The Clan of the Cave Bague

I appear to have some difficulty when it comes to series. Inasmuch as I seem to be incapable of reading the whole series from start to finish.

For example, at the moment, I’ve read the first three books of “The Dark Tower”, by Stephen King; the first book of “Warlord”, by Bernard Cornwell; and have just started the prologue to “The Shannara Epic” by Terry Brooks.

I think this has started happening since the sorry tragedy of Harry Potter, when there was a 2 year wait between books. Previous to that, I have no problem chuntering through “Necroscope”’s five books.

So, I’m going to break the cycle. I’m going to stop “First King of Shannara” (I’m only a couple of chapters in) and finish “Warlord” – they’re all on my Sony Reader anyway. After that, I’ll attack the rest of “The Dark Tower” (which I’ll have to buy first – yay for fictionwise.com!), and then come back to “Shannara”. 

After that, I’m going to spend some time reading books that actually finish the story in a single bloomin’ volume.

“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, 

or is it something worse?”

Bruce Springsteen – The River

Here’s an annoying thing. I have this box which is used as a development database by one of our dev teams. It’s a lightweight little thing – an HP ML110 quad-core jobbie with a couple of 500GB SATA drives configured as RAID1 using software RAID under CentOS Linux. The thing runs Oracle9i in 4GB of RAM, so it’s quite busy.

All fine and dandy. Or at least it was. About a week after it was deployed in the dev environment, one of the disks dropped out of the RAID array. "Odd," thought I. I hot-re-added the disk to the array and  it rebuilt quite happily and passed an fsck just fine. Nothing untoward in the system logs either.

A couple of days later, it did it again but this time was accompanied by a lengthy vomit of SMART errors in the logs. Not so good. So, I shut the box down and slapped a third disk in there – the intention being to add it to the array as a spare so that when the dodgy disk DID fail, it would swap in. While I was in there I checked the SATA cables to make sure everything was secure – all seemed fine (although I confess I did move one of the disks from SATA4 to SATA2 for the sake of neatness).

Partitioned the new disk, added it to the array, and here’s where the wierdness begins.

First off, catting /proc/mdstat lists the partitions is being part of the array, but the drive status is [UU]. I’d have expected it to be [UUS] or similar. Secondly,  the dodgy disk is now stubbornly refusing to fail again. It’s possible that it was just a bad SATA cable connection, but I really want the bugger to fail so I know if adding a spare to a RAID1 array will rebuild automatically or not.

Tres annoying.

The Winter King  is the first volume in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy. It’s a retelling of the Arthur legends, but from a more historical perspective. Gone are the glittering castles, Knights in full armour, and magic wielding druids. They’ve been replaced by warrior tribes, mud, mental nature worshippers, mud, blood, mud, murder, mud, and turnips. And mud.

The Winter King is kinda tough going during the first half, as it’s largely focussed on painting an image of a fairly barbaric feudal England (or, at least, the bottom half of England, below Northumbria). It’s so tough, in fact, that for the first four hundred or so pages, it reads like a scholarly history textbook.

Then Merlin, Galahad and Lancelot arrive and we’re suddenly reminded that Cornwell is the chap who writes the Sharpe novels. It fairly clips along for the last half and the characters who had up until then been two dimensional placeholders for future events suddenley spring to life and the entire first half provides a richly painted backdrop for the intrigues and machinations going forward. Hopefully the next two books in the series keep the same pace.

It’s worth noting that this book probably won’t be loved by those who like their Arthur majestic and their Lancelot brave and honourable. Merlin and Galahad don’t disappoint, though.

Hasn’t been much point in updating my Game Diary of late as I’ve not really been playing very many games, with the exception of PSU.

I’m a long-standing fan of the Phantasy Star series and managed to run up a bit of a monster phone bill playing the DreamCast incarnation. The 360 version is just more of the same, and that’s a good thing. I haven’t actually ventured online with it yet, because for the first time, PSU provides a fairly lengthy offline compaign.

OK, so it’s not the prettiest game in the platform and suffers from the odd bit of inexcusable slowdown, but hey – it’s Phantasy Star – it would be ACE in ASCII.

Just a quick post while I’m waiting for a CD to burn. Here’s the thing: back in, ohhh, 1994 or 1995 – I don’t recall exactly when, but the first build of Slackware Linux had just been released – I had this idea that, as I was fortunate enough to have dial-back internet access from my employer, it was no problem to have my little 14.4k modem dialed in all night downloading Linux distros from sunsite.unc.edu at 1k per second. I had this idea that I could spend 400 quid on a CD burner and maybe make a bit of profit selling Linux CDs back to students at just over cost.

I’m glad I didn’t do that. With broadband the way it is at the moment, it actually takes me longer to burn a kubuntu disk than it does to download it in the first place.

A brief google appears to indicate that no one seems to have taken the time to translate any of the works of William Shakespeare into the dialect of Neds.

This is a crime. If only I had the time or energy to put it right.

I wonder if using a garish and hideously bright wordpress theme could consitute an actual act of assult. See, I like this one – I munged it many years ago when the intertubes were less slick that they are now, and it reminded me (at the time) of serial consoles, blurry crt displays and nice coloured command lines.

There’s also the camoflage aspect; as most of my desktop is covered in terminals running mutt, slrn, various source files in vim, and irsii, having nelefa.org open in a brower looking as it does now seems to fit quite nicely.

Ok, so it makes your eyes bleed but – frankly – I don’t care about your eyes.

Of course,  none of this makes any sense because – in my silly fickle and whimsical little mind – I’m fed up and have changed it already. FOR SOMETHING EVEN MORE EYE-BLEEDING!

“His skin’s all covered in slimey lumps,

with lips that slide across his cheeks,

his twisted limbs like rubber stumps,

slubberdygullions on squeaky feet.”

Genesis – The Colony of Slippermen

This post was made from Windows Live Writer and it’s actually surprisingly nice!

And that’s the only purpose to the post. I have nothing more to say about that.