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VW has announced that the new Scirocco will not be coming to the US. Apparently they expect people to buy a GTI or an Audi A3/S3 instead.
As a former Scirocco owner (and current owner of an Audi wagon) I'd like them to know that I would buy the Scirocco, but probably wont buy a GTI or an A3, so they're denying me choice and most likely losing me as a customer for something small and sporty.
To me, an Audi is too expensive (as a second car for fun) and a
Golf is too boxy, but, just like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the
Scirocco is JUST RIGHT. I am intrigued by the TwinCharger engine, I
like the raked coupe looks and the price would probably be within
reach. Please, VW USA, reconsider.
posted at: 13:05 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
My latest hobby is deleting email. I used to keep it all, but I get way too much and I don't care about a lot of it. Now I've started to delete it. My new rule is if a machine wrote it, I am not interested in keeping it very long. It might be news, it might be a special offer, it could be a cvs commit, an error message on my server, but basically if I didn't look at it and act on it in a certain period of time then a) it's now old and probably useless and b) I can probably get the same information still somewhere else.
It's so liberating to see my inbox full of just personal emails that people typed to me. I think subscribing my own personal email to mailing lists is a time stealer, let alone Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Borders etc etc all spamming me regularly. So... they have all been nuked, even from my backups!
I've even discovered that Apple's Mail.app is not quite so slow as
I thought - it was doing quite a good job in face of a massive
overload of impersonal machine generated email.
posted at: 20:12 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
Multiple Bifurcations is a term that I first heard from Andy Grove when he explained the future of Intel product positioning.
In my case, however, it's just a good term for how I'm slowly losing my mind. Instead of being interested in "Unix", now one has to consider Solaris, Mac OS, Linux, BSD etc. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, such that I can't just standardise on one. I love my old SPARC machines, for example, and Solaris is best on those. I use my various Macs for music, video, email and web browsing. Gotta have those. But for my webserver, my home-brew Slackware Linux machine is still plugging away after several years reliable duty.
Similarly, for blogging, I started off using Blosxom on Linux. It's really simple and I can work disconnected too. On my webserver I can post from a simple ssh session, or I can work on my mac and then upload afterwards.
However, for blogs with themes, photos, counters etc, I have been
experimenting with "iWeb". It's just about ok for a first 1.0 release
of a product, but has some shocking limitations. For example if you
have a slideshow, every photo is shown with a sort of reflective
foreground, like it was standing on a black shiny surface. There is no
way to turn this off. Personally I hate it. HATE IT. Also there is no
way to participate in the quality of photos, I can't ask for bigger
images, or smaller thumbnails, or more sharpening. I think that Flickr
is most likely better. Finally, a friend of mine has Aperture and a
quad Powermac with 4.5GB and produces some fairly nice slideshows
using that setup.
posted at: 19:05 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
I've been away from blogging for a bit. I started blogging due to some encouragement from the OpenSolaris pilot crew and Jim Grisanzio, but then the OpenSolaris launch was so amazingly full of life and expert blogging, I didn't feel like there was much more to say. But life has settled down a little bit and perhaps I will be able to find the time.
So what's new? Well, lots of things... apologies for a 'portmanteau' blog post, I will behave myself and categorise entries properly following this one.
On the Solaris front I recently dipped my toe into Solaris x86. Previously over about 10 years of using Solaris, I had never seen or logged into an x86 incarnation. I converted an old Linux machine I had lying around unused and got b27a installed fairly easily. Netbooting, loopback filesystems and endian-neutral DVD images should make this all extremely convenient for the well-organised, however for hardware where it's unknown whether the OS will install, I prefer good old fashioned CD images. After all if there is a good chance that the install may fail at any point, then it makes sense to sit and babysit the process... so then feeding in CDs every few images is not much additional hassle. That's my excuse anyway.
The nominal reason for all this was I wanted to play with ZFS and the machine seemed like a nice target since it has 4 scsi drives. I got as far as making a mirrored pool and filesystem and mounting it and creating a txt file. It really is as simple as the blogs from the ZFS team claim. Very impressive. I plan to use the mirrored space for my most critical files - my documents, email, programming projects and digital photos. I've been distracted from getting any further by problems with the X11 configuration (naturally, I always have problems with this it seems) and also the NIC configuration.
The machine has a genuine DEC Tulip chipset 10/100 ethernet card, which unfortunately cannot be persuaded to run at anything better than 10Mb half-duplex under Solaris. Fairly horrible for a machine I am prepping to be a fileserver. I tried various setting in /kernel/drv/dnet.conf including a reconfiguration boot each time, but to no avail.
