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Fourteenth book of the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, published in 2012. The Trollocs are attacking on multiple fronts. Rand manages to unite all the people to fight in the Last Battle under Elayne's command. He also convinces Tuon that the Seanchan must take part in the battle against the Shadow. In the Black Tower, Taim is revealed as a Darkfriend and turns Asha'men to the Shadow. Logain, his prisoner, resists and with a few followers manages to escape when Perrin, in the World of Dreams chasing Slayer, deactivates the ter'angreal that prevents making gateways. The battle is going badly for the forces of the Light, especially since the four Great Captains are under Compulsion from Moghedien and do mistakes on purpose. They are howerver relieved of their command and Mat, unaffected by the Power thanks to his medallion, becomes the General of the armies. Meanwhile, Rand enters a cave in Shayol Ghul and confronts the Dark One in spirit while swordfighting against Moridin. He is shown possible futures where the Shadow wins and where Rand kills it as he intends, but none of them seems good to Rand. On the battlefield, Galad and Gawin die figthing Demandred, leader of the Sharans, who have suddenly appeared on the Shadow's side; Egwene dies as well, burned out by drawing too much Power while reparing the rips in the Pattern caused by Demandred's repeated use of balefire. Faile, in charge of taking the Horn of Valere from Tar Valon to Mat, ends up with the Horn in the Blight, and then at a Trolloc's camp. She gives Olver the Horn, asking him to find Mat, while she disappear distracting the Trollocs. Olver, trapped, eventually sounds the Horn, making the Heroes of the Horn appear and fight along the forces of the Light. Lan finally manages to kill Demandred while Rand understands that the Dark One cannot be killed and closes the Bore, preventing it from reaching the world again. He then wins against Moridin and exits the cave carrying his body. The Shadow being without a leaders, the forces of Light eventually win the battle. The last of the Forsaken are killed or taken prisoner. Rand apparently dies, and his body is burned on a public funeral pyre, but his spririt wakes up in Moridin's body; he quitely leaves.

“crystal, black and pale malts, Challenger and First Gold hops”

Sweet with an initial hint of honey. Contains malted barley.

Greene King, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England. 6.5% alcohol.

Fruitée mais assez amère. Contient des malts d'orge et de blé.

Sainte Crucienne, Sainte-Croix-en-plaine, Alsace. 6.0% d'alcool.

Douce et fruitée. Contient des malts d'orge et de blé.

Sainte Crucienne, Sainte-Croix-en-plaine, Alsace. 5.4% d'alcool.

My new computer has a UEFI firmware. I installed Debian Wheezy, which in turn installed the EFI variant of GRUB. For that purpose, the Debian installer made the first partition on the hard disk drive of type VFAT and mounted in /boot/efi.

My problem is that GRUB tends to freeze, either just before booting the kernel (showing forever “Loading initial ramdisk”) or just after the welcome message (“Welcome to Grub!”). Pressing the computer's reset button allowed to reboot the computer, and everying went then fine. It seems to be possible to reproduce the bug at will by switching off the power supply, waiting 15 seconds for the capacitors to get empty and then reboot the computer. Booting however also hangs quite often after powering the computer off in software (where the power supply still provides some power to the motherboard).

I read here and there that EFI GRUB was quite buggy, so I decided to switch to PC GRUB (the variant for booting with the Legacy firmware, aka BIOS).

In a first attempt, I configured the motherboard's firmware to use “Legacy ROM only” instead of “UEFI only”. Debian continued to boot normally with the still installed EFI GRUB, and the freeze when rebooting after having switched off the power supply seemed to have disappeared. It howerver froze again today and so I decided to change from EFI GRUB to BIOS GRUB.

/usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: This GPT partition label has no BIOS Boot
 Partition; embedding won't be possible!.
/usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible.
 GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists.
 However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..

After a bit of research on the Web, I found someone's advice to change the flag of the FAT partition to bios_grub. I then forced the reinstallation of grub-pc with apt-get install --reinstall grub-pc, which didn't complain anymore.

On the next reboot however, the startup script indicated that “fsck died with status 6”. I found out that it tried to check the VFAT partition, but since GRUB is now installed there, it is not anymore recognized as a VFAT partition, and fsck was legitimately skipping it. parted confirmed that fact, and blkid does not list the VFAT partition anymore either. I therefore commented it out in /etc/fstab and now the boot does not fail anymore.

“malty and fruity Christmas ale… bitter finish”

Just another ale. Contains malted barley.

Greene King, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England. 4.2% alcohol.