cobolhacker.com

P.C. Gwen Cooper is providing security around the scene of another brutal murder in downtown Cardiff. Suddenly everyone is sent away from the scene and an ominous black SUV pulls up. She’s told it’s Torchwood, some kind of “special ops” group. Four of them get out of the mysterious vehicle and begin to work on the victim. Sneaking up into an adjacent car park, she watches from above as the team bring the victim back to life temporarily and ask him questions about his murderer. Stunned by what she has seen, she vows to learn more about this shadowy group.

Because I’m such a Doctor Who fanboi, I naturally had to check out Russell T. Davies’ new series, Torchwood. It’s the first Doctor Who spin-off since the ill-fated K9 and Company pilot and it’s set in the same universe and same continuity as the current series of Doctor Who. It follows the exploits of Torchwood Three in Cardiff, sometime after the destruction of Torchwood One in London (Doctor Who episode Doomsday). Numerous references to Doctor Who are made in the series, though Davies says there will be no direct crossover episodes (yet).

Following his resurrection by Rose (DW ep. Parting of the Ways) the dashing Captain Jack Harkness apparently found a way back to the 21st century and got himself a job running Torchwood Three. We discover that Torchwood Three is located under the Roald Dahl Plass in Cardiff, right where the Rift is (DW ep. Boom Town). Aliens and alien stuff fall through the rift from time to time and it’s the job of Torchwood Three to clean it up and hide evidence of it. It’s also their job to figure out how to arm humanity with the alien technology they recover. As Jack ominously says, “In the 21st century everything changes, and you gotta be ready.”

Although John Barrowman is one of the main selling points, so far the show has been very restrained with Captain Jack. His experiences on Satellite Five (DW ep. Parting of the Ways) have changed him, literally. Gwen discovers under the most violent of circumstances that Jack cannot be killed. He says it’s because of something that happened to him “a while back, long story and far away.” He’s a less bombastic character than he was in Doctor Who, portrayed now as more mysterious, more private and more alone. His coworkers know practically nothing about him, and it is revealed that he lives in the Torchwood offices and doesn’t sleep, presumably working away in its tunnels after all the others have gone home. Maybe getting killed and brought back can have that affect on a guy. Still, we are occasionally treated to the happy, playful, naughty Jack of before; Gwen’s lesson on how to fire a handgun is a particularly good scene.

Like Rose in Doctor Who, Gwen Cooper serves as the surrogate character through which the audience can be drawn into the bizarre world of Torchwood. Same deal as Doctor Who, but hey, if the schtick ain’t broke… Gwen, an experienced policewoman, relentlessly tracks down the Torchwood team after their first encounter because she is convinced they can help her solve the murders. She doesn’t realise it at the time, but her first humiliating encounter with the team face to face is also her first job interview. “She’s actually carrying pizza!” teases Owen. She eventually beats Jack’s amnesia drug and returns to Torchwood in time to catch the killer. Convinced of her worth, Jack offers her a job.

Torchwood is ensemble show, but Gwen is effectively the female lead. While episodes in the first series have focused on characters Toshiko, Ianto, Owen, and even Suzie, Gwen is by far the most fleshed out character in the show, more so than even Captain Jack. One of the recurring themes in the series is the slow destruction of her boring girl-next-door life and the replacement of it with a racy Torchwood one. Not only is her innocence and virtue being drained away, but also her relationship with Rhys, her live-in boyfriend. Like Mickey in Doctor Who, you feel kind of bad for Rhys, like he doesn’t deserve all the lying and the sneaking. When it all goes down Gwen may well find herself living at Torchwood Three like Jack.

The role of Gwen was written for actress Eve Myles and she brings a lot of sincerity and spunk to the surprisingly complex character. She’s also a doe-eyed cutie, toothy grin and all. That might well be my inner fanboi talking (I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for girls with strong accents and you get Welsh from Myles by the truckload). Astute Doctor Who fans will recognise her from Doctor Who episode The Unquiet Dead, where she played a character named, interestingly enough, Gwyneth. No word yet if this is merely a coincidence.

