So I decided to treat myself to a decent pen for a change. A Cross Apogee rollerball (specifically with gel ink which I’m a very big fan of) …
It is a little fatter than I’m used to but it is already feeling pretty comfortable. It is a heavy pen, enhancing the feeling of quality. If you are considering getting a decent pen, the Apogee could well be a decent candidate.
I am not an audiophile – perhaps indicated by buying a QTV-2 rather than something more “serious”. I certainly did not want some sort of complicated setup that required tons of wires and another complicated remote control. So the QTV-2 looked like a fairly simple way of improving the audio on my TV without going to a great deal of effort.
So I took a chance and bought one. It’s a large box when it turns up, and unpacking it reveals the speakers themselves – packaged in a flat array designed to bolt onto the back of the TV, various accessories including a bewildering array of bolts, washers and “spacers”. I instantly thought “Uh oh! Looks complicated”, but it turns out that most of the bolts and washers are unnecessary – they’re provided to allow the speakers to be strapped to the back of a range of different TVs. So why cannot TV manufacturers come up with a standard fixing mechanism ?
After spending about 30 minutes connecting the speakers to the back of the TV – fairly easy, although I would have one of those TVs whose connectors are a little obscured by the speakers! After a brief attempt to use the the RCA connectors (unsuccessful because I could not be bothered to hunt down the TV manual!), I resorted to the headphone connector and managed to get the sound working.
For a while I was listening BBC News 24 (or whatever we are supposed to call it now), and immediately noticed that I could lower the volume and still hear the talking much more distinctly than with the TVs speakers. In addition the sound seemed to fill the room much more.
Switching to a film (2001 on Blueray), started to show the benefit of the subwoofer much greater bass; probably a touch too much, but that will be because of the sound adjustments for the TV speakers. But the overall effect was far greater detail in the sound and a greater ability to speech even when mixed in with other sound.
Overall, worth having if you are not interested in a full home cinema system. It greatly increases the clarity and quality of sound over standard TV speakers. In fact in a noisy environment such as my flat (with a high volume of traffic outside the window), it is possible to decrease the volume and yet still hear the sound from the TV clearer than before.
It just occurred to me that there’s a somewhat different way of finding the latest and hottest new websites out there – just take a look in CPAN (Perl’s third-party library repository) or the equivalent for other languages for modules that match “WebService”.
If someone has gone to the trouble of writing a module for communicating with a site, it probably is at least worth looking at.
Whether you are using ufs filesystems or zfs storage pools, Solaris has a rather nifty way of migrating storage from one SAN to another wih no (or little) downtime. Or various other reasons involving moving from one disk to another. The key advantage to the following method is to reducing or eliminating downtime. Even if your users can take the hit, not having to slowly watch a multiterabyte filesystem copying from one disk to another is reason enough to use this technique.
Basically it is by using mirroring. Using mirroring to copy a disk might seem a little odd to begin with, but once you’ve seen it work you’ll be a fan.
This section assumes that the source disk device (cXXXXX) is set in the variable ${sourcedisk} and the destination is in ${destdisk}.
For UFS filesystems, the first step (which does require an outage) is to :-
This should take no more than 10 minutes and is the only outage involved. There are two remaining sets of steps :-
At this point, the mirror will start resilvering. It may take some time to complete, but the time it takes to do so does not really matter. In particular the resilvering process should not cause a performance problem to your application – the application I/O takes priority.
When the resilvering is complete :-
You will see that I have used the metadevice names d1000 (for the mirror), d1001 (for the old sub-mirror), and d1002 (for the new submirror). Whatever device names you use, it is worth trying to be consistent – it helps a lot when you have dozens of filesystems to process.
This is even simpler. If you have a storage pool called ${pool} which contains a single device called ${sourcedisk}, you simply :-
Of course be aware of anything you read on the Internet! I have not actually tested the above; I’m merely regurgitating memory that has recently been exercised – I’m doing a SAN migration at work right now.
The BBC have invited Nick Griffin – the head of the BNP neanderthals onto Question Time (a public question and answer forum with a panel of politicians of various kinds). Of course there is a lot of fuss about this – any self-respecting person of almost every political persuasion is horrified at the prospect of seeing the BNP use national TV to peddle their filth. The BBC’s argument is that the BNP has achieved sufficient electoral success for them to be invited to take part – along the same lines as the Green party receive invitations.
