So, last week was generally frustrating in a wide variety of ways, at work and at home; it culminated in Friday evening, in which I sat in the Castle with a bunch of people expecting to see taimatsu, only by 10pm she hadn't shown up so I wandered over to the Carlton to see nassus who turned out to have already left. Can't help feeling I got something wrong there; also, the evening going like that was a microcosm of my entire week.

Saturday was better, though. I went down to London for my sister's cunning plan to take Mum up the London Eye. I'd never done that before, and it was great fun; extra points for the terribly civilised idea of having a premium ticket which not only cuts down your queueing time massively but also gets you a glass of champagne during the ride. (Or ‘flight’, as all the official text insists on calling them; looks as if British Airways' involvement has had a linguistic as well as an engineering influence.)

The security checkpoint confiscated my Leatherman before I got on the Eye, which I thought was odd. They gave it back when I got off half an hour later, of course, but I confess I'm not sure what kind of serious threat they were expecting someone to be able to pose with a penknife, even a largish and quite sharp one. On an aeroplane I would naturally assume they were scared of me pulling a 9/11-like stunt, but that fundamentally relies on aeroplanes being steerable; even if someone did take over a London Eye capsule at knife point I think it would be a bit tricky to fly it into the Houses of Parliament! (In fact, if I really wanted to do such a thing I wouldn't go for the capsule at all; I'd go for the motor control centre, wherever that is, and rev it right up. It'd certainly work in a cartoon, and it might even work in a Bond film :-)

Sophie asked the guide when was the best time to ride on the Eye, to which he responded ‘between 7 and 9pm on 5th November’. Brilliant. And apparently they don't even charge extra for that…

Then we went to a fish restaurant, which is only about the third time I've eaten out anywhere since being diagnosed coeliac. They actually had a special list showing the allergy information for all their dishes, which was impressive service; sadly it was obviously inaccurate in two places, which was less impressive. We pointed that out after the meal and got it corrected, but it did leave me less than confident that it wasn't non-obviously inaccurate anywhere else :-/ Still, the food was excellent.

Now back at work, and hoping that something might go my way this week.

‘Do you know what I want right now, more than anything else in the world?’

‘No … ?’

‘Neither do I. ’

A couple of weeks ago I posted a question asking my readers to gauge their general life luck using the metaphor of some dice which might or might not be entirely random.

I expected the answers to divide into two categories: simple answers giving a number in the range 1 to 6, perhaps with some justification, and clever lateral-thinking answers which stretched or extended the metaphor in order to express something more complicated. I wouldn't have been surprised if the former class of answer had given rise to some sort of debate about what level of luck we take for granted in the privileged western world and whether it's plausible for (say) anyone at all who isn't homeless or starving to rate their overall luck at anything below (say) 4.

Instead, somewhat to my surprise, every single answer I got was a clever lateral-thinking answer; everyone who had an opinion at all felt that a single number from 1 to 6 was insufficient to adequately summarise the nature of their life. The overwhelming consensus, as I see it, was that life simply isn't that simple; and as I entirely agree with that (my own answer wasn't simple either), this absolutely delighted me.

It also made me think that an audience of this nature might appreciate me re-running a lateral-thinking audience-participation question I posted in this diary way back in 1998, when LJ hadn't even been thought of and this diary only existed on Monochrome. When I posted it, I didn't particularly intend to solicit answers from the audience; I was mostly whinging, in a cryptic and metaphorical way, about some things which were happening in my own head at the time. As it turned out, though, I received a wide variety of excellently lateral responses, some of which even made sense when translated back through the metaphor. On the basis that many of my current readers were not my readers then and might enjoy coming up with their own answers to the same problem, here it is in full:

Picture this.

To protect yourself against the marauding Enemy, you have built two fortresses, one inside the other. In the inner one go all the things you really can't afford to lose; in the outer goes the less critical stuff. Also in the outer goes an absolute shedload of heavy weaponry, for defending the walls.

The Enemy comes, as you knew they would, and you fight them. You successfully hold the wall for over ten years. Then – for whatever reason, maybe an Act of God, perhaps a tactical error, possibly a genius taking over on the other side – the outer citadel falls. You'd hoped this would never happen, but you'd been prepared for the idea that it might; so as you'd planned, you retreat to the inner fortress, which should have enough weapons in it to protect the truly vital things therein.

The Enemy masses for its assault on the inner fortress, your last line of defence. As they prepare for their attack, an icy feeling sweeps through you. You've just realised that the Enemy is better armed than you'd expected. Why? Because they've taken over all the weaponry in the outer fortress.