Davies has described the show as “a British sci-fi paranoid thriller, a cop show with a sense of humour… dark, wild and sexy, it’s The X-Files meets This Life.” This is nicely sums up what the show is about. With the same “science fantasy” theme prevailing throughout, there are also many comparisons to be made with Doctor Who, with some reviewers calling Torchwood “Doctor Who for grown-ups”. Unlike Doctor Who, Torchwood’s sometimes silly humour is often sharply offset by a gritty viciousness. It is most definitely not for children. The characters swear and fuck, and people violently die. Davies has also said that that he wants to “knock down the barriers so we can’t define which of the characters is gay.” To this end, the show deals with GLB themes head on, with no holds barred. Even poor Gwen is not immune. Her first day on the job finds her dosed to the gills with pheromones, helplessly snogging some poor girl possessed by a sex crazed gas alien. I don’t think we’re supposed to believe she really fancies girls, but Gwen’s not freaked out about the experience either. Sexuality is often like that in real life, and Davies wants to make good and sure we don’t forget it.

At first, such outbursts of funny and queer broke me out of the narrative of the show and for the first five episodes, it seemed as if the writers were struggling to find the right groove. Now that the series is ten shows in, the writers seem to have struck a decent balance between the show’s quirky science fantasy underpinnings and its gritty cop-drama presentation. One could describe it as a cross between Doctor Who, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Bill. Only with sex and cussin’.

Though its actual subject matter is nothing new, Torchwood’s curious presentation is certainly like nothing I’ve seen before and it alone is worthy of recognition. The characters are interesting and the flow of the stories is rarely boring (though perhaps oddly paced at times). If you like the current series of Doctor Who and you’re the kind of fan who watched The X-Files less for the Cigarette Smoking Man and more for episodes like Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, you’ll probably dig Torchwood.

I’m still a little bit sore over Pluto, too.

Pluto and Charon were a unique pair of planets in our solar system before they got, uhhh… demoted.  I’m not entirely sure what to tell my kids when they start reading all of my various “outdated” astronomy books.

I just finished reading an interesting paper about DRM in Windows Vista, Microsoft’s next OS.

And you think your computer doesn’t do what you want it to now? I well expect to be spending the next few years of my life explaining to people over and over that you can’t watch certain things on your computer because they don’t want you to.

If I don’t answer the phone at first, how likely is it that I will answer it one minute later, three minutes later, seven minutes later, ten minutes later or thirteen minutes later?

Ladies and gentlemen, let me be the first to tell you that your computer is important, but not that important. Take a break. Make a sandwich. Go outside. Go to the water cooler and talk to your associates about the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica. But whatever you do, don’t waste your precious life calling me over and over for support.

Let us pause to consider why I might not answer the phone when you call:

• I am not in the shop. I often have go out to fix computers. So do the people who work for me. Simply put, onsite is more lucrative than support and I’ve got to go where the money is.
• I am in the shop, but it is after hours. As astonishing as this might seem to some, if I’m in the office I don’t answer the phone when it is 11:30 at night. Ever. So don’t bother calling at that time.
• I am eating. When you get right down to it, I need to eat so I don’t die, to say nothing about being grumpy. I dislike talking on the phone while I do it.
• My personal life has got in the way. It doesn’t happen very often and I’ve nearly got rid of it all, but little bits of it flare up now and again and they often require my full attention.
• I am in the shop, but doing something that requires a lot of concentration, like fixing a computer or something. There are these times, say when something electronic is burning up in front of your face, when answering the phone is not only inconvenient, but also risky.
• I am on the phone talking to someone more important than you.

So now you’re thinking, “Surely he’s got a cellphone. Why not give me the number so I can call when he’s out of the shop?”

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea doesn’t understand the computer service industry very well. Here’s a story for you to contemplate. A number of years ago one of my computer technician friends made the mistake of giving his cellphone number to a couple of his important customers. People got talking and in a matter of months, all of his customers knew that number. After that there was never a moment of peace. We would be in the pub, at like 12:30 at night, and people would call him because they wanted to ask a question. He said that sometimes his mobile would ring at four in the morning. He couldn’t tell these people to fuck off because they were customers, so he would have to either ignore the phone or suck it up and deal with it. He eventually changed his number.

The moral of the story is that if I don’t answer the phone, there’s probably a good reason for it. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, it’s that I’ve got a lot of stuff going on and sometimes I can’t get to the phone. There is a reason why I have an answering machine.

So don’t call five times in a row. Relax and leave a message. It may not be an instant kind of a thing but surely you have something else you can do in the meantime. I will get back to you. Honest.

I have found it!

I could never remember the name and mostly forgot about it, but now I have stumbled upon it again, purely by accident: the hottest hot pepper in the world.

At up to a million and a half Scoville units, the Capsicum chinense ‘Dorset Naga’ isn’t just hot, it’s stupid hot. It’s so spicy it makes its venerable brethren the habanero look like puppy shit by comparison. So much beauty, so much burning… yes!

