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 )

If I'm trying to solve a puzzle and I accidentally find out the answer through some sort of cheating means (e.g. somebody spoils it for me), it's quite common for me to continue working on the problem and try to convince myself that I would have got there on my own. So I might, for example, ignore what I now know the answer to be and continue to grind through the step-by-step solution process regardless, to make sure it does come out to the answer it's supposed to.

This all seems reasonable enough given the premise that a major purpose of solving puzzles is to prove to myself that I can, and that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable premise. So far, no surprises.

Yesterday I did surprise myself. I had a small problem at work (some piece of code wasn't working as expected and I couldn't figure out how we hadn't noticed before); after staring fruitlessly at the screen for a while I decided to take a break and go and refill my water glass. In the process of doing that I had a sudden ‘aha!’ insight and instantly knew exactly what the problem was.

That by itself isn't uncommon either; but what was odd was that I then found myself, pretty much instinctively, doing the thing I describe in my first paragraph: trying to convince myself that if I hadn't had that insight, I would still have been able to get to the solution by step-by-step means. It's as if I subconsciously consider sudden flashes of intuition to be cheating in some sense. Which is weird, because flashes of intuition come from my own brain, so it's hardly as if they constitute being given the answer by somebody else!

I suppose it might be that I didn't feel that I'd worked for the answer, and hence didn't feel I deserved credit for finding it. Or perhaps it was that I was worried that next time the insight might not materialise and I'd want to be confident that my step-by-step debugging process was adequate to compensate for its absence (which is admittedly a potentially valid concern).

Or perhaps I'm just slightly weird. Yes, that seems far more likely.

By way of making conversation he mentioned that the taxi he had arrived in had had the number 1729, and remarked that this was rather a dull number.

‘On the contrary’, his interlocutor replied, ‘it is a very interesting number. When it appears on my clock, it is one minute to going-home time.’

The entryway to the office gents' currently contains a big yellow warning sign saying ‘Caution: wet floor’.

In fact the floor isn't perceptibly wet at all, and certainly not nearly wet enough to cause an increased risk of slipping; but I nearly tripped over the sign. I'm therefore unconvinced that this safety measure has reduced the risk of me falling over and cracking my head…

I just had a strange and vivid dream in which a large bear had somehow got into my house. (Not my house, actually; I seemed to be living with a largish family which included, for instance, a completely fictitious Uncle Henry.) It seemed quite happy in there and wasn't trying to kill or eat anyone, but most of us were nervous of it (of course) and wanted it gone. Only you can't exactly argue with a large black bear, and we weren't quite sure who you call in the UK when you have a problem with a bear. We tried to lure it outside once or twice, but there seemed to be a bit of confusion: occasionally we'd think we'd managed it, but find it indoors again. We didn't seem to be very good at bear-luring. It also didn't help that at least one member of the family seemed totally untroubled by the bear's presence, and never seemed particularly bothered about helping our eviction efforts by having the right doors open and shut.

Eventually we noticed that there was one time of day when it seemed to particularly want to be outdoors, so we left the door open to let it out and then shut and locked it once it had left, breathing a sigh of relief.

Only it didn't end there; the bear was subsequently seen lurking around the garden and making life difficult for people trying to get in and out of the house. So the family thought about it a bit and eventually came up with a plan to scare it away for good using electrified booby-traps in the garden. This involved people going outdoors, of course, to set the traps.

Now comes the twist in the tale which really made me think my subconscious had turned into a short-story writer.

While an unspecified family member and I were outdoors fiddling with electric wires, we were grabbed and dragged into the bushes by other members of the family, and tied up. I think it was around this point that the dream switched to an omniscient third-person perspective, in which we see an identical-looking copy of me return to the house, which turns out to now be completely full of people who look like my family but are in fact were-bears, and have just finished kidnapping the real family one by one and taking their places. The original bear turns out to be the alternate form of the fake Uncle Henry, who (unlike the rest of the fake family) happened not to be happy spending all his time in human form. The real family, by now, is all either dead or tied up in the bushes.

At this point the story ended, because I woke up and went ‘wow, I have to write this down’. It's a perfect natural end point for the short story anyway, though.

