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.

Today I had a phone call from the estate agent through whom I made an offer on a house ten days ago. Throughout all of last week she was giving me running updates on her efforts to merely get in touch with the seller and let him know there'd been an offer. Apparently he was extremely hard to contact.

She called me again this morning. The seller has decided he wants to keep his house after all, so he's taken it completely off the market. Bah!

(He had previously cancelled my attempted second viewing of the house at fifteen minutes' notice, which led Mum to speculate that he didn't really seem to want to sell his house. Absolutely accurately, it seems!)

Back to the drawing board, then, I suppose…

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there exist people whose email addresses are of the form ‘administrator@some-domain’.

However, it did surprise me this morning when one of them signed their email

Best regards,
Administrator

Their parents must have been really stuck for baby name ideas, that's all I can say.

In other news, today I plan to make an offer on a house. Gosh and ooh.

Also, last weekend I played ‘War on Terror: The Boardgame’, courtesy of pseudomonas. Gameplay-wise I think I'd have to describe it as one third Settlers, one third Risk, and one third something slightly odder involving the terrorist counters which players have to buy but which can then be used by all players equally. (I would liken that aspect to the role of buildings in Caylus, except that that would dignify WoT:TB with a strategic depth that it really doesn't have.)

I was last to choose my two starting countries, and the UK and US were still available, so I picked them both and played as the Special Relationship. In this role I declared war on France (and won), nuked the Middle East, and believed I had a good chance of winning right up until the last move when I was out-expanded by China. All seemed very appropriate to me, really :-)

It also fell to me to read out the rules before we started playing, mostly (I think) because I happened to be holding them at the time. I rapidly discovered that even if you unfailingly pronounced ‘terrorist’ with three syllables to begin with, by the time you've finished reading out loud a rulebook which uses the word several times in most paragraphs, you will pronounce it as at most two. Presumably this happened to US politicians some time ago, for similar reasons.

At lunchtime I managed to cut my finger on a tin I'd just opened, which turned out to be unexpectedly so razor-sharp that just brushing it very lightly broke the skin. Bah.

It's very annoying to lose the use of my left middle finger. Typing without it is requiring considerable concentration and feels very strange. In particular, letter combinations such as ‘er’ and ‘tre’, which I'd normally type using a finger-drumming sort of motion, I now have to stop and think about and type one finger at a time. It's a good job that the QWERTY layout doesn't have too many adjacent letter pairs that often occur in English text, or I'd be having even more trouble.

Fortunately, it's Friday afternoon, so I don't have much typing left to do this week, and I can mostly rest it over the weekend. But bah.

I don't often think about myself or the people around me in terms of ‘national identity’; for the most part I tend to think that's a term which gets used by the popular press to make a fuss about nothing a lot more than it gets used to do anything particularly useful. But in spite of this, just occasionally, I do notice something utterly and stereotypically English about myself.

For example, a few months ago I was crossing a zebra crossing in the Tesco car park near work, and a car came zooming towards me with its engine revving, apparently not having seen me. I dived out of the way; the car belatedly realised its error and screeched to a stop. I turned round and gestured my displeasure at the driver, who wound down his window and apologised, and then we went our separate ways. It was only afterwards that I realised exactly how I'd gestured: even in the heat of a nearly life-threatening moment, my instinctive means of expressing my displeasure had been to frown a bit and point downwards at the zebra crossing. And the best bit is that it worked: from the driver's reaction it was clear that this almost comically understated gesture had been more than adequate to convey the full force of what in a more forthright culture might have been translated from the local language as ‘look where you're going, you reckless idiot!’. If that isn't stereotypical Englishness then I don't know what is.

Outside the window of this office we have some builders applying loud power tools to a big hole in the car park. I keep getting an urge to open the window and shout ‘KEEP THE NOISE DOWN, DON'T YOU REALISE IT'S THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY?’.

(Fortunately, the window doesn't open, which relieves me of the need to rely on my self-control.)

Occasionally I invent an imaginary gadget which would solve a particular problem, and then I wish I had that gadget.

People have probably heard me talk before about the stasis fridge (time stops inside it, so it doesn't even have to be cold to stop your food going off, and also you can keep hot food in it and it'll still be hot the next day), and the force-field saucepan (generated from the handle, like a lightsaber – you don't have to wash it up, you just hold it over the bin and turn it off).

But one thing I notice is that when I invent these things, other people always seem to come up with the real killer applications for them. For example, when I described the stasis fridge to drswirly, his reaction was ‘Aha, and when you go on holiday for a week you can put the dog in it’, which clearly outdid any of my own ideas.

Just now in the office, a colleague has been playing with his new gadget, a ‘digital photo frame’. He mentioned this yesterday, and so last night I was idly wondering what one of those might be. My best idea was that it should be a static display: able to retain the same image indefinitely with no power consumption, and only requiring power to change the picture. Then you could plug it into your computer and download a picture of (say) your girlfriend to it; unplug it and stick it on your bedside table miles away from any computer; and when she leaves you six months later, just download a picture of something else instead. An end-to-end digital photography solution, without resorting to outmoded paper technology at any point.

The actual photo frame in question isn't a static display, as it turns out; it's just a small and gadgetty monitor. The static idea sounded like a more interesting gadget to me – but it took another colleague to point out the ‘real’ killer app, which is that it allows you to have multiple girlfriends who don't know about each other, and change all the photos round every day so that whichever one is visiting that night doesn't suspect! And I have a nasty feeling that that would indeed be the most profitable market for the thing…

I have a problem with locking my front door when I go out.

