Seamless Windows RDP

After a quick look at Sun's free Global Remote Desktop product at work today I decided I'd look into it this evening. This allows applications to be exported from one OS to another. What's the big deal? There isn't one if you've ever used X windows, which is a client-server model by design and as such allows applications to be displayed on different machines, or even via SSH tunnels.

Windows has Remote Desktop, which is handy for remote admin or using a remote machine fully. However, if you want to run, say, Photoshop, then it's not really much use. This is one thing that Sun's product allows you to do.

I spoke with James about this a little and he suggested I check out Tao of Mac, which I did, and found Cendio's SeamlessRDP project, which provides a custom Windows shell that allows just a single application to be exported, instead of the whole desktop. Really great stuff... if you're running a version of Windows with a new enough version of Remote Desktop that also allows more than one concurrent user (i.e. Windows 2003 Server).

A few hacks further on and I was happily viewing notepad on my laptop, which was being run on my desktop PC running Windows XP. To take this one step further, here's Photoshop CS2:



This confirms two things: SeamlessRDP (already available in rdesktop CVS) is awesome, and Photoshop was not designed to be run over a wireless RDP link. I doubt performance will be much better to a local Windows vmware image, either.

But still... this is cool stuff.

Genji and the Temples

I did a search for The Tale of Genji yesterday, after spotting a complete translation in a bookshop a few weeks ago. I don't really know if it is a story I will like but I'd quite like to give it a try... after all, it's supposed to be the first novel ever written.

When I search Froogle I usually just type it into Google first and then select the Froogle tab. This caused me to come across The Tale of Genji, which has a fairly complete summary, background information and most importantly a comprehensive set of photographs of the temples and gardens that are used in Genji Monogatari. This is cool not only because they'll certainly be a handy reference to anybody reading the book, but also because even as a set of Japanese temple photographs they are surprisingly complete.

I remember now just how much difficulty I had in putting names to some of my temple photographs a couple of years ago. A handy resource to have.

Mahjongg: The one true GNOME game

GNOME 2.18 (due in a little over six months) is hoping to shake up the bundled games (the gnome-games package) by removing one game, and adding one new one. I took my part by voting for Mahjonng, Mines and Same GNOME. It's clear to me, that Mahjongg is the one true GNOME game.

Want.

Mmmmmmmmm. My Yamahas (big) are in the living room (a good thing), but so too are the other people I live with. I've not got any 'speakers connected to my PC and this is something that has been bothering me. I notice today that Weymouth Hi-Fi are doing a fairly impressive deal on Quad 11Ls: delivered for £229.



This leaves two big problems: WHICH COLOUR? and how to handle the fact that I've only got one amp/pre-amp and CD-player. But that Quad CD99-P and 99 Stereo Poweramp sure is looking nice...

Something

I stumbled across a new photoblog today, that of Michael Vesen. Here's my favourite shot from his blog, it's a really great one:



Check out http://weblog.michaelvesen.de/ for a whole pile more, well worth a look :)

Standing Order

I cancelled a standing order yesterday because I'd arranged for my Dad to transfer the money instead. Unfortunately I had my card reclined today and was annoyed to find out that the standing order had gone out anyway :( I've spoken to the bank and it turns out you need two full working days to do this -- I don't think that the OLB website mentioned this, which is a real shame.

In the meantime I've got about four pound coins in my wallet until about next Wednesday when I get paid by work. Very uncool.

I'll get the money back a few days after I get paid, as NatWest have issued a standing order recall (or something) for me.

ZFS

I've just been talking to Chris Gerhard who is one of the high-level engineers that work in the same area as us. The conversation started with Mooktakim's idea to use an E450 as a storage server, but then shifted towards Solaris' big new feature: ZFS.

ZFS is now available in the latest Solaris 10 update (u2), which was released recently. I overheard a conversation he was having a while ago about why using ZFS with hardware RAID controllers was bad, and decided to chase this up. The reason hardware RAID won't work well with ZFS is because a hardware RAID controller hides faults from ZFS (i.e. ZFS doesn't know that there is an error on one disk, or when a disk has failed). This is straightforward enough, but I was confused as to how ZFS performance could ever be close to a hardware solution.