The thing I find fascinating about this, as a dream, is its sheer coherence and plot consistency. There were admittedly some slightly dreamlike oddities I've glossed over in the description above (notably that the original bear was inexplicably carrying around a telescope, and the reason it liked to be outside at a certain time of day was that it had apparently learned that looking through the telescope at things was fun), but the twist at the end actually explained what had seemed like dreamy inconsistencies at the start (such as the mysterious difficulty in evicting the bear, and the one other family member who didn't seem bothered by its presence), and thereby turned the whole thing into really quite a satisfying narrative experience. It's almost as if it had been planned from the start by an actual writer. The idea that a subconscious without free access to my logic centres was able to come up with that in sequential order is frankly very impressive.

Unless, of course, my memories of the first half of the dream were subtly modified during or after the second half, to make them match up to it better; I don't think that would be beyond the bounds of possibility, since memories of dreams are pretty fragile in general, but that would have been pretty impressive too! It paints a picture of my subconscious as a short-story writer with a word processor, who gets to go back and edit the beginning bits once it knows how the story's going to end.

I don't seem to have felt moved to write a review of last year, which I think is probably because it was neither interesting enough nor (as 2005 was) boring enough to be remarkable. Roughly, I continued doing the same sorts of things in the same sorts of ways. Towards the end of the year things looked up in a couple of ways, among which is that I seem to have recovered enough energy to actually do some free-software coding for a change.

I'm mostly not one for formal resolutions, but my most coherent general plan for the coming year is to buy a house. (For all the usual reasons: lack of interfering landlords, freedom to mess the place up how I want, the pleasant knowledge that while I'm still paying the same amount per month it's gradually turning into a capital asset for me rather than paying somebody else's bar bill, etc.)

I'm also probably going to have a gloomy mortality moment some time around May, because I'll be turning thirty this year. (I'm currently trying to limit myself to only one morbid mope every five years, and the last one was on my 25th birthday.)

I just got into work for the first time this year and found an envelope lying on my desk addressed to me c/o my company, from HM Revenue & Customs. That immediately made me nervous, of course: the imagination can think up plenty of dramatic reasons why they might write to me, and they're all bad news. It's harder to think of nice reasons they might write to me, because ‘you've paid too much tax, here, have some back’ is so improbable and all the other nice or neutral reasons are just so bureaucratically tedious that the imagination shies away from thinking them up.

So I opened the envelope, and it said that HMRC would like my personal details because Royal Mail have been returning their recent letters to me as undelivered.

I have no idea why RM should be doing this. But then, I don't even know what HMRC think my current address is; they didn't bother to mention that in the letter. (Perhaps I should suggest they read ‘How To Report Bugs Effectively’.)

But most annoyingly, I still don't know what they've actually been trying to write to me about, which means that that feeling of nervous anticipation and potential doom hasn't gone away. Of all the things the letter could have said, this is probably the only one which could have left me in this state of mind. Gah.

(I'm also slightly disturbed that the date on the letter says 25th December. Do taxmen really work right through Christmas?!)

After a somewhat hectic first week of holiday, today I finally got round to doing the thing I usually do when I take time off work, which is to pop down to the local Blockbuster and rent all the recent films that I was too disorganised to see in the cinema.

So I browsed around the shelves, picked up some DVDs, took them to the counter, looked in my wallet for my Blockbuster card, and to my great embarrassment it wasn't there. Moreover, I had not the faintest idea where else it might have been – it never comes out of my wallet except in Blockbuster stores, so unless it fell out of its own accord somehow I was at a loss.

The woman at the counter was unfazed. She asked me for a credit card for ID, which I handed over, and within about ten seconds was able to tell me that I'd accidentally left my card in the store the last time I'd been in (September), and that they'd destroyed it.

I was reasonably impressed by the fact that they routinely kept notes on that sort of thing and could retrieve them that efficiently (and also somewhat relieved that I wasn't going to have to go hunting round dark corners of my house and car desperately trying to work out where the errant card could have got to). But ‘reasonably impressed’ gave way to ‘gobsmacked’ when she then – pretty much as part of the same motion – promptly reached under the counter and handed me a shiny new card with my name on it and everything.

I asked whether they'd been keeping that card ready to give to me since they knew I'd lost my previous one, or whether she'd just printed it on the spot on no notice in under ten seconds. She said the latter. In retrospect, I'm not sure which would have impressed me more: the former would have involved very shiny corporate procedures, while the latter involves very shiny technology. Either is good.

