I’d been wanting to get a hold of this for a couple of years but had never actually come across it in a local book shop. ‘The Road’ is possibly the bleakest fiction I’ve ever read. The story follows a boy and his father struggling to survive in a journey south to the coast across the wastes of a post-apocalyptic landscape. If that doesn’t sound like your sort of thing don’t be put off, there is practically nothing in the way of scinetific or political background in the novel leading you to infer from your own knowledge and the descriptions of a world carpeted in ash what has occurred. The image in your head will be as much your own as McCarthy’s.
Having read plenty of this sort of fiction the innovative aspect here is the air of total finality, destruction and loss that permeates the story. There is little balancing of dark and light here. Much post-apocalyptic fiction depicts a ruined world, but in McCarthy’s you find yourself wondering how long the oxygen might last and if even the bacteria will survive. Some of the scenes are truly horrible but are never unbelieveable and there is no time given to the characters for hand wringing or moralising because the concepts have become irrelevant.
It is to the author’s skill that the never properly explained mantra of “carrying the fire” that father and son use to describe retaining their ‘humanity’ as they travel from day to day isn’t hopelessly at odds with their ability to survive, which is most often down to quick thinking and more often to luck. The novel is short, due to the lack of background, slimmed down character development and lack of participants for dialogue but also only as long as it has to be to portray the story. The prose is skilled all the way through, with the final paragraph (which is more poetic than anything else in the novel) fitting as a closing thought, reward to the reader and moral of the story all at the same time.
An innovative cross between a Dickens novel and ‘Crime and Punishment’ (without the moral / psychological quandry of the latter being at the forefront) ‘The White Tiger’ is the black as coal and worryingly humourous story from childhood to success of a man from the Indian “darkness”. How true to life the story depicted is might be another matter (it is fiction after all) but the themes have a familiar air from English novels of the growth of cities during the industrial revolution and the writing is always believeable, whether depicting down trodden small village life or the habits of call centre workers servicing our own convinience lifestyle. The fact that practically no one in the book acts in anything but their own self interest may grate on the reader depending on their own world view but it hardly comes across as unrealistic.
The author achieves what few do and you are rarely if ever skim-reading passages waiting for a dull or annoying sub plot to be resolved. You’ll most likely read to the conclusion as quickly as you can.
It was with a little trepidation that I kicked this one off. However, absolutely no problems what so ever. Nice 
One of the worst things about being a heavy web user when it comes to shopping is that you rarely just go out and buy something. Instead you waste a substantial portion of time trying to get a feel for if you’re getting a good price, whether the company will give good service etc etc. Sometimes this saves you quite a bit of money and gets you an excellent quality item. Other times you’re just pissing your life away into a big pot named “informed consumer”.
So, on to the point. Big high street chains that constantly have a sale on are confusing. Here’s my experience with DFS and their regular “hurry! our sale ends Sunday” in the interests of saving other nervous shoppers some time.
Continue reading Does the DFS sale ever really “end tomorrow”?
Mirror’s Edge is a new take on the first person shooter genre, set in a dystopian city which on the surface looks very clean, polished and ordered. As all electronic and traditional methods of communication are monitored by the city state, those who wish to stay off the record communicate via messages couried over the rooftops by “runners”, one of which, Faith, you control throughout the game.
Continue reading Mirror’s Edge Review
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while now to make my quick solutions posts more readable. Only tested it on one post so far but seems to work on latest WP and Thematic. The little plugin allows you to display Linux terminal input / output in a “pretty” fashion in your posts, you can also customise the user@computer if you wish. Thanks
Odd error when running yum update on my slice. This appears to be a currently outstanding bug which can be worked around by issuing a
user@computer:$ yum clean metadata
or
user@computer:$ yum clean all
The former worked fine for me. Original error shown below.
user@computer:$ yum update
Setting up Update Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/yum", line 29, in ?
yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True)
File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 229, in user_main
errcode = main(args)
File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 145, in main
(result, resultmsgs) = base.buildTransaction()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 647, in buildTransaction
(rescode, restring) = self.resolveDeps()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py", line 704, in resolveDeps
for po, dep in self._checkFileRequires():
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py", line 939, in _checkFileRequires
if not self.tsInfo.getOldProvides(filename) and not self.tsInfo.getNewProvides(filename):
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/transactioninfo.py", line 414, in getNewProvides
for pkg, hits in self.pkgSack.getProvides(name, flag, version).iteritems():
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/packageSack.py", line 300, in getProvides
return self._computeAggregateDictResult("getProvides", name, flags, version)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/packageSack.py", line 470, in _computeAggregateDictResult
sackResult = apply(method, args)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 861, in getProvides
return self._search("provides", name, flags, version)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 43, in newFunc
return func(*args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 837, in _search
for pkg in self.searchFiles(name, strict=True):
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 43, in newFunc
return func(*args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 586, in searchFiles
self._sql_pkgKey2po(rep, cur, pkgs)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 470, in _sql_pkgKey2po
pkg = self._packageByKey(repo, ob['pkgKey'])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 413, in _packageByKey
po = self.pc(repo, cur.fetchone())
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 68, in __init__
self._read_db_obj(db_obj)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitesack.py", line 94, in _read_db_obj
setattr(self, item, _share_data(db_obj[item]))
TypeError: unsubscriptable object
It’s possible that this is the error reported fixed here in RHEL. The version on CentOS doesn’t seem to have caught up yet.
user@computer:$ rpm -q yum-metadata-parser
yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-2.el5
Encountered a rather odd error, two HP Vista laptops failing to copy large files to network shares, these would error out complaining about being able to access the source file on the local disk, which was a rather confusing way of reporting the error as there was no problem with the local disk. On network transfers of lots of files of varying sizes over wireless, they’d drop the wireless connection entirely. The only way around this was to use a cable when copying files over the network.
