Why should you vote for me though? I do have very significant influence in British IT – much more than the others I would contend. Some highlights are below. If you want a quick test, try Googling some of the names on the list. My name is unique, by the way, and “Kate Craig-Wood” gets about 2.5m hits. “Dame Wendy Hall” gets about 2.1m.

And why else? Not only do I feel that I am deserving, but also it would be great to see someone who has broken into the system from the outside get the top award. I am not someone thrust into the limelight due to family wealth or connections. I’m certainly not “usual” either, being transgendered, about to marry my girlfriend and a member of London’s alternative community. Also, I’ve not just climbed a corporate ladder; I am a self-made entrepreneur who started her business with just £3,000 and a crazy idea about renting virtual machines on short time frames. All my success has come from hard work, and often pitted against challenging preconceptions.

Demonstration of my influence

For many years now I have been one of the very, very few highly visible and successful female IT entrepreneurs. Under my guidance Memset has gone from strength to strength and is increasingly a renowned name. We have won too many awards to list (including PCPro’s Best Web Host award for 7 years running), and I have had my fair share of entrepreneur awards too. I have always strived to be a role model for young women and girls who might be interested in science, technology and entrepreneurship.

I am regularly quoted in the IT press on a range of issues from energy efficiency to security to public sector IT. This is an important way in which I influence the industry since I am one of very few people who is willing to speak her mind on popular issues, unfettered by overprotective PR departments.

In 2009 and 2010 I was instrumental in the formation of G-Cloud and brought a fresh perspective to government IT procurement through my position as technical architecture co-lead of phase 2 of the programme. I was the principal author of that workstrand’s report which laid the technical foundations for G-Cloud – the new way government buys IT.

I have been on the main board of Intellect UK, Britain’s high-tech trade association, since 2007. I was their youngest ever main board member at the time and remain one of the few women on the board, one of the few SME entrepreneurs on the board, and the only one who is both!

I also chair Intellect UK’s climate change group. At last year’s annual dinner I was told by a BIS official that I was one of the two people who were key in bringing about the much needed review of the Carbon Reduction Commitment in relation to data centres and starting us on a path towards a Climate Change Agreement for data centres (the other being Emma Fryer, from Intellect, with whom I work closely). This is the clearest example of me directly influencing government policy, and certainly not the only example!

I have been a member of the ministerial Green Economy Council since its inception. This council consists of about 20 top-level business people as well as a selection of civil servants and no less than 3 secretaries of state (BIS / Vince Cable, DECC / Ed Davey and DEFRA / Owen Patterson). Our goal is to oversee the transition of the UK to a low-carbon economy.

Now that the large systems integrators have fallen out of favour with government, especially the Cabinet Office (CO), the top IT brass in the CO have turned to leaders in the SME IT field, and I am foremost among them. I am now regularly asked to assist central government in their objective to ensure that the market is not only open to SMEs but also that 25% of business goes to us. Memset is regarded as the poster child for this new era of public sector cloud suppliers, and I attribute this to the fact that we have always operated with the highest moral integrity – until I showed the Treasury how I work out our prices back in 2009 they had never had an IT supplier be so open, and not come across one who operated a fixed “cost-plus” pricing model.

Over the years I have also been very engaged with BCS, the chartered institute for IT. I was part of the Data Centre Specialist Group for many years, including during the time when they created the EU Code of Conduct for data centres with the European Commission; I contributed to that in a small way. I was recently awarded Fellowship of BCS in recognition of my expertise in ICT.

I spent some years engaged with Intellect and BCS’s women in IT groups also. Although I have stepped back from championing the women in IT cause in the last two years to focus on my PhD (see below), I am now re-engaging with Intellect with a view to helping them once again work on encouraging more women into IT. In the meantime though I have openly and honestly shared my unique experiences from both sides of the gender divide in relation to business and IT, most notably in the Financial Times articles in which I have been interviewed. Again, this is evidence of the breadth of my influence.

I have this year been appointed to the European Commission’s (EC) European Cloud Partnership steering board. This is undoubtedly my most prestigious and humbling position. I was appointed at the specific request of the Cabinet Office’s minister, and by VP Kroes herself. Until then it was solely a group of mega-corp companies like SAP, Amazon and Accenture, with a requirement of CEOs only (so yes, with Werner Vogels!). The group is chaired by the President of Estonia himself. I shall be the only SME on the steering board and I have a mandate from the CO to represent the interest of all British cloud SMEs at a European level.

I am also something of an educator; I am not just a business woman but also an expert in my fields of cloud computing, information security (especially government) and energy efficiency. I speak or present at a conference at least once a month if not more, and increasingly I am getting requests from other countries. I have given two presentations in Brussels via the EC’s DG CONNECT this year already and have two lined up in the US. I have spoken at a range of prestigious events, from the Lib Dem party’s annual conference to OSCON.

Finally, I am currently in the final year of a part time PhD with Surrey University researching the energy efficiency of cloud computing and attempting to answer the very important question of whether ICT can deliver its promised societal efficiency gains without itself becoming a major emitter. I have secured two conference publications so far and my and my PhD supervisor’s (Professor Krause) latest work is published on the ESP KTN’s web site here. I personally developed the model for this seminal piece of work which proves much of the hype around the energy cost of cloud to be quite wrong. This article in TechWeek Europe on the topic is a nice example of my influence.

But it’s not just me…

I do feel it is important to mention that I would not even be in this list without the support of a number of wonderful people, most notably my brother Nick and my assistants Gosia and Helen, but also my entire staff. They are all superb and we are very much a family business in all senses. If I do get voted the most influential woman in Britain (which is something you might have noticed I want a bit I shall share the success by taking the whole Memset crew out for a night on the town on me.

Why we use open source

We turned to open source for a number of reasons:

Price

You don’t need to pay for proprietary software anymore, simply download the open source software and install it, and don’t pay a penny. Furthermore, you usually get unrestricted access to the source code enabling you to modify it to suit your requirements.

Flexibility

Once you have the software installed you are free to host your applications wherever you like. This means you no longer need to put all your information in one basket, say with Google, so instead you’re able to separate the software from the host and own your own data. A good example of how to achieve that would be Zimbra; an open source, Web based software as a service (SaaS) suite of office applications that can be hosted by any managed hosting provider.

Efficient systems integration

By using open source software and adapting it to suit our needs, with fairly minimal development effort, we’ve been able to build on those foundations to automate a large number of our processes such as account billing, administration, provisioning, maintenance and monitoring activities so that they require very little staff input. Our preferred core tools (all open source of course) are:

• Python (programming language)
• MySQL or SQlite (data bases)
• Django (application framework)
• Ngnix and Apache (Web servers)

A key part of our approach is “one database to rule them All”. Thus, our configuration management, billing, and everything-else database (aka. “The database of Doom”) is something we have built ourselves, using the above tools. As with most development approaches we tend to start with an object model, which we give to Django to turn into a database structure and hang a bunch of appropriate code off it. The in-house built stuff takes care of the following:

• firewall rules management
• asset management
• IP address management
• Domain Name Servers (DNS)
• vLANs and switch fabric management
• network connectivity/bandwidth regulation, shaping and accounting
• automated provisioning of infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• customer accounts and details
• billing / invoicing

That might seem like quite a lot but actually, thanks to the extremely powerful and highly-efficient open source tools we employ, we have built all of that and maintain it with a very small development team (single digits). When you consider that we are the cheapest cloud IaaS provider on the UK market (including cheaper than Amazon) thanks to our approach of massive automate, and that most companies competing at scale have massive development teams, this should hopefully impress!

