New Broadband Speed

Setting up at the new house and yes, the download speed is fine.. Upload however is not, not at all....

I've a guarantee for 17-18Mbps upload, and I've seen it peak at 6.  It's currently, during daylight running between 1 and 5 tops.

And annoyingly asking my provider for assistance they've still got my mobile linked to the OLD postcode, so it's becoming a bit of a struggle to get any help from them as they've not realised "I moved"... and they know I moved because they activated the new socket this morning at 7am.

Upload speed before 9am was marginally better, around 6-9Mbps, but still well below their guarantee,

Ghosts.... From the BBC (A Fan Theory)

 Talking about Ghosts.... Sorry, I mean... 

I've gotten quite into this, watching them all over a couple of times, and I've come to a bit of a fan theory; which I'd love to think is true... Alison can seem to only see Ghosts whom have been murdered...

That's my whole theory, here's the thinking.

Mary - Burned at the Stake

Thomas - Shot in a duel

Fanny - Thrown from a window

Pat - Shot with an arrow

Humphrey - Beheaded by accident, but whilst hiding from being wrongly accused of plotting against Queen Elizabeth I.

Then secondary ghosts, she see's:

Luftwaffe pilots - you could say were murdered, killed in action, they're still "mid-flight".

Civil War (Round Head) - appears to have been skewered by a pike.

Hitch-Hiker - Literally says she was murdered.

60's Architect - looked like he had been stabbed in the head as he waved from the window.

And the whole basement plague pit are all found to have been killed by Mick bringing the plague back with him.

So, murder or killed, each has a known perpetrator of their death.

This leaves a few holes in my theory, which I would like to plug...

Kitty - It does seem in Series 3, Episode 5, we have the lead up to her adoptive sister murdering her... We're yet to hear the full truth, but it seems to be the way that is played out.

The Captain - Well, he's a soldier, stationed at the hall we can't rule out a bomb or accident taking his life, he certainly was willing to sacrifice himself by throwing himself over an explosive device; and his love interest subordinate had been posted to the middle east, so there's something there to be explored.

Assuming the above this only leaves us Robin and Julian... Robin lived in pre-history, the stone age, a brutal time, his death may very well have been at the hands of another, be it animal or human; it does not seem likely with his describing wolves removing faces and eyes, and keeping his fathers skin, that he met his maker from his fur bed.

Julian is perhaps the biggest stretch for my theory, as we know a lot about his death, "the perfect death, booze, bit of rumpy pumpy and out".

But it wasn't alone, clearly the woman with whom me was in congress had a literally deadly effect on him, and he found the whole episode to be the most traumatic event in his life...

So there's my theory, the persons who remain are those who meet their end at the hands, or by cause, of another; and they can't resolve it.

The only two I can't answer this for are Annie the maid and the Ghost Doctor.... We shall see.

Covid-19 : Has the Break Down of Society and Community Begun?

Dystopia and apocalypse are common themes in fiction, for many alive today Covid-19 is the first real taste of such a global catastrophe, the removal of social and stable norms of life, the dramatic secession of normal work routine and the imposition of lockdown put a massive strain on society; I have lived this.

And today ask Was That The Start Of the End Of An Era?  An era where you had relative silence from neighbours, a time where you had rules of sleep at night, work in the day broken irreparable, a time when pub, club, entertainment shifted unending from going to be entertains over to remaining at home to be entertained and that leaking out of your space into that of others?

Of course this is a subjective and very personal question, your mileage may very well vary.

However, I have had the vast number of reports from friends and coworkers that their personal space has been irreparably invaded by the actions and selfish nature of others.  I myself have lived this nightmare.

With social norms broken certain people seem to accept that they are going to party at home, be entertained at home, be themselves however they wish that means drink, drugs, music and other people - despite the lockdown.

For us this happened at two different properties (yes we moved) at the first people in the high vulnerability groups were happily accepting visits and then also crossing over visiting each other, in one case over 70's were receiving their grand children, who were out playing in the street with other children, and then they would walk into the houses of other over 70's... And then these self same idiots would ask "Why are we getting sick?"

In the second this happened because our neighbour, she wanted her drink, drugs, music and sex at full on volume, and literally said to me "I'm just trying to have a bit of fun".

So that's cause, people doing whatever they want, despite social restrictions, law and quite obvious risk and disturbance they are causing others who are similarly struggling to find some semblance of peace in these trying times.

How does that then convert into the break down of society?

Well, the agencies charged with resolving these issues, the police, the district and county councils, all seem extremely toothless.  Even in one situation we resorted to the extreme of a private prosecution; WHICH WE WON.  And the court was toothless to enforce anything.

