Author: Rory

My apologies for seemingly dissapearing over the weekend. I have four or five proper posts brewing, but none of them are the kind I intend to finish and publish at one ine the morning. Instead I’d like to draw your attention to the post currently linked in my nostalgia section. For those of you who weren’t around at its inception, the nostalgia box in the sidebar displays links to the posts that were on the front page of SoylentRed this time last year. The only post there at the moment is Pharyngula, which I consider to be the best piece I’ve ever written. I continue to stand by the sentiments expressed in it, and I continue to read, with enthusiasm, the site which inspired it.

Just to clarify, if any one has any issues with this whole "God" thing, here’s the official God FAQ. It’s worth reading to the end to make sure you don’t miss any of the questions.

I’m not a UK citizen, I’m not a politician or political pundit, and I have payed very little attention to the Ukian election campaigns. If that means you don’t care what I think about the election then you might want to stop reading now. On the other hand you might have nothing better to do. I guess it might be a good idea that someone read this, if only to avoid the very awkward philosophical question of whether or not, if no-one reads a piece, I can truly be said to have written it.

Anyway, here’s the gist of it as I see it. Labour and the Conservatives are still the big two. The Conservatives are becoming less popular because they’re so racist. They’re edging further right until they eventually fall off that wing altogether and land squarely on the orange lap of Robert Kilroy Silk. They are by now too unpopular to win, but inertia will grab them second place.

Labour is drifting right too, as if compelled into the gap left by the Tories like a window closing when you open the door in a small room. Labour now occupy the space traditionally shared by the two main parties. They’re sitting in the fuselage during their stop-over on the way to the right wing. Unfortunately the pilot’s seat is in their with them and they’re almost guaranteed to get another try at sitting in it.

The Liberal Democrats are gaining popularity. They seem to have a popular stance on some issues but I’m not convinced they know how to win an election yet. All of the online questionnaires reckon I should vote Lib Dem, if only I was a citizen. I’m inclined to agree. They’ll make further gains over the course of the coming term and may get second place by the next election.

This is my impression of the electoral landscape without having conducted more than cursory research. I don’t intend to back up my assertions, since I meant this only as an indication of the impression I’m getting, rather than as an argument for or against any party. So, if any of my readers agree or disagree or care in the slightest, tell me what your impression is. Who’ll win? Why? What have I got right and what have I got wrong?

I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed. Yesterday I watched a movie that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That’s not to say there wasn’t anything redeeming about it. It was still worth the ticket price. Alan Rickman’s Marvin was worth at least that much. His delivery of the line "I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish" had comic timing accurate to the femtosecond. Likewise, Stephen Fry’s periodic Guide entries, some of which were animated to great effect, were delivered with the brilliant Englishness that the rest of the movie ufortunately lacked. Both Rickman and Fry were entertaining because they were accurate to the spirit of the Guide. They acheived this by being pretty faithful to the word of the radio series and books.

Some of what was changed for the movie was also good. Small things like the infinite improbability drive and the airlock on the Vogon constructor ship were as they should have been. Sequences had to be shortened and changed to fit into a movie but these bits, and some completely new bits, managed to cling to the spirit and wit of Adams’ Guide.

So what was bad about it? Zaphod. The crumby, thoughtless, uninteresting, uncompelling, tacked-on, badly-paced, ill-conceived love story. Zaphod. The fact that many aspects of the previous incarnations had been included in such a way as to make no sense in the context of the movie. Zaphod. The irritating lack of Englishness throughout. Zaphod.

Zaphod should have been so cool you cood keep a side of meat in him for a month. I don’t know where they got their version from, but it wasn’t from Douglas Adams. Trillian was entirely unlike herself too, but Trillian was never very important before so the movie didn’t miss her the way it missed Zaphod. Ford and Arthur were closer to who they should have been. The complaint that the plot was entirely different from previous versions holds no water, on the grounds that even the books aren’t faithful to the books. But changing the characters so significantly was a mistake, and a big one.

I’m sorry, I think I might have been able to cope better if I hadn’t bruised my arm.

Update: They’ve fixed the crawler to stop reporting a referrer, so my logs are now wonderfully clean again. Thanks guys.

It appears I’ve been syndicated on IrishBlogs.ie. What brought this to my attention was the number of hits I got yesterday and today with that site as the referrer. No-one actually asked me about this, which I thought was a bit odd. Strictly I think they’re probably on solid enough ground in that they’re just quoting excerpts and they’re giving proper attribution, but an email would have been nice. I’m not bothered by it as such, just surprised. To be honest I’m not sure why a wider audience would want to read the stuff I churn out here, but if someone disagrees I won’t stand in their way.

