Publishing - revolution

My sister published a book today. It took 20 years to write but just a couple of hours to publish to the world.  No fancy software was required just MS Word and a web browser to upload to the Kindle self publishing store.  Preparation of the manuscript takes the usual effort for writing, proofing and simple formatting but then upload and publish is really straightforward.

To work best as an eBook simple consistent formatting is required. A page break before each chapter and use paragraph styles to format the headings helps build a live link "Table of contents" page.  That along with some cover artwork makes the complete package.

No more waiting for publisher approval, no more slaughter of trees, the kindle publishing platform is direct and all electronic process.

Originally the development of DTP was all about being able to emulate the technical requirements needed for paper and ink publishing but for ebooks, where the page is formatted on the fly, almost no formatting is needed.


I haven't examined all the commercial arrangements, and I don't know if there are fortunes to be made, that probably comes down to promotion and marketing but the ability to access such an efficient publishing platform is a true revolution.

And the book ....  It's a tale for youngsters told from the view point of Nipper a brave sheepdog that saved 300 cows and sheep from a barn fire.  Over in the kindle store ...  

Not surprised by this.

The Independent newspaper reports ...

British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows

Research shows public opinion often deviates from facts on key social issues including crime, benefit fraud and immigration ....

It's probably because more folks read the Daily Mail than The Independent and Daily Telegraph put together :-). The Daily Mail, like much of the press these days, is a shameful paper that will print what it thinks the public wants to read regardless of the facts of a situation. Specialising in taking opposite ends of a story in the same week it has the morals of a crack den.

Newspapers have a guiding influence on public opinion, so the research above proves how badly they are doing their core function.

Gannett

What to look for in a good knowledge base article.

Continuing the theme of knowledge base articles here are some hints to build a great knowledge base article.

What are the conditions that lead to the event described ?

What are the conditions exclude the event described ?

Build a compelling article by showing the

•             The evidence needed to identify the issue
•             What you see in that evidence,
•             What you understand from that evidence
•             What you recommend in this situation
•             What does a successful outcome look like ?
•             What reference material should you refer to.

When reviewing the document before publication

•            Does the document read as fact or opinion ?
•            Does the document standalone or does it need to be linked to other information.
•            To what versions does the issue and fix apply.
•            What impact will this have on the customer, product or company. 
•            What is the best route of distribution, Customer alert, Urgent posting on Social media, update into company support forums, alert to customer facing teams etc.

Cue the shared knowledge picture :

What to look for in a technical case that would make a good knowledge article.

Knowledge base articles can help divert calls, improve the time to resolution and provide research material when working on technical troubleshooting calls. Good KM articles work well for support folks and customers servicing themselves.   

Every support engineer has cause to be grateful to his colleagues that took the time to generate the knowledge base articles that helped with a tricky case. These articles often derive from previous casework. 

Here are some notes about what to look for in a case to see if it is a good knowledge base article candidate.

Lost –Functionality of product is different from that expected by the customer.  Describe the feature functionality in a way that would avoid confusion in the future.

Missing – Data lost or corrupted by unintentional action of a customer or rogue product. Describe the conditions that lead to the data loss and how it can be avoided. These technotes can be the most contention so be sure to get senior technical advice on theses ones. Some times these KM articles will be promoted to product alert status for direct distribution to customers.

Gaps – Holes in a documented procedure or process that substantially impact the success rate of that process. Describe the purpose of the procedure and how the gap in the process can be avoided.

Scrolls – Documentation errors that are substantially misleading or dangerous to the integrity of customer systems. Be specific as to the documentation reference Book, Number, Page, Paragraph title.

Alien technology – Other vendor problems which impact our software.  Document the events and versions involved link to the vendors support site.

Found – New features or functionality can have unexpected benefits and/or consequences.  Describe the upside of the new feature but also include any Trade-off that come with the new feature.

Wisdom – At the end of a case ask yourself "If you knew at the start what you know now how much better would that case have gone ?" Write that KM document to save your colleagues from the same pain.

Knowledge base articles are the golden nuggets of technical support documentation, learn to find cases and forum threads from which to build them.

Cue the Knowledge base picture :

The speed and size of a hotrod PC's in 2012

I have been thinking about the speed and size of my favourite computer as it crunched it's way through a combinatorial monster of a problem. Looking at the differences between the parts of a PC can really help to exploit the performance characteristics of the machine.

