It’s the end of May, and that signals the end of yet another TV season. Inspired by Matt’s season wrap-up, I thought I’d sum up some of the stuff I’ve been watching. (There are probably more than a few spoilers in here).

First up, the powerhouse of Lost has finished it’s 3rd season. After a meandering 6-part mini-series to start the run, this really started to go places. Sun/Jin and Charlie episodes had the same boring flashbacks they always do, but the rest of the season really started moving forward. Highlights include Desmond’s visions of the future started bringing a much more peculiar twist to the show (since everything else is apparently pseudo-scientifically explainable); the exploration of The Others and Dharma (and “the purge”) was great, particularly the insane episode where we finally meet Jacob (yes, he does appear for a few seconds); newcomer Andrew Divoff as the apparently unkillable Mikhail; and that flash forward ending and all of it’s implications. While they could easily jump the shark (yet another plot-vital hatch, you say?), I think we’ll see this through to a satisfying conclusion.

Next is Life On Mars. I’ve only watched season 1, but thoroughly enjoying it. We constantly want to know why John Simm’s character is in the situation he is in (trapped in the past, somehow) and figure out his hallucinations, but that frequently gets side-lined by the excellent DCI Hunt. A man in the mold of The Sweeney, he’s a great character that proves to be the real driving force. Can’t wait to see the second season soon.

Another long-since-aired show I’ve been watching, Curb Your Enthusiasm is one of the consistently best comedy series from the US. Larry David, as a caricature of himself is superb, the semi-improvised style is fresh and reinforces some of the excruciating situations the lead gets himself in. Best described as “what would happen if you didn’t have that voice in your head telling you to stop, ever”, if you haven’t seen “The Group”, you don’t know how painful comedy can be.

More comedy, this time in the form of Peep Show. I’m late to this as well, having watched all 4 seasons in the space of a few weekends recently, but I’m very impressed by this Mitchell and Webb series. Despite fairly well explained character motivations, and effective resets every week, Jez and Mark repeatedly surprise, repulse and entertain. As with all comedy, the terrifying thing is seeing small elements of yourself in the characters and thinking you might do the same in their situation; the comedy duo play perfectly on this.

For the sci-fi fans, Battlestar Galactica goes from strength to strength. This season had a reasonable amount of filler (who cares what’s going on with the labour disputes or the chief?), but also some pretty big hits. The rise and fall of Starbuck, the fall and fall of Gaius Baltar, the increasingly maddening delusions of Six/Baltar, the wrath and authority of General Adama, and the increasing peeks into Cylon society (the ship-hybrids, for example), there’s a lot of meat to this season. With the surprise ending, I would say the next (and final) season is going to be great.

Finally, Heroes. I don’t mind saying that I hated the first few episodes of this. The plot dragged, the characters were dull, and the acting was appalling (who hired the guy that plays Peter? They deserve a slap). I stopped watching after about three episodes, it was that painful. After being convinced by a number of people, I forced myself to watch another few and got hooked. The acting is still woeful (barring guest appearances by the likes of Christopher Eccleston), but the storyline quickly picks up. I’m a sucker for big, well-planned, interweaving stories and this is a masterclass in that. Everything converges, and there’s plenty in the background for second viewings (or dedicated fan communities) to be worthwhile. The ending is a bit anti-climactic but the season as a whole is well-executed.

I’m missing more than a few things here, but that’s the cream. Looking forward to next season, but the off-season should also be decent (The 4400 and The Dead Zone return very soon).

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a piece called Ubuntu and Storage about my ideas for both upgrading to Ubuntu (from Windows, it is an upgrade) and setting up a better storage solution. I’m going to focus on the latter part here.

I have data that I never want to lose or have to recreate: photos, music, documents, and a wealth of other stuff. I’ve considered backing up to DVD but I’ve had so many back experiences with them (another CRC error, you say?), that it’s not an option. Instead a RAID array seemed like the obvious choice.

If you want a decent personal NAS solution, all roads lead to the Infrant NV+. It’s quiet, powerful, and has excellent RAID options. The proprietary X-RAID option gives hot-swapping and hot-expansion of the disk array, and provides single-disk failure at the cost of just one disk.

