Matthew Walton’s Blog

So what have I been doing during my latest absence from blogging? Well, as might not be surprising to most of you, I’ve been playing City of Heroes. Finally got Nettle to level 36, got picked up by a very good random group (apart from the defender’s tendency to try and snipe things and get killed, which is totally not necessary when there are other snipers on the team) and did the second respec trial. Dead easy really – must get round to doing the first one some time!

At the weekend I installed my new hard drive. It’s a 200GB SATA drive (Seagate and very quiet) exactly the same as my existing 200GB SATA drive. It replaces two IDE drives (noisy), one of which was starting to get unreliable. All is well of course until one gets around to installing Windows XP Home on it (Linux was already on the existing SATA drive; Windows was on the dodgy 40GB IDE which is now headed for oblivion). In theory of course, one should be able to load the SATA drivers at boot time, because the XP installer doesn’t have SATA drivers in it (this is the SP2 version, couldn’t they have bundled a few?). So then comes the first big shock: Windows XP is incapable of loading drivers from a CD at boot time. After I stopped swearing about this, I found that my motherboard comes with a couple of floppies specifically so that you can install Windows XP on SATA drives using its on-board SATA controller. The trouble is, I have no floppy drive in my computer.

A few minutes with a screwdriver and mum and dad’s PC corrected that.

Unfortunately, loading drivers from both disks didn’t help Windows see the drives. Ho hum. Check the motherboard manual just in case it says something. Why so it does, here’s a clue – there are only drivers for the SATA controller which is linked to the RAID chips, not the normal one which the disks were plugged into. How very odd. Plug the disks into the other one, Windows sees them, installs onto the new one just fine.

The trouble is, Linux doesn’t like the RAID controller and I never did put any effort into getting it to boot off it. So now I need to get Windows liking the normal SATA controller enough so that I can swap both disks back to it. As it turned out, that was pretty easy, because the motherboard driver CD has those drivers on it. Tip for Microsoft: when Longhorn comes out, I know you’ll have put SATA drivers in the install kernel by then, but could you please allow extra drivers to be read from arbitrary locations in an ISO9660 filesystem? Thanks.

Then I had to get the Linux bootloader (GNU Grub) installed on the new disk so that Linux could be booted again. Stick in AMD64 Gentoo 2004.2 LiveCD, boot off it (non-framebuffer kernel, for some reason the framebuffer on the CD doesn’t work for me). It comes up with both disks visible, so I mount / and /boot and chroot into the installed system, run grub, some panic with the config file and disk designations, forgot the root= line, haven’t got the pretty pictures woring yet, but it does boot and work fine.

So that’s all over and done with. Except that my music is mysteriously missing – will have to stick the 120GB IDE drive back in at some point and copy it over again.

Anyway, last night I got my hands on LEGO Star Wars, which is to be perfectly frank an extremely silly game. Short in story terms – it only took me a few hours to play through the entirety of Episode I – but lots of fun. It’s not often a game has me laughing out loud. Seeing little LEGO men fighting with lightsabers is just too good. It also looks beautiful. They recommend nVidia cards as they use Shader Model 3.0 and nVidia’s fancy shadow technology, and I’m sure it looks excellent on those, but it’s jaw-dropping enough on my Radeon 9800 Pro. Since I’m intending to get an nVidia card next time, I should get to see it in even more glory soon (the shadows are a bit lax, I must admit).

So it won’t take me long to finish Episode III (not too much of a spoiler for the movie actually, as there’s hardly any explanation of what’s going on beyond a brief bit of text at the start of the level, this is probably why it was allowed to be released before the movie comes out), so what then? Free play mode of course! In keeping with the general silliness of the entire game, you can go back and play any level you have completed with any character you’ve unlocked, in order to find all the secrets, get more money, and buy more silly accessories. Which include moustaches for your LEGO characters. Since it’s impossible to find half this stuff using the characters you’re given in story mode (I’ve already run into a few places I need people who can jump higher – why Jar Jar Binks can jump higher than a Jedi I do not know, but I suppose they had to give him something to do) this should prove interesting. Or at least highly amusing.

