Monthly Archives: August 2005

Beth's Reading Log, Books

His name is Fforde – Jasper Fforde

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Remember how I waxed lyrical over Gregory Maguire’s rewriting of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, ‘Cinderella’ and other well known fairy tales? I’ve found another author who does the same for nursery rhymes. And fairy tales. And any other literary reference he can cram into a sentence.

I ordered Jasper Fforde’s newest book, ‘The Big Over Easy’ because of its blurb – who wouldn’t want to read about the murder of Humpty Dumpty, I thought? Especially if the DI is named Jack Spratt, with a DS named Mary Mary? Sounds like fun. Little did Richard know that he would be subjected to a contant barrage of impromtu readings and ‘I can’t believe he did it AGAIN‘s on the plane to Canada this summer.

Fforde has created a world in which popular culture is literary – ever want to go see a full-audience-participation production of Richard III, a la Rocky Horror Picture Show? (‘When is the winter of our discontent?’ bellows the audience. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ answers the actor…) See more of what it’s like in ‘The Eyre Affair’. Ever wonder how many neuroses a large egg might have living in today’s society? Find out in ‘The Big Over Easy’. And I’m sure there will be many more interesting questions and answers when I’ve read the whole of Fforde’s output to date. Because I’m that hooked.

It’s not just that his sense of humour saturates his books – his website, and advertisements in the back of his novels are amazingly funny as well. Ever wonder how toast got to be such a popular breakfast food? Maybe it’s because of the work of the sterling people at the ‘Toast Marketing Board’. And wouldn’t it be neat to be able to own a pet that has been extinct for hundreds, or even millions of years? Leave it to Pete and Dave at ‘Pete and Dave’s Dodo Emporium’ – all dodos guaranteed non-feral!

All I can say is that I’ve always wanted to meet Mr. Rochester, and Thursday Next, the heroine of ‘The Eyre Affair’ gets to to this, and change the course of one of the best-loved books of all time. What avid reader wouldn’t want to be able to do that? Please, meet Jasper Fforde’s creations in person – they are well worth your time.

The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next) The Big Over Easy

Computers/Technology

Tiger Upgrade

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So this afternoon, I finally made the jump to MacOS X 10.4 Tiger.

I eventually decided to take the chance to clean up the machine by doing a clean install, rather than any sort of upgrade. It’s not quite as drastic an action as first sounds, as Tiger has a really powerful migration wizard that pulls almost all the settings, files and all my installed applications across and sets them up. It is provided for people who have bought a new Mac – and is very quick considering that in my case it was shifting a large number of applications and matching the installs into Panther. Basically after an hour, 95% of my old setup was up and running on the new machine, without me once having to reach for the original installs – try that on a Windows PC! (Take a look here for more details on the Migration Assistant)

The only problem areas were where I expected, Norton Internet Security (requires an upgrade to work), Missing Sync (again requires an upgrade), and the e-mail setup which I had hacked together under 10.3, and to be honest wasn’t expecting the wizard to be able to cope with.

The e-mail setup has actually taken me several hours to sort out, primarily because Apple have changed the way that fetchmail and postfix are setup. Most of the setup was just a matter of working through Postfix Enabler, which I was able to accomplish pretty quickly. They are now charging $9.99 for the enabler (just over £5), but for the hassle it saves, it is well worth the cost. However fetchmail was another matter, and isn’t configured by the enabler.

As usual there was a multitude of suggestions as to how to enable fetchmail. The first I came across was linked from the Postfix Enabler, however the big clanger in this one is that it installs a fresh copy of fetchmail, when Tiger includes it already. Postfix Enabler makes use of a new Tiger feature, launchd, so I tried to find a solution that would launch fetchmail in a similar manner. Ultimately I used the instructions towards the bottom of the comments on this page. It’s still a slight bit of a fudge, as the last couple of comments state, as it’s using a sleep command to trick launchd slightly. However I imagine that a better solution will appear with time.

As far as I am aware, I’ve not lost any incoming e-mail in the changeover – although apologies in advance if something does go astray. Tomorrow I’ll give the whole setup a bit more of a workout, and hopefully sort out Missing Sync and Norton.

Church

Ooops, Thats Another Fine Mess The Anglican Church Has Got Into

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This article in the Times raised a smile, although I feel a good deal of sympathy for the priest involved.

Basically, the vicar of Ealing in West London has been elected Bishop of the Lake Malawi diocese in Central Africa, following an almost twenty year relationship with the diocese. During that time he has raised over £250,000 for projects in the diocese, visited frequently, and even arranging hospital treatment in the UK for the previous Bishop for the cancer that ultimately killed him.

However there is a slight problem, the diocese is very conservative in their theology, and the vicar of Ealing is not. In fact he used to lead the Modern Churchpeoples Union.

The church in Central Africa is now busily trying to unlect their new Bishop, despite him winning a significant majority in the election, using eclesiastical law to find a problem with the process of election.

All in all it’s another embarassing bit of worldwide publicity for the Anglican Church. Basically the regular electors elected the man on the basis of having met him and his actions, and yet the whole ongoing war within the Church has resulted in other parts of the church abusing it’s own powers to unelect the duly appointed bishop. Father Jake offers a pretty succinct statement of the whole situation in a recent posting, in the USA, which seems just as relevant to this.

Computers/Technology

Developer Developer Developer 2 Bookings Open

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DDD

Back in July, I posted that the next Developer Developer Developer day had been announced. As of Friday, Microsoft started taking registrations, so get your booking in quick!

The Developer Developer Developer web site has been revamped, including a massive list of proposed sessions which will eventually be voted down to a final agenda.

Just to reiterate, the event is entirely free, all you have to be able to do is get to Reading on 22nd October. If you are a working developer, it is well worth the effort to attend.

General

So You Think Your Fuel Is Expensive?

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Whilst we were over in Canada, one of the big grumbles was about the price of fuel, much the same as the rest of the world. From our point of view, despite the price rises, the cost to fill up our gas-guzzling rental was still less than the cost to fill up our 50mpg VW Golf, so it was still pretty cheap.

Scot Hacker posted a blog entry making the same point, and linking to a CNN list of fuel prices around the world quoting figures from March 2005, and putting the UK in seventh place behind a number of our European neighbours, and all significantly more than North American prices.

Anyway, I know our UK prices have been climbing too, so I thought I’d see if there were some newer UK figures. The AA have a monthly report on UK and International fuel prices, the most recent being July 2005.

It makes interesting reading. In the UK, the average price for petrol was 88.66 pence per litre for petrol, and 92.73 pence per litre for diesel. That puts us in fifth place for petrol prices, but most expensive for diesel. As a comparison, petrol is 35.63 pence per litre for petrol and 37.97 pence per litre for diesel in the USA, less than half the price of the majority of Europe.

Of course, as Scot is right to point out in his article the price of fuel is not really a free market, with most countries in Europe taxing fuel heavily, whilst others in the world subsidise the cost. The UK of course comes into the former category, where our fuel tax has always been regarded as high, leading in particular to the Fuel Protests in 2000. The Wikipedia has an article comparing the rates of fuel tax in the UK, Canada, the USA and China, and looking at who pays what, and where it goes.