One message that is coming through loud and clear from the various Sun blogs is that their engineers are feeling incredibly bullish about Solaris 10, and rightly so. It’s a good sign when a product is trailed not (just) by meaningless marketese about “e-enabling IT and business paradigm integration” but by the backroom boys saying “Hey, cool stuff, look!” It’s even better when you can download a free beta and check for hot air leaks.

Classic Gold have just suspended Tony Blackburn for “violating station policy” by repeatedly playing Cliff Richard tracks. Head of Programmes Paul Baker wrote in an email to Blackburn:

“As I said on Monday, we might carry out research on him, but for now we have a policy decision that he doesn’t match our brand values, he’s not on the playlist, and you must stop playing him.”

Another long time Linux peeve resolved: for the past six months or more, my rxvt terminals have lacked a proper mouse cursor. The standard cursor shape was, and should be, the I-bar. Sometime around one of the many RPM upgrades, it suddenly became a white arrow with, annoyingly, a selection zone under the arrow itself rather than at the apex, thus making it very difficult to accurately select text. File under “Minor irritations that will slowly drive you nuts”.

The Linux cheerleaders are hugging themselves with glee ever since IBM came down so heavily on their side. Personally, the more I use IBM software, the more convinced I become that their support is either a) an underhand Microsoft-funded sabotage attempt (paranoid conspiracy theory par excellence of every Linux hacker) or b) a curse. Of course they embraced Linux - did you ever try using AIX??

Here’s a fix for the NSAPI (Sun ONE/IPlanet) HTTP plugin in WebSphere Application Server 5.1 that you won’t find on the IBM support site (heck, you’re lucky to find the IBM support site).

Seen ahead in this morning’s commuter jam: a large Jag with personalised number plate also featuring the Playboy bunny symbol, and on the rear windscreen a car sticker from The Prisoner gift shop at Portmeirion:

who is number 1?

It’s not entirely clear that the driver appreciated its full context.

There are currently lots of fine things being said about the HP Photosmart 7xxx range, particularly their amazing black & white printing capability, but mainly by those lucky people who have already taken a chance on one. The rest of the world, or at least the part that skulks in Internet photographic fora, seems content to continue swapping tips on unclogging Epson heads while pointedly ignoring the HP users raving about their great printers. I’m delighted… overjoyed… ecstatic with my 7660 (ex-Epson users tend to be like that when they finally switch to any other brand of frickin’ printer) under Linux, so here are a few hints on making it work well for photo printing.

Forgive us for banging on about not being able to buy anything we like in the shops, but The heavy price of seeing food as a commodity by Andrew Anthony in yesterday’s Guardian contained an apposite observation:

“Large corporations like British supermarket chains do not define demand in terms of what people want, so much as what their customers can get elsewhere. And as supermarket competition is driven not by quality but price, what they can get elsewhere is the same, only perhaps cheaper.”

This goes not just for supermarkets but practically every other major retailer. Certain “leading” high street photographic stores come to mind. As do those defaced Aber pubs we bemoaned the other day. Thanks, Adam Smith and all the proles.

All About Eve’s grassroots Top 40 comeback campaign has hit the buffers, as their new single, “Let Me Go Home” stalls at no. 52. Given that a band only needs to sell about fifty copies to reach no. 1 these days, this is a pretty bad showing. Presumably, if BB hadn’t bought a copy they might be at no. 62 instead. They had it all so well organised too, apart from one key element:

“Right, so we’ve got the fan mailing list set up?”
“Check!”
“The CDs are pressed, they’re on the way to HMV?”
“Check!”
“Web site ready, downloadable sample?”
“Yep!”
“And we’ve got a decent song…”
“Err…I thought you were writing that?”

Just added, the Nostalgic guide to Aber pubs, a lament for those drinking dens of yore and how they’ve been steadily eroded or ruined (“modernised”). “Had to leave to get back to Swansea in time, so couldn’t go to see whether the pubs are the same too,” said Telsa of her recent Aber trip. Probably for the best, chuck.

There are a million online articles and forum postings that tell you how to develop 35mm negatives. This isn’t (exactly) one of them. Rather than intimate that it’s dead easy (it is) but dismiss some of the details with a wave of the mouse (“simply pop the top of the canister off…”), I’m going to a) boast about how little it cost me; and b) tie some of the steps down to specifics for raw beginners.