However, that is just the core, and in many ways it is little more than a rather large and complex, database-driven object-oriented spiderweb of applications. The clever bit is that it also stitches together a whole bunch of open source applications, much like the conductor of an orchestra. Below are some examples of the individual open source tools and applications, which comprise of our orchestra:

• Xen Hypervisor to chop up a host server into multiple Miniserver VM virtual servers (more on this below)
• Logical Volume Manager (LVM) – does the hard disk bit of Miniserver VMs
• OpenStack SWIFT to run our Memstore cloud storage service
• Linux Virtual Server (LVS) and Heartbeat to run our Performance Patrol clustering and load balancing service
• IPtables – runs our firewalls
• Nagios which we use for monitoring all servers and services in our estate

Because all of those bits of software are open source, and therefore built with the intention of being transparent and easily accessible, it has been very simple for us to integrate them. Most of them are actually driven by simple textual configuration files, which we auto-generate and automatically propagate, to the appropriate places. Because of this elegant simplicity it also means that our systems are very, very reliable. On the one hand, there is not much to go wrong, and on the other when something does go wrong it is easy for us to poke around to figure out what the problem is without having to get in touch with some third party software vendor’s hopeless support desk!

Cheap enhancements

Following on from the above, another of the beauties of open source is that unlike their proprietary counterparts it is possible to modify or enhance them yourselves relatively inexpensively. We have done exactly this with many of the solutions we use. For example, we improved the virtualisation technologies we employ to enhance its fair scheduling (ie. making sure that one VM cannot monopolise the host’s resources. Another good example is with OpenStack SWIFT, the object-storage system we use for Memstore. Normally it does not come with a content delivery network element nor the ability to upload files via FTP or SFTP. We added those pieces of functionality, giving us a competitive edge over other SWIFT users.

In some cases we have chosen to open source that code ourselves, which we have done with the FTP server add-on to Memstore. We have actually taken over as the lead developers on a project that had been ailing for lack of support and others are now using that software. They can be anywhere in the world, for example a Russian ISP is one of the organisations that has been helping us to further develop that package with detailed testing and improvements suggestions as well as some of their own patches. Through being open ourselves we are tapping into a wider communal resource that we would not otherwise have; in effect some of the minnows are able to group together to compete in terms of software development with the major players.

Mobility

Because all of our systems are Web-based it is really easy for people to work from home or on the road – one of the many advantages of a SaaS model but without the usual lock-in associated with proprietary providers – some popular enterprise resource management software vendors spring to mind! A good example of such a package we use is Trac – and integrated Wiki, ticketing & project management system and software repository (it contains staff job lists/work flows as well as all company documentation). Further, because we can see all the inner workings of the systems we use we can be completely confident about their security. For instance, even I with my rusty old coder skills can comprehend Trac’s security measures as well as the defences we put around it as part of us self-hosting it (how it does access control, how we ensure it is only accessible via HTTPS, where the data is, who has physical access to the machines it is on, etc) which gives me much more confidence than an opaque, proprietary SaaS service elsewhere.

Reliable, free personal operating systems. We have now migrated most of our staff to ‘nix-based systems (mostly Linux, but some of us use MacOS), and all they need is just a browser and an email client. Firefox & Thunderbird are certainly enterprise-quality these days and indeed the collective subjective viewpoint is that using, say, Ubuntu (an open source desktop/laptop operating system) with the likes of Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice is actually significantly more reliable than Microsoft Windows platforms. This opinion comes from a point of many years experience among our systems administrators – they love Linux because it is more reliable and more secure (see below) than MS Windows as a personal operating system.

Transparency (no lock-in & easy analytics)

Open source is not solely about publishing your code and getting a community of developers and users to collaborate to build, maintain and improve it. It is also something of a design mind set; when you are building something that needs to be easily understandable and maintained by many you have to be transparent and easy to comprehend from the ground up.

This means that most open source applications store their information in very accessible ways, most commonly in databases like MySQL in fact, and usually with very clearly defined and accessible structures. This means that it is very easy to export and import data between systems. It also means that you can do data mining and analytics very easily. We run the company in a very scientific way, exploiting very large data sets (we collect about five million data points per day) to inform our management decision-making. We do this without any expensive software nor any special expertise, but I can instantly access statistics from any of our systems using tools that our development team cooked up sometimes in a matter of minutes, which simply run a query on the appropriate database.

This open design approach is in stark contrast to make proprietary solutions where the vendor’s strategy is to make it very hard to dig into the data so that a) the users get locked in to that solution and b) they can monopolise the addition of helpful services or data analytics tools and make more money on that part too.

Increased Security

It is the opinion of everyone at Memset (all experts in their fields and many fully “bi-lingual” in terms of Linux and Windows operating systems) that, in general, open source applications are more secure than their commercial equivalents. This may seem a bold claim, but let us examine it. The source code for open source software is just that; open and public. Open source applications stand naked in the wind and anyone in the world may scrutinise them and attempt to hack them with this significant advantage. The result of this is that if there are any exploits they are rapidly discovered by the open source community of developers (those who specialise in finding exploits and publishing their findings are called “white-hat hackers”, as opposed to “black-hat hackers” – the ones who do it in secret for personal gain) with an interest in a particular project who then release a patch.

By contrast, proprietary (closed source) software is not open to this wide scrutiny. Instead the usual way exploits are discovered is by a hacker somewhere in the world who busily takes advantage of the exploit or bug to their personal gains – and your personal loss. Inevitably such news of such exploits gradually leaks out and the corporations behind the software patch the hole. However, it can often be many days or even weeks before the likes of Microsoft become aware of the hackers making merry with a flaw in their code, and it is not uncommon for it to again take many weeks to get the patch rolled out. In the intervening time there is often significant damage done.

For evidence of what I’m talking about you need only look at the security advisories sites to see that there are, in general, many, many more serious security exploits for closed source products than open source products. Further, such sites also demonstrate that it is more common for exploits in open source software to be first discovered by white-hat hackers who do not exploit the bugs.

To take two more simplistic examples; if you put a Linux server online with no firewall and default settings then it is extremely unlikely to get “rooted” (root is the Linux equivalent of the Windows administrator account – the super user account which can do anything) – it is secure by default. In contrast, as a hosting company we rapidly learned that you cannot deploy a default-install Windows machine without a firewall since it immediately gets hacked, usually by automated viruses. What do I mean by immediately? Well our record was 17 seconds from the completion of boot up!! This is why, if you look at the Miniserver VM virtual servers on our Web site, we provide a free basic firewall with Windows machines.

The Basis of Miniserver Virtual Machines

All of our Miniserver virtual machines use Xen, which is an open source virtual machine monitor or hypervisor originally developed by Dr. Ian Pratt at the University of Cambridge’s computing department. Since then it has had contributions from many major companies including IBM, Microsoft and Intel. Originally the main goal of the design and development was being able to run up to a hundred full-featured OS instances on a single computer or server. Xen provides secure isolation, resource control, quality of service guarantees and also protects each individual account on the system. The advantages of having this technology are clear and for applications such as web hosting where server load and higher amounts of processor or memory power are not needed the benefits and cost savings are huge.

Why are Miniserver VMs better?

One reason that Xen is more effective than commercial programmes like Virtuozzo is that operating systems must be explicitly modified to run on Xen, this enables Xen to achieve high-performance virtualization and also prevent any sharing or memory, processes or having any individual account on the server disrupting any others. Xen also allocates each account on the system its own sub kernel making it at an operational OS level a dedicated machine. This means should one account fail or crash the others would continue unaffected. Virtuozzo on the other hand relies on the services of a single kernel, all of the VPSs on a given server must run basically the same operating system. Another major issue for Virtuozzo is reliance on a single kernel. Should the underlying OS kernel fail, all VPSs running on the server would be brought down as a result.

