Turgid minor was born at 02:58 BST on Sunday 28th June 2009. Mother and baby are doing fine.

He's taken 7 years of trying, following 3 miscarriages. Mrs Turgid's 5th, my 1st.

So far he has cried a bit, made lots of squeaky noises, done some very treacle-y poos and fed a bit.

They're coming home tomorrow. Then we'll get him started on vi, C and scheme.

Just received this youtube link in the mail. Scotland has a new world-class rap artiste. There's Nae mince in Moray.

Look out for him topping the Hit Parade, pop-pickers.

I have always wanted a Sun Ultra 80. You probably know that I used to work for Sun on the Companion CD team. Well, that was a long time ago. Our personal workstations were Ultra 60s, with dual 450MHz UltraSPARCIIi CPUs and dual 18GB SCSI hard disks.

Fast forward about a century. My employer was having its annual clear-out. Two Sun Ultra 80s were going in the skip!!! (quadruple UltraSPARC IIi CPUs at 450MHz and dual 18GB SCSI hard disks).

Company policy is such that staff can't have obsolete IT gear. There are many reasons, from the sensible, "It costs money to erase the hard disks," to the ludicrous, "Staff were getting the PeeCees home to find no Windows and Office and were angry that they had to pay £300 to obtain them legally."

Apparently our staff are as thick as pig excrement and have never heard of Free and Open Source Software.

So I managed to borrow, officially, the two Sun Ultra 80 workstations that were going to be tossed in a skip.

They now no longer contain any company data. They are called phobos and deimos and are running Solaris 11 b114 and are on my network.

I have them for 2 years.

Just now, phobos is compiling gcc-.4.2.4 -j4. Let's see how long that takes compared to my lowly SunBlade100 which has a single UltraSPARC IIi at 500MHz.

Oh, and I have possibly the coolest house in the UK. I have 10 UltraSPARC CPUs in the house and 2 in the garage. If you count multi-core CPUs, we only have 8 x86 CPUs!

Call me crazy but I buy my RAM from www.crucial.com/uk because every time I've ever bought RAM from anywhere else it has been defective. Honestly. gcc and memtest86 say so.

I'm sure that nowadays there's healthy market for RAM, and I'd be interested to hear of other sources.

I've been meaning to upgrade from 1GB DDR2/667 ECC to 4GB DDR2/800 ECC and a couple of days ago it was £43.something including VAT. Now it's £50. Grrrr....

I'm not one of these crazy overclocking loonies. My time and money are too valuable to have an extremely fast but flaky system. I'd rather pay 10% more and get quality and not have to reboot every 10 minutes if you know what I mean.

My last record up time was 64 days. That's in a domestic setting with no UPS and running Slamd64.

The limiting factor seems to be how long the electricity company can keep the power going.

Talking of which, today on Radio 4 news, it was announced that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (formerly BNFL, for whom I worked), has announced that there are four sites worthy of new nuclear power stations, including Bradwell (mine).

I frobbed (in octal) with the Honeywell 316 there, and did the k-curves for the PDP-11s :-)

Gentoo is absurd. I've been at it for over 2 hours and I'm just "downloading the kernel source."

In the name of goodness, what were they thinking?

OK, so I wanted something custom for my old K6-2/500 which has 512MB or RAM and a 40GB hard disk. Slackware 12.2 doesn't boot on it.

As an educational experience, I suppose it's worth it, but, by golly, there are some masochists out there.

It's pretty half-impressive, if you know what I mean. So far it's a masterpiece of not-quite-scripting-things-enough but with obviously some fiendishly clever source configuration in the background.

Maybe in a month of Sundays (if the suspense doesn't kill me) I'll have my very own electronic equivalent of an ancient Citroen Saxo with blacked out windows, lowered shocks, alloys with ultra low-profile tires, pointless spoilers, stick-on neon lights, fluffy dice and 1kW of skull crushing techno handbag disco drum and bass.

Update: Well, after about 4 hours of my time and maybe 3 or 4 compiling, the basic system is up and running with a 2.6.27 kernel. It went completely without a hitch. I wasn't confused at all by the instructions and didn't have to try anything twice. It was fairly tedious, but now it "just works." The box is headless again and on the network. I suppose on a modern multi-core machine with lots of RAM the compilation is pretty trivial, and I suppose I might have saved some work by downloading an install image with the graphical installer, but there wasn't one guaranteed to work with the ancient processor.