The answer, it turns out, is that ZFS benefits greatly from a hardware RAID controller with plenty of cache -- one of the answers is to use the expensive hardware controller to present the disks to Solaris as JBOD, but at the same time leaving the cache enabled. This is an all-round win: the expensive investment is still used, the performance is retained and the data integrity is even better protected thanks to ZFS' copy-on-write architecture.

CPU speeds have massively outstripped disk speeds, so using compression also provides all-round benefits: in many cases it is now faster to read a smaller amount of data and uncompress it than it is to read all of the uncompressed data direct from the disk.

ChrisG suggested that soon it will be beneficial for Solaris to have a single partition/slice for the whole OS. This includes even swap, which will also be able to benefit from the improved integrity.

It's also fairly interesting to note that because of the copy-on-write design of ZFS, snapshots and clones are "free". It also means that ZFS performs faster with a snapshot than without.

Cool stuff for sure. Looks like tonight will be install Solaris on laptop and desktop day. Good job Solaris has great netinstall support!

MPlayer

Bah. While MPlayer is an utterly awesome video player, it has a few really nasty deficiencies:

# it is unable to jump between DVD chapters without a restart
# it has no support for switching angles on a DVD track without a restart
# fast-forwarding DVDs with more than one angle can result in the angle automagically changing for you (not very nice)

What surprises me most is how trivial the first two points would be to implement. I might even have a go at firing up the MPlayer source and giving it a go myself. Maybe there is a specific reason it hasn't already been done :)

Won't somebody please think of the children?

So I've been hacking the Freevo box again. My previous work with mplayer arguments is working beautifully -- everything* shows up at the correct aspect ratio. I achieved this in a fairly dirty way, but so far I've found no better way of doing it.

For some reason the GeForce card in the Freevo box refuses to output at anything other than "standard" ratios: i.e. it outputs at 1024x768 instead of a more handy 16:9 ratio. To compensate for this I've configured Freevo to use 1024x576 (16:9), which works, in conjunction with the 16:9 zoom option on the TV. In order to get everything* else to display at the correct ratio I've had to force mplayer to not grow any larger than the same size (actually a little less in height for some odd reason). Some fancy use of the -geometry flag allows me to shift the image to the centre of the screen, where I then use some other options to force the correct (scaled) aspect ratio.

It's fairly painful stuff, if you ask me.

This brings me on to ratios and standards in general. Why are they all so obscure? Why are the standards not designed in such a way that it is instantly straightforward to view the correctly scaled output, regardless of display size, stretch, etc. As for new modern widescreen TVs... just give over giving the user an option to change the aspect ratio. There should be a fixed default and that should be the "correct" aspect. I'm fed up of watching short fat people wander around my (James') TV screen.

Anamorphic DVDs are something that is worthy of note. I was complaining about the fact that they need to be stretched horizontally in order to be displayed -- it would surely make more sense for them to be packaged at the correct aspect instead. The reason they stretch them is to make use of the extra scanlines, which would otherwise be wasted as "black bars". I complained to Vlad about this, but he suggested that it does make sense, thanks to the fact that cameras are not "widescreen".

It turns out that Freevo doesn't support proper DVD playback using MPlayer. Xine is the preferred choice, thanks to correct(ish) handling of DVD menus, chapters, subtitles, audio languages, etc. Much to my surprise there is no way to change (or even enable/disable) subtitles when using MPlayer. The last six hours or so have been spent fixing this. God knows how it took so long, but the Freevo code isn't very well commented and I had a very hard time figuring out how things worked. I'll spend a bit more time tidying my code up and enabling audio language and angle support before submitting a patch to the Freevo devs.

I'm sure happy that I can now enable subtitles on my foreign films :)

Ubuntu Edgy Eft

For the most part I've been running Dapper Drake (the latest stable release) on both my laptop and desktop. All the while I've had a testing install of Edgy Eft, slated for release in October, running alongside. There are a number of big issues -- Java applets cause Firefox to crash and there are some nasty font-rendering problems with Firefox. These will all be worked out come release time.