So if you start with 2 * 500Gb drives (as I did), you get 500Gb of effective storage and it doesn’t matter if one drive blows up. Want more room? Shove in another 500Gb drive without switching off, or any downtime for the array to rebuild, and it still doesn’t matter if one of them blows up. Upgrade the size of the drives one at a time, and you don’t have to rebuild the array from a remote source.

Other interesting features they keep quiet include the DAAP server (for iTunes compatible streaming music), the UPnP server (for different av streams), the rsync server (for anything else) and one-button backups to attachable storage.

My only grumbles are the NFS transfer speeds are a little low (being worked on, apparently), and no shell access (if I could put a torrent client on there, I’d be very happy).

All in all, a great piece of kit.

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a piece called Ubuntu and Storage about my ideas for both upgrading to Ubuntu (from Windows, it is an upgrade) and setting up a better storage solution. I’m going to focus on the former part here.

It was probably a year and a bit ago, before Ubuntu really started kicking off, that Stuart Langridge recommended it to me. After a quick browse I was sold, and got the live CD. Problems quickly arose.

The biggest problem I had was the perennial problem for former Windows users: wireless networking. My wireless card just wouldn’t work, and no amount of ndiswrapper was fixing it. I did briefly consider writing a device driver, but I thought that if I don’t have time to keep this site as up-to-date as I’d like, then maybe that was a tad ambitious. Instead I got a new wireless card that had a manufacturers driver… which didn’t work. Bollocks.

That set me back a good few months. Sadly, in my old flat, the router was too far for a wired connection, and couldn’t be moved to a more convenient location. I got round this inconvenience by moving flat and using good ol’ ethernet. Sometimes we use a sledgehammer on a nut because it’s so much more satisfying than a nutcracker, or repeatedly smashing our head against the wall that is wireless support.

That gripe aside, it’s mostly good. Beryl is impressive (though mostly just eye candy), and package management is just amazing. Having absolutely everything on the system update automatically, safely and uniformly is just how it should work. The individual updaters on Windows seem positively prehistoric in comparison.

One last complaint though: why the hell does everyone love Amarok. It’s feature-rich, sure, but it looks and behaves like an absolute dog. Want to go randomly through your music collection? You don’t want collection, you want a playlist. The play/pause/forward controls? Tiny and relegated to the middle of the bottom edge. Have the designers never heard of Fitt’s Law? Though I used to be a big proponent of WinAmp, I prefer iTunes now and nothing on Linux comes close.

This is, according to WordPress, the 600th post I’ve made since I started Solitude way back in January 2003. A lot of time has passed, lot of changes, and lot of silly things said (as well as the odd gem). I did consider going back through the entire archive and pointing out all the places I disagree with myself, but I figure that could take a while.

No grand promises about posting more, or better, or anything like that; just a marker to say we’re still going.

Things have been quiet here for the last few months for a number of reasons: moving flat, getting internet back, changing jobs (within the same company), and a bunch of other reasons (some of which I’ll be mentioning soon).

One of the big reasons for a slowdown in the number of posts is that I’ve been unhappy with my current content management system, Finetto, for quite some time. It was designed with a fairly limited amount of functionality in mind, primarily to help out a friend who needed a CMS quickly. It was also one of the first big PHP projects I had undertaken, before I really understood the language, and while I was still quite fresh to real programming (I have been programming since I was about 8 but not in a consistent and structured way). The design quickly became messy as more features were required. I could go back and rewrite the whole thing, with some interesting ideas, or I could just enhance an existing product.

In the last month or so, I’ve taken the time to pull data out of the old CMS and migrate it to everyone’s favourite CMS, WordPress. I’ve been talking about doing this for a while, and one of my long stated goals for any such transition is that it would be functionally seamless for end users. Since I actually switched a few weeks ago and no-one seems to have noticed, I’ll call that one a success. As an aside, the recent feed problems were not related to the WP switch.

The switch itself was pretty painless. WP is easy to set-up, the design I used on the old CMS was easy enough to convert (using standards-based design helps), and the data was easy enough to migrate on the WP side. The only trick was actually pulling the data out of the old CMS. While it’s file-system based storage was exceptionally quick, it wasn’t the easiest to manipulate.

Expect some WP plugins to appear soon.