I would like to personally thank the staff of all our brand-new peers at JINX, and the commitment shown by you. Neology thanks you for your efforts at JINX over the last 72 hours — for your support, quality technical skills, and willingness to make JINX a better place. It has been a pleasure working with you all. So far 12 peers means a 66% peering rate at JINX, and the final ones (bar the umentionable two) are simply a matter of logistics.

In total — 12 Peers  — less than 72 hours. That’s about a peer per 6 hours. In fact, the first 12 hours turned up the most of the local ones.

It was all as simple as finding a contact in the organisation and exchanging peering details and netblocks. Of course, has been settlement free as well, and Neology will continue to do so as long as it has capacity. And if we don’t have capacity we will endeavor to provide more capacity.

Thanks to all the new peers,  you are part of the drive that is going to make INX’es in South Africa a success in the current and future tense.

It makes sense to peer settlement free at JINX. It’s good for the local internet. Except if BGP and route-filters are rocket science, as is generally the excuse toted by the “unmetionables”.

Sanity check:

It’s actually cheaper for me to get transit to the “unpeerables” via Telkom, rather than attempt to negotiate their prohibitive local peering requirements and pricing. Thanks Telkom, you are my friend. True value for money! Oh wait. Doesn’t that defeat the entire point of JINX ?

Here’s the thing — I’m paying for the SAIX local transit, and the “umnetionables” are paying for it too. So, in the end — we all paid for SAIX transit. If we don’t peer via SAIX or JINX then it would have to go SAIX, or international. So — wouldn’t it just make sense to peer at JINX? Yeah. I thought so.

Finally, many thanks to Graham, and Regardt for “making it so”. And thanks for all the V6 work as well. Neology is probably one of the better connected V6 providers at the moment, simply due to our willingness to do V6. We are hoping to establish peering with all the remaining JINX participants at this point. Basic logistics and time-zone issues appear to be the most common issue. Not “peering” agreements.

To the “umentionables” (you know who you are) … Thanks for your “cooperation” and entirely ridiculous peering policies. o_O

Thanks to Ant Brooks’s intervention my  router at JINX is now powered and live. ISPA organisational efficiency at it’s best.

(unqualified post, since I’m relying on info from my employees)

So I’ve got a shiny new router  in at JINX, at 158 Jan Smuts Ave, Rosebank. JINX Central. The prime peering point for ISPA members.

We’re a new JINX Peer. My router is there, with 8 Gig ports. Awaiting BGP peering, and whatnot.

Except apparently my router  cannot be turned on,  because the JINX rack is out of POWER. Also, according to rumour we’re the first new JINX peer in nearly three  years.

Sigh.

To start off — A classic romantic song. Something to appease the brain with. Something to make you refocus. Something to make you forget about the noise in your life, and think about what’s important.

Honestly I cannot think of anything better than Andrew Eldritch (Sisters of Mercy) and the following song: “Under the gun”. Terri Nun is the girl doing backing vocals. Eldritch had a preference for hiring vocalists, guitarist and other band members in order to just make a single song. This did not make him popular all the time. But it certainly worked.

Eldritch was hard on his musicians. He is a perfectionist. Over the course of the Sisters’ existence he went through nine band members. Every video made was painstakingly constructed to his specification. It didn’t make him popular with his band members, but he rolled ahead regardless. And the results show. The man is a musical genius.

This educational post has got a bit of a “gothic” slant to it. Eldritch hated being labeled as goth, or for being labeled as the “father” of the genre.

And that — I have to agree with. Goth, is simply not a label. It is merely a dark state of mind that many people experience. Some of them longer than others. It is a lovely, dark, imaginative place to be. Every teenager should experience it in my mind. I still make space for that state of mind regularly. It puts perspective on the world.

Many parents freak out when their children “turn to the dark side”, but having had the experience, and being involved in the Gothic scene I can honestly say that the only thing that parents have to fear is themselves, and their prejudice.

I was classified “gothic” for a long time, but for me it was simply a state of mind. Not a “look”.

However, if you’ve never put on some tight leather pants, thrown on a loose fitting cotton shirt, struggled with your eighteen-up Doc Martins and applied some black nail varnish, and then proceeded to have some deep conversations about love, live and death over a bottle of wine — then you haven’t lived. It was not about the look. It was simply about the rebellion and romance of it all.