Xen uses a technique called paravirtualization to achieve high performance (typical performance penalties are around 2%), at the other end of the spectrum, emulation solutions entail performance penalties of around 20%.

After extensive testing we opted for using Xen even though we had to do a reasonable amount of bespoke work ourselves to port Linux operating systems to the server. Many other hosting companies have now jumped on the virtual server bandwagon and most of these have decided to use Virtuozzo. That is because it is very easy to set up, administer and also allows them to put up to sixty accounts on one server. We only put 5-10 Virtual Machines accounts on each physical server and as a result performance and uptime is excellent.

Another important consideration is that because Xen is open source unlike Virtuozzo we can keep the costs of our Miniservers lower and we do not need to put a large amount of accounts on a server to cover our underlying cost.

Open Source Advantage & The Future

Being open source, Xen also allows us to offer customers the ability to manage and change their kernels and also as Xen supports different operating systems on the same server we can offer customers the choice of either Debian or Fedora as underlying Linux OS.

Our firewalls use open source Linux IPtables, which we automatically configure from our master database (open source MySQL, of course) with our own scripts. We also use the new open source Open Stack software for our cloud storage solution, Memstore.

We also use an open source implementation of the vLAN’ing and bridging software (for creating a virtual switch on the host servers), all using standardized, open interfaces and protocols.

By using Linux and open source software for our core infrastructure also means we are able to use commodity servers for everything from our firewall-routers to our virtual machine hosts. By doubling up on everything (which is made economically very feasible when using commodity hardware and not paying license fees) we are able to achieve huge levels of resilience for very little outlay.

Security and brand concerns

Moving into the government hosting space, we’ve been able to dispel some of the myths that open source is insecure and unsuitable for high-security requirements. In fact, Memset firmly believes that open source is more secure than closed source software. Recent penetration tests carried out by Encription who are CREST & Tiger certified, found there were no vulnerabilities or warnings of any kind. The tests included attempts to launch attacks on virtual machines (VMs) sharing the same host server and the failure to cause any impairment to the performance of security of the attacked VMs demonstrates the integrity of Memset’s Xen-based hypervisor layer.

Gaining cross-government CESG accreditation for its service, incorporating the open source hypervisor, even though Xen itself was not certified, proves that any virtualisation software could be used to put government VMs at IL2 on the same machine as other customers (in our public cloud), regardless of the software’s security certification.

I believe people are hung up on virtualisation and make a big issue out of VMware versus Xen. But it’s not a big issue. Yes, VMware is accredited to multi-tenant IL3 VMs along side untrusted ones, but in reality you need to have a separate infrastructure stack on IL3 hosting anyway as it can’t be connected to the public internet. It’s possible to use Xen in that setting; we are just going to run a secure IL3 community cloud for government. If some public sector customers still have an issue we just provision a private cloud within that estate.

With the Government ICT strategy, released in March 2012, which said OS solutions should be considered alongside proprietary frameworks during digital procurement. By 2015, the Government hopes to procure 50% of ICT through cloud-based solutions, this simply highlights the need to get up to speed with a platform that’s relatively new to the public sector.

Is Open Source Software Really Enterprise-Ready?

Despite the fact that there are several enterprises using open source to run mission-critical functions, there are some CIO’s that still prefer proprietary software for their enterprise requirements. Their major concern is about the software being supported in the future with open source projects, and being reliant on an unpaid community of volunteers. There are several flaws in this perspective:

First off, you have this problem with commercial software; what if the supplier fails, or in the case of one like Microsoft what happens when they change version and stop supporting yours.

Second, while some open source packages are indeed more of a labour of love than something commercially motivated, as cited in my example with Memstore’s FTP/SFTP server, there are an increasing number of commercial entities that recognise the value in pooling their efforts in a collaborative manner and have bet the farm, so to speak, on open source solutions. You might saw that we’re an odd, small British company, but I would remind you that OpenStack (the leading open source cloud IaaS solution) is actually RackSpace’s code – the multi-billion dollar number one manage hosting company. They saw their market share being eroded by Amazon Web services and their answer was to fight back by open sourcing their code base. It was a very clever move; they have in-effect united us Davids in the war on the Goliath that is Amazon Web Services.

Third, those CIOs simply to not understand developers!! Personally I would also trust the projects that are more of a labor of love as well, provided I could be confident that if push came to shove we could take it on and become the leads ourselves. This is because, unlike C*O execs, developers (open source oriented ones I should add, I don’t necessarily include Microsoft-oriented devs in this) are in general extremely bright men and women who are not overly motivated by money but are more interested in having interesting and challenging problems to solve. They also take satisfaction from collaboration, a bit like scientists, and are highly motivated by the kudos that contribution to open source projects bring. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the open source development community is the single example of functional, healthy communism.

Finally, even if a project does stop being supported, because of the aforementioned transparency and because (if you’ve taken my advice) the solutions are self-hosted (ie. you’re getting the software from someone other than the organisation providing the hosting) you are in total control of your own data and can easily migrate to someone else.

We do not use Google Docs, for example, mainly because I don’t want all my company information to be stored on servers with a company I don’t whole and utterly trust. Not only am I not confident that they can keep our data safe and/or will not misuse it, but there is no guarantee that they might close ranks and start making it hard to export stuff. Unlikely, yes, but personally I’d much rather put my faith in a community of enlightened, liberal, intelligent people who are just trying to make things work a little better than a purely capitalistic entity.

In this first post (1 of 2) I shall address the resilience aspects of this evolution.

RAID failings

Large RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Disks) systems – the defacto standard for storage systems – are increasingly unreliable, especially with large disks and slow rebuild times we see on busy arrays.

For example let’s look at a RAID with 24 x 2TByte disks. For this calculation I have used our RAID failure rate calculator. First, some assumptions:

• RAID6 which means that any two disks may fail simultaneously and you still have your data, or RAID5 which means you can lose one disk.
• Between zero and two hot spares (see below). A hot spare is a disk in the chassis which the RAID controller can automatically add into the array in the event of a failure. This takes times since all the data that was on the failed disk in effect has to be re-created / re-written. This cannot be done in advance since the data on each of the disks in use will be different.
• A rebuild speed of 20MBytes/second. This is also based on our data; most RAID arrays are quite busy doing their work and therefore have a limited amount of bandwidth to devote to rebuilding.
• An Annual Failure Rate (AFR) of 3.6% – ie. a 3.6% chance in each year that a single disk will fail. This is based on our actual collected data from thousands of 2TB disk-years in service.
• A lifetime of 3 years.
• That probability of failure is evenlly distributed across a disk’s lifetime. This is not a great assumption since in reality disks are more likely to fail either in the first few weeks of service or increasingly over time (in our experience) but will do for now.
• A time to replace a faulty hard drive of 24 hours. Again, this is based on actual data; our customers prefer that we let them know and get permission before swapping disks even in hot swap chassis.

As you can easily see from the table, RAID5 is hopeless with large arrays of large disks. However, this should not be news to any sysadmin professionals (anyone still using RAID5 for such setups should be lined up and shot for being a twit!) but many professionals are still labouring under the illusion that RAID6, especially with hot spares, is safe. Indeed, a few years ago they would have been right.

