"Incrediblania was a kingdom, though it didn't sound like one. In fact most people who heard its name for the first time thought it was either an illness or the name of a new kind of dance. But it was a kingdom. A rather small kingdom, certainly, but what it lacked in size, Incrediblania more than made up in completeness."
- The Home-made Dragon And Other Incredible Stories

BB's Junior Research Assistant is in dire need of further bedtime reading to accompany her loud attempts to destroy her bedroom. (Given that the JRA currently isn't the sort to sit quietly and listen, BB figures we may as well at least read something that we enjoy.) Hence, we've just ordered one copy of every Norman Hunter Incrediblania book that we could find on ABEbooks.

We're looking forward to telling the JRA of the king who eventually abolished all the days of the week (because he hated washing day), the Royal Disco that was built on a slant and the kingdom that kept halving itself to reward dragon slayers. Hunter's Incrediblania tales are now, incredibly, all out of print (there is a Professor Branestawm title that's been reissued, but those stories are generally judged inferior to the wacky kingdom of Incrediblania, and certainly so by BB). Strangely, we couldn't track down a complete bibliography so here's a brief list of the ones we've found so far in case anyone can add to it.

1. The Dribblesome Teapots (1969): "Modern fairy tales" about a variety of kingdoms with silly names, such as "Sypso-Sweetleigh" and "Inkrediblania" (sic). These stories appear to have been rehashed from an earlier collection first published thirty-one years previously when Hunter, born in 1899, would have been 39.
2. The Home-Made Dragon (1971): The first volume dedicated purely to Incrediblania, presumably inspired by the new success of the previous tales. Classic Fritz Wegner illustrations.
3. The Frantic Phantom (1973)
4. Dust-up at the Royal Disco (1975)
5. Count Bakwerdz on the Carpet (1979): Illustrated by Babette Cole, who went on to write her own childrens books; Princess Smartypants has a strong Incrediblanian influence and a pleasingly modern princess.
6. Sneeze And Be Slain: only available in hardcover, not sure if this is just a single tale from one of the other books to accompany a Jackanory reading. (Haven't ordered it.)
7. Wizards Are A Nuisance: Another Jackanory TV tie-in.

More info sought and gratefully received. If you're also looking for these books, most of them seem to be ex-library copies in poor condition but should be readable.

Other bubbles

• If you're wondering what these tales are like, there's a short extract here (scroll down to Waiting for Good Luck or search the page for "Incrediblania"); don't even ask what the rest of that site is about.
• Brief biography of Norman Hunter.

Finally, a Fedora upgrade that Just Works ... it's called CentOS.

Still suffering the aftershocks of a disruptive update to Fedora Core 5 on my own PC (currently, either the X server or the entire system will lock up after a sufficient number of days has lapsed), I was still left with my Glamorous Research Assistant's PC to sort out. This has been running FC2 more or less happily for some time now, but FC2 is no longer supported by either the Fedora project or, to any appreciable extent, by the Legacy project. The GRA does not like change; she expects her PC to Just Work, the same as it did yesterday. The GRA's PC is also the fileserver on my network, so a bad upgrade would have a knock-on impact on my own box (and I already had enough instability to cope with on that score). I really didn't fancy turning it into another smoking FC5 corpse.

After weighing up the options, I downloaded CentOS 4.3. CentOS is a freely-available rebuild of the open source parts of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) so, although both are ultimately derived from Fedora, they are better-tested, more stable and supported for longer (CentOS 4 support, at least for security issues, should go until 2012). For the record, the other options were:

• Fedora Core: While Fedora was still a usable desktop OS in its early releases, lately it has become too bleeding edge to offer much assurance. Besides, I badly wanted to get off the Fedora upgrade treadmill of six monthly releases (actually, FC5 took nine and is the worst yet)!
• Ubuntu: A lot of good notices and reports from users, but financially it seems to be bankrolled by a single rich donor who has seen one of those films where the protagonist has to lose a fortune as quickly as possible. What happens when the legacy dries up? (True, CentOS is in a worse state financially but at least they're only repackaging someone else's code instead of maintaining their own and they don't have any huge cash injections to encourage complacency.) Also, Debian-based and thus not of my world.

