eta: I forgot to say so specifically, but I hope the people who have ticked "something else interesting" will say what it was :-)

It's nice to hear that pretty much everybody else seems to have had a good Christmas. I, unfortunately, did not have a good Christmas, because I've spent most of this week basically incapacitated by flu.

So my Christmas Day largely involved me sitting on the sofa watching DVDs I'd seen before and trying not to move too much. The original plan had been that Mum would come to visit and I'd cook her a big Christmas roast dinner; instead, she came round and cooked me a small and inoffensive omelette, which was about all my beleaguered metabolism could cope with.

That made yesterday the first Christmas Day in my whole life (at least since I was old enough to remember them at all) which didn't involve some sort of appropriately Christmassy celebration. I feel surprisingly unhappy about that. It's not that anything's actually been lost, as such – Mum and I plan to have a postponed celebration at some later point once I'm well. And it's not even as if I've gone without Christmas dinner so far this year: I cooked an early one for Dad a week ago, and the Gallery did its usual excellent one the week before that. But, somehow, it isn't the same.

Turns out they hadn't taken it away permanently; they were just replacing it with a newer (and, mysteriously, smaller and uglier) model. How silly.

You know you're in serious trouble, in programming, when you find you need to use the word ‘ontology’ in a technical discussion.

I've been running my personal alarm clock program on my Chumby for over seven months now, and this is the first morning on which it's occurred to me that it might have been a bad idea for the ‘SNOOZE’ and ‘SHUT UP’ buttons on the touch-screen to be the same size, shape and colour and to have legends starting with the same letter.

I thought I'd hit Snooze this morning, and had certainly meant to hit Snooze, but the next thing I knew I was waking up half an hour later and going to be late for work, so apparently I hit shut-up instead. Some redesign required.

This morning I was woken from a dream by my alarm clock, right in the middle of the bit of the dream that made the least possible sense. Under the influence of the resulting sense of confusion I got into the shower, washed myself, realised I hadn't used nearly enough shower gel and had to wash myself again. Then I pulled the shower curtain rail down in a fit of total incompetence.

When you realise it's one of those days before you've even got dressed, it's going to be a bad one.

Just now I went to the company kitchen for coffee, and dropped a corporate mug on the floor, breaking it in half. It broke beautifully: a single straight break in a vertical plane, dividing the half with the handle from the half opposite the handle with an absolute minimum of small shrapnel. If I had my camera here I'd have taken a picture, that's how prettily it broke. Unfortunately, it didn't do anything to dispel the sense of it being one of those days.

Last Sunday evening – that is, about eight and a half days ago – I was out in the street on foot, and I walked around the back of a large van parked by the roadside. I found out slightly too late and the hard way that the van had a tailboard sticking a foot out of the back at mid-shin height, which was almost invisible in the shadows. So I did the obvious thing: hopped up and down for a couple of minutes clutching my shin and cursing, then went on my way.

Since then my shin has given the occasional mild twinge in the place where I hit it, but it's looked undamaged, and not actually inconvenienced me. I had expected it to get completely better soon.

I am therefore somewhat startled, over a week later, to find that my shin has now, fairly suddenly, developed a visible bruise and become inconveniently tender to the touch. Bodies make no sense!

Yesterday I got a travel brochure through the door addressed to a previous occupant. So I stuck a ‘return to sender’ label on it, and left it by the front door to repost the next time I went out. Today I left the house to go to work; I picked up the brochure on the way, and walked four houses down the street to the incredibly convenient nearby postbox.

Or rather, to where the postbox used to be. It's vanished, with not even an obvious scar where it was uprooted. I stood and stared at the empty space for a couple of minutes, unable to believe I hadn't just made a silly mistake of some sort.

Bah! Suddenly the niceness of the location of my house has gone down. Not that the convenient postbox contributed at all to my purchase decision – I didn't even notice it was there until after completion – but I've been finding it thoroughly useful while it was there, and now they've taken it away. Humph.

(So now I need to find my next nearest postbox. A quick google turns up four or five websites which purport to be able to show me a map of where all the nearest postboxes are to a given location; but they're all rubbish as far as I can tell, and in particular they all have incomplete data.)

