[Nottingham] [Social] *Tomorrow* Tuesday 19/01/2010 YO! Sushi 'n' beer

[Martin]

Martin wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> Following on from no less than *TWO* previous attempts (for me at
> least)! Take #3 for *tomorrow* Tuesday 19/01/2010:
> 
> For something completely....  the same????
> 
> 
> Yo Sushi for their latest offer of 40% off:
> http://www.yosushi.com/offers/eat-forty-percent-more

Yae! We made it!! ... But only just...

Good also to welcome some new faces. Hope we weren't too scary!


The Pit was its usual self except that they've turned up the muzak a
little too loud and the non-alcoholic drinkers were being charged more
for their lack of alcohol than us beer drinkers for a full quota of
drink... The vote was that we try another of the nearby establishments
next time when in that area.

We arrived at Yo! Sushi at about 19:05 to find that it was full and with
a 30 minutes queue! They don't take table bookings but a little
persuasion bagged us a queue position 'booking'. Thence we wandered
around the corner for a swift foray to the Cock 'n' Hoop, a very old
NLUG haunt of years ago. Back to Yo! Sushi for some very good nosh and
including some equipment exchanges before returning to finish off the
old haunt oncemore.

There were various comments about GUIs that I've forgotten. For anyone
who's seen Avatar (see the 3d version!), there were some nice GUI
gesture ideas shown for their graphics tablets and 3d displays. I still
think we've made little GUI progress since the early ideas published by
Xerox Palo Alto in the 1970's...

(BTW: Avatar was rendered on a Linux farm...)

Good brief comment about RAID and btrfs and filesystems. I rather like
the idea of btrfs intelligently taking over RAID functionality and so
avoiding blindly replicating vast tracts of unused storage area as is
done at present by device level RAID. That is, only live file data and
metadata are replicated by btrfs. (Note: btrfs is still 'experimental'
where certain bits are known not to work yet...) Perhaps we need the
flash inspired "TRIM" command for device level RAID? Also, there was
agreement (by two of us that is) that /application level/ data
redundancy/replication is the way to go as is practised by Google.

After further thoughts and investigation, I follow Linus' opinion that
we shouldn't need to do anything 'special' in the OS or fs to
accommodate using flash storage. The fs should simply be a fs with at
most optional tuning for the elevator for the obvious access
optimisations for HDD vs SSD. However, I seem to have killed a flash
memory stick with just three months of use for a "/var" :-(

Various comments and concerns about "cloud computing". And lots more.


And we need to get a calendar of talks posted up for this year! That
would be much better than the comments typical of late of, err...
errmmm... Such as...

It's a talk on "From Switch On to Desktop", *tomorrow* *WEDNESDAY*
03/02/2010! ;-)


Cheers All,
Martin


OS: Operating System
fs: filesystem
GUI: Graphical User Interface (such as your computer desktop)
RAID: Random Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks
btrfs: A new filesystem
HDD: Hard Disk Drive
SSD: Solid State Drive (such as flash memory "disks")
BTW: By The Way

Abbreviations and acronyms we are!

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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