So, what has changed? Well the main thing is the size of the disks themselves. While disks have grown exponentially larger their bandwidth (the speed with which data can be read or written to them) has grown much more slowly. As mentioned above, when a disk in a RAID array fails the controller automatically starts rebuilding itself to include one of the hot spares (or if you don’t have hot spares then the disk you replace the faulty one with). This is also why hot spares make such a difference; the machine is not waiting on a human to do a disk swap.

Anyway, rebuilding an array takes a long time, especially on full and busy arrays. This is because all the data that was on the failed disk now has to be written to the newly-recruited hot-spare. This involves reading data from all of the other disks and if they are busy, which is usually the case in a live array, then this process can take a long time. We often see rebuild rates as low as 10MB/sec (100Mbps) for very busy machines. I’ve been more generous in our example but even then it would take 1 day, 3 hours to rebuild a full array.

Herein lies the problem; if you get one more failure (in the case of RAID5) or two more failures (in the case of RAID6) while the array is rebuilding itself after the initial failure then you’re buggered; you can expect to lose all data. This is also why having more hot spares does not really help you; you are still vulnerable to that window. It should also be noted that, if you have hot spares, the time to replace a disk becomes fairly inconsequential.

Cloud storage

However, by contrast our cloud storage system Memstore, which is based on OpenStack Swift (the same sytem RackSpace uses for CloudFiles), boasts a 1 in 100,000,000 chance per year of losing any individual object. This is also quite a fair comparison since, physically, Memstore consists of a bunch of 3U servers each with 24 disks in, but not using RAID.

Not only are those odds vastly better than the RAIDs but those are the chances of just losing one object. In general, this is a lot better than losing an entire 40TB of data in that rare failure scenario. The trade off is that it does mean that if you have 100,000,000 objects you can expepect to lose about one per year.

Memstore achieves its resilience by storing every object (or file) on at least three different nodes (hard disks). If any node fails it automatically re-distributes those objects that have lost a copy across to a new node. It also re-creates the lost node very swiftly due to the disk cluster being overall more lightly loaded. Here is where the comparison is a little unfair since we are being somewhat wasteful with disks. Even in our maximally-resilient RAID we are still using 20 out of 24 disks for data (83%) whereas Memstore only makes available 33% of the space for storage.

This means that to lose data three disks on different machines must fail within a short time of one-another. A slim chance!

However, my contention is that this doesn’t matter because disks are ridiculously cheap! Even with that triplication our costs for Memstore are <£25/TByte.

Performance

Some of you will now rightly be thinking, “but what about the performance loss?” or, “but it is not a file system”. You would be right to do so, but even there we have emerging solutions which I shall discuss in my next blog post…

Unfortunately there was a very deep saddle between us. My MOD Recon clocked a daily max speed at 77kph, presumably as I exited the bottom of the dip. I so nearly held it, but then hit a small (invisible due to low cloud and low light) mogul field at speed. Full pitch-pole, ass-over-tip, and my right ski pole didn’t quite detach in time.

Irritatingly, having hurt my hand due to ski poles in the past, I had invested in some high-end Lekis with straps/bindings that go around your hand with a small hoop on between your thumb and index finger. The poles then clip into that loop, and part of the idea of the design is that they auto-detach when too much force goes through them. My right pole did detach, but clearly too late.

Net result: in the doctor’s words, “one of the most important ligament in my body, the one that separates humans from Neanderthals” (the one that stabilises the thumb while you grip stuff with it) has ripped a chunk of bone off my thumb at its insertion point.

Yesterday I had exploratory surgery in Vancouver to fix it. They were not sure if it would need repair but it turns out it was actually a bit worse than expected. As per the image on the left (source) I had completely severed my ulnar collateral ligament.

However, before fixing that they had to expose the re-attachment point by cutting through my adductor pollicis (the muscles that goes from the middle finger metacarpal to the mid-point of your thumb which allows you to pinch). So the net result is that I now have a small titanium screw in my thumb phalanx, and sutures holding my ulnar collateral ligament and my adductor pollicis together – on my right hand as Sod’s law would have it!

If I had been doing something truly stupid I’d be less miffed but I don’t think I really earned this one. Oh well, shit happens!!

An infographic looking at how safe is cloud computing?

Get the “How Safe is Cloud Computing?” graphic for your site: copy and past the code below.

<img src="http://cdn.katescomment.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Cloud-Security-Infographic-600px.jpg" width="540"><p>An infographic looking at <a href="http://www.katescomment.com/how-safe-is-cloud-computing-infographic/">How Safe is Cloud Computing?</a></p>

For further reading and/or background please see the following articles:

• Password security
• The silent cyber war
• Is the cloud safe?

I have been involved in the G-Cloud project almost from the beginning; as the technical co-lead on Phase two of the project, proposing the detailed architecture (on the Cabinet Office Web site here) for the G-Cloud and helping to shape the core principles that we felt were vital to ensure its success: that it would not be a “thing”, but instead a collection of cloud infrastructures, services and applications, probably mostly provided by private sector but with some public sector in there too, all bound together by open standards cloud APIs with an app store and services interchange at the heart.

To now see almost 500 suppliers using the CloudStore where IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and other cloud services can be procured in as little as six minutes, is incredibly humbling. With almost 74% of suppliers SMBs including channel players Trustmarque, Computacenter, Kelway, Bytes and Softcat all being featured, is there a place for channel suppliers in the G-Cloud?

Partners

Personally, I’m surprised not to see more channel suppliers signed up to the G-Cloud’s CloudStore, after all, some of these businesses have become trusted partners for the public sector, supplying not only IT infrastructure, but software and other associated services too.  Their ability to deliver Servers, Storage, Networking, Security and Virtualisation infrastructure, puts them in a strong position as the public sector rapidly moves towards cloud.

There are definitely opportunities for channel players in the G-Cloud. Where it was originally thought that the cloud movement (aka. centralisation or IT-services-over-the-wire) would put hosting companies like us out of business, the shift has only changed who our main customers are.  So too will be the case for G-Cloud.

For example, we are seeing a lot more business from channel suppliers who want to use our infrastructure as the back-bone for their SaaS – we can run the IT layer much more effectively than most operators, since for almost all applications the actual required hardware is fairly small in terms of number of machines these days (thanks to Moore’s Law).

Security

Another area where channel partners can contribute to the success of the G-Cloud is through security.  There are still some common concerns that arise when migrating to the cloud – lack of understanding and worries about cloud security – the channel can really help with this transition.

Collaboration

Generally software suppliers and development companies don’t want to have to offer a host provision themselves and G-Cloud is all about SME suppliers playing to their strengths rather than trying to be all things to all people. This means there are opportunities for collaboration and partnerships for suppliers amongst themselves to plug any of these gaps.

Where To Start?

If you’re a channel supplier and wondering if you should dip your toe into the G-Cloud project, there is still time and plenty of options.  The public sector are able to procure a wide range of services through the CloudStore, including the services you probably already offer, such as storage, back up, hosted email and much more.

Whilst the 2^nd iteration of the G-Cloud allows for contracts of up to 24 months, channel suppliers who keep in mind the premise of G-Cloud, to offer services purely on a “pay as you go” basis and without contracts and punitive charges, these are likely to be the real winners in the CloudStore.

With a third iteration planned before Christmas, there is plenty of time to get on board.

In a perfect world I would want to be able to drag things seamlessly between all four screens. I have been reliable informed (by my friend Jon Topper) that you can get a Mac to drive four screens with Display Link USB to DVI adapters but I just don’t think my poor little ‘Air would cope. Part of the rationale of getting the Mac Mini was to offload the ‘Air and get a competent games and video editing machine as part of the bargain.

