My oven gloves just caught fire. That wasn't how I expected to find out I needed a new pair!

I've mentioned before in this diary that the last day of work before a holiday feels less like work to me and more like holiday, because even though there's still work to be done I at least don't have to get up early any more.

Well, I'm not due for any more holiday until December, but it's just occurred to me that since the clocks change on Sunday, this morning was the last time I'll have to get out of bed at 0700 UTC until next March, and it's already over. Realising that has given today a small echo of the same feeling :-)

Every so often someone sends me, or the PuTTY team, an email whose gist is ‘I would like to discuss a [ business proposition | project | piece of work | half-baked idea | whatever ] with you’. No further information (but enough personalisation to be sure it isn't spam). We generally reply ‘go on then’, with varying degrees of sarcasm depending on mood, and then they send some details of their actual suggestion.

I've never quite understood why they bother with the initial zero-content opening email. It delays the useful part of the conversation by an entire round trip, and doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose. I suppose if the description of the idea was going to be very long, they might feel it was worth giving us a chance to say ‘don't bother’ before they went to the effort of typing it all up, but if they don't give any detail in the first message then there's no way we can make an intelligent judgment about whether we're interested! (Well, except that if the mail talks about a ‘business proposition’ then they tend to be to do with website advertising, so we're usually not. But occasionally they want to pay us to add a useful feature to PuTTY, so we can't even reject them on that basis until we know more.)

I've managed to lose two umbrellas in the past two weeks. The nice one appears to be lost for good, but fortunately I recovered the cheap backup umbrella this morning so at least I have some rain protection until I buy a new nice one this weekend.

(That'll be my third really nice umbrella this year. The first one underwent catastrophic twangy failure in May, and the second disappeared last week in mysterious circumstances. Perhaps this time I should see if the shop assistant can find me one without the curse.)

I slept very badly the night before last, so I was extremely sleepy yesterday evening and was careful to get a very early night. I slept like a log from 10:30 until about 4am, at which point I snapped wide awake and only managed to doze off again at 7, leaving me just enough time to become sleepy enough to resent my alarm. Whenever I have middle-of-the-night insomnia, this always seems to happen: I finally doze off again just at the moment I need to be getting back up. I suspect my body clock of doing it deliberately.

I'm clearly not all that sleepy now, though, because on the way to work this morning I spotted the number of a bus, remembered what its route was, and hence deduced that it was going to turn left (and therefore it was safe for me to pull out in front of it) some time before it bothered to indicate. That struck me as quite cunning and useful, although I probably couldn't have done it if I hadn't had the bus routes fresh in my mind from last week.

I've been working at home today, because somebody was scheduled to turn up and replace my gas meter so I had to be in. So a few days ago I carefully set aside some document-writing which I could usefully do without access to the company network, and I've spent the day sitting in my study doing that.

I had worried about my productivity in this environment: it seemed to me that with nobody else around I might easily succumb to the temptation to (for example) play computer games all day, or browse the web, or just sit on a sofa going uuurgh, or be otherwise unproductive.

But instead I've been stonkingly productive, in fact significantly more so than I would have expected to be in a typical day in the office. I suspect I was mostly overcompensating for the above worry, and not permitting myself a moment's rest ‘just in case’. I've finished all of the work I set aside, which is more than I expected to manage; and I'm exhausted. (Though that might also just be because writing documents is much harder work than it looks. Coding is pifflingly easy by comparison.)

It's probably a good thing most of my job can't be done under these conditions; on present showing, if I made a habit of working from home then I'd probably work myself to death in short order!

‘See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.’

– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

For several days now I've been getting around town on buses, because my car has (once again) demonstrated all the reliability and build quality of the Millennium Falcon.

Public transport is, of course, terribly slow and inconvenient compared to personal transport. You have to walk to the nearest access point; you have to stand around waiting until a bus or train deigns to turn up; you have to tolerate slow zigzag roundabout routes from A to B and repeated stops to exchange other passengers; you have to walk from the access point where you end up to the place you actually wanted to be. Not to mention that if you're unlucky you have to change vehicles in the middle of your trip and do half of this lot all over again. And that you're restricted in the times of day you can travel, so taking public transport to a distant club or party means you have to either find somewhere to crash or leave annoyingly early to get the last train back. None of this is a surprise, and all of it is annoying compared to the ability of your own bike or car to deliver you from one front door directly to another, in your time, by as direct a route as you can invent, whenever you want.

