How to annoy Chaz, without even trying...

Well, you could be me, and keep leaving the heat on under my most expensive pans. For hours'n'hours. Grr.

Or you could be a cat, either of the cats, and keep leaping like thunder onto my desk and sending things that belong there plummeting to the floor. Grrr!

Or - today's favourite! - you could write a cookery book, and give all the dishes complicated names that list half a dozen of their crucial ingredients - and then you could index them with no more discrimination than a simple alphabetical order. Which would, for example, mean that Gin-Laced Pork and Pig's Liver with Cinnamon and Cloves is indexed - yup - under G for Gin. And nowhere else. Aurrgh! This does, since you ask, render the index entirely useless. And thus, pretty much, the book. I may have to re-index it my own self, picking out the useful things like, y'know, Pork. With a P...

The book of my enemy has been remaindered

Actually the title of this post is probably not true - there's nothing like conspicuous success for inspiring true enmity, I find - but it's still a good line. And the converse is absolutely true, that the book of my friend may be pre-ordered.

My talented and delightful colleage Daniel Fox - that's moshui, to those of you in the know (read him! he posts about writing! not idiotic cats and cooking!!) - is publishing a fantasy trilogy with Del Rey, and the first of this, Dragon in Chains, may be pre-ordered now: from Amazon.com or from Amazon.co.uk.

Pre-ordering is good. It indicates demand; it makes the publishers smile; it makes the bookshops order more. We like this.

Also, you will like this book. How not? It has a dragon! In chains! Also armies and an island and pirates and paddy and fishermen and palaces and barricades and temples and stuff. Lots of stuff. Few come through unscathed, for such is the nature of stuff.

And a dragon.

Linux meepery

Meep.

I'm a Suse user. I've been using it for, I don't know, ever since I went seriously Linux: eight years? Longer? Something on that order. I like Suse, I'm comfortable with it.

There have been problems, but more moral than technical. The original company sold out to Novell, which was not good; then Novell sold a significant share to yuck-spit Bill Gates, and that wasn't good at all. I could have migrated then; I'll never have a better reason. (Damn, half the point of my coming to Linux in the first place was to get away from Bill Gates.)

At least I stopped buying Suse distributions; but I stayed with Suse and updated online, and that's where I'm at still.

Bear with me: I'm introducing a second plot-thread here.

When I installed Suse 10.0, I had the first major panic of my Linux life: went through all the installation procedure, got to the end and - black screen. Nothing. Eek.

Had no idea what to do. Happily, I have a Linux guru; he said "Chaz, don't panic. Your new hardware has an ATI Radeon card, which Suse doesn't support on account of proprietory software in the driver. All we need to do is set you up with fglrx, and you'll be fine."

And, bless him, he came round and did that. It took a bit of faffing (weirdly, I have a dual-core 32-bit chipset that insists on running 64-bit software), but he did it.

When I wanted to upgrade to 10.2, he had to come round and do it again.

Now I want to upgrade to 11.0, but he's a busy man; I really don't like asking. And I really don't like that I have to ask. I used to be a competent computer-user, even something of a power-user, but that was long ago; Windows ruined me (which is another reason I abominate Bill Gates and all his works), to the point where I've been using Linux all these years but never really learned it. I hate that about myself.

But. I downloaded the LiveCD version of Suse 11.0, burned it onto a disk, shoved it in, rebooted - and waddayaknow? No black screen. Functioning driver. Functioning Radeon driver, seemingly. Nothing spectacular - as far as I can tell, 3D's not enabled - but it works. From the LiveCD.

So. Do I dare go for a full installation? Without guru back-up? It ought logically to be the same - but you know how minds work, they sit here and writhe their bony hands together and murmur hissingly about how maybe they put a driver on the LiveCD and not on the full installation, for reasons unfathomable to mortal man...

I live in fear of the black screen of doom. Especially as this wouldn't be a clean install on a new machine, it's an upgrade with three years of work to eat if it chooses to. (And yes, I will be thoroughly backed up, but that's not the point...)

Eek. And that's before we even start thinking about how, if it works, I might none the less want to install fglrx to get the most out of the video card. By myself.

Meep!