On Saturday I went to the Depot (formerly the Vaults), in a small group gathered by cartesiandaemon who had recently tipped me off that it had a gluten-free submenu. This was an excellent experience, not least because it was the first meal I've eaten in a restaurant since 20061; usually the sheer hassle of finding coeliac-friendly eateries puts me off. And the Depot is also an excellent place to have your first restaurant meal in two years, because its unusual menu structure (lots of starter-size dishes, you order a lot of them and have a bit of each) meant I didn't have to dither over which of the many appetising things on the menu to select. ‘I'll have nearly all of them, please!’

Anyway. It turned out that one of the group who I didn't already know is also coeliac, and not only that but is on the committee of the local branch of the Coeliac Society. Apparently this is entirely coincidental: her other half (also present) was at university in Jack's year. Small world.

During a discussion over what wine to order, I excused myself from making detailed wine-buying decisions on the grounds that my absent sense of smell rather rules out a career as a wine expert. The abovementioned other half promptly startled me further by asking

Tim	‘Did I just hear you say you've got no sense of smell?’
simont	‘Yes, that's right.’
Tim	‘Are you therefore Simon Tatham?’
simont	<blinks several times> ‘Yes!’

thus proving that the world is even smaller, or possibly merely that I am still the Internet's most famous anosmic. (He'd encountered my FAQ on Reddit.)

1. well, unless you count having lunch in Tatties once last year, on a technicality. I don't.

Over the past decade I have been gradually forming an opinion about computing, and it is this: complex computer systems and pronouns do not mix well.

I said something like this nearly ten years ago in my article ‘How to Report Bugs Effectively’. Near the end I mentioned that when writing a bug report you should be careful of pronouns, because they can easily turn out to have more than one plausible referent and render your sentence ambiguous. Since then I've been gradually forming the opinion that this principle goes further than bug reports, and should in fact be extended to most – if not all – statements about computers which are intended to be technically precise.

The reason I say this about computers in particular is that computer systems seem to be a particularly fertile field for not being quite sure which bit of them someone's talking about. A complex computer system contains a great many cooperating processes, programs and scripts, so if someone says something like ‘it couldn't find the file’ then there are often several of those programs and scripts which might plausibly have been looking for the same file, so it's easy to be unclear about which the person meant. (And, indeed, there are often many files those programs could have been looking for; ‘the file’ in my above example isn't technically a pronoun, but for these purposes it can easily have the same vagueness problem.)

Part of the problem, I think, is that people are often not sure themselves which part of a complex system they're talking about. That's excusable when a user is reporting a bug: as long as they can clearly describe the visible symptoms, it's not their responsibility to understand the tangle of interoperating processes that gave rise to them. But if (for instance) there's a subsequent conversation between two programmers trying to fix the bug, and one of them advances a hypothesis about what's going on, then the excessive use of ‘it’ in the statement of the hypothesis seems to me to be correlated with the programmer being hopelessly confused about which part of the system is doing what – often leading to the hypothesis being fundamentally unviable.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that one must not use pronouns; but I think that if one is trying to conduct a precise technical conversation, one should at the very least

• make sure one has a clear idea of the exact referent of every pronoun one uses, and be prepared to state that referent precisely if queried
• be sparing in the use of pronouns: be aware that there's a constant risk of ambiguity, and only use a pronoun when you're reasonably sure it's safe to do so. In particular, become less willing to use pronouns the more involved the conversation becomes.

(I'm half tempted to coin the word ‘antinoun’ to describe a pronoun used to – not necessarily consciously – cover the fact that you're not sure what its referent is.)

So the other day Stephen Fry wrote a long blog post about pop versus classical music, and his specific reason for preferring the latter. I've seen a couple of posts discussing whether he was right, but reading the post has reminded me that when I was a child I also preferred classical music for a specific reason, but the reason was completely different.

The thing I disliked about pop music when I was young was that there wasn't enough music in it. Specifically, the same verse and chorus section tended to be repeated several times throughout a song, pretty much exactly unchanged except for the lyrics sung over the top of it. But, at the time, I just wasn't very interested in lyrics compared to music; so I tended to feel shortchanged by four minutes of pop song compared to the same length of classical music, because the latter tended to have more different music packed into its four minutes whereas the pop would only have one minute's worth of tune repeated over and over.

(The observant will notice that this isn't really about classical music; it's about instrumental music. And, indeed, I eventually worked that out for myself: the first modern musician to really hold my interest was Jean Michel Jarre, largely because his music was instrumental.)

I got over it in the end. I now like lyrics as much as the next person, and I have no fundamental problem with repetitive tunes any more as long as the lyrics make them worth my while.

