I was looking at the eee PC and I've got to the stage where I'm about to buy one.

PIXmania seem to be doing a decent deal on them - get the cheapo version for ?191.60.

There are a number of problems with this:

1. First of all, I had a nagging memory of the name PIXmania.  LearningToSnap had mentioned them, and not in a glowing way.  So that's not good.
2. SWMBO mentioned that she'd heard they were the way Dixons/Currys shifted their FNF returned goods and overstocks.  If I'm getting an FNF item I'd rather it was more obvious...
3. They require a landline and date of birth for registration. (As far as they're concerned, you can call me on their example number '0102030405', and I was born on 1st January 1920...)
4. When I got to the delivery stage, it offered me overnight shipping through UPS (the expensive option) or... nothing.  There was no standard delivery option.  I don't know if that was another Norn Iron thing, or if they're just playing silly buggers.
5. A search on Google for 'uk ASUS Eee PC 2G Surf' brought up an advert from PIXMania saying 'Get ?15 OFF on Asus 4 GB EEE PC! Use Code "EEEUK15" at Checkout.'  Using the code just got me an error saying 'Sorry, this offer has now ended'.
6. Now that I've got to that stage, I can see that they've automatically added 'Zen Engagement' to my basket.  This costs ?19.06, and gets me - I kid you not - 'A refund in case your product malfunctions'.  Well thank you very-fucking-much - you mean if you sell me something that doesn't work I get my money back?  Isn't that, y'know, a statutory obligation for goods sold with the customer not present?

To sum up: I still haven't got my eee, and I'm certainly not going to buy anything from PIXmania.

Funnily enough, I just found another voucher code for PIXmania and I gave it a go.  It only offers ?10 off, but it works.  Unfortunately for PIXmania, while I was doing this I noticed that they added something else to my basket - 'VIPIX Loyalty Card', for ?7.  Bastards!  I hate the way with some retailers you really need to scrutinise every part of the purchase to make sure they're not ripping you off.  (Tesco are another company like that - they often have three-packs of items that are more expensive than the buying the 3 individual items, just because it's become ingrained in us that buying in bulk is cheaper.)

PETA have just announced an X-Prize - $1million to the first person to produce a commercially- viable 'artificial' meat by 2012.

Here's what I don't get. Artificial meat will - if successful - mean fewer animals being bred for their meat.

That means that fewer animals suffer, true. Because the 'suffering' animals will never exist.

Some philosophies say suffering is inherent in the nature of life. Everyone tries to make the best of it, but "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation".  It seems daft to me that these people are trying to encourage non-existance for animals in the name of "ethics".

I'm not trying to defend cruelty to animals in any way here, but I'm pretty sure that if you asked an animal whether it would prefer a life of suffering and quiet desperation, or no life at all, I know what it would choose.

"Needs A Good Proofreader"
Score: 3/5

Well, here's an 'internet phenomenon' that passed me by.  I'd never heard of this book until SWMBO passed it along.

Apparently I'm just an out-of-touch old crusty, because as well as its own web site, it has a MySpace page (I still don't have one of 'em, and I don't plan on getting one).

It started out as a self-published book on Lulu.com, before getting a real publishing deal and going mass-market.  All of which is irrelevant, but will either give you a warm, tingly stick-it-to-the-man feeling or dear-lord-get-me-a-proofreader palpitations.

I thought it was pretty good.  It was very readable, easy when compared with the book I read just before it, and it does have some nice scene-setting in it.  Wikipedia says it's reminiscent of a Tarantino or Rodriguez film (I think they mean Once Upon A Time In Mexico rather than Spy Kids), and I suppose that's true but it reminded me more of a Robert Rankin book set in a pseudo-Mexican village.

If you were to take Rankin's love of all things Brentford, and transplant it to a hot desert location in the Americas, and add a lot more violence and death, you'd be pretty close to this book.

Speaking of geography, I have no idea any more where the book is set.  I thought Santa Mondega was a fictional place supposed to be in the U.S., somewhere around the Texas/Mexico border.  We'd never heard of it because it's a special place that doesn't appear on maps etc.  Plus, a U.S. special agent is sent there to investigate.