First impressions are that Solaris x86 on this machine, in its default install, is a bit of a dog. Slow to start, slow to shut down and not that snappy in between. However, I am sure this is partly because lazily installing the entire set of software on a machine with only 256MB RAM, as I did, makes no sense. It was a first install, I plan to do it again when a ZFS enabled build makes it to an official Solaris 10 point release, or perhaps Solaris 11 comes out. And ... yes, I did know that I could pick and choose the packages myself if I wanted to. For a first install the urge is always to finish the job and she what the machine can do.
On the other hand, Solaris nicely recognized both SCSI host adapters and didn't barf when it noticed the IDE channel is idle. Yes, this is a PC with nothing connected to the IDE controller : SCSI hard disks, SCSI cd-burner, SCSI tape drive, SCSI zip drive. Has an original Athlon 750Mhz slot-A cpu. In 2001 this was something of a dream machine in my eyes.
For my trusty Sun Blade 1000 I upgraded the backup facilities. As much as my DDS3 drive gave good service, a Quantum DLT7000 is a significant step up. I managed to get a factory refurb with very low hours on the heads for about $300 on Ebay. 35GB native capacity and DLT tapes have a bit more reassuring heft and solidity than DAT tapes. Some people apparently feel that the non-helical-scan formats are a more reliable choice for backups, I wouldn't know, but choice is always useful. I can for example backup up selections from that machine to cheap, ubiquitous DDS3 media, but occasionally do an archival level 0 dump to good old DLT tape and put it away for safekeeping.
Other stuff I'll blog :
The Baroque Cycle - Neal Stephenson
A book review of sorts
I am part-way through book three of Neal Stephenson's Trilogy "The Baroque Cycle" - Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World
Wow! There is no better word. I frequently find myself thinking it is quite impossible for someone to have written this book. It's huge, and it's deeply thought out, and it touches on a lot of topics, yet continues to entertain, to provoke and to amuse.
What is it about? Well, I'd say it's about Money, Science, Alchemy, Trade, Natural Philosophy, Pirates, Kings, Vagabonds, Slavery, plus a fascinating excursion through late 17th and early 18th century British and American history. And more...
The language is fun, Stephenson uses a lot of anachronisms which hint at the history that lead to current usage. It's often a bit like the moment in Blackadder when the prince's servant (Blackadder - played by Rowan Atkinson) is asked what he's eating - he replies "oh it's just something the Earl of Sandwich recently invented". Funny and educational.
The action is big and bold, people kill each other, marry, divorce, beat, steal, poison, blow up buildings, ships, carriages etc. Revenge simmers for decades, enormous fortunes are won and lost, sometimes more than once by the same people. Babies are stolen, slaves are freed, england goes from bust to boom and back. Coffee and chocolate, newspapers and theatre become popular. London becomes too noisy, crowded, dirty and dangerous for a man who lived there in earlier times but revisits from Boston.
The principal protagonists are fictional, but are on first name terms with all the famous people of the day - Isaac Newton, Leibniz, King Louis XIV of France, Hooke, Boyle, Huygens, Samuel Pepys, assorted English nobility. Not all the historical backdrop is familiar to me - I'm fairly certain the Tower of London did house the Royal Mint, headed by Isaac Newton at the time, but I've never heard of the "Black Torrent Guards" - might be a play on Coldstream Guards. Similarly I know Newton and Liebniz argued over who invented the calculus, but did Newton really have a close, jealous companion called Fatio? Not sure...
So far it's been enthralling, and I'm looking forward to the finale. Sure
there are some annoyances (too much use of italics,
repetition of odd words or phrase like "penetralia", "glacis", "watered
steel", "watered silk"), and quite a few bits that don't ring quite true
(a welshman called "Angus" not to mention long overly clever
conversations) but overall it's a triumph.
posted at: 16:38 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
Blockbuster still doesn't get it
If I rent a DVD from Blockbuster under their new much ballyhooed "no late fees" scheme, then if I happen to keep hold of the disc for a week (as I often do with Netflix, which I love) they will "automatically sell" me the disc.
Oh dear, sounds like a late fee to me.
If I want to own a DVD, it must be box fresh, I'm going to want artwork, both discs, vouchers etc. I want a disc that is fingerprint and scratch free.
Blockbuster still doesn't get it.
posted at: 22:42 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry