Well, I’m back. I do apologise for the low density of Gimboland content over the last few weeks, but it’s been a pretty hectic time (of which more below) and there were Things That Needed Doing before I could really think about this weblog again.
First and foremost: I crashed and wrecked my car just before Christmas, which has caused no small disruption. It was Wednesday 18th, the same day as my last post to the blog (spot the connection?). That evening, I’d been climbing and was on my way home, on dual carriageway heading north towards Merthyr Tydfill. It’s a long drive, so I was in a hurry and probably going too fast, and it was a bit icy too, though I hadn’t noticed at the time. Anyway, shortly after I overtook two other cars I came to a right-hand bend and as I went round it, I just lost control. I remember, just as I went into the bend, being momentarily distracted by the looming black bulk of a mountain to my left – perhaps that was another factor in what followed.
You know when you’re going round a bend a little too fast and you feel the back coming out and you’re like, whoa, whoa, and you keep it together and make it round OK? Well, it was like that except this time I didn’t keep it together. Details and order is sketchy, but I can tell you the following: I swerved all over the round, and I span round twice, anti-clockwise, I think. I think I swerved then span. I scrunched along the crash barrier on the central reservation, badly denting/scraping the car’s right hand side, and I took down a road sign of some sort, leaving a laaarge dent in the front of the car. I think I hit the barrier at the end of the second spin, and I think I hit the sign shortly thereafter. Best bit: during the second rotation, feeling quite calm now as the situation is clearly beyond my control, I looked out the window on my right, back down the road, to see two pairs of headlights coming towards me fairly rapidly – the cars I’d just overtaken. “That’s not good”, I thought. Fortunately I was far enough past them that they didn’t get involved.
Anyway, I came out of the spin and regained control, pointing in the right direction. I hit my hazard lights (ha ha ha), and to my amazement saw a lay-by just ahead. I pulled over, killed the engine, got out, and walked away. I was totally unhurt. It was, basically, an incredibly lucky escape. If the other cars had been closer, if I’d hit a tree instead of a sign, if I’d hit the central reservation differently, etc. etc. it could all have been very different. At the speed I was travelling I could easily have been badly injured, and fairly easily killed. The car took a lot of the impact, and I am now somewhat less enthusiastic about the idea of a motorcycle than once I was. My new year’s resolution is left as an exercise for the reader.
Fallout: one of the cars behind me stopped to check I was OK and had a way to get home. I phoned Julie & told her first that I was OK and then what had happened. I phoned the AA to get a lift home (with the car). I put some warm clothes on and gazed at the stars. A policeman arrived, took my details, breathalysed me (first time I’ve done that – clear of course) and then went off to sweep the road. Breakdown recovery arrived and “whisked” me home. Car is currently sat outside the house in mangled form, a fine display of personal ineptitude for all my new neighbours – hurrah. Mr Scrap is picking it up tomorrow, and when I get the pictures developed I will, of course, post them. :-)
Worst of all, I have to buy a new car, a process which I hate (‘cos I don’t know nuffink about cars, innit?). To be fair, the Astra was on its way out and we’d have been dealing with this anyway some time, I just hates it anyway.
Swansea were characteristically cool about things (it’s Christmas anyway so…). The day after the accident I got the train in, which was highly tedious and inefficient and took ages, but nobody cared. I grabbed some books and paper, told them I wouldn’t be in tomorrow, and went home. I’ll be back in on Monday, hopefully in a new car.
So that’s the big news. In other news, we had Christmas and New Year. Christmas was very nice but very full – we scooted to Cornwall to see my folks around from the 22nd to Christmas Eve, then scooted back up here, to Julies’ folks in Pembrokeshire for Christmas itself. They “do Christmas” the European way – presents on Christmas Eve, which is good fun but slightly weird for me. They also don’t give you any time at all for sitting around doing nothing and/or watching TV: it’s all eating, walking dogs, talking, or playing games. Very familial and really really good but bloody exhausting! :-) Oh yes, and we had them back to our place on Boxing Day for a monster beef joint – our first roast which went brilliantly: nice one Julie! :-)
The only downer on the Christmas period has been that Julie’s grandad (“Opapa”) has been in hospital. Even more annoying, it’s something that could have been sorted out before Christmas but for, as he puts it, “somebody dropped a clanger”. He’s handling it with his characteristic Polish blend of good and bad humour, love him.
New Year’s was pretty chilled out and very pleasant. With the notable exception of 1999-2000, I haven’t enjoyed New Year’s very much at all for the past few years. I always got maudlin and nearly always argued with Julie for stupid reasons. This year I was hoping for something different and gladly, that’s what I got. We stayed at home, and Rich and Em came to visit. The plan was to keep it fairly chilled, possibly checking out some of the local pubs (which we haven’t made it to yet). We were invited next door and spent an interesting hour or so there. This was the first time I’d seen the neighbours when they weren’t hung over: like us, they were pissed. It is as Emma predicted: everybody in this town knows each other. Rich’s hair seemed to cause a sensation. But all very nice, welcoming, friendly, and pleasant.
We didn’t make it to the pubs. Alas, Julie was ill with a cold (my turn had been in Cornwall), and Rich & Em have both had such a hectic couple of months (moving house and preparing their wedding in February), so everyone was happy to just sit around and chat. We had champagne at midnight and then over the next hour or so, one by one, they fell asleep – bless. I was left feeling very “up” and wondering what to do with myself, so I popped next door but the parents weren’t back yet and the teenagers still held sway. I decided not to invade.
Now, I know that doesn’t sound like a mad crazy wild New Year’s, and you’re right, it wasn’t, but it was highly enjoyable and just what the doctor ordered. As Emma said, it was nice to wake up on the 1st of January feeling relaxed and not too hung over, without panic or regrets, refreshed and ready for the year to come. Or as ready as we’ll ever be.
Right. I’m feeling caught up (with the exception of my thoughts on The Two Towers movie, which can come later – executive summary: they blew it) so I’m going to try to get this baby uploaded again now. Belated felicitations of the season upon you all, and all the best for 2003. :)
In the words of Jim Royle, “The Two Towers? My arse!”.
I was really impressed by The Fellowship of the Ring. Sure, it had a couple of horribly cheesy moments (“And you shall be known as… The Fellowship of the Ring!”), but on the whole it was a superb job – a great movie and a great movie of the book. Unfortunately, I just can’t put my hand on my heart and say the same about The Two Towers – it may, from certain points of view, be a great movie (though personally I’m less convinced than with Fellowship), but it’s sure as hell not a great movie of the book, a fact which I found dreadfully disappointing.
Now, I don’t want to be a “nit-picking Tolkienite” – really I don’t, and I have moans beyond divergence from the book. In particular, it seems that one of the main charges levelled at the film from other quarters is that a huge chunk of the book is missing (namely the whole Shelob thing) but I wasn’t too concerned about that, so long as squeezing it into the third movie didn’t mess that up.
What did bother me, however, was the following:
1. Vastly increased density of cheese. How many times do we need a rousing speech about how this will probably be the last time we stand and fight, but stand and fight we must? Throughout the film it wasn’t terribly hard to spot which dialogue was written by Tolkien and which wasn’t, but in these too-frequent and too-heavy moments of cheese the disparity became embarassingly obvious. This is the main reason why I don’t think The Two Towers is a great movie. Waaaay too Bruckheimer, and a real shame.
2. Inversion of the character and motivation of no less than three reasonably major new figures: Theoden, Faramir, and The Ents are all turned from noble groovy dudes who do The Right Thing into fools who make the wrong decision, only for it to somehow turn out OK in the end. What the fuck? Why was that necessary? What, makers of the movie, have you added to the story by making this change? Beyond the cheese, this is the main reason why I don’t think it’s a great movie of the book. There were plenty of others, but I won’t dwell on them because then I am nit-picking.
Having said that…
3. The (entirely “original”) warg attack/Aragorn escape & Arwen dream sequence. I could stand the Aragorn/Arwen love story in the first movie (though it was another low point of the film), and at least they were in the same place as each other. But to have this long sequence shoe-horned in for no other reason than to meet the Hollywood necessity of having some love interest (or so Liv Tyler gets some lines in this film too?), really sucked. And it’s not just a guy thing: Julie thinks so too. :-)
4. Jar-Jar Fucking McGimli. Say no more.
Basically, I came away from the film feeling really disappointed. I’d love to see someone come along and make a great movie of Tolkien’s book “The Lord of the Rings”, and for a while there I thought Peter Jackson was doing so. Now I realise I’m going to have to wait a few years more. Shame.
The search proxy (right hand sidebar) should be working again now. Gimboland is almost back at full strength… :-)
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I love Unix. Except Mandrake, of course, which sucks. ;-)
I’m doing a lot of TeX and LaTeX work at the moment, getting back into the system and in particular transcribing course notes from a Microsoft Word version into TeX (because I want to be able to change parts of the course, and I’m obviously not going to be doing that in Word, am I kiddies?).
Now, I’ve often found with Unix that the way it works is, you realise you have a need, or a desire – “if only I could do this” – and you start to think about how it might be done, and you do some digging, maybe a bit of googling, and after a while you find that (of course) someone else has hit the same problem before, they’ve solved it, in fact they’ve done an excellent job – much better than you could have hoped for, the solution is freely available, and quite often it happens that you’ve already got it installed.
My recent joyous discoveries have been CTAN – the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (hmmm, I wonder which came first, CTAN or CPAN?), FoilTeX – exactly what I want for making overhead slides with LaTeX, psnup – exactly what I want for combinging multiple pages onto single sheets of paper, and psselect – exactly what I want for turning a subset of pages from a postscript documents into a new postscript document. All free, all extremely scriptable, all fully documented, and all doing exactly what it says on the tin.
Like I said, I love Unix.
Heh. According to The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX2e, “The version number of TeX is converging to pi and is now at 3.14159.”. Nice.
I forgot to say… I’ve got a new car! The following level of detail is provided mainly for the benefit of Doofer: It’s a 1994 M-reg Citroen ZX Aura Turbo Diesel 1.9 5-door hatchback in red, with 76,000 miles on the clock and alloy wheels. Its name, for number plate reasons, is “Mooj”.
I knew I wanted to get a diesel because I’ve got a 70 mile round-trip commute now, and the ZX came recommended from a couple of people on that basis. So far, I’m very happy with it. I picked it up on Monday morning, drove to work, and discovered that the right-hand rear door didn’t lock, which was somewhat annoying, but the garage fixed that for me on Tuesday morning so I’m happy. It’s newer and much tidier than the old Astra, and it should be cheaper to run – all good things. It’s also closer to “shit off a shovel” than the old Astra was which, considering what happened there, may not be a good thing. At least I can keep up with Julie now…
Might as well make a small contribution to the meme… The funniest weblog ever!.
It was Jala’s birthday on Sunday, so we had a few buddies over on Saturday night for a birthday party and a monster curry sesh. It was great: I was in the kitchen from half past three in the afternoon until midnight, the food being served at ten – “good dhal”, apparently. I love my dishwasher. After that, some of us managed to stay up until six in the morning, though alas, it being winter and all, that was still two hours shy of dawn. Shame. We managed to polish off my growing collection of whiskey/port/gin/tequila miniatures quite nicely. At one point, apparently, Rich was gleefully refilling the Jack Daniels miniature bottles from the big bottle of Jack by his side, which to my mind missed the point that we were trying to get rid of the miniatures, but what the heck. You can’t argue with success, and nor can you argue with a drunken Rich with a bottle of Jack and a crazed glint in his eye.
