Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn’t in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as “worth reading”.

It is not really a bad book, but when you’ve just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you’ll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it’s promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry’s throat. But Harry’s thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl’s pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn’t even look up her skirt when she’s riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.

I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could’ve brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.

Tell me that wouldn’t have been sweet! Now, though, I’ve got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I’m already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!

More, more.

Hmm...you know you’re an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it’s completely, utterly the opposite of you:

When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.

[From 5 of the best desktop operating systems you never used | Classics Rock | TechRepublic.com]

I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I’ve Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?

OS/2
I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.

NeXT[sic]
I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it’s probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs’ playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it’s lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.

BeOS
In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you’ll be hating life.

DESQview
This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck‘s QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?

GEOS / GeoWorks
GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.

I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?

It’s almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there’s “Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps”:

1. openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
2. make thisthinghere && then that otherthing

Easier than it looks, I tell you, I’m gonna ace this exam.

And then there’s some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, “*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY” in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn’t run under inetd you didn’t need it, anway, now get off my lawn.

Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.

I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone’s Samba caches start expiring and the “Shared” sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:

OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.

★ [From OpenDNS]

OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON’T EXIST!!1! That’s what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.

Found by A-Heldin in the Ladies’ Bathroom of Stansted Airport

“Unfinished Tales: Of Numenor and Middle-earth” (J.R.R. Tolkien)

If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It’s basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.

Me, I’m what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.

Tolkien’s stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it’s that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.

So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien’s Middle-earth makes possible. The ‘Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You’ve got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.

I wasn’t really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that’s basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you’ve got the Extended Director’s Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it’s time I read something this year that doesn’t have its own booth at DragonCon.

March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that’s what the Google tells me. I’ve heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.

When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There’s an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.

It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there’s that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I’m not, so a Foster’s it is.

So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We’ll see how that old wives’ tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.