But musical and lyrical variety don't have to be mutually exclusive; even in verse-and-chorus structured songs, it's possible to have melodic or harmonic evolution between successive instances of the verse and/or chorus, and the occasional song which manages that still makes me particularly happy. There needn't even be very much of it, as long as it's done well: for example, there's a two-note change between two choruses in the Sisters' ‘First and Last and Always’ which has always struck me as just right. And the subtle tweaks to the tune between successive verses of Steve Vai's ‘The Silent Within’ make me rather fond of the song in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it at all otherwise.

I was having a conversation this morning about the meaning of life. I suggested that one of the biggest problems is that it's such a vaguely specified concept, and another is that talking about the ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ of life in the first place suggests a presumption of some sort of intent in the mind of ‘whoever’ put life there in the first place, and hence a presumption of some (fairly nonspecific) form of theism. Which is fine if you're a theist anyway, but makes the question a difficult one to even start answering if you're not.

So I said that if the question were rephrased into one which is neither presumptively theist nor hopelessly and unanswerably vague, I'd be happy to try to answer it; and then I mused that actually it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that any such reworded question was embarrassingly trivial to answer, and that the really difficult aspect of the original question lay in determining what non-vague rewording of it you really meant to ask in the first place.

This seemed like a basically defensible position to me when I said it, and nicely articulated the essential frustration I have often felt when discussing the question. ‘If you tell me what you mean by that, I'll try to answer you!’

However, it wasn't until an hour later that I thought about what I'd said. Giving an answer to the Great Question is relatively easy compared to working out what the Question was in the first place? Suddenly I realised I'd heard someone say that before, and it was Deep Thought.

So my philosophical worldview has apparently been subconsciously shaped by Douglas Adams. I suppose there are far worse people, but I'm still a little unnerved to discover that.

(I've had this lurking around in my file of half-written rants for some time. It came up in conversation today and someone expressed interest in reading it, so I thought perhaps it was time to polish it up and post it. I'm probably mostly preaching to the choir here, but I wanted to get it down in writing anyway.)

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a FAQ about having no sense of smell, and put it up on the web.

Since then, people have occasionally happened across that web page and sent me comments on it. In four years I have received 43 such comments (it's easy to count them since they have their own mail folder), which works out to an average rate of about one comment a month or so.

Today I received thirteen comments on that page, which was unprecedented and not a little startling. One of them, helpfully, told me why: my FAQ was listed on the front page of Reddit. It was half way down the second page when I just looked, so with any luck the comment rate will now drop, but for a few hours there I was apparently the Internet's most famous anosmic. How strange.

I was physically assaulted in the street on the way home from the pub just now…

… by an extremely tiny puppy, who ran up behind me and collided with the backs of my legs, provoking a loud yell of surprise before I realised I hadn't been harmed in any way.

How sweet. But also rather unexpected and startling; it must surely have noticed that there was something in its way?

Over the past couple of weeks I've done a considerable amount of work to port ick-proxy, the disgusting URL-rewriting utility I wrote a few years ago, to run on Windows. Unlike Unix programs, Windows programs need icons; but I haven't yet been able to think of an icon design which is both (a) usefully related to the nature of the program and (b) within the scope of my drawing skills.

The function of ick-proxy is to arrange for a web browser to notice when it's asked to visit selected classes of URL, and modify the URLs into different ones before going there. I use this to append ‘?style=mine’ to nearly all Livejournal URLs I visit, so that I see everyone's LJs in my own nice readable style instead of the eye-torturing monstrosities favoured by some people who aren't me.

The method by which ick-proxy achieves this function is to load the browser with a complicated Javascript proxy configuration file which recognises specifically those URLs which require a rewrite, and tells the browser to retrieve them by going via a custom web proxy. That web proxy – the actual ick-proxy program itself – handles requests for rewrite-requiring URLs by returning a 302 response (temporary redirect) pointing at the rewritten URL. The browser's proxy configuration does not in turn direct that URL to the custom proxy, so the browser retrieves it in the normal way. This means that ick-proxy is never required to do any real HTTP proxying – it's only ever called when it needs to return a 302, and in fact it will return an internal server error if you call it in any other context. If you think this entire idea is thoroughly disgusting, I wouldn't disagree (hence the name), but in fact I've been running it for four years now and it's been astonishingly robust and reliable.

However, since it just took me two longish and quite technical paragraphs to describe what the program does, it's unclear to me how I can express anything even approximating that in a 16x16 icon, or even a 32x32 one. My best idea so far is to have the icon represent the program's name rather than its function, by showing a human face screwed up with its tongue poking out in an ‘ick!’ expression. Unfortunately, I don't think I can draw that recognisably.

So, anyone else got any clever ideas for a suitable icon?

On Saturday night, I saw a long limousine parked by the roadside, with a bunch of teenagers milling around outside it. I assume it had either just taken them to a party or was just about to.