When we cleared up, being dutiful citizens we collected the bottles into bags to take for recycling. We placed the bags in the boot of the car and of course promptly forgot about them. Today I am Gandalf in Calais.
Shame Christmas has just passed, here’s the ideal toy for your baby: it plays soothing ocean sounds, and murmurs “I hate you” very quietly [null].
Also via null, an interesting little story about a skier whose Microsoft-OS phone failed him when he most needed it – although to be fair, I think an equally applicable moral to this story is “don’t rely on a tool you received yesterday and which you don’t know intimately to save your life”.
How Jeeves met Wooster [robot] – I must read some Wodehouse soon. Radio 4 has done a couple of series of “Meet Mr Mulliner” which was excellent. So many things to read, though…
DailyStrips – “a perl script to automatically download your favorite online comics from the web”. Works for me.
Su-perb Goats, today.
Catching up on Megatokyo. It’s in general a very pleasant, tremendously well drawn, slow moving, slightly quirky but not too crazy comic, but every now and then, it comes up with a classic like this. Lovely.
Off we go to Amsterdam for Rich’s stag night/weekend thang. Oh, the fun to be had… Back Monday.
Some randomish thoughts and highlights from our trip to The ‘Dam:
In the Post Office on Friday morning about 30 minutes before the taxi arrived to take us to the airport: frantic delivery of a crash-course on how to fill in your E111 for the four of us (out of six) who didn’t have one. D’oh!
At Cardiff airport: speculation as to whether it would, these days, be easier to actually steal a plane from the runway than to hijack one in mid-air.
At Schipol airport on the way out: Rich arsing around in an automatically revolving door, putting his arm through the ever-decreasing gap, etc. and then being surprised when it hit him in the face – much to the amusement of Dave, myself, and a random fellow passenger.
At Schipol airport on the way back: Rich stepping into an automatically revolving door and then wondering why it had stopped, before realising it wasn’t actually automatic and you had to push it to make it turn – much to the amusement of Dave, myself, and a random fellow passenger.
Outside the front door of the hostel: two black dogs (poodles, it turned out) came running at us and barking. I stood my ground, but was surprised to receive (as Malcolm put it) “a nip” on my left thigh. Son of a bitch! At first I thought it was nothing, just a pinch, but when we got inside, I discovered that it had drawn blood in three places – not deep (“’tis but a flesh wound”), but vexing nonetheless. I’m up to date on tetanus, and the others promised to monitor my condition, and take me to hospital if I started raving nonsense and foaming at the mouth.
I’d like to stress that this was a “proper” full-size poodle with all its hair, rather than a brainlessly-shorn miniature poodle (see diagram below), and thus my wounding is not utterly without respect. All the same, there is now no doubt as to my Red Indian name, which is “Mauled By Poodles”, and in honour of this discovery, Gimboland has been renamed for a short while.
In the Dampkring coffeeshop (our first stop): the most relaxed cat in the Universe. I mean, I’ve seen relaxed cats, but this bad boy took the crown, no doubt about it. At first, Anthony thought it wasn’t real, and if you stroked it it kinda felt like it might not have been, so minimal was the reaction. But the careful observer would occasionally see it sit up and open its eyes for a moment, before stretching a bit and then laying down again. Over time it seemed to get lower and lower, and to spread out across the table top, Dali-like. This got me thinking that Sony had it wrong with Aibo, and that a much cooler robot pet would be a cat which just slept all day, occasionally moving ever so slightly. Over time it could develop further behaviour, such as actually walking around, jumping on your lap, etc. I’d buy one (or I would have until I was in a position to get an actual cat, which I am now). When bored of Dampkring, we found a Rokerij instead – tiny stools!
Our first meal on Friday night was at “The Golden Chopsticks”. We looked at the place next door, “Oriental City”, which looked good but expensive. Then Malc and Anthony noticed this place, and astutely pointed out that not only were the prices cheap, it was also full of Chinese. Surely a good sign? I gotta say, it was one of the best Chinese meals I’ve had, despite the fact that they got part of the order wrong. Malc & I rose to the chopstick challenge (ie, use chopsticks not cutlery) and proved mighty, I reckon. We followed this with a visit to an old favourite of mine, namely Global Chillage, which my guide book describes as “ridiculously cosmic”. Good beats were played through the Alesis Monitor Ones on the wall.
Our second meal on Friday night (feeling strangely hungry) was at an Italian called Crystal. We initially rechristened it “Crystal Meth”, but then realised “Crystal Maze” was much better, and started devising rules: If Rich didn’t complete the task on time, he’d be locked in the toilet and we’d have to sacrifice a pizza to get him out – or we could eat the pizza and leave him there until the end of the meal. We all decided we’d definitely eat the pizza. Can’t remember what the task was – probably going to the toilet, in fact.
On Saturday morning we went to the Van Gogh Museum and had a lovely time drifting around and soaking up the vibe. Museums and galleries are nice, calming, places to be the morning after a heavy night.
After that we went looking for somewhere to eat a light snack, with the plan of heading into the red light district a) to see it and b) to look for a club rejoicing in the name of “Trance Buddha”, then back to the hostel for a shower, then out for an Indonesian and off to the club. We ended up eating our “snack” at Mr. Coco’s (“lousy food and warm beer” – both lies), where the snack idea pretty much went out of the window. Even if you selected the 2-euros-cheaper “not so huge” option on your burger, it was still colossal. Dave didn’t even do that – mighty! Good place, though.
The red light district is my least favourite place of Amsterdam. I just don’t like the vibe, I guess – it’s too agressive, edgy, hard, nasty, and yes, sleazy. I suppose that’s what it’s supposed to be, but it doesn’t suit me, especially if I’ve been chilling out and soaking up the “good vibes” to be had elsewhere. Anyway, in we went. I must say, I wasn’t quite mentally prepared for the bikini-clad UV-lit young ladies of the afternoon, seperated from me only by a sheet of glass and about fifty euros (I’m guessing?). I mean, I knew they were there, but I’d kinda forgotten about them and was taken a bit by surprise. Anyway… We headed into a bar and got some beers, and then Anthony declared we should take Rich to a sex show. Malc was of the opinion that “it had to be done”, and Dave was of the opinion “get Rich”. Rich, of course, had no jurisdiction. Si and I didn’t fancy it but a party of four seemed reasonable so it was agreed that Dave would act as Deputy Best Man and look after Rich while they took him to the show, and Si & I would keep the barstools warm. They returned about half an hour later and agreed it had been “an experience” – four small shows: a girl, a couple, a girl, a couple. It’s a good thing for Rich that I didn’t go, because when the first girl (the “warm-up” act, by the sound of it, as she was the only one to work the crowd, as it were) asked if there were any “stags” in the audience, presumably so she could drag them onto the stage and embarass them with candles and orifices, nobody pointed at him, and I most certainly would have.
Oh yeah, and I was almost bitten by another dog outside the bar. Can they smell my fear, now? Is that it for me and dogs? I sure hope not.
Trance Buddha, alas, had closed a while back – so we looked for “Time” instead. That was gone too. In its place, however, was a club called O2O, and tonight at O2O there was “Underground Sound of Amsterdam”. With no idea what the music would be, we nominated it as our “top spot”. If it was crap, we’d go to Mazzo, which is a longer walk away but would definitely let us in, I reckoned. Jala and I went there two years ago and had an excellent time.
After ablutions at the hostel (much fun caused by the placement of the ensuite shower room’s lightswitch outside the shower room) we hit the town again, checking out another Rockerij (“Rock Ridge, Rock Ridge…“) where, after but a few moments, Malc pulled. Alas, he didn’t properly go in for the kill, and she had tickets for a show elsewhere, so it was not to be.
We lingered later than intended, and left at nearly eleven. We had a disastrous hour looking for somewhere to eat but going the wrong way at every turn. The later it got, the more places were shut. There were places open (indeed, when we walked past the aforementioned Crystal Maze four hours later it was still open), we just didn’t find them. We found Golden Chopsticks but didn’t fancy it. To our shame, we ended up in KFC – a far cry from the Indonesion we’d anticipated. The night was not going as planned.
We headed to the club and very nearly didn’t go in. They appeared to be searching people on the way in, which in our agitated pissed-off state seemed very “bad vibe” and made the place a lot less attractive. We headed round the corner into Abraxas and grabbed a table. Anthony went to get coffees and we discussed what to do. Anthony returned with the news that they were shutting imminently and coffee was no longer being served – another crushing blow to the evening. OK, here’s the plan: we go back to O2O and try to get in. If they don’t like us and send us away, we’ll go to Mazzo. If we can’t get in there, then to hell with Amsterdam.
I took the lead, and a deep breath, and approached an amiable looking guy outside the club. I asked what was actually on, and the good vibes immediately returned as he told me, in that friendly, laid-back Dutch way, that they had an “acid punk” night on, with twelve DJs, some of them from Britain, and that “yeah, it looks like it’s gonna be a good night” (I wish I could do the accent, it’s such a part of what he was saying). Reassured, we headed forwards. The searching was nothing to worry about: they were concerned only about weaponry, and if you got through the metal detector without beeping, you didn’t get searched. Of course, Anthony beeped for some reason, but all was well. In we went, and immediately I knew that Everything Was Going To Be OK. Loud, thumping music, smoke, people, and a generally groovy place. It was just a shame we’d wandered around so much because everyone was pretty knackered. Simon and I danced like lunatics for a goodly chunk of time, Malc did for a bit, and Rich had a quick groove. We stayed until about 2:30. The music, to my mind, was fantastic, and I want to find more.
We crashed. In the middle of the night I got up to go to the toilet. I nearly fell off a chair on the way down from my (top) bunk, thinking the chair was in fact the floor – no injury though, gladly. After I’d paid my respects to the bathroom, I blearily looked at my watch and was astonished to discover that it was 8:50 on Sunday morning, and our alarm clocks would be going off in ten minutes. Bitch!
At breakfast (in the hostel), I helped a blind guy around and sat with him, eating and talking. He seemed young (early twenties?), was called Hendrik, and was from Costa Rica. He’d spent the last month travelling round Europe on his own, and had spent Christmas in Paris. Pretty impressive. We saw him later on, at the railway station, with another temporary helper in tow. Interesting way to travel – you meet a lot of people very briefly, I guess.
We checked out, trammed it to the railway station, and left our luggage in lockers. Then we headed over to the NEMO NewMetropolis centre – a sort of hands-on tech/sci playhouse/museum, along the lines of Techniquest in Cardiff, but much bigger. Like the Van Gogh museum, it was a great place to wander round with a fuzzy head. The demonstration of a chain reaction (a la the old board game Mousetrap) was particularly enjoyable.
We lunched somewhere terrible (a kebab shop, basically – another case of aimless driftage) then headed to Greenhouse Effect for our final cups of coffee. We had loads of time to get to the railway station and airport, and we did so in a relaxed and easy fashion, which was much more enjoyable than the last-minute rush I’d expected. Rich, as has already been mentioned, still can’t work out revolving doors.