People annoying others, loosing court cases, breaking the law and yet council police and commonsense do not reel them in?  What can?

Well, I believe violence, frustrated in such situations something has to give, you deprive your neighbour of sleep for a month and they will snap, they will be extremely antagonised, doubly so when they have spoken to you and tried to talk over the issue before all the other agencies were involved.

That is the first crack, the first chink in the armour of the old social norms breaking down, and I believe anyone in a property with an attached neighbour, a flat or any other con-joined property can and will run into this, but since Covid I think they'll run into this far more often.

Naming a new Storage Server?

 Server names?  In practice I've always been in places or projects where folks are bad at naming things and I am as guilty as the next person in that realm.  I've been on projects naming releases for obscure lord of the rings characters, for characters in a random fantasy story the lead developer had written, for birds, biomes, planets and stars.... Generally these are very niche, if you know the reference you're fine, and it brings a little character to your server.

The trouble arises when a name becomes attached to the history of that thing, the worst I never had was a project with a release named Elrond, where the release itself was re-released, so we ended up with Elrond-2, 3 and 4, then Elrond4RC1 for an update to that successful update, it was just a minefield.

In servers, the worst I ever managed was a box called "Diomede", which would often fail because of bad (read that as cheap) hardware, so the name became inextricably linked to bad performance and issues, despite being a really nice Tomcat & IBM Websphere host with a near 99% up-rate, but that 1% let it down because EVERYONE worked on that one box.

At home at the moment I have:

* Wellington

* Napoleon

* Elba

* Ney

* Waterloo

I'm sure you can tell the reference, but I've had about three versions of "Waterloo", I've also had two versions of "Ney" and at least five "Napoleons".  The names are getting mixed up, as I leave a home project and come back I'll go look up my notes, pull up that machine storage only to realise "oh this was on the OLD version of that name" which was long whisked away into the ethereal world of my replication server or just lost to time.

As such, I want to have ONE big disk server, and I really want to make it nice and neat.   I've already retired all my older machines, like this one:

But I do now have TWO cases of this specification, with the many internal drive bays:

In one of these I have a low-power Core i3 T class CPU, I forget the exact spec, but it's a low-power chip (35W) just enough power to run storage backups IMO, so this is where I'm going to start my quest.

Spinning rust drives are the challenge, I have four 4TB drives just sat idle, plus a host of smaller 1TB drives lying around, these need sorting out, mounting, checking and I then need a strategy.

I'm very likely to go with ZFS creating a mirror across three 1TB for critical storage and then some striped storage across the 4TB drives.  I then want this to make files available across the network, both to my 10GBit and my 1Gbit LAN's.... That's going to require a bit of work to install the former, but the latter should be available out of the box.

This starts to completely retire my 4Gbit fiber channel interconnects too.

So what to name this first stepping stone?.... Comments below:

Elba

Helena

Since it's about storage, I think my theme of names points to one of the islands which hosted Napoleon in exile... but lets see what you guys come up with.

What's Going On?

Well, we're moving house again!.... Yes, this has been a bit mad, there's a lot going on and logistics are in place, but I'm going to be getting my own little office room back again rather than having to split creative thinking with a bedroom/high traffic area.

There's no real reason for this beyond this house didn't suit us for our living needs of space and specification, sure it's very close to our horses but it's not the house for us.

We've made a modest profit on what we've paid for it, with the rise in the market happening all around, but that's been offset by our paying more for a target property than it is really worth, and it itself being inflated in price by the market.

But whatever, a move... so that's where I've been, as well as being very very busy with work.

I am also working 100% at home now, so I've found that break between wanting to program in my own time somewhat removed by being at home all day working at programming, and of course I can't talk at all about my work on these pages; one day maybe.

Today though, a head of the move, I've been thinking about my network set up, at the moment my network is rather broken up, some of my machines are already at the new house, some are in storage with the in-laws and others are here sat with me, but without power.  I have though received some nice kit from my employer to work from home... New screens and a lovely spec PC are the big ticket items, but generally I'm just in a holding pattern until we move.

Here however is my planned network...

We will go over this in a follow up post towards the weekend.  And I'm going to be changing things up a bit, I want to support PXE booting several things, replacing some of my servers/services with VM's on the lower-power machines I have.  And then only waking up the high power machines when serious work is required, and all that waking and sleeping going on automatically through scripts & network magic packets.... Lets see where this evolution goes.

Home Engine - Loading PNG Textures into DirectX11 with SDL2

ANYONE Interested in my sharing the code to do this?  Leave a comment, 10 comments and I'll blog it.

I'm using SDL2 as the background framework for providing cross platform input and window handling, but I'm writing my own renderers for various platforms (DirectX11, 12, OpenGL and Vulkan).

