Mike's musings

Support, Rita and Ubuntu

Spent much of the day dealing with a number of support calls from one of our customers who's due to go live pretty soon. I think things are sorted now, and it's not a bug with our software: we're helping them through with something which has turned out to be a little trickier than expected. I'm going to be one of the (three) people doing 24x7 support from next week. A bit of a commitment, true, but both Moo and I reckon it's worth the money. Hopefully there shouldn't be too much coming through, and if there is, there's extra money for that, too. We could use it at the moment - small babies and 1500 quid on the car don't help much...

So, the US is braced for another big hurricane. We can only hope and pray that there won't be the levels of devastation that we saw with Katrina. I guess (though I couldn't be sure) that Houston doesn't start below the waterline, so we shouldn't see the terrible flooding that New Orleans suffered, but the damage from the force of the hurricane itself may be huge. The latest news seems to be that there's gridlock on the roads out of Houston - which means that many people may get stuck in cars when the storm hits. I know that the official view is that this isn't caused by global warming, but it can't help, surely?

Ubuntu seems good. Apart from the fact that it didn't install smbfs (which contains the apps required to allow you to mount samba - Windows - network shares), which took me quite a while to discover, it seems OK. Comes with a shiny new kernel, though not as new as the one I was using on my laptop, so I may roll my own. On a related note, it seems that the problem with fast USB devices failing to be registered properly is something to do not with hardware but the relevant driver: ehci_hcd. When I remove this, things work fine (though slower than they ought to, obviously!). There seems to be a clash of some sort with something else kernel-related, but I've been unable to track it down yet, as there seem to be another set of problems which give similar symptoms, but which don't seem to be related.

Thanks, btw, to Mark, who's helped me with a couple of questions that I had with Ubuntu: the most important one being how to get a root login. Cheers, mate.

Music today

• Atto II - Part 1 - Signore,v'assista il cielo! - Verdi (Falstaff (I))
• God Bless The Child - Billie Holliday (Good Morning Heartache)
• Magnificat - Chapelle Du Roi (Thomas Tallis: The Complete Works Vol. 4)
• Thelma Holt / Let me not to the marriage of true minds - Various (When Love Speaks)
• Book 3 - I Force et Agilit# des Corps Glorieux - Messiaen (Complete Organ Works (Latry) - CD2)
• Anyway U Want It (feat. Keon Bryce) - Ms Dynamite (A Little Deeper)
• We Almost Got It Together - Tanita Tikaram (The Sweet Keeper)
• Ready To Go (Original Mix) - Republica (Republica)
• Blazhen muzh (Blessed is the man - Sergei Rachmanino (Vesper)
• Guns In The Sky - INXS (Kick)
• The Whites / Keep On The Sunny Side - Various Artists (O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
• C. Debussy - String quartet No 1, G minor - III Andantino dolcemente espressivo - Bartok Quartet (Dvorak - Debussy - Ravel , String quartets)
• See you soon - Coldplay (The blue room)
• Pierre de la Rue / Doleo super te - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)
• What Goes Up... - The Alan Parsons Project (Pyramid)
• She Moves Among Men (The Bar Maid's Song) - June Tabor (Abyssinians)
• Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, op.30 Intermezzo - Adagio - Rachmaninov (Complete Piano Concertos - Vladimir Ashkenazy-LSODisc 2)
• Crumbs From Your Table - U2 (How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb)
• What Better Said - K.D. Lang (Invincible Summer)
• Experiment Number Six - Lemon Jelly (Lost Horizons)
• To Last A Lifetime - Del Amitri (Change Everything)
• Herbert Howells / Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks - Choir of King's College (English Anthems)
• Barrington Pheloung / Theme from Inspector Morse - Various (Cellnet - The Classic Collection)
• Katie Williams / Girl next door - Various Artists (The Classic Chillout Album 2 - CD2)
• The Sea - Morcheeba (Parts Of The Process)