risk 4

Last night's events filled a news cycle and provide plenty of speculation for the weekend media. The Syrian civil war has already suffered over 400,000 deaths, according to the United Nations and Arab League envoy to Syria. Alongside the recent chemical weapons, there's been widespread cluster and incendiary bombing, which reaches back to 2011.

Now, 5 days into his job, we see ultra hawk National Security Advisor John Bolton and White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders watch the US announcement of the strikes in Syria. Bolton appears to want stronger action and Sanders has to untangle the ramblings of the so-called president.

Someone gave Trump an autocue for his last couple of announcements, notice his changed accent and pauses in. phrasing after every. few word. (s).

My guess is that the air strike targeted the area adjacent to the Higher Institute of Applied Sciences, which is out on the boundary of Damascus and adjacent to desert. There's that big messy processing complex of some kind right next door.

The other targeting appears to be of the rather dilapidated complex along the road from the military Al Tiyas (T4) airstrip. My picture shows the T4 runway foreground and this other possible target slightly further away (to the east actually, the runway runs east to west).

Aside from the inevitable political and party political squabbles, no one-one really knows what will happen next. We've just prodded a dragon with a stick.

Trump could, for all his rhetoric, still be running diversionary tactics away from his attacked and erratic ego. Comey's book. Mueller's investigation. Stormy's revelations. Cohen's extending payoffs. The son-in-law. That awkward background of money laundering in Trump Tower. Melania's displeasure. The list goes on.

We had a power cut just after the news came in. Radio 4 suddenly stopped working. I checked the fuses. No, it wasn't a nuclear alert signal.

risk 3 ?

It's impossible to assess any accurate position through the hail of non-diplomacy in current US interactions related to the Middle East. The so-called president is blasting out on twitter and the White House Press Office is blustering about his words. More ridiculous than episodes of a box set.

Now we are also waiting for Theresa May to describe a UK position and whether or not Parliament gets to vote on any action. Even that's partly about whether the Tories lose a vote in the house.

Meanwhile, like one of those movies, the Russians appear to have access to the tunnel hangars at the airfield near Latakia, Syria as well as the Syrian owned S-400 missiles which have an air defence range beyond Cyprus. They are surface to air, but there's be other options around.

The American 6th Fleet is based in Naples, so we may have a lull whilst available missile carrying ships chug into the area. I took a look and there seems to be about half a dozen U.S. warships around the Mediterranean, although any aircraft carriers would probably need to move across from Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia, although I reckon this would take about 17 days in a fleet formation.

The whole Syrian regime may be horrendous, but missile escalation didn't work for the last Trump endeavour. 59 missiles used yet the runways were tokenistically back in use the next day. And it's not just one airfield. They are scattered all over Syria and generally well-stocked with planes and armaments.

I generated a quick indicative list and although there's still some ageing MIGs active, there's also a fair few modern planes.

However despicable the actions of Syria's tyrant, there needs to be a plan above gesture politics for this knife edge.

Experiments with Drobo 5N during a spot of housekeeping

I needed to swap out a hard drive on one of my Drobo 5N. It all went smoothly as I swapped in a new 6 Terabyte drive. The whole thing only took a few minutes and I left the drive running to hot-swap the WD Red 6TB. No drama.

It reminded me that one of my backup disk packs has 5 x 6 Terabyte drives, but that the available space is only 16 Terabytes. I know, it sounds a lot, but well, there was around another 5.7 Tb of unallocated 'blue' space.

Drobo changed its firmware a couple of years ago to support up to a 64 Terabyte image, but although I use the latest version, my original disk pack predates the 64 TB limit. Time for some reconfiguration and a little experimentation too.

The whole WD Red 30TB pack was a backup of a backup, so I decided to try a couple of experiments before rebuilding. These are kind of 'worse case scenarios' and the kind of things that meander along unanswered on forum posts. I was more interested in the latitude of the Drobo against a human error than in really exercising these varied disasters.

Experiment 1: Reset the Drobo (which should cause it to lose everything) and then re-insert 4 of the 5 disks. Would the Drobo still find the remnants of the pre-existing pack and attempt to rebuild it? Yes, it did, although it estimated around 60 hours for the rebuild. Despite the reset, the revised pack would still be a maximum size 16 TB. Useful to know.

Experiment 2: Shuffle the still existing 5 Pack of disks before re-insertion. The Drobo figured this out too, and attempted to rebuild all 5 of the now jumbled disks. Interesting.

Experiment 3: Erase the 5 disks, one at a time in a USB3 caddy using OSX Disk Utility. Then reinsert four of them into the Drobo and see if it would attempt a rebuild. Yes, even this appeared to work, although I didn't let the 60 hour rebuild run.

Experiment 4: Take 4 of these good disks and another Mac erased WD Red 6TB disk, which had previously been defective in another Drobo. See whether this 'reset' Drobo also decided the disk was defective. Yes, even after the reset I got a red light on the duff disk. The disk works fine in a stand-alone caddy, but in such a mode it isn't subject to the same level of duty as it would be in a server pack. Implies that Drobo maybe marks the disk as well as storing a defective drives table.

