Thanks to ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, I found out the annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture has an extra feature this year: a performance of the radio scripts of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by many of the surviving original cast!
Artists hoping to take part include Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing Davey, Susan Sheridan, Stephen Moore and Roger Gregg (who will play Eddie), with a Very Special Guest at the voice of the book.
I’ve booked my tickets… 🙂
Monty Widenius (creator of MyISAM and MySQL) has announced the first public release of the Maria engine. This basically sounds like crash-safe MyISAM crossed with the InnoDB featureset, and there’s a Bitkeeper archive here.
It would certainly be nice to have fulltext column indexing in a format which supports ACID and row-level locking, together with the capability for foreign keys. It’s useful in some cases to have a table-per-file and would be even better if it was crash-safe 😛
I guess it’ll end up being version 2 or 3 before it’s ready for production, however. I certainly wouldn’t feel safe using something like that before it’s been through the mill at larger MySQL installations such as Yahoo, either.
More fodder for the ENUM-Bad-Or-Good argument!
I’ve just read this article over on the MySQL Performance Blog, comparing speed of ENUM vs VARCHAR vs Joined Tables.
I like ENUM and find it makes my life a lot easier in a lot of cases (but not all, let’s get that straight – it’s good where it’s appropriate).
Nice to know other people can justify use of it too 😛
After a pleasant afternoon where we all watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark (Ben was transfixed) we switched over to Star Trek II on Sky Movies. Conversation happened, Ellie wanted to see my old Star Trek uniforms from when I was a proper Trekker. Oh dear!
I know where they are in the loft, so ten minutes later we had the old suitcase in the front room. Apart from a musty smell and a few missing pins, they’ve fared pretty well – I only tried the Wrath of Khan uniform top, which fit OK although I had to breathe in a lot to fasten the poppers and the belt. Mind, the remaining elements are all tops – I don’t think I’ve got the trousers any more (size 28L, which would have no bloody chance considering I’m 36R now, porky bastard).
Hmm, I wonder if Sheffield Space Centre is still open – might be able to get a replacement rank pin for the Wrath of Khan top (the original Captain pin has broken in two, no idea how) and for some reason the combadges from the TNG and DS9 uniforms are missing.
Once again demonstrating an utter lack of clue, the EU guy in charge of the ‘personal data and privacy’ working group has stated IP addresses are personal data. I wonder what planet he’s on?
Back at Mailbox in the late 90s we’d allocate a block of 255 IP addresses to share between approximately 3000 dialup users, for instance. Then there’s the RFC1918 private address space, which not only is reused again and again the world over, but is regularly allocated by ISPs nowadays looking to conserve address space (as an example, Vodafone do this with their 3G service).
What an astounding display of fuckwittery.
OK, the new Trek trailer came out yesterday (over at the official site). Because I was a bit busy I’ve only just got time to watch it now – I bet it’s quite breathtaking on the big screen.
It does look a bit different to the Enterprise we ‘know’ – more rounded nacelle pylons, more curved secondary hull, the nacelles have a different ‘feel’ to them… and it’d definitely being constructed in some pressurised gravitational atmosphere. Surprised the port nacelle Bussard ramscoop is spinning slightly too.
I’ll shut up about it now: it’s a ‘re-imagining’, so I’ll not be as nerdy. Promise.
An important note for the future: don’t eat so much buffalo mozarella, it gets really uncomfortable the day after.
(Probably the equivalent of two packs, yesterday afternoon at lunch. Ow.)
For Nicky’s birthday last night we’d got a plan to join some friends for dinner at Rustico, an Italian restaurant which has been attentive and good food in previous visits. To be fair we hadn’t booked, they were very busy when we turned up, and the waiter said he’d get us a table for 8:30pm – not a problem, there’s a very good pub across the road. Returning at 8:30pm there were no tables ready for us, three tables full of people hadn’t been seated in front of us, and we were herded upstairs to a bar with no space and a very confused waitress – total chaos and Gordon would have gone mental in the kitchen. Plan B then.
Out of the window and across the road we saw “Magdalene’s”, a fairly new restaurant specialising in ‘Mediterranean cuisine’ (it’s pretty much next to the Talbot & Falcon, where Cantors used to be). A short walk over there for a recce and we got a table within a minute. Salvation!
Magdalene’s menu is primarily Greek and Turkish, with a couple of interesting house specials alongside more traditional dishes – and no predictable kebabs! I started with ‘keftedes’, herbed meatballs in a tomato sauce which tasted freshly-made; it’s always nice to be able to identify ingredients but it not detract from the dish as a whole. They probably batched the meatballs but they were very well cooked, remaining firm without being tough or overcooked.
