• 6250 BPI Tape Drives

    Does Solaris 9 still include drivers for SCSI half-inch tape drives of the 6250cpi vacuum-fed variety? I know I should go look this up but I am rather bogged down at the moment…

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  • Microsoft creating Windows for supercomputers

    [zdnet.com.com] Microsoft has launched an effort to produce a version of Windows for high-performance computing, a move seen as a direct attack on a Linux stronghold. High-performance computing once required massive, expensive, exotic machines from companies such as Cray, but the field is being remade by the arrival of clusters of low-end machines. While the…

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  • successful french biker protest

    Somehow I cannot envision this ever working in the UK; there are too many petty-minded folk over here. [blogs.motorbiker.org] In one of the busiest shopping streets, boulevard Haussman (where the Galeria Lafayette is located), some 50 motorcycles arrived at 8 o’clock in the morning and took up all car parking spaces on the roads. Half…

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  • post-ibook fritz confision

    so, shortly before going on vacation my ibook video went on the fritz again – sporadic flashyness, shimmering-waves of grey and occasionally absolute deadness – so i phoned applecare for the second time in two weeks, fought my way through the inane frontline of call management people, and had a box delivered for service. called…

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  • DIY coffee

    Having seen Dan Lacher’s posting about coffee, just as an aside I have used the following technique [www.sweetmarias.com] to roast green coffee beans (using a £15 / $20 hot air popcorn popper) at home; the results are variable, but improve with practice and it is good fun so long as you do it outdoors. 😎

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  • highlights and announcements

    memories: the hyper-enthusiastic b&b owner in canterbury. canterbury cathedral at night the last post at ypres lobsters and oysters in honfleur the bayeux tapestry the german gun battery apple sorbet the vietnamese history channel filmcrew omaha beach for hours and hours and hours the exceptionally cute redhead the laundry incident velcro, bungees and burping your…

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  • update on progress

    well, i am back. 1700 miles through france and belgium on my dr-z400s with a homemade luggage rack. and i am intact. canterbury, ypres, honfleur, port-en-bessin-huppain, vierville-sur-mer, vierville-sur-mer, paris, paris, reims, reims, leuven, home. more later, when i have recovered and fixed the leak with my washing machine; images which – in reverse chronologcal order…

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  • conference spam

    Am I the only person who receives weekly invitations to present at various IT-related conferences around the world, the suggestion being that I pay the sender lots of money for the privilege of doing so? Are these mundane spam that everyone else also gets, or am I trancendentally standing upon some higher plane of spam?

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  • this is fascinating…

    …in a crumbly old books sort of way; a list of occupations as seen by insurance brokers, and how much risk is associated with each. article: [secretplans.org] image directory: [secretplans.org] I have a small interest in something similar [www.dtc.umn.edu] [home.ca.inter.net] [homepage.usask.ca] so I may be predisposed to liking this sort of thing.

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  • the modern compendium of minature automata

    this is just too much weird fun; a bit like conway’s game of life meets a terry gilliam cartoon. http://www.lycettebros.com/automata/auto.htm

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  • grids, and gigaflops-per-cubic-foot

    I saw my friend Chris [www.csamuel.org] and his wife Donna [www.donnawilliams.net] weekend before last; stopping Chez-Muffett for breakfast off the flight from Chicago, I served them a breakfast of grilled lamb chump steaks, bacon, mushrooms, and well… an enormous mixed-grill basically. Chris looks fantastic, having dropped 2 Stone / 12Kg and dumped a whole pile…

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