There's a near-future SF novel called ‘The Armageddon Crazy’, by Mick Farren, which at one point describes a sermon given by a rabble-rousing preacher with the aid of high-tech holographic special effects.

During the sermon the preacher quotes a lot of doom-laden fire and brimstone and plagues and demons and bottomless pit stuff from Revelation, while the holographic special effects conjure illusions of demons from the Pit running among the audience (since this is in a rock-concert type venue I hesitate to say ‘congregation’) and the soundtrack produces screams and moans and the like. Then, very suddenly, the preacher shifts to quoting from the Gospels – ‘I bring you tidings of great joy that shall be to all people’ – and simultaneously all the scary special effects evaporate, the preacher is enveloped in pure white light, and a choir sounds in the background with hallelujahs. The effect, in both directions, is enhanced by subliminal hypnotics; so the audience is made to feel a great surge of relief and gladness and euphoria when Jesus makes his appearance in the sermon, which is presumably intended to reinforce their faith.

This is a shabby trick, of course, and (in the novel) only really works if you fail to realise it's being done to you. The preacher in question was preaching to a lowest-common-denominator audience for the most part, so it worked for him. But one of the main characters is alert enough to realise what's going on, and immediately the effect of the hypnotics reverses and he just feels exceptionally irritated.

The reason I mention this is that when I read the Bible from cover to cover earlier this month, an actually startlingly similar thing happened to me when I hit the boundary between the Old and New Testaments.

The end of the Old Testament is full of minor prophets who are mostly relaying God's words around the time of the Babylonian exile, and therefore a lot of those words tend to be along the lines of ‘you've all been very naughty and I'm very cross and I'm going to punish you severely’. Then suddenly you cut from the unrelenting wrath of God straight to the redemption offered by Jesus, who might not be entirely a nice guy at all times but by comparison to what came before is as close to sweetness and light as makes no odds. But it's not just the storyline; the very quality of the text has a reinforcing effect. The minor prophets are all rather similar and tedious and just sit there repeating the same things over and over, whereas the Gospels tell a story with a plot that moves forward. Additionally, the minor prophets are often cryptic and difficult to parse, and are written in more flowery language, whereas the Gospels are clear and straightforward. (I wonder if that might be partially a consequence of them being translated from Greek rather than Hebrew; perhaps ancient Hebrew lends itself less well to sensible translation into modern English.)

The combined effect of all this was that when reading the minor prophets I felt (with hindsight) a lot of pressure on my brain, due to the difficulty of parsing meaning out of the text at both the grammatical and semantic levels, the tedious nature of the meaning when I got it, and the depressing message of the Wrath of God once I got through the tedium. Rather like watching a TV programme full of static, in a way, and trying very hard to see through the static to find out what's going on. Then the sudden transition to the Gospels removed all these various kinds of pressure and mental static, and the result was that I felt a strong subconscious sense of relief and gladness at exactly the moment I was reading about the birth of Christ.

Unlike the incident in the novel I describe above, I don't think this was done deliberately; it doesn't seem to me that the Bible was really designed to be read from cover to cover in order. But it happened to me nonetheless, and it took me a day or two to recognise exactly what had happened to me and how. And, just like the preacher's special-effects trick, it's counterproductive if noticed: once I realised what had been done to me I mostly felt irritated by it.

On the other hand, I also felt dreadfully impressed that it's even possible to achieve this sort of effect without using any expensive special effects or subliminal hypnotics, using nothing but words written down in a book. I wouldn't have guessed it could be done at all.

Over the last couple of weeks, I did something I've been meaning to get round to for a while now: I sat down and read the Bible from end to end.

Not for religious reasons, I hasten to assure you; anyone who was expecting to be able to count on me as a staunch atheist can still safely do so. A minor objective was to find out a bit more about what the Christians I know believe, but primarily my motivation was literary: lots of modern writing refers or alludes to the Bible, and I've often not been entirely sure what the explicit references are talking about, and have probably missed quite a few of the subtle allusions.

So after an unusually large number of Bible references happened to go over my head during a period of three or four days the other week, I decided enough was enough and set out to actually read the thing. I allowed myself to skim-read if it got boring (the censuses, the genealogies, the endless indistinguishable psalms and proverbs and prophecies, the extensive theology and moralising in the New Testament etc), but I wanted to at least get from one end of the book to the other and be left with an understanding of its overall structure and plot.

