Stuart Herbert

Just a quick test to see if I can post using the latest Opera beta. If you can see this, the answer must be ‘yes’

Mmm … my belly full of jambalaya, an hour of Teen Titans on the old goggle box, and the latest hate mail powered by His Noodly Appendage.

Is it possible to have a better end to the week?

One of the great things about this holiday is Kristi introducing me to Full Metal Alchemist (no link to the official site; it’s flash-heavy, and doesn’t render for me in Firefox). She spent the summer collecting all the DVDs that are currently out (the first 8 disks are out over here in the UK), and it’s been great to just sit around in the cottage watching them all.

Rapture TV’s currently showing the series too, so we should get to see all the episodes on there whilst waiting for the remaining DVDs to be released over here.

If you haven’t seen Full Metal Alchemist, and you enjoy Japanese anime, try and find the time to catch an episode or two.

Came across GoGrinder this evening. It’s a downloadable Java app containing 347 practice problems for Go players to solve. There are thousands more problems available from other sites.

I struggle to find the time to play regularly, so I’m not very good. When I do play, Kristi normally beats me, and my teacher absolutely hammers me. Maybe this will help me a bit

… because I’ve been having too much fun playing with the v2 firmware upgrade for Line 6’s excellent Pod XT. I also picked up the additional amp packs, giving me 72 different amp models to enjoy. I picked up the songbook to St Anger this lunchtime (never been very good at learning music by ear), which gives me a nice excuse to crank up the volume over the weekend.

The Behringer DEQ unit I bought a couple of months back has been retired for the moment, until I find which machine the Delta/66 card has ended up in. I’ll have to make do with recording off the XT’s USB port for now, until I can hook the EQ unit up to the Delta/66’s A2D.

At some point, I really should make the time to record something. The last sizable bout of recording I did was back in 97. There again, the last gig I did was in May 92, and the less said about that the better.

All I want now is to upgrade my aging Roland GR-30, get an S/S/81 set of pickups for the Fat Strat (and maybe another set for the Charvel), and I’m in hog heaven.

Rob H - if you’re reading this - you still owe me that demo (Btw, he has a genuine Gibson SG, which I’m very jealous about)

I recently splashed out on a nice dual-xeon box. With 2 x 2.8 GHz 533MHz FSB cpus and onboard SCSI, it\’s really made it much easier to investigate and fix bugs in packages.

When I first built up the box, though, the main surprise was just how long it took to put Gentoo onto the machine. This thing is a compile-beast, it really is. But, partly because a lot of packages cannot safely be compiled in parallel, this machine spent a lot of the time running at far less than 100%. Boy was that dissappointing!

With a compile-beast box like this though, you quickly notice just how much of a bottleneck GNU\’s autoconf scripts are. I have a few ideas on what could be done to reduce this bottleneck, and I have some code that looks promising. It\’ll be a week or two before it\’s fit for public consumption.

… means that Newcastle won\’t be playing in the Champions\’ League next year. :( That\’s now two years without Champions\’ League football (we lost in the qualifying stages this year). With the cash injection coming Liverpool\’s way over the summer, getting back into the Champions\’ League next season is going to be a bigger challenge than ever.

Hats off to Sir Bobby and the team for getting to the Uefa Cup semi-final. We may have won nothing in the end, but Chelsea were the only other British club to manage a European semi-final.

Here\’s to next season!

… you know that it\’s time to tidy the computer room