What do you do?

In a week or so I'll post the answers I received in 1998.

I went to taimatsu's birthday picnic yesterday, and now my knees hurt.

This is because there was a load of juggling equipment there, and several people actually using it, so I picked a few balls up and joined in for a while. Juggling when I haven't done it recently (which, these days, is most of the time) always hits my leg muscles hardest, because while the actual juggling is not particularly strenuous the crouching down to pick things up requires me to lift my bodyweight a metre into the air repeatedly, usually in a hurry and at a strange angle. So I generally end up with my legs feeling a bit wobbly from fatigue, and then painfully stiff the next day. And lo, this has happened. I never learn.

On the plus side, thanks to Lucy cunningly situating the picnic in the shade of a ginormous tree, I am only slightly pink-tinged rather than painfully sunburned, and that without having to use any suntan lotion. (I hate that stuff; it's slimy and horrible and hard to wash off. The only thing more unpleasant than suntan lotion is sunburn. If I can possibly get away without either, I prefer to.)

It was a good picnic, containing a good combination of lovely people I already knew and lovely people I hadn't previously met. Special mention in the latter category must go to huggyrei, for living up to her name and also startlingly lifting me into the air in the middle of a conversation. (The conversation was about physical strength, so it was relevant to the point she was making; nonetheless it was the most unexpected thing that's happened to me in mid-conversation for a while.)

Today I plan to do as little as possible for as long as possible with all the windows open. Bah, hot weather.

It's happened a couple of times before that I somehow get confused in the middle of the night as to what the time is, either because my alarm clock had got confused or because I had. Well, it happened again this morning; I woke up at what I thought was 6am, went to the loo, went back to sleep, and what felt like several hours later I woke up again feeling much more rested and the clock said 6am. I have no idea whether the clock got confused in the middle of the night or whether I somehow dreamed I'd looked at it but hadn't, but either way it was confusing. I checked to make sure the clock hadn't been right the first time and wrong the second time, but my emergency backup timekeeping device agreed with it the second time, so I have no idea whether it was me or it the first time.

Today at work I have to write a document, which reminds me that a conversation I was part of in the pub last night invented the fabulous word bibulography, which is a section you put in an academic (or other) publication giving due credit to all the alcoholic (or other) beverages which sustained the author(s) through the writing of said publication. The front cover of ‘Asterix and Cleopatra’ has one, for example.

Gosh, that has to be typo of the day. While typing ‘writing’ in the above paragraph, it came out as ‘wronging’. How on earth did I manage that, I wonder?

I've mentioned before that I often find myself noticing fundamental bugs in the way the human brain works and wishing my brain was better designed.

Here's another one: my brain is often very bad at predicting how it would behave in dangerous or scary situations. It's annoyingly common for me to evaluate several courses of action in advance of an event, decide which one I like best, and then when the time comes to actually commit myself then I discover that the one I'd chosen is terribly scary now that it's actually physically staring me in the face rather than being considered as an abstract strategic puzzle.

If I were designing an ideal intelligence, I would give it a properly working imagination. It would be able to set up a hypothetical situation, put itself into that situation, and then reason exactly as if it were real. It would either be able to temporarily completely suppress the knowledge that the situation wasn't real, or alternatively it would just be able to reliably inhibit that knowledge from impinging on its reasoning processes. In fact, now I've written that either/or, I'm not entirely sure I can robustly define the difference between those two possibilities; but either way, the fundamental architecture of my intelligence would be designed in such a way that if it decided it would react a certain way in a scary situation, you could depend on it being right.

At stephdiary's house last night there was a silly conversation about papal infallibility, and how the Pope is only infallible when he specifically says he's being infallible. It occurred to me that this was probably just as well, since you'd hate to be burdened with the responsibility of infallibility when you'd just got up and were wittering incoherently over your breakfast.

This morning I got up, saw the ‘1’ on my calendar, and while still half asleep said to myself ‘oh yes, it's July now’. I think that proves my point. If I'd been the Pope and my infallibility had been always-on, there's no telling what might have happened to the nature of time and causality as a result of that absent-minded misstatement!

I decided the other day that it was about time I did some spring cleaning; specifically, scrubbing the encrusted gunk and scum off various kitchen and bathroom surfaces. The scouring pads I normally use for washing up are the kind designed not to annoy non-stick saucepans, which makes them far too feeble for a task like this. So I wrote ‘vicious scourers of death’ on my shopping list and went out to Sainsburys.