I must grow these! All I gotta do is get me seeds…

A number of FCP home customers are using Grisoft’s AVG Free Edition as an anti-virus solution. We like it because it is free, but also because it’s small and fast. If you are using version 7.1, the software is probably starting to bother you every reboot, telling you it will expire sometime in January. It presents you with a screen that takes you to their e-commerce website so you can purchase the supported version 7.5.

If you are satisfied with AVG and want to send some money to the Grisoft company, consider purchasing AVG Professional Edition. It’s only 40 bucks USD, and gives you two whole years of free updates, plus a bunch of extra features. If you’ve been used to renewing Norton Antivirus, that’s basically one whole year you are getting for free. In addition to that little incentive, Grisoft’s product is also better.

If you don’t feel like paying for it, limited, free protection is still available. All though they don’t say it quite so obviously on their site, you can get the free version at the AVG Free Edition website. Read what you see carefully and select “Download Free Version”. This will take you to the download page where you can download the installer binary (it has a “.exe” on the end) of the most current version.

Once downloaded, un-install your current version of AVG by going to the “AVG Free Edition” program group in the Start Menu and selecting “Uninstall AVG Free Edition”. After you have removed 7.1, you can install 7.5 by double-clicking on the installer binary to run it.

As always, if you are unsure about this whole process you can bring your machine to us and we can do the install for you and make sure it is right. The fee for this service is $30.

This strange looking thing is a 2U rackmount chassis by Antec. Compared to other computers, it’s dimensions are very odd. The “U” in 2U is part of a specification for high density computing. The idea is that you can stack many of these things in a standard 17 inch rack to save space. Since co-location companies charge you based on the amount of space you need, smaller is always better. So, because it is a 2U chassis, it is exactly 3.5 inches high and 17 inches wide. Because this one needs to have room for four hard drives, it is nearly 27 inches long.

Most of the weight in a rackmount case is concentrated near the front since because sometimes the entire computer can only be secured to the rack with two heavy flanges mounted at the front. The optical drive and power supply unit are up there with the power supply blowing in. The lighter mainboard is mounted in the rear. The three fans in the centre keep air moving across it. The smaller fan at the back keeps hot air from pooling near the back of the case.

Like many of the curious little projects in get involved in, I can’t tell you exactly what it will be used for. Part of the project goal is to keep cost down, so commodity parts will be used. This is what Google does with their hundreds-of-thousands of nodes, and it’s served them well. The mainboard is an Asus M2NPV-VM, the CPU an Athlon64 X2 4200. The parts were selected for their low cost, high performance characteristics, as well as stability and compatibility reasons.

A 2U enclosure is not tall enough to put in a regular expansion card. A riser card is normally used instead, allowing the expansion cards to lie parallel to the mainboard. One of the advantages to this mainboard is that everything you need is built in, VGA, four SATA ports, even a high performance gigabit network interface controller. This allows us to drop the riser completely. The board will ultimately take 4GB of DDR2. It will begin its service life fitted with 2GB.

SCSI was deemed too expensive, so Serial ATA 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptors will be used instead. They perform almost as well as 10,000rpm Ultra320 SCSI drives and are about half the price. My hard drives come in little cloth bags. How cute! A ordering screw-up has given me a pair of SATA Raptor X 150s to work with, instead of regular Raptor 150s. Since I didn’t get charged extra and the performance characteristics are the same, I think we’re going to use them anyway.

Yeah, that’s a little window on the top of the drive so you can watch it work. Isn’t that just the shit? Too bad no one is ever going to see it once it’s in use.

That little brick of drives is worth more than a lot of people’s computers.

Fully assembled it looks kinda wrong as PCs go. But all the components are in there: power supply and optical drive at the front, hard drives in the middle, and the core in the rear.

It’s hard to tell from the photographs, but there is actually about 1.5cm of breathing space between the top of the CPU fan and the enclosure cover.

The Defense Minister noted not to long ago that despite the fighting, progress is being made in Afghanistan.

He noted that 80 per cent of Afghans now have access to health care, 6 million children are in school, and 84 per cent of Afghans consider themselves better off now than under the Taliban.

I completely approve of the mission in Afghanistan. A number of people I know don’t understand my position on it. They see it as pointless and worthless; a waste of time, resources and lives. So why the hell should we send our troops there to kill people and die?