Finally, another reset. No drives in the unit. Put in two and wait for the proper re-initailisation to start. New space offered, 64 Terabytes, of which my 30TB pack with redundancy has 21TB to use. That should keep me quiet for a while.

risk 2

When I put up a picture of the Risk board a couple of days ago, I didn't expect things to escalate quite so quickly, but the world is getting ready for a Nato/US/Russia face-off in the already war-ravaged Syria. My map shows in blue the 90 km road route between the two biggest Syrian air bases.

Syrian ruler Assad and his cohort have much blood on their hands with unlawful attacks by both Syrian government and Russia forces against civilians, with attacks on medical facilities, schools, and mosques. There have been cluster munition attacks by Syrian government forces against opposition-held areas as well as use of thermite incendiary weapons. Add continued use of chemical weapons and organophosphorus nerve agents. Then there's been sarin dropped from a Sukhoi SU-22 plane and helicopters dropping chlorine. All with huge civilian casualties. That's the Human Rights Watch picture, but the UN has been stymied to even write a report on all of this by Russian downvoting.

Now the so-called US leader has jumped in making pronouncements about action. His speeches continue to be full of double-talk. One minute he is saying he wants to withdraw American troops. His soundtrack wasn't about atrocities, more that the sphere of influence is away from US strategic interests. Now he's talking about a military strike.

He did the same around a year ago, when he suddenly attacked Shayrat airfield. I know he's just allocated over half the US budget to military spending, but he's already diverting part of that spending to domestic border control.

Trump continues to act erratically. He has other distractions related to 'alleged' sleaze, corruption, vote rigging, payoffs. Even the Trump Tower fire illustrated that his company built this luxury tower block without any upper floor sprinklers. He issued a duck'n'dive DontheCon tweet about that too.

So now we see him hinting at strong-arm retaliation. I've used a particular version of an ISW map to illustrate some of the lines.

But for Trump it's about symbolism. Gesture politics. He can make some good headlines, even if they are against what he has said only a few days and weeks and months ago about this situation.

Syria has around 20 airforce bases. They've also taken to spreading their planes around the desert to make them harder to hit, when on the ground. My satellite picture over one of their main airstrips indicates the situation. Four decoys in a row and four real planes sprinkled around the sand.

Russia has sold and operationalised its S-400 missile system within Syria too. They are ground to air systems that can supposedly track 35 airborne targets and fire missiles at Mach 3.

So far they've not been deployed but if there's a hint of air traffic from Rammstein or other big US airforce conurbations then I'd expect that to all kick off as well.

The UK is being encouraged to take part in whatever happens. RAF Akrotiri is a few minutes Mach 2 airspace away and has Tornado bombers and Typhoon fighters. But with Trump at the front of all this it is potentially a case of Ready, Fire, Aim.

risk?

I enjoy an occasional board game of Risk. Seems as if the real world versions are back in play.

The U.S. National Guard will deploy up to 4,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border beginning Friday night, according to a the tRump memo from Defense Secretary James Mattis.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 600 points on Friday, a decline of around 2.3 percent. The sell-off came after that man threatened a new round of tariffs against China, upping the ante between the two nations.

Is the so-called president taking his China sanctions from Bob Lighthizer? A “might makes right” believer in the trade world. A brash and successful negotiator, a free trade sceptic who believes in using hard-hitting measures to protect domestic industries.

And what about the Russian angle? Kamchatka and all that? Former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort filed a motion late Friday to suppress evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team found in a storage locker in Virginia. Evidence which could illustrate some of the curious Manafort/Trump dealings prior to Trump's election.

It's better than box sets. Even before the minor sub-plots like the non-climate change believer Pruitt heading the Environmental Protection Agency having a Capitol Hill condo for $50 per night, via an energy lobbyist's wife.

No wonder Instructables have created a nuclear option for the board game.

Just remember, no fighting in the war room.

Topsham gulls tempted by tractor

The tractor was out on the field at the front today, much to the entertainment of the local gulls. Usually they will fly purposefully past here, as a short diversion from the nearby estuary.

But a freshly ploughed field...Too much of a temptation. I think they are mainly herring gulls. Wings tipped black, red spot on the yellow bill and pink legs. Excuse the blurry pictures taken through a window.

drive failure on backup day?

Someone said it was 'backup day' or 'backup week' or something similar. Co-incidentally, I had a drive fail in my backup disk array. The picture shows the disk out of its normal NAS enclosure and being examined in one of those hard drive docking stations.

I've already replaced it with a fresh disk in the Drobo and didn't even need to take the server offline.

The last 6 Terabyte drive failed about a year ago, and was in the same unit, but a different slot.

