PigBlog

Are The Green Mile or The Shawshank Redemption on permanent repeat by at leats one channel late at night?

Every time I’m up in the early hours (which is unusual- it only generally happens if I drive late at night, which I don’t do often, as I like to be awake to drive, then have trouble getting to sleep) one of the above films is on.

I have no problem with them: they are both fine movies, but it’s *always* the case that if I watch TV after midnight, they seem to be the best or only option.

I don’t know if this is a parody, but if not, by Jebus, he’s dumb.

I lived in Wolverhampton for a few years, and worked there for 4 more, and quite like it, so this rather made me giggle.

I’ve installed Windows 7 on my work PC, after a few years with XP64.

[talks very quietly and looks embarrased]
It’s actually very good, and quick too. It even installs fast, and found all the hardware in my HP workstation without any fiddling.

Damn. I’m suppose to hate MS software, but there’s little to hate. It’s quicker than the (admittedly bogged down with crap I’ve installed) XP64 that was on the machine. and it just works, mostly. I think that a few people may have been told ‘must do better’ after the clusterfuck that was Windows Vistarse.

Even the copy Outlook 2010 Beta I installed is less dreadful than it could have been, even if the interface is far too cluttered. I’ve not used the rest of Office yet.

[shuffles off into a dark corner, in embarrasment]

I’ve been mucking about trying to come up with something lightweight to back up my neighbour’s computers to their NAS device. The unit comes with some software, but it doesn’t handle multiple users well, and the Mac version broke itself.

Yes, there’s a Mac involved. I wasn’t keen. I’ve never really ‘got’ Macs, and I get frustrated with them hiding some of the complexities. This is, of course, just what their fans love. Anyway, back to that in a minute.

The XP & Vista PCs are easy: a quck robocopy script along the lines of:

robocopy "%userprofile%" \\NAS\%username% /E /XJ /r:0

Does the job nicely. It will even skip unchanged files, even if it’s a bit lazy in that it just dumps the whole user profile.

On to the Mac. I borrowed an old G4 Macbook, and got frustrated with the single mouse button, but after a while the interface begins to make sense, ish.

I thought about Time Machine, the Apple-supplied utility- even finding a version that would talk to a CIFS network share. It does what it says, to be fair, but my old frustrations return- it is intended to fill up a disk with backups, then manage those backups by deleting the oldest and filling up again. This isn’t good for a shared filespace, and it’s not configurable. That’s good for a user who doesn’t care and has a drive for backups alone though- in that case it will ‘just work’.

The answer once again is the salvation of the shell prompt: OSX is after all FreeBSD with an Apple layer on the top. A bit of googling reveals you can mount a CIFS share from a command line (even if it doesn’t appear in the GUI), and unmount it afterwards.

OSX also follows the Unix-like idea of user files in a home directory, so dumping that directory does a reasonable job of a backup:

mount_smbfs //username:password@NAS/macbackup /Volumes/backup
cp -R ~/* /Volumes/backup
umount /Volumes/backup

and if you name the file backup.command (well, anything.command), it can be launched from the Finder, and it then runs in a terminal. You have to pre-create the mount point beforehand.

Result! This isn’t quite as slick as Robocopy as there’s no checking if the file exists, but hey ho.

While I’m talking about Walsall MBC, They’re busy pushing HomeAccess via their twitter feed.

This is the Government-sponsored scheme to provide broadband access and a PC to families on low incomes.

That’s, I suppose, quite a noble plan, but I do wonder about priorities here, and indeed if the educational benefits will really do what is claimed.

There are already PCs for public use at libraries and in schools.

From what I’ve seen of computer use of kids at home:

1. The young kids play games.
2. The older kids use MSN, Facebook, or Bebo, and download illegal music from P2P sites*.
3. Teenage boys discover the joys of gigabytes of free pr0n*.
4. All of them download crap of the internet and install spyware, crapware, and viruses*.

Call me an bitter old cynic, but how many of these PCs will be either sold, or knackered inside a year?

How much money will some company who bunged BECTA enough cash make out of the public purse to provide the support?

How much money will Microsoft make out of the public purse?

Is Internet access at home really a necessity? Should there be higher priorities from state funding?

How about all the families that don’t meet the requirements but cannot afford a PC and broadband? Plenty of people I know fall into that bracket.

Discuss.

*Yes, I know: the PCs will be

Pre-set with parental controls – this means unsuitable content is blocked from the first time you turn it on.

But Internet blocking and security software is not foolproof- even if you’re an experienced techie, never mind a parent with no Internet experience. I’ve lost count of the number of family PCs I’ve cleaned up for a favour.

So then, Walsall Illuminations is no more, and it’s permanent.

[edit]
No it isn’t. Christ, they can’t even get their publicity straight.

Council leisure chief Barry Sanders said today the lights would be sold off and the proceeds used to improve the Arboretum.

or

“Let’s be absolutely clear on this – Walsall Illuminations are not being scrapped,” said Councillor Bird.

It’s very true that it did make a loss in recent years (I’ll come back to that in a moment), but it did al least give Walsall something that all the other towns in the conurbation didn’t have, and raise awareness of the Arboretum (which really is a rather nice place).

Anyway. On to the loss of money. The real losses started when Walsall MBC chucked a pile of cash the way of some consultants (PDF). Read the recommendations for a giggle: it’s full of the usual halfwitted marketing bollocks from a bunch of, well, halfwits.

Walsall Illuminations was always the same thing: For the kids it’s a bit of ‘Oooh shiny’, a few tame fairground rides and their TV characters, for the adults it’s a nice walk around a park with some nice decorations.

What can’t have helped was the way people were actively being turned away on the last night one year (after not publicising the earlier closure). We managed to persuade them to let my sister-in-law and niece in with our pre-paid tickets, and we went to the pub, and a load of other people drove off pissed off, which is a shame. Clearly we (council tax payers in Walsall) cannot subsidise the old Illuminations to the tune of £200k, but would we have to, if Walsall MBC hadn’t managed to cock it up so well?

Anyway, the plan is that after the planned work in the Arboretum, parts of it will be lit in Autumn, Winter & Spring, which may well be nice, but I strongly doubt that will bring anyone in from outside the town, which is a shame. Walsall doesn’t have much to attract anyone in to the borough, and now has one less thing.

Black Country Kid’s comments.

Perhaps TCP/IP is less robust than we might think?

Is this a case of IP over avian carriers that can’t fly in snow, or has www.dominos.co.uk got temperature-dependent links to franchises?

Meh. Sorry, I do not wish to speak to anyone. That’s why I order online.

Once again the Bumpkin managed to suggest lunch and a few pints on a freezing cold day .

Yesterday involved a couple or six pints in Wolverhampton & Wednesfield, followed by a trip back to Walsall via Bloxwich for a nice curry and…..more beer. A very pleasant day, all in all: The pubs were nice, the company pleasant, and the chav factor on the buses was low too. Maybe the cold kept them at home?

I want one.