The second book of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. The series follows the fortunes of the first Mars colonists as they come to terms with the earth-led commericalisation of Mars, and the evolutionary influence of the planet itself.
My free copies of ubuntu arrived today! Nicely packaged debian fun! It comes with an install CD, and live CD. Ubuntu will ship free CDs and is sponsored by canonical, Mark Shuttleworth’s software development company.
The first podcast only novel. Written and performed by Scott Sigler.
Last night U2 played at Hampden. That’s the second time I’ve seen them. The first being in Botanic in Belfast ten years ago as part of their zooropa tour. The set wasn’t as freaking wierd as the zooropa tour. It was very industrial looking following the colour scheme of their new album. The band came on stage in quite a low key entrance, and immediately launched into Vertigo. They played all the old favourites like, Bloody Sunday, New Years Day, and finished with With or Without You. Bono made a speech about the repression in Burma as it was Aung San Suu Kyi’s 60th birthday this week. It is also coming up to the G8 summit so he had plenty to spout about. The atmosphere was really good but I couldn’t really get into it as we were up in the stands away to the right of the stage. I’m never going in seated again if I can avoid it.
Exterity moved offices on Friday, 2 weeks ago. It is only now we are getting things together. The actual move went smoothly enough, and the new accomodation is fantastic. Each desk has four switched network points, two RF feeds and half a dozen power sockets. There is a lot more room which means the office doesn’t heat up to over 30 degrees even on the warm days we’ve been having, and if it does there is air con too.
The reason why things are only now geting back to normal is that BT will not allow you to buy a phone line and a DSL line at the same time. So it takes them two weeks to set up the DSL line, even though it is just an admin task for them. Luckily our hosts Cemtron have allowed us to use a proxy till then. Unluckily they only allow web traffic.
Forgot my password to wordpress so couldn’t access this from work.
Had a both frustrating and productive day at work today. It has become apparent that the chip we are using in scapa is not powerful enough to run the standard linux dvb api. This api is clean and modular but that comes at the price of efficency, there are 5 copies of the data from arrival over the PCI to outgoing over the ethernet. Five copies is clearly too many so the api will be refactored to allow some of these step to be zero copy. This will free up some processor usage and hopefully that should be enough for it to function reliably.
I put some batteries in my little olympus 100, which is broken in such a way that it destroys batteries like there is no tomorrow. I took some macro shot of the flowers in the bushes around our new offices. The results were pretty good, I’ll need to identify the species, but I’m pleased how they turned out.
This was inspired by Ross Burton’s blog which regularly features this kind of photography. I think I’ll invest in a decent digital camera for my birthday. In fact it was reading Ross’s blog on planet debian that got me into this blogging in the first place. Hats off to burtonini
In other news some eejits called Matthew Garret and MJ Ray have been having a public slanging match on planet debian, that has them both looking like tits. I don’t doubt they are fantastic hackers but they seriously need to grow up.
Since work has had no ftp access for a few weeks now I’ve decided to change my content engine to Wordpress. It is a lot more complicated than blosxom but it has the advantage that I can post using just a web browser. It is actually a very impressive project and feels very polished. What is like to live with time will tell.
The new gateway product is now streaming. It is taking a lot of CPU usage to do the streaming but it is working. The next stage is to make two tuners stream simultaneously.
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