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.

I took my car in for its MoT on Friday, which was accomplished with a startlingly small amount of all-round pain, and also a startlingly small amount of money. So this morning the garage rang me up to ask if I was completely satisfied with the service.

The last time they did this, it was an utter pain: they'd delegated the job to a market research company who managed to make me lose my temper twice and spoil my good mood despite the fact that I'd had nothing but good things to say about the service. They did this by having a hugely long questionnaire asking lots of stupid questions and demanding answers fitting into an unhelpfully small set of tickyboxes.

This time it was, or at least claimed to be, a woman from the garage itself. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, ‘I'm just calling to find out whether you were completely satisfied with the service.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I then drew breath to expand on what in particular I'd liked about it, and prepared myself for what I expected would be a few specific follow-up questions.

But before I'd finished breathing in … ‘Good,’ she responded, ‘thanks for your time. Goodbye!’

I can only assume they've learned :-)

One way to invent interesting new kinds of video game is to take an existing video game, and invert it, in the sense of having the player take the part of what was previously the bad guy or monster or antagonistic force of nature. Perhaps the clearest example of this was Dungeon Keeper (1997), which inverts the general D&D theme of a party of adventurers wading into a dungeon and hacking and slaying; now you're trying to keep the dungeon in good order and these pesky adventurers keep coming in and making trouble.

I was recently idly wondering whether any of the real golden-oldie games could usefully be inverted and hadn't yet been. Space Invaders could just about be, for example: it's fundamental to the nature of the game that the invaders move in a fixed pattern, but you could control their firing by clicking the mouse on an invader to have it drop a bomb, and your aim would be to try to fire bombs in the right pattern to box the defending ship into a killing zone. That doesn't sound like a particularly interesting game – certainly not interesting enough to motivate me to sit down and write it – but it illustrates the point. Qix might be a more interesting one to invert, on the other hand; and I've actually seen a quite playable inversion of Asteroids.

Another one I was idly wondering about the other day was Pac-Man: there surely, I thought, must be scope for a game with a slightly RTS-like interface by which one player controls all four ghosts and tries to box in the computer-controlled Pac-Man?

But just now I realised why it wouldn't work: there is in fact a trivial strategy by which four intelligently cooperating ghosts can guarantee never to let Pac-Man finish a level. Each ghost moves directly to one of the four power pills, and sits on it. When Pac-Man comes near that pill, the ghost moves one step towards the direction he's coming from, so as to cover the adjacent dot. If Pac-Man circles round and comes at the pill from the other direction, the ghost has ample time to move two steps back and cover the other adjacent dot. Hence, each ghost can reliably protect the power pill and the two dots next to it, and Pac-Man will eventually run out of other dots to eat.

(I suppose if you adjusted the winning condition so that the ghosts had to kill Pac-Man rather than merely preventing him reaching the next level, that might become more interesting again.)

Last weekend the Debian project released Etch, and so this morning I sat down and upgraded my main home Linux machine. I now have a mostly working Etch system in front of me, which is nice.

The biggest serious problem was the complete replacement of /usr/X11R6/bin with a symlink; Debian automatically got rid of most of the contents of the old directory but missed a few things, resulting in me receiving unhelpful and confusing messages for a while until I lost my patience and started forcibly uninstalling any package that looked as if it was in the way. As it turned out, though, this was in fact the right strategy, so that was all right.

Apart from that, actual headaches during installation were minimal; there were lots of scary-looking package uninstalls, but almost all of them turned out to be because the package in question had been renamed or made virtual, and very few things actually turned up missing when the upgrade was complete.

That said, the two notable things which did end up AWOL, namely MediaWiki and CUPS, both needed reconfiguring nearly from scratch when I reinstalled them. Not too impressed with that, although both appear to be basically working again now. I think.

The single funniest moment of the upgrade, however, was when I was in the middle of a long series of aptitude commands and they suddenly stopped working, because aptitude had somehow contrived to uninstall itself and terminate without installing an upgraded version in its place. That was just breathtakingly impressive; I'm not sure I could have written a packaging system capable of that if I'd tried. Still, when I installed the upgraded aptitude by other means, everything proceeded mostly smoothly from there.