For the first time in about two weeks I've booted into Edgy and done a full upgrade. Wow. It feels fast. It boots incredibly quickly and the whole system feels more responsive. Firefox 2 (Bon Echo) is great too -- the red-underlines for unknown words in text fields is an absolute must.

Obviously GNOME 2.16 is full of great new features, Evolution in particular. I really get the feeling that Edgy will be a great and fast release.

Congratulations and thanks to all of the GNOME and Ubuntu devs -- great work!

It's been a long week

It sure feels like a long week. The Solaris 10 Advanced Admin course went fairly well -- as before I found it fairly straightforward, with no major new information. I strongly believe that for this level of course it would be easier to sit down in front of a machine yourself and try out the stuff in the books. The instructor is obviously a useful asset when things go wrong, or you're having difficulty getting your head around a certain concept, but the rest of the time I find it far better to work things out for myself. One of the main benefits is that you are forced (sort of) to sit down for a week in a classroom to do stuff. If I had a week off, I might spend more time sitting about slacking off.

On Wednesday evening I caught the train from Blackwater to London where I had a meal with Xiao, Tina and Tina's housemate. The food wasn't great, but it was good to see Xiao before she went. We went to see My Super Ex-Girlfriend at the cinema after that, which was pretty funny, although at times a bit sketchy. I stayed over at Tina's house and caught the train first thing in the morning from Clapham Junction, thanks to the fact that Tina lives all of about five minutes away. This greatly reduced my return trip time.

I'm glad to say that Xiao arrived in China without any hitches and was even lucky enough to have a whole row on the plane to herself, which meant she slept all the way :)

Yesterday I sat down to watch my new DVD (The Hidden Blade by Yoji Yamada) on the Freevo box only to discover that the sound output had completely broken. I spent a bit of time trying to troubleshoot it before James, Kim, Liam and Charlotte came back and decided they were going to sit down and watch Die Hard. Not wanting to watch it I decided to get an early night. So much for my film :(

The course finished at lunchtime today and Chris gave me a lift home (but not before I beat him in three straight games of air hockey!), which meant I spent a bit of time working from home. Most of the time I was connected to SWAN (the Sun Wide Area Network) via the VPN software. This is pretty awesome as it means I have full access to all of the internal Sun info, docs, software, as well as all the machines in the lab. The downside is that all communication MUST go through the VPN... this meant I couldn't keep an eye on the Freevo box and its torrenting activities. In future I'll probably just switch my laptop on and use that cool software that allows you to control the keyboard/mouse remotely (you just move your cursor off the edge of one screen and it appears on the other computer!).

I've been messing around with CompSoc stuff a bit today... I'm working on troubleshooting the Sun StorEdge T3 we have; in theory one of the disks is broken, but I've not managed to come across any problems so far. The RAID 5 volume verify (about 360GB) is currently at 43%, so it should be done by the time I go to bed.

I pulled the Freevo box apart, wired up the front audio and put it back under the TV. The sound still didn't work so I tried a live CD I had kicking about. Somehow this initialised the soundcard properly and it now works from the Ubuntu install that runs Freevo. I can't say I've come across a problem like that for about ten years. I honestly thought it was down to a hardware failure.

Thanks to working in the lab so much it now feels incredibly wrong to be handling PC internals without an ESD wrist strap. I feel as though I'm being naughty.

Airborne Cats

Don't miss out on airborne cats by junku!

What did I do today?

Quite a lot, but at the same time, very little. I got quite a few small things out of the way which have been bothering me for quite a while.

Xiaoxiao emailed me her cover letter this morning, which I went through and changed a little. I'm hoping she'll get some job applications sorted on Monday. It's only taken her a month so far.

I wandered down to Tesco where I picked up some frozen food... I decided to get two frozen stir frys: an egg fried rice one, and a noodle one. I've no idea what these will taste like. I was looking for slippers too, but they didn't have any. Homebase is right next door so I headed in for a new lightbulb (oh joy) and an extension cable for the Flymo thing. While I was there I also picked up a door bit... the "male" part that goes physically inside the door and connects to the door handle.