This PR draft (sorry - PDF download) says it's in South America.  I didn't get that at all.

Well, it doesn't make a great deal of difference.

One problem I did have was that sometimes it was impossible to keep track of the dialogue.  I'd love to have an example to put here, but I couldn't find the one I was looking for and I'm buggered if I'm going to read it all again just for you lot.  But there was one bit that was a simple conversation between two people.  It was only five lines.  It should be trivial:

Person A says something

Person B says something

Person A says something

Person B says something

Person A says something

But that didn't work here.  Here it was:

"Something", said Person A.

"Something".

"Something".

"Something".

"Something", said Person B

It's not possible to figure out who said the in-between lines because it can't be one person then the other taking turns since that just doesn't add up.  To make it worse, the 'voices' weren't distinctive enough in this case to demonstrate who was speaking each of the lines.

This is the sort of thing proofreaders catch, so maybe it could use some better editing.  (There was a missing open-quote as well, but I'll let them away with that one because there are problems like that in most books.)  The couple of times I noticed the problem with dialogue were more serious though.

And don't believe the PR bumph - it's not even a little bit scary.

"Good, But Perseverance Required"
Score: 4/5

This book was recommended on a mailing list I'm on, and I wasn't sure whether to buy it or not.  I mean, I'll take recommendations from anywhere (feel free to pass any recommendations on, by the way), but these folks weren't as scathing as I was about Stross's half-book The Family Trade.  (I still resent wasting money on half a book just because the publisher wants to monetise a resource or whatever.)  Folks on the list were more accommodating and defensive of Stross when I ranted, saying it was his publisher's fault, not his.

So I wasn't sure what their recommendations would be like.

I needn't have worried - I enjoyed this book.  That said, it took a lot of work.  This book is rich, but it's hard to get into and you need to pay a lot of attention throughout the book because of the way it shifts timelines and characters.  The character switches can be particularly difficult if you're not paying attention, since, without giving things away, names can change and the same character can go by different names at different times.

It's quite 'Russian' in that regard - if you've ever read Dostoevsky you'll be used to characters being referred to by seemingly completely different names depending on who is talking.

Anyway, the book had an unusual depth to it.  Well worth reading, but I wouldn't put it down for too long or you'll forget who's who...

"Two Blokes' Excellent Adventrue"
Score: 4/5

I really didn't think I was going to like the series 'Long Way Round'.  I liked some of the stuff Ewan McGregor had been in, but I'd never heard of Charley Boorman and I'm not a petrol-head so the idea of a bloke's road trip on bikes wasn't really a turn on.

OK, I shouldn't pre-judge things.  Sometimes I'm right though.

Still, in this case I was wrong.  I loved the series.  It felt honest (no idea whether it was or not, but it felt it).  You could feel when there was tension amongst them, and when they were happy.

This is the book of the trip.  It covers the same sort of things the series did, but it glosses over some parts the series dwelt on, and it goes in to more depth on some things the series didn't really cover.  It complements the series well.

And the writing's not bad either.  I don't know who wrote it (I doubt it was the purported authors - I suspect they told their stories to a ghostwriter and had him or her put the actual words on paper) but it flows quite well.  The chapters and sections shift perspective, with some bits being 'Charley's words' and some bits being 'Ewan's words', but that works quite well here.  I'm not sure why it works so well - possibly it's because after the series I feel like I've come to know them both a little bit.

(That must be really annoying for folks in the public eye - all these people think they know a little / a lot / everything about you and you know nothing about them, and then they come up to you as if you're old friends...)

And then there's the bikes.  I've only ridden a motorbike a couple of times - never enough to actually say I can ride one, let alone sit the test.  But I've always thought that one day I might.  I was reading this book on our barge trip, and we talked about what we'd do for our trip next year.  Well, it looks like we might take a bike trip.  We're slightly hampered by none of us:

• Owning a motorbike,
• Having a motorbike license, or even
• Knowing how to ride a bike

But, well, we have a year to sort those minor details out.  So, maybe next year I'll be telling you all about our 'Long Way Round Ireland Without A Fridge' trip.

