a view from afar

Thanks to the incredible incompetence of our soon-to-be new broadband provider DST, my blog may be out of action for a while (10 days is apparently the worst case). DST let the MAC code we provided lapse, and Pipex are refusing to issue a new one. (Pipex actually claim that issuing a MAC code is considered a form of cancellation, so I'm not even sure why we still have a net connection at all.)

Unfortunately, due to the time I'm spending at work lately, I don't have time to move the blog to shared hosting. I intend to do that as soon as I can though... I'm getting ever so slightly sick of the universal contempt that consumer ISPs show for their customers.

I just bought a CanoScan LiDE 25. Apparently I'm not the only person that thinks Canon's scanner software is a crime against humanity. I now use Yep for scanning, so I just need the TWAIN driver provided by the Canon installer. But the closest I got to making it work was seeing it install the files, then delete them immediately after. Yes, that's right. I WATCHED THE FILES DISAPPEAR from /Library.

I think Bart Simpson has the best phrase to describe this software - it sucks and blows at the same time.

My installation guide follows...

In a mission to get Sven Fuch's Mephisto plugin Tag Cloud working, I decided to upgrate to Mephisto-trunk (revision 3005). Ultimately it was successful (this blog is now being served by the Mephisto-trunk), but here are some things you should know...