What a weekend

The now monthly Nerol Productions show at Babalou in Brixton is getting better and better. First Nina when up and did her soulful thing, live wire Evon went up and got the venue in the mood and finally Sky finished it off. It's such a pleasure to see it all work well. The confidence is growing and it's becoming more like a party than a show now. That's good. The crowd's learning the songs and everyone wants "to say hello".

I spent Saturday at Silverstone with Avon Racing. I think we're all feeling the off-season blues. There were some stunning cars there, in excess of £2M I'd guess. Top of the list were the Porsche Carrera GT, and Lambo Murcielago and that white R35 Skyline. I personally don't see the point in having cars like that. You really need to be racing instead.

I've spend Sunday trying to recover from this flu. I've been going through cycles of sleeping and being cheered up by a friend.

Jazz Cafe

I went to see our artist, Sky Montique, at the Jazz Cafe on Sunday night. It was as it always is, a standing crowd with tables and chairs further back. It wasn't packed as I remember it on Saturday nights, but it was full enough for me to give up trying to get a drink at the bar.

It was my first night there since our friend Nathan Heathman died. It just wasn't the same, no Nathan Heathman, no Gary Gillespie or any of the others.

Sky's performance was uplifting, but the sadness of a departed friend remains.

Thoughts on the 2008 racing season

The regulations are being revised again.

Apparently, it's impossible to enforce the "no chip" rule for Class G. There's not one kind of engine or one kind of ECU and each has its sneaky work-arounds. So all are reluctantly agreed that chips will be allowed.

My thoughts? I don't care either way, so long as we all do the same thing. Plus it is annoying to have a race car that's down on power compared to my track day car. Let's face it, the faster, the better. Maybe the 147s will go better when chipped too, the 156s definitely will. The Little Car may have less to gain, we'll see.

Aims for this year? To be as fast as Graham Heels at Brands Hatch, Paul Buckley at Castle Combe and still be myself in the wet.

Photo copyright (c) 2007 www.alfaracer.com

PC Hard Disk Partitions

This article has been moved to:
http://keith-technotes.blogspot.com/2007/12/understanding-pc-hard-disk-partitions.html

Installing Debian Linux

This article has been moved to:
http://keith-technotes.blogspot.com/2007/12/installing-debian-linux.html

2007 Newcomer's Title

What a season this' been. A win, a second place, lots of good racing, meeting lots of good folk, finishing 3rd in class and 10th overall. I've enjoyed all of it.

I've learned so much and there's so much more to learn. And to top it all, tonight I found that I've been selected as the UK Alfa Romeo Championship - 2007 Best Newcomer.

I'm ecstatic.

The new car is ready!

I'm looking forward to this season, I should have done this years ago.

Where Microsoft fails

Since the early days of Novell's PC networking, it was clear that Microsoft didn't have a clue what to do about networking. While Novell's networking simply worked seamlessly with MS DOS, Microsoft's Lan Manager was a clumsy black art. It only became popular when it was integrated into Daytona (which became Windows NT, which became Windows 2000, which became Windows XP, ... 2003, Longhorn ...).

Microsoft's next attempt was in distributed objects. The basic technology was Distributed Common Object Model, DCOM. This was a big fat ugly technology, but elegant when compared to other Microsoft services such as OCX, OLE2. They've continued to believe that network speeds will improve with CPU speeds. To everyone else, this is obviously never going to happen.

The next attempt at networking was to provide a Multics style computing service, where all the important apps are distributed on Microsoft servers. You'll then have to pay a Microsoft utility bill to access your own stuff. The technology to make this happen? .NET. After some years of dabbling with .NET, Microsoft still don't offer a platform and tools to develop the latest .NET 2 apps and the existing .NET 1.1 apps.

Enter Google. Have you seen Google Mail, Calendar, Spreadsheet? They're bloody good applications. They're easy to use, and slick to look at. And of course, there's searching on nearly everything. If Google brings out an online word processor, it'll be all over. The Operating System will just be a tool to access the world wide internet and run viruses.