When I got back I fitted the door bit, the bathroom door now closes properly and it doesn't require a sharp kick to get it open again. In the process I hammered my finger. It hurt. A lot. Still does, and it hampers my typing. The underside of my finger has gone black and I've got a crescent-shaped black discoloured bit on my nail. I'll be impressed if this finger nail lasts a week. Things aren't looking good for my future cabinet making profession. I should also mention that the first time I re-fitted the door handle I got them the wrong way around. This posed numerous problems for closing the door. More worryingly, my first thought was that I had got them the right way around but just needed to re-fit them each side at a time, with the door closed. At least the net result is about a zillion times better than the landlord's DIY skills. And I did have the black finger hampering me ;)

After fixing the bathroom door I decided to fix my bedroom door too. I did some more hammering but didn't hit my finger again (it was too painful to touch things with it). I removed the metal plate that goes on the door frame and shifted it forwards a bit. Now the door closes without having to twist the handle and pull really hard.

Then I went outside with my new Flymo cable, got the mower out of the shed and discovered three existing cables inside the mower (where the grass goes). I can't decide whether to take the cable back, or just send the estate agents the receipt anyway.

I wondered why Flymos were so cheap. Now I know. They're shit. I don't think I've ever had the misfortune to have to use one before now. If I ever feel strapped for cash and need to mow the lawn... I sure as hell won't get a flymo. I'll find a loanshark and get a proper mower. In the process of cutting the lawn I managed to stab my black finger on a cactus. This also hurt. A lot.

On the upside... strimmers are much fun.

I also did two loads of washing and used some of Charlotte's fabric softener. I bought a big bottle of it when I went to Tesco though, so it should be okay.

I feel a bit lost as to what to do now. I've been the mad tidying person for the last week. I've attacked the kitchen, the bathroom (which I did a really great job with), the lounge, the garden (well, lawn) and, to an extent, my room (but that's already tidy and I don't actually have any stuff). I've actually enjoyed it. I like doing things properly and it gives me a chance to listen to music. I've discovered Bob Marley and John Coltrane during the last week. That means I listened to a few songs other than I Shot The Sheriff and No Woman No Cry. I've got a complete collection of all Bob Marley's albums. BitTorrent is great.

On Thursday I placed an order with Amazon and set the shipping address as work. I've ordered Regina Spektor's Soviet Kitsch and a film I saw in Bangkok called The Hidden Blade (yes, it's a samurai film). Regina Spektor still rocks and will continue to do so. Her new album is great, I recommend everybody gives it a try. The order shipped today so I guess I'll have it by Wednesday (Super Saver delivery). Next purchase will be a Bob Marley album, or two. I'd buy a John Coltrane CD as well, but I need to check that the quality is better than the MP3s I downloaded where stereo seems to mean one instrument per channel... it's just no good on headphones.

On the topic of headphones, my new ones are great. I'm enjoying the orange fluffy ear bits, but I suspect I'll need to buy a bag of replacement ones. They're not the most practical headphones though -- they take ages to put in properly, the cable is too long, and the jack is a right-angle one, which doesn't work brilliantly with the MP3 player concept. But they do sound great.

I've noticed that some recordings work better with headphones over 'speakers. The Bob Marley stuff works well on the go -- it's great stuff for winding up cables. As I already mentioned, my task this week was to tidy the cable store up a bit. I got it finished off on Friday and I'm happy about that. Hopefully the work now will pay off over the next year. No photography is allowed in the lab. I don't think there's anything stopping me taking photos around the rest of the campus though. Some day during the next week I might take a few shots to show everybody what the Sun campus is like. I'll ask Paul about taking a snap or two inside the lab, it might be possible if I go through him. Or maybe there is a shot or two somewhere else that I can use.

I've got The Hidden Blade downloaded. I'm very much in the mood for watching it this evening while everybody else is out, but I'll wait until my genuine DVD shows up. I might watch The Twilight Samurai, which I've had on DVD for a while, instead. Or maybe Tony Takitani, which is based on a novel by Haruki Murakami, my favourite writer right now.