Parked behind that was a second long vehicle, of a type I hadn't encountered before. It was to a limousine as an SUV is to a normal car: taller, rugged-looking design, big wheels, intimidating front grille, but still a long vehicle. A Sports Utility Limo.

I suppose, thinking about it, there are one or two practical advantages to the design over a normal limo; for instance, it might be easier to move about inside it with a bit more headroom.

However, I was a little disturbed nonetheless by the concept of an SUV limo, and in particular I can't help thinking that what the world really needs is for Jeremy Clarkson to take one off-road and laugh at its performance :-)

Gosh, that's pretty serious hail out there. And I do believe I just heard it set off someone's car alarm in the car park :-)

A couple of weeks ago I randomly, and rather unexpectedly, picked up Nethack again and had another go at it.

After managing to win it once in 2006 playing the traditional and relatively easy Valkyrie, I tried to beat it again playing a Wizard, and had two near-successes but no joy. I got disheartened by this and stopped playing; but it still niggled at me a little that I'd got so close to ascending a Wizard and not managed it.

It turned out that my feeling of demoralisation wore off faster than that niggling feeling of unfinished business, so somewhat to my surprise I had another go this year. And successfully, this time: after only a few weeks of trying, yesterday a Wizard joined 2006's Valkyrie in the short list of my personal ascensions.

I don't think I have any expectation of playing again, this time. There's no feeling of unfinished business: I haven't seriously tried playing any other role, and none of them gives me a strong urge to do so. And my recent winning game was such a total faff that by the end it was feeling more like a chore than a pleasure. I may of course change my mind in another couple of years, but right now I feel as if I could comfortably stop for ever.

But it's a good feeling to know that I've now managed everything I seriously tried in the game. Even if I don't manage to achieve anything lastingly worthwhile this year, I won't be able to look back at the end of 2008 and feel that I didn't at least achieve something.

I recently replaced the seven 50W GU10 halogen spotlights in my kitchen light fitting with 7W energy-saving bulbs, after managing to google up some which weren't 2cm longer than the originals and hence actually fitted into the space.

The new bulbs take a few minutes to come on fully. I wondered how long, because that way I know how long to go away and wait after flicking the switch. Unfortunately, finding that out by sitting and watching is a bit tricky, because one's attention wanders and in any case one's eyes adjust constantly so it's hard to say whether the lights are still getting gradually brighter or have stabilised.

Solution: the digital camera to which I treated myself at Christmas, in video recording mode. Set it up on a tripod pointing at the kitchen door, with a bit of uniformly lit dining room wall in shot as well to compare against; start it recording; turn kitchen lights on; go away and leave it until it runs out of disk space. Extract the resulting video file, convert into a gigabyte of PNGs, and analyse them in software.

( I don't imagine everyone will actually care about the results )

An excessive effort, perhaps, but it was fun. Also it vaguely justified the new camera, since the old one's video recording capabilities wouldn't have been nearly up to this job. (That is, even before I broke it beyond repair.)

Sometimes, one band writes a song, or publishes an album, which has the same name as a different band. For example, last night lark_ascending played me some music by ‘Van Canto’, including a song called ‘The Mission’. And Leonard Cohen had a song called ‘Sisters of Mercy’.

It occurred to me last night to wonder how common this is. In particular, my most immediate thought was this: if one were to define a directed graph on bands with an edge from one band to another iff the former had a song or album named the same as the latter, would the graph be cyclic? That is, does there exist a band called A with a song/album called B, and a band B in turn with a song or album called C, and … eventually some band X with a song or album called A? My own knowledge of music is less than encyclopedic, but I wonder if any music-trivia buffs among my readers might enjoy having a try.

(Standard conventions for directed graphs apply: it's cheating for a band to link directly to itself, but two bands linking to one another are a valid cycle. Also, I'm prepared to be a little forgiving on the matter of whether or not band, song or album names have a leading ‘The’. Finally, I don't demand that the name matches be coincidental: if the song name directly inspired the band name or vice versa, as in the second example above, that doesn't disqualify the link.)

I was phoned at work by a headhunter today, who said he'd heard I was a good software developer and who tried (unsuccessfully) to interest me in jobs in financial services IT.

I would have considered this a one-off oddity and ignored it, if it hadn't been for the fact that I had a very similar call from a different headhunter ten days ago (and at the time I did consider it a one-off oddity and ignored it).

So I wonder who's just got hold of my details, and why they think joining the financial services sector is a natural career move for someone whose day job is facilitating embedded software development and whose extracurricular interests revolve around giving things away to people for free.

Don't suppose anyone else has been getting similar calls recently? If it were widespread, I think I'd be less disturbed than if I were being targeted specifically.