That’s basically it. Loads of other little things happened I guess, but that’s the outline sketch of the weekend. All in all it was very civilised – I’m sure plenty of stag parties have a much more debauched time than we did – but that suited us. And we’ve definitely got to go back some time with no aim other than clubbing. :-)
Now if you’ll excuse me I really must be writing my Best Man’s speech…
I’ve just (five minutes ago, over lunch), finished reading Bill Tilman‘s “The Ascent of Nanda Devi“, his account of the 1936 conquest of that peak which, at that time, was the highest mountain climbed (though people had climbed higher elsewhere without reaching a summit). Anyway, It’s fantastic – I just love his writing style. Very dry and humourous, and very very English indeed. Lots and lots of moments like this:
My suit-case had now arrived, and in it another exciting discovery awaited me in the shape of the havoc wrought by an uncorked bottle of ink.
It is therefore pleasing to record that in clibming Nanda Devi no mechanical aids were used – apart, that is, from the Apricot Brandy.
The Americans and ourselves do not always see eye to eye, but on those rare occasions when we come together to do a job of work, as, for example, in war or in the more serious matter of climbing a mountain, we seem to pull together very well.
I’ve also just started (over the weekend) reading Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods. It’s very Sandman (as you might expect) and seems to be exploring an idea which kept cropping up in that series, about gods being a product of, and consumer of, belief. Odin seems to be a major character in the book (under the name Wednesday – heh), and Ishtar has also appeared, and I expect we’ll see more of her later – both of these feature fairly prominently in Sandman. So far, very good indeed.
Ender’s Game, a short story by Orson Scott Card. No idea if it’s any good or not, because I haven’t read it yet. :-)
Some particularly bleak Get Your War On [robot].
The Films They Dare Not Make Today – Dune, Starship Troopers, and Fight Club [rivets].
Mad pictures abound on the internet, and here’s a collection obtained via buffoonery. They’re mainly juvenile or uninteresting, but some are quite funny, eg:
Cat, Bike, Terrorist, Maylok (wtf???), Fridge, Halloween Costume.
Richard Herring, of Fist of Fun fame (and other, crapper, stuff) has started a weblog (thanks, Si).
UK wobbles over ID card plan.
The UK Government appears to be getting cold feet over its proposals for a nationwide identity card scheme.
Speaking at a conference on the future of ID cards organised by tech industry body Intellect, Home Office Minister Lord Falconer told delegates that the government may change its mind.
It’s amazing what a bit of feedback can do (see ntk 2003-01-10 and ntk 2003-01-17 for context).
The best man will have sparkling cider, thank you – wtf?
Update, 2003-01-29: Keri (whose page I hadn’t looked at yet – she’s totally hot) wrote to me to explain that the best man is indeed the ickle Michael pictured, and as such will have sparkling cider instead of champagne. This confused me at first, because isn’t cider alcoholic also (?), but then I realised that maybe it’s just that ickle Michael doesn’t like champagne. I know I didn’t when I was as ickle as that.
Booze rules [wotever]. My favourites:
2. Always toast before doing a shot.
41. Anyone on stage or behind a bar is fifty percent better looking.
42. You can tell how hard a drinker someone is by how close they keep their drink to their mouth.
52. Your songs will come on as you’re leaving the bar.
82. There’s nothing wrong with drinking before noon. Especially if you’re supposed to be at work.
On Start The Week this morning (warning: two identical cheese-matic pictures of Andrew Marr on that site), I heard about Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain by Polly Toynbee, which sounds like a jolly good read.
Could you live on the minimum wage? Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee took up the challenge, living in one of the worst council estates in Britain and taking whatever was on offer at the job centre. What she discovered shocked even her. In telesales and cake factories, as a hospital porter or a dinner-lady, she worked at breakneck pace for cut-rate wages, alongside working mothers and struggling retirees. The service sector is now administered by seedy agencies offering no prospects, no screening and no commitment. Most damning of all, Toynbee found that despite the optimism of Tony Blair’s New Deal, the poorly paid effectively earn less than they did thirty years ago. Britain has the lowest social spending and the highest poverty in Europe. As the income gap between top and bottom has widened, so social mobility has shuddered to a halt. The low-paid are caught in an economic double bind that victimises them and shames the rest of us.
I must confess to being a little sceptical about the claim that Britain has the highest poverty in Europe. Perhaps that’s another reason I should read the book…
Cor… I’ve just got back from attending my first lecture in about seven years. CS_226, Computability Theory with the very nice Dr Ulrich Berger. What’s particularly nice is that the person who decides which lectures/courses I attend is me – I don’t have to, but if I want to, I can. Kewl.
It was also a good opportunity to take a sneaky peak at the second years, and at the lecture theatre. Watching Dr Berger search for the blackboard lightswitch means I don’t have to, which should save me from a little sniggering on Thursday.
Very pleasing to note the guy falling asleep a few seats to my left. Perhaps not a good idea to sit in the front row next time, mate.
It is my understanding that this is the person upon whom Leonardo Dicaprio’s character in Catch Me If You Can is based. In which case, I particularly like, in his “Experience and qualifications” section:
First-hand personal knowledge and experience in exploring methods for altering documents and overcoming security measures and, subsequently, in evaluating secure document features, techniques, practices and safeguards useful in combatting fraud.
Heh.
Sixteen years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated shortly after launch. For me, it’s my “Kennedy getting shot” moment – I was playing the space-trading game Elite on my ZX Spectrum when I heard [rotten].
The Magdalene Laundries – more bonkers stuff brought to you by the Catholic church.
man 1 lsd – first time I’ve seen this. Wonder how I can weave it into the Operating Systems course…
The Gimboland layout is achieved, in time-honoured fashion, using HTML tables. However, these days that’s not seen as A Good Thing, and it’s in fact possible to achieve the same end using Cascading Style Sheets. Here’s a page which shows how it’s done (in particular see this page [gamma].
I’m not about to implement any big changes just yet – I’m waaay too busy. But maybe sometime… Hmmm, and the text doesn’t seem to wrap nicely if the window’s too small. Wonder if there’s a way to make that work.
Lots of “quick reference cards” [gamma] including a handy-looking one for TeX. I put “quick reference cards” in quotes because, for God’s sake, the bash programming one is six pages long!
Classic Astronomy Picture of the Day today – the Horsehead Nebula.
Jala and I went to see Once Upon A Time In The Midlands last night. Not brilliant, but pretty good and with some very funny and/or touching moments. There were about ten of us in the cinema – and until five minutes before it started, just the two of us. Shirley Henderson – mmmm.
Unpleasant reading: The Stinkyfeet Project, The Fat Project, and in case you haven’t seen it before, The Stinkymeat Project [wotever].
Also via wotever, and also unpleasant and disturbing, but in many different ways: Tardblog. I sat on the bus taking me to work this morning, with a styrofoam cup of good, hot, sweet tea in my hand and a great book on my lap, gazing at the gently rolling Welsh countryside as it meandered past, and I pondered how happy I was, and how good life is at the moment: a house in a beautiful place, a woman I love, and a job which is reminding me exactly how fulfilling work can actually be. I thought to myself “what a fantastic planet”. Two hours later I read stuff like this and I’m reminded that for a hell of a lot of people, it’s a shitty, painful, frightening, god-awful planet. Everybody’s got problems, but chances are if you’re reading this blog, you’re relatively well placed and should be thanking God or your lucky stars or just something every day for the life you lead.
I know I do.
Phil Greenspun hopped in a Winnebago and went round America for five months, taking some pretty groovy photographs on the way, as usual [robot]. And, as Jorn says, writing some nice rants. For instance:
It occurred to us that, as a matter of protocol, Queen Victoria would not have dealt directly with the potentate of an insignificant foreign land. It would have diminished the citizens of England to see their leader treating one-on-one with the leader of an inferior nation. A problem like Saddam would have been delegated to a 3rd undersecretary in the Foreign Office. When asked about Iraq, we kept expecting to hear George W. say “I’m not sure. I delegated that problem to Colonel Smith and he is going to report back to me in three months. Can we move on to questions that more directly concern our society?” But of course it never happened.
Oh my god… Only an hour and a quarter to go until my first lecture. Aaaaaaargh!
Well, that went reasonably well. 113 students, according to the attendance sheet. The time was gone before I knew it. I felt like I was talking too much, but then had to remind myself that I’m the lecturer so that’s kinda the idea. Weird.
The really weird part was using chalk on a blackboard. I just hadn’t expected that – I assumed it was all whiteboards. There’s just something about chalk and a blackboard that feels, I don’t know, just weird. But in a good way. Right, back to work, I’ve got to get to grips with the notes for tomorrow’s lecture. :-)
Captain Ribman on the sexual revolution.
An interview with Steven Wright, who I really haven’t seen enough of for the last few years…
Blimey. I’ve just left a seminar in which I understood perhaps five of the sentences which were spoken. Still, it’s made me want to refamiliarise myself with the lambda calculus, which I guess isn’t a bad thing. Unless I wish to retain my sanity, that is.
Mad… As I sat in that seminar, I idly wondered what the speaker was using to present his work, ruefully admitting to myself that it was almost certainly PowerPoint, despite the presence of all those lines of lovely LaTeX-looking maths, and I idly wondered what I would use when my turn came, concluding it’d probably be acetate sheets and an overhead projector (the same as in my lectures).
But what’s this? In a remarkable bout of synchronicity, Need To Know tell me about OperaShow – if you hit F11 in Opera it goes full screen and if you build your pages and stylesheets correctly, it’ll even split the page into slides. Horrorshow! Hurrah for Need To Know and purveyors of non-Microsoft software everywhere…
I’d never be able to capture, here, just how wonderful Rich & Emma’s wedding, last Saturday, was – so I’m not going to try. Those who were there know what I’m talking about.
My bar bill for the night came to a mere one hundred and forty pounds.
I’m in disagreement with Jim on this one… I agree that we need to get into space (after all, the fundamental reason the dinosaurs died out is that they didn’t have a space programme), but does it have to involve flag-planting? Does it have to involve flags at all?
I don’t really like flags, to be perfectly honest.
If you ignore the first paragraph, here’s a pretty good article on why the Space Shuttle was still in use despite being old, overexpensive, and unsafe [diepunyhumans]. Unsurprisingly, it’s all to do with politics, money, and entrenched interests – and ooh look, there’s Boeing’s name.
Bloody hell… I just turned up to give a lecture, and I was an hour early. How many more times is that going to happen in my career, I wonder.
Well, the wounds seem to be healing up now, so I think it’s time “Mauled By Poodles” reverted back to plain old Gimboland. Those of you who missed the whole “mauled by poodles” story, here it is.
Hey Rich! Hey Mike! Hey Roger! Roger Dean wants to rebuild your house [null]. Sweet.
Columbia debris field map [robot] – wow, or, to put it another way, “holy fuck”.
Gibson has created a guitar that you can plug into a computer and record directly on to a hard drive. [wotever]. There’s a picture of (what I believe is) a Les Paul with an ethernet connection – not that I noticed, I just thought it was an ordinary cable. Shrug.