Incidentally, running SETI@Home on this box is a bit like spitting into the wind nowadays, but for a laugh I put a new client on. The floating point speed has gone from 189 MFLOPS to 262 MFLOPS. The 64-bit dual-core Athlon 2.6GHz is about 2070 MFLOPS per core. The 1.67GHz Athlon XP is 1287 MFLOPS. The dual PIII/550 is 276 MFLOPS per CPU, whereas the 500MHz UltraSPARC II manages 328 MFLOPS.

I need to get me some CUDA hardware.

I'm very disappointed with Slackware 12.2. I went to upgrade my old K6-2/500 this evening with Slackware 12.2 and it doesn't boot :-(

The reason is that the CPU doesn't have the cmov instruction, so Pat must be compiling with PentiumPro (II/III and greater) instructions.

So, not only is there not an official 64-bit Slackware (I am using Slamd64 on my main box) but now it doesn't run on all of my old gear.

I pressed F2 to see a list of kernels at the boot prompt, but there's just the one available.

Woe is me.

I have insomnia so I was reading the guardian and came across an article on adertiser-funded music downloads by the hugely revered Peter Gabriel who can do no wrong.

Oh dear.

It would appear that, far from having the opportunity to experience a taste of the avante guarde, we get to download the likes of Girls Aloud and other such vacuous detritus.

Let me be quite clear here: I am not being a snob. I am sure there is a market for that sort of thing amongst those too timid to go to Harmony to buy real pr0n (I can thank my wife here).

But get a grip. Some of us like to have music for music's sake, and a bunch of whinging plastic women murdering second-hand songs just doesn't cut it.

According to the BBC, the threat of terrorism in the UK is growing

The government wants to sell us expensive plastic cards to protect us from this menace.

There is at least one elephant in the room: why haven't they banned fireworks yet? Why are we still burning an effigy of a Catholic terrorist? Why not update things for this century? Or how about the most dangerous subversive in the UK today?

And chapati flour. You can make a bomb out of it apparently.

Yooman rights? Yooman rights? I don't need no yooman rights! I'm a hard-working law-abiding citizen. God save the Queen!

Don't want to hear about the drugs you're taking,

Don't want to hear about the love you're making,

Don't want to read about the lies you're faking...

At last, the UK government has made a rational and positive decision and given the go-ahead for a new generation of nuclear power stations to be built.

The decision should have been made 15 years ago, of course, and the electricity supply industry would be in a better state today and we wouldn't be reliant on Russian gas.

Unfortunately, before global warming became a political issue, it would have been career suicide for any politician to announce new nuclear power plants. Together with the privatisation of the electricity supply industry and the deregulation of the market 10 years ago, the proce of electricity plummeted, making the older nuclear stations uneconomical to run. My old power station (Bradwell, in Essex) was such a victim.

Ignorance among the general public and the irrational scare-mongering of self-styled "expert" environmentalists created very hostile feelings towards civillian nuclear power. The accidents at Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl we constantly wheeled out, along side the nuclear waste "problem" to make arguments against nuclear power.

Nuclear reactor design and nuclear safety are very large, complex subjects and it's very difficult to explain to the average member of the public (who probably only studied science up to the age of 14 if at all) that different reactor designs behave differently due to the laws of physics, i.e. Chernobyl couldn't happen in Britain since we don't have any RBMK reactors. Three Mile Island could, nowadays, though since we have Sizewell B - but it has a containment building. Windscale couldn't happen again since it was a problem caused by the design and operation of those two specific reactors. All of our reactors have passive safety features which can not be disabled (unlike Chernobyl) and we have ways and means of ensuring that they are shut down properly (and permanently) in the case of a serious accident - which has never happend,

Dounrey is another favourite whipping-boy of the environmentalists. The problems there are political, i.e. it was badly run. There were a couple of fast reactors there. They worked. A friend of mine was there standing on the pile cap when one was running. That's right, we could use our nuclear waste (plutonium that everyone is so needlessly scared of) for generating more electricity, and getting rid of the plutonium into the bargain. The French had a much more sophisticated reactor of this kind.

And everyone hates Sellafield. But it's been there are long as there was plutonium to be made in Britain for the Cold War nuclear weapons programme, and subsequently became the place for reprocessing and disposal/storage of nuclear waste. Of course, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth would have you believe that the Irish Sea is a highly-contaminated nuclear graveyard as a consequence. If you actually go and take measurements (proper unbiased scientific observations that are independently testable) you will find that they are lying through their teeth as usual.

Terrorism, eh? Well, we managed with the threat of IRA terrorism all these years without incident.