Kayboard and mouse sharing tools for MacOS

So, instead I just wanted to be able to move the mouse / keyboard focus seamlessly between the screens. I tried Synergy but just could not get it to work. On my Mac Mini (OSX Lion) it crashes immediately.

Instead I tried Teleport. The earlier versions were quite unstable (I’ve been experimenting with this for a few months) and I ended up in a situation where although it had been working it was no longer.

Fixing Teleport

In the past the issues had been caused by Teleport getting its knickers in a twist over changed IP addresses or machine names (I lost/broken/upgraded my Mac Air several times in 2012) and found that generally the following steps in some combination would work:

• Turn off Teleport in its preference pane on both machines
• Quit System Preferences
• Re-open system prefs
• Re-activate Teleport

Sometimes I would need to swap around which had “Share this Mac” ticked (denotes the one being remotely controlled) to get it working.

This latest problem was a total failure though, which I suspect to be due to my having upgraded the machines since Teleport was originally installed. The Macs could see each others’ screens but they showed in the arranger in red. Much fiddling and rebooting did not help. Therefore I decided to completely reinstall Teleport, which is a little harder tha it first appears!

Uninstalling Teleport (or Synergy)

Note that these steps also work perfectly well for uninstalling Synergy KM – just change “teleport” to “synergy”.

To remove it you need to find the relevant files using the console and delete them, as well as killing off the process. You should be able to kill the process by unticking “Activate teleport” in its preference pane and to confirm that it is no longer running, type:

ps aux | grep teleport

If there is only one process showing (the grep) then you’re good. If not, use ‘kill’, as I have in this example:

KatAir-2:~ khcw$
KatAir-2:~ khcw$ ps aux | grep teleport
khcw 525 0.0 0.0 2432768 588 s001 S+ 2:20pm 0:00.00 grep teleport
khcw 520 0.0 0.2 2579184 20708 ?? S 2:19pm 0:00.43 /Library/PreferencePanes/teleport.prefPane/Contents/Resources/teleportd.app/Contents/MacOS/teleportd -psn_0_323663
KatAir-2:~ khcw$
KatAir-2:~ khcw$ kill 520
KatAir-2:~ khcw$

Now comes the tricky bit. You also need to remove all of Teleport’s files. You may just need to remove the preference pane and its .prefPane and .plist but I removed all its other files as well just to be sure. To find the files us mdfind from the console, thus:

KatAir-2:~ khcw$
KatAir-2:~ khcw$ mdfind -name teleport
/Users/khcw/Library/Preferences/com.abyssoft.teleport.plist
/Users/khcw/Library/Caches/com.abyssoft.teleport
/Library/PreferencePanes/teleport.prefPane
/Users/khcw/Downloads/teleport/teleport.prefPane
/Users/khcw/Downloads/teleport
/Users/khcw/Downloads/teleport.zip
KatAir-2:~ khcw$

Now I could give you some clever xargs + rm foo here to delete everything in one handy command but that would be rather dangerous (you might have other files called “Teleport”!) so use the following command and paste the file names onto the end:

sudo rm -rf <filename>

Using my example above you would run the following commands:

KatAir-2:~ khcw$ sudo rm -rf /Users/khcw/Library/Preferences/com.abyssoft.teleport.plist
Password:
KatAir-2:~ khcw$ sudo rm -rf /Users/khcw/Library/Caches/com.abyssoft.teleport
KatAir-2:~ khcw$ sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/teleport.prefPane

You will be asked for your password since you are using sudo (switches you into superuser mode). Be very careful with “sudo rm -rf” – you can delete files which stop your computer working if not!

Now that Teleport has been removed, simply reinstall it and you should hopefully be good to go!

I just realised that you can actually just right-click on Teleport in System Preference and remove it that way. *facepalm* That may be all you need to do to uninstall it but I’ve not tried the easy way. :$

Performance

On Two Worlds II (one of my favourite games) there are very time-critical things like the lock pick mini game. I think there might have been a tiny perceptible delay but I am not certain – it seemed like I had to click a few miliseconds before where I would have before.

Therefore I switched it around so that the Mac Mini was the keyboard and mouse server since I don’t do anything latency sensitive on my ‘Air. This also has two other key advantages: First, I have one less wire to connect to my ‘Air when I plug into my home setup and secoond if there is an issue with Teleport (which there quite often is) I already have a keyboard and mouse connected to both machines (the ‘Air’s built-in ones).

security

I did not like the fact that it wants a connection to www.abyssoft.com (Little Snitch, my local firewall and network monitor, informed me). I allowed it at first but then blocked it – almost certainly just checking for updates but it was a free download and would be the perfect vehicle for a keylogger harvesting info and transmitting it back to a central source.

Personally I would not trust such a system over an untrusted network either. Yes, it has an encryption capability but I’d rather not rely on that.

It is set in a delightful post-apocalyptic world with a fusion of steampunk and magic. It only takes about 10 hours to play through and is very satisfying I found! One of the things I liked the most is that it is non-trivial. You really do have to use some tactics when fighting multiple baddies!

General hints & tips

Chests

Chests are mostly pseudo-random, ie. they will generally give you one of a set of objects some of which might be useful and some of which might not be. However, you can save immediately before opening a chest and if you don’t like what you get just reload – the random seed gets reset.

This can get tiresome though and is cheating (ie. it can make you a bit too powerful) so I suggest only doing it when you come across a chest that yeilds something really good that you don’t want (the other options will likely also be good and might be better for your character).

Changes of outfit

You can accumulate an unlimited number of items during your travels. Most of them you will want to break down (see below) or sell, but keep the best ones handy because you can change your equipment at any time during battle without penalty. For example, on my main character (a shaman, Xanthia) in the end game (there are some seriously hard battles!) I would swap to the Conductor Ring when resting for more mana recharge, then back to the Ring of Wind for nuking down the baddies.

Item colour

Equipment is coloured in the same way as World of Warcraft items: white (normal) < green (uncommon / "a bit special") < blue (rare / quite good) < purple (epic / awesome). However, I have found that in practice the colour of an item is not a good way to guage its quality or usefulness. On Xanthia I completed the final über baddie (Louhi) with only one purple item (the best shaman weapon, Gambanteinn), one blue (the Conductor Ring, which I only used when resting at that point) and the rest greens (Pistol of Might, Astral Cloak & Ring of Wind).

As an aside, I could not kill the Louhi with my barbarian. I had possibly nerfed her by taking some shammy skills rather than the max barbarian ones - she could only damage him on a piercing hit (other than the DoT) and even with 10 attack dice that was rare.

Potions and resting

You can use potions during your turn without penalty in battle (it does not cost you a move). In tougher battles you will definitely need some, but I found that I could do the vast majority without – especially making good use of the shaman skills which recover mana and the Conductor Ring (you’re probably gathering that one is important for a Shaman! .

You should never have to buy potions. They are dropped pretty much every battle and if you are using so many that you are having to pay for them you are doing something wrong.

Note that you can only have nine of each (mana and health potions) though so you may as well use them if you’re close to nine.

The thing I didn’t actually figure out at first (and why I did start buying potions) was resting. It seems obvious but I didn’t spot the zzz icon for the first hour of play which made things tough!

Crowd control

Many of the battles have multiple mobs (baddies). There are a few ways you can deal with this. One is to try and “pull” (attract the attention) of only one or two at a time and then run away a little to fight them on their own.