The system in question BB02, previously seen in Gannetts Folding hall of Fame, is quite a beefy box that was assembled at a cost of about £2000 and has recently had some memory and storage upgrades.   

Starting off with memory and Core i7 Gulftown processor we can see in the top left of this screenshot, taken from Memtest, that the processor has three levels of cache and 16GB of memory.  The cache levels decrease in speed as they increase in size.

Memtest results

The speed quoted for the memory at 9600 MB/s sits a bit under the max speed shown in the reference table below that shows DDR3-13333 at 10,666 MB/Sec. Not having all the same memory modules in all 6 slots may account for part of this 10% discrepancy. Thanks to http://www.hardwaresecrets.com for the data.

Memory speed table

The motherboard, an Asus PT6 Delux V2 has 6 data ports that have been loaded with, an older 5400 RPM drive, a 7200 RPM drive,  a Corsair Force 3 SolidSateDrive and three new Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM drives.  The Seagate drives have been configured as a RAID 0 stripe group using the Ubuntu MultiDevice technology. Using a stripe group shares the I/O load across all the disks in the group. The tests were performed across 2 and 3 drives.  

Asus P6T Delux V2

The evolved and well known filesystem & disk speed utility Bonnie++ was used to access the disk performance. Bonnie tests through the filesystem layer, rather than exercising the raw disk, giving better real life performance numbers. 

Here are the consolidated results converted to MBytes for the sizes and MBytes/second for the transfer speeds. 

We can see in the table, for most levels, that as speeds go down as the size goes up. The impact of using faster drives in a RAID configuration results in at least 3 times speed up over the older single drives.

Plotting the results on a chart also gives some insight into the numbers.  Having memory as the crossover point we see the step down between CPU and storage speeds and relative sizes. The vertical axis is on a Log scale showing the progression from the 32K cache size to the 9Terra Bytes of the 3 way stripe storage.

Sizes and speeds of processor caches, memory and various storage.

Looking at the sizes of the various elements we can see that the variation in size between largest (3 way stripe) and smallest L1 Cache is much bigger than the difference in speed scale.  Interestingly the difference between main memory speed and the slowest disk is about the same order as between a cheetah and a tortoise.

Other comparisons are:

Max Differential speed scale	2472
Max Differential size scale	281250000.00
Diff Mem/L2 cache	6.82
Diff Mem/ Fastest Disk	49.66
Diff Mem/ Slowest Disk	362.26
Diff Speed  Cheetha/ Tortoise	411.76
Diff Size Stamp /football pitch	5000000.00

Also included in the main table above are the seek operations per second numbers for the storage drives that clearly show the distinct advantage of SSDs technology in a read situation. The ability of SSDs to maintain full transfer speeds in a read (and random read) situation make them particularly useful as database index and system drives. 

Max Differential speed scale

2472

Max Differential size scale

281250000.00

Diff Mem/L2 cache

6.82

Diff Mem/ Fastest Disk

49.66

Diff Mem/ Slowest Disk

362.26

Diff Speed  Cheetha/ Tortoise

411.76

Diff Size Stamp /football pitch

5000000.00

Corsair SSD

Windows 7 has a performance comparison utility built into the Control panel that scores elements of a system between 1 and 7.9. The system under consideration scores a respectable 7.8 on all elements except 7.6 on Disk Drive speed.

For real cpu work Folding at home gives a system a real work out. For this system over 36 Gflops are delivered. 36 GFlops is more than a Cray T932.

Writing final coordinates.
[02:51:00] Completed 500000 out of 500000 steps  (100%)

 Average load imbalance: 0.7 %
 Part of the total run time spent waiting due to load imbalance: 0.4 %
 Steps where the load balancing was limited by -rdd, -rcon and/or -dds: X 1 % Y 0 %


Parallel run - timing based on wallclock.

               NODE (s)   Real (s)      (%)
       Time:  17278.673  17278.673    100.0
                       4h47:58
               (Mnbf/s)   (GFlops)   (ns/day)  (hour/ns)
Performance:    711.518     36.599     10.001      2.400 


When looking at network speeds be sure to register the distinction between MB/s (MegaBytes) and Mb/s (Mega bits)/s. Long distance lines and telcos will often quote as Mbits/s but payloads are usually measured in MBytes. A high res photo is about 6Mbytes so would take either 6 seconds on a 1 MByte/s line but would take 40 s on a 1Mbit line.

In the house there is Gigabit wired networking and Wireless infrastructure.

