The Occasional Masthead

Since HP are very slow to release new drivers for the HP 5370c scanner, I’m looking for alternatives. VueScan will definitely work, although I’d rather not spend cash on a solution. I was initially quite excited to find that work had been done to get SANE ported to OS X 10.3.x, but so far my tinkering has met limited success.

The main thing I’ll say about SANE is that it is horribly documented. I’m sure it’s a very good piece of OpenSource hackery, and it certainly appears to work in Linux-land. There are even reports of it working in OS X 10.3.x—but the documentation is so appallingly bad that it’s a project that only geeks could learn to love.

I anticipate that in order to get it working with my scanner I’m going to have to download the source code, roll up my sleeves and do some serious debugging. I really don’t want to to that: I do it at work, I don’t want to waste my time doing it at home to get a piece of consumer electronics working again.

I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: if you’re buying a consumer flatbed scanner, don’t buy a Hewlett-Packard one. They’re technically quite good, and were a good price when I bought this 5370c, but HP are appallingly bad at providing and maintaining drivers, particularly for Mac OS X. Buy a Canon instead. They’re cheaper, and the drivers are continually updated.

What do Fats Waller, Winnie The Pooh, tarantula wasps, Loxodonta africana and Cartesian Duality have in common?

They’re all in the index of The Science of Discworld II—TheGlobe, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, a lovely little popularisation of some recent ideas about the evolution of the human mind and human society, centered around the concept of Man as Pan narrans, ie the StoryTelling Chimpanzee. This was a particularly timely Christmas present from Robyn, as it resonates neatly with some vague thoughts I’ve been having about stories, and their importance.

Not that they’ve been particularly deep thoughts, I’ve just been exposed to some great stories recently, and noticed again how some stories just keep coming back in different forms.

With the imminent release of the film, I finally read Cold Mountain, and can strongly recommend you read it. I hope the film lives up to it, but based on the previews I’ve seen I think the film will tell a slightly different story. The book has tremendous use of language, and has an outstanding rhythm and flow, at both the narrative level and the level of individual phrases. About halfway through the book I suddenly realised that it was, more or less, a retelling of the Odyssey, which is partially why it’s a good book: it’s a great story. So’s the Illiad, and I just hope the Troy film doesn’t muck it up too much. A few days ago I found myself briefly recounting both stories to some folk who had never heard of either of them, yet knew fragments of the stories. That says something of he power of those stories, that they can be embedded in the cultural matrix.

We’ve seen some other great stories on screen over the last week or so: Master and Commander is a ripping yarn, Peter Pan is awesomely good, Love Actually is a sweet collection of good old fashioned love stories, and Casablanca is the Ur-Romance.

Oh, and we watched Westside Story again. As we discussed with Issi while she was up a couple of weeks ago, the strength of the story overcomes the truly awful acting of the leads (have a look at the Oscars it received and was nominated for: even then the public and the Academy noticed that). She was telling us about her exposure to Shakespeare so far. It’s no surprise that another generation of students is being taught to loathe Shakespeare by teachers who completely fail to recognise the core of his genius: fantastic stories (plagiarised from all over the place) wrapped up in spiffy language and blatant use of dramatic tricks to manipulate the audience.

There’s a theory that there are only a few story forms in literature. Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, As You Like It and _Richard III_ cover most of them. Not a bad achievement.

Anyhow, I’m off to wallow in some more ripping yarns. Happy Yuletide, y’all.