Sun, 24 Oct 2004
Going Postal - No not me, the book
I've been a Terry Pratchett fan ever since I bought a copy of "The colour
of magic", he was a master of constant jokes, diverse and interesting
characters mixed together in a fantasy world which had enough commonalities
with our own to add an extra twist to the tale.
If one thing stands out from that sentence it should be the word 'was', while the quality of the recent stories (Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch) is, if anything, better than the earlier books the newer books including Going Postal are very quiet on the humour front.
The last comment I'll make on this reasonable read is the inclusion of the clacks 'hackers'. I'm sorry but this part of the story is way over played in every review I've read and, IMHO reads like an unimaginative stereotype hastily added.
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Posted: 2004/10/24 19:42 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Consoles, Binary files and Funny Characters (Unix)
Occasionly you will pipe or cat a file to the screen or a program will die and the
screen will begin to show gibberish when ever you type anything (I don't
mean the usual gibberish that most people type on a command line :)) If you
use putty then you will see the word 'PuTTy' appear contantly.
The quick way around this is to type 'reset' and the screen will begin to work as expected again.
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Posted: 2004/10/24 16:36 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Recovering a Frozen Terminal
After you've been using a Unix (or logging into one via putty) for a while
you'll probably encounter a key combination that locks the term and leaves
you unable to do anything. You'll hunt around the keyboard pressing
combinations until you sigh in despair and try Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D to kill the
current command or the current shell respectively; and they won't work.
After some more key-bashing you'll get lucky and the term will bomb out.
This entry is an attempt to explain what's happening and how to get around
it in the hope that google will send other unwary Unix users to this page
for a solution.
The key combination you've hit is Ctrl-S, this sends a stop signal to the terminal process that gives it the appearance of freezing. Anything you type here is still being queued up and will be actioned; this is why when you do hit resume the term dies if you've Ctrl-D'd. The correct way out of this is to hit Ctrl-Q, which sends a signal to resume and everything carries on working perfectly.
Occasionally this comes up on a mailing list and after the poster finds out the answer the typical reply is 'that's stupid behaviour'. While this trick is a lot less useful than it used to be it can still be useful to know, if you have a process writing to the screen at a high rate (and the scroll-back buffer isn't set very high) the ability to stop and start what you see independent of the process itself can be very handy.
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Posted: 2004/10/24 16:30 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Ubuntu Dropped Desktop Themes
For those of you that don't know it, and even for those that do, Ubuntu is a
Linux distribution that is based upon Debian but with up-to-date desktop
packages such as a modern Gnome. The distro itself has received a lot of
good press and looks very promising.
But that's dull. No one cares if it's technically excellent or it meets the needs of a large number of people (I may soon be running this on my Linux laptop so my views on this are pretty transparent :)) What is more interesting is controversy and differing opinions. Ubuntu had a theme named Human that was added as the default in the testing cycle. This theme had scantily clad people people on it. A number of people took offence at this, you can read the thread for yourself here.
Unfortunately for this story the Ubuntu people had an open IRC session with the users where this issue was discussed calmly and openly. They then took the concerns of the users in to consideration and changed the default theme. The rational bastards!
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Posted: 2004/10/24 16:25 | /operatingsystems/linux | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
2004 Shows -- Short(ish) Summary
This is going to be my last TV post for a while now, I promise! While in
general I don't watch more than four or so hours a week of TV (mostly
comedy shows like Have I got News For You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks)
the magical combination of an always on ADSL connection, Torrentcasting,
a new 250GB harddrive and two monitors (one for work and one for playing
TV shows) has rekindled an interest that was almost destroyed by the
ending of Angel, FarScape and Wonderfalls.
After hours of pain staking research (oh the hardship!) I present below my views on the season so far of what all genre geeks have probably already made up their minds on.
Starting off with the pilots we have Darklight and HEX. I'd heard nothing about Darklight before watching it so I had no expectations. And it failed to meet even that. With a number of genre actors, Shiri Appleby from Roswell, John de Lancie (Q) from Startrek the Next Generation and Stargate and David Hewlett, a Brit(!) who has become the most interesting thing on Stargate Atlantis this show has helped hammer a nail in their collective careers. Bland, bad CGI and no cohesion. It's actually lucky for Darklight that HEX, from Sky and constantly billed as the next Buffy, came along. Because it's worse; slow, badly written and with dialogue that feels forced (and a heroine that goes from "what's happening" to abusing her powers in about thirty seconds) this program makes me wants the ability to forever ban things from my downloader.
