2013 — 11 July: Thursday

As it becomes cooler¹ so the amount of sleep I generally clock up rises. Excellent. I've also scanned dear Mama's bank statements to confirm I need do nothing else this month before the care-home takes its next bite. That's quite enough real work for one day, so I shall grab a few more bites of my own of fresh stuff ahead of my weekend visitors and then make sure I'm in time for my lunch date.

Heedless until now...

... I didn't even think to look, but the Synology NAS had logged the "improper shutdown" caused by the half-hour power cut last Monday, so at least I now know it was at 18:38. Recovery was both automatic and trouble-free which is what I'd expect given that the NAS wasn't doing anything beyond the old military "hurry up and wait for instructions" at the time. Its main 'working' job until I think of anything else is simply to hold files en route to the media player. I do use it as data backup, of course, but since it's slower than any of my other online disk storage that's about it. It sits there in (I hope) a typically-Linux reliable good mood just as my inhouse web servers have done for the last decade and more.

It never occurred to me when I first entered the I.T. industry back in February 1974 that I would ever be hosting, within easy kicking range of my desk, more computing power and data storage than a typical mainframe² of that era. Nor did I ever expect to take on typical system admin tasks in my own distinctly un-airconditioned³ living room. Funny old world.

Steve Bell's cartoon — policies direct — is a thing of beauty and a joy to behold. Unlike 50% of the titles here:

Oh mama! One of yesterday's patches fixes a TrueType font parsing issue in the GDI+ library that allows remote code execution. (Link) Is nothing safe?

Thanks, Mr Postie

My evening listening can now be the Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell CDs that both showed up together this morning before I set off for lunch. Now, why do you suppose I forgot to unpack my shopping into the fridge for several hours, yet did manage to put the milk in there? Odd, even for me.

And, had I only paid closer attention to the fact that the Pat Metheny album ("As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls") was released on the ECM label back in 1981, I could have been enjoying it for over 30 years, dagnabbit. Meanwhile, a young mandolin bluegrass⁴ player yclept Christopher Thile has been having tracks from his latest album ("Bach: Sonatas and Partitas #1") ...

... featured on the BBC steam wireless — though I'm not planning to pay the current asking price of £17-14 for a pre-order import copy of it, delightful though it sounds.

Binary bits on the edge

There are, I belatedly discover — sarcasm, Mounce? — distinct differences in programming ability. Whoever wrote the TextPad editor I use daily did whatever was needed to make sure that it never gets upset as it tries to write a file back to a hard drive that is (as it were) not yet up to speed, and is thus "not responding". Whichever (idiot) in the Seattle Empire wrote the equivalent functional portion of code in their otherwise quite useful "Snipping Tool" took no such elementary precaution. I've crashed it. Again. Still, when Windows components crash (not "if", notice), they generally manage to reload themselves even when (not "if", notice) you can kiss the in-flight data a fond farewell.

Obviously that bit of function has been well-rehearsed.

Footnotes

¹  The usual behaviour, of course, for an average UK summer.
²  There's a photo of the very ICL 1904 I first programmed for money here.
³  In 1976 (the summer of the heat wave just after we'd moved into our little 3-bed semi in Old Windsor) I was working on a six-week assignment (writing a book about ICL's miniature equivalent of CICS, funnily enough) that took me into the vast machine hall in the Bracknell location. On one occasion there was a power cut, and the hall became remarkably hot remarkably quickly. When standby generators brought the aircon back on a wall of blessed cool air descended like a safety curtain. In a way, that was more impressive than all the development machines on test or being tinkered with in their various stages of completion.
⁴  As eny fule kno, grass ain't blue, surely?