There’s this old saying, a nation that is unwilling to fight for it’s existence doesn’t deserve to exist. What do you suppose they say about the nations that are willing to fight for others to exist? Ask a World War Two vet and he might tell you that if you win, afterwards they’ll call you the good guys. I argue that unlike the quagmire that is Iraq, the mission in Afghanistan is achievable, even desirable, especially when you read about numbers like the ones above. There are a number of good reasons why we should be sending our people there. Here’s a few.

For starters, section 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, a treaty of which Canada is a founding party, obligates us to be there. Forces sent from Afghanistan by the Taliban attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. They may have been crazy undercover terrorist forces, but the Taliban are still an enemy, and they attacked one of our allies.

I suppose we could have declared the Taliban militarily beaten and went home, but instead we decided to stay and really thoroughly clean the place out. That makes sense to me and it’s another good reason for staying. If we don’t rid the place of the Taliban they are just going to keep on causing trouble and destroying things. Don’t think for a second that increased security at airports and ports will foil every one of their plans. The next time around it might be the First Canadian Place, the Sky Dome, even the CN Tower. Exterminating the threat is the only way to be sure.

Consider also how useful it would be to have a stable, democratic, mostly secular Muslim nation in the region other than Turkey (as far as I am concerned, Pakistan doesn’t count anymore). There’s not a lot of stability floating around in the Middle East. If the West wants to enjoy a safe, prosperous world, then maybe the time is right to step up to the plate and stamp out violent extremism once and for all. Afghanistan is as good a place to start as any.

Another important reason, as ghoulish as this sounds, is Afghanistan is good practice for our military. Being able to operate unrestrained in a real combat theatre against a tenacious foe like the Taliban will help our soldiers keep their edge and give them the experience necessary for fighting the nasty kinds of wars we’ll be seeing more of in the coming decades. Keep in mind that Canada has only ever been in traditional “stand-up-and-fight” kind of wars, never in the kind of cruel shit they’re seeing in Afghanistan.

There is also the international prestige, of course. Fighting the good fight gives you cred in the eyes of other nations, particularly the United States, but there is more to gain from it than that. Willingness to get down and dirty is the kind of thing that puts you on the same leadership level as the Americans and it’s a useful place to be on the global stage. The Americans completely understand this angle of international diplomacy. There is no denying their leadership role in world politics.

Honestly, I don’t see how anyone can credibly accuse the U.S.A. of not pulling its own weight on the issue of global security. Whether you agree with all of their foreign policy decisions or not (I certainly don’t), it is hard to deny their conviction. Over the years, America is proven itself above cowardice, sending its people to die in wars they didn’t have to fight. To argue self-interest is too simplistic; no, there is just something about their culture, for all its many faults, that compels them to truck around the globe helping other nations. Canada has always been about this too, but only ever as a peacekeeping force. For all the positive talk of peacekeeping though, there are some problems in the world, like Afghanistan, that require peacemaking, and on this score Canada was considered soft. But not any more. After the last year of work in the south of Afghanistan, no nation in the world is going to accuse Canada of not pulling it’s weight. Can the German forces in Afghanistan honestly make that claim?

I supose the best reason of all is simply a moral reason. The Afghan people. Who will help them if we don’t? Here are a people who, like us, want to be left in peace. Before the brutal rule of the Taliban, Afghanistan suffered through years of warfare and strife. The country and the people were basically used for a proxy war between NATO and the Soviet Bloc. In a way, Canada, as a founding member of NATO, must share some of the blame for that. Exporting Peace, Order and Good Government to the people of Afghanistan is one way of making things right. If the mission is a success, the nation will also serve a beacon hope to the other oppressed people of the Middle East, letting them know that it is possible to get out of the shit, if you let the right people help you.

And why is all this so important? Because it is the responsibility of rich nations to help the poor ones. Not to wipe their noses for them, but to at least give them a fighting chance. Giving them food is good, but stopping the bad men from taking the food is better. Eventually those bad men are going to come for our food too, so we might as well start dealing with the problem now.

photo courtesy of the CFCC.

Nobody feels the pinch of rising oil prices like the shipping industry.  One way to reduce your fuel costs is to deploy a giant sail to help pull the ship along, just as sailors have done for thousands of years.

Most people have more free time than me, actually.

But this is dedication we’re talking about here. This dude has created a blog post with over two thousand hyperlinks in it – every word a link to a another place on the net.  It put a big grin on my face.

And in other, unrelated news, this is my 500th post! Yay me!