GNOME seems to have made Nautilus more mandatory than before, which is annoying. I quite like the various GNOME bits and pieces such as gnome-panel but dislike my root window being covered in pointless file manager icons, because I prefer using the command line for file management. So I used to get rid of Nautilus by removing it in the session control panel, but that no longer works because it just comes back the next time I log in. I'm currently working around that by means of a nasty script which executes gnome-session-remove nautilus shortly after every login, but that's race-condition-ridden and so I hope to think up a better way at some point.

This post would under other circumstances be a rant, but in fact when I compare this experience to my last Debian upgrade, it looks downright painless by comparison. So, one and a half cheers for Debian this time round; let's see if it can be even less painful next time.

For the benefit of the (probably very few) readers who haven't heard me going on about this for weeks on end…

I've spent my spare time during the past two weeks mostly writing DVDs. When I upgraded my main home computer in January the new one came with a DVD writer at negligible extra cost. I hadn't bothered to equip my previous machine with one of these, on the grounds that it never seemed terribly important, but now I had one anyway it seemed like time to play with it. So I bought some blank DVDs (rewritable for testing, write-once for the final results) and started looking around for the software I needed.

( then I did stuff )

And now I've finished: I had a mental list of things I would have liked to do if only I knew how to write DVDs, and now I've found out how to write DVDs and done everything on the list. So now I can turn my attention to things that aren't 12cm across, round and shiny, and I can let all of that confusing terminology fall back out of my brain. I think that's a relief.

I'm getting thoroughly fed up with Debian's chkrootkit program, which keeps giving me false alarms.

( These reports are outrageous. I don't expect to receive cron mail like this. )

On one of the occasions described above I mentioned it to the nearest friend of mine, who was bjh21. I asked if he knew anything about chkrootkit, and he said not really but he ‘got the impression that it worked pretty well’. I can therefore only assume that in order for Ben to have got this impression, somewhere out there there must be at least some people who run chkrootkit without it doing this to them on a regular basis. I wonder who. And how.

And finally, it's difficult to report any of this as a Debian bug, because it's fundamentally about cooperation between two packages, so I'm uncertain of which package I should report any particular incident against. Given the sheer number of the wretched things, though, perhaps I should be leaning towards the idea that chkrootkit is fundamentally the cause of the trouble and report all bugs against that unless proven to be someone else's fault.

I got an early birthday card through my door yesterday. Well, a card prominently mentioning my birthday, at least. All right, it had ‘OFFICIAL POLL CARD’ written on it.

So there's a local election on my birthday this year. I fear this might lead to a substantial risk of me accidentally turning in a ballot paper on which I've written ‘Arrgh, I've just turned thirty, how on earth do you expect me to have any idea who to vote for under those circumstances?’.

Today I've had spam suggesting a link exchange between my website and some hair styling websites. The odd thing is that they bill themselves as ‘white hat sites’. I'm not sure that description would give me confidence in a hairdresser in particular; it suggests that I might get a haircut so bad I had to wear a white hat to cover it! (Though, I suppose, a white-hat hairdresser is probably an improvement on a black-hat hairdresser, since the latter must be someone who maliciously shaves your hair off while you're passed out at a party.)

Finally, it occurred to me last night that manual dexterity is of course the skill required when you throw the book at someone.

I just walked from the office to Tesco to buy my lunch. On the way, I was passed by a large group of people I recognised as from my company, heading in the other direction. As they approached, I could hear them chattering to each other, but couldn't hear any of the actual words in the conversation.

As they neared me, the conversation suddenly seemed to encounter a lull, and they all went quiet. Then, just as they passed me, one of them said, quite clearly and distinctly, ‘Frobbing trout’. As they went off into the distance, their conversation started up again.

I probably don't want to know what that was about, really. But suggestions from my readers will probably be amusing :-)

For some months now, deerfold has been showing up to the Calling with two battery-powered brightly glowing coloured stage balls. Initially I thought he only had two, and felt a little disappointed since if only he'd had three it would have been fun to have a go at juggling them. Then one day he turned up with a red one and a blue one, where previously he'd had red and green; this was perhaps even more frustrating, since now I knew he had three but wasn't bringing them all at once.

Last night he did turn up with all three, so I finally got to have a go, which was very satisfying :-)

It's odd what happens when you start juggling among people you don't know but not in a formal performance context. Usually I juggle among friends, who don't feel any inhibition against saying ‘ooh, cool’ if I do something particularly impressive (but who usually don't, because they've seen me do it all before). I've only ever done actual performance juggling about three times, but in that situation people generally don't hesitate to applaud if they feel so moved. But somewhere in between, there seemed to be some sort of inhibition: a crowd gathered around me, so I must have been doing something reasonably impressive, but almost nobody actually expressed any appreciation. Except for lupie_stardust, who seemed more fascinated by the glowing balls themselves than what I was doing with them, and for one guy I hadn't seen before who was a juggler too so we went off into a corner and juggling-geeked for a bit.