Following a little research this appears to be a reasonably widely experienced issue with a particular Windows configuration option in some environments. You can change this using an administrative command prompt by entering the following command
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
(To open an administrative command prompt, right click on a command prompt entry on your desktop or start menu and choose “Run as Administrator”. If you use a standard command prompt to issue the command you’ll get a permissions error).
More information on these settings can be found here. What I haven’t yet come across is a KB article explaining the issue in more detail (i.e with a list of routers this may be a problem with), which seems rather unfortuntate.
One of the things about having your own little server, not really used for anything absolutely critical to anyone is that you can install updates as soon as you like. Non critical updates are one of those things that you have to do sooner or later and for non critical systems it can often be appropriate to install them as and when they arrive, rather than spending a larger amount of time performing monolithic updates once a year or more. They also tend to challenge the techie in you from time to time… like this little lot on my x86_64 CentOS Slice.
Downloading Packages:
Running rpm_check_debug
ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve:
Package mkinitrd needs nash = 5.1.19.6-28, this is not available.
Oh dear. Messages like this are occasionally just a mistake somewhere in the chain, leave the updates a few days if you were only doing it because you were bored anyway and the error might just have solved itself by the time you come back…
…Not in this case however. So on we go.
The error message produced by Yum in this case is a bit useless as it omits information about the architecture of the package, let’s see exactly what’s installed with “rpm -q“.
# rpm -q mkinitrd
mkinitrd-5.1.19.6-28
mkinitrd-5.1.19.6-28
Two packages. I vaguely remember a discussion from the Slicehost forums on possibly unnecessary packages installed by default. So, let’s see if these packages are from different architectures.
# rpm -q –qf ‘%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n’ mkinitrd
mkinitrd-5.1.19.6-28.x86_64
mkinitrd-5.1.19.6-28.i386
So they are. If we’re feeling brave and we’re reasonably sure we don’t actually need the i386 package,we can remove it.
rpm -e mkinitrd.i386
Which get’s us past that error. But then another pops up with a variety of packages, all of the below variety.
file /usr/share/man/man8/avcstat.8.gz from install of libselinux-utils-1.33.4-5.1.el5 conflicts with file from package libselinux-1.33.4-5.el5
So, exactly what other packages are on here that aren’t x86_64?
yum list *.i386
At this point, if we’re sure we don’t want the i386 packages the above command returns (i.e you’re sure you aren’t making use of multilib and don’t require the packages on your system) we can remove them using Yum, as this will tell us whether any software we’ve installed via the package manager actually depends on them. Anything you’ve compiled yourself however won’t be reported.
yum erase *.i386
This also showed up an i686 package, which we can double check for others of the same type and remove in a similar manner to above.
The CentOS upgrade then proceeded as expected
- Note: Before removing packages, be sure to keep a log of exactly what you’re doing and everything that was output to terminal for each command run if you aren’t sure what you’re doing. This will be invaluable if you have to call for help.
- If there are packages knocking around on your system and you aren’t sure why, a good place to start is /var/log/yum.log – it may well jog your memory on anything you’ve installed and forgotten about
- If you’re upgrading a remote system make sure you have a way to access it if it won’t boot, on Slicehost of course you have this with the recovery console available in Slicemanager, otherwise you may want to ask your provider to hook you up a KVM for that nailbiting first reboot after the upgrade.
This is obvious, but also clever in the way of many clever things in that the attack is only obvious after it’s been explained to you. In short, if an attacker sucessfully impersonates someone you know, or gives you the impression you may / should know them, they may be able to exploit you.
Like many things, social networking sites are great until you let people use them. Yes there’s a certain disappointment when you discover a contact now hides their friends list, you can wonder what you’ve done wrong (although admittedly not so much as when that “view photos of so and so” link you used to use to browse pictures of said contact in their bikini that person to see how they were doing suddenly disappears from view. Does anyone know if the default setting on facebook is now to hide the friends list? (I doubt it somehow).
It occurs to me more and more that maybe we need to get away from being so tribal (trusting people because they look like us, or our friends appear to know them and immediately distrusting people who seem odd) and through getting most of our information once it has been squeezed into convenient stories or concepts, even if those don’t evoke much of a response anymore (see below). Funnily enough you can just imagine anyone reading this post through after it gets linked on facebook, tutting or uttering “oh dear”. Ho Hum.
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