The Tesco near work has recently been teching-up the price labels attached to its shelves. In several aisles, the old-fashioned pieces of paper with product details and price printed on them have been replaced with little electronic gizmos with LCDs of comparable size, and the same product and price information is displayed on those.

I have to assume the useful feature of this system is that they can update the prices at the touch of a button from their lair central control room; they can introduce special offers, rescind special offers, or just keep prices generally in line with the current economic conditions without having to send a henchman stock control operative out in person to physically replace lots of labels.

I am therefore at a loss to explain why they have two different types of gizmo, one with a beige case for normal prices and one with a red case for special offers. Surely this precisely defeats the purpose – now they have to send someone round to replace the gizmos again whenever they want to start or stop a special offer!

When you compile a source file and get multiple compile errors, there are two conflicting principles governing the order in which you go through the source file fixing them.

On the one hand, you want to fix the errors from the top downwards, because of the possibility that some errors are cascades from others: fixing earlier errors may cause later ones to turn into non-errors or shed light on what the problem really was.

On the other hand, if you fix an early error in a way that changes the number of lines in the source file, then you have to mentally adjust all the line numbers in the subsequent error messages. Do this multiple times and you're looking at keeping a running track of the cumulative change to the file's line count as you edit, which you didn't really want to have to hold in your head at the same time as the more important state regarding the problems you're fixing.

The solution is simple. Line numbers in source files should be indexed backwards from the end, with line 0 being the part of the file after the final newline, line 1 the line before that, and so on. If compilers reported errors using those line numbers, and programmers' text editors displayed the same line numbers, then there would no longer be a conflict: you'd fix compile errors from the top of the file downwards, each error message would have a correct line number when you reached it, and you'd only see cascade errors after fixing the primary error that caused them.

So I see on LJ that quite a few people on my friends list stayed up very late last night to watch the US election results come in.

I didn't; I went to bed as usual, and checked the result on the web when I got up (admittedly half an hour early) this morning. This is generally what I do with elections in my own country, too. My stated reason for this yesterday was that whatever the result turned out to be, I couldn't imagine my attitude to it today being improved by sleep deprivation. Other people responded that the sense of suspense would prevent them from getting to sleep until they knew the result. I thought, at the time, that I must simply not be feeling the suspense in the same way.

However, I think that in fact that wasn't the answer. What it was is that I did want to know what the result was – so I didn't want to spend several more hours of subjective time waiting to find out! By falling asleep, I got to effectively skip ahead to the bit where I find out who did it, instead of having to plod through the intervening pages one by one.

Occasionally I will see somebody post something – on LJ, Usenet, Monochrome, wherever – and think ‘ah, I have something useful to say in response to that’. So I'll start writing a response, and part way through writing it I will realise that it's coming out as complete drivel: what seemed like sensible and relevant points when they sprang into my mind on reading the post in fact look rather less relevant, or less coherent, or both, when I write them down. So I decide I can't make a useful contribution after all, abandon my half-written reply, and go on my way.

That's all fair enough. But often what happens is that I later have another look at the original post, and in spite of my previous failed attempt to post a response, I find myself thinking ‘no, look, that stuff I wanted to post really is useful and relevant and I should post it’. So I try again, and the same thing happens. And then, the next time the original post crosses my line of sight, I go through the same cycle again.

That annoys me. Why can't the two parts of my brain talk to each other, reach some sort of synthesis, and stop alternately bombarding my top-level consciousness with their conflicting opinions? Gaah.

I bought two books the other week which, slightly to my surprise, turned out to be isomorphic.

The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is an alternate history novel depicting what might have happened if Europe had been wiped out by plague at some point around the end of the first millennium, and the various cultures east of there – China, India, the Arabs – had expanded into the space, discovered America, and written the history books their way instead of ours. The story spans a period of time orders of magnitude longer than the lifetime of any individual character, and is told as a sequence of connected short stories in which the characters of each one have some sort of connection to the characters in the last (because they're reincarnations of the previous lot in accordance with an appropriately generically-Eastern theology).

Evolution, by Stephen Baxter, is a novel dramatising the evolution of humanity, starting at small ratlike mammals just before the dinosaur extinction and continuing aeons past the present day into what Earth might look like after humanity as we recognise it is long gone. The story spans a period of time orders of magnitude longer than the lifetime of any individual character, and is told as a sequence of connected short stories in which the characters of each one have some sort of connection to the characters in the last (because they're their descendants, hundreds or thousands of generations later and considerably evolved).

