“The whole sixth form likes The Smiths and he’s listening to Yes!” scoffed Garve one day in the sixth form common room as I foisted 90125 on everyone again. No actually Garve, the whole sixth form does not validate your tastes because they’re not all tossers (not quite), I thought inwardly. Strange that someone who prided himself on being so radical in his politics couldn’t tolerate non-conformity in music preferences. Sadly, I lacked Garve’s raging certitude of the rightness of my own opinion and couldn’t muster the appropriate response, which would have been to pull out a large revolver and empty it into his smug, twitching corpse. Doubtless there would have been denim-clad rockabillies throwing gladioli at his funeral; he’d have liked that.

If only back then, as an alternative to random violence, I’d been able to tell him that one day “How Soon Is Now” would be covered by a couple of Russian pretendy teen lesbians - and they’d do it better.

Thanks to Matt from Debris for putting me on to the OSI album. Say “prog metal supergroup” to me normally and I’ll be halfway out the door before you reach the final syllable, and indeed I approached this one warily, circling round it for a good few months (twelve, actually) before hitting the Buy button. But there’s a lot of melody amidst the heavy riffing, plus some artful drumming from Mike Portnoy (who you can watch in action on the bonus enhanced CD-ROM). It puts me in mind of the late lamented XC-NN (I managed to get their second album, Lifted, on import and it’s far, far superior to the first). And surprisingly for a prog group, there’s even a political angle (what was the last prog rock song in that vein? Get ‘Em Out By Friday?), with the 9/11 theme suggested by the name carried through to the lyrics.

Of course, it turns out that most of the songs were created by splitting up a 25 minute concept track, and that one of them is in 25/16 which, as far as I’m concerned, looks as Wrong on a sheet of music as it would on a faulty digital clock.

Standout tracks: OSI; When You’re Ready; Head.

Lonely? Depressed? Filled with despair and feeling suicidal?

You’re probably best not downloading these Scarlet Martyrs MP3s then - now available once more following a long, and we’re sure much-needed, absence.

The pace of change in the Unix world has sure picked up since Linux took off. Whereas previously a sysadmin could coast for years on knowledge of a few key packages like sendmail V8.6 and BIND v8, secure that little was likely to change and the skills were transferrable to every site (ahem), suddenly the Unix infrastructure can change overnight (or at least between Solaris releases) and you find yourself having to relearn basic configurations on the fly.

Case in point: Sendmail in Solaris 8 & 9.

Another new delight in Fedora Core 1 is the libusb library. I wasn’t aware of this until I upgraded to VueScan 7.6.78, which can now use libusb instead of the normal USB scanner driver. In fact, the driver no longer worked, but since it’s going away with the 2.6 kernel, this seemed a good opportunity to switch to libusb. The linked instructions were mostly sufficient to get it working with my Canon flatbed scanner. One tip: if you’re using a 2.4 kernel, you need to rename or otherwise disable the scanner.o module (under /lib/modules/) to stop it conflicting with libusb. Update: VueScan 7.6.80 appears to have fixed this issue.

…It’s frightening how much that previous paragraph resembles typical MS-DOS advice from fifteen years ago. Progress, eh?

Back when I installed Red Hat 9, I mentioned some Unicode-related problems with GTK+ 1.x apps. Following another upgrade to Fedora Core 1 (mostly painless, but once again I had my carefully customised and working CUPS configuration broken), I managed to get to the bottom of this. It’s not pretty (in fact, with the wrong font, it’s downright ugly).

Years of corporate servility and domestic senility have left BB unable to summon the once-legendary rage and venom, not to mention literacy, that sustained whole articles of tilting at windmills. Reduced to soundbites and “boom-boom” punchlines, we can only sigh apathetically about the following:

The 50mm (“normal”) focal length lens is: tack-sharp; immediately rewarding; easy to use; harder work; better than a zoom; boring; ideal for low-light work; required for a natural perspective; not really “normal”; good for learning the value of “foot zoom”; obsolete; underrated; cheap; best value; best for a beginner; the only lens you need; too limiting; made in China. At least according to what I’ve read in various internet forums and articles. And from my experience, I can state definitively that all those opinions are precisely right/wrong.

Felicity Lawrence in the Guardian, on the scandal of those exploited Chinese immigrant cockle-hunters drowned in Morecombe Bay (yes yes, it’s shocking - but you’ll be buying cheap seafood at Tesco again this week, just like BB):

…Retailers and manufacturers order “just in time” from wherever is cheapest around the globe, waiting for their barcode scanning to tell them how much consumers are buying. Instant communications allow them to relay what they need at a moment’s notice. Modern transport networks enable them to have it delivered with unprecedented speed.

Well if that’s how retailers think their systems are working, we suggest they give up now and go back to the barrow in the street market. In BB’s vast and unrewarding experience, “just in time” usually translates to “out of stock”. (And where are these “modern transport networks”? The rail network runs at 20mph, and all the motorways are jammed.) In fact, one day BB is going to open a shop called “Out Of Stock”, and it will contain nothing but empty shelves - acting as a major competitor to every other high street retailer. Tremble, Jessops! Be afraid, HMV, we’re going to eat your lunch (although doubtless the queues for bread will be huge).

Sun’s Flash archiving in Solaris is a great way to clone systems or take OS backups. It ties nicely into JumpStart too. However, the basic flarcreate(1M) command (prior to Solaris 9 Update 2) is somewhat limited; notably, it won’t let you exclude multiple files/dirs from the archive because the script only processes one -x argument (bugid 4501772). There are ways around this.