( the good, the bad and the curious )

Nasty-looking rain around noon today, so I waited until it seemed to have stopped before venturing out to Tesco for my lunch. I was right, as it turned out, and the umbrella I'd brought with me was more than adequate to protect me from the last remnants of a light drizzle.

It didn't, however, protect me from a white van driving through a puddle at me with perfect aim and timing. Bah. Umbrellas are clearly inadequate; I want a semi-permeable personal force field which lets in air but not liquid water.

$ pwd
/village
$ ps ax | grep find &
[1] 12890
$  3122 ?        R      0:00 /usr/bin/find . -name information
 
$ ls -l /proc/3122
ls: /proc/3122: Permission denied
$ 35868 ?        S      0:00 /usr/bin/find . -name information
38892 ?        S      0:00 /usr/bin/find . -name information
39562 ?        S      0:00 /usr/bin/find . -name information
 
[1]+  Done                    ps ax | grep find
$ rm */information
rm: cannot remove `hook/information': I/O error
rm: cannot remove `crook/information': I/O error
$ ps axu | grep 3122
number2   3122  0.0  0.1  17796  8800 ?        S    Apr26   0:00 /usr/bin/find
$ grep 1: /etc/passwd
number6:x:2671:2671::/village:/bin/sh
$ su `cut -f1 -d: /etc/passwd | grep -v number | head -1` -c 'man free'

I just had a piece of paper come through the door looking like this:

I doubt they're going to get very many ‘unwanted Ladies’ out of the average householder, somehow :-)

I posted last week about the strange lift sign in the new Lion Yard car park. I went back there this evening with a camera, and the weird sign was still there and I managed to capture photographic evidence of it.

The sign on the left is reasonably sensible, and looks like this:

But the sign on the right says this:

See, I wasn't going mad! (Or, at least, it wasn't just that I'm going mad.)

It seems traditional for me to have a morbid mortality moping moment every five years or so; and since my last one was around my 25th birthday, I'm now about due. I had vaguely expected to have one last month when I turned thirty.

But actually, I don't seem to feel it coming on at all. Human mortality keeps striking me as a basically reassuring thing at the moment.

Partly this is because it relieves me of the responsibility to do various things absolutely perfectly. If I were theoretically capable of living forever, then it would be greatly in my interest to keep my body in perfect shape, keep my brain properly organised, and generally never do anything to myself or my possessions whose effects I couldn't somehow repair – and also to actually get round to repairing everything I did do. Instead, the fact that it's all going to run out in a finite time anyway means that a certain rate of mental and physical entropy can be tolerated: although it's worth making some effort not to be a total wreck by the time I'm 75, I at least don't have to take the quantity of care that would be required not to be a total wreck by 175, or 1750, or 175000000. And a good job too, since I imagine that diminishing returns would set in, and the amount of maintenance effort required would rapidly become unmanageable.

Also, since I seem to gradually accumulate traumatic experiences and bad memories as I go through life, it's occasionally reassuring to think that at some point that slate gets wiped clean and someone else gets to start afresh, that the effects of any given betrayal or unintentionally hurtful action are limited in their extent. Just imagine if someone did you the kind of wrong you never really forget, and you immediately knew you were doomed to live with that in your memory for an entire unimaginable eternity. And just imagine if you knew that any such blow you inadvertently dealt someone else through (say) not paying attention would stay with them for eternity.

It's not that I want to die. Far from it. I want to carry on for a good while yet. It's just that, well, given that we all have to go anyway, I keep seeing silver linings in that.

Something that came up in conversation the other day: the English language is annoyingly badly designed for programmers.

The most obvious example of this is that almost any pair of words you can think of to represent boolean values have different numbers of letters, so that it's inconvenient to line them up in tabular layouts in a fixed-width font. TRUE/FALSE, YES/NO, ON/OFF. All of them out by one. Even if you look further afield to things like YEP/NOPE and YEAH/NAH, you don't find a matching pair. AYE/NAY works, but it's a bit specialist in its connotations (it suggests there's a vote taking place) as well as archaic. This is just useless. French can find OUI/NON with no difficulty at all (although I have no idea whether French programmers actually use those for booleans), so why can't we manage one pair of suitable words that are the same length?

