Possession, by A.S. Byatt.

Possession ranks as one of the best books I have read and is one of those rare works one doesn't want to finish.

A great novel has a level of writing skill far superior to the average one and this becomes clear quite quickly in a book. Not only is the writing itself beautiful but the whole structure of the story itself.

This includes two wonderfully realised worlds: the 19th Century where Randolph Henry Ash falls in love with Christabel LaMotte, both poets but Ash very famous, and the 1980's world of academic literary scholarship, picking apart his life and poems. The sometimes dry and musty, sometimes strange and funny ivory tower of college and library work feels real and is surely drawn from the author's own experience.

The book also contains many poems from both Ash and LaMotte, each one in a style to match their own muse. We also have lengthy exchanges of letters between them, and even some myth and fairy tales.

Both couples, Ash and LaMotte in the Victorian world, and Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey in the modern are very sensitively and believably brought to life. You really care about the characters in the end. This is a great book and very moving.

I am slightly ashamed to say that I did not manage to get through a lot of the longer poems, although I managed the shorter ones. I really need to learn how to read poetry properly.

Computers can be pretty frustrating, even when you think you understand them fairly well. This understanding might make things worse in some ways, as you'll go the extra mile, persevere a bit longer, do the extra debugging and perhaps end up no better off (except even more frustrated).

What's brought this about? Well, over and above the usual nitpicks :

Mozilla Thunderbird IMAP Issues

My domain email stopped working a few days ago. Initially I thought it was just an email dry spell, but some more concerned digging showed a problem connecting to my IMAP server (dovecot).

Some potential complexity here ...IMAP itself but especially the SSL layered over it (imaps). So a fair amount of anxiety about what might have been broken - server update? expired certificate? problem ertificate? or a problem on the client computer, or client mail application?

Suspicion settled on the client application, Mozilla Thunderbird, and I went through a slightly painful process of regressing some major releases and finding that version 23.0 broke things.

Somehow I had managed to get through v23.0, 24.0 and 24.0.1 via the automatic updates with a working mail capability. At least until last week. I am not sure how!

Posted some notes and asked for comment on mozillaZine, and then ended up logging a bug. Should have expected this, but then tasked to find the nightly regression point, a potentially painful process. "Luckily", being on holiday meant I have had some time to do this ...

Mozregression didn't seem to work well for me, not finding any break point, so I took the manual route of downloading some releases close to the last version that worked for me (release 22.0) and seeing where it failed :

So, IMAP to my domain broken with the 2013-05-14 build. Let's see how things go.

• Bug : 930878
  IMAP with SSL/TLS,normal password fails to retrieve mail after v22.0

One always wonders ... it's probably my fault somewhere. Still Diggin' :-)

Software RAID Failure

Did I mention holiday? A couple of days ago I got an email with subject line :

Fail event on /dev/md/2:shuttle

That's a disk failure with a RAID mirror I have in a system (where I normally stage the blog). Something to look forward to fixing when I get home. Hopefully the remaining disk stays well, always a slight concern with something like this.

On top of this issue, I have smart complaining on another system about "unreadable sectors" but this is something I've been momitoring for a couple of months, the number not increasing for now. RAID is not a backup, but it helps mitigate hardware failures.

Laptop Random Hibernations

I'm trying Debian Testing (Jessie) on my Thinkpad x220 and it's generally been fine. In fact, in many ways it's the best and fastest version yet (and the laptop's pretty good as well)

However, I've had it decide to hibernate itself when I'm not looking. This wouldn't be so bad except it has a problem resuming (libgcrypt message, similar to bug 724275), so this turns into a hard reset. As usual, a number of places I could look to solve this (initramfs, acpi, uswsusp etc.) and I'll see if I can find some time and do some debugging. Chasing this sort of issue is particularly tough because of the need for rebooting/hibernating to test things.

I was going to followup a post on the Debian Users web forum but it looks like my account has been "deactivated" manually by an admin and I can't re-activate or re-register (username in use!). A large bit of friction having to send a mail to the admins about it and a bit of a crappy policy if you ask me ...

So ...