When I was at school, a friend of mine wrote a program to delete lots of files at a time (since the school computer system neglected to provide a ready-made tool for this). He wasn't content with having it just delete files, though; he thought it would be cool to have it delete files while scrolling up the screen some thoroughly bloodthirsty-sounding lyrics which he said were from an Iron Maiden song.

Several of those lyrics have stuck in my head since then, and just occasionally bubble to the top of my brain when I'm doing bulk file deletion of my own. But last night – and I'm really not sure why it hasn't occurred to me to do this at any point in the intervening seventeen years – I actually got round to googling the bits of lyrics I could remember, tracking down the original song, and arranging to listen to it in full.

It turns out that the song in question is ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’, which surprised me a little because my vague memory was that he'd said it was called something like ‘Killer’. Several details of the lyrics weren't how I remembered them either, and worst of all the tune was noticeably different from my memory of it. It's unclear to me which of these various discrepancies were due to transcription errors originally made by Will, which were due to me not paying attention at the time, and which are due to distortion of my memory over the intervening decade and a half (although I suspect that the errors in the tune are largely attributable to the latter by way of my music theory training, which I've noticed before tends to obscure the fact that I can't remember how a certain bit of a tune goes by seamlessly making up a believable but uninspired substitute and pretending I can remember it going like that).

But the combined effect of all those errors is that although I recognised most of the song as being unquestionably the source material for Will's lyrics, I have a lingering feeling of not having listened to the same song I've really been thinking of all these years. Strange, and slightly annoying.

I was referred to as an ‘Englishman’ yesterday on a newsgroup. That startled me. Initially I wasn't sure why it startled me, since it wouldn't particularly surprise me to be referred to as English, and it's been some years since I had that reflexive am-I-sure-I'm-grown-up-yet hesitance to think of myself as ‘man’ rather than ‘boy’; after a bit of thought I decided that the reason is analogous to the way ‘girlfriend’ has a specific meaning distinct from ‘girl’ + ‘friend’. It wouldn't cause me cognitive dissonance to think of myself as an ‘English man’, but an Englishman is a stock character in Englishman-Irishman-Scotsman jokes!

I was listening to some Mesh the other day. A thing I keep meaning to mention in here is that for some years I've been unable to hear their song ‘Safe With Me’ without giggling, because the very first line, sung with almost no instrumental backing, is ‘This is my space, no-one can ever get in here’. I think I managed to take that vaguely seriously the first couple of times I heard it, but now I'm unable to parse it as anything other than ‘This is MySpace’.

Like last year, Sainsburys stopped stocking grape juice over the Christmas period, so I had to resort to temporarily buying it from Asda. To my increased annoyance, Sainsburys have now come back out of Christmas mode, and still aren't stocking white grape juice; it isn't in the online catalogue any more either, so as far as I can tell it's been permanently discontinued. (They still do red grape juice, but it's not the same.) So now I'm probably going to be making a special trip to Asda every month or two just for that. Gah.

I've had an interest in fonts1 since I was a teenager. I've never represented myself as an expert in typography or font design, but I can pick out a few more specific fonts than most people and I occasionally have strong opinions about which ones people should (or more often shouldn't) have used in a given piece of text.

( possibly the single most boring thing I've ever written in here )

1. yes, yes, ‘typefaces’ is more accurate, but the difference isn't critical to anything I do, and ‘font’ is faster to type and say.

I went to bed last night, and lay there having insomnia. No obvious cause: no persistent thought or worry running around my head, no physical discomfort. I just lay there, fully awake, failing to naturally descend into sleep.

I lay there all night, in fact, watching the clock gradually advance from 1:30 to 7:30. Then, rather to my surprise, at 7:30 I woke up from what felt like a deep sleep.

So I can only guess that some of that insomnia was actually a dream of insomnia; but I have no way of judging how much. In other words, I have no idea how much sleep I got last night. A sort of Schrödinger's Snooze, I suppose.

(I can't even gauge it by how tired I feel now, because what usually happens when I don't get enough sleep is that I feel perfectly fine and awake for part of the day and then suddenly become sleepy later on. So if that happens, I suppose, I'll be able to make a decent guess.)

A silly thought that came up at post-pizza last night was that it'd occasionally be nice to have a sheet of sticky labels to hand for guerrilla fallacy-highlighting. The idea is that you'd have two sticker designs, looking roughly like this:

and you'd peel off the appropriate one and stick it on any publicly posted text which you felt deserved it :-)

I dreamed that my house had somehow acquired an extra bedroom.

Then I woke up, realised that was silly, got out of bed – and found my house had acquired an extra bedroom, but in a different place.

Then I woke up. Extra points for a dream-within-a-dream! I think I've had one of those before, but never that vividly.

(On the minus side, second time this week I've overslept. I need to get better at using this alarm clock…)