Matter by Iain M. Banks

Last week I finished my freshly Amazon delivered hardback copy of Matter, by Iain M. Banks. I'm a long time lover of Mr Bank's Culture novels, since I first read Excession in my early teenage years, so I had high hopes for the latest. I have to say that I was not disappointed. Either I'm just very used to his writing style these days (I recently re-read all the Culture novels), or this latest outing is much more accessible for people not familiar with his style. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not I'm right, and whether or not it's a good thing.

It was another of those books I found myself unable to put down; It's a fantastically written novel, and very much like Player of Games, in the way in which Iain zooms in from a galactic to a personal scale. Iain also introduces some newer concepts in his universe, such as Shellworlds which you can consider a very large faux-planet with multiple civilisations leaving in distinct sections (or levels). It seems to have worked nicely. One thing you won't get much of is the Culture itself, despite one of the characters being from Special Circumstances.

If you're at all into your SciFi, I highly recommend this book. Although I would wait until it comes out in paperback. This was my first hardback for quite some time, and I'd simply forgotten just how much of a pain they were to store or hold, when sat in certain locations.

I'd also suggest keeping an eye out for the epilogue, which is hidden away, behind the appendix in my copy. Whilst it seems almost as an after thought, although most likely isn't, it makes a vast improvement on what I felt was a little bit of a clichéd end to the story.

Times are a-changin'

It seems times are changing. About 15 years ago Shannon Larratt started something called BME, which some of you may know. This eventually flourished into the current and ever popular modblog, over the last few years. Today Shannon announced that he will be relinquishing his part ownership and handing it over to his ex-wife, Rachel, in it's entirety.

I wish Shannon all the luck in the world in whatever he decides to do, and to thank him for what he's done for the modification culture. His work has certainly helped to shape a significant part of my beliefs over my recent years. The people I have met have been amongst the kindest, the politest and the most social people I've had the good fortune to deal with, and I only hope that with his absence that things continue.

ZFS - Making file systems sexy again?

Ok, so maybe not again. After all there's not much you can get that happy about when it comes to filesystems these days - a lot of the really exciting stuff has been done so far.

Like Resier[3|4], ZFS is one I'd heard about, did some research on but never considered using at all. The fact that it currently only runs on Solaris or via FUSE under Linux (which in itself can be considered to be a benefit, as the filesystem is recoverable and separate from the kernel - performance supposedly sucks though), had kind of put me off a bit.

If you're unfamiliar with ZFS and it's feature, then may I suggest taking a quick look-see at the ZFS wikipedia article. There are many pretty cool features in ZFS, such as the concept of pools (and everything that comes with them, such as growing pools with the file systems mounted - very slick), the sheer capacity, RAID-Z, etc. all which helps it to to sustain multiple disk failures in a RAID-Z2 array, much like you'd see in RAID-6, except this is acheived within the filesystem itself. Granted you might not see someone attacking your drives with a sledge, but you never know what might happen some days...

The video is certainly it's aimed at managers or some sort of technical head, but you cannot deny it. That. Is. awesome. I've been considering creating a small box, with multiple SATA hard disks in a separate enclosure (possibly attaching the enclosure to a mini, pico or nano ITX box) to create a home-grown NAS box and ZFS certainly seems interesting enough to consider as an option, considering that iSCSI, NFS and CIFS (aka SMB or Windows sharing) support is now built into the kernel (interesting decision perhaps?), plus Samba is running on Nexenta as well. My only hesitation is the work done on Nexenta - GNU tools sat on top of the OpenSolaris kernel. I'm familiar with the various tools used by this distro and it would speed up my understanding of what I'd be using, however the rate of packaging and development seems to flucutate. Playing with it in a virtual environment is going to be limiting at the end of the day, and my spares box won't cover something of this scale, so maybe I'll have to jump in with both feet Real Soon(TM)...

Does anyone have any practical experience with ZFS? Is it mature enough to trust my files and believe that I won't have to go through the pain of restorations?

