Crikey, what a week. But first, meet JD Cronise - spectacularly-monikered and hirsute frontman of George R R Martin-inspired Texan thrash metallers The Sword:

The Sword played at The Wedgewood Rooms on Wednesday night, and it was an excellent gig … excellent if you like ridiculously downtuned thrash riffs and lyrics that make HP Lovecraft turn in his grave, that is.

You can read my review of their new album Gods Of The Earth, which was released this week (and is streaming in full on their MySpace, too), but unfortunately I can’t share the live review with you just yet …

… because, as you may already know, I lost pretty much the entirety of yesterday as far as productivity is concerned, thanks to one of my hard drives dying on me.

The good news is that I’m up and running on an all-Linux system (Ubuntu, as you asked), and that I managed to rescue almost all of my important documents (bar a few reviews and what was to be this week’s Friday Flash, which I haven’t had the time to rewrite yet - hence the lack thereof).

Also, the magic of cloud computing means that all my emails and contacts (and certain completely irreplaceable documents) are floating out in the aether where I can retrieve them at will, just as they should be … which just goes to show I learned from the last time my hardware conspired to destroy me.

The bad news is that the drive that died appears to be definitively dead beyond any form of resurrection, so it’s time to invest in a USB external drive for backups, and to look at signing up for the ultimate security of Jungle Disk. Soon.

Writing about music

As mentioned above, saw The Sword on Wednesday and they were totally thrashtastic. Hardware death has meant I missed a scheduled article on TDP last night, but I managed to get up early enough to make this morning’s self-imposed deadline. Go me!

Writing about books

Finished and review the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Vol 2, which I thought was on the whole a pretty decent little anthology.

Have yet to approach the Book Of The New Sun review; still stewing over how to say what I want to say. Next in the queue will almost certainly have to be Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces, because everyone seems to be going nuts for it, and I loved a few of his short pieces.

Writing about other stuff

Pipeline, pipeline, pipeline; I’m too harried and hurried to go into details this week, I’m afraid.

Books and magazines seen

A double-thick issue #12 of Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest.

An ARC of Subterranean’s reprint of Stephenson’s Snow Crash (though before you get too jealous, it’s not a production-grade copy, just a bound proof).

Coda

As you can see, I’m wrapping it up quickly today; the last 36 hours have been more than hectic enough, and I have yet to compile and post Friday Free Fiction at Futurismic … having lost the use of Windows Live Writer is probably the only serious regret I have about my computer dying …

… well, that and the prospect of having to re-rip a 400+ strong CD collection. Still, it’ll be fun hearing some old albums I’ve not listened to in a while.

And so, with a distinct (or at least comparative) minimum of blather, I shall bid you all a good weekend and head off for a hard-earned Friday Curry Of Justice.

Hasta luego, amigos.

Ok, I know it’s not precisely his fault. But after years of building up a good head of antipathy, I’ve finally lost my rag with Microsoft products.

Mid-way through posting this morning’s Dreaded Press review, the file system on my secondary hard drive collapsed irreparably. I tried accessing the partition from a Ubuntu live CD, but the drive read as being raw and unformatted, so it’s reformatting now.

This could have been much worse. Indeed, it was much worse last time it happened, as I only had one hard drive then - meaning that when it died, the entire machine was DOA and I lost almost all my documents along with the Windows install. To be fair, though, that was caused by we screwing around with settings I should have left well alone.

After that incident, I bought a second HDD, splitting the system so that Wind0ze ran off the c: drive and the My Documents folder lived on the f:. “That way,” I thought, “when Wind0ze dies again my files will be intact and I can rescue them!”

Naturally, it was the (newer) f: drive that went down this morning.

This isn’t a major tragedy, as I take weekly backups every Sunday and have almost all my writing and business data saved to a USB stick; plus the machine still runs, although it’s slow as all hell because it keeps hunting for files that aren’t there any more. It is, however, a major irritation. I now have around 400 CDs worth of music collection to re-rip. Again.

So, it’s time to take the long-threatened plunge. Once I’ve made a list of all the Firefox settings and passwords on this machine, and a list of the programs I have installed (and that I actually use with any regularity), I’m going to completely wipe Wind0ze off of this machine and put Ubuntu on it.

Yup - The Hall Of Mirrors is about to become a 100% open-source household, and f*ck the learning curve. I’m sick of being at the mercy of poor programming and legacy filesystems; I’ll find it easier to accept problems when they’re caused by my own ignorance rather than someone else’s incompetence.

This is a very long way of saying “things may be a little quiet here for a day or two”, though I hope to be up and running pretty swiftly.

This is a minority interest post, I’m guessing.

If you aren’t kind of fascinated (or or utterly and irredeemably geeked out) by huge racks of the most powerful computer hardware on the planet, you’ll have no interest in the picture below, or the others like it in this gallery of supercomputer images at Guardian Unlimited.

[Image: hardware from the supercomputer MDGRAPE-3 at RIKEN in Japan; image credit - RIKEN.]

I’m all stuffed up with a nice seasonal cold. Skilled craftspersons among VCTB’s audience who would like to make me feel better are welcome to build me one of these.

[Via Boing Boing]

I wish my father, a computer engineer and employee of IBM long before I was born, was still alive to see an IBM 1401 Mainframe computer being toured as part of a musical show that features interpretive dance.

He’d probably have been quite disgusted, but in a good way.

Following on from my mention of the Dune Project roleplay sim in Second Life, here’s an article on New World Notes that talks about another roleplay sim that looks far and away better developed, coded and styled:

[Image lifted from original article at New World Notes blog; please contact if removal is required.]

“There’s a pretty elaborate backstory to CoLA , but to sum up: you are playing in a world that saw the Apocalypse but forgot to die. Most of humanity is wiped out, undead, mutated or cursed. As a role-player you get a nice spread of species to choose from, so no matter what mood you’re in, we have you covered.”

Much like the Dune Project, it looks a little too hardcore for me - I left my roleplay days behind long ago, not through any sense of shame but through lack of time to devote to them. But it’s interesting to see these things develop - sure, there are plenty of MMORPGs out there, but the way that Second Life can act as an adaptable host platform for a multitude of different user-created games is nothing short of unique. When the server code goes open-source and peer-to-peer, things are going to get very strange very quickly.

Precious, precious computer innards - I love them so:

Okay, so that’s a bit of a cop-out for a Friday photo, but as previously explained I’ve not had much of a chance to get out of the house on photographic missions. Even if I hadn’t had the computer crisis, the weather has been far from conducive to leaving the centrally-heated comfort of The Hall of Mirrors. So, PC innards is what you get. I rather like the way they look, as it happens, and I’m considering keeping the sides off of the case on a permanent basis - not just for aesthetics, you understand; it also improves the airflow. Ahem. Continue reading “Friday Photo Blogging: Electronic intestines”

You probably have no idea how much of a relief it is for me to be able to see this:

Continue reading “It’s alive … alive!“

You know how they always say the screwing with your .dll files is a profoundly stupid idea?

They aren’t lying. Continue reading “Fr1d4y phuXx0r3d boXx0r”

As the DRM wars heat up, and the rise of peer-to-peer sharing shows little sign of stopping (despite ineffective and draconian litigation against children and people who don’t even own computers), the smarter computer games companies are looking at new ways to monetise their products. Continue reading “Product placement”