(The new card is prettier and less flimsy than the old one, too. Bonus :-)

In the last couple of days I've been updating the PuTTY online help mechanism in anticipation of Windows Vista discontinuing the old-style Windows Help. I've prepared a new-style HTML help file, but I want to keep the option to use the old one, because (among other reasons) PuTTY still tries to work on Win95, which doesn't support new HTML help. So I hacked together an automatic detection mechanism which will use the HTML help file if it's both present and supported by the OS, and will fall back to WinHelp otherwise.

In order to make sure this really worked on Win95, I needed a Win95 machine to test it on. The PuTTY team used to have a real Win95 machine available, but currently doesn't; so lacking any other convenient options, I dug out my old Win95 install media from a dusty pile of CDs (amazingly, even the boot floppy which accompanied the CD was in full working order) and attempted to install it on a Bochs virtual machine.

It took me twenty minutes of editing configuration files and installing extra Debian packages to even start Bochs; no individual hoop I had to jump through seemed actually unreasonable, but it all added up to a lot of hassle. Eventually I had a working virtual machine and was able to run the install process – which ran very smoothly and promisingly up until the install program said ‘Setup is preparing to install files’ and then sat there beating its little drum icon for over an hour until I lost patience and killed it.

So then I tried QEMU instead, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn't even need a configuration file. I gave it command-line arguments pointing it at a floppy image, a hard disk image, and a CD image, and let it rip; it just worked, it ran much faster than Bochs, it installed without a hitch, and it's now cheerfully running a working Win95 system for me on which I've been able to test the help file switching mechanism and confirm that it works fine.

Somebody told me once that if you buy a medium-price hi-fi amplifier, it will come with tone controls, graphic equalisers, and no end of knobs and dials on the front so you can adjust it to exactly the sound you want, but if you buy a really expensive one it will just have a power switch and a volume control and get everything else right without having to be told. That was the feeling I got from comparing Bochs to QEMU.

(Unfortunately, it all went a bit pear-shaped when I tried to get the networking to work; I managed it in the end, but it wasn't nearly as painless as the rest of the process. I think this was mostly Win95's fault, however.)

The other day I found a cheap copy of Arthur C Clarke's ‘2010: Odyssey Two’ in a charity shop. My bookshelf was lacking a copy and I hadn't read it in years, so I snapped it up and re-read it.

At one point it describes the means by which the people on the spaceship secure their communications links back home:

[…] the cipher was based on the product of two hundred-digit prime numbers, and the National Security Agency had staked its reputation on the claim that the fastest computer in existence could not crack it before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe.

It doesn't take more than a nodding acquaintance with cryptography to recognise the cipher being described here as RSA; but two prime numbers of 100 decimal digits each come to what in modern terminology we would usually describe as a 665-bit RSA key, and that's frankly feeble by modern standards (768-bit keys are a thing of the past and 1024-bit keys are starting to look shaky). For once, Clarke's vaunted foresight seemed to have let him down.

Then I stopped and thought a bit harder. He was writing this around 1980, trying to look thirty years into the future, and not only has he got the encryption algorithm right (well, probably – it isn't 2010 yet and there's still time for surprises, but it doesn't currently look as if RSA will be generally abandoned by then), but he's also within a factor of ten of the right key length – and over a thirty-year period, to be out by even a full factor of ten only needs a 10% error in the doubling period of Moore's Law (although I'd guess it's more likely that what Clarke really failed to anticipate was improved factoring algorithms). So, actually, that's not bad at all!

It's now been nearly two years since I was diagnosed with coeliac disease. In that time I've mostly come to terms with the required changes in my diet. I've adapted to a life without pizza; I've either learned to cook, or found gluten-free varieties of, the Chinese meals I missed most; I've done the minimal necessary adaptation of my usual bulk self-catering habits; and generally, apart from it being nearly impossible to eat out and often severely inconvenient to have friends cook for me, I basically don't feel too annoyed most of the time by the whole business.

One thing I have had trouble finding, though, is good gluten-free bread. I have several options which are suitable for making into breadcrumbs for stuffing and bread sauce, and one or two which make passable toast if you lay on pâté with a trowel, but last week I would have told you I knew of no GF bread products which I'd be willing to eat in the form of actual bread.

Within the last few days I've been fed three startlingly good GF bread products, all of which were made by Dietary Specials, a company which I previously knew for making decent GF steak pies and utterly inedible GF ready-meal pizzas. I don't know if any of them would be good enough to adopt as a regular part of my diet, but for the occasional sausage butty or light snack they're definitely an improvement on anything I'd previously encountered. I will have to go and buy some more.