My main course was ‘Sarsem fish’, small pieces of halibut, salmon, king prawns and calamari cooked with red onions and asparagus, and flambeed in ouzo. The flambee was evident in the slight crispness of the calamari on the outside but not to the point of them being singed to rubber, and complemented the sauce (it’s easy to get sauces wrong on calamari, it being a subtle flavour). Served with rice to soak up the sauce, the portion amount was just right with not too much or too little, leaving with a simple feeling of well-being rather than over-stuffed.
(It being Nicky’s birthday we couldn’t get away without a pudding, although I didn’t partake. Nicky’s vanilla cheesecake was home-made, and Alice’s chocolate cake was very light and fluffy apparently.)
The service itself was excellent – our attentive and friendly waiter Taf was never far away, and the price was right. We were served quickly even though restaurant was about three-quarters full. Very much recommended, we’ll go there again.
(They have a website which, had I seen it first, would probably have put me off… so quite glad I didn’t see that first!)
The new Trek trailer comes out on the Intermawebs on Monday. Trekmovie.com has a shot from it, the new Enterprise. It’s apparently being constructed on Earth.
Now this is odd. While it makes sense for the ship to be partially constructed planetside (and in the case of 1701-D the saucer was partially constructed on Mars at Utopia Planitia) you can clearly see the nacelles behind. The problem with this being that the integrity of the ship is not designed for planetfall – they would quite simply come crashing down, and on top of that it would be really very very dangerous to make first flight with a shitload of antimatter next to a planetary body!
OK, the 1701-D tech manual isn’t canon even though it was Okuda and Sternbach who wrote it; the plaque on the bridge of Enterprise had note that it was constructed in San Fransisco; the only other partial construction of a Constitution-class vessel is in one of the Lost Years novels where the refit 1701 saucer was landed for work then re-assembled in spacedock. But for goodness sake we saw NX-02 being constructed in spacedock back in Star Trek: Enterprise.
It just doesn’t make sense to have it assembled planetside. The integrity would fail, and there’d be an awful lot of bits of starship scattered around all of a sudden. Never mind what the vessel weighs…
(I know it’s just a movie… I think I need a bit of fresh air now…)
Update: There’s a screener of the trailer over on YouTube. No breathing apparatus, not sure they’re in space, no real hints other than it’s “under construction” which could of course just be something specially done for the trailer… 😛
Oh this is funny, after being so self-righteous about the whole battery-hen thing.
While I agree with the sentiments and have a lot of respect for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I think Jamie Oliver is a bit of a bandwagon-jumper – especially after hearing him on ‘You And Yours’ on Radio 4 the other week attempting to justify why he was doing stuff with Sainsbury’s (who of course stock ‘basic’ range battery-farmed stuff) while running this campaign.
The numbers don’t add up, and while I’m happy to buy free-range and properly-farmed birds, they cost a lot more money and most people can’t actually taste the difference! Therefore, for a day-to-day requirement for chicken breast I’ll still be buying the convenience packs of individually-wrapped breasts that I can just chuck in the freezer; they cost about 6 quid for 8 breasts and I don’t have to worry about them going ‘off’.
(That said: for other meat I can heartily recommend Mr Allum, our Wakefield butcher who’s just next to the market hall).
Torchwood is a spinoff of Dr Who, written by Russell T Davies. It was aimed as an ‘adult Dr Who’, and initially aired on BBC3 last year in its first series, starring John Barrowman.
I gave up on Torchwood after about 6 episodes, because although the premise was good (alien investigations on Earth – think ‘X Files’ set in Wales) it tried too hard to be an adult programme. The plots were frequently interrupted with needless sex, and an almost constant need for the main characters to try and shag each other. At least with Dr Who the writers were bound by the pre-watershed time and thus the hands were tied leaving a lot more time for plot. Anyway, series 2 started last night and in the absence of anything else to watch, we apathetically clicked over to BBC2 in the vague hope that this series might be watchable.
It’s not. For a secret organisation it’s remarkable that the first scene opened with some woman at a pedestrian crossing saying “bloody Torchwood”. The initial car chase (why do they have their 4×4 festooned with blue LEDs anyway?) led us to a poorly-scripted reminder of the roles of the main characters and the predictable entrance of Captain Jack. Hell, it was only 12 minutes in that we got the first gay snog followed by a fight between the principle character and the (presumed) principle baddie of this series, reminiscent of Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in ‘Women In Love’. More setups for sex later on in the series, a plethora of innuendo and schoolboy humour, and a crap plot terminating in the setup for the series story arc. At one point me and Nicky were looking at each other saying ‘ahhh, there we go!’ as predictable plot ‘twist’ followed predictable plot ‘twist’.
As a conversation last night went, it’s like Davies is trying to remind us every bloody minute that it’s Adult Dr Who, so it’s gotta have sex! He wrote Queer As Folk, so it’s gotta have sex! There’s no watershed, let’s have sex! Christ, man – do you not get any at home or something?