And it's these guys' fault.

"Pile Of Pretentious Wank"
Score: 2/5

From the moment I picked up this book, I didn't like it.

Actually, that may have been the problem.  I remember 'Birdsong' had no little impact in the literary world when it came out, and I remember seeing the 'cover with the naked man' on the stands in the local Waterstones (before it got burned).  I remember picking it up a couple of times, deciding it wasn't really for me, and putting it back down.

This particular edition though has 'an introduction by the author' that the original edition lacked.  And it turns out that the author is a pretentious wanker.

Seriously - go get this edition and read the introduction.  If that doesn't put you off reading the book, nothing will.

SWMBO had put the book on my to-read pile, so that put me in the 'nothing will' camp.  She liked bits of it and said the war chapters were worth reading.

She - smart girl that she is - didn't bother reading the pile of wank that is the introduction.

And it's true enough - the war bits are OK.  They're not great (I think the war poets got the fear over better, and All Quiet On The Western Front and The Green Fields Of France communicated the futility) but those bits aren't bad.  The rest - the actual 'plot' - just isn't that interesting, and it's a shame that this dross takes up the bulk of the 500 pages.  It's probably supposed to be a study in characters but really all it does is show that the author doesn't get much of a view with his head stuck up his own arse.

"Needs More Swordfighting Babes"
Score: 3/5

So, what have we got here?  We have a near-future (almost panopticon-like) society where everywhere is littered with surveillance cameras and everything is recorded, where a 'virtual' crime was committed in a World-of-Warcraft-type game, with police, forensic accountancy and programming all meeting in one large lump.

It has a lot of great elements, as far as I'm concerned (a babe wielding a sword, for one thing), but it just doesn't quite hit the mark.

Part of that may be the way the jumps between characters.  I'm certainly used to that - lots of books do it - but it seems to jar here because of Stross's choice of the second-person singular narrative voice.  That's hard to pull off, and, well, here it remains firmly un-pulled.

(If that paragraph lost you, 'second person singular' is where it's all written like 'You wake up and look around.  You see a clock on the mantelpiece.  You see a candlestick holder with an unlit candle in it.'  Second-person is all 'You...' rather than first-person 'I...' or third-person 'He/She/It...')

I suspect the reason Stross did it this way was to give it a bit more of the feel of an old text adventure.  (Remember them?)  It just didn't really work for me, and it jarred with each new chapter (a chapter change equates to a perspective/character switch in this book).

That said, it's still a science fiction book with a programmer hero and a swordfighting babe, and you can't be bad to that.

There really is a dearth of documentation on IIS6's wildcard redirection.

It seemed simple - I was renaming the Blog.aspx page in my blog to BlogEntry.aspx (no, don't ask why) and I wanted all the requests for the old page to go to the new one.

Similarly, I wanted requests for the Rss2.aspx page to go to the Rss.aspx page.  (Don't ask about this either.)

Except IIS's wildcards don't work the way you expect, and the expected redirection rules led to either:

1. No rewriting,
2. Incorrect rewriting, or
3. Really, really incorrect rewriting that kept rewriting until the URL was too long for it to deal with.

So, a frustrating half-hour later, after trying every interpretation of the two documents Microsoft provides I could think of, I've come up with a rewriting rule that works.

And I'm going to share it with you now.

Remember, this is a fairly trivial thing to redirect (confused a little by the way my blog puts querystring parameters in the path, I admit).  And yet this is the most complex example of IIS URL rewriting I've seen.  The examples in the documentation and the ones I've found elsewhere are much more trivial (something I didn't think would be possible).

Are you ready?  Here goes:

*;/*Rss2.aspx;/Blog/Rss.aspx;/*/Blog.aspx;/Blog/$0/BlogEntry.aspx

That does the trick, for me at least.  I really figured something like:

*;Rss2.aspx;Rss.aspx;*/Blog.aspx;$0/BlogEntry.aspx

would have worked...