My preference, however, is the cripple shot assassing skill. I got this on my shaman and my barbarian so that I could freeze one of the melee mobs in place while I dealt with the ranged / caster mob(s). I got it on my barbarian too but it was a waste; they generally want to run into the middle of combat for the mana regen anyway!

On Xanthia I also got Silencing Wound, which stops casting. This turned out to be a waste for her since, as a caster herself, she had zillions of magic defence dice and caster mobs hardly ever landed anything on her.

Rerolls and mana conservation

If you’re a caster and you are using wind strike or the thunder spells you will generally want to reroll pretty much regardless (spend a mana to do so) in order to guarantee a piercing hit and get your three mana back.

Also, if you are using a damage over time (DoT) skill or one like cripple shot and want it to land it can be worth spending the extra mana to guarantee it, but remember that you can’t get a piercing hit with those (nor cripple shot) so only reroll if you think your target might successfully defend.

Otherwise, unless you’re near the end of a battle or have completely fumbled (missed), it is rarely worth re-rolling other attacks in my experience. It gets expensive in terms of mana very fast otherwise!

Also, I recommend never wasting rerolls on defensive rolls unless you’re in really dire straights!

Mana is your most valuable resource – conserve it!

What the numbers mean on items

Rimelands is, like most, a mathematically-based game. The beauty of it is that you get to see the workings out of the battles. It is helpful therefore to know what all the numbers associated with equipment you can use mean.

Mel/Rgd/Mgc A/D: X / Y

When something says “Mel A/D” (Melee), “Rgd A/D” (Ranged) or “Mgc A/D” (Magic) the two numbers (X and Y in the title example) correspond to a bonus to attack and defence dice (ie. they add to your base skill number for that attack mode). Having more dice is very important since it both maximises your chance of hitting a target and also improves your chance of a “piercing hit” which do much more damage and which many skills rely upon. More on those in a moment.

Mel/Rgd/Mgc Pwr: X (damage calculations)

Here X denotes a bonus to the attack power for that particular mode of combat. Your total power for a particular attack mode gets added on to the weapon or spell’s base power (usually a random range) less the opponent’s armour value for that sort of attack. “Pwr” therefore relates to the amount of damage done.

Armor / Mgc Res

Armor and Mgc Res (magic resistance) values work in a similar way. Each item which affects them will have two numbers, for example “Armor: 10(2)” and “Mgc Res: 5(1)” for the Rusty Mail you start with. The first number is fairly simple; “armour” or “magic resistance”, the amount which is subtracted from a successful attack on you using a physical or magical attack.

The second number (the one in brackets) is “toughness” or “magic deflection” respectively. An attacking mob needs to score more hit dice (the total of their skulls minus the total of your shields) than your toughness (for melee and ranged) or magic deflection (for magic) to achieve a piercing hit.

The opposite is also true; if a mob has a high toughness or magic deflection it is much harder to score a piercing hit on them. You can see mob’s toughness and magic deflection in the two numbers above their heads.

Blueprints, codes and crafting

one of my favourity features of the game is the ability to craft / make stuff. Before selling things I’d always check what I could dismantle for good value so I could mess about with making things from the blueprints I found.

As mentioned, I found the conductor ring invaluable for my shaman and the heal bracer very handy on my barbarian. Even better for the barbarian was the Vampire Dagger though. This is a tricky one since it requires two amber which are rare dismantle drops, but you can get them by buying a couple of Meka-Bracers and dismantling them (1,500 each plus 500 to dismantle). 4k may seem a lot but there are not many good things to buy after the early game so I think it is more fun to spend the money making stuff.

Some blueprints come with codes which allows you to port them between characters or share them as I’m about to here. However, frustratingly few of the blueprints I found had a code with them. Below are all the blueprints I found, including some I found without codes:

Ripper
Damage: 28 – 36
Rgd A/D: 1 / 0
50% chance to make enemy bleed
Bits: 15 / 20 / 0
#g113s0

Healbracer
Mel Pwr: 6
Gain HP on rest
Bits: 12 / 16 / 0
#1a554q

Shock Mallet
Damage: 80 – 100
Mel A/D: 2 / 1
25% chance to stun
Bits: 42 / 56 / 2
#s4hk01

Conductor ring
Armour: 5(0)
Mgc Res: 8(1)
Gain extra mana on rest
Bits: 18 / 24 / 0
#c1554s

Conductor Blade
Damage: 50 – 62
Mel A/D: 1 / 0
Use Magic value for attack
Bits: 24 / 32 / 0
# n/a

Conductor Pistol
Damage: 42 – 50
Rgd A/D: 1 / 1
Rgd Pwr: 4
Use Magic value for attack
# n/a

Note that all the “conductor” items come out of the same chest. I recommend using the reload strategy when you come across this chest to make sure you get the one you want in addition to the Conductor Ring which you can just add via the code. The chest is in “Norn: Futures – treasure chamber” just after the bit where Hermann pinches the artifact.

Vampire Dagger
Damage: 60 – 70
Mel A/D: 2 / 1
Mgc A/D: 1 / 0
Gain HP on hit (about 40hp – doesn’t seem to work with whirlwind though)
30 / 40 / 2
# n/a
- From the 4th or 5th vault – important for melee types (see above)

Bone Crusher
Damage: 68 – 80
Mel A/D: 2 / 0
25% chance to cripple
36 / 48 / 2
# n/a
- Loki’s vault

Slayer (gun)
Damage: 48 – 67
Rgd A/D: 1 / 1
50% chance to make enemy bleed
# n/a
- Camp

Gyroscopic lense
Rgd A/D: 1 / 0
Rgd Pwr: 8
Free re-roll when aiming
42 / 56 / 2
# n/a
- Forgotten vault – floor 3

Energy pistol
Damange: 46 – 52
Rgd A/D: 2 / 1
Gaim mana on hit
42 / 56 / 2
# n/a
- Titiana chamber

Flamethrower
Damage: 56 – 62
Rgd A/D: 2 / 1
50% chance to set target on fire
48 / 64 / 3
# n/a
- Reign vault – basement

I have mislaid my notes of where the others come from (all without codes unfortunately) but when I find it I’ll add them.

If you have found any with codes that are not in the above list please let me know and I’ll add them to this page!

SD card error / how to format the SD card in the GoPro

The first problem I ran into was that I had just stuck the SD card in assuming that the GoPro would be okay with the default formatting (probably FAT – I hadn’t checked), but it was not. Instead the GoPro came up with “SD card error” which at first made me think I’d bought a duff card!

However, after some Googling I discovered that you need to format any new SD card in the GoPro. The option is actually rather hidden. You have to follow these steps:

• 1. Insert the SD card
• 2. Turn it on (hold the front button)
• 3. Press the front button until the screen shows a white-on-black spanner symbol
• 4. Press the top (shutter) button
• 5. Pres the front button again until the screen shows three dots and “more”
• 6. Press the top button again
• 7. The screen should now show a trash can symbol – press the top button again
• 8. Press the front button twice to scroll down to “ALL/format”
• 9. Press the top button (it will then show “DELETE ALL?”
• 10. Press the front button to scroll onto “YES”
• 11. Press the top button and hey-presto your SD card is formatted!

MP4 files not recognised or unreadable

The first time I used it everything was fine; I was able to insert the SD card directly into my MacBook air and then copy the video files off it.

But the next day when I tried to do the same thing, all the .MP4 files I had recorded on the slopes were there but none of my video applications (iMovie, QuickTime, VLC and DivX) could read nor recognise them as video. This was obviously very frustrating!

