A little Danish elefant embraces his future in Germany. I guess everyone knows now that Nic and I are moving to Munich next year.

Nic and I went to Windsor on Sunday on a whim. I took Nic to Carluccio’s for the first time. She was very pleased with the ciocolatte Fiorentina - it’s nice that little things make her so happy. :-) We also wandered round the castle for a bit and took at quick trip to the shops to buy my mums birthday present.

I thought this would be hard but essentially it was very easy - I guess and seemed to get it right first time. You don’t need to install CUPS as the SUNWhpijs package already supports Sun’s own print system. Simply run: /usr/sadm/admin/bin/printmgr … as root, choose PRINTER->NEW ATTACHED PRINTER from the menu and then add the printer. I found it to be attached to /dev/usb/printer0 and I had to claim it was an OfficeJet 6110, but essentially everything worked perfectly and seconds later I was printing in colour on A4 paper....

Following on from my cider related shenanigans, I’ve just found a beer I haven’t had before that’s really improved my evening. Summer Lightning by the Hopback Brewery. You can get it in Waitrose. It’s a nice light flavour with an excellent roundness. Perfect for the glourious summer we’re not having here in the UK. See http://www.hopback.co.uk for details.

Flock So I’m trying flock out again. It’s been a while since I last looked at it. All I can say is it’s improved massively. It’s actually just like Firefox with lots of lovelly extra interactions with my favourite web sites. So far so impressed. Cider I haven’t drunk cider since university, but at the Walkabout bar in central Birmingham I was introducer to Kopperburg, Swedish cider (thank you GUADEC!) which was actually really nice....

If there’s one thing in this world that makes me mad (and there isn’t, there’s loads of things) it’s the portions of the Free/Libre/Open Source Software community who assume that anything to do with the law is inherently evil. Every time I see this is riles me - from the anti-GFDL people in the Debian community, through the “me too” boys who decry the GPL (and especially the GPL3) as being “less free” than BSD licenses without understanding the effect of either, right down to those whom, even with the best of intentions, make statements like this....

I continue to be totally blown away with ZFS. This post covers a lot of the reasons why. Every time I explore a feature it’s better than I was expecting. The fact that you can send incremental snapshots (essentially the binary different between two points in time) is exciting me currently. There must be the basis of so many applications there - distributed version control and package management are just two ideas that spring to mind....

Wow. This is turning out to be a good weekend. I’ve just seen the best concert I’ve seen in quite some while and tomorrow I’m flying to Lisbon for a weeks holiday. House concerts are always so intimate that they can make anyone with anything reasonably intelligent to sing about sound like Joni, Dar or Ani. Anaïs is something else though she writes songs that are both beautiful and cut to the heart of the great wrongness of the western world right now....

OK, so many, many people will be saying many things about project Indiana before we ever see anything concrete, and then many more people will inevitably form two camps - the “Indianaphiles” and the “Indianaphobes”. All of that is inevitable and I guess we should just enjoy the ride. However, given the scope for Indiana thus far expressed is “Make a Sun branded Solaris distribution that’s a lot more like Linux”, and that the top man is Ian Murdoch, I have exactly one wish for this project....

Another minor victory in my quest to get more familiar with OpenSolaris. I’ve upgraded to Nexenta unstable, and I noticed a package called sunwaudiohd being installed. That looked like a promising solution to the lack of audio on my OpenSolaris machine - the Intel HDA soundcard has never worked under any version I’ve used. Sadly, the mere presence of this driver didn’t seem to fix things (it’s never that simple). A little research confirmed that it was the right driver, but that this bug had been discovered....