The BBC has pointed out (quite rightly) that their role is not to impose any form of political censureship and if the BNP has achieved the level of electoral success that allows other political parties to be included in programmes such as Question Time, then they cannot legitimately not include the BNP. Given the amount of time that has passed since the BNP achieved its electoral success in the last European elections, the fault for “allowing” the BNP to take part in Question Time must be passed directly to those in parliament who hae not passed legislation prohibiting the BNP from being heard on TV or radio (as happened to Sinn Fein in the 1980s).
There is an argument that says that because we have free speech, we should allow Nick Griffin to spout any kind of rubbish he wants to on Question Time. Well, perhaps although our tradition of freedom of speech is not unlimited. And certainly Nick Griffin’s freedom of speech does not give him a license to spout his rubbish on Question Time.
Of course Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time does allow us to more easily see how foolish and immature his views are. Interestingly he has already portrayed just how deranged he is even before the programme when he was making comments on the way to the studio.
He claimed that the reason that the Labour Party had paid for protesters to show up outside the BBC studios. Whilst I do not have any evidence to refute this, it does seem more than a little ridiculous to think that the anti-fascist protesters would need paying to turn up. Especially when you consider that protesters have shown up outside regional BBC offices – why would anyone pay for them to appear there when they could have been paid to appear in London ?
Let’s have a look at some of his statements …
“I am the most loathed man in Britain”
I somehow doubt it. He just isn’t that significant. Compare Nick Griffin with some of the British monsters like Harold Shipman.
“We are the aborigines here”
Presumably meaning that the English white people originally arrived in the UK shortly after the last ice age finished. Well perhaps there are some still left but the UK has seen immigration ever since the ice age – first of all Celts (yes! they didn’t originally come from here), Angles, Saxons (the BNP of course lump the two into the mythical “Anglo-Saxons”), Vikings, and Normans.
And of course the Romans who undoubtedly left more than a few genes behind. Which undoubtedly included a few ‘black’ genes given that they also (in their later days) included “native” troops in their army and shipped them around to where they might be needed. Wouldn’t it be funny if Nick were “tainted” with a bit of “black blood” ? I’m not normally given to using such phrases; I don’t believe in them, but old Nick would certainly be upset if he found out he wasn’t “pure white”.
At least in the UK, the whole concept of “indigenous” people at least in terms of “aborigines” is foolish in the extreme and shows an immense ignorance of British history. Really quite peculiar for someone thinks they are as patriotic as Nick undoubtedly thinks he is.
The reason behind Nick’s blatant racism is that he is terrified of being swarmed under by hordes of non-British immigrants. Even ignoring that immigration makes Britain a more dynamic and interesting place, such fears show that the racists are the kind of people who need to take their socks off to count beyond 10. If you look at the statistics, 92% of the current population of the UK is white. We’re hardly in danger of disappearing!
“I can’t explain …”
In relation to his allegedly changed views on the truth of the Jewish holocaust in WWII. Of course the obvious conclusion when he claims he cannot explain himself due to European law is that his views have not changed and that he still denies the holocaust. Or perhaps he refuses to accept the holocaust because he would loose his core supporters if he did.
And of course there is no European law in force in this country against denying the holocaust; that clause of the law can be blocked in individual countries who feel that it is an unacceptable limit on freedom of expression. And yes the UK opted out of that bit of the law. It is interesting that someone who has previously denied the holocaust and is a European politician is ignorant of this!
“You can stay …”
In response to a question from an Englishman asking whether he (not white enough for Nasty Nick) would be allowed to stay in a BNP controlled country. Kind of contradicts the BNP website (and the constitution) where it is campaigning for a white Britain. Which one is it ? Are you confused Nick ? Or just lying ?
“Adolf (Hitler) went a bit too far”
Which was not something that Nick said on the programme itself, but something he is supposed to have said in a video. The interesting thing that came out in the programme is that Nick consistent denies having said embarrassing things in the past even when there is clear evidence that he did say such things.
It was plainly obvious that you simply cannot believe any denials Nick makes.