With the Magic technology, the sound from each string is captured individually, so a guitarist can put a special effect on just one or two of the strings.
The killer question is, of course, does it sound any good?
Gridlock. Warning: time sink.
Squirrel fishing – “A new approach to rodent performance evaluation” [gamma].
In the rare cases where this does succeed, the subject becomes freaked out by the experience and runs away.
Get ‘em out for the first annual Nude Weblog Awards [pussy]. Get over there and vote for Shauny in the “Weblogger We’d Like To See Nude” award.
I presume this should be making some sound. Alas, it isn’t for me. It’s still fairly amusing even without sound, though.
Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! [jumps up and down excitedly]
V For Vendetta annotations! (Also here).
Plus there’s the V For Vendetta Shrine with some good looking stuff including V versus Rorcshach and the music of V For Vendetta.
Tasty.
Pioneer 10 falls silent [wotever].
Gimboland’s been verging on the silent lately, hasn’t it? Don’t worry, I still love you, I’ve just been busier and more focused on my work than ever before. I’m getting the impression that this job is going to be frantically busy in term-time, and somewhat gentler the rest of the time – which would be a good thing ‘cos then I might get some research done (zip so far). Anyway, this is just a brief burst of telemetry data so you know I’m still transmitting, I guess.
I’m going to completely and shamelessly rip off those good boys at wotever with this one, just ‘cos they do it so well…
dogsincars.co.uk – does exactly what it says on the tin.
Julie: There’s an interesting snippet regarding the RSPCA being somewhat stupid (in a spamming sense) in last week’s Need To Know, (which I’ve only just got round to reading, so busy am I) – about the third item down, look out for FAXYOURMP.COM and you’re in the right place.
What if everything on this page is true?
I read about Warren Buffett in a Sunday supplement a few years ago, but whilst I remembered the gist, I’d forgotten his name and the name of his company. Now Jorn has reminded me: Berkshire Hathaway. Now if only I had some money to buy some shares with…
Cor. There’s a baby Guillemot in a box in our spare bedroom. It’s got the best heater in the house next to it, keeping it warm. Bless.
Via Phil, some interesting results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe – in particular (check this out, Julie), the Universe is flat, Euclidean space (“within the limits of instrument error”).
Oh yes, and baryonic matter, that stuff they teach you about at school involving electrons and neutrons and the like, that constitutes about 4% of the Universe’s mass. Nice.
Global Economy Tutorial, apparently with a somewhat anti-capitalist stance [phil]. Alas, too long to read right now, and thus probably ever.
Y’know, it’s been years now, and Unix still has the capacity to surprise and amaze me. Also, I still can’t spell surprise without looking it up.
Also Flash, but check out Channel 4′s Gayometer.
Gimbo is 40% gay! You might act straight, mate, but I bet your mother always knew you’d grow up to be a gay guy! Great.
Blosxom looks good…
Blosxom (pronounced “Blossom”) is a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind.
Fundamental is its reliance upon the file system, folders and files as its content database. Blosxom’s weblog entries are plain text files like any other. Write from the comfort of your favorite text editor and hit the Save button. Create, edit, rename, and delete entries on the command-line, via FTP, WebDAV, or anything else you might use to manipulate your files. There’s no import or export; entries are nothing more complex than title on the first line, body being everything thereafter.
Sounds similar in approach to Neomorph, which is what I wrote for Gimboland, except Neomorph’s in python, and I stopped developing it when it was “just good enough” so it doesn’t have fancy-scmancy features. I might have to give this a look – provided its Perlness doesn’t completely put me off, which it might…
I’ve just read an interesting paper in December’s IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking called “Beyond Folklore: Observations on Fragmented Traffic”. In fact, ah yes, here it is.
From the conclusion (my boldface emphasis):
Many assertions about the nature and extent of fragmented traffic are based in folklore, rather than measurement and analysis. Common beliefs include: fragmented traffic is decreasing in prevalence or nonexistent, fragmented traffic exists only on LANs (due to NFS) and not on backbone links, misconfiguration causes most fragmentation, and only UDP traffic is fragmented.
While the majority of fragmented traffic is UDP (68% by packets and 72% by bytes), ICMP, IPSEC, TCP, and tunneled traffic are commonly fragmented as well. Microsoft’s Media Player is the single largest source of fragment series, accounting for 52% seen in this study. Tunneled traffic is a major cause of fragmented traffic, and accounts for at least 16% of fragmented series.
NFS accounts for only 0.1% of fragment series observed.
BTW, a lot of the papers on that site look very interesting indeed. Sigh, so little time…
The USA has been taken over by non-human life forms, specifically “money-based” life forms, ie corporations [null]. Interesting…
Self-control comes in limited quantities, must be replenished [chicken].
There are three main theories about how self-control operates, according to Baumeister. One theory suggests that self-control depends on an energy or strength like “willpower,” while a second theory considers self-control as a skill to be learned. Yet another theory views self-control as a thought process, where individuals process their different behavioral options and choose a course of action after analyzing their situation.
Hey Gimbo! Fancy interfacing prolog with, say, C or python?
Well, Bedevere provides a SWIG wrapper to GNU prolog, and PyProlog embeds SWI-Prolog (in the python interpreter, I presume). Gnarly.
Must be doing the rounds, but it’s fantastic if only for the photos of the beardy chappy: Imaginary Friends Instant Girlfriend [wotever]. (BTW, what happens to ebay items when the auction’s over? Will the above link become defunct? We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess. Or, more likely, allow time to pass and forget about it.)
Apparently (and no big surprise), the RIAA’s figures for piracy are complete bullshit [gamma]. Well worth a read. I particularly liked: Tom Petty would be better off if his fans DIDN’T buy his album and sent him $2 with a Post-It note that said “Rock on, Tom” instead.
As any fule kno, we’re always up for a bit of Microsoft-bashing here at Gimboland. And so…
The Advertising Standards Authority of SA (ASA) has ordered that a Microsoft ad implying that its software will bring about the extinction of the hacker is to be pulled for being “unsubstantiated and misleading”.
Laubscher says despite the decision, Microsoft fully maintains that its software is able to fulfil the task of keeping hackers and viruses out, making the customers’ data safer than if kept in a safe.
Clarke described Microsoft’s claim as “laughable”.
Special thanks to my Souf Efrika correspondent for that one.
Dawkins on Bush [null].
Whatever anyone may say about weapons of mass destruction, or about Saddam’s savage brutality to his own people, the reason Bush can now get away with his war is that a sufficient number of Americans, including, apparently, Bush himself, see it as revenge for 9/11. This is worse than bizarre. It is pure racism and/or religious prejudice. Nobody has made even a faintly plausible case that Iraq had anything to do with the atrocity. It was Arabs that hit the World Trade Centre, right? So let’s go and kick Arab ass.
… Would you do business with a company that devoted an entire year to little else than the process of choosing its new CEO, from the strongest field in the world, and ended up with Bush?
My former boss, Gareth Bult, is selling his L1NUX number plate. I wonder why…
Frontier people: Interesting to note Fenty’s name in the bidding history. :-)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor Questioned as Suspected Terrorists because some petrol-pumper in Oklahoma didn’t like the way they looked [null].
Also from null, nice to see that the marvellous Seascapes of the Interior have their album out at long last. I sense an impending purchase…
Brazil sounds nice [null].
Includes this “wtf?” quote, in respect of the 1991 Gulf War:
You will almost certainly not hear about the retreating column of almost 50,000 Iraqi soldiers that were incinerated on the highway from Kuwait on the orders of war criminal-turned-Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey.
WTF???
Thank you, Need To Know, for reminding me about Sledge Hammer.
I think some of the samples might have to make it into my next gig, whenever the hell that is…
PyTeX – Python plus TeX. Like, w00t.
On the subject of python, I’m going – also w00t.
Well, 3,100 UK pounds wasn’t enough to meet the reserve in the L1NUX number plate auction (see Gimbolands passim). Maybe the seller just wanted to find out how much he “could” get, if he wanted to… Or maybe it’s just worth less than he thought. *shrug*
Hmmmm… I wonder how much the “PLAN9” plate would be. ;-)
Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics [robot]. Not quite as well indexed as possible, eg there’s a page for “E” but not even an anchor in that page so I can link straight to “eigenvalue”. Not that I’m particularly hung up on eigenvalues, you understand. Now, Euler Lehmer Pseudoprimes, oh the other hand…
Just kidding.
Hey, talking of kidding, I put a joke into my lecture notes last week… The notes were on the Morris Internet Worm, one important aspect of which was that it replicated much more quickly (I’m tempted to say “virulently”, but I guess that’s a loaded term) than the author intended. In a footnote, which I didn’t read out or drawn attention to in any way, my lucky students got to groan at the following gem:
Q: Why did the computer programmer die in the shower?
A: Because the instructions on the shampoo bottle said “Rinse, lather, rinse, repeat”.
Honk honk.
Autoclave – hard drive sterilization on a bootable floppy [gamma].
I’m sure Julie used to work in a (biotech) lab with a device called an autoclave… Ah, yes.
If I thought that the students being on holiday would mean I was less busy, boy was I wrong.
On Tuesday I went to Cardiff for a seminar hosted by the Welsh e-Science Centre (caution: website gratuitously resizes browser windows) on Grid Computing. It was fairly interesting, but a little geared towards corporate types rather than being technically deep. It was enough to whet my appetite, I guess.
But Wednesday… Wednesday was something else altogether. I got up at 04:30, drove for four hours, attended the Python UK Conference 2003 from 09:00 until 19:30, then drove home, getting into bed about 11:30. A long, full, and highly enjoyable day.
For one thing, it was so cool to be surrounded by people who are as into Python (or more so!) than me – others who “understood”. :-) And yes, I did talk to Guido (heh – top hit when you google for “Guido”), and was pleased to put some faces to some names I know from the mailing list.
It was also somewhat frustrating in that respect – this time last year I was a regular on the mailing list, asking and answering questions, and starting to feel I was part of the community. Then I had less and less time for that, and of course I started this new job and haven’t had time for anything other than writing notes and teaching. So although I knew who Alex Martelli, Andy Robinson, Chris Withers, and Laura Creighton were (for instance), I really didn’t think they’d know me and I was shy of approaching them. Having said that, I did collar Chris and talk about rock-climbing briefly, but it wasn’t a pythonic conversation. :-)
But it wasn’t just a Python fanboy event: the content was excellent. Guido opened with his keynote on the history and background of Python, after which I basically stuck with the first “track” of the conference: Chris Withers on Extreme Programming, Duncan Booth on Design Patterns and Python, then a somewhat improvised panel discussion involving the great and the good. In each of these cases, it was the questions and answers that got really interesting – really mentally stimulating stuff.
The main reason I’d actually made it to the conference was because of a discussion at the end of the day, “Programming For Virgins”, on the subject of teaching programming to, well, people who’ve never programmed before. My colleague Chris Whyley was particularly interested in this, and since he was going and he knew I was into Python, invited me. The discussion was really interesting, not to mention inspirational – one of the prime movers was Russel Winder, formerly head of the Computer Science department at King’s College, London. We came away from that with lots of ideas and opinions.
Oh yeah – the other thing that was really cool was that I met (without realising it at the time), PyTex developer and Knuth lookalike (I hope he won’t mind me saying that), Jonathan Fine. Which was nice, given that I was raving about PyTex just last week.
