I wasn’t planning to buy a new camera any time soon. And then suddenly, I was looking at reviews and catalogues and product specs. Funny how that happens.

Overall, very little. I’ve had this phone for about six months now and I love it. Tablet? Nah, don’t really need one. Either I’m mobile, in which case this is enough, or I’m able to sit down at a proper computer with a keyboard and a large screen.

Coincidental to John Vincent’s SysAdvent entry, Always Be Hacking, I just completed my first Sinatra web app. It wasn’t a big app (36 lines, plus a tiny bit of HTML), nor a particularly important or impressive one (it searches a file for matching strings). But it turned out to be a useful exercise.

1. It’s the wrong system.
2. It’s the wrong data centre.
3. The guy fixing it is almost done…nearly there…just edit this file…hey, who shut the system down?!
4. It’s a network issue.
5. It’s an application issue.
6. It’s a configuration issue.
7. It’s a memory leak, so it will solve your problem…temporarily.
8. It’s an issue at your end, not the server’s.
9. “It’s not a fucking PC, Derek!”
10. It’s not a hardware problem. It’s a psychiatric one.
11. You’re an idiot.
12. You’re not wishing hard enough. Do you want Tinkerbell to die?
13. You’ve used up all your magic beans.
14. We’re going to not do it and say we did. Same result.
15. You’re an idiot.

It was supposed to be a surprise outing for myself and my eldest Junior Research Assistant and, to be fair, I didn’t click even when we drove on to the local industrial estate at Treforest. In fact, it was only as we rounded the corner to the anonymous blue warehouse and I spotted the letters “BBC” on a warning sign that I realised this must be the location of those studios … which must mean we were going to see something from … that show … which was really kind of … oh wow. OH WOW! Somewhere back in 1975, a small boy watching Tom Baker would probably have felt the psychic echo of my sudden excitement thirty-six years in the future.

If you have a Solaris 8 install disc which you want to upload to a Solaris 10 Jumpstart server with ZFS filesystems, you’ll find that the setup_install_server script returns an error complaining “not a local filesystem, can’t export …”. This is a quick workaround, as it does not appear to be in Google.

As we’re heading back to Tenby next weekend for a last wild fling before the end of summer, I thought I’d undertake a quick survey of Tenby images on Flickr to see how other people have photographed the place and whether I could learn something prior to my next attempt. My resulting picks are in this gallery.

“I discovered this extraordinary period in music, particularly the first five years of the 1970s, and I think you can hear that in the record.”

Steven Wilson has given a very encouraging interview to promote his forthcoming solo album, Grace For Drowning, in which he talks up the influence of jazz on early progressive rock and how he has attempted to take this forward after a thirty year gap.

An incomplete review

(Let’s just call it the S2 from here on in, ‘kay?) The Galaxy S2 is a smartphone running Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”, whose main selling point appears to be the 4.3” Super AMOLED display that therefore makes it better than the iPhone 4. In fact, any device that does not require iTunes is better than an iPhone. My model is a 16GB S2 provided under an O2 monthly contract.

I developed five rolls of black and white film this weekend, mostly dating from 3-4 years ago except for one roll I finished off on Sunday. That cleared almost my entire backlog except for a roll of 120 from the Holga, plus several rolls still loaded in various cameras (including one I, er, started on Sunday). It also used the last of my main bottle of developer and the all-important fixer, so there won’t be any more done without an investment in new chemicals. I wouldn’t say it was fun - I appreciate the results but not the process - but it was fairly painless except for one roll that stuck while I was winding it on to the reel, and that I subsequently had to cut mid-length and develop the last bit separately.