In currency terms, CentOS 4.3 is somewhere between FC2 and FC3. Hence most of the FC2 RPMs will be updated if you perform an OS upgrade, being slightly later versions. A few, such as the kernel, need special attention. Here's what I did:

1. Take a backup, and also commit copies of important system files to CVS.
2. Perform a CentOS upgrade using the "upgradeany" boot option.
3. On reboot, the GRUB bootloader did not appear to have been reinstalled on the MBR (possibly due to the missing kernel update). I rebooted from the CentOS DVD in rescue mode and mounted the filesystems. I had to install GRUB by copying a grub-install script from a later version on another system, as the version in CentOS doesn't understand /boot partitions that are located on RAID metadevices.
4. While in rescue mode, I also manually removed the fedora-release RPM and installed the centos-release RPM in its place (probably easier to do this in the next step).
5. Reboot successfully in single user mode and mount the CentOS DVD. Force a manual installation of the CentOS kernel RPM and check the grub.conf file.
6. After a reboot into the new CentOS kernel, I removed the old Fedora kernel RPMs as they prevent the CentOS one being updated due to their later version numbers.
7. Using my own centos-rpmcheck script, I searched for packages that hadn't been updated by the CentOS upgrade (because RPMs with later version numbers had been installed while running FC2). I performed a forced update of each of these. I also removed obsoleted packages. Afterwards, I rebooted again to confirm things still worked.
8. Run a YUM update (and - sigh - reboot again for the newest kernel).
9. Add the kbsingh Fedora Extras rebuild and sangrah Livna rebuild repositories to YUM and update again to fix the remaining packages. (These aren't of any proven long-term stability but better than nothing; Dag Wieer's RPMforge repository is an alternative.)

Comment from my GRA: "Hey, it's changed - it's faster!" (probably due to the later KDE version in CentOS, since little else has incremented).

Following such a positive experience, it's tempting to "downgrade" my FC5 box to CentOS too, but unfortunately I'm already used to later versions of heavily-used desktop programs like the GIMP, OpenOffice and Firefox in Fedora, and these haven't made it to RHEL/CentOS yet. And by the time they do, Fedora will be far in front again. What I really need is something with a stable core like CentOS, that doesn't play "kernel fix of the day", but with a bang up to date user space. The alternative is to install CentOS but do my own rebuilds of the Fedora RPMs for the packages that matter to me. However, this risks entering library dependency hell (e.g. latest GIMP requires latest GTK, which then requires updating all the GNOME packages, etc.). It would also be a bunch of extra work. There is a "CentOS Plus" repository for packages that may override official versions, but tracking this automatically is an all-or-nothing proposition; you couldn't, say, choose to have Firefox 1.5 from Plus but stick with the distro PHP 4. This is a limitation of package managers like YUM and APT.

Other bubbles

• The CentOS project. (Needs a few RSS news feeds.)

I keep meaning to post a moan about the generic landscape pictures that clutter up photo gallery sites, not to mention yards of shelf with glossy colour hardbacks in tourist shops, but it probably wouldn't amount to much more than "GAH, if I have to look at one more 'glorious' sunset, I'll smash the monitor!!" This post from Auspicious Dragon and this essay by Mike Johnston are more eloquent and insightful than my annoyed ranting would be.

I would, however, like to add my "karaoke" theory of landscape photography, which is that such pictures are usually more fun for the participant than the audience. (A glance at any edition of "Outdoor Photography" magazine will usually turn up suitable examples - medium format on Velvia, taken at dawn or dusk.) You hike out to some wild and desolate region an hour before dawn, often in foul conditions, to catch the breathtaking first light creeping over the mountains. My ghod, it's a wonderous moment to be alive just then. But you take a photo because that was your original justification for coming here when everyone sane else is still tucked up in bed at home (and also thereby not spoiling your photo by walking into shot). But the photo is actually a poor facsimile of the total experience - the chill wind cooling your skin, the warm glow from your exertions, the knowledge that you're the only witness, the awesome stillness, etc. It's a souvenir of your efforts. To the viewer, the photo is "pretty" - pretty much like all the other "magic hours" photos that fill up every available space. The only deeper meaning it can have is the glory of nature and the fragility of our incredible environment - and believe me, we've got that message from countless other examples (even if we haven't done much about it yet).

(Of course, I'm talking mainly about ambitious landscape photographers here - the majority of amateur shots don't go to so much trouble, being little more than "here I was at the time, this was the view". But the karaoke principle still applies.)

Actually, I suspect my real problem isn't so much with all these photos - people are, after all, free to choose what they want to photograph and many other people less curmudgeonly than I enjoy the results - but the impossibility of filtering most gallery searches to exclude such shots.