Definitely the best Star Wars game I’ve heard of since Jedi Academy.

Last night I cooked dinner, and it was quite successful, so here’s what I did.

Firstly, I took a nice piece of pork tenderloin fillet and slit it along the side in order to lay it open. This was then covered with cling film and hit a few times with a mallet to help it spread out a little more, although this didn’t have all that much effect so it might not have been worth the effort. It was fun though.

Then I took a small handful of sage leaves (the garden is just starting to produce enough herbs for us to harvest again) and finely chopped them, along with half an onion. These were added to breadcrumbs made from one thickish slice of bread, and the whole thing was chopped a bit using the hand blender’s chopping attachment (which had just been used to make the breadcrumbs). To complete the stuffing, the zest of just about half a lemon was added to it.

This mixture was then used to stuff the pork fillet. A few knobs of butter were added, then the whole thing was tied up with string to keep it together, and placed in our fabulous non-stick roasting dish.

To this was added a sliced eating apple and half a can of cider. The lid was put on, and it was placed in the oven at 170 degrees C for about half an hour.

After the pork was cooked (checked by spearing the thickest meat part with a fork to see if the juices were clear), it was removed from the liquid and placed on a plate to rest in the top oven, which was warm due to the bottom oven having been on for a while. The roasting tin, which is hob safe (did I mention it’s fantastic?) was put on a ring and the liquid in it boiled. I used a whisk to break up the apple pieces, then added salt and pepper and butter and cornflour/water paste to thicken it. It needed extra water a few times, but formed a nice apple-cidery sauce to go with the pork.

To serve, the pork was de-stringed, sliced into thick slices and placed on a plate with the sauce, some cauliflower and broccoli, and roast new potatoes. Delicious!

Even my family liked it.

So I’m going to GUADEC! It’s official, because I’ve booked the flights and hotel. Now let’s just hope I get on well with those GNOME hackers I’ve never met.

I know this is a horribly short entry, but I’ve got a lot going on in my head and I’m not sure how to set it down, or even which bits to set down. I’ll come up with something — eventually.

I just changed my spam karma settings somewhat. Comments on entries over 14 days old will now be deleted without question — no filtering of any kind takes place. Since most of my spam is on older entries, this should help avoid too much extra work for the server. If you really really want to say something about an old entry, contact me some other way, and if you don’t know how to do that, I suggest that you can probably figure out a reasonable email address from the URL of this site that will reach me.

I’ve also tweaked a few other things. Since I hardly ever get comments anyway, I probably won’t notice the difference, but feel free to complain if you think that you’re not getting the opportunity to say whatever it is you’ve got to say.

So the Pope has died. There are worse ways to go I suppose. He did some good while he was around, but one can’t set aside his perpetuation of the Catholic position on such things as contraception. But I shall not go into that sort of thing here, readers of this blog know my theological position and something of what goes with it.

Tonight was a night of Sci-Fi on the BBC. First on BBC One, the second episode of the new series of Doctor Who. Not bad, although I’m disappointed that they seem determined to do single-episode stories.

Second, and more noteable, was a remake of The Quatermass Experiment. It was originally a six-part series broadcast live in the fifties, now it’s a two-hour live broadcast on BBC Four. Lots of tension. The basic plot concerns a manned rocket which travels unexpectedly far from Earth, and eventually returns, carrying… something. It starred David Tennant, who is, it is said, currently under consideration for the role of the Doctor, since Christopher Ecclestone has left. He seems to have suitable potential.

As people on WonkyIRC and various bits of IM and Real Life will know, I’m working on another story. It’s coming along very well by my standards — I like the basis of it, I like the characters I’ve got so far, and I even have a vague idea where it’s going. To top it all, I rather like the prose I have too.

But you’re not going to see it until it’s ready. It’s a bit like Grolsch, but without being beer, or even a beverage.