All of them support coloured shape and line renderering to one extent or another, so I decided to take the leap into texture mapping.

First of all I put in all the framework to represent textures in my engine in a cross platform manner, and for ease I decided to use SDL2_Image to load my pixel data.  And I started with a simple PNG file I created in MSPaint....

Immediately I ran into issues, PNG is RGBA, the png I created had a transparent background as far as I knew it should all work.  I swapped to RAW pixels and I was getting 4 bytes per pixel, it was only after a bunch of reading and then stepping into the SDL_Surface format did I realise the data might be whatever format but the surface was clearly 3 bytes per pixel.  And funky things were happening.

My assumption that MSPaint was outputting 4 bytes per pixel was just wrong, instead it's 3 bytes, RGB.  And there's no matching DXGI_FORMAT for just RGB - least none I could spot.

A quick reexport in GIMP setting the explicit pixel format to 8bpc RGBA, which then of course just worked....

Therefore, it's official, using an SDL2_Image load of a PNG as your DirectX11 texture is perfectly possible.

And for me, this reduces the need to include yet another library (other than SDL) to handle image loading.

----

Not even sure how, but this older video got attached to this post, which is about "SuperSampling".... but really just changing the renderer to window resolutions...

House Buying - Sealed Bids

Until yesterday I'd never heard of sealed bids, they are apparently common in Scotland, but in the five house purchases I've done over the years I'd never come across them.

Just parse that again, FIVE house purchases, that's above the national average, I've bought and lived in five different houses; I'm not talking about buy to let, I'm talking about my main house.

And in all those transactions the process was see the house, offer accordingly, offer rejected or accepted etc, so you knew your budget, you chose the value and off you go.

Now, as a vendor, this worked but you were never sure what other offers you might get, you certainly never found out whether the buyer was able to pay what they're offering; and recently that has been an issue for us, we rang up about £400 in solicitors fees only to find the buyer hadn't gotten enough from their property sale and they pulled out, so our chain collapsed.

Knowing a head of time if that buyer was going to be good for the offer they'd made would have been nice.

Indeed, I've only myself been able to offer once I was sold (subject to contract) and had a mortgage agreement in principle to offer against, this is what the vending estate agent is primarily paid to do, ensure the chain can be set up.

So 36 hours ago we offered on a house, lets say we offered £250,000.  This was summarily dismissed, fine instant feedback, I can live with that.

We therefore upped our offer, £252,000... a 2K sweetener, literally.   And we expected, just as the first offer, this to be accepted or rejected.

The vending estate agent they got our hopes for a simple transaction up by asking for both our agreement in principle and status of our sale, the proof needed for the vendor to know whether our offer was firm and real or not.

I duly handed these over, still expecting the call back that day saying "Great, accepted" or "No, rejected".... Now, I've shown my hand here, my agreement in principle was much higher than the price offered, I could offer more; much more in fact, and they now know this.

I don't know if there are any other offers, they've not just rejected my offer as too low, so I'm now flying blind.  I can spent more, but I'm not willing to unless I have to.

Only now do "Sealed Bids" appear on the horizon, I receive out of left field this request for "best and final offer by 2pm".

I don't even know what this means, and I ask, but get literally ran around until not only am I annoyed with the agent, but I'm annoyed with the vendors, they just rejected an offer, clean, simple and normal the day before, today there's some shenanigans going on?

They've decided, or the agent has decided, AFTER seeing we can potentially offer more, to go for sealed bids.  I literally say to her "I could offer more, but I'm not throwing money into the wind, either there are other offers and ours is now too low, or there's not and our offer can be accepted".

But she persists in this sealed bid, I don't change my bid.

And this annoys me, I'm thinking:  "Are they just pushing up the price by scaremongering?"  They've seen I can offer more, are there truly more offers in?  If there are more offers in, are they now getting pushed around the same as me?  or not..... Because the experience, the strategy they have here has just changed.

All in all I think it does the vendor down, this method is very off putting, they could get lots of low-ball offers, which any number of the potential buyers might be able and willing to offer more than, and ultimately it makes the buyer quite stressed.

Buying a house and moving is one of the most stressful things already.

And this model isn't even like an auction, lets take eBay, if I see an item bidding at £1, and I put a max bid of £20 on it, it doesn't just put £20 on the item, it puts £2.... then whatever up to the ending price.

That's not how this whole sealed bidding is presented, this estate agent wanted out best and final offer... it could have been £275,000.... and we'd be the best offer... except the next best offer might have only been £250,500... and we've just MASSIVELY over paid.

It's already stressful, the housing market is already crazy, if you run into sealed bids folks just don't get involved.