Of course I hadn't primarily been doing it to impress other people: juggling glowing balls in a darkened room looks at least as pretty to the person doing it as it does to everyone else, so it was still mostly for my own enjoyment. So I can live without a steady stream of attractive women people coming and telling me how fantastic I am, if I have to :-)

In other black-related news, last night I dreamed that a friend of mine was black.

Well, actually what happened was that my dream somehow merged a friend of mine at work with another friend outside work. The dream person's personality seemed to end up as a reasonable half-way point between the two real people's personalities, but the visual effects department didn't seem to have as much effort available, because the dream person looked exactly like the non-work friend but with the work friend's skin colour: a deep rich dark brown that makes me think of plain chocolate and black coffee.

This all seemed perfectly natural at the time (as dreams do), but when I woke up and realised what I'd dreamed I was suddenly extremely startled and went ‘warrgh!’. I think this must be because people can't conveniently change their skin colour in the real world. Dyeing hair is so easy and commonplace that I barely bat an eyelid when someone I know is unexpectedly blonde instead of black-haired, or vice versa, or green or purple. But although cheap and nasty fake-tan products are available, the technology to conveniently adopt a totally different (or a natural-looking) skin colour is not; so if a white friend of mine was black the next time I saw them, then it would indeed be very startling, if only on grounds of ‘good grief, is that even possible?’

(She looked fantastic like that, though. I almost wish the technology was conveniently available.)

It occurred to me a couple of days ago that I've been wearing black clothes, almost exclusively, for probably a bit over ten years now. That's quite a stretch of time. Gosh.

I clearly remember why I started. I'd always been temperamentally suited to having lots of clothes looking basically the same, because that way I never had to make a difficult decision when I was getting up in the morning; so at any given time I'd tend to have a few identical nondescript blue-green sweatshirts and a few identical pairs of nondescript blue jeans. Every so often they'd all get too grotty to live, and I'd go out and buy a whole new lot. And one day, when this was about due to happen again, some friends of mine suggested that even if I didn't feel up to making a fashion decision every morning, I could at least make one now and buy clothes in a colour that made it look as if I'd at least given some thought to what I was wearing at some point. Since I was hanging around with goths and near-goths at the time, the obvious suggestion was black; so the next time I went clothes-shopping, I bought black sweatshirts and black jeans instead of blue-green and blue, and switched colours pretty much overnight.

I remember that it felt really weird to begin with. Wearing the same colour most of the time, you get very used to looking down at your arms and body and knowing what you expect to see. So for a few weeks, I'd keep looking down and being startled: ‘whoa, it's all gone black’.

Wearing black has continued to seem like a generally good idea. I'm still hanging around a reasonable amount with goths, near-goths and people who at least have goth sympathies. Dressed like this, I look a bit goth in an environment full of normals (such as my office), and I look a bit normal in an environment full of goths (such as the Calling), but I can move between the two environments without stopping to change clothes and I don't look too far out of place in either place; and somehow I feel as if that suits me reasonably well, because I am the same person in both situations and it seems somehow fitting that I should look it.

But I don't think that's actually why I've carried on doing it. I never really stopped and thought ‘should I carry on wearing black?’, took a mental inventory of my current situation, and decided ‘yeah, go on then’. I just did the same thing I always have: went out clothes-shopping and bought a whole new load of clothes in accordance with my existing policy. The clothes have changed a little (jumpers rather than baggy sweatshirts), but the colour remained the same, not because I carefully decided it should, but simply because it was the default option in the absence of a clear reason to decide on something different. This is typical of me, I now realise: I've always been temperamentally inclined to have a clear separation between (a) deciding what to do, and (b) doing it. Revisiting the decision often doesn't even occur to me once it's made.

So it's slightly startling to look back now and realise that that general tendency to carry on doing today what I did yesterday has caused me to be clad from head to toe in black, with great consistency, for five-sixths of my adult life. It feels, somehow, as if that passive attitude of ‘oh, go on then’ shouldn't have been able to have that big an effect; it ought to have taken effort to be this consistent about it. But it didn't.