I've made a little progress with my book. So far I've learned that all of the important things for cabinet making are well out of my reach: space, a good solid bench, natural light and a large(ish) electric saw. The only real place I could work is in the garage, but James parks in there, it's very small and the light is crap. It's times like this when I realise just how much useful stuff there was at home, and how badly underused it all is (by me, anyway).

Xiaoxiao has been talking about getting a visa as a couple today. Non-married couples who have been together two years or more can apply so long as they can prove they were co-habiting during that time. They are also required to live together when in the country. It's unfortunate that Xiao and I hadn't been living together for two years (although we kind of were), but the fact that I'm already settled rules it out anyway. Hopefully she'll manage to sort herself a suitable job out and it won't be a problem.

I think it's time to go and cook dinner. Have fun.

Photos that grow...

There are some photos that I don't instantly like. My latest TE post, Dereliction, taken four months ago in Ancoats (Manchester) is one of them. The PP work here is outstanding, even if I say so myself. The out-of-camera shot looked nothing like this and didn't have any feeling at all. The PPd version is close to what I'd imagined at the time... maybe a little better. This is truly one of the wonders of digital photography (or at least digital image manipulation).

Today was fairly hectic... the past week I've been sorting out the cable store in the lab. It's not a hard job at all, but I have to print fairly detailed labels for all of the boxes. This takes time as I've got to lay them out, find appropriate pictures or diagrams, print them (a task in itself), laminate them and then try and remember where to stick them. In between this I try and do bits of tickets that I'm handling for the engineers.

Yesterday evening I booked out a 3800 (domain-based machine, the ones I did the course on last week) for an engineer who wanted any box with two network interfaces. Paul suggested the 3800 and the theory was good: each IO board will have a NIC, which will save juggling cards in other machines. From there it all went wrong (thanks to my not double-checking) and it turned out only one IO board had a NIC and that they were cPCI cards. This meant finding another cPCI NIC (which Anton did for me :) and hooking it up. The problems didn't stop there... in the end we discovered there were no disks hooked up and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get a JumpStart (network install) going. In the end I gave up and found a Sun Blade 150 with six network interfaces and booked that out instead ;)

This evening was spent at the Hungry Horse. I had the all day breakfast, which was good and filling. They do fairly big servings and for the first time ever David managed to eat all of his, and so attempted a dessert. I can't remember quite how that went.

In the meantime I've decided that I'm going to learn cabinet making. A fairly crazy idea for sure, but it passes the time and when I've finished (ooohh, about thirty or forty years from now) I'll have some decent bedroom furniture. Handy though IKEA and Argos' flatpack furniture is... I'M FED UP OF PLASTIC FANTASTIC FURNITURE!

Stop the War shots

I've uploaded five shots from the Stop the War demonstration that took place last Saturday to my photos website. You can get to them at http://www.fajita.org/stopwar/

fatsort

The iRiver UMS (USB Mass Storage) firmware for my MP3 player allows me to copy songs to/from it as though it were a regular USB memory stick. It's great that iRiver decided to make one, but annoyingly the player displays the files in the order they were uploaded. Sometimes weird things happen when you're uploading a whole album and you get the songs in a totally random order (when you want them in order).

Enter fatsort. In less than a second it updates the FAT to order all of the filenames properly. Works perfectly and leaves me with one less thing to worry about :)

purplelewiz, 98.9%

As a very quick follow-up to my entry about getting a full refund for my undelivered Sony DVD-RW drive I checked eBay today and discovered I had received a very friendly negative feedback entry:

"If you are not happy with transaction lets work something out We value your busi"

Great. Maybe if they had valued my business a little bit more earlier on, and done as I'd asked I wouldn't have filed a PayPal claim.

Anyway, I've left a feedback reply and contacted eBay about it. I don't see any reason for them to not remove the unfair comment.

PayPal refund

Today I was awarded a full refund of US$275.06 for a claim I put in against Costupdate-International for an unreceived Sony DVD-RW drive. I'm most pleased about this as the company had just been messing around and (I expect) blatantly lying about having sent the item.