Unfortunately it doesn’t appear as if anyone does disagree. On closer inspection of those referrer logs I found that the requests were all coming from a single IP address. It turns out the bot that harvests my atom feed twice an hour is sending a bogus referrer header to spam my logs. Since many people publish their logs it can be a valuable but dubious advertising method to put your site’s address in referrer headers. I’ve also seen this done innocently by well-meaning bot writers who don’t know any better, so we might hold off on the flames until I can contact them about fixing it.

Stephen’s recent phone outage appears to have left me no effective way of congratulating him on his graduation, so I’m doing it ineffectively instead. So let me be the first (okay, second) to offer Stephen my most enthusiastic contrafibularities. In honour of this occasion, all "your ma" jokes will now be "your MA" jokes, and will be directed at Stephen.

I will never know for sure when I regained network connectivity on this machine for one outright bizzarre reason. All the time I was checking if I could communicate with other machines on the network by pinging my router. I continuously got 100% packet loss, so I rebooted into Windows, searched around a bit more for new information, asked questions of helpful people online.

Eventually I was able to see the network (identified by its ESSID and the MAC address of the router) but I still couldn’t ping the router. I turned on DHCP and was assigned an IP address, so I was certainly communicating wit the router. Still no response to ping.

The next reboot stalled at the point of trying to synchronise the system clock with an online time server. It had been simply failing instantly at this point and skipping that step, which made me think that maybe it was timing out a name-server lookup instead of just finding no network interfaces. So I tried pinging the router again. 100% packet loss ensued. There was no reason for me to even sonsider pinging the modem instead. If I couldn’t reach the router I couldn’t reach the modem. Nothing I know about networking could possibly have led me to believe that pinging the modem would do any good. So I pinged the modem. And got an instant response.

So, um, when was I able to do this? Who knows. Probably some time after switching the network card drivers from the ones supplied by Linksys to the ones supplied by HP/Compaq for a different card with the same chipset. That’s when the power light came on on the card; it’s when I picked up the ESSID and router MAC address. I still wasn’t able to ping the router at that stage so I thought it still wasn’t working, but then again I’m posting this without being able to ping the router so what does that tell you?

The bottom line is that it works. Now I can get down to sorting out my sound card again. And installing all of my Firefox and Thunderbird extensions. And getting my bookmarks back in order.

After all of that I might tell you about the (potentially) absolutely cool (and by cool, I mean totally sweet) news that I’m too excited about to be able to coherently write about.

I got around to installing Ubuntu this afternoon. I’d been hoping to try it out for a while and my weeks off college seemed to give me enough time to fix anything that went wrong. Yes, I gave myself two weeks to install an OS. I’m now taking bets on whether I’ll need it.

Cock-up the first: I made sure all of my data (years of emails, gigabytes of juggling videos, other miscellany) onto the data partition I created when I got the new hard disk a few months back. During installation I wiped every partition on hard disk one besides the Windows one, leaving the data all safe on hard disk two. Except for some reason that is completely beyond my comprehension I was completely wrong about what disk contained what data. I’ve had a 120 gigabyte disk with no data on it for the last few months; the data partition was at the end of the first disk. Fiddledee-dee.

Cock-up the second: Actually this one isn’t so much a cock-up as an annoyance. Much like having a pencil jabbed in your eye is annoying. I have a Linksys wireless network card, with a Broadcom chipset. The only thing you need to know about this is that Broadcom hates Linux in general and everyone who uses it in particular. So I have to use some very cryptic and obscure methods to get it to work; I won’t detail them here. What I will detail is how frustrated I feel right now. Details of how frustrated I feel: Uuuuaaaaarrrggghhh! Uuunnnngggghhh!!?!

To be fair, shitty network cards and Dell’s even shittier sound card aside, Ubuntu’s install is very easy, and it looks just stunning. I’m pretty sure I’ll like it once I get it working. For the moment I’m back on Windows.

My constant whining has once again payed off. DIT Netsoc has now got an Atom feed, so there’s one less site I have to keep up with manually. Syndication and aggregation are taking over the Web. Anyone not on the bandwagon should start thinking about jumping on before it stops being cool and starts being mundane.

I apologise for the crappiness of this graph; this was my first use of Open Office Calc. I just wanted to give you an impression of the ammount of traffic this post drew on April 19^th (Tuesday). The graph is of daily hits from search engines in the last month, and that spike is when Dirk Benedict got elected, as is my understanding. Most of the searches were for variations of "how is a new pope chosen".