Death to the SA80 [Lurks]

The BBC is reporting that the British Army's SA80-A2 standard infantry rifle is still 'mis firing' even after the £92 million of modifications which have been made to it after complaints on the first model. The SA80 is a bit of a running gag, on one hand is a brave and solid bullpup design that's renowned for being accurate, but on the other hand it's littered with design flaws. The first model had a magazine catch that was notoriously easy to snag on clothing resulting in the magazine dropping out. Then there was the other amusing issue of the choice of plastic dissolving when exposed to the standard issue insect repellant.

Anyhow this new model, the SA80-A2, was introduced this year and saw action for the first time in Afghanistan. It appears that three official failures have been recorded and other servicemen have gone on record claiming that 'the new model still jammed and could not cope with extreme heat, cold, sand or dust.'

This is not good. The SA80 is a symbol of British troops, they look easily as distinctive as the yanks M4s. However I think it's rather a bit more important that your armed forces be equipped with functioning technology ahead of some sort of aesthetically pleasing national icon. I think it's time that they packed it in. It's time to get a proper rifle and there's plenty on the market. I think the choice is clear, the H&K G36 or the Steyr AUG. The former is extremely modern and just being introduced as a national firearm in some European countries, the latter is a well proven rock solid performer but both are modular and so suitable for conversion to support and sniper configurations in the field.

I say it's time to ditch that heavy old jamming piece of shite, how about our troops become renowned for sporting assault rifles that actually work instead. That's bound to give the enemy more pause for thought.

MP3 Masterclass [Am]

I'm an audio junky - love it. Just neeeeed to fiddle when it comes to audio and it gives me much satisfaction to spend time in Cubase VST composing obnoxious ditties. Anyway, one of the losses in the Great Meltdown of '02 was my personal mp3 collection - approximately 80 cd's ripped from my own collection onto hard-disk. As a result now Guiness Mk II is up and running, I needed to get my ripping prog back and running. Audiocatalyst has been bought out by Real and of course the website is now a foul kludge yielding circular menus, suffocating pop-up and no fucking information of any worth whatsoever.

As a result I had no way, it appeared, of getting my key back for AC. This in fact turned out to be a very very very good thing indeed.

Lurks is insanely helpful...when he wants to be ;) .... and today I picked up an absolutely awesome set of tips and tricks from him which I *have* to share with y'all.

First out - there is an absolute beaut of a *free* mp3, wav, mpeg encoder out there called cdex - www.cdex.n3.net/. Yes free. The process is as follows;

Get CDex, next find yourself a copy of force aspi - the necessary driver behind this in essence www.afterdawn.com/software/cdr_software/cdr_tools/frcaspi.cfm. Install forceaspi, check the installation is correct using the utility on that page. Then go to www.r3mix.net where you will have access to what is frankly guru-standard information about the ripping process and mp3's - check the ripping & quality tabs for a start. This is a goldmine.

The upshot of this is a free, totally configurable ripper which allows you to code quickly on the fly or to use intensive algor...err.. ripping processes like the r3mix one which encode to a quality which is indistinguishable from cd but at heavy savings to wav filesize.

Lurks owe you a beer - that's a fantastic set of resources. And the rest of you lot? Stop using that piece of crap grabber and get out there and 'dex.

Bap or Butty? [Lurks]

Slim says it's a bap, Dave says it's a bun. Someone says it's a butty, I think. Which is right and more importantly, who gives a fuck?

Pegleg back in World Cup mode [Shedir]

Well it's been 4 months and a day since I broke my ankle, tore both ankle ligaments and something to my achilles. But I made my comeback to 6 a side football and have emerged unscathed. Rejoice!

NTFS = SUX0R [Lurks]

Ever since I've been using PCs, I've always formatted my volumes with FAT, in recent years FAT32. Even when using proper OSes like NT, Win2K and XP. My limited early experience with NTFS was that it was insanely slow and I recalled a problem where I had a drive corruption and nothing would fix it. The insanely slow thing was a laptop in fact, formatted with NTFS and yet appeared to have the slowest HD I have used since 20MB on a card in my A2000. There may have been other reasons, I appreciate this isn't a proper scientific analysis of the performance but that's why I've chosen FAT32 ever since.

Now, the other day a HD crashed in my work machine. An almost new Maxtor 540DX drive in fact, how odd! That was a bit of a bugger but shit happens. Fresh install, new HD and so on and I think... hey so many folks have queried my choice of FAT32 (including the EED boys) that I'll choose NTFS. Bish bash bosh.

Yesterday, my machine crashed. I don't know why. It was running fine for a couple of days but up pops a BSOD with 'NTFS' somewhere in the meaningless garbage that MS helpfully provides. Odd, brand new Win2K install and all that but, and I need to make this point now, I didn't and still do not necessarily believe that this crash had anything to do with a weakness or shortcoming in NTFS necessarily.

