Bellerophon symbol, variation 7 jonath.co.uk
Wednesday 14th July 2004

Hello. Me here again. Well, what's going on, then? It's all a bit dull, really . . . recompiling kernels. My keyboard and mouse were being weird . . . well, I think this was because I kind of semi-disabled USB support from my default kernel. The keyboard gave up completely (fortunately I have a PS/2 back-up) and the mouse was fine except for the middle scroll wheel thing (not responding). Also, the computer kept pausing for a fraction of a second every five seconds or so. Perhaps as if it was trying to handle all these signals from the USB mouse whilst not having a full grasp of how to handle USB appliances, and it couldn't keep up with it all. Not good. Perhaps a silly idea in the first place. It started when I thought, "Hmmmm. This printing service Boots and the like offer digital camera users . . . whereby you can take in your memory card and get the images printed for, erm, about 50p a copy (this varies depending on how many images you get printed at one time), for a single 6" by 4" image . . . well, surely these are just jpegs we're talking about here, so can't I put any images I choose onto this memory card and get those printed? So, erm . . . not necessarily pictures taken by my digital camera, but in terms of image size and resolution, they're the same thing. That's okay, isn't?" And assuming it is . . . I can up/down load images onto my camera's memory card and take those to Boots/Jessops/whatever for printing? Yep, all sounds fair enough. But what's this? The application I'm using to get the images from my camera does not support the uploading of images (from computer to memory card), even though the computer itself recognises that the camera does support this. So what's going on then? What's all that about? So, knowing that the memory card should just be another of these so-called 'mass storage devices', why can't we just access it from the computer as just another file system? But it seems you need SCSI support to do this . . . just generic SCSI support should do . . . and maybe enable support for DOS-like filesystems (FAT) whilst you're there . . . oh, and in the USB sub-section, tick all the boxes for 'mass storage support' . . . and it goes on and on . . . nothing's ever that simple. I should have got bored of all this a long, long time ago, but, the thing is, I really could do with some interesting colour images to cover wall space with . . . that's the problem, and is that so wrong?