Phlogiston

XML.com: Hacking Open Office is an excellent article on using XSLT to manipulate OpenOffice.org’s XML file format.

I pretty much feel like I should just replace my blog with a link to Miguel’s. Everything in his most recent entry is worth a mention, but this link particularly stood out. Apparently some guy in London was actually mistaken for a cracker, raided by the police, and thrown in the cells for a few days, just for attempting to make a donation to a Tsunami-relief charity on the web using an unusual browser (Lynx on Solaris). Welcome to the United Microsoft Kingdom, PLC.

The New Yorker: 1992 House. That really made me laugh. And really made me feeel old.

My computer died over a week ago. Last weekend I got up and discovered that my computer wouldn’t wake up from being in xscreensaver. Hmmm. X has crashed, or something, I thought. Moving the mouse and fiddling with the keyboard made no difference. So I held down the power button until the machine rebooted. It got past the BIOS screen and then just said: “Primary internal hard disk drive not found. Fixed optical drive not found.” Sure enough attempts to boot from a CD-ROM failed with the same message, but attempts to boot from a floppy worked (albeit with the same message again). So, the machine boots from a floppy, but neither the hard disk drive nor the fixed optical drive can be found. It must be the on-board IDE controller, I decided.

Thankfully everything is still under warranty (but only until June or July, I’m not sure which), but I had to wait until Monday to call Dell. The guy I spoke to in Ireland was actually very helpful and seemed to know what he was on about. He seemed to think it was a hard drive failure whilst I favoured the idea that it was a motherboard failure. As I was covered for next day on-site maintenance I suggested that an engineer come out with both a new drive and a new motherboard. To my astonishment I was told that Dell engineers are only allowed to come out with one part at a time! I feel mean complaining about that right now, as the guy (Declan, I think) was actually helpful and good at his job—he used Linux himself at home and didn’t blink when I said I did—and it turned out that he was right and I was wrong. Dell sent a new hard drive the next day, and sure enough that was the problem. However, based on my report (especially the bit about the machine refusing to boot or even recognise the CD drive) it seems to me that there was a pretty good chance that I might have been right, in which case sending out a new drive would have made no difference at all and I would have been left having to call Dell again, and waiting another day for the right part to come out.

Anyway, the bottom line is that hard drive failed. I have a farily good backup regime: I backup my home directory every night onto an external Firewire drive, and I backup /var, /etc and /usr/local as well. But there simply isn’t the backup space to backup everything. Sadly, however, everything includes a Windows XP partition, a Linux (Fedora Core 3) partition, and within the Linux partition four VMware Workstation virtual machines (all varieties of Windows with different versions of browsers installed). So all in all I had to restore the equivalent of six machines, each with radically different software on them. What a complete nightmare.

So, as I blogged earlier, I missed the first episode of Desperate Housewives when it first aired, so I downloaded it instead. Little did I know that the episode I downloaded was in fact the unaired pilot. (I discovered when it turned out there was a repeat of the first episode on Channel 4 the night before the second episode.) The unaired and aired episode were almost identical, except for the fact that Gabrielle’s lover (the much younger gardener John) was now played by a different actor. In the original pilot he was a blond haired surfer type (Gabrielle is Hispanic), whilst in the aired pilot he’d been swapped for a young Hispanic boy. How creepy is that? Why do Americans have such hangups about interracial relationships?

Miguel de Icaza brought this book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, to my attention, and also the fact that The Church Report is available online.

Garden State is one of the loveliest films I’ve seen in a long long time. Very funny, very very funny, and as touching and sweet as you can imagine.

So, Desperate Housewives finally started last week in the UK. Unfortunately, I missed it as I was having dinner with my friend Philippa. I downloaded the first episode this weekend and I’ll definitely be watching from now on. But as much as I enjoyed it, I was also shocked by my sense of deja vu whilst watching it: it’s such a rip-off of Twin Peaks. Apparently, I’m not the only one to have noticed this; but even so, having it narrated by a seemingly unlikely candidate for suicide, as opposed to starting with a seemingly unsuitable canditate for murder, in order to reveal the dark underbelly of suburban America behind the white picket fences; and to have a character who appears at the most prescient or inconvenient moments like the “Log Lady” constantly crop up like Mrs. Martha Huber (who in her first appearance was carrying a blender just like the log lady carries her log) strikes me as pushing the limit of the difference between reference and plagiarism.

Still, it’s exciting that there are new shows worth talking about. Of the returning shows, tonight and tomorrow 24 makes a comeback. I hope to God it’s better than the last season. The first season was genius, but primarily because of its originality, and its taut script — even the occasional idiocy like Mrs. Bauer’s amnesia were forgiveable. I personally found the second and third seasons to be trading on the originallity of the first, and to be slightly lacklustre in comparison. Of course, the sad truth is that I watched, was hooked from episode to episode, and was in thrall to the cliffhangers each week nonetheless. So I guess it worked in some sense of working, but whereas I honestly think I will one day re-watch the first season of 24 I very much doubt that I will bother re-watching seasons two or three. Here’s hoping for season four.

Of the other new shows, Veronica Mars and Lost strike me as the best. Veronica Mars has irritated me in the past: the detective theme borders on Murder She Wrote from time to time, and some of the emotional content is juvenile and thin, but on the whole I enjoy it, and lately the episodes have been wonderful. Lost is, let’s face it, incredible. It’s one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen. I honestly wasn’t expecting somethng that good from the creator of Alias.

And so, to Alias. It’s a stoooopid show. But it’s first season was hugely enjoyable, and just, well, cool. But season two got worse, and season three was so bad that I vowed never to watch it ever again. But some of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel wtiters apparently moved to Alias, and it suddenly became a possibility again for me. The double-bill that was the season four premiere turned out to be more like season one than season three: still sttupid, but fun, and not annoying. So maybe there’s hope for Alias after all.