However, when I tried to reboot, I got that hyper annoying problem of a BSOD on boot complaining about inaccessable boot device. When Win2K boots it loads all of its driver files in 16-bit mode including drivers for accessing the HDs and so on. Then it fires up all the 32-bit drivers and carries on booting etc. So you often see this problem if you move a Win2K volume to another mobo with a different IDE controller and so on. Win2K wont start looking at your hardware until the essential 32-bit drivers (like disk access drivers) are running and if you can't run the 32-bit drivers, because the essential hardware has changed or at least is incompatible, then you get this sort of nonsense. Annoying but understandable to a degree.

Not the sort of thing you'd expect from a simple crash and not changing ANY hardware though, especially on a brand new install on fresh hardware that's been running fine for two days. Even more annoyingly, you can't get to a command prompt on NT based OSes, safe mode or whatever without loading the essential 32-bit drivers. So even safe mode command prompt will BSOD. Of course being an NTFS volume, I can't boot a floppy to get a command prompt to look at my install either.

I'm dragging this out now so I'll cut to the chase. After investigation I had concluded that the implementation of NTFS has a serious flaw where it is not possible to mount and access an NTFS volume in 32-bit mode when there is some form of corruption on the volume. Now of course this corruption shouldn't be there anyway on a journaling file system, it ought to just roll back the changes. That's not happening, the crash in NTFS itself according to my original BSOD if you recall, has resulted in some actual corruption of the NTFS volume which it's (obviously lame) journaling capabilities cannot resolve.

The solution was to take the drive out of that machine, place it in another and boot that machine. Bingo scandisk pops up, does a quick once over and fixes some extremely minor stuff - I mean the sort of shit you see scandisk fix all the time on reboot after a crash when using FAT32. I pop the drive back in my machine, and it boots perfectly and everything is cool.

Oh my lord how lame can you get! I mean what good would NTFS be for a server, even, if it crashed and couldn't reboot so far as to load scandisk to fix minor issues with the FS and restart the remote access services?! The implementation of NTFS assumes that it cannot be corrupted and will refuse to mount if it is. That's not good at all.

So the moral of the story is that I feel vindicated on my choice of FAT32 for small/boot partions all this time. Naturally I expect to get a load of people going 'I've not have that problem' which automatically means it doesn't exist :)

Potty pot [Slim]

So you'll have all seen the news that pot is to be officially de-classified to C in October. I understand that many police forces have been doing this unofficially for some time, so you've got to wonder a little what the fuss is about. Anyway, I noticed this little stinger in the BBC's coverage: Mr Blunkett raised the maximum sentence for dealers of class B and C drugs from five years to 14 years. So you're not going to be able to buy any of the stuff anyway. Top! I also love the way any stories on the subject are featuring prominent politicians backed with pictures of weed on the beeb, hilarious!

BBC gets terrestrial digital licence [Lurks]

Following on from failed On Digital/ITV Digital, the licence to broadcast terrestrial digital came up for grabs. The BBC put in their bid in conjunction with Crown Castle, the guys who set up and ran all the terrestrial digital transmission infrastructure for ITV Digital. Well it looks like the BBC have won. This could have been good/bad but after having a look into it, I proclaim it as good.

You see what they're going to do is set up 24 free to air channels, obviously all of the regular terrestrial analog but also some stuff from BSkyb, presumably the Simpsons station Sky 1. I like this since I've been pretty happy with the basic channels I get on my analog cable but, bizarrely, the quality is dreadful. I can't justify lashing out for digital based on my usage and unlike some of the other boob-box fans in EED (eh Suit? :), I'm just not going to shell out for pay stations like the movie channels.

My only reservation was that I thought the quality of the service on terrestrial digital was pretty bad before. More good news there;

At the time the bids were submitted, the BBC said its offer to broadcast 24 channels would allow for better quality reception that the previous 36-channel service provided by ITV Digital.

33% better bit rate will make a noticeable difference to quality. The other operators that were vying for the licence were your typical pay-per-view media giants so you can bet they'd try to cram more stations in and half of them would be pay-per-view so many wouldn't see them anyway. If you're a boob-box fan then you need Sky, terrestrial digital ought to be television for the masses in my opinion.

Of course little of this changes the fact that I live in a valley in North London and can't get analog television. Then again, I was surprised with DAB because I'm full whack on that - so if they're transmitting from Alexandra Palace I should be sorted.

So what's the deal then, you just got to buy a box presumably? Can I buy one that isn't a Nokia? Call me odd but I prefer to have a digital box that doesn't crash because you push the channel forward button too fast.