aagh.net

I'm building a new machine for my mum; a dual core low-power AMD64 to replace her wheezing old 1GHz Athlon. The system runs fine on Ubuntu Linux, provided I use the latest ATI drivers and not the ones Ubuntu itself ships with (hint: apt-get install envyng-gtk).

Anyway, I put Windows Vista on it to see what it's like. What a clusterfuck. First, the installer is slow as shit; boot the DVD, and it treats you to an colourful screen with nothing but a mouse pointer to start with for the first 40 seconds or so. Long delays like this with zero disk activity are common with it for some reason.

About five reboots later, I have a desktop; I install the critical updates for it, reboot again, install the ATI drivers, reboot again, install SolSuite and Opera, and think the end is in sight. To finish it off before I prepare to migrate her email, I turn on Automatic Updates. Oh, two more updates to install? Um, OK, I guess it's doing the "Recommended" ones I ignored.

Reboot number 7; the system fails to boot. It gets to fading in "Microsoft Corporation" and simply hangs. Safe mode does the same; right after crcdisk.sys loads, all disk activity stops and the system locks solid. Well done, Microsoft QA.

Now, the true, unforgivable, what the fucking fuck aspect of this: the Windows Vista install DVD no longer boots. That's right, it hangs too, at roughly the same spot. Scouring the interwebs, this is apparantly not an uncommon issue; I expect I need to wipe the hard disk so it can no longer trip over whatever the last update fucked up. And this piece of shit retails at over £300?!

Hmm, I wonder how easy it would be to get SolSuite running under Wine…

I just watched the remake/miniseries of the classic sci-fi The Andromeda Strain. I have trouble thinking of ways they could have fucked it up more; it's surprising they didn't add a fluffy wisecracking CGI sidekick spewing oneliners to complete their game of Awful Sci-Fi Bingo.

I'd say the original story's aged quite well, but Robert Schenkkan clearly thought he could improve upon it: what it really needs is a conspiracy, wormholes, time-travel, terrorists, a clumsy out of place romance scene unconnected to anything else; oh, and that ending is a bit bland, let's throw in a deadly nuclear reactor pool and some gore. Jesus wept.

And what's with all these fucking sci-fi remakes? Blake's 7 is next on the chopping block, I dread to think how they're going to fuck that one over. Can't we have something new for a change? Maybe bring a proper book to the big screen instead of some rebadged hack-job.

I got a few new toys on tuesday. You can probably guess what one of them was.

First, I got my first new console since the CD32; a PS3 with GTA4. Why a console with only 1.5 games worth having? Because that's what most of my friends have, and because I want it to not die in the first 5 minutes.

My opinion on GTA4 so far? Well, every review site that gave it a perfect 10, or 9.8, or whatever: they're *so* full of shit. This game has flaws, annoyances, glitches, lockups (apparantly related to network code) and misfeatures like any other. For instance, the phone is a cool way of interfacing with missions, but does Niko really have to pull it out in the middle of a firefight and make shooting impossible? Great, I just completed a mission, but now I need to escape the cops, and I can't even fucking run away or shoot back without aborting a bunch of dialog.

Not that it's a bad game; it's really, really good, but it's not the flawless orgasmic experience everyone says it is.

In addition to the PS3, I got a new monitor; a Dell 3008WFP, since my pair of NEC 2070NX's are getting pretty long in the tooth (nasty persistance issues; like, the tops of windows burning themselves into the top of the display), and I needed something to plug the PS3 into.

The good: it's huge, and got lots of pixels. The colours are good, it's got more inputs than a cheap hooker, it's got a scaler so whatever input you give it get scaled to the full size of the screen, and it's got plenty of controls for tweaking.

The bad: it's huge. Too huge. Why can't you get intermediate resolution displays that are a bit smaller? As soon as you drop down from 30" everything's 1920*1200 at best; half the number of pixels, even on a 27".

Second, it's bright; too bright. A brightness of 0 means "a bit too bright"; the default brightness of 50 means "DO NOT LOOK AT MONITOR WITH REMAINING EYEBALL"; who the fuck calibrates these things, Ra? You basically have to wait for the backlight to start to die so you can display a pure white display (like, say, most websites) without burning out your retina.

Third, and this is the worst; it's got nasty backlight bleeding. The whole lower right of this display basically can't display black unless you sit 4ft away; this is apparantly not an uncommon problem with these panels. I wonder if this is one of the reasons they currently have a 2 month lead time on new ones. Completely unacceptable for a monitor that retails at £1500.

Fourth, input switching is a chore; you get to switch between each one individually each time. There's "auto select", but it doesn't seem to do very much.

In retrospect, I think a pair of 24"'s might have been better. But not one of Dell's, which are all crappy PVA panels. Not that it isn't fun having 720p HDTV content playing in a corner at full resolution, with a maximum-usable-size web browser and a very large TV guide either side of it.

After reading the power of feeds on The Daily Mumble, I remembered I was gonna add feeds to FreshBSD.

So, there you are. No RSS yet, just Atom. Feeds inherit all items of your search, so if you want a feed of all FreeBSD RELENG_7 commits by sos which mention ata, now's your chance.

Hammer it, and I will, of course, brutally murder you. Or at least your packets.

I suppose I should do aagh.net next. Comments, too.

After years of using PenguiNet to SSH into my home server, and from there everywhere else, I've migrated most of my terminal use over to Terminator — which is about 700 lines of Python (plus, er, about half of Gnome). I still use PenguiNet, but it's mostly just a SSH tunnel for Terminator's X window.

My primary motivation? Fixed 6x13, in Unicode. PenguiNet can do one or the other, but not both, because the Windows .fon/.fnt formats can only handle up to 255 glyphs and nobody's managed to make a vector version of it that actually works properly. Oh, and every TTF/FT console font I've ever seen sucks donkey balls.

I don't really *need* Unicode, of course, good old iso-8859-1 suits most of my needs just fine, but there is something to be said for being able to copy something off a website using curly quotes and em-dashes, and having them actually paste properly elsewhere. Also, now I can actually see all that Russian and Chinese text spammers keep sending me. I feel almost worldly.

Also, for the most part, I find I prefer the tiling approach to PenguiNet's MDI; I often do open way more terms than I can actually display at once, but this often turns out to be a mistake, since I'm constantly losing the bloody things. I do look forward to being able to put groups of terms into tabs, though; there's already a branch (or two) for that, in fact.

A FreeBSD port is in the PR queue, and Ubuntu users can grab it out of Universe.

"The Prime Minister revealed his strong support for reclassifying cannabis as a "class B" rather than "class C" drug … Today's comments from the Prime Minister suggest he will push ahead with reclassification regardless of what the review concludes".

Typical fucking politician; who cares what smrt people who've actually researched something say, my opinion is more important, and deserves to be forced on everyone else.

Of course, it's all pandering to the electorate; the public are bombarded with constant media witterings about how cannabis causes people to become psychotic (sure; at about the same rate alcohol causes psychosis) and schizophrenic (an association made strongly with tobacco). I guess "New report finds cannabis less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco" isn't as exciting as "Cannabis ruined my son's life!!!".

Of course if alcohol ruining lives weren't so common I'm sure we'd have the media flooded with articles on that too. And tobacco, which pretty much directly kills 25% of the population, is somehow safe enough to simply tax heavily. Did I mention something like 80% of schizophrenics smoke?

So, fuck you Gordon Brown. Fuck you for putting your own opinions ahead of my own autonomy when it comes to consuming something that the facts clearly show as being less harmful than things you yourself consume. Fuck you for ignoring facts that might help you form policies which actually help society, instead of flailing around trying to appease Daily Mail readers.

MusicToday — I'm currently downloading The Blue Album FLACs from you at 60k/s (my line tops at at around, oh, 2300k/s). To do so I had to install an ActiveX control with an expired digital signature. Awesome.

The alternative was to manually select links which provided me with the incredibly useful filename "bigriver.aspx" for each individual track. That is, when the download list would actually load; 60% of the time it just hung on the request.

Perhaps hoping for some machine learning to make suggestions of what other music I might like is a bit much to ask of an industry still struggling with the incredibly tricky issue of "zipping up and downloading a file".

Anhydrite mine under Billingham. "[The mine] measures 11 million cubic metres, runs under housing and commercial buildings across two thirds of Billingham and the area towards Cowpen Industrial Estate."

Shame the images are so retardedly small.

Please stop sucking.

See, I don't have any interest in iTunes, or AAC, or any form of lossy, DRM protected bullshit; I have an iPod, but I run Rockbox on it, and on my computer I play mostly FLACs with fb2k; previous experience has shown this will doubtless change over the course of my lifetime, and I'd rather not have my music tied to any particular hardware or software, or indeed, codec. This goes doubly so if I'm giving you money for it.

So, a few of you have seen the light, and let me buy FLAC; MagnaTune are the obvious poster boy, who even let me pick how much I like to pay, but there's also sites like BoomKat, Beep and 7digital.

Magnatune: Auto-play audio on album pages makes browsing using tabs annoying. No means to buy multiple albums in one transaction. Likes selling multi-CD albums as several single CD ones. Shopping baskets make larger purchases easier; you like money don't you?

BoomKat: Catalog consists almost entirely of glitchy-Commodore-64-in-a-microwave nonsense. If I didn't already know I liked Higher Intelligence Agency I'd have no chance of finding out through them, since their related items system is rubbish. Overpriced; just cos FLAC is CD-quality doesn't mean I want to pay CD prices; bandwidth doesn't cost that much.

Beep: Where do I fucking begin? The average 12 year old's MySpace page is more usable than Beep. Want to find what they have in FLAC? Yup, you can list them; have fun hovering over the 4mm wide album cover thumbnails for several seconds waiting for the title="" on each one to appear. Also, hope you didn't expect any track listings or previews; hey, you know Boards of Canada rock, what do you need a sample for?

7digital: £9.99 for a FLAC of In Rainbows. That's *more* than the price of the CD new, what the fucking fuck? And for this, you have to download each track individually even using their nasty little download tool. Oh, and they'll come down at around 300kbps; evidently that high price isn't going towards endless immortal bandwidth, because I could blow off all my limbs and crawl down the shops on bloody stumps to buy it faster than 7digital can let me download it. Do they offer anything else in FLAC? No idea, they don't let you search on that. And while embedded album art is nice, it's generally only a good idea if you're doing FLAC-as-CD-image and targeting the 5% of the market who uses the very latest foobar2000 and will actually notice them. If only there was some sort of… archive format, which could "Zip" up multiple files into one big one.

Even ignoring my admittedly rare desire for lossless, there's so much these sites could be doing to encourage me to spend more; let me queue up interesting sounding tracks/albums to listen to while I browse; learn what I might like and make suggestions; give me my own RSS feed (aka PodCast) based on my preferences so I'm not forced to use your pathetic web based player; buy some fucking bandwidth; hire a HCI guy to fix your crappy site usability…

If you want to beat piracy, you don't do it by putting DRM in everything trying to make water not wet as the industry is clearly starting to notice; no, you do it by actually offering a better service than a bunch of random unpaid geeks can provide.

Thanks for sending spam pretending to be from qurl.net, meaning I get dozens of angry "unsubscribe me!!11!!1!!1!11" mails every day.

And thanks, all you other spamming idiots using qurl.net links in your messages. They no longer work, fuck you.

If you were using qurl.net legitimately, I'm sorry, you were in the minority. It might return at some point when I can take proper measures to limit abuse.

k8temp is a tool for reading the on-die temperature sensors on AMD K8 processors (Athlon 64's and Opterons) on FreeBSD, and probably the other BSD's provided they have a similar /dev/pci.

And yes, unlike my other projects, I'm actually releasing this one, since it's nice and small and mostly works. I'm surprised nobody's done it before, actually; it's just poking at a PCI device register.

(Update, 2007-10-24: now available as a FreeBSD port)