The scourers I came back with have a fantastic warning message on the back of the pack: ‘CAUTION: This Scotch Brite® scour pad is a highly effective scouring tool.’

The warning then goes on to explain that you should therefore not use them on anything scratchable, polished, varnished, non-stick or otherwise vulnerable to being fatally scoured, and gives a lengthy list of unsuitable surfaces, which is all reasonable enough; but I can't help but find it slightly amusing that consumers have to be warned with dire capitals and boldface that a product performs its intended function well. One is left with the feeling that perhaps the quality of other scouring pad products have conditioned people to expect mediocrity so that they might be startled at not getting it.

I suppose it's not actually all that silly: other very efficient products might also carry semantically similar warnings. Superglue tends to be sold with warnings pointing out that it sticks things together so well that it can easily be inconvenient and/or dangerous; and it wouldn't be too unreasonable to put a warning on a kitchen knife which was above-averagely sharp. So I think it must just be the wording of this particular warning which amuses me. Also, there's the interesting fact that if the same sentence had appeared on the front of the pack I would probably have dismissed it as self-serving marketing propaganda bearing no relation to product quality, but seeing it in the warning section on the back makes me believe it more readily and think ‘aha, just what I need’.

Still, the scourers didn't disappoint; several bits of my flat are now cleaner than they've been in years. In fact the draining board on which I put dirty crockery is now so clean that I'm reluctant to put any dirty crockery on it, which is clearly a risk I should have anticipated!

mooism recently posted a link to a web game called ‘Tringo’: http://www.donnerwood.com/tringo.html.

He said his current high score was 278, so I had a go at the game to see what would happen. For those unwilling to go and play it themselves, the game involves trying to fit a sequence of loosely Tetris-like pieces into a square grid, and getting points for forming a complete rectangle of filled squares which then vanish. If you can't fit a particular piece in at all, you can skip it, and points are deducted.

I immediately found a strong sense of motivation to get through a round without having to skip a piece. However, having succeeded at that (and scored somewhere in the region of 240) I felt no urge whatever to try again and attempt to finish with a higher score.

I think I'm fundamentally far more motivated by the desire to achieve specific qualitative goals than I am by quantitative challenges such as scoring as much as possible on the way to those goals. I'll pay attention to score-maximising play if it has a material advantage to me (such as an extra life or power-up every N points) which might help me reach a qualitative goal, but otherwise I generally have very little interest in score compared to more ‘natural’ milestones: if one person reaches level N of a game, whereas another person dies on level N-1 but has a higher score, I will not consider there to be any particularly interesting way in which the latter has done better.

(And no, I can't generally persuade myself to see ‘complete this game with a score of at least <previous high score> + 1’ as a you-either-do-it-or-you-don't qualitative goal; I spot immediately that it's a quantitative goal wearing a qualitative hat and am not fooled.)

I've been meaning to post this mild frivolity every time I hear or think of the NMA song I just listened to. This time I was at a computer when it went past, so it's time I actually got round to it.

My dice still roll in sixes
And yours still turn up ones
And I've taken my good fortune
And I've run, and run…

– New Model Army, ‘Marrakesh’

What kind of numbers do your dice turn up, in general?

I think for my own answer I have to assume my life is governed by more than two dice; most of mine reliably produce fours, fives and sixes, but a couple of them seem to turn up almost nothing but ones and the occasional two.

beckyc told me in the pub today that she had happened to be passing through the police station recently and they'd been interested to hear she lived below number 1A, and asked if she might happen to know what I was doing with tinfoil over my bedroom window. sonicdrift then explained to me that tinfoil-covered windows are apparently often a sign of someone growing cannabis; that and high electricity bills for the bright lights (which is what the tinfoil would be hiding from passers-by).

In fact, the tinfoil is there because I'm ludicrously light-sensitive when I sleep, and don't appreciate it getting light in my bedroom at 5am in the summer when I don't want to get up for another three hours. I've tried thick curtains, and they help, but enough light still comes in round the edges that I had to resort to tinfoil as well, and having done so I can now get a full night's sleep even at midsummer. But the hilarious thing is, I do also have high electricity bills, because my flat uses night storage heaters rather than conventional gas central heating. (Well, I have high electricity bills in winter, at least; it's all turned off at the moment.) So I guess that puts me smack (ahem) in the middle of the profile for cannabis-growers, which I find wildly amusing.

What's particularly amusing about this is that I can't stand cannabis. I've never actually smoked it, but I've once or twice been at parties where other people were smoking it, and I'm sensitive enough to the stuff that the