Death Became It
For the last few weeks I've been seeing weird DMA errors from the kernel when I start using my laptop, and the wifi card has been a pain when I insert it. I put this down to the new kernel or some package updates... until tonight when I tried to use the laptop to be greeted with a number of decidedly non-trivial messages...
A fsck.ext3 later and the disk is worse, some dentrys are invalid and I've a number of bad sectors. Arse. Luckily I had enough time before the disk fell apart to boot my desktop and run unison, so I have a backup of 90% of my personal files, but reinstalling the laptop is not a task I'm looking forward to. My magical interfaces file took me ages to get right!
Sigh, the return is filed with Hitachi so I'll be sending the disk off tomorrow and will receive a replacement, well, in the future.
Rock On Time Dub, King Tubby. Must get more dub to go with the bassier headphones I'll be getting.
Observation Of The Day
Several short but sweet observations of the day.
- 10,000 Hz Legend by Air is very, very poor compared to Moon Safari. The first two tracks are an exercise in strange audio effects on vocals, and track 3 sounds like a bad 80s rock song.
- How does anyone get anything done with a make which doesn't support pattern matching rules? Being forced to use a non-GNU make is right up there with dripping water torture.
- Today I discovered a very nice Toshiba laptop, which is totally unavailable to the European market. I suspect it's a Japanese model, and was very sexy (as far as laptops can be, anyway).
NP: 10,000Hz Legend, Air.
UI Design Lessons
Mikael discovered the user interface gem which is MLDonkey, and suggests that we learn a thing or two from it. I agree, and hunted around for more prime examples of UI design lessons we should learn from. Especially for Mikael, I found a Windows Jabber client called Exodus. This is the connect dialog:
A beginner will notice that the terminating button layout is clearer as OK | Cancel rather than Cancel | Connect we'd normally use. However, a closer look reveals finer details than we are used to. The Details button opens a dialog to edit the current profile, and the blue underlined label is not a web link but a pop-up menu to create new accounts. Finally, successful integration of the web and the destktop is here!
NP: Liquid Swords, GZA
Observation For The Day
Observation For The Day: there is something inherently funny about girls in CFM killer-heels running down a slope for a train.
That is all.
NP: Simply Things, Zero 7.
Fast Car Abuse
To: vernon.kay@bbc.co.uk
Vernon,
I just turned on my radio and had the misfortune to hear a remix of Fast Car -- is nothing sacred these days!? Could you tell me who is responsible for this atrocity...
Cheers,
Ross
What's next? A happy hardcore mix of Imagine?
What a Week
Blimey, what a week or so this has been. We've finally finished sorting out the wedding gift list and I'm pretty pleased with what we've found &mdash most things essential apart from a kitchen sink (which was an option with the service we've got) such as kitchenware, book cases, new hifi for the bedroom, towels, etc. "Domesticated", and possibly "homely", are very much the words.
Last Saturday we were due to be planning the wedding photography, but that was cancelled so we spent the day doing some shopping. Well, by some I mean a few very large items, including a wonderful framed print of Farbstudie Quadrate Mit Konzentrischen Ringen by Kandinsky. Stortford has a wonderfully large Arthouse store, but there was a man in there who started by telling Vicky off for holding a print badly and then was probably trying to be efficient, but ended up almost framing a few prints we had barely looked at. Thankfully the woman who was putting the prints into the frames was far nicer, and snapped at him a few times.
We caught up on films over the weekend: finally watched the excellent Kill Bill Vol. 1 (I found Jackie Brown a bit of a let-down, so I was pleased that I enjoyed KB as much as I did) and went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which was good. Finally to finish the weekend we watched K-PAX, and had the usual is he/isn't he debate. You can get all three K-PAX books in one now, which is very tempting.
Last night there was an excellent Dispatches on Channel 4, about the battle some residents in Lee were having with the government about an asylum seeker holding center which was being built in their own. Lots of hot NIMBY action and some amusing (if they were not so appalling) quotes: "I don't want them anywhere in England, they are dangerous" and "He looked hostile and, you know, foreign. Had a bit of a beard" (when asked "how did you know he was an asylum seeker"). Jesus, people. I can feel myself entering a Garrettesque rant, so I'll stop now. :-)
Oh, and Murray Cumming was right: Tasking are the enemy.
NP: O, Damien Rice
SCSL vs OSD
Thanks to Glynn for linking to SCSL vs OSD, an analysis of the SCSL by Dalibor Topic (a Kaffe developer). An excellent read, detailing the evilness of the SCSL.
Whilst wandering around the net I think I found some of the best photos from GU4DEC here, here and here, taken by Germán Poó Caamaño.
Moore Blocked, Again
Michael Moore, author of Stupid White Men, has had his latest film (Fahrenheit 9/11) blocked by Disney. For some reason I'm not totally surprised by this: Disney isn't exactly the world's most liberal and experimental company. Well, it's being shown at Cannes so hopefully either Disney cave in, or someone will take it from them. If all else fails I'm sure someone will get a screener at Cannes...
Mail Overload!
Blimey, some Debian developers do seem to like their name in list archives... At the moment I have 1808 unread messages in my debian-devel folder and 1077 unread in debian-private. I was very close to selecting hundreds of messages at a time and deleting them, but then I discovered a gem from Our Glorious Founder, Ian Murdock:
If I were dead, I'd be rolling over in my grave right about now. — Ian Murdock
Classic. Enough of the flaming and fighting people, let's get back to getting Sarge ready!
NP: Brand New Second Hand, Roots Manuva.
The Book Meme
It appears I'm being blamed for the book meme/fad on Planet GNOME. Don't blame me! I just followed the trend on Planet Debian which was already going strong, honest!
Book Meme
The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
"Security was maintained by a huge standing army consisting, according to one account, of 9000 elephants, 30000 calvary and 600000 infantry."