I’d like to write more, and maybe even try to write something more interesting than the above, but I just don’t have time. So that’s your lot. I firmly resolve, however, that next year I’m going for both days of the Python conference, and staying over. :-) See you there?
I need to find/choose some research to do soonish – just haven’t had time to think about it yet. It has been suggested that process algebra and algebraic specification are areas in which there may be some work to do, so here are a couple of preliminary bookmarks for me to check out, possibly in conjunction with Dr Fokkink‘s book. Well, not possibly, given that I’m reading it right now. :-) Anyway.
An Introduction to the Algebraic Specification of Abstract Data Types, and Introduction to CSP. Rob van Glabbeek’s note on process algebra.
Why am I telling you this? I’m not. I’m telling myself. This is me remembering that Gimboland started out as a bookmarks collection, before I succumbed to the conceit that anybody was listening. :)
Hey, the house nearly caught fire on Saturday night!
We had some beloved buddies over for a “good dhal” night (ie I was cooking curry), and prior to adjourning into the library, one of our number, who shall remain nameless (the goon!), volunteered to set the fire in there. Go for it, we said, seeing as how this person had done such a good job on the fireplace in the living room.
So there we were, in the kitchen and the living room, when the smoke alarm went off. “Oh ho,”, thinks us, “the firestarter’s going to appear in flames and tell us they’ve got the fire lit, ho ho ho.”
Well, we were wrong, but only somewhat.
Firestarter and Firestarter’s Accomplice were in the hall, with the front door open, looking sheepish/worried, announcing that all the smoke was coming into the room instead of going up the chimney. Well, this has happened before, when the wind was wrong, and yes, the room can get quite smokey in the fire’s early stages (once it’s really “going” it’s never a problem). So I went in to have a look.
Blimey, that really is incredibly smokey, thinks I. Let’s open the window. Good. Now, ah, hang on, I think I see what the problem is.
“You’ve left the chimney door shut!”, I shouted.
“Chimney door?”, shouted they in response, their voices tinged with panic and ignorance.
Yes indeed, there’s a little door at the bottom of the chimney, which you shut when the fire isn’t in use, to keep the cold air out, and which you (should) open when the fire is in use, to let the smoke out. Our good volunteers had simply neglected to open it.
Now, before we point our fingers and laugh in ridicule, I’d just like to confess that I’ve done this as well: started the fire and left the door shut, only to realise what the problem was when the room filled with smoke. Being unfamiliar with the fireplace’s configuration and management, our venerable firestarters hadn’t made the final connection. They can’t really be blamed, can they? Well OK, just a bit, but be nice.
So, seeing what the problem was, I went up to the fire, and kicked the door open. Only it didn’t kick open – there was resistance. What the hey? Kick again. Nope. Leave the room, take a deep breath, dive back in, and kick really fuckin’ hard. The doorway fell away from its place (it just sits there, there’s no hinge or latch, ie no damage done), into the logs, to reveal the open chimney, up which the smoke could now escape, and into which the flames were now licking.
Oh. Fuck. It’s full of twigs.
Fuck. It’s a bird’s nest.
Fuck.
“Get me some sand! We need sand! Or earth! We need to put the fire out! Where the fuck’s the bucket!?”. Julie handed me the bucket (containing embers from the last time the fire was used – would probably have done the trick), and I ran outside, emptied it, and headed into the garden to get some earth. Only there’s no exposed earth in the garden: all the beds are some weird low-maintenance thing the previous owner installed: gravel, sheets, wood chips (“try those!”), etc. and no mud or sand.
“How about water?”, suggested Simon, intellectual titan that he is.
“Water! Yeah!”. I had initially dismissed water due to the mess it would cause, but time was of the essence and I didn’t see any mud or sand appearing any quicker than water. To the kitchen! Fill the kettle! To the library! Put the fire out!
Now, by this time the smoke was clearing, partially up the chimney but mainly out through the (now open, thank you guys) door, so extinguishing the fire was no hard task. A couple of old towels to mop up the dirty water, and all was well.
Once everything had cooled down, I got to work pulling the twigs out. There were, to put it mildly, a shedload of them. They just kept coming. We took a couple of photos, but it’ll be ages before I get them developed and scan them, so I’ll just have to say that there was definitely a bin-liner’s worth of twigs there. No birds and no eggs, thankfully. A fair but of mud and assorted plant matter, but mainly twigs.
Not being aware of any vertical take off birds (except perhaps harriers – geddit?), we can only presume the nest started its life at the top of the chimney and collapsed in at some point. Either that or some remarkably persistent and stupid avian decided that if they just kept dropping twigs down the chimney, sooner or later they’d have a nest. I don’t know.
However, stupid avian’s loss is stupid human’s gain: we’re sorted for kindling for a while, at the very least.
A Confession, by Donald Rumsfeld.
Once in a while,
I’m standing here, doing something.
And I think,
“What in the world am I doing here?”
It’s a big surprise.
More superb Rumsfeld poetry here [bash].
(Also, many thanks to Mark Hughes for pointing out that I’d said Ronald, not Donald, above – d’oh!).
Phil wrote to tell me his own tale of flammable living, which also happily ended well, and while he was at it he pointed out that according to my sidebar, I’d been reading American Gods for quite a long time now. Well, of course, he’s right to be knowing and mildly sarcastic in such an assertion – I’m a slow reader, but not that slow. Since American Gods I’ve enjoyed Schismatrix, and the His Dark Materials trilogy, and I’m currently in the very early throes of what looks like being a passionate affair with The Moor’s Last Sigh.
Schismatrix was excellent – suitably grand and epic in its sweep, and I think it’s always a Good Thing for me, an avowed Arthur C Clarke fan, to read a solar-system spacefaring sci-fi novel in which everything isn’t just fine and dandy, and in which politics is as important, if not more so, than science. Maybe it’s just a side effect of growing up and becoming cynical, but I get a kick from that these days.
I also really enjoyed His Dark Materials, but not, perhaps, as much as I thought I was going to. I think I’d over-hyped it in my own mind, and of course it is a children’s book ultimately, and as sophisticated as it is, and as readable by adults too, it was still a bit simplistic, compared to what I was hoping for/anticipating. I realise that this is entirely my own fault for having that expectation, and I don’t mean to detract from Mr Pullman’s achievement with the books, which really are very good indeed, but there it is. Still, I look forward to the days when my children read them, and we can have deep discussions about challenges to authority, and then they can steal the car keys and go shoplift some alcohol. Bless ‘em.
And as for The Moor’s Last Sigh, well, I’ve hardly started it, maybe twenty pages in, but it’s got me captivated. A little slower than The Satanic Verses, which had me in its grip from the very first paragraph, but impressive nonetheless. I am settling down for a long, slow, sumptuous, treat.
All quiet on the Gimboland front.
I had a “big oops” type event on my hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and I managed to recover from it badly enough that I destroyed my weblog data. Last backup was in December, so I’ll have to reconstruct since then by reverse-engineering from the archived HTML pages. Shite. This has not been done yet, so please bear with me.
OK, I think Gimboland may be up and running again. And to start things running, I’d like to recount a strange tale of something which happened to me on Saturday. I was in my favourite shop on the planet, viz Spillers Records in Cardiff, which claims to be the oldest record shop in the world, and it characterised by the following things, amongst others:
1. The merchandise is presented on bits of cardboard with photocopies of the album covers. 2. The prices are invariably much lower than the big chains (generally 11 or 12 quid, but many (good) things for less). 3. They have Lots Of Good Stuff. 4. There’s usually Very Cool Music playing there. 5. There’s usually Very Cool People working there, and I don’t just mean cool as in stupid, I mean cool as in I’d like to have a drink with them.
Alas, on Saturday, Spillers disappointed. It was partially my fault, but nonetheless… I was idly browsing just before closing time (6pm), and was trying to decide whether to pick up, from the “Electronic/Experimental Compilation” section, one called Painted Black – an entire album of covers of The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black”. Not being in a truly adventurous mood, I went to the desk and asked if I could have a listen. To my surprise, the lady serving me, hummed and harred, and said they were about to close, but er, maybe, hmmmm, errrr. I assured her that the briefest glimpse of a few of the tracks would be enough to give me the gist and make up my mind, and she disappeared into the back to put it on.
She reappeared shortly, holding the cardboard sleeve out for me to take back, and said that sorry, but because it was so late they didn’t want to, …, and left the sentence unfinished. I stepped in and helped her out with the words “… sell the disk to me?”. She nodded, to my amazement.
I suppose I should be happy, really. I do love that shop, and to find out that they’re doing so well that they can afford to throw away a purchase in order to ensure they get home a minute or two earlier than they otherwise would, is surely good news in terms of their long-term survival. All the same, it rankled somewhat.
I haven’t managed to Soulseek it yet, for which I’m glad to be honest. If I do find it, I probably won’t buy it (sad but true, best intentions and all that), whereas if it remains Unknown To Me them I might at least see if it’s still there next time I’m over that way. Hey ho.
If I do get it, rest assured gentle reader, you’ll be the third or fourth to know.
Band/track name idea: Positional Sacrifice.
Grand Challenges for Computing Research – and the ten tentative proposals. Number 7, Journeys in Non-Classical Computation, sounds particularly groovy:
A gateway event (a term coined by Murray Gell- Mann) is a change to a system that leads to the possibility of huge increases in kinds and levels of complexity. It opens up a whole new kind of phase space to the system’s dynamics. Gateway events during evolution of life on earth include the appearance of eukaryotes (organisms with a cell nucleus), an oxygen atmosphere, multi-celled organisms, and grass. Gateway events during the development of mathematics include each invention of a new class of numbers (negative, irrational, imaginary, etc.), and dropping Euclid s parallel postulate.
A gateway event produces a profound and fundamental change to the system: once through the gateway, life is never the same again. We are currently poised on the threshold of a significant gateway event in computation: that of breaking free from many of our current classical computational assumptions. The Grand Challenge for computer science is “to journey through the gateway event obtained by breaking our current classical computational assumptions, and thereby develop a mature science of Non-Classical Computation”.
Exciting stuff, eh?
Delight. My new local (or one of them, at least), has Old Speckled Hen (“it’s hopped up to the nads” – EvilC) on tap. Real ale ahoy!
So how’s the USA going to persuade the rest of the world that Iran and North Korea must be destroyed? How about this? [null]
Something to read after I’ve seen the new Matrix movie: Corporate Mofo reloads The Matrix [gamma].
Watching the movie, I was personally less impressed by the fists of digital fury than by the Brothers’ evident familiarity with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the theology of Origen of Alexandria. Seen in the light of the books they’re referencing, the movie’s plot is brilliant; of course, to the non-initiate, the characters’ actions and dialogue seems arbitrary and incomprehensible, and the exposition is just filler between car crashes. It would seem, therefore, that a bit of exegesis of The Matrix: Reloaded is warranted. But be warned: If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t read on. There are some major spoilers.
The Museum of Techno [null]. Just the job if you don’t know the difference between the Peruvian long-tailed kickdrum and the Lesser Canadian kickdrum, for instance.