But in spite of all that, there's something that feels somehow magical about public transport, which personal transport just doesn't seem to have for me. I think it's got something to do with the fact that I leave my starting point on foot, and arrive at my destination the same way, as if I'd walked the whole distance, and yet the two points are so far apart that it would have been infeasible to actually walk all the way. And I don't have to exert physical effort to move myself the extra distance, as I would on a bicycle, or mental concentration as I would driving a car. I just find something that's going the way I want to go, grab on, and let it carry me to where I want to be.

I shall certainly be glad to have the Falcon back with its hyperdrive fixed: that feeling of magic would probably evaporate quite quickly if I used public transport all the time, leaving me with nothing but the various annoyances. But as long as I only have to use it once in a while, I find it actually makes for rather a pleasant change of pace.

Today I wrote a random comment on somebody's LJ, and five minutes after I posted it I suddenly realised I'd inadvertently used the phrase ‘sounds good on paper’. Not sure how something does that. Does it rustle pleasantly, perhaps?

I suspect that mental crossover was simply due to my brain being momentarily indecisive between ‘sounds good’ and ‘looks good on paper’, and the fact that what I was thinking was an entirely abstract thought about the superficial plausibility of the comment I was responding to, to which either of the phrases I was considering would have been at best an approximation.

A more interesting case of linguistic synaesthesia showed up in a mathematical proof I jotted down in 2001 and recently found lying around on my computer, which described a nasty algebraic mess as ‘the following smelly-looking polynomial’. I suppose that in the age of the television, ‘smelly-looking’ would be a perfectly reasonable concept to apply to something seen on a screen, but I'm inclined to feel that when I used the phrase it was probably an unconscious reflection of my sensory deficiency: for practical purposes, when I hear the word ‘smelly’ I can generally take it to mean that the object thus described is something unpleasant which you don't want to go too near if you can help it. Thus, it didn't seem the least bit incongruous to describe a polynomial as looking as if it had that property; after all, how else could I judge something to be smelly?

If you're designing an XML representation of some type of data, and you want a key-value sort of organisation, this is inherently reasonably well supported by XML. If you want to set the key ‘foo’ to the value ‘bar’, you can simply set up your DTD so that it lets you write

<sometagorother foo=bar />

Now occasionally I can understand that you might want to layer your own key-value structure on top of this:

<set key="foo" value="bar" />

because this approach gives you the ability to add extra attributes alongside each key/value pair, which might be useful for all sorts of vaguely sensible reasons: expiry dates, permissions, conditionalisation, you name it. Also it doesn't require you to specify the full set of possible keys in the DTD, which is obviously useful.

However, when I see a third layer of key-value structure on top of even that …

<method name="SetVariable">
    <arg key="name" value="foo" />
    <arg key="value" value="bar" />
</method>

… I really do start to wonder whether someone's brain has been EATEN BY PARASITIC XML MEMES OF DEATH.

I got a new car stereo at the weekend, to replace my Dension DH102 which packed up in April. I was unable to get another DH102 or anything like it: players with their own hard disks seem to have gone totally out of fashion, and even Dension don't sell them any more. Instead, the new fashion is stereos which have an iPod connection; so I now have an Alpine CDE-9850Ri, and an iPod to plug into it. I haven't yet worked out whether I prefer this to the Dension.

( car stereo comparison )

Particularly bad about the last two points (in fact, quite possibly the last three) is that as far as I can tell they're fundamental limitations imposed by the iPod-based design, which means that no other stereo on the market will be able to fix them for me.

On the plus side, I suppose, that means I don't have to worry about whether I should have bought some other model instead. But it is rather annoying me that I can visualise exactly what my ideal car stereo would do, and none of its features seem obviously specialist to me, and yet nobody is prepared to sell me anything remotely like it. If I were more of a hardware person I might have given serious thought to building my own.