(Some years ago, lark_ascending and I gave some thought to this, and the best we could come up with was VERILY/NOWISE, which is even more archaic than AYE/NAY. However, it does have the advantage of allowing MAYHAP to be inserted in the middle if the application demands it.)

Another annoying thing is that one of ‘width’ and ‘height’ shares an initial letter with one of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ – and it's the wrong one. So if you're looking through some code which has dimensions in it, and you encounter a variable called h, you can't be sure which dimension it contains until you find out whether it's accompanied by v or by w. I suppose we can at least count ourselves lucky that ‘width’ isn't spelled ‘vidth’, in which case we'd be even worse off.

It feels particularly unfair because these sort of accidents of language happen to work better in less programming-specific contexts. For example, the fact that ‘his’ and ‘her’ both begin with the same letter is very convenient for acronyms such as HMRC and HMG.

Also annoying is that I've been planning to post this rant for months, and have been delaying because I had a strong feeling that there were several other examples which I couldn't quite bring to mind. But they still haven't come to me, so I'm just going to have to post it like this and kick myself when I realise what they were moments afterwards…

This morning I looked at the BBC website's 24-hour forecast for Cambridge in order to judge how wet I was going to get walking out to Tesco at lunchtime; it said it was raining a bit at 11:00, would be raining a lot by 13:00, and would become an outright thunderstorm by 16:00.

Trouble was, it was already after 11:00 and there wasn't a drop of rain in sight. So, on the basis that it might just be late, I went to Tesco as early as reasonably possible, and it was still bone dry.

But it's now past 13:00 and still not raining, and the BBC website still thinks it's pouring down out there. It's very much like the motion-tracker scene in Aliens, where the guy with the detector keeps insisting that the aliens are already inside the room and the guy in the room keeps saying no they're not. Only it would be rather hard for the weather to turn out to be hidden where the aliens were…

In programming, I often find myself faced with a task that has easy bits and hard bits. My usual policy is to tackle the hard bits first, for two reasons:

• The hard bits are the bits that are most likely to turn out to be actually impossible or infeasible due to some unforeseen wrinkle. So if that's going to happen and the entire project is going to turn out to be doomed, it makes sense to find that out as early as possible so as not to have wasted any more time than necessary.
• If the easy and hard bits are basically similar in structure, so that their methods of solution are also likely to be similar, then doing the easy bits first runs the risk that as I go along I might develop a standard method which works for them only, and then get a nasty shock when I come to the hard bit and have to work it out all over again. By contrast, it's generally much easier to simplify a method that worked for the hardest bit so that it works for the easier cases, so that way I only have to work out my method once.

So this generally seems like a sensible strategy to me. I've used it for nearly all my programming life: I have a clear memory of advocating it to a couple of schoolmates who were giving programming a try when I was twelve.

Just occasionally, though, it backfires on me. In the past week I've had a task to do with hard bits and easy bits, and of course I did the hard bits first. I beat my head against them for days, and after great effort I'd managed to cobble together something which would probably just about work – and then I suddenly thought of an alternative method which made it all much easier. If only I'd done the easy bits first, that insight could have saved me all the trouble I had with the hard bits. As it was, I had to rip up the mess I made of the hard bits and do them all over again by the sensible method. Bah.

(It is of course possible that I wouldn't have reached the insight in question without the experience gained from struggling with the hard bits, so that the apparent waste of time was unavoidable; but in this particular case I don't think so.)

I went into town at lunchtime to run errands, and parked in Lion Yard. Rather to my surprise, this was a completely different car park from the one I parked in last time I went to Lion Yard: the Grand Arcade building project has evidently progressed to the stage where they can activate the new piece of car park and (presumably) shut down the old one to start refurbishing that.

It's mostly just a car park, but it has one or two notable oddities in its design. Firstly, even its lowest floor is a long way up in the air, and access is via an extremely long helical ramp which guarantees that by the time you get up to the car park itself you won't have the faintest idea how you're oriented relative to the shops, and hence you don't know which set of lifts to use to avoid having to walk round the entire outside of the building to get to where you really wanted to be. There seemed to be a dearth of useful signs to tell you what was where; perhaps they're going to put those up later.