Most annoyingly I've lost out on £23.29 as a result of a stronger pound against the dollar. Still, better than nothing :)

Telephone contract

A while ago I decided I was spending quite a lot of money on my mobile, which is an old Orange pay-as-you-go SIM card I bought from a friend back around the time I was doing my GCSEs. After a little searching around I found coolnewmobile where they do super-cheap contracts with all of the different telephone companies.

I've opted for a contract with Three (Video, Talk and Text 700) where I get 400 cross-network anytime minutes, 250 texts and a bunch of other assorted things. I'll be getting a Nokia 6280, which is a slide 'phone (it's from last year, which is why it's cheap, but I couldn't care less so long as it dials ;).



The contract is for £35/month but so long as I get all of the right bills in at the right time (and the company doesn't go bust! (after a little digging I found out they have very close ties with phones4u, which is a pretty big mobile company)) I get all of my money back -- i.e. I get a free 'phone and a free contract with plenty of minutes and texts.

The credit check has gone through but I've got to ring them tomorrow to confirm my address and other details. In the meantime I've bought a cheap (£7) USB Bluetooth dongle and I'm figuring out how to set up my computer to synchronise with the 'phone...

SunRay hot desking and Gaim away

On Friday James had an interesting idea about setting the away status of Gaim, the default GNOME (and therefore Java Desktop System (JDS)) IM client, based on insert/remove actions of the SunBadge many Sun employees use to access their remote X sessions.

SunRay software and hardware is pretty great stuff and works on the concept of tying a token card (SunBadge) to an X session. The first time you use the card you log in on a thin client with a standard username/password to create a persistent session on a central server, which is then associated with the token card. On removal of the card the thin client becomes free for anybody else to use while the session remains active on the central server. Next time you need your desktop back, you simply insert the token card in a free client and pick up where you left off. In more advanced setups the software can be configured to allow "hot desking" between networks or regions (i.e. connecting to a session running in England from a thin client in Japan (Sun call this "regional hot desking")).

After a little thought it became clear that all of the elements existed to implement an auto-away as described earlier. Gaim can be extended by writing plug-ins that have access to a powerful API and SunRay sessions can be "extended" using utaction to execute code on session connection and disconnection.

Perl plugin support was broken in my Gaim build and I was uanble to get the GaimAccountSetStatus Gaim D-Bus call to work properly so I turned to #gaim on Freenode and was directed towards gaim-remote.pl, which had helpfully been excluded from my Gaim installation. Using one simple command I can change the state of all Gaim accounts, in this example to the Away state with a helpful message:

gaim-remote.py setstatus?status=away&message="I am not currently connected to a SunRay"

Tying this command into utaction is very straightforward:

utaction -c 'gaim-remote.py setstatus?status=available' -d 'gaim-remote.py setstatus?status=away\&message="I am not currently connected to a SunRay"' -t 30 &

Here it's easy to see that -c is the command to run on connection, -d the command on disconnection and -t is used to specify a timeout after (dis)connection before the command is executed. I added 30s here because it is common for us to let another user very quickly use our SunRay client, during which time we are not really "away".

I see no reason why this won't work as-is, but without having had chance to test it, I can't say for sure. What does annoy me a little is that the SunRay server software provides no clean way of allowing a user to specify a connect/disconnect script that persists between sessions (i.e. if the central server is restarted or I manually log out for any reason). It's not a massive problem, but adding the utaction command to GNOME's Startup Programs is not the end of the world.

Bibble update

The latest Bibble 4.8 revision inclues a simple but efficient rating system. Good job! I can't wait to get my hands on Bibble 5!

Stop the war

The Serengeti course concluded today in pulling some cPCI cards from a live domain, re-inserting and jiggling them around. The same goes for some system boards (the CPUs/RAM) and IO boards. Definitely the most interesting stuff on the course. I guess they do save the best for last.

I'm considering heading to London tomorrow for the war march which hits off in Hyde Park around midday. Rob (from photoSoc) is also heading down so I might meet up with him briefly, and maybe there'll be some TE members going that I'll finally get a chance to meet. It should be a good chance to grab a few photos for the first time in ages.

