Much as a death is always a sad occasion (sniff), BB is looking forward to hearing "Teenage Kicks" by the Undertones again (and again, and again...), just to remind ourselves how much we hated John Peel's latterly eclectic but uniformly dire taste in music.

Of course, we don't get to make gratuitously snide remarks about it while supposedly presenting the Glastonbury festival. So we'll settle for doing it here. Rather like an Egyptian king, it would be nice to think of Morrissey and co. being buried alongside him. He'd like that. So would we.

I'd only tangentially heard of the sinister "Out Of Memory Killer" in the 2.6 Linux kernel series, until a few nights ago when my system experienced its devastating efficiency.

It turns out that, as well as a mechanism for killing "random" processes when the system runs out of memory (remember: it's not a bug, it's a feature), 2.6.8 also has a gaping memory leak triggered while burning audio CDs. This is not a happy combination, even when the price of blank CD-Rs is negligible.

You start writing the CD. Around the fourth track, most of your 512Mb RAM has been swallowed up outside of userland. The OOM Killer kicks in and zaps the biggest hog it can find in userland: Mozilla. But the CD writing process demands more sacrifices, more bytes on the pyre. So the OOM Killer goes to work with a vengeance, slaying apparently random desktop processes - GIMP sessions with unsaved images, editors with unsent emails, etc. Eventually, it kills something that locks up your entire session, and shortly after that it causes your PC to reboot. ("We had to burn down the entire village to save it.") You toss the incomplete CD-R in the bin and start again.

Eventually, when your bin fills up with useless silver discs, you get a bit smarter than the dope who invented the OOM Killer and made it the default - you check Red Hat's Bugzilla system, where you learn all about the million and one CD burning bugs in the "production" kernel update you're running (e.g. #131251, #132180).

You swear and revert to 2.6.5 or something else less buggy ... well, differently buggy. You swear some more, but reflect that at least it only cost you a few CD-Rs, rather than an entire system - like when you almost dragged the PC outside and beat it to death with a lump hammer. You resolve to burn CDs in dummy mode first from now on. Like you used to before you were lulled into believing the process was reliable.

LWN carries as good an explanation of the thinking behind the OOM Killer as I've seen and crucially, a hint on how to disable it. Running out of memory isn't pretty on any Unix system and you would expect some instability to result (of course, it helps if you don't run out during simple, common, proven tasks). Funnily enough, I've been able to resolve this problem on Solaris before now, without the benefit of an OOM Killer. In fact, I'd rather deal with the instability myself than receive automated help in the form of an algorithm that can't possibly know which, if any, processes are expendable. I look forward to the day when Linux addresses disk space shortages by randomly deleting files. No wait, I mean I look forward to the day I don't act as a beta-tester for my OS anymore.

Other bubbles:

• Memory overcommit: Solaris OS vs. other operating systems

BB's goal of abandoning the high street, and indeed never going outside again, in favour of online shopping has almost come to fruition with the ability to buy socks online at Blueshire - for all your HJ Hall Diamond Argyll needs. We recommend the cotton intarsia style (HJ 7406). Minimium order three items, no delivery charge. The site seems to require IE to make the "Shopping Basket" link visible but heck, warm feet trump crap browsers. (Apologies to anyone who found this page while looking for a way to make IE work with a SOCKS proxy.)