Secondly, and most delightfully, there's a pair of adjacent lifts on the south side. One is labelled ‘South Lift, Levels 2 – 4’. The other sign, and I had to stare at this for a couple of minutes before I convinced myself that it really said what I thought I was seeing, reads ‘South Lift, Levels 2 – -1’. Really. Two to minus one. On a huge, beautifully presented, professional-looking sign, and moreover on a sign ten metres away from one that makes sense. To add to the visual jar, the dash and the minus sign are at different heights, which is presumably just a question of how the font they were using happened to be designed.

I'm quite tempted to go back with a camera and take a photo of it before they realise and correct it.

The other day I was driving down Histon Road, and saw something lying in the middle of the road which looked from a distance as if it might plausibly have been a largish dead animal. Fair enough, I thought, that's not entirely surprising on a main road. Poor little creature; I wonder what it was. Except that as I got nearer it began to look like an odder and odder kind of animal, until eventually I was close enough to see that in fact it was a cushion, with a generic-animal-skin-brown cover, abandoned in the middle of the road and folded over in a way that arranged that from my viewing angle all the tassles were hidden at the back. It's rather strange to have already felt pity for a poor defenceless beast in a world full of scary fast-moving wheeled boxes, and only then to discover that the object of your pity is a cushion.

Also, yesterday I felt a worrying bump as I was reversing into a parking space. When I got out and looked, I found about two thirds of a pair of sunglasses, which had been lying on the ground and which I'd run over.

So I'm declaring this the Week of Strange Roadkill, and of normally inanimate objects contriving to get themselves into the road and be run over. I fully expect that tomorrow there will be an accident on the A14 due to a stray armchair trying to scuttle across the road and causing a lorry to swerve.

After a hectic week just past of house-hunting, I saw a house yesterday afternoon which was pretty much ideal for me. This morning I phoned in an offer to the estate agent, and within hours they phoned me back to say it had been accepted.

I think this is the point at which people usually say things like ‘ooh, how exciting!’, but in fact my main emotion right at the moment is dread of what will surely be an interminable saga of chaos and confusion and complicated legal manoeuvrings and inexplicable delays, culminating in it all falling through at the last minute. When (if) I have the keys to the house in my hand and a large negative amount of money, then it'll be exciting. Perhaps.

Still, at least it means I got something useful done this week. My usual use of two weeks off work is to spend the first week lying around doing nothing, and the second week doing something useful. I had vaguely intended that ‘something useful’ to be making a start on the piece of PuTTY development that I failed to get round to last September, interspersed with house-hunting, but in fact the house-hunting took over the week quite vigorously and left me no energy for coding. So it's good to have something to actually show for the house-hunting, because that suggests that the week wasn't a complete waste. (Though I suppose if I were PuTTY I might not think so, and indeed might be throwing the tantrum of a small boy whose parents have repeatedly reneged on their promise of a bicycle :-)

I just muttered under my breath to myself ‘I must stop trying to predict the future. It's going to get me in trouble some day…’

A word that occasionally irritates me is ‘technical’, and its associate ‘technically’. Specifically, their use in software engineering (and undoubtedly hardware too, and quite probably further afield than that) to describe the domain of discourse concerning itself with the way the hardware really functions and whether things you might want to do will actually work, as opposed to the various domains of discourse (‘legal’, ‘social’, ‘ethical’, ‘commercial’) revolving around how humans will react to those things.

It's certainly good to have a word for that. It's very useful to be able to describe things as ‘a technical solution to a social problem’, or ‘technically sound but ethically dubious’. I'm having a hard time thinking of any other comparably concise way to convey the same concept.

I just wish the word in question wasn't also used to mean ‘technicality’ in the sense of loopholes. Every time I describe something as ‘technically correct’, or ‘technically possible’, I get annoyed by the need to clarify ‘I mean, from a technical standpoint’, in case people thought I meant ‘only correct due to a technicality in the specification’ or ‘only possible in the strict sense of the word but not actually feasible’. I wish someone had picked a different word (for one meaning or the other).