However, I realised that I had deleted the MP4 files using my laptop rather than with the steps above and had a flash of inspiration, which turned out to be correct! Since only using the GoPro itself to delete the movie files I have not had the same issue with unreadable movie files again.

This has not helped me salvage those videos from the second day though so if anyone knows how please let drop me a comment!

Review

While on the subject, I do think my GoPro Hero 2 is awesome! The quality is astonishing and vastly better than strapping a “sports” camera to me helmet that didn’t have a fishbowl lens! The lens really makes the difference – you don’t have to really point very accurately and it produces quite stable images. It is no good for long-range shots though so if you want to take movies of someone else doing cool stuff I suggest you just use the video mode on your hand-held camera (no need for a dedicated video camera really these days!).

Two short examples of footage below:

But back to the point. Not only did some ancient civilisation’s spiral calendar run out two weeks ago causing some doomsayers to get a bit excitable, but people widely have been starting to seriously consider what might bring about our end. Last month there was an interesting article in New Scientist on the new Centre for the study of Existential Risk (CSER). It seems that the focus is on nuclear war, doomsday viruses, climate change & singularity (machines) as the modern day horsemen of the apocalypse.

Since it appears musing about such things is no longer considered a bit looney, and given that the Mayans were clearly wrong, I thought I would share some of my own thinking on the subject of which apocalypse we should actually worrying about.

Is the clock ticking?

This is something I have been thinking about for a long time – roughly 22 years. When I was 12/13 I became very interested in astronomy and developed my hobbyist interest in astrophysics. At that tender age one of the things that occurred to me is that, if we assume that humanity as a species will continue to expand in numbers exponentially over time, and if we assume a somewhat deterministic universe, then it was extremely odd / improbably that I should find myself alive now when humanity only occupies one tiny planet in one small corner of the cosmos.

Consider this: I give you a bag and tell you that it has a number of blue balls in it and one red ball and instruct you to start picking balls from the bag without looking. The third ball is the red one. I then ask you whether you think there are 10 or 1,000 balls in the bag. You would likely suspect the former. Now, this isn’t a terribly robust hypothesis but it got me thinking since it could be used to suggest that there will likely not be many more humans.

At a similar age I also decided that one lifetime was definitely not going to be enough to explore all the interesting things in this little world, let alone the universe, and thus began my interest in life extension. That is why my Masters degree was in biomedical science, specialising in neurology, but more about that later. It also led me to conclude that there might be some threats to my planned immortality which although at the time were questionably-based I have, in the mean time, come to think was probably right.

The four horsemen

Back to the CSER’s four horsemen. They are looking at things which humanity might do or create to bring about their own demise, which seems sensible as it is those which we have a chance of avoiding. Let’s run through those four threats.

Nuclear war. Yes I can see this as a threat but I think it unlikely that it would result in our total extinction. We are a highly adaptive species and though it might decimate us there are plenty of remote areas which would be largely untouched. A nuclear war would only focus on areas of strategic importance to the warring nations. Even in scenarios like a nuclear winter it seems unlikely all would die since as the population diminishes the consumption of finite food and fuel resources remaining would eventually plateau at a level which would allow a few of us to survive the winter.

Doomsday virus. There are some good models and even fun games on this, and the conclusion is that it is actually extremely hard to design a realistic pathogen which would entirely eliminate us. This is mainly because most countries have good systems for shutting down their borders in the event that neighbours have a pandemic outbreak and we have become rather good at developing immunisations swiftly. Having been hurt by such in the past we are quite well prepared. Perhaps the most credible threat would be a pathogen with a very long gestation period that also affected the hosts in such a way as to make them “aggressively infectious” (ie. rage virus / zombies) but with my background in biomedical science I think that very unlikely!

Climate change. The worst possible outcome of climate change is probably an extraordinarily rapid transition out of our current ice age. We’re actually in an interglacial since the ice caps have receded, but the normal cycle would be for us to return to “normal” ice age in a few tens of thousands of years where the glaciers would advance about as far as Birmingham. Now, the glaciers are receding at an alarming rate so the idea that we might, within a couple of lifetimes, revert the planet to a state which dinosaurs like (no ice caps and rather warm with temperate zones having shifted a long way North) is a remote possibility, but it is hard to see how this might be a terminal event. Indeed, I can’t actually see this killing more than a few tens of percent of our population due to famine.

Singularity event (rise of the machines / artificial intelligence). Now on this one I have to agree with them, but actually I think it is inevitable and should be embraced, not feared. More on that later.

Threats from above

But what about extraterrestrial intelligence? Yes I am serious; surely that must be high on the risk-factor of things human activity could do to end our own existence? We recklessly announce our presence to a universe which appears to be capable of supporting life and yet the skies are mysteriously quiet.

Again, I first started thinking about this in my early teens. I was bamboozled by the night sky; where the hell was everybody? It seemed (and still seems) to me that if life could spontaneously spring up on this planet then surely among the 100,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy there would be other such occurrences, and failing that then surely the observable universe consisting of something on the order of 80,000,000,000 galaxies and about 6 x 10^22 stars would be teeming with life? Further, there have recently been tantalising hints that there might be organic matter on Mars and the recent penetration of lake Vida in Antartica revealed wholly new forms of life which could in theory survive under the ice on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons (ref). If our closest neighbours could or might have once supported life then it really does seem very odd that there isn’t more out there.

As an aside I did go through a solipsistic phase and even now have not discounted the possibility that reality is some form of simulation, but in the absence of better information it seems prudent to accept the reality with which we are presented!

Back to these malevolent aliens. I came across the anthropic cosmological principal in my late teens – the idea that there would only be a narrow window in which intelligent civilisations could recognise each other as such – but discounted it. Again, if there were many civilisations surely some would be hegemonistic, spreading out among the stars and leaving some sign of their passage? Further, if a benevolent society evolved then presumably there would remain more primitive elements still recognisable to us? Instead I concluded that it is probably a good survival trait for intelligent life to be quiet about their presence and/or that noisy intelligent life gets silenced by more aggressive species.

This might seem a bit paranoid, but consider this: there are limited accessible resources in the universe. I conclude this from the evidence that a) the expansion rate of our universe is accelerating and b) that general relativity suggests that spacetime can expand faster than the speed of light. Therefore, if you can only travel at less than or equal to the light speed there is finite amount of space which can be explored, and thus a finite amount of resources which can be exploited. This is also supported by one of the modern hopefuls of a grand theory of everything; string theory holography suggests that the universe is limited to the stuff within the cosmoogical horizon.

Given this limited resource, If I were the dominant species in the neighbourhood I would sure as hell not want to risk some young upstart becoming a threat and a competitor for resource. The logical conclusion would be to eliminate them while vulnerable. If we draw from our local experience too, what happens to lesser species (eg. flora and fauna that we don’t find useful or bend to our will through selective breeding), a less advanced evolutionary cousin (eg. Neanderthals) or more primitive civilisations (eg. native Americans) that we encounter? Generally they get eliminated or severely curtailed by the dominant species/civilisation (us).

So, back to CSET’s mandate, what are we doing to encourage this untimely end at the hands of genocidal extraterrestrials? Some might argue the cosmological anthropic principal’s view that we are not broadcasting in a manner that would be noticed, but if we look at our own technological advancement we do still use old modes of communications (eg. amplitude-modulated radio) as well as modern ones (eg. digital spread spectrum or directed microwaves).

Further, the more we advance the “louder” we get! Picture planet earth in the electromagnetic spectrum; we are a giant Catherine wheel of microwave beams lancing out into the sky from our equator (all the geostationary orbit satellite uplinks – most of the radiation misses them), spinning handily in the same plane as the rest of the galaxy as a lighthouse might shine out across the sea.

