A post for the geeks in the audience.

• NotN: Famous person's son stays in jail, thank Christ. Photo: hi wanna update my feed.

1. Recent Sun Xxx00 x86 servers are really nice boxes, and actually quite cost-effective for what you buy (a decently-built x86 server with good service, at least in our experience on gold and silver contracts). However, the firmware is so awful and buggy that it simulates hardware failures when there are none. If you call Sun, the first thing they will ask is that you upgrade the iLOM and BIOS firmware to the latest version. They are quite correct in this. (The engineer who looked over our X4600M2 that wouldn't boot claiming defective CPUs and was perfectly fine after a firmware afterward was quite scathing in his characterisation of the base firmware.) The nuisance is that you have to hook up both the iLOM serial (to configure the web version) and Ethernet ports, and upgrade the firmware through the browser interface to achieve, ooh, basic functionality. But it works quite well, the iLOM is really nice and we're still big fans of the boxes in question.

2. OpenBSD doesn't do X11 on VirtualBox because VirtualBox is officially crappy and Sun don't care (and Theo is sick of dmesg logs from known-defective virtual hardware). Guess I'll be sticking to running Windows 2000 on it (and that only to play MP3s over SMB without undue annoyance).

I'm trying to help with problems with current Wine on OpenBSD — the ports version is from 1999! And current versions do work quite well on FreeBSD — and have resorted to qemu, which works perfectly in full emulation (kqemu doesn't work; see above) despite being really slow. Use -std-vga not to need an xorg.conf, though that will give you a 1280×1024 screen every time — for something else, use driver "vesa" in xorg.conf. Good Lord, the yakshaving — including setting up vsftpd on the laptop to serve install tarballs via FTP to its hosted virtual machines, so I don't have to keep re-downloading 221MB.

3. Tomorrow (today, Tuesday) I will be down t' pub with sweh and syringavulgaris and the BOFHs. Must get home at a sensible time afterwards, unfortunately. Feh!