Something that's come up in conversation a couple of times recently is my habit of looking out of the window shortly after I get out of bed. I don't feel quite comfortable until I've had a look at the world outside; but I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for. There doesn't seem to be any specific thing I want to know when I pull back the hallway curtain and peer out.

It's at that point that I get my first idea of what the weather's like (unless it was audibly raining even before that), but I don't generally need to know that for another half hour or so, and don't feel any particular curiosity about it. So I don't think that's it.

It also grounds me in reality; if I've been having a weird and realistic dream set in some other world then it reminds me which of Cambridge and the dream-world is … well, I hesitate to say real because I probably look out of the window in some of those dreams too, but it tells me which world is the one I currently have to deal with. But although weird and immersive dreams set in other worlds are not unheard of in my dream-life, they're not common either, and my need to look out of the window isn't conditional on just having had one. So that doesn't seem like it either.

It also has the effect, I suppose, of reassuring me that the world outside still looks as I expect it to, that there's been no large and sudden change while I was asleep. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of having a brain that needs to be powered down for eight hours on a regular basis: I want to have some confidence that it didn't stay powered down for longer than that by accident.

But then, I thought, hang on a minute. What sort of large and sudden change might I be expecting or fearing? What sort of large and sudden change even makes sense?

And at this point an altogether more plausible answer occurred to me. As befits someone like me, I was of course raised on Hitch-Hiker's Guide from a very early age. So it's entirely possible that the true reason I feel a need to look out of my front window shortly after getting up is a subconscious desire to reassure myself of the absence of big yellow bulldozers.

I think, perhaps worryingly, that that answer is a lot more likely than any of the previous ones, or even all of them put together.

Yesterday I opened the driver's door of my car, prepared to get out, and stopped just in time: lying on the floor, just where I would have put my foot, was a banana skin.

Come on. Nobody really leaves banana skins lying on the floor if they're not in Tom and Jerry cartoons, do they? And leaving it just where someone would put their foot is just suspicious. I'm sure that if I'd slipped on it, some unlikely chain of events would have ensued which culminated in an anvil dropping from the ceiling of the car park.

Imagine, if you will, a paperback novel typeset as follows:

• The entire cover of the book (title, spine and blurb), the chapter headings, and the book title at the top of each page are all in Dom Casual.
• The occasional lengthy footnotes, as well as the page numbers at the bottom, are in ITC Galliard Italic, with too little leading.
• The main body text is in the supremely ugly LTC Twentieth Century.
• There is no hyphenation at all, so that it's fairly common to find a line with so little text on it that the spaces are half an inch wide, and extremely common to find a line in which noticeable space has had to be inserted between letters to make the text justify even remotely sensibly.

I'm really having a hard time imagining how it might be possible to make a book uglier than this. I'm not even convinced the use of Comic Sans would make it much worse. I'm also having a hard time believing that whoever typeset it managed to make it this disgusting by accident; I don't think you can do this bad a job out of simple ignorance. You would surely have had to have read a book on typography and deliberately disobeyed most of it.

(On the plus side, in the course of writing this post I discovered www.identifont.com, which is very cool and without which I would certainly not have been able to provide the exact font names given above.)

It's been a while since I had occasion to do anything blisteringly unpleasant with the C preprocessor. But I did today, so here it is.

( non-geeks probably don't want to read; even geeks might reasonably not )

When I clean my teeth, it's generally one end or other of the day, so I have a high tendency to be half asleep. Sometimes, this causes me to put rather too much toothpaste on the brush. The result of this is that I get through the brushing and rinsing fine, but then my tongue suddenly notices that things are rather mintier than I'd bargained for.

When this happens, my instinctive response is to try to get as much fresh air around my tongue as I can, which involves simultaneously sticking my tongue out as far as it will go and opening my mouth very wide. This looks very silly in the mirror, not surprisingly, but it seems to help me cool off faster; and the appearance has always vaguely reminded me of something.

Today I realised: it reminds me of a gargoyle. My eyes narrow in an evil-looking way in the process of pulling the face, simply because there isn't room for wide open eyes and a wide open mouth in the same face at the same time. You could probably sculpt the face of Simon-having-used-too-much-toothpaste and put it on the wall of a castle, and it wouldn't look too out of place. The Mint Gargoyle.