I decided to look at mean time between failure on these devices. I've quite a few Western Digital RED drives for servers and have a pretty good experience with them. Mine are mainly 3 Terabyte (15T packs) and 6 Terabyte (30T packs). By the time they have a single or dual disk redundancy, the available space diminishes somewhat.

It still seems crazy large compared with my oldest disk computers which had something like 2x32Mb disk drives.

Nowadays, I should probably be storing all of that data in the cloud (it's not like I need it all at once), although I'm still somewhat nervous about the way various services just come to an end. A recent example is the termination of the Amazon cloud storage of personal music libraries, which isn't allowing any new things to be uploaded after the end of 2018.

I like the stats that backblaze keep on disk failure rates, from their server farms, as a quick way to get a sense of relative failure rates, from a population of about 90,000 drives.

Pig and Whistle

An expedition to the Pig & Whistle, out in the Essex countryside. I know there's a lot of Pig 'n Whistle bars in America, but the pictures of pigs with whistles is a somewhat more literal translation than what I think of as Pig and Whistle, which is more or less a piggen wassail. That's a bowl or jug of beer which gets dunked/poured with individual beer mugs.

It used to be a thing in London, around some part of the City. Draft bitter sometimes gravity-fed from the barrel into a jug/pitcher and then distributed around the table.

Mainly just 4 and 8 pints, but nowadays it has almost completely disappeared except for the buckets of beer, which is simply iced (usually foreign lager) bottled beers bought in units of around 5. Those sawdust floored real ale pubs, underneath railway arches and lit by candles have been progressively replaced with Weatherspoons or expensive cocktail bars.

But back to the country pub in Essex. It serves a lovely Sunday carvery. Oh yes.

saddled with it

A chance for some family catch up, although there were several comments about my apparent hole-digging cycling performance. I sometimes forget how far and wide the Garmin statistics get spread via tapiriik and other systems.

When I use turbo mode then it does look as if I'm prospecting for oil. I know I sometimes come back thinly covered in it, but I think that's the chain fighting back.

Bookish magical realism

A stop off in Piccadilly at the Edward Lutyens designed Maison Assouline, partly to look at the rather expensive books, and partly to tipple one of the rather expensive cocktails. The sign outside might say books, gifts and cafe, but it is a rather understated indication of the model Ferraris, coffee table Andy Warhols and afternoon teas on offer.

I decided to try the tequila based Frida Kahlo, which somehow matched the book on display just in front of me. Or maybe it was subliminal advertising? Magical realism?

CDs vs digital - a listener's licence?

Before we moved I did a rationalisation of vinyl music. Around an 80% cull. We do still have a record player, but it is somewhat decorative nowadays, akin to those vintage typewriters that are making a comeback. A few special albums and ones with extra memories survived, but the rest (often duplicated as CDs) are doing the rounds of charity shops.

The next set of items to follow my old bright orange Olympia Traveller de Luxe out of the door, could be my CDs.

Ages ago I started removing CDs from jewel cases, to get around a 5:1 space reduction. They spent some time in plastic binders, but then as we went digital, the CDs started to migrate into crates. Never a good sign.

Currently the crates are in the garage, awaiting the next set of decisions.

Do I build some shelving to bring them back indoors? My artistic recreation of shelving suggests not. And if I did, would they ever be browsed and would individual CDs get played the way they were when there were far fewer and they had a dedicated Hi-Fi system?

I somehow doubt it. I know all about the higher quality of the CDs compared with .mp3 and FLAC encoding. More dynamic range. On headphones with some I can even tell the type of tape used on old analogue to digital conversions of albums.

Would that it were so simple.

Convenience will win out. Being able to think of an album and just play it still wins over rummaging around through racks of CDs in most cases. Even playlists for those Chilled Afternoon Coffee Moments Where Even Stereo Is Unimportant.

I guess there will be exceptions. Some CDs with elaborate cases that are still akin to artwork. A few with extra special memories, but the bulk are really a way to be able to prove that I have the licence for a particular set of music.

I haven't started the physical process yet.

fedora hat man

That new movie Unsane with Claire Foy as the leading character is a sort of stalker take on a Gaslight movie. Whilst with some sunny outdoor moments, it's set largely within a hospital and oft-times inside the head.

Close quarters and dimly lit, it was entirely made on iPhones. It makes me wonder how the techniques for iPhone and very small camera based movies will develop. Some of the static well-lit scenes have incredible detail, other major story-telling parts go somewhat murky and dare I say blurry.

For monochrome movies there developed all kinds of back-light/rim light techniques to set the right noir tones. You almost can't have a noir without one of those shutters/blinds scenes and some of that cigarette smoke...For Canon/Lumix/RED style big lens digital there's a chance to show off creamy blurry depth of field.

Now with the tiny cameras, away from Top Gear style saturation and magic bullet post-processing, there'll presumably be a whole new set of techniques? I suppose this movie is something of a trailblazer. All the way from selfies to wide-screen?

Here's a trailer for the movie, although, by way of a warning, it is one of those that partially summarises the plot.