So, did anybody watch the Torchwood miniseries then?
( really minor spoilers )
Not for the first time, I'm left not entirely certain why I bothered to watch it.

Uh oh.

SPV are the parent company of record labels InsideOut and SuperBall, who between them publish about 80% of the music I'm buying these days...

Here's an interesting meme via hmmm_tea,

Pick a musical artist whose discography you know fairly well. Using only their song titles, try to answer these questions. Try not to repeat a song title.

Pick your artist: Marillion

( Read more... )

Oh dear. My pet vacuum cleaner managed to find a cotton reel:

rebifurcation
noun the act of bifurcating a second time, occurring some time after the bifurcated parts had been carefully joined together.

I used this in an email at work today, because I wanted to avoid the rebifurcation of some source code that had been branched off the trunk in our svn repository. I knew it wasn't a real word because of the squiggly red line, but everybody knew what I meant.

It wasn't until later, when someone pointed out that google returns only 22 unique pages for this search term (and 14 of those are in French), that I realized just how neologismy it was.

Oh hang on...

neologismy
adj. having the properties of a neologism.



[EDIT: typo]

Well -- it was no worse than anything in season seven...

Continued from http://shadowphiar.livejournal.com/61524.html...

It's working! It's working!
(well, mostly...)



Installing Leopard was surprisingly little trouble (once I had got the efi-x plugged in properly, which took a couple of attempts. Even with the little extension cable they give you, it's very fiddly to reach that corner of the motherboard, so at first it wasn't quite in far enough and didn't do anything).

The things I expected trouble with (e.g., system sleep, updating graphics drivers etc.) have been no problem at all. Instead, I get Time Machine falling over when selecting a local SATA hard disk as the backup volume, because "the built-in network interface could not be found". (Don't be silly, of course it can - it's working perfectly and I'm posting through it right now!). Allegedly this can be fixed buy buying a PCI network card... (or maybe a future efi-x firmware update) (or maybe it will only work on motherboards with two network connections -- it's a bit difficult to tell when your only official source of information is also filled with random people posting questions and unreliable opinions).

And then there's all the whole business with AHCI (new command protocol for SATA hard disks). One the efi-x forum there's very clear guidance that AHCI should be turned on in the BIOS after installation of the OS. What it doesn't say, is that doing so will prevent DVD burners from being seen! Aha - I think - there are two SATA controllers on this motherboard (southbridge has six channels, and a separate chip has other two) and they can have AHCI turned on and off separately. So I'll put one of them into legacy mode and run the DVD drive off that? No - because the separate SATA chip doesn't work with efi-x.

This must be some strange new usage of the words, "all features of these motherboards are supported", of which I was not previously aware.

It took a good deal of searching and browsing on their forum to discover that last bit of vital information! I've been unimpressed with efi-x's documentation and support in general. Anyway - in benchmarks I've been barely able to tell the difference between AHCI on or off, so I'm leaving it off in order to get the benefit of a functional DVD drive!

In short, it's been a bit of a faff (and that's not over yet). However, it was at least mostly quite interesting faff, and considering that to buy a machine from Apple with as high specifications as this would cost nearly a thousand pounds more than I paid - I consider it a few evenings well spent. While I like Apple hardware, the latest round of Apple desktop upgrades was insipid at best, and prices went up about 40% across the board. Perviously I've been willing to pay a premium for premium-quality kit. But not so much that it makes me feel like a chump for having done so.

I am posting this from a new computer what I have put together myself from components...

I'm quite relieved that it seems to be working, to be honest. As it's the first one I've done, I've paced it quite slowly and it's taken a few evenings to do - I would have finished yesterday, but I discovered one of the power leads from the PSU was about half an inch too short to reach the right place on the motherboard (unless I were to drill a hole through the middle of the graphics card) so that had to wait until after work today when a trip to Maplin supplied me with an extension cable.

Turning it on for the first time was very underwhelming... Nothing went bang, but it didn't exactly work either. It was randomly hanging in the middle of Kubuntu live-CD boot and sometimes even in the BIOS menus, which seemed extremely ominous. Fortunately Kubuntu provides a memcheck utility from the CD boot menu, so I ran that for a while and found a lot of memory errors.

After taking one module out, and testing one at a time in various slots (to rule out problems with the motherboard or cpu itself), I'm reasonably convinced that one of the DIMMs is bad... which is not unheard of, although it's the first time that I've had problems with anything from Crucial. The other one passes memcheck at 100% and seems to be behaving stably enough now. Fortunately I can keep using the computer with (a mere!) 2GB of RAM until a replacement arrives, which is an order of magnitude more convenient than sending back the cpu or the motherboard.

And so there you have it. Kubuntu is installed on one HD, with another ready and waiting for the inevitable fun and games which will ensue with efi-x and Leopard. But that is a job for tomorrow...

Incidentally, I'm a bit unimpressed that the case manufacture has described no less than three things which are to be done using "the special screws provided" - without ever making attempt to distinguish between the seven-or-so distinct types of screw which came in a little plastic bag in the case. Also, minus 5 points to Kubuntu, whose CD boot menu only talks to PS/2 keyboards, so I had to dig one out of the loft before I could drive it...

Next weekend (on the 7th and 8th of March, at 7:30 and 8:00pm respectively), I will be taking part in the Mark Experience, a 90-minute dramatic presentation of the life of Jesus based on Mark's gospel.



Of course, this means that I'm currently trying to learn it, but that's not quite as daunting as it sounds (the dialogue will be semi-improvised rather than word-for-word scripted, and to help us learn the sequence of events we have an excellent study guide written by Andrew Page from Above Bar in Southampton, who will also be directing). I hope you'll agree this sounds fresh and exciting (and in not a small way, scary - especially since we haven't had any rehearsals yet, although you'll be glad to hear that we are planning to have some before the performances...) and if you can make it it would be great to see you there.

It's at Emmanuel United Reformed Church, opposite Pembroke College, near the Fitz museum. Entry is free - there are no tickets, so you'll need to come early to get a good seat! (Actually, there will be a small block of seats reserved for friends/family of the actors, so if you let me know beforehand I'll try to ensure you're counted in.)

Intel CFO, on selling to smartphone vendors:

"We would love dearly to win one of the big guys, that really is the smartphone game, it really is a concentrated set of suppliers. We're lurking behind every bush and showing them our product line."

Bwah? That really is a very strange image. I'm not sure I'd be inclined to buy Intel if one of their execs jumped out at me from behind a bush and flung open their coat to show off the ...err... "product line". At best it sounds like they're selling fake Rolex watches, and at worst...