Wireless - 8.9 MB/s

Wired ( Gigabit) 70 MB/s

The numbers above are obtained using a simple shared folder drag and drop file move. Whilst a good indication of real world performance the wired number is missleading because the file transfer speed is capped at the disk speeds of the PCs involved.

Using the iperf network test utility that just sends network data between the same two machines we see on the wired network gets over 900 Mbits/s ( 113 MByte/s).

------------------------------------------------------------

Server listening on TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)

------------------------------------------------------------

[  4] local 192.168.1.2 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.11 port 53619

[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth

[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.05 GBytes    906 Mbits/sec

[  5] local 192.168.1.2 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.11 port 53620

[  5]  0.0-40.0 sec  4.28 GBytes    920 Mbits/sec

[  4] local 192.168.1.2 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.11 port 53623

[  4]  0.0-40.0 sec  4.27 GBytes    916 Mbits/sec

and the wireless route gets up to about 100Mbits ( 12MBytes/s) when forcing a large packet size.

$ iperf_Intel -c p.local -w 256K
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to pup02.local, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:   257 KByte (WARNING: requested   256 KByte)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  5] local 192.168.1.70 port 63886 connected with 192.168.1.68 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  5]  0.0-10.0 sec    122 MBytes    102 Mbits/sec

Out to the Internet we have a good service from BT Infinity giving 64Mbits/s ( 8MBytes/s) download and 2 MBytes upload when testing with the well respected Speedtest.net That is about the same as the internal wireless connection.  Using a wired connection about 70Mbits/s is seen.

Steam engines at South Molton Rally 2013

Some of the steam engines at the South Molton Rally 1&2nd June 2013.

Organised by South Molton Vintage Rally Club

Enjoy.

Now looking forward to :

Devon Traction Engine

Veteran & Vintage Car Club

2013 RALLY 6th & 7th JULY

Chapelton Barton, Chapelton, Barnstaple, Devon.

Well signed on the A377 Barnstaple to Exeter Road - Plenty of FREE parking next to the rally field

For SAT NAV use EX37 9EB : For details see http://www.dtec.freeuk.com

gTLD is the new Y2K

Change is coming to a feature of the internet that has previously been stable, predictable and mostly secure. In an environment where services, sites and content changes at light speed having a core infrastructure protocol change is unsettling for many.

The top level naming system of the internet is expanding to include non-roman characters and a multitude of new suffixes. The familiar .edu, .net, .com, .countrycodes will be joined by

http://उदाहरण.परीक्षा
http://例え.テスト
http://例子.测试
as well as
.lol
.docs
.nyc
.travel
and lots and lots of others.

 Assumptions about the format of domain, website names and email addresses will have to be updated.

The smaller new domain suffixes will be set up with a specific registrar possibly making the hunting of rogue domains even harder.

IT departments and software companies are scrabbling to ensure compatibility and reliability of internet services. Looking forward to an inevitable change that shifts the foundations within a hugely diverse set of infrastructure is as nerve racking as the Y2K episode all over again.  Lets hope the preparation work gets done and the new gTLDs have the same minimal impact as Y2K. Somehow I doubt it.

Addition ..

Domain names now contain non-roman characters. These would have to be processed into equivalent but unique ascii before regex/applications could work reliably. See RFC 3490 Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) ... See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3490  which has 

Until now, there has been no standard method for domain names to use 
characters outside the ASCII repertoire. This document defines 
internationalized domain names (IDNs) and a mechanism called 
Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) for handling 
them in a standard fashion. IDNs use characters drawn from a large 
repertoire (Unicode), but IDNA allows the non-ASCII characters to be 
represented using only the ASCII characters already allowed in so- 
called host names today. This backward-compatible representation is 
required in existing protocols like DNS, so that IDNs can be 
introduced with no changes to the existing infrastructure. IDNA is 
only meant for processing domain names, not free text.

Marmite collection 2013

Marmite collection 2013 

Top row from L->R
Cheesey marmite ( only available from South Africa )
Maarmite ( jubilee celebration )
Mini-marmite (single portion )
Gold Marmite ( Olympics edition 2012 )
Squeezy Marmite
Cheesey marmite (again)
Marmite ( from New Zealand) Post "Marmageddon" jar.

Bottom row L->R
Regular jar Marmite,
Guinness Marmite
Valentines Marmite ( Champaign )
Marstons Pedigree Marmite ( 2009 Ashes tour )
Marmite XO ( original )
Marmite XO ( new packaging 2013)

All new and sealed.

Enjoy and read more over on Wikipedia.