Puzzling craze

I don't get the whole sudoku thing, but maybe that's just the dyslexic and functionally innumerate side of my brain speaking.

When I read Tim Dowling's article in yesterday's Grauniad and I felt my lip curling at the foolishness of it all. The whole thing just seems like a terrible waste of time and effort, so instead of attempting Friday's puzzle, I skipped straight on to the crossword...

IMAP and Maildir

While trying to fix my IMAP server - I eventually discovered that, following a software upgrade, I now need to specify MAILDIRPATH in the configuration file - I found the following gem from Dan Bernstein in the maildir man page:

Many sites use Sun's Network Failure System (NFS),
presumably because the operating system vendor does not
offer anything else. NFS exacerbates all of the above
problems. Some NFS implementations don't provide any
reliable locking mechanism.

He's pretty much hit the nail on the head - NFS is a failure. You'd think that in return for appalling performance, no locking, no cache coherence etc, you'd at least get a certain amount of reliability, but no, that sucks too.

The Empty Child

Yet another deeply cool episode of Dr Who and, to me, the scariest of the lot so far with the whole zombies with gas masks thing. Given the fuss over the dalek torturing ep and the DVD being released with a 12 certificate, I'm impressed that the BBC managed to show it at 6:30 although I guess they probably didn't have much choice - if they'd canceled or postponed it to make way for Eurovision, they'd probably have faced a barrage of complaints from the nations geeks.

Anyway, enough of scheduling - I get enough of that at work - it's the ep that really matters. Question is, did it remind anyone else of the Authority story Shiftships? Maybe it's just me and my tendency to filter all my cultural references through comics, but the combination of a space ship with retro interiors parked over London, the gloomy night time skyscapes and Rose's union jack top - very Jenny Sparks - all made me totally think of Sliding Albion. The fact that all the victims were being kept at Albion Hospital (and being looked after by a Dr Constantine) didn't hurt either. The gas masks also reminded me of the Cyphermen - the Outer Church's very own time travellers - currently working through astral projection from a top secret military base somewhere in the UK.

I guess there were also echos of Quatermass 2, where the aliens set up a big funky fresh factory somewhere and gradually infect the local residents with "overshots", really some sort of weird gas alien thing that freakily possesses them. I'm not sure the detail was in the original radio and TV versions, but I'm pretty sure that when the people got possessed in the film version they developed a nasty looking cut from the alien possession. Luckily, thanks to Professor Q and Welsh super mathematician Leo Pugh, the world was saved when the British Rocket Group's latest and greatest was deliberately crashed into the factory by the recently infected Valleys numbers head.