I just arrived home from work. I opened the door, picked up a letter lying on the mat, then slung my bag over my shoulder and went upstairs. I got into the study, put the letter down on the desk, put my bag on the chair, and opened the bag. Then I stopped, confused, and wondered why I'd opened the bag.

After some thought I realised that what I had in fact meant to do was to open the letter, but a mental glitch had somehow caused me to mistake which of the things I was carrying I had intended to open – and to mistake it so cleanly and at such a high conceptual level that I carefully put the bag on the chair instead of (as I do when I'm not planning to open it) the floor. At no point did I attempt to treat the bag as if it were a letter; my confusion was not at that level. I opened it exactly the way I would have done if I'd been genuinely intending to open my bag. It's just that that entire intention was the product of a glitch, and the thing I'd been intending to intend (as it were) should instead have driven me to put the bag on the floor and pick up the letter-opener. Very strange.

When I opened the letter, I found I wasn't the only person being strange. The letter was from my bank, regarding a funds transfer I had recently performed via their online banking service, and it said ‘We hereby notify you that we transferred one penny less than you asked for, because otherwise you would have completely emptied the source account and thereby automatically closed it’. This is almost fair enough (though I don't immediately see why it's conceptually unthinkable for a savings account to temporarily contain no money), except that in fact they had transferred £6000.01 less than I asked for! It turns out that the online banking interface handles transfers from this type of account by generating an email to a human, so the human must have manually copied the amount of the transfer from one place to another and got it wrong. Barking mad! I should count myself lucky they managed to get the money into the right destination account, and didn't send it all to Peru.

You know you're half asleep when you realise you've been participating in a Usenet thread for a couple of days without even noticing that one of the main participants is using the outstanding name of ‘Vladimir McBadger’.

For not very interesting reasons, I just calculated 11 factorial; it came to 39916800. On a random whim, I then typed that number into Google.

The first search result told me confidently that the number I'd entered was 12 factorial. Oops.

‘Captain Waterhouse? You are to proceed to the Mansion,’ says the guard who had spoken on the telephone. ‘You can't miss it.’

Waterhouse walks for about fifty feet and finds that the Mansion is, indeed, tragically unmissable. He stands and stares at it for a minute, trying to fathom what the architect had been thinking. It is a busy piece of work, with an excessive number of gables. He can only suppose that the designer wanted to build what was really a large, single dwelling, but sought to camouflage it as a line of at least half a dozen wildly mismatched urban row-houses inexplicably crammed together in the middle of six hundred acres of Buckinghamshire farmland.

– Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

As part of beckyc's birthday celebrations, I was part of a bunch of about ten people who went to the Bletchley Park museum yesterday. I'd never been there before, although I had of course read Enigma and Cryptonomicon so it was a familiar setting in my imagination if not in reality.

One of the major things I noticed on getting there was that the above quotation is all absolutely true. The crowning touch, I feel, is the gable and cupola which interpenetrate in a manner which suggests they were accidentally overlaid in a ray-tracing program by somebody who wasn't paying quite enough attention to their coordinates. It's a monstrosity, and that's coming from somebody who doesn't usually have enough interest in architecture to express any strong opinions about it at all.

As for the rest of the park, well, it was good, but somehow more museumy than I'd have hoped. As a museum it's definitely good – many of the display cases and information boards tell you genuinely interesting stuff – but somehow I felt that you could have set up a conventional glass-cases-and-posters museum about Bletchley Park anywhere you liked, and if you were going to do something on the site itself then you surely ought to make use of that in a more creative fashion, such as by trying to reconstruct the interiors of the huts in a way that actually gave an impression of what it might have been like to be involved in the codebreaking efforts. Hut 4, for example, should have been cramped, crowded, and full of filing cabinets and exasperated naval intelligence officers dashing back and forth with small slips of paper, or failing that at least given the impression that said officers had just popped out for an important meeting and would be very busy again as soon as they came back. Instead, it was a largely empty shell containing a lecture room.

