Welcome

Welcome to our family website, a look into the lives of the Walker-Smith family, well thats the idea

To find out more about us read the whoweare page, to find out more about this site have a look at the colophon... hmm which doesn't yet exist

This site as it stands at present looks excellent on Mac, with Sarari, Netscape7.1, and Mozilla Firebird0.7, and now IE. If it looks bad in your browser, either buy a Mac or upgrade to the latest browsers!

This is a work in progress, I hope to turn the whole site over to this look and feel over the next few days, so this site may not be working 100%, esp in those pesky window browsers.

Want to send a virtual card?

Why not use 3-cards a new service brought to you from walkersmith.net

Reviewed

• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• Hybrids, Robert J Sawyer
• Havana, Stephen Hunter
• The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind
• Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Cloud of Sparrows, Takashi Matsuoka
• The Teeth of the Tiger, Tom Clancy
• The Last Samurai
• Time's Eye, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
• Ilium, Dan Simmons
• Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• Film: Just Married
• book: Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson
• book: Bios, Robert Charles Wilson
• book: Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke
• book: A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch
• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• book: Red Thunder, by John Varley
• Film: Kill Bill
• book: Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
• book: Colony, by Rob Grant
• book: Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson
• Film: 28 days later
• Film: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
• book: Pale Horse Coming, Stephen Hunter
• Films: three good ones
• book: Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• book: Humans, Robert J Sawyer
• book: The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
• Film: Terminator 3
• book: Blue Horizon, by Wilber Smith
• book: Evolution, by Stephen Baxter
• book: The Physics of Consciousness
• Matrix Reloaded: Theory

Words

• minutia
• Perfidy
• Necromancer
• ephemeral
• bete noire
• etymology
• heliopause
• agitprop
• entr'acte
• allegory
• ameliorate

Recent Entries

• We're Londoners
• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• Indy at six… months
• Its a bit unnerving...
• Hybrids, Robert J Sawyer
• Havana, Stephen Hunter
• The Jimny, bought July 1999 – sold June 2004
• Hmm Apple Juice
• Options
• The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Uncle Toms Fotos
• My many faces
• Mass Destruction
• Being left by ...
• minutia
• Daddy, where have you been all this time?
• Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind
• Certified Geek
• Green Delight
• Perfidy

Archives

• August 2004 (1)
• July 2004 (2)
• June 2004 (7)
• May 2004 (7)
• April 2004 (5)
• March 2004 (9)
• February 2004 (17)
• January 2004 (24)
• December 2003 (21)
• November 2003 (15)
• October 2003 (20)
• September 2003 (25)
• August 2003 (15)
• July 2003 (32)
• June 2003 (51)
• May 2003 (12)

fscking

The other day whilst waiting for a machine to recover from a crash I thought about writing about fsck the real bane on UNIX system administrators, the machine was fscking of course. Today I am really going to write about it, its been forty five minutes of waiting, my toes are frozen to the blue colour of the computer room controlled temperature, and it still has not come back up and finished its fsck. How long can it take? As long as that piece of space time string I expect.

For those of you in the know you must be asking why are you not using some sort of journalling file system. Well we could, our system, or rather todays crashed system is an HP-UX 11.00, and could quite easily have the a journaled file system. But somebody a while back when HP-UX was in its 9.x stages made a decision not to use it, and today at version 11.00 we still don't use it. I am not in on this decision making loop.

Can you believe, right now as I am writing this the machine has come back up, after some ninety minutes of fscking, that is fscking annoying!

So is fsck really a bane, not really because if the RAID which had been fsck'd did not come back up I would have been here all night trying to get things up and working again. Long live fsck, but bring on the journal'd file systems as well.