Slug fsck problems

Following an unfortunate power cycle last week, my slug has been in a sulk. Every time I powered it on, it would spin up the external disc and start to load the initramfs before going completely catatonic. Naturally, given the power cycle, I suspected an file system consistency problem but I wasn't quite sure why init and fsck weren't fixing the problem automatically.

In the end, I attached the disc to another system, manually fscked and checked the contents of /etc/default/rcS. Sure enough, I found that I'd forgotten to set FSCKFIX to yes, causing the boot to hang waiting for confirmation on its non-existent console, so I changed the file, reconnected the disc and the slug booted up as expected.

I've often wondered why fsck bothers to ask whether you want to fix consistency problems, rather than simply going ahead and fixing them. It may have made sense to ask back in the day when file systems were only a few megabytes and files were sufficiently few that it was possible to make a judgment on whether to accept consistency changes, but these days it seems pretty pointless.

Fell

I've just finished Fell by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Here is a quick overview and a few thoughts.

Detective Richard Fell has fallen. Formerly a big city cop, he has been exiled across the bridge to Snowtown, a decaying and crime ridden ruin of a city. A big fish in a small pond, Fell's analytical mind and strong drive stand him in good stead as he starts to deal with the bizarre crimes thrown up by the feral city.

Fell also finds himself struggling to deal with the locals. His colleagues in the police department are, by and large, insane and the crime scene guy is usually so bombed that he's unable to pick up bullets lying on the side walk. When he first meets Mayko, the owner of his local, she brands Fell on the neck with the Snowtown symbol in an attempt to prevent the city from killing him, but he soon forgives her. Fell also finds himself taking an instant, not entirely surprising, dislike to a sinister, silent nun wearing a Richard Nixon mask, whom he encounters on a number of occasions indulging in some very un-nunish behaviour.

I really enjoyed Fell and, in particular, Templesmith's art which complements the noirish atmosphere of the story as well as being a thing of beauty in itself. The minor characters are also rather enjoyable, leavening the dark horror of the crimes committed by the city's denizens. Particularly good are the addled Lt Beard, who is shown at one point reading the Necronomicon in a determination to solve the crime problem with magic, and Violet the secretary, whose husband left her for a poodle.

Williams and Walton?

Is it just me, or does John Williams' final celebratory march at the end of Star Wars sound very similar to William Walton's film music? It seems to me to be very reminiscent of Walton's Spitfire Prelude and Fugue albeit with strong hints of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, orchestrated by Korngold.

Mind as Machine

Todays Sunday Feature on Radio 3, entitled Mind as Machine, was truly wonderful. A forty-five minute gallop through the field of AI, from the Dartmouth Conference to speculation about the future, with contributions from some of the top people in the field, including the magisterial Marvin Minsky.

On the philosophical side, there were short potted exchanges between John Searle and Dan Dennett on the subjects of semantic understanding and whether simulations could be said to be thinking. I particularly liked Dennett's response on to the simulation question:

Imagine a machine that can perform multiplication by looking things up in a table just like a human. The process isn't simulated multiplication, it really is multiplication.

Programmes like this are what make R3 special. It is, in the best possible way, shamelessly intelligent and resolutely highbrow. Long may it continue.