The problem is not that I forget to do it, in general. I hardly ever forget. But I did forget once and leave it wide open (fortunately with no resulting burglary), and I've been hugely paranoid about forgetting ever since, and that's the problem.

You see, going out of my front door is something I do quite a lot, and it's very similar every time I do it. So if I get out of sight of my front door and then think ‘wait a minute, did I lock it?’, I can't remember. Because any clear memory I have of locking the door might just as easily be from yesterday as from today, so even if I can bring such a memory to mind it doesn't help me be confident that I've locked the door this time.

It's not so bad if I'm only one minute away from home when I think this. Then I can turn round and go back to check, and because that's not a usual part of my routine I'll be able to remember that I checked for the rest of the day and that will stop me from worrying. But if I think it when I'm most of the way to work, or worse still half way down the motorway to Reading to to visit my dad, then it's not really practical to go back and check, and I have no way to prevent myself from worrying my head off for hours or (in the latter case) days.

I get it particularly badly when my morning routine is in some way unusual, because that's when I think I'm most likely to make mistakes. Today was particularly bad, because I had to brush the snow off the car, and half way through doing that I noticed the door was still wide open and thought ‘better remember to lock it once I finish clearing snow’. Twenty minutes later I realised that I had a vivid memory of having thought that, but couldn't call to mind any memory of actually following through on it. I worried about it most of the way to work, and then finally managed to remember that when I was locking the door I noticed a piece of litter someone had apparently discarded in my driveway the previous night. Bless you, litterbug; if it wasn't for you I might actually have had to turn round and go home again to make my brain stop yammering.

I have not yet succumbed to the obvious geek solution of setting up a webcam inside my house pointing at the door. (I only really need to check that it's shut, because I am confident of my procedure for making sure I never shut it without also locking it.) I may yet resort to this, since most of the places I go are net-connected so I could easily check the webcam once I arrive. But it seems like an admission of defeat; this is a problem in my mind alone and I surely ought to be able to find ways to solve it in my mind.

My best strategy so far is to try to make locking the door a memorable event. I generally do this by coming up with some faintly amusing ditty, or a mangled quotation in which I substitute some words about locking or doors. For example, ‘I locked the door and the door won’. Or ‘It was the Door of the Third Age of Mankind’. Or singing ‘now I have locked the dooooor’ to the Blake's 7 theme tune. Or even just chanting something inane like ‘I've locked the door, I've locked the door, dee-doodly-doo, I've locked the door’. Whatever. Prose, rhyme, tune, it doesn't matter; as long as it's different from yesterday's one and sticks in my mind well enough that I can remember it when I suddenly panic two hours later, it's good enough.

But sometimes, of course, I forget to do that, and I just lock the door and charge off to wherever I'm going, and then I'm back to the same problem again. As this morning.

I can't think of any other way to make myself more reliable at remembering I don't have to worry. It feels particularly silly that I'm not even trying to increase my reliability at actually locking the door; that's absolutely fine as it is. It's just that I worry about forgetting in huge disproportion to the chance of me actually forgetting.

Perhaps I should just give in and buy the wretched webcam. :-/

It occurred to me the other day that there's an incredibly common piece of jargon in software which doesn't make any real sense in the modern world; and this jargon word is not safely hidden behind the scenes where it only bothers programmers, but instead it forms an important part of the user interface of a great many programs. And I've never seen it remarked upon before, which is why I only just noticed it myself after a decade and a half of using GUIs.

That word is ‘exit’.

In the old days of single-process operating systems like DOS, this word made complete sense. Your computer could only do one job at a time; so once you started (say) your word processor, you couldn't do anything other than word processing without first getting back out of that environment and returning to some other context, typically the command prompt from which you launched the word processor. Hence ‘exit’; the metaphor was that you, the user, were in some sense immersed in the word-processing environment, and you wanted to leave it and go somewhere else. And not just the user, either; it made sense from a programmer perspective as well, because the CPU was stuck executing the same program until it could get out of the word processor and go back to the operating system.

But none of this has been the case since the advent of the windowed GUI. Your word processor at no point defines the limits of your interaction with the computer; it's just one of many applications each of which is contained within its own window. You don't need to ‘exit’ it in order to do something else, because you're not trapped in it: you can quite happily do something else while the word processor is still running, and indeed you probably did. When you've finished word-processing, you want the word-processing program to terminate, or to shut down, or to disappear, or to close, or simply stop or end, but you probably no longer think in terms of getting out of it. And yet the vast majority (at least out of a hasty and unscientific small sample) of GUI applications still describe this function in their menu bar by the word ‘Exit’ – and even the most naïve users cheerfully take this for granted, because they accept that that's just the way user interface designers talk.

I suppose you could argue that you want the program to exit, to leave your screen and wander off to wherever software goes when it isn't running; but it doesn't seem to me that that's really been the intended metaphor at any point. Also it's unnecessarily inaccurate, and somewhat patronising: it smacks rather of telling small children that their deceased pet has ‘gone away’.

I don't imagine there's any getting away from it now; the word has become such standard terminology that users would probably be disoriented to find alternatives like ‘Vanish’ at the bottom of their File menu. But it struck me as interesting that this curious linguistic vestige of single-process operating systems is now so universal, even among people who never used such a system.

Occasionally something diary-worthy happens to me which never quite gets written down in here, because it happened so gradually that there was no point at which I could look back and decide it was obviously over and hence able to be written about coherently. Earlier this week, a conversation at post-pizza reminded me of just such an incident from the year before last, so I'll write it up now on the basis that it's better late than never.

( four-colouring algorithms; geeky as hell )