This isn't a criticism; both are perfectly good books, they're very different in every detail beneath that basic structural similarity, and there is certainly room in the world for both of them. But it struck me as an entertaining coincidence that I happened to pick them both up during the same trawl of a charity shop. I wonder if the same person donated both of them for the same reason!

$ echo "long long x;" > z.c
$ gcc --std=c99 -pedantic -Wall -c z.c
$ gcc --std=c90 -pedantic -Wall -c z.c
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-std=c90"
$ gcc --std=c89 -pedantic -Wall -c z.c
z.c:1: warning: ISO C90 does not support `long long'

Hmm. Nothing like clear consensus on standards nomenclature.

Back in the office today, after two weeks off. In those two weeks I've managed to do several almost useful things, which is unusual.

I've finally got hold of a gluten-free bread recipe which I'm actually willing to eat for pleasure rather than just using it as breadcrumbs. As a result I've spent most of the last two weeks methodically going through everything I can think of to eat on toast, and eating it on toast.

I've also advanced the remains of my house-sorting-out list, by acquiring a bookcase for my DVDs and hence removing them from their previous location in an unsightly and inconvenient pile in the corner of the dining room floor. This took some work. After searching various furniture shops (both online and off) for the right sort of wall-mounted bookcases, I eventually resorted to Dad's carpentry skills to get a custom bookcase built for me. So last week I went down to visit him for a couple of days (at his suggestion) with the plan that we'd build a bookcase together in his garage. In fact, ‘building it together’ turned out to mean that I mostly held one end of something while he bashed nails into the other end, but I took careful notes throughout the procedure in the hope that I might be able to at least try to build a similar sort of thing myself should I ever need to. Then I brought the newly assembled bookcase home, where I had to varnish it myself and wait another couple of days while two coats of varnish dried, then I screwed it to the wall on Saturday and filled it with DVDs. I'm unreasonably pleased with the result given how little of the work I actually did.

Aside from those, there was some geeking (some useful, some potentially profitable, some thoroughly silly) and some helping of other people get useful things done. I feel almost entirely satisfied with the way my holiday has gone, apart from the fact that I feel somewhat tired now it's over!

Is it just me, or does cheese taste noticeably better when you have previously grated part of the block and are now eating the part with the grated-from surface?

My guess is that (if I'm not just imagining it) it's a surface-area thing. If so, I wonder if there's a market for weird specialist cheese knives that leave a highly uneven surface every time they cut.

It's not unheard of for people forced to get up early in the morning to describe it as ‘ungodly’ when grumbling about it, as in ‘*yawn* why do I have to get up at this ungodly hour?’.

It occurred to me, in a silly moment a few months ago, to idly wonder if that phrase has only ever been used as hyperbole, or if there might ever have been a real religion which considered the early morning to be genuinely and literally ungodly. Some sort of breakaway Christian subsect, perhaps, who hold that not only did God have a bit of a rest on the seventh day but he also didn't get out of bed until nearly noon on the previous six. The keystone of your worship as a member of that sect, naturally, would be what you did on a Sunday morning – you'd stay in bed, with great reverence and solemnity, and cry sacrilege and blasphemy at any miserable heretic who dared try to make you get up.

In an unrelated conversation with atreic recently, she made the lighthearted suggestion that perhaps the main benefit of humanity having achieved sentience was that it conferred the ability to properly appreciate the pleasurable nature of sleep, as a contrast to all that thinking.

Suddenly I realised that my fictional sleep-obsessed religion had met its nemesis: atreic's line of thinking there would clearly be its evolutionist counterpart, its personal sleep-obsessed Richard Dawkins! In a world containing both, there'd be huge philosophical debates all over the national media about whether sleep was great because it was God's grand plan or because it was the pinnacle of human evolution.

But it would be noticeable, to anyone paying attention, that no cut or thrust in the ongoing public debate on the subject ever took place before two in the afternoon at the earliest. :-)

At some point last week, while the Olympics were on TV, there was a five-minute segment mentioning that although China was at the top of the medals table by the IOC's official ranking, the USA's internal news services all put it at the top of the table – because the IOC likes to count gold medals and use the others to break ties, whereas the USA prefers to count total medals first and break ties by means of how many of them are which colour. (It was claimed that the USA has always counted this way, and that it was pure happenstance that on this occasion it happened to be a method of counting which put it at the top.)