Strange co-incidences of our time. Bifurcated Rivets just pointed at Señor Coconut, which was the music the good people at Spillers refused to interrupt last Saturday. It was, actually, pretty damn cool, in an extraordinarily cheesy manner.
Saw Goldfrapp in Bristol last Friday – great gig. I hadn’t, at that time, heard anything from the new album, and was feeling somewhat trepidicious. Gladly, all was well – they seem to have moved a little away from the acoustic and orchestral, and considerably closer to the analogue, which is Just Fine With Me. Lots of big bleepiness, squelchiness, and bassiness. Having rushed out and bought the album the very next day, I can report that the highlight of the gig was Train, which I’ve just noticed is the first single from the album, so maybe I should get that too. It’s huge and marvellous.
Plus, Alison looked uber sexy. Of course.
Jorn pointed at this family tree of programming languages (2200×1300 600Kb jpeg), which is interesting in terms of the relations between the languages, but which also has some bafflingly stupid things to say about the languages. Examples:
On Lisp: Lisp has an unusual syntax made up of lots of nested parentheses. Er – how about mentioning the most important point about the language, namely that it’s functional? Same comment for ML, Scheme, O Caml, and Haskell. Similar comment for Prolog, though yes, I know it’s not functional, that’s why I said similar, dummy.
On Python: A popular language among Web site builders, it includes features missing from Perl. That has to be the strangest summary of Python I’ve ever read. Python’s by no means the most popular lanugage among webbies, nor is website building its only (or even main?) application. Why the comparison with Perl? Why that particular one? Baffling.
On Tcl: The duct tape of programming (a scripting language for patching together different languages). Unlike, say, Python?
On Ruby: A hardware description language. Er – excuse me? OK, I can find RHDL, but RHDL != Ruby, people.
Still, it’s pretty.
Thing in a Jar [buffoon].
It’s fun to leave the Thing in a Jar in someone’s refrigerator and watch their reaction.
On the same site: time the Earth had an image upgrade, and just how far away is the moon, anyway?
Kewl… We do a third year “History of Computing” course here, and next year we’re trying something new, splitting the ten lectures up among various lecturers who’ll then talk about an area of interest. I’ve just volunteered to talk about “antiquties”, ie computing from waaaaay before there were computers – stuff like Euclid’s algorithm and so on. Should be funky.
Just thought I’d share. :-)
A nice illustration of the all-too-often-witnessed disparity between dreams and reality: the Pumpkin Rocket [bash].
Had a very cinematic day on Saturday… We started with the fantastic Bugsy Malone in the afternoon (the “Family Feature” at Chapter – two quid – bargain!!!), then took a chance, since it was on, and caught Russian Ark, of which more shortly. This was followed by a DVD double-whammy at home of the likeable and unchallenging My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and one of my favourite movies, Human Traffic (the “remixed” version of which I picked up on Saturday for eight quid – bargain!!!).
Bugsy completely ruled – so cool to see it again after all this time and on the big screen at last. Was slightly disappointed by the revelation/realisation that the kids were miming, but this was more than made up for by everything else about the film being as fun as I remembered. And oh, Talullah… *sigh*
Russian Ark was something else altogether. An incredible movie, one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. At the start of the day we had no intention of watching it – indeed had never heard of it, but after Bugsy we noticed it was on later and it sounded intriguing, so…
The first thing to say about it is that it’s a single take – no cuts, just one shot, an hour and a half long, moving through the Russian State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, following the main protagonists, who are an unnamed character in the first person, and a 19th Century French Diplomat. They walk through the building, sometimes invisible to those around them, witnessing events from Russian history which took place there, admiring the exquisite art around them, and discussing the relationship between Russia and Europe, the art, and the people around them.
It’s hard to grasp, so to a certain extent I stopped trying and just let it wash over me. I’m sure that with some more knowledge of Russian history some things would have made more sense, but on the other hand I don’t think I lost much of the experience for that. If nothing else it was a visual feast – the rooms, the art, the costumes…
The film truly came alive for me at the end. The last major scene is the last Great Royal Ball of 1913, at the end of which the hundreds of people in the ballroom begin to file out, the camera amongst them, and it just perfectly captures that poignant feeling you get at the end of a marvellous show where everyone’s shuffling outwards, having shared this great experience and now having to return, perhaps regretfully, to reality. It’s something I’ve experienced many times but never before seen captured like this – a truly original piece of film-making. This gently leads into the achingly beautiful, oh-so-gentle end of the piece, and quite frankly I was left stunned. Bash summed it up perfectly: “that was like a dream”. Like watching someone else’s dream.
Glyn Webster wrote with regard to my recent moaning about the family tree of programming languages. Apparently a lot of the mistakes or confusion seem to come from The Language List. Thanks, Glyn! :-)
BTW, if you only follow one of the links above, follow the Glyn Webster one.
And here’s the first juicy nugget to be extracted from tiddly-pom (although presumably I’d have already seen it if I was still watching comp.lang.python): Guido talking about what makes a good general purpose main() [tiddly-pom].
Wow. Cool. It’s a lot like what I usually use, except I usually put the argv-checking stuff in its own function. Groovy.
Ooh, and while we’re there, here are Guido’s notes on the UK Python conference (mine are somewhere in here).
Ooh! Ooh! Duncan Grisby has photos of the conference including one with a bit of my arm and a couple with my colleague Chris Whyley – clearly a photographically interesting sorta chappie. Oh wait, here we both are, browsing the books, and there’s Chris again, just two seats away from The Benevolent Dictator For Life.
Simon Brunning’s Guilt – ouch. He’s right, you know.
The first picture of Earth from Mars [phil].
Alas, it was taken from orbit. I guess we’ll have to wait a while before we get a decent shot of the blue planet from the surface of the red one.
The 800×600 Project [consume].
800 pixels wide, 600 pixels high, 64 pictures, 1 subject.
Last night, flicking through my scribbled, fairly randomised, diary of my trip to 2000′s Glastonbury Festival, I was particularly taken by the following snippets:
“The trouble with psychiatry is that it is the business of making people normal, not the business of making people happy.”
and
“I’ve just walked past a burnt out shoe, for fuck’s sake.”
:-)
When you come back, bring pie – the weblog of one of my students. One of my particularly hackish linuxy students, in case you couldn’t work it out. ;-)
He’s also, apparently, an angry spork-flinging plaid wildebeest. This explains a lot. Here’s the quiz. I’m an invisible train station, btw.
Nice.
/me points and laughs at everyone who said it wasn’t about oil [null].
Later: oh, OK, a little context makes things a little clearer. All the same, I’m still incredulous at the idea oil had nothing to do with this.
I spotted the link to this on popbitch but didn’t like the sound of it, so I didn’t look. However, then Rich sent it to me and I had to look. It’s fantastic.
‘That is a well-groomed terrapin,’ he says.
And the rest.
Lots of good stuff in general on this site. Indeed, the first other thing I read is this marvellous critique of TLC. Superb, although loses it a bit in the last few paragraphs. I particularly liked: And yet I am lovely, and would make a dog-like and devoted husband.
Oh, so much more to read, and yet it’s such a waste of time. I love the internet. Unlike him.
Star Wars: In early drafts of the screenplay there is a strain of cynical humour, and when Ben Kenobi says he hears many voices crying out to him through The Force it turns out to be his pacemaker picking up CB.
I heard this today and thought I’d share:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
All my base
Are belong to you.
OK, so we all knew that fruit machines were rigged, right? I just always thought it was within the law. These guys disagree, having got hold of and analysed a ROM from one of these machines, and they’re trying to do something about it (complete with obligatory faxyourmp link). [null]
49 years ago today, Alan Turing ate an apple laced with cyanide to escape the bigotry of this world. RIP, Alan.
So I’m sitting here doing the thing that I’m doing, and I suddenly stop myself and say “Oh my God, I’m marking exam papers. Degree level exam papers.” It still feels pretty barmy.
Some wag wrote, for one question, “I am a fish”. Unfortunately they didn’t do it 400 times otherwise I might have been tempted to give them a mark.
BitlBee [ntk], an IRC <-> Instant Messaging gateway, which is exactly the thing I need if I want to talk to anyone via IM. Which I don’t. But if I did, wow, this would rule.
It all went downhill when everyone stopped using MUDs and MUSHes if you ask me, anyway… ;-)
Never mind four-dimensional hypercubes, what the world needs now is a four-dimensional Rubik cube [bash].
nb: I haven’t tried it yet, I just thought it looked cool. I’ve got work to do, dammit!
The Maine Solar System Model – At forty miles from Pluto to Sun, the largest three-dimensional scale model of the Solar System in North America [gamma].
Check out the difference in size between the Sun (so big there’s just an arc) and Earth (which also includes another good illustration of the distance between Earth and the Moon.
Whilst browsing through the Gimboland archives a couple of weeks ago, I came across an old favourite entry concerning Ewoks and missing arms. Distressed to find that the links were broken, I revisited the site in question and tried to track the pictures down, but alas, despite experiencing once again the pleasures that are Bad Day on the High Sea, Etsuhiko Shoyama, and most especially Norton Defiant, the sought-for pictures were not found.
As I got older (and, I think, as my exposure to students and their wily ways increases), my willingness to moan is increasing, so I wrote to the artist, Brandon Bird, and asked what had happened. His reply:
Well, I’d done some re-organizing, moving all the artwork onto its own unique domain in the fall, and I trimmed out some things I decided I didn’t really like anymore. But I think killing a lot of the Star Wars stuff had more to do with some phase where I wanted to come off as less of a huge dorkish fanboy retard. Of course, now that they’re gone I’ve started to miss them, too. So I took your advice and the ewok painting is back: http://www.brandonbird.com/yubnub.html, and I’ll bring back walrusman, too, if I can dig up a good .jpg.
I also just added a bunch of “Law & Order” art from around the world, if you’re interested: http://www.brandonbird.com/artisticintent.html.
Thank you for making me see the light.
No problem Brandon – thanks for caring.
It’s… The Welsh Club. Cheesy Club on a Wednesday night, thank you very much. Rich tells me the Goldie Lookin’ Chain (warning: Completely Fuckin’ Broken in Opera) have their first gig there on my Dad’s birthday, heaven help us all. Don’t think Dad would fancy it, anyway.
Locus – I heard them in session on John Peel a week or so, thinking they were Locust (thanks to Malc) and loved it. So now I’ve got their album, Flossie, and it’s stonkingly good. Multi-layered rolling instruments, basically – tremendously listenable. I’m told they’ll have some unreleased tracks available for download some time soon, which would be good – so far the only downloads are tantalisingly short clips. If you only listen to one, I’d recommend Oranjsuper (355K).
Superb spring-loaded packaging too – check it out.
Also, Chris from the band saw my lego link and sent me this – thanks Chris! :-)
Aw, how cute… pika! (thanks, Jo).
I’m currently teaching myself Haskell (using yaht). Right now I’m having terrible trouble trying to stop my brain from flipping out through my ears as I try to understand something called Continuation Passing Style. This is the clearest explanation I’ve found so far, God help me.
I’m also trying to adjust to the fact that in Haskell, 0+1+2+3+4 could also be written as (+)1((+)2((+)3((+)4(0)))) or even (+)((+)((+)((+)(0)4)3)2)1. Bargle!