Raffle!

Woohoo! How did I forget? Every Wednesday Sun hold a quick feedback session for their courses. This involves a free raffle for a handful of prizes. I was lucky enough to win today and I got a free Sun bag! It's absolutely awful and I expressed how displeased about having not won the t-shirt I was. The response was great: one of the guys on the course with us has a friend who is frequently complaining about the fact he has never won *anything*. A five pound note came my way and a Sun bag went his.

Happy days!

It's all go

It doesn't seem like much has happened in the past few days, but when I sit down and think about what to write about, quite a few things have happened.

Yesterday evening I had my second "introductory" driving lesson, this time with a different guy. It was only for an hour but I feel as though I got on much better with this instructor than with the other. It's not that I didn't get on with the other guy, it's just this guy was even easier to get on with, to talk to, etc. The fact that he complemented my driving and suggested I should be booking my theory test asap so as to get my name down for a practical test (six to eight week wait) didn't harm that impression. This was what I was really hoping for all along, which is great. This instructor doesn't seem quite as organised (the last guy provided me with a name card and then a sealed envelope and progress report card) but I felt much happier driving with him. His car was also a lot more familiar to me than the last car, which had the highest clutch I've ever come across and the most bizarre indicator stick (on the right hand side). I'm booked down for another lesson at the same time next week and I've told him I'll try and book a theory test in the meantime.

My new headphones arrived yesterday -- a pair of Shure E3cs. They were £50 (including delivery), but I've already found them to be far better than the last pair of Sony headphones I had (about £35). They come with three different styles of in-ear bits and each different style comes with three different sizes (I've found the orange earplug-type to be most comfortable so far). The cable is much thicker and stronger than the Sony's and I hazard to guess it'll last longer. In terms of sound quality I'm really not an expert but I'd say they're a bit better than the Sonys. They're definitely better in terms of comfort (once you get settled with the right earplugs) and they look a lot more durable. Because they're over-ear (but not the big clippy ones) they also stay in better too and you don't need to keep pushing them in when you catch them on things.

Kim ordered a table yesterday so in a few days we may finally have somewhere to sit down and eat that doesn't involve getting hot knees.

Tomorrow will be day four of the Serengeti course (mid-range Sun hardware) and so far things are going really well. It's a fair bit more complicated than Sol intermediate but on the whole not too complicated. Domain-based machines (those where hardware is logically (and to an extent physically) divided to create multiple segments/domains for isolated computation) take a little getting your head around, but with that out of the way it's fairly straightforward stuff. We're working on pairs for this course and James and I are working on a Sun Enterprise 3500 populated with two system and IO boards. They're relatively slow machines by today's standards, but they can be packed full of RAM (64GB per system board and a maximum of four system boards (with the fifth slot for an IO board)). The 3500 is more of a telco box and as such all access can be done from the front... the interesting part is the cPCI slots, which are designed for hot-plug. There's plenty more I could say about the Serengeti range (the "all-African" naming scheme comes to mind), but it would just get long and boring.

Well, that's it for now. Time to go and do something useful :)

What portable music player?

I've got this great little 1GB iRiver MP3/Ogg player. It appears as a standard USB mass storage device (i.e. you can add music from Explorer -- no fancy software) and takes a single AA battery in return for almost twenty hours of glorious stereo sound.

The catch? 1GB is starting to feel a little limited. I'm not sure why. It was always enough for the last two years and I bought it at a time when much larger players were commonplace. But, times change, people come and go, and I need more flash storage.

What is there though? I need a player that has at least 2GB of storage, although four or six gigabytes would be even better. It doesn't *have* to appear as a UMS (USB Mass Storage) device, but it is an advantage. Flash over a small hard disk is good too, but not essential. What it *must* support is a standard throw-away battery instead of crappy built-in battery. An AA is good, an AAA would be even better, so long as it lasts at least ten hours. Ogg support is a high priority, but I could learn to live with MP3s.

Does such a device exist?