A howl on the wind…

On the whole, Deep Space Nine is not great and most episodes are forgettable. I have no empathy for Kira Nerys or the Bajorans in general. Dukat is a great character, but then it turns to the whole silly Pah-wraith. Kai Winn Adami is just annoying and should have been fed to a wild lion at first sight. The war with the Dominion brought in a lot of good, and an equal amount of crap. Throughout the show, Julian Bashir remains my favorite character.

Best Episodes

In order of best to next best…

• 6×19 In the Pale Moonlight – probably the single best Star Trek episode. Smooth script, smooth acting, smooth direction. It’s all good.
• 7×16 Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges
• 6×09 Statistical Probabilities

Other Notable Episodes

In simple sequential order…

• 3×17 Visionary
• 5×02 The Ship
• 6×11 Waltz
• 6×13 Far Beyond the Stars
• 7×05 Chrysalis
• 7×10 It’s Only a Paper Moon
• 7×13 Field of Fire
• 7×23 Extreme Measures

Worst Episodes

In order of worst to next worst…

• 6×14 One Little Ship

Voyager is overall a good show. And that is despite the fact that the only character I really like is that of Captain Kathryn Janeway – her way of doing things sets her very clearly aside and beyond from the rest.

Best Episodes

In order of best to next best…

• 5×10 Counterpoint – another episode that stands above the rest of Star Trek as a whole.
• 5×04 In the Flesh
• 6×12 Blink of an Eye
• 5×24 Relativity
• 3×22 Distant Origin
• 4×23 Living Witness
• 5×09 Thirty Days
• 3×21 Before and After
• 6×23 Fury
• 6×03 Barge of the Dead
• 7×11 Shattered
• 7×25 Endgame

Other Notable Episodes

In simple sequential order…

• 1×07 Eye of the Needle
• 1×16 Learning Curve
• 2×16 Meld
• 2×18 Death Wish
• 2×20 Investigations
• 2×21 Deadlock
• 3×03 The Chute
• 3×16 Blood Fever
• 4×07 Scientific Method
• 4×14 Message in a Bottle
• 4×20 Vis à Vis
• 4×25 One
• 5×01 Night
• 6×04 Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy
• 6×08 One Small Step
• 6×20 Good Shepherd

Worst Episodes

In order of worst to next worst…

• 3×22 Real Life
• 3×12 Macrocosm
• 4×17 Retrospect
• 5×08 Nothing Human
• 5×19 The Fight
• 5×23 11:59
• 6×15 Tsunkatse

TNG has Jean-Luc Picard – what more is there to discuss. Well, the first two seasons of TNG were less than stellar, but from third season onward it feels like a solid show. A lot of that has to do with the look and feel, where the uniforms were changed to look more sane.

Best Episodes

In order of best to next best…

• 7×12 The Pegasus – conflicts of duty at a high level…gotta love it.
• 5×25 The Inner Light – has a quiet depth and profoundly changes a character.
• 5×03 Ensign Ro – introduction of the great character Ro Laren, and an overall good episode.
• 7×24 Preemptive Strike – more conflict of duty, and has Ro Laren.
• 7×11 Parallels
• 6×20 The Chase
• 6×25 Timescape
• 4×02 Family
• 5×05 Disaster
• 5×18 Cause and Effect
• 4×14 Clues
• 6×14 Face of the Enemy
• 5×24 The Next Phase
• 6×05 Schisms

Other Notable Episodes

In simple sequential order…

• 1×12 The Big Goodbye
• 2×13 Time Squared
• 2×18 Up The Long Ladder
• 2×20 The Emissary
• 2×21 Peak Performance
• 3×03 The Survivors
• 3×04 Who Watches The Watchers
• 3×06 Booby Trap
• 3×18 Allegiance
• 3×19 Captain’s Holiday
• 4×24 The Mind’s Eye
• 6×18 Starship Mine
• 7×09 Force of Nature
• 7×15 Lower Decks
• 7×16 Thine Own Self

Worst Episodes

In order of worst to second worst…

• 7×13 Homeward
• 5×06 The Game

Ordered a new computer Friday, received it Monday.

Comparison

What I look for…

As is probably evident from the hardware list, I value silence. I do not, however, care what the cabinet looks like as long as it has USB plugs in the front. The computer goes under the table, so I won’t be looking at it enough to care whether it is black, white, or purple.

The 320GB harddrives are Seagate Barracuda 7900.10’s, which are nicely silent. I wanted to move both drives over, but hadn’t foreseen that the DVD drive would take up an IDE slot (duh me), so I’ll have to get an external enclosure for one of them. Suits me fine as I also wanted a nice big portable drive anyways.

Relocating Windows XP via Ubuntu

As my old computer’s DVD burner was rather dead, I wanted to use the new machine to burn a Windows XP SP3 (sic) disc I had slipstreamed with latest updates and various drivers. Luckily I had Ubuntu 7.10 on dual-boot from the 320GB PATA drive, which had no problems with any of the hardware changes. So I used Ubuntu to dd the entire harddrive over to the 500GB SATA drive, basically relocating existing installations so that when the system boots from the SATA drive, partitions won’t complain about being re-enumerated. This worked without any problems and I could boot Ubuntu from the SATA drive after some /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst edits.

I figured that my old Windows installation would blue-screen or refuse to boot since all the hardware had changed and I had not made a clean hardware profile for it. I also recalled something about Windows needing a clean reinstall to properly detect and work with multiple processors if it had been installed with only a single CPU. So I didn’t even consider booting that installation. If only I had…would have saved me a few hours.

I installed the fresh Windows XP SP3 (sic) onto a new partition and started filling it up with drivers and tools. That turned out to be terribly buggy: Sound would not work at all and applications would randomly crash. After a few hours of grumbling, I decided to see what would happen if I booted my existing Windows XP SP2.

To my amazement, it worked. No blue screen, no warnings nor errors. It simply ignored hardware it couldn’t find and happily started detecting all the new hardware, so I installed the drivers and everything just worked. Windows XP SP2 successfully relocated to entirely different hardware (even from PATA to SATA drive), and it just worked. No need to reinstall any of my applications, and it has full use of both cores in the CPU.

I must grudingly admit I had not expected that at all. I thought only Linux/BSD/MacOSX were hardware agnostic to such a degree. But I cannot complain…saves me weeks of fiddling with installations and preferences.

Here’s a little rant about a sin of which Google, Microsoft, and MySpace, and many other big names are all guilty: Automatic language detection based on anything except the actual Accept-Language header the browser sends. They instead use IP geolocation or try to guess from you picking the country you are from.

I am Danish, I live in Denmark, and my gateway is indeed in Denmark as well. However, I prefer to read English, and thus I have set my browser’s Accept-Language header to “en, en-gb;q=0.7, en-us;q=0.3“. Problem is that none of the big sites seem to respect that. Google automatically redirects me to the Danish google.dk (which I at least can force back to google.com). Microsoft sites cannot be changed without manually editing the URL to append “mkt=en-us” to the query string.

I could understand geolocation if the browser was not sending a valid Accept-Language, or to supplement and show local news or events, but please honor the nice standard header in all other cases…

Veering from the online track, in the offline world a similar annoyance struck me with Fedora‘s language and locale settings: It seems impossible to have the full Danish keyboard layout with dead keys, while also having all applications, menus, and terminal messages be English, and have the default encoding everywhere be Unicode (UTF-8). If anyone knows how to overcome that particular issue, I’d be happy to hear…