Blimey… I was looking at continuations over a year ago.
The phrase “chiseled spam” popped into my head earlier – it comes up in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but I’m not sure why I was thinking of it today. Anyway, feeling curious, I googled on the phrase, and the first hit was worth reading, so here it is: chiseled spam.
Which is nice, because it introduces me to Strip Mining For Whimsy, which looks good in general. Huzzah!
Hectic day… A three-and-a-half hour Internal Examiners meeting this morning, and a seminar right now, then I have to write up the minutes of the meeting. Can’t these people see it’s sunny, god damn it! ;-)
Come and get it: Mobile Asses [wotever].
Archaeologists in western China discovered five earthenware jars of 2,000-year-old rice wine in an ancient tomb and its bouquet was still strong enough to perk up the nose, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Nice.
Project to build an Enigma Replica [gamma].
Jorn is back after nearly a month, and the first thing I see is a pretty cool logarithmic timeline of the history of the Universe with (some) references.
Includes such nifty moments as “diamonds created in South Africa”, “fish with legs”, “giant cockroaches”, “cats and dogs diverge”, “giant birds eat tiny horses”, “whales diverge from hippos”, “Mediterranean sea evaporates”, “Sahara more arid than today”, “first Australians hunt giant marsupials to extinction”, “discovery of prime numbers”, and of course, “Riverdance”. :-)
Crazy horses. You need flash and sound. Thanks Pete!
Why Functional Programming Matters, a paper from 1984. Alas, in general, functional programming is still rare, so presumably this paper didn’t have quite the intended effect. Yet. :-)
Miracles You’ll See In The Next 50 Years (written in 1950) [dm]. Simply chock-full of fantastically whacky science-will-rule-all ideas. My personal favourite:
Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose.
Or how about this:
It is easy enough to spot a budding hurricane in the doldrums off the coast of Africa. Before it has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain.
I’m sorry, I must be going mad. I thought you said “oil is spread over the sea and ignited”. Oh, wait.
Something I hadn’t heard of when it came up in a meeting a few weeks ago, and which I’ve just got round to investigating: The Stable Marriable Problem. Kewl.
Peter Gabriel is still as interesting as ever, it seems [robot]. The highlight of the article is definitely the account of improvising with a bonobo:
“Play a grooming song!” says Panbanisha through her human interpreter. “I want to hear a grooming song!”
Onscreen, Gabriel begins playing slow synth pads not unlike something that might appear in one of his soundtracks. Panbanisha listens and begins to pick out delicate single notes on the keyboard, like a beginning and extremely hairy Brian Eno or Erik Satie. It’s stunning footage, albeit not the sort of thing that would make the cut on When Animals Attack.
“She likes this note,” says Gabriel, as the ape begins repeating a note and its octave. “No one has ever told her about octaves. She finds out for herself. So she’s either recognizing the pattern, or it’s through what she’s hearing.”
It’s also nice to see the Blind Boys of Alabama mentioned, as I’ve coincidentally been enjoying their work lately.
He’s looking very Zen-master, isn’t he?
Speculations on a gay subtext to Harry Potter. Rubbish when taken literally of course, but the last paragraph Andrew quotes has got it right, I reckon.
Text Processing In Python, by David Mertz – available free online or in dead tree format. And here’s the Slashdot review [robot]. I think I’ll give Chapter 4 (Parsers and State Machines) a look…
A couple of tasty bits from tiddly-pom over the last few days: Six plays Hex, telling us about a KDE app for playing Hex, the game John Nash invented because Go was too inscrutable for him; and Planet of the Zeppelins, on interesting plans to colonise Venus with Cloud Cities from The Empire Strikes Back. Well, not quite, but almost.
How stupid is this? babyink.com – tattoos for babies. [popbitch]. I’d like to be able to say it’s satirical, but alas, it looks genuine. Sigh…
I went looking for a chicken/pesto/pasta recipe last night and stumbled upon allrecipes.com, which I’ve got to say, is totally the business. A few particularly nifty aspects: for a given recipe, you can automatically scale the ingredients to however many servings you want, you can have the amounts in metric or “US standard” (ie everything in terms of “cups” – whatever they are ;-)), each recipe has reviews and ratings, and if you register you get a “recipe box” in which to keep your favourites and any notes you make on them. Very cool.
OK, so maybe none of this is news to anyone who’s used the web as a recipe resouce for some time – but to me it was all new and exciting.
Plus, the meal I selected, Chicken Pesto a la Lisa, was dead easy to cook and super-duper yummylicious.
Oooh, so that’s what blanching is – I always wondered.
Here comes the heavy weather, says the World Meteorological Organisation [rotten].
Thank you, wotever, for doing the sensible thing and finding out that in fact, babyink is fake. That’s a relief.
As mentioned previously, electronic voting machines are making election fraud easier, not harder. Now here’s a detailed article on the subject: How to Rig an Election in the United States [null].
Stalin vs. Hitler – very strange [rich].
It’s really time I listened to Simon and started reading Defective Yeti, so I have.
Unfortunately, that means I now have no choice but to present a long list of fantastic posts. It’s almost redundant, since most of the posts are, frankly, rather good, but anyway… kitten wrath, Dr Pepper, Logan’s Run (I actually quite like Logan’s Run, but knowing me that’s probably just because Jenny Agutter gets nekkid), toothpaste slapstick, go you chickenfat, What Venomous Egg-Laying Mammal Are You?, lego currency, etc., etc., etc. – wow.
It’s a while since I discovered a site that made me laugh out loud so consistently. I guess the last one was bash.org. Simon, I repent!
In the same vein as Marky, here’s a whole load of wise words from Monty the bot [ntk].
Websites that shorten long URLs [gamma]. Nice – I used to use makeashorterlink until I discovered tinyurl, but some of these other features look interesting. Perl API, huh? Where’s the Python one? ;-) (Yeah, I know, I know, write it yourself. I know.)
Like, wow: the CSS Zen Garden [tiddly].
… a demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.
Seriously impressive – I didn’t actually realise quite how much was possible, it seems. For instance, compare Gothica with, say, Calm & Smooth – they’re the same HTML file, just different CSS! Corking.
Desire to play with Gimboland design growing…
OK, OK, so I’m nearly fifteen years late, but hey, I just discovered The Pixies, maybe just in time for a reunion [gamma]. Caribooooooooouuuu!
Photo in St. James Park by the marvellous John Hegley.
Courtesy of Simon (although I expect the meme’s getting top rotation right now), a review of Real Life. Ho1 ho1 ho1, etc.
Player death is a serious issue in real life, and cause for continued debate among players, who often direct unanswerable questions on the subject to the game’s developers, who are apparently (and understandably) so busy that they generally keep silent.
You are here, ie nowhere [found]. Start here and zoom out – stunning and humbling.
Here’s an interesting article about how the market for tantalum, which is an essential ingredient in all our lovely consumer devices like mobile phones, computers, palmtops, etc. is feeding war, corruption, destruction, and extinction in central Africa [null]. Argle.
This just in: pizza is good for you [chicken]. Well, the right kind, anyway.
Via ntk, and timely since I’m thinking about doing some Palm development soonish, maybe, if I get round to it and don’t get distracted by lots of other exciting things, which is also likely, we present, Onboard C:
A C language integrated development environment that runs right on your Palm PDA and compiles native Palm executables
I must also, of course, take a close look at pippy.
I’ve just heard about Agnula, a project which aims to support the production of two Linux distributions (one based on Debian, the other on RedHat) dedicated to audio and multimedia. Check out the project description page for a list of the software they’re aiming to include – pretty ambitious.
Superb Defective Yeti on Moby Dick. Given Matthew’s propensity for making up bullshit (good examples here and here) I assumed that the quote (spleens, hypos, knocking hats off) was made up too. But just to check, I mosied on over to Project Gutenberg and downloaded me a copy – and there it is, Chapter One, spleens, hypos, and hats. Superb. Now I simply must read this book, not withstanding Matthew’s comments about twentysomething Moby Dick liars.
Is the US going to allow Afghanistan to return to Taliban/Pakistani rule [robot]?
Karzai shared with Ahmed Rashid his belief, like that of the average Afghan today, that the answer to that question lies in an understanding reached between the United States and Pakistan during Musharraf’s visit to Camp David, that Afghanistan could be, in effect, “sub- contracted” to Pakistan. Karzai also told Rashid that Musharraf’s critical remarks about the Karzai regime during his visit to the United States reminded him of the pre-September 11 days when Pakistan was fully backing the Taliban and exercising ever-more-strident control over Afghanistan.
Awesome. The Dark Wheel, the novella which came bundled with the best computer game I ever did play, the classic space-trader-battler Elite. The only thing I remember is a passage about a guy with some weird parasites lying dormant in his face, and his hopes as to when they would choose to emerge. Let’s see… Ah yes, here we go:
It was a human being, and not a humanoid alien that faced them. But what had happened to its face was beyond description. There were many ways to change ordinary human looks to nightmarish caricatures of the same: flying too close to certain stars, being exposed to the interstellar vacuum too often, working in certain ore and mineral mines . . . But Alex, as he stared at the lumpy, grey swellings that swathed this person’s flesh, could not imagine what grotesque disaster had befallen the caller.
…
‘These things. This . . .’ tapping his face. ‘Parasites. Spider worms. I did a stint in the pen on Dykstra’s world, and the little buggers took a liking to me. These are the larvae, about two million of them. They’ll hatch out in about ten years, and that’ll be the end of me. I sort of hope I’m at a dinner party with someone I don’t like, at the time, but you can’t plan for these things.’
Classic. Thanks, Dave! :-)
It’s a good month for Mars-gazing – the best it’s been for 5,000 (or maybe even 60,000) years, in fact.
Yoga warm-up.
It is illustrative of the bizarre way my mind works to note that I reached that page by the following path: I was reading a (paper) document about CASL, the Common Algebraic Specification Language, which is something I’m researching at work. This mentioned Monoids, so I searched and found this wikipedia entry – very elucidating. That took me to category theory, which according to that page is also apparently half-jokingly known as “abstract nonsense”, which fact led me to google on that term, which took me to this page on everything2.org, which links to the usual yoga which is a dead link page with a link to yoga warmup – hurrah.
The World Wide Web – your free association playground on acid.
Hello, World.
It’s been a quiet fortnight, hasn’t it? I went on holiday to Cornwall and had a lovely time, mainly lazing around in my parents’ back garden, although a trip to Eden didn’t go amiss either, especially combined with a gig by The Orb and Moby.
Anyway, back to work, busy busy busy, etc. – but just enough time to point out that The Diamond Age is fast approaching [null although apparently Slashdot's seen it too so probably so have you already, but anyway] and Dubai is to build the world’s first underwater hotel – groovy [rotten].
Whale fart – fantastic [rotten].
Humans closer, genetically, to rats than cats [robot]. Bummer.
This snippet caught my eye:
It also supports what is becoming increasingly clear – that the stretches of DNA we call genes are only a small part of the genetic story.
When I installed gentoo linux, I also started using grub as my boot loader (as opposed to the more traditional LILO). Grub can display a splash image in the menu background, and for quite a while I’ve idly wanted to customising this. Well, here’s the howto. w00t.