I won’t be watching next week.
Given the service manual arriving and a day away from the Beeb heap in the garage, I was absolutely champing at the bit to try and get the Domesday system working. After finding the focus error, the service manual suggested cleaning first (easy), or replacement of the focusing module (pretty much impossible). I’d got a few photography-grade cleaning buds in my lens bag so that seemed like the first port of call; goodness me, the muck that came off that lens, all that grease and dust – it’s a wonder the sodding thing hasn’t got more in it. Anyway, that cleaned, I powered it up with the debug codes on.
I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t expecting it to work! Thus I was really pleasantly surprised when with a ‘rumble’ the disc span up. It seemed quite shaky on its bearings and spent 2-3 minutes ‘focusing’ and recalibrating itself, and eventually I shut it off again thinking it was still bust. Bring it up to read the POST codes some more and – well I’ll be damned, I was rewarded with the intro video from the Community Disc on the screen.
A quick bypass of the CUB monitor that the Beeb was showing, and this was the result. Hooray!
Power-down of the LV player to get rid of the POST codes, and it came back up no problems. No shaky disc, no problems reading, I spent the next ten minutes trying each side of both discs in turn which worked fine. It even showed the video on side 4, and searching worked fine. Now this is important, because in order for the computer to allow searching, almost everything needs to work – the SCSI card, the Master AIV, the 65C12 coprocessor inside the Master, the genlock (which is apparently one of the more frequent things to go pop) and the LV player itself.
All is not completely happy though – we still have no sound. There’s a very slight ‘fzz’ in the speaker when the audio is meant to get to a higher volume, and if you switch off either audio channel you get a satisfying ‘pop’ from the audio as it cuts in and out. This is leading me to believe it’s something as simple as a popped bit of the amplifier circuitry, which should be trivial to fix from the service manual.
If you’re curious, photos are here. There will be more (and some screenshots) once I’ve fixed the sound, and I’ll try and encode the video too.
I’ve not done a lot of Beeb stuff recently, primarily because the garage has been in such a state it’s been impractical to work in there. However with Christmas gone I can clear a lot of the junk out and that’s given me better access to the Domesday system I acquired late last year. Plus I was in a bit of a stinky mood last night so decided to have a crack at getting it all going again.
Having fixed the monitor, I was confident that I might be able to fix the remaining non-worker! The Philips VP415 laserdisc player is a notoriously cranky piece of kit famed for failures and overheating; since the videodiscs themselves loaded fine and it seemed to try and spin up I was in a pretty bullish mood as I connected it all together and switched the BBC Master AIV unit on.
Uh-oh. Click click click. Something’s resetting the BBC Master computer repeatedly. Disconnect everything, retry, click click click. Traced it down to the PSU which had blown (and thankfully I have some spare BBC Master units I could strip one from) but still a bit of a heart-stopper moment – the SCSI interfaces in those are like hen’s teeth.
So back to the LVROM: nothing on the screen at all, and I still couldn’t find a service manual! I’d already asked on the BBC Micro mailing list with no success last year, but I thought I’d give it another stab and within 10 minutes I’d got two replies telling me about Mauritron who sell service manuals as PDF files! Hurrah! One debit for a tenner later and I was waiting.
This morning the manual arrived by email. It’s taken me five minutes to put the LVROM into service mode and got an onscreen result error code ‘007’ meaning ‘Not in focus after 5x (no rotation of disc)’. Now this could be one of three things: the focus module, the control module, or the decoder module. My money’s on the focus module, which may (fingers crossed) just need a clean.
As a side-point, at least the debug info appearing on-screen indicates that the video circuitry is working and the monitor works too. There’s still a thousand things that could go wrong yet but I’m quietly optimistic 🙂
Kevin Greening, one of the few radio DJs I enjoyed listening to, has died according to BBC News. Used to catch him on Radio 1 when I still listened to it in the mid-90s.
He was only 44. Very sad.
Software update just popped up this:
This update addresses a responsiveness issue on MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers. Some MacBook and MacBook Pro systems may occasionally experience a temporary suspension of keyboard input which can last a minute or longer. The Mac OS X 10.5.1 update is required before installing the MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1.
It’s installing now. I guess we see if it works. Also it appears 10.5.2 is seeding to developers for a rumoured January update (presumably to support new hardware being announced at MacWorld or whatever it is).
Yorkshire lass, born-and-bred. Photographs stuff, writes software, makes music, cooks, dances round the kitchen. Happy lesbinum, wife, and parent to three. Proud to have a rainbow family.
Musician, composer and producer, under the monicker of The Bleeding Obvious.
Regularly seen performing live – gig list here. Been on TV and radio in various capacities.
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By day I work as a systems architect for a marine technology company. More details about all that on LinkedIn.
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