Maybe I have too many computers, and too many computer related activities going on. I'm juggling different virtual machines running different versions of Debian, doing different things and occasionally thinking about synchronisation. Silly things such as whether to run the development system VM on KVM or switch to VirtualBox? If I use both, best ways to sync them up? Converting raw KVM disk to a VDI etc.

No wonder the odds increase that I end up in pain sometimes. The aim is always to get things sorted and arranged in such a way that I can actually do some work, or something worthwhile. Not spend all day fixing or configuring things before managing any of that!

I've had to re-write and re-post this after accidently losing the (completed) original (another post perhaps). It's always a bit soul-destroying when this sort of thing happens, but nothing to what happened to Thomas Carlyle's first volume of the manuscript of his book on the French Revolution, burnt by accident.

Peter Day's been reporting the world of business for the BBC for 30 years and he's recently written a BBC magazine article and presented a BBC radio show looking back at his experience over the years. Not only is he a good interviewer, asking intelligent questions, he's often concentrated on the technical changes in business. Mass production, new market strategies, the internet (particularly) and, more recently, the promise of 3D printing. On 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing) :

I was in the offices of a company called Bespoke Innovations, with a designer called Scott Summit. He had gone into partnership with a surgeon to make individualised artificial limbs, using a 3D fabricator. Bespoke can match an existing arm or leg, or design a prosthetic limb to be eye-catching in its own right.

We'll also see these techniques making things like heart valves, bones and other internal organs in the future.

As a retrospective, he's talked to a surprising number of interesting people, sometimes before they and their companies became better known. People like Larry Page of Google (pre-CEO), Gordon Moore of Intel (of the famous Moore's Law, Peter Drucker, a management guru and Joe Kraus, co-founder of the now defunct early 90's search company Excite.

Excite was extinguished by Google a long time ago because Google figured out a way to make money from a much larger percentage of their customers than Excite could.

This leads to a mention of Chris Anderson's long tail, a market phenomenon made possible by the reach of the global internet.

Day thinks that we might be reaching the end of the first industrial age and that a new one is starting. Its first gasp was the dotcom boom (and bust) in the late 1990's and millenium. But a lot of lessons have been learned since then and a clearer picture of the promise of much of this new networked technology is coming into view now.

Read and hear more :

• article
• show

I bought a lovely fresh green tea at Postcard called Supernatural Green. This is made in Japan by someone called Master Matsumoto :

Master Matsumoto, a 4th generation tea maker who is well known for continuing to use old tea trees (his trees are around 90 years old) and no pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers or even manure - hence the tea grows 'supernaturally'. Only 30 kilos of this tea is made each year.

It's light and sweet and as the page linked says, it is "less grassy than sencha". Very recommended and makes a great change from the usual Darjeeling. The best green tea I've drank.

Above: Moonlight Iona Beach

Another new artist I came across at the Francis Kyle gallery on my way to Postcard Teas late last week.

Ramsay Gibb (and the gallery site) has a couple of dozen oil on board paintings of some wild North Easterly landscapes called "The Pilgrim Coast". Wild, isolated and lonely, both mountains and beaches. Atmospheric landscapes that evoke the spiritual, as they have for centuries.

Gibb says at the Kyle Gallery page :

'I was struck by the impressions left on the wet sand by the feet of pilgrims following the staves marking the path out to the island. These prints were continually washed by the tide and obliterated, then re-established by the feet of new pilgrims. This cycle has repeated countless times for hundreds of years. I witnessed the traces of an act that could be dated to the arrival of St. Aidan in 635, the coming of Christianity to the Angles of Northumbria, the beginning of Northumbria’s golden age. These prints in the tidal mud connected me directly to the first footfall of the Christian mission to Lindisfarne. Whereas the last paintings explored the wider context of Pilgrimage, this collection returns to the origins of my inspiration, to the stories of one of the richest flowerings of early spirituality in these islands: the blossoming of Christianity that took place in the kingdom of Northumbria.'

A short film about his work.

This is the landscape of Lindisfarne, of St Cuthbert and Aidan, the Apostle of Northumbria.