SPBLinux – Linux on a USB keychain drive. Like, yeah!
These things are getting seriously cheap – I bought one today (256Mb, USB2.0) for 55 quid from Mr USB (look under “Flash Drives/MP3 Players), but for 90 quid I could have got half a gig (in fact, I kinda wish I had). Now, that’s just silly, and where’s it going to end?
I mean, OK, compared to a 3.5″ it’s expensive – I can get 80Gb for about 100 quid now, right? But this baby’s so much more transportable than a hard drive. Half a gig is enough to put a reasonably repectable linux distro onto, and then you can cart it around to wherever you go and boot into it. How long before we have 1Gb drives? 2Gb? 5Gb? 10Gb? At this point, the computer you’re on becoming irrelevant – a hotdesk. You carry your operating system and your data with you. I really like this idea. Of course, the tricky bit is hardware configuration – you can only hotdesk if your OS is good at autodetecting hardware and playing nice with the local network, whatever it happens to be. But it’s a nice idea. One day…
Oh, and since hotdesking already has a meaning, I hereby invent a new word. Er, but what? I dunno, how about “pocketdesking”? Any better ideas, send me a postcard.
Winners of the nerve.com pick up line contest [null].
I like the one for the woman holding a baby…
Yeah, I know, it sounds like a joke, but look: glow in the dark light bulbs! [null]
Fascinating “don’t-miss” (to quote Jorn) interview with Bernard Lietaer, all about money – what it is, what the problems are with the current system, and lots about the complementary “yin” currencies emerging all over the place [robot]. Way cool.
Hand-picked nuggets:
I am afraid that if the United States had to live by the rules that are imposed on, say, Brazil, the United States of America would become a developing country in one generation. It’s the system that is currently unstable, unfair and not working.
Africa for instance has been dropped off the world economic map for most practical purposes.
…
I spent last summer in Bali. People are remarkably artistic in that island. Their communities are unusually strong. They have festivals that are totally mind-blowing, and can last a month. They’re having a good time. It’s a comparatively non-violent society. And what I found is that it isn’t a simple coincidence that they have been using a dual currency system for many centuries. All these unusual characteristics of Bali turn out directly to be nurtured by their dual money system.
I’m saying that exclusive use of a competitive programmed currency in a community tends to be destructive for the community fabric. This isn’t theory. We’ve seen this happen at the tribe level, with the collapses of traditional societies. I’ve seen one happen myself in Peru among the Chipibo in the Amazon. That tribe had been in existence for thousands of years. When they started using the national currency among themselves, the whole community fabric collapsed in five years’ time.
Untying the Gordian Knot – mildly interesting though short on detail. OTOH knots are complex buggers.
I got to that page after googling on “gordian.knot”, inspired by a student of mine cutting the Gordin Knot in an exam question. When asked to provide a solution to the famous Dining Philosopher’s Problem, this bright spark suggested adding more forks. Who’d have thought that the next conqueror of Asia would be a Computer Science student at Swansea?
If none of the above makes sense to you, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll do my best to explain. :-)
The Non-Expert: Defenestrate Your Résumé! by Matthew.
If you are having trouble getting everything to fit, try narrowing your margins, reducing your font to 7, or getting rid of the ‘deadweight’ by eliminating your education or omitting the nouns.
More on knots via Mark Hughes: The Tangled Task of Distinguishing Knots and Knots and Their Polynomials. Unfortunately I’m waaay too busy to read them at the mo, but maybe later tonight… Thanks, Mark!
Good news for Wombles fans everywhere: the BBC is to open up its archive [null]. Unfortunately all the music will be in Real Audio instead of Ogg, I suppose, but hey, it’s a start…
Why negotiate with your political opponents when you can annihilate them? In the era of WoT, little concerns like war crimes and human rights just don’t register.
Naomi Klein on the “War on Terror” [robot].
Geek interlude: As of about half an hour ago, I’m running linux kernel 2.6.0-test4, courtesy of this howto. Everything went smoothly, and things seem decidedly snappier, no doubt thanks to the kernel preemption patch, which was my main motivation for trying it out (although I hear CD burning is simpler too). The only thing that seems to be broken is lm_sensors, but I pretty much expected that – it seems incredibly fragile.
PyXMMS – control XMMS using Python. Here we go…
Also nifty: pyosd, for TV-like on-screen displays from Python.
World Press Freedom Index [null]. The UK is in 21st place, behind the USA. Cor.
Murphy, Democritus, Heisenberg, Einstein, Rockefeller and Wittgenstein discuss web service architectures [robot].
Murphy: Yes, I will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who thinks they can architect on the basis of everything working and all bits talking to each other in synchronous lock-step. All architecture should be pessimistic, not optimistic. Design with failure in mind. It’s the only way. An asynchronous approach to time ordering is critical.
May be true, may be untrue, but certainly scary [robot]:
If we are going to lose, we arm everything with cobalt – and I mean everything; we have jackets at nearly every missile magazine in the world, on land or at sea – and contaminate the world. If we can’t have it, nobody can.”
Update 2003-09-15: A few comments over at /dev/null, mostly on the sceptical side.
RIP Johnny Cash. Time to go and listen to Personal Jesus, I think…
The Isophone [null] – though I think an easier, and possibly cooler, way to do this would be to just fit speakers and a microphone into an ordinary sensory-deprivation tank. In fact, don’t they come fitted with speakers already so you can drift away listening to whales humping and whatnot?
The Monkey, which I really should get to more often.
On-line Orgasmic Simulation [bela].
Not accurate though, because I don’t somk.
Andy’s Saturday Night. I was a Cheshire Cat. Not a ginger one though, which seemed to annoy some people.
One of the nice things about my work is that I get a steady stream of academic and not-quite-so-academic journals turning up in my pigeon-hole, for me to read and then pass on to a colleague. Most of the time these contain nothing of interest to me, but now and then that’s not the case. The April issue of ACM Queue just turned up on my desk, and it’s dedicated to embedded systems. Booooring, I hear you say. Well, yes, but look: here’s an interview with Jim Ready of Monta Vista Software, all about his company‘s use of Linux in the embedded space.
Nice interview, and a couple of particularly neat-o quotes:
On Microsoft:
For similar reasons, the Asia-Pacific region is also a very strong supporter of Linux. Part of Linux’s strength in Asia comes from not wanting to hand the keys of the kingdom to a proprietary OS vendor. Neither Sony nor anybody else is going to let Microsoft define what a television, PVR, PDA, or phone is, although Microsoft would love to do it. There’s an “ain’t going to happen” aspect driving the Linux adoption in the consumer space, meaning people are not going to hand the market over to a sole-source provider. The beneficiary is Linux, and we are a key supplier of embedded Linux. This is a very, very strong market phenomenon, no question about it.
On porting Linux to non-x86 architectures:
Let’s put it this way: If it were a big job to rip out x86 stuff and put in all these other CPU-specfic things, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing today. We release an image of Linux and its utilities across all those architectures at the same time, exactly at the same revision level: something no one has ever done in the world before, by the way. And we’ve done it in a very straightforward, highly automated way. If there were really weird “broken” parts of Linux, it would make that impossible. So we’ve demonstrated beyond a doubt that Linux is completely portable and architecture-independent.
Well, I know I’d rather see Superman as President than, say, Conan the Librarian.
Bash shaved her head for charity last Friday – or more accurately, me and Faron Moller did, as the pictures testify. Groovy.
Stop stop talking about who’s to blame, when all that counts is how to change.
Aaahhh, James…
It’s quite amazing to see how many of the predictions made in this Byte article on microkernel operating systems from 1994 were just completely wrong.
I mean, apart from the big one at the start, that “Every next-generation operating system will have one [ie, a microkernel]“, there are all sorts of little predictions and “obvious points” about the market about that time which ended up not happening for one reason or another.
Fueling the current microkernel frenzy is the recent fragmentation of the operating-system market. With no one vendor a clear winner in the operating-system sweepstakes, each needs to be able to support the others’ applications.
I suppose this was still in the day when it looked like OS/2 might have a chance.
Since the processor market seems more likely to fragment with competing designs than to converge on a single architecture, running an operating system on more than one processor may be the only way to leverage buyers’ investment in hardware.
Well, that didn’t happen, except in the embedded space.
Operating-system designers have learned their lesson and now build operating systems that make adding extensions manageable. There’s no alternative. With increasingly complex monolithic systems, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to ensure reliability.
So how come Windows and Linux are still monolithic then? Eh? Eh? Eh?
There’s also a need to subtract features. More users would flock to Unix or NT if these operating systems didn’t require 16 MB of memory and 70 MB or more of hard disk space.
Ah, if only it had been true. But no, we’ll just buy more memory and bigger hard drives, dummy!
Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of a microkernel and I hope (but doubt) that somehow they’re the future. I’m just marvelling at how much this article got wrong. Not that I’m suggesting I could do better, then or now… It’s just interesting, is all.
Dad sent me a couple of photos, which I thought I’d share:
That’s Blossom, their cat, doing the kind of daft thing cats do; and Adam, my nephew, who appears to growing frighteningly fast. Wave to the internet, Adam. :-)
Hmmm, Blossom’s pose (and, to be honest, general attitude) reminds me of this excellent Get Fuzzy cartoon:
Paul Novorese on Type C and Type M arguments – nice.
The most famous type M argument is the “law abiding citizens have nothing to hide” justification for any given big brother policy. I particulary despise this argument, and often I despise those who make it, as they obviously are too lazy to develop rational justifications for thier positions.
And yet, what is the right answer to that? I mean, how do you counter that argument? All suggestions welcome… (Man, I need a commenting system – maybe it’s time I looked at Movable Type).
Jam – a nifty looking replacement for make (particularly nifty in that it understands C and C++ dependencies, so your Makefiles (or Jamfiles, I suppose) tend to be a lot shorter). Plus it doesn’t use XML, unlike ant, which has got to be a good thing… :-)
Plus, I spoke, for the first time, to Alan Cox today. Very briefly. More on this some time in the next fortnight or so, I reckon…
Two mildly interesting things which happened to me last night:
1. I saw a house round the corner from mine with Christmas decorations in the window. Guess they’re starting late this year.
2. I read Winnie The Pooh for the first time; it was cool, but I was disappointed to get to the end without meeting Tigger. I hope they make a sequel some day. ;-)
Speaking of which, here’s some excellent footage of the recent Siegfried & Roy accident.
Nuclear Bomb Effects Calculator (370Kb jpeg) apparently “found in 1991 at old civil defence HQ at Pounds House in Plymouth, UK” [from this page]. Crackers.
This is all over the place at the moment, but if you haven’t seen it yet… Things to do while watching the Lord Of The Rings movies.
Three of my favourites:
Dress up as old ladies and reenact “The Battle of Helms Deep” Monty Python style.
(at least it wouldn’t have dwarf-tossing or surfing elves in it…)
Finish off every one of Elrond’s lines with “Mr. Anderson.”
Imitate what you think a conversation between Gollum, Dobby and Yoda would be like.
16th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information – with a bit of luck, I might be going. Colour me logical, baby!
Courtesy of the lovely Bash, What’s Alan Cox up to these days? Answer: an MBA, and getting involved in Welsh Linux. :-)