Apparently, when Sisters of Mercy opened for Depeche Mode, with “Ribbons”, they had to wait half an hour for the crowd to calm down. The embedded version of Ribbons below, is audio only since most of the liver versions on youtube are just really crap. Incoming!

If you don’t own “A slight case of Overbombing”, then about now would be the time to go Amazon it.

The next song is by “The 69 Eyes”. They’re a Finnish band, and epitomize everything in a modern  “Goth” band. They’ve taken the Gothic genre, combined it with good quality music, and vocals without trying to be too pretentious.  Some of their older video’s such as “Wasting the Dawn” did have a bit too many girls “sowing the seeds” for my liking but the quality of their current music is a testament to their evolution.

I want hair like that fucking drummer!

“The Chair” — “The 69 Eyes”.

Finally, and this isn’t really gothic, but just brilliant musicianship.

Were you under the impression that Marilyn Manson was simply a talentless dolt, trying to impress teenagers across the world?

Wrong.

If Tim Skold, and an accoustic version of (gasp) Justin Timberlake’s song “What goes around comes around” does not impress you then I guess you’re a BeeGee’s fan. This cover clearly shows Manson’s vocal abilities. And of course there is simply no disputing Tim Skold’s capabilities as a musician, but that’s is worth a post on it’s own. This cover simply kicks the pants off the original. What are the chances of Justin Timberlake ever covering a Marilyn Manson song ? Hmm… Yeah. By the way this song was recorded in a radio station after an interview with Skold and Manson. Not shabby for an impromptu performance.

Marilyn Manson – accoustic cover of “What goes around comes around” by Justin Timberlake.

So, to tie up with the “interference” portion in the title of this post. To any would-be or current parent. Don’t interfere. Darkness is a fact of life. It’s better that your children get exposed to it, and learn how to deal with than to attempt to interfere by “hiding” it.

In the end, they’re going to find out the following:

“We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn’t have to stop there.’” — Dana Gould, via jwz.

Short post, whilst watching postgres doing it’s crap.  Musical education.

Music just makes the entire world so much more bearable when you’re watching a database removing defunct rows. Reducing “plumbing” data to single-key dbm hashes is just a performance win. But when you have some legacy to deal with, it’s not always that easy.

For all the young budding computer scientists and DBA’s out there: forget about “first normal form”. Forget about relational databases. Forget about anything you learnt during Comp.Sci. It’s all bullshit. The only way to scale is to consider your data as “disconnected”. Unconnected. No hard relations. If you need to relate, code is going to be more optimal in joining stuff that an RDBMS ever will be. Build systems that allows you easy, speedy access to the most relevant data, regardless of relationships.

Relational databases with referential integrity, and all the crap that goes with should be the domain of a good programmer as implemented in code. Not some half-baked entity relationship diagram produced by a poor DBA, with complex SQL queries to find out if “bob” is a “user” or a “customer”.

Build high-speed disjointed storage, forget about SQL “JOINS”. Build , and use high-speed distributed API’s, and queues using gearman, and whatever else the hell you fancy to retrieve and store your data — and only the data you need.

Devolve every storage issue into what it is – a storage issue. RDBMS is the evil of the 20th century. Hastables, and “flakey” relationships is the way to process thousands and millions of requests per second.

Using an RDBMS for anything more than a couple of rows  is just simply “insane”. In the membrain. You will go down the painful performance alley. And steer away from anything containing the tag “SQL”.

Unless all you’re writing is YEAFBS (yet another fucking blog system) based on some dumbass MVC framework. Cause then you’re good. Except, it will NEVER work in the real world.

As a furthering to musical and database education — watch Oomph “Augen Auf”

Augen Auf meaning – “Open Eyes”. Something an RDBMS will give you, but at a pedestrian pace. Partition your data. Store it in it’s most optimal fashion. Don’t worry too much about consistency. What matters is speed and ” relative” accuracy.

Oomph don’t allow embedding, but it certainly is is one of the best videos from Oomph.

Finally. Orgy – Blue Monday.

This is simpy one of the best covers of a classic 80’s song in a long time.The video is absolutely awesome too. It’s got nothing to do with databases or “first normal form”. Thank God.