portsmouth this time :-

    Old Metal 1, 2, &3

    Old Metal 1
    Old Metal 2
    Old Metal 3

    And something a little more accessible :-

    Sailing

    Sailing

    Dog Inspects Memorial

    Dog Inspects Memorial

  • Saving Space

    Every so often I have an “episode” where I come up with an idea on how to save space in my flat (which is not overly large). Last time this happened in a serious way, I threw away all my DVD cases (yes it was that long ago) and put the DVDs into a folder. Now I have a stupidly large number of DVDs and BlueRay discs in a couple of those two hundred disc folders you can get. And I don’t have a living room packed with shelves holding nothing but DVDs.

    After a week or so of looking at a large pile of recent (and in some cases not so recent – I cleaned my old CD storage unit last week which is currently a display case, and found quite a few oldies) CDs piled up on the stairs waiting to get boxed to go into the spare bedroom, I get another idea … related of course :-

    56060

    A CD spindle box of course! Or as otherwise known, a cake box. One of those tubular thingies which you could get large stacks of CD-R media in. I happened to still have one lying around, and packed in that large pile of CDs (and a few others). That huge pile is what is about to be thrown out, and that little thing next to it are the CDs themselves.

    Now there are disadvantages to this of course – playing the CDs themselves is tricky as you have no easy way of finding a particular one. And looking at the artwork on the case is even trickier. But given I don’t play CDs anymore – they’re all ripped and stored online – and I look at the artwork never, those disadvantages don’t strike me as a reason not to do this.

    Of course now I need more empty “cake boxes”! Lots of them.

  • Making A Core Dump Of A Running Process

    For my own future reference …

    Today I encountered an interesting little issue where I could not send an ABORT signal to a running process to kill it with a core dump because the process had a limit of 0 for the core dump size. Try as I might, I could not find a way to change that process’s core dump limit.

    Turns out there is another way of tackling the problem, which is to use gdb to generate a core image :-

    gdb
>attach PID
>gcore /var/tmp/core.PID

    There is of course the gcore shell script wrapper for this, but that may not work if the working directory of the process no longer exists.

  • Grand National Fatalities Analysis

    This is a companion blog entry to the one where I merely published the table of fatality statistics. That article was the raw facts; this one is where I can whitter on about anything I please – ideally backed up with some analysis of the raw statistics.

    One of the things that became apparent to me as I worked on the table, was that the Grand National of old was not anywhere near as fatal as one would assume. Over the years, all sorts of things have been tried to make the Grand National safer – removing stone fences (!), removing the ploughed fields, reducing the heights of fences, etc. Yet it doesn’t seem to have made that much difference.

    Over the last 20 years, there have been just 7 years without fatalities. In the 35 races for which I have details ran before 1900, “just” 10 had fatalities in. So we have gone from a majority of races (in the earliest supposedly most dangerous era of the Grand National) being fatality free, to a state where the majority of races do have fatalities. So much for making things safer.

    Looking more closely, we can average out the fatality rate over time. The average fatality rate over the whole period for which I have figures comes to 1.70%. This compares to an average rate of 2.05% over the last 10 years (2001-2011), and 3.2% for the 10 years before that. So I guess the rate is falling, but it is still well above the average over time. If we go back earlier in time, we have a rate of 2.8% for the years 1950-59 (including the infamous 1954), or a rate of 1.4% for the years 1930-1939.

    There is a great deal more that could be done with the figures … not least of which is to chase down the figures for the missing years. However what seems to be the case is that what has happened over time is that the race has been made easier and not safer.

    So How Can We Make The Grand National Safer ?

    I am totally unqualified to make any sensible suggestions, but someone who just criticised without trying to be helpful is nothing but a whinger, so I will try …

    Let me repeat that overall statement – the Grand National has been made easier and not safer over the years. That is of course subject to debate, but let us assume it is true. How does making a race easier, make it less safe ? Well, simply if you make a race easier you make it possible for horses to run faster. When horses have accidents they are more likely to have fatal accidents the faster they are going. By making the race easier, we have let the horses run faster and so make it more likely they will have fatal accidents.

    So make the race harder – higher fences, plough some of the track, etc.

    Make it easier for horses to give up and disqualify themselves – a horse who has had enough should be given the opportunity to say “No, thanks. I’ll pass on this one”.

  • Osama bin Laden’s Death

    We have all heard today about the death of Osama bin Laden. This of course is good news – whilst Al-Queda will carry on, removing their founder is certainly a blow. And who needs terrorists? But I’ve had a few thoughts from the ongoing discussions :-

    1. The celebrations of Americans at the announcement was understandable, but a touch distasteful … it may well have been necessary to kill Osama rather than bring him to justice, but celebrating any death no matter how unpleasant the man himself, is less than dignified.
    2. It is unfortunate that he wasn’t brought to justice to face an international court for crimes against humanity. Killing him was almost certainly unavoidable given his declaration he would rather be killed than captured, but he wasn’t ‘brought to justice’ – that would involve a court and being sentenced to some form of punishment.
    3. It is worth pointing out that Osama got at least part of what he wanted. Given the choice of being killed immediately or being brought to face a court and a lengthy trial, Osama wanted to be killed. Of course he would prefer to be free to create more trouble than he has already.
    4. I rather hope that the US authorities obtained some sort of permission to go into Pakistan – whether it was a blanket permission to “extract Obama” at some point, or whether it was specific authorisation for this mission.
    5. There are those who are saying that as Osama was found “hiding in plain site” as it were, then it is certain that he was being helped out by the Pakistani authorities. This is ridiculous. First of all he was hiding in a walled compound out of plain site. He was probably never in a position to be observed except by those closest to him. Secondly, whilst he may have received assistance from some individuals within the authorities in the past, that is not the same as receiving assistance from the authorities themselves … and the fact he was caught this time is an indication that his support is disappearing.