I got into an argument with the tour guide at one point, over a technical point about the codebreaking procedure. I did some quick calculations using my watch's calculator mode to support my claims, but he said some of my assumptions were faulty. I went away and thought about that; it occurred to me that if I had a computer handy instead of a piffling little calculator then I ought to be able to knock together a real demonstration of my point pretty quickly. Then it occurred to me that the hands-on exhibits in the history-of-computing museum included a BBC micro, so I wandered over there and quickly typed in a twenty-line program which tested my assertion; the tour guide came back half an hour later while we were eating lunch and I was able to cite the results of that program as part of my argument :-) He eventually conceded my point after discovering that he'd misunderstood it. (Phew.)

It hadn't occurred to me, but clearly should have with hindsight, that Bletchley Park's visitors would be likely to contain a high proportion of geeks. While I was hacking on the Beeb, a random old guy came over to watch what I was doing, and then said in a slightly puzzled voice ‘You don't look old enough to know how to program a BBC’. This struck me as slightly odd, since I didn't even encounter a BBC until about seven years after starting to learn to program, by which time it wasn't about to present me with any conceptual difficulties; but I suppose if (as he did) you'd programmed the things yourself when you were forty, you might be slightly surprised that a teenager would have been doing the same things.

Still, a good day out all round. A tiring one, though, so it's a good job I have today to recover from it before going back to work!

Well, that's pretty much it. Four weeks ago I began a four-week break from work; so tomorrow I'll be back in the office, probably struggling through a month of email backlog to begin with and then resuming the big project I was in the middle of implementing when my sabbatical began. (Which was pretty silly timing, but sabbaticals are booked six months in advance and the big project came up on shorter notice than that…)

When my company introduced the sabbatical scheme, I'm sure I remember them trying to encourage people to use the break to do something constructive or at least purposeful. Last time I had one, four years ago, I used it to do some serious PuTTY development including porting some big chunks of PuTTY to Unix, which seemed pretty constructive to me.

Nowadays the company doesn't seem to be emphasising that angle so much; I suppose they must have accustomed themselves to the idea that if you give people four weeks off work it's going to take more than well-meaning encouragement to stop most of them from treating it as a four-week holiday. When I left work four weeks ago they just said ‘enjoy your break’. Regardless of this, I wanted to do something useful with my time, and I had laid plans for some far-reaching PuTTY infrastructure renovation. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

I spent the first week lying on the sofa watching DVDs, punctuated by an occasional walk to Blockbuster to rent a succession of films I'd recently failed to go and see in the cinema. By the end of that week I was feeling rested and energetic enough to want to do something useful, which was pretty much how I'd planned it. But at that point the machine on which I read my email changed its spam-filtering configuration and I suddenly found myself deluged with a flood of Japanese newsletters and stock-market scam mail from which it was quite difficult to pick out anything legitimate; so I hastily changed direction and devoted a couple of weeks to writing some spam-filtering code which would solve my immediate problems. As a result, my inbox is now quieter than it's been in months and I have some reasonably convenient ways to make it quieter still as necessary, but PuTTY's data storage infrastructure remains stubbornly unrenovated.

I suppose I should be glad that the spam emergency came up when I did have time and energy available to devote to it; if I hadn't been on sabbatical last month then I might still be struggling with it now. But I can't help feeling somewhat peeved that a bunch of spammers stopped me from having the time and energy to do what I really wanted to do with that month of freedom.

Still; aside from that annoyance it hasn't been a bad month. Even though I haven't written the code I'd hoped to write, I have at least reassured myself that I can still write useful code in contexts other than work; and I've had time to laze around, time to sort out various things that have needed sorting out, and time left over to spend with a variety of nice people who I don't see nearly enough of. So, could have been a lot worse really.

It often occurs to me that if a Martian were to eavesdrop on my home, pick up all the random mutterings I mutter to myself when I'm alone, and try to parse some meaning out of them, he'd be left with a lot of strange ideas.

Foremost among those strange ideas, it usually seems to me, would be that there is some unspecified item in my home which I lose far more frequently than anything else, called the ‘oh there it is’.