Now we're over the complete rubbish lets look at the programs that failed to meet expectations; Andromeda and CSI:NY. Andromeda had a lack luster start and after the first couple of seasons was handed to Robert Engels, a man I suspect was paid by the Enterprise Team to make their program look passable. I only watched a handful of episodes from all the seasons combined but while the original couple of series were cliched and quite dull, except for Lexa Doig who can do no wrong, the last couple have been full of new age 'theories' taken to a whole new level of insanity and plot holes wide enough to drive DS9 through. This program defies logic with its very existence. PS The new ships avatar looks like a badly aged barbie doll.
For my next trick I'm going to group the CSI shows together, I was a big fan of the early CSI, it had a blend of pop science, humour and characters that made it great fun to watch, trying to solve the cases before they did made a nice change from the usual dumbed down shows in this category. While the original CSI is still watchable, William Peterson is a master of his craft, the newer series seem to have become more like a soap opera and have lost the earlier novelty factor. I blame part of this on CSI: Miami, if David Caruso (Horatio Caine) ever cracks more than two expressions half the watching audience will die of heart attacks. As for the rest of the cast I can't really find anything to comment about, they are just so forgettable. CSI NY seems to suffer from the same problems; both the new teams are just dull. While CSI could afford a little bit of under characterisation, which has been mostly fixed with Greg and Dr Robbins, the other two don't have any thing to differentiate them.
Now on to Stargate and Stargate Atlantis, I don't really have much to say on these, Stargate has just plodded along happily as ever, and lets be honest it's formula is above average if no longer excellent, but with more cliched story lines and less of what made Richard Dean Anderson great as Jack O'Neill as his screen time gradually drops season by season. Stargate Atlantis on the other hand is, in essence, Stargate season 1 and 2. The plots are very similar, the characters fit the SG1 mould, Sheppard is O'Neill and Teyla is Teal'c, and nothing exciting ever happens. Except for David Hewlett who plays Dr. Rodney McKay. Ever since he called Carter blonde on Stargate this mostly anti-hero has been left to bring some originality to the series on his own. And unfortunately he's losing.
Enterprise. The first two seasons were rubbish and wasted an excellent opportunity. They also had rubbish credits and a very grating opening song. Season three (the Xindi storyline) lead to some great episodes among the chaff. Season four has started out a lot more promising and I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now. However I don't think this'll be reaching series 7 like all the other treks have. On the upside it doesn't have Janeway.
Now the positive, Lost is the best of the crop this year, I've already whittled on about Lost in a previous Lost blog entry but lets just say that it's the only thing keeping those of us missing Joss Whedon on TV sane. The last surprise is Veronica Mars, I like this show but I'm not sure why. The characters are mostly stereotypes and the stories are far from ground breaking but as a package it does seem to work. And anything that includes the Streets in the sound track is worth a watch.
This post has become a little longer than I planned but now it's off my chest I can get back to posting tech stuff only the google spider and twelve techies care about :)
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Posted: 2004/10/24 15:51 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Network Executives Get Lost
While I'm on the subject of genre TV (One more post after this one I
promise :)) I'll mention a program that is actually well worth setting your
TiVo / Torrent downloader for; Lost.
With J.J. Abrams of Alias fame on the creative team this show might actually get past the first dozen episodes (unlike the tragicly killed Wonderfalls) and have a chance to tell its story. The basic idea is very simple, the survivors of a plane crash are forced to live with each other on a remote island, but the execution is excellent.
Each episode is well paced and slowly reveals more about both the island and the characters themselves. While the constant flashbacks might become annoying enough of the characters personalities are shown through interactions with each other that hopefully the use of them will die off as the series progress. How long the show will last I'm not sure, people stuck on an island like this only works as long as the characters are fresh and the island holds some subtle twists and surprises, I suspect this might be a one or two series show and if it carries on like it began then it's one I'll be following.
Hell it must be good if the Penny Arcade guys like it!
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Posted: 2004/10/24 11:00 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
FarScape Mini-series -- Lowering Filters
I finally had a chance to sit down and watch this over the weekend and
while I wasn't as blown away as I thought I'd be (I had stupidly high
expectations) it was still very good TV and tied up a lot of loose ends
that the series never got to close.
While four hours may have seemed like a long time in which to have one last outing, when you look back at the series and examine the three episode arcs such as "Kiss the princess", "Liars, guns and money" and "We're so screwed" they gave any Sci-fi film a run for its money and, for me, were defining achievements for FarScape.
Even now that I've seen what is possibly the end of FarScape, this feels a lot more definite than the end of the series did, I can't help but think back to the end of the last episode when the people behind the series put the "To be continued" on screen despite having no contract and no home for the series. They believed in what they were doing, the fans agreed with them and thus it was fated to come back. To everyone who helped get it back even for just four hours I'd like to say thank you.
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Posted: 2004/10/24 09:44 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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