Iron Man and why cinemas suck

First off let me say that I've tried not to give too much away, but I fear that I may've. If you're still to see Iron Man, then I'd recommend not reading this post after the 3rd paragraph.

So, I finally got the opportunity to see Iron Man last night. Myself and Tom headed to see it at the 20:30 showing in Longwell Green Bristol. The Vue cinema there tends to be a little less crowded, easier to park at and nice seats than the Odeon in Bath. We got there, a little later than I had hoped (which was entirely my fault), and ended up at seats near the front. This wasn't too bad though as my neck wasn't completely knackered by the end of the showing.

So the movie started, eventually, and a few minutes in it stopped. Lights up, adverts on. Now I appreciate that everyone can have technical problems, but over the last few times I've been to the cinema something like this has happened. In my opinion this is exactly why digital distribution is going to have to lead the way. The other issue is of course the age old desire of wanting to pause the film to drain the python. About half way through I really, really needed the loo and didn't want to leave. At the end of the film there was a horrendous queue and I just didn't want to wait, so we went home. The Vue employee was giving out tickets to see Iron Man again for free, but I decided not to take one and barged my way through. The thing that most annoyed me was the simple fact that I had to barge my way through. There was no provision for those of us who wanted to bypass this ridiculous offer of appeasement. Even funnier was the fact that the british public clearly didn't know what they were queuing for.

This kind of ruined the cinema experience for me, and thus I felt it had slightly diminished the film. Now don't get me wrong, Iron Man is an awesome film. It is undoubtedly the best comic conversion I've seen to date, which clearly demonstrates that having Marvel directly behind it is a good thing. The film is funny, entertaining and I wasn't wishing that it would hurry up at any point. I've only read a few of the Iron Man comics in the past, but I do remember the cartoon from my youth which I felt was good fun, although a little wet. In comparison to this I found that the Stark from the film was much more real and his change of character portrayed perfectly by Robert Downey Jr. I think Gwyneth made a perfect (not to mention "hwat") Ms Potts. My only concern with the film was that I felt parts of it were cut a little short and maybe could've been expanded on a little. The film is clearly setting the scene for a sequel (if this wasn't the case then possibly they've made a cock up there).

I'd really, really recommend seeing this film when you can. It's certainly one I'll be buying on DVD, and maybe the film that finally motivates me to buy a HD-DVD or BluRay device. Seriously go and see it. Even if you're not aware of the Iron Man story, or if you're not a hardcore comic fan you'll love it and won't really be missing out on much, except maybe the S.H.I.E.L.D. references.

Print margins off in Outlook 2003, when using a custom font

We had a bit of a weird one come in today. A customer, using a specific custom font, had found that HTML emails using this font would have the right hand side of the text missing, effectively cutting off part of the email, when printed. Forwarding the email to yourself would fix the issue, since a forwarded email is indented I pretty quickly figured it was down to margins.

Now I was aware before this that the IE engine was used to print documents from Outlook, but what I wasn't aware of was that the print/page settings in IE affect the print also. Turns out that the File > Page Settings, Margins need to match the ones in Outlook to reliably get everything output right (in some cases). If it's not already been set IE will default to using 0.75 inches, which in the UK comes out at 19.05 mm, where as Outlook appears to default to 130mm (its actually measured in cm in the GUI oddly - nothing like consistency gents!).

Glad as I was that this resolved the issue for them, I wasn't happy about the prospect of telling the users to manually change these settings. I'm very much a believer that users should use the system, and not be bothered about stupid things like this (plus I like playing sysadmin god and making stuff just happen, then telling the users it's "just magic"). Thankfully the settings are sensibly stored in the registry (and rather handily documented in KB236777), meaning that it was possible for us to distribute the fixed settings to our client's users via a quick registry import in the logon script (I chose to use HKCU, rather than HKLM for various reasons, but it is possible to apply per computer rather than per user). It would've been very much possible to also take care of this by creating an ADM(x) file and distributing it via GPO, however I chose to do it via the logon script for 2 reasons;

  1. Someone looking at the script in question can see my reference, in a comment, to the call ID
  2. It was just much quicker using a reg import \\path\to\file.reg