So, just out of interest, I've prepared an alternative view of the final medals table for the 2008 Olympics, which simply does not take sides in debates of this sort: it shows which countries must be considered to have got a better medal haul than which other countries by any sensible ranking policy, and doesn't try to make arbitrary judgments between the rest.

http://tartarus.org/simon/2008-olympics-hasse/

I'm slightly surprised at how that turned out; I'd have guessed there'd be at least a few more unambiguous pinch points. As it is, the only countries in the entire table which can be sure of their position in the ranking are Russia, Great Britain, and the group at the bottom with one bronze medal each.

My Leatherman is beginning to get long in the tooth. (Specifically, and somewhat unimpressively, its pliers now don't open and close properly, due to protruding nicks on the wire cutters which I apparently caused recently by using them to cut wire.) What multi-tool should I replace it with?

My current one is the long-defunct Leatherman Flair, which I bought because it was a Leatherman-type tool but also had a corkscrew and bottle opener; I thought, and still think, that this seemed like a generally useful combination. The Flair also has two other ‘picnic accessories’ which are completely pointless (a spreader and a cocktail fork, for goodness' sake), but it includes a blade, pliers, scissors, a useful range of screwdrivers and assorted booze-opening technology in one convenient package, and that's all been consistently useful to me for years.

If I could design a new multitool myself from scratch I'd leave out the silly picnic accessories, add a few more screwdrivers, have the tools fold out from the outside rather than the inside, and probably make the knife blade much smaller. (My own best judgment says the Flair isn't in violation of UK knife-carrying legislation, but on the other hand I don't actually need a blade longer than a couple of centimetres since I only really use it for opening packaging; so if I were designing from scratch I'd play it a lot safer.) Oh yes, and I'd make the wire cutters out of pure adamantium, bah.

But it isn't feasible to design one's own multitool from the ground up, so I probably want to buy some reasonably good approximation to the above. I've done a bit of googling, but nothing has really stood out for me as being obviously what I want. Any satisfied users out here with personal recommendations?

I had an odd email this weekend. Someone mailed me about a couple of minor points on my website, and then added at the end of the message that he found it curious that I hadn't written anything about religion. He said, in particular, that he thought knowing something about what I believed in that area might, in his words, ‘shed some light on an important aspect of [my] personality’.

Well, I was willing enough to answer his question in private email. It's true that I've never bothered to mention on my main website that I'm an atheist, but that's not out of any strong feeling that it's Nobody Else's Business; partly it's because I'd expect any such mention to attract too much email flamage to be worth the trouble, but mostly I've just never felt that I had anything particularly interesting or original to say on the subject. (And if I did, it would more likely be a vague musing to mention in passing in this diary, rather than something to publish on my permanent website as a Serious Essay intended to attract ongoing widespread interest.)

But it struck me as particularly strange that someone might feel their understanding of me as a person was noticeably incomplete without knowing my religion. I mean, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find there are people whose religion is responsible for significant aspects of their personality (e.g. if their personality changed noticeably when they converted). And I certainly know there are people who at least believe their religion is the most important thing about them: I occasionally come across LJ bios saying faintly nauseating things like ‘The most important fact about me is that I love God’, or ‘I'm a Fooist, and once you know that, you know everything you need to about me’. (My general feeling tends to be that if they say everything else about them is even less interesting than their religion, I'm willing to take their word for it.)

But it's always seemed to me that such people are a small minority: for the most part I wouldn't have said there was any particularly noticeable divide of personality between the various theists and atheists I know. So when I meet somebody new, I've never felt a particular need to know about their religion, beyond finding out whether or not they're the sort of person who makes an overwhelmingly big deal of it. Sometimes I've managed to know people for years before finding out that they've been a devout Fooist all along and I'd never known – and once I've blinked a couple of times, it generally alters my attitude to them not one jot.

Am I unusual in this? Does anyone else round here feel that their understanding of someone's personality is necessarily (or even usually) incomplete without some knowledge of their attitude to religion?