We made new nuclear fuel for the conventional reactors out of depleted uranium and plutonium. It was called MOX and it worked, it was safe, it used up plutonium and it was clean, however "environmentalists" and the media put an end to it.

So, the price of electricity plummeted for a couple of years, the industry went into decline and all the expertise was retired, the nuclear engineering university course closed up, young people like me jumped ship into Software Engineering, and that was that. Electricity is now the most expensive it's ever been and demand is far outstripping supply.

Ten years later, the idiot politicians (but I repeat myself) and "environmentalists" have finally realised that we need reliable base-load electricity that doesn't emit millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and the only way to get it is nuclear.

Who will build and operate the new nuclear power stations? The French, of course. EDF is going to be the first to build four new power stations in England. Scotland, in its inimitable arrogant luddite way, will not be having any more nuclear power stations. They're going to cover the island of Lewis in wind turbines and burn peat to keep warm.

Germany decided last decade to close down its nuclear power industry. Germany now imports a lot of electricity from France. France gets over 70% of its electricity from nuclear power and has the most advanced nuclear science and industry in the world. The UK imports 2GW (gigawatts) of electricity from France via a cable under the English Channel.

Once again, can't-do won't-do Britain fails to plan for the future, sweeps things under the carpet, and says "I'm sure it'll be alright."

If you want to get something done, don't even think about it in the UK. I work for an American company. We make very good high-tech things and make a good living.

Still, mustn't grumble, eh? We're British after all.

Bill has answered the questions put forth to him by BBC web site readers.

He has some priceless comments regarding Open Source Software. (It's not professional). Oh, and Vista is wonderful.

You can watch the interview at the BBC.

Perhaps you have always wanted to know what the inspiration was behind Windows. Maybe you want to know what it is like being one of the world's richest men. Or maybe you are more interested in the philanthropic career he has planned after he steps down.

Courtesy of the BBC, here is your big chance to get Bill Gates to answer all those awkward^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsycophanic questions you always wanted to ask.

Who was first at Xerox PARC: Apple or Microsoft? How has Windows and Microsoft software advanced human civilisation, does he feel he's earned the money, and how about the time he gave India nearly four times as much money to fight Linux and FOSS than he did to fight AIDS? Will he now become the first paying space tourist?

Ho hum.

Gillian Gibbons is a 54-year-old primary school teacher from Liverpool in the UK. She teaches in Sudan and has just been jailed for 15 days for "insulting religion." Luckily she was spared the lash.

Her crime was to ask her class of 7-year-olds to choose a name for a teddy bear. The most popular name by far was Muhammad, and thus was the toy bear named.

Some children's parents were incensed by this act of blasphemy and had Gibbons arrested and charged. She was found guilty and jailed, to be deported as soon at she serves her jail term.

The streets of Khartoum are awash with protesters calling for Gibbons to be put to death.

There are some rants on the subject at Have Your Say.

Isn't there a war on on Darfur or something?

At long last I managed to get another UltraSPARC box on my home network.

So I was doing a bit more mult-threaded programming.

Now, when we all got downsized from ${THE_ONE_TRUE_BIG_UNIX_COMPANY}, dicky gave me his dual PIII/550.

A month ago, now that I have a good salary, I upgraded from an Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) to an Athlon X2 5200+ (2.6GHz dual core).

I was frobbing with POSIX threads and have this program which does some pointless trig calculations for the purpose of showing that I can dispatch an arbitrary number of threads and get sane answers and so forth...

So here it the rub. Dicky's old dual PIII takes about 3-4 x as long as my funky new athlon dual core. My 500 MHz UltraSPARCIIi SunBlade 100 takes just over 1.8 seconds. My shiny new AMD athlon 64 X2 etc. 2.6GHz takes over 28 seconds.

Poor Sun. I used to work for them, and I know the grief they take from the popular press etc., and now I think "poor AMD."

See, I don't really know yet how efficient Linux's pthreads implementation is, and I bet the trig functions I'm using are pretty ropey. I haven't tried my own ones yet....

So there you have it. gcc on a ropey development version of Solaris beats Linux on its home turf by an order of magnitude. On one specific test. Register windows anyone? More efficient code?

Update: Yes, I took out the trig, and replaced it with trivial assignments. The Athlon 64 is now significantly faster, as the clock frequency might imply. 64-bit RISC rules for floating-point. Did you know, intel fanboys, that UltraSPARC, since about 1996, has been able to do quadruple-precision floating-point in hardware?