So what to do about it?

Unfortunately that horse has probably already bolted. We have been announcing our presence to the neighbourhood for decades and therefore I think the answer is to be prepared. We probably have a lot of time before anyone unpleasant turns up. First, we are quite early in the universe’s existence; the earth is a third of the age of the universe and it is likely that the first generation of stars would not have been able to foster “goldilocks” planets (not too hot and not too cold for water-based life).

Second, the galaxy is about 70,000,000 light years across and even if we assumed that 1 in 100,000 stars had “goldilocks” planets and 1 in 100,000 of those billion stars supported life which had evolved into intelligence that would be about 8 in our galaxy. Based on a random distribution it is very unlikely anyone would be within a few hundred millennia of us. However, one might argue that a hegemonistic civilisation would be more likely to have spread into our locale but even then we’re likely to have hundreds if not thousands of years in the very worst-case scenario.

However we have another problem; thanks to medical science we are no longer evolving as a species and remain, frankly, rather “squishy”. In fact one could argue that thanks to the aforementioned medical wonders combined with socio-economic forces we are actually devolving as a species (highly intelligent women tend to breed less due to careers). It should be noted that the recent increase in average intelligence among humans can be attributed to a combination of improved diet and education – it will plateau, and soon.

Escaping from wetware-reliance

For me with my goal of living long enough to explore the entire universe, this lack of evolution presents a bit of a problem – I don’t think we will advance swiftly enough to be able to defend ourselves, and if anything immortality would likely slow us down. Thankfully, my preferred solution for immortality also presents a handy answer. My Bachelor’s thesis at university was an exploration of the most effective methods of life extension.

My conclusion was pretty simple; while it will probably be possible to genetically engineer an immortal child in my lifetime that’s not going to help me, and instead my best hope would be the progressive replacement of my mind’s substrate (body and brain) with maintainable artificial systems. I’m not necessarily advocating wholesale replacement – though possible by microtoming (very thinly slicing) a brain and scanning it under an electron microscope then running an emulation in software it would arguably have the unfortunately side-effect of the subject having died and a copy living on – but rather a gradual replacement of failing bits.

Consider someone who has a stroke; it is likely that within my lifetime we will have the technology to replace the dead brain tissue with an implant which would take over the functions. Repeat this many times and your mind is running mostly in silicon. Thanks to the brain’s massive redundancy it should then be possible to disconnect the “wetware” and hey presto you’re consciousness is in something that can be maintained indefinitely.

Now, I do fear that this might not happen in my lifetime, but that’s why I chose neuroscience to specialise in for my Masters since neither the technology necessary to do the human-machine interfacing nor the neurological understanding to emulate a brain exist yet.

The other important piece of the puzzle is efficient computing, and that is partly why I’m doing my PhD researching computing energy efficiency. The goal is challenging, I admit. There are 10^11 neurons in the human brain and about 10^10 of those are cortical pyramidal cells (the important ones). It has been estimated that you need 1,000 instructions per second (IPS) to emulate 1 neuron, but I think they are a bit cleverer than that so let’s say 10^6 IPS/neuron. A modern Xeon can do about 100 million IPS (MIPS). This suggests that it is possible to emulate a human brain in real time using 100,000 modern Xeon processors – a very achievable number (Google has at least that much compute).

Of course given my proposed “staged replacement” that presents a bit of a challenge, but arguably not for long given Moore’s law. The human brain is really quite remarkable; it is doing all that work with only 20 Watts whereas my 100,000 Xeons would consume at least 6 Mega-watts! However, Moore’s law can also be roughly applied to the energy efficiency of computation, with it doubling every 18 months. On that basis it should take us only about 30 years to be able to do the equivalent of my 100,000 Xeons’ work using less than 20 Watts.

Some of you might point out that we will approach the limit of Moore’s law in the traditional sense (the exponential increase in transistors crammed onto integrated circuits) towards the end of this decade due to electron tunnelling as you bring the “wires” in a circuit very close together. However, it should be noted that transistor density is merely the fifth paradigm of Moore’s law and it is likely that it will continue well beyond this decade in some other form, be that quantum, optical or DNA-based computing (more here).

There is of course a danger that we still might not develop the necessary technology in my lifetime, so my backup plan is still the whole microtoming my brain thing. Not ideal but probably subjectively no more of a death than having a general anaesthetic. Also, I suspect that experimenting with massive compute resource in the mean time will be an important step towards developing the necessary technology. That’s partly why I became an IT infrastructure entrepreneur (the other reasons being its fun and I’m good at it); phase 1 of the master plan is to amass wealth and compute resource, and that’s is proceeding quite well so far. In a decade or two I’ll be ready to move onto phases 2 and 3; how to emulate a brain in software and how to interface brain tissue with electronics – after all, if you need something doing it is better to be in charge of it yourself!

Dues ex machina

So how does this help? Well if, hypothetically, we were able to “upload” a consciousness then it would not only render the subject immortal and much less “squishy” (ie. vulnerable) but it would also allow them to enhance their own cognitive abilities; one could re-write/re-wire one’s own brain, adding enhancements directly plumbed in – a literal mind expansion. This would likely be an exponential process and is generally termed a “technological singularity”; where an artificial intelligence’s development accelerates it beyond human comprehension.

I must admit that I’ve been a bit obsessed with this for most of my life and have given it a lot of thought. For a time I liked the idea of completely eschewing my humanity (especially the emotions bit – they are terribly distracting) but more recently have decided that a purely intellectual existence would probably result in self-termination since you’d likely either conclude that there was a limited amount of interesting stuff you could explore/experience, or that the mysteries of the universe are fractal in nature but also ultimately pointless (I’d explore this philosophical epiphany more, but I’ve rambled on too long already! ). As an aside, my personal theory is the latter (fractal/effectively infinite possibilities), especially being someone who operates at the bleeding edge of technology creating new stuff who is also a scientist doing research on the unexpected effects of the things her field was creating only a few years ago!

Further, I think that our best bet for creating an artificial intelligence (AI) will be to base it on the intelligence that already exists in nature; ie. our brains. As mentioned above, the human brain is astonishingly complex and as yet neuroscience has only barely scratched the surface. Yes, on a micro scale I can describe to you how an individual neuron operates and interacts with its neighbours, and yes on a macro scale I can explain the psychological effects of pharmacologically encouraging a subset of a 100 million or so neurons to behave a bit differently. But how those 10 billion neurons operate in symphony to produce the emergent property that is self awareness is at this stage simply beyond our ken.

So, on the one hand I don’t think we can expect AI to be “built” from the ground up in our lifetimes. On the other hand, I think that the AI that we will create will be based on people like me. Since a purely intellectual existence whose only reward is learning seems a bit pointless to me I decided that I’d want some company when I get around to ascending my mortal form. Additionally, as part of that I think we would want to retain some of our animalistic humanity – specifically emotionality.

I don’t therefore think that a “SkyNet” type singularity is actually particularly likely. Also, even if one did end up with something of a divide (the fleshies and the immortals) I think that the immortals’ basic human nature would be retained – indeed I think it would be necessary to give the immortals’ lives meaning. I don’t therefore believe that the technological singularity would present a significant threat to humanity. Instead, I expect it to dramatically accelerate our collective understanding of the universe and also to equip us with the tools to avoid whatever fate befalls our galactic neighbours.

So, in summary, I think the thing we should worry about is why the night sky is so quiet, and what we should do about it is evolve, fast.