Today I decided to get rid of my mobile phone. I've had one for a bit over six years (initially got it just before moving house, on the basis that it would be helpful to have a stable method of contact while everything else was up in the air), but hardly ever used it.

My biggest problem with a mobile is that I'm very bad at keeping battery-powered things charged. I initially kept the phone on all the time, but found that it would be on for a few days and then off for a week or more before I remembered to recharge it. So for the last few years I've mostly kept it turned off, on the basis that that way it's almost always got some charge in it, in case I need to turn it on and make an outgoing call. (I'd occasionally turn it on if I knew I was going to need to receive incoming calls, for example if I was trying to do a complicated piece of organisation involving meeting somebody in London.) Meanwhile, I've also been paying for it on contract, rather than PAYG, on the basis that PAYG would mean another thing I could never remember to keep charged up. Expensive for my usage pattern, but if the aim is to have it work when I really need it, it seemed the most reliable way.

A week or two ago I tried to turn the phone on for an outgoing call and found it wasn't working. This is the fourth phone I've gone through in six years, and it's now getting to the point where they fall apart (presumably due to battering in my pocket) almost as often as I need to make calls. So I decided enough was enough; I was just about willing to pay for the wretched thing's upkeep when it was occasionally actually useful, but if I can't even rely on it working on the very rare occasions I ask it to, it just isn't worth keeping. So enough is enough; I'm getting rid of it. Today I posted a letter to Orange cancelling my contract.

So now I've got all this space in my left pocket. I wonder what I should keep in there instead.

As of now I don't have to go to work until 2nd October. That's a good feeling :-)

My hayfever has been mostly unproblematic this summer, but it seems to be seizing its chance to have one last go at me this week. I've had several sneezing fits already this morning, and I'm currently sitting here experiencing physical symptoms that feel exactly as if I've been crying: the puffy eyes, the lump in the throat and the sniffling all match. But I haven't been crying, of course; I've just been sneezing.

Curiously, this is having an emotional effect on me, presumably by associative memory. On the very rare occasions that I do do serious crying, I tend to feel fragile afterwards: prone to treat minor setbacks as major, on the basis that I've only just returned from beyond the limit of what I can cope with and so even a minor frustration pushes me perilously close to going back over that limit. And what's odd is that I'm feeling very much like that now, for no better reason than that my current physical state is similar to the way I would be feeling just after a crying fit. I keep having to actively remind myself that my life is quite good at the moment, that nothing has gone seriously wrong recently at all, and that it's only hayfever.

I think I've mentioned before, haven't I, that the human brain is a shoddily designed piece of ad-hoc-ware and should be sufficient in itself to refute any feeble excuses a creationist can come up with? Well, perhaps it's worth saying it one more time. If I were an omnipotent god, or even just a finitely-but-extremely potent one, I'm sure I could do a better job than this, and if I couldn't then I'd deserve to have my deification revoked.

Over the past three days I've put real new features into PuTTY, which is pretty unusual these days.

( for those who speak geek )

Last week something rather surprising happened to me: I discovered I'd become a morning person.

Normally my natural inclination on any given day is to stay in bed until absolutely forced to get up by the oppressive tyranny of regular employment, or failing that the lure of breakfast. Eventually, after a decent run-up, I become able to concentrate on doing useful things.

However, for about a week now, this has no longer been my pattern. I've been consistently finding myself wide awake and raring to go about half an hour before my usual alarm time; moreover, when I do get up I then find I'm filled with energy and alertness and enthusiasm and do lots of useful productive work. Then, some time around four in the afternoon, it wears off and I begin to feel less like manically doing work and more like sitting on a sofa and not moving much.

So I've just spent most of the Bank Holiday weekend getting up early and doing real PuTTY development, which I think is the first time I've done anything more to PuTTY than occasional bug fixing for about a year and a half. This is a very, very satisfying feeling.

But at the same time, I'm filled with a sense of ‘yikes, what's happened to me?’. It's often said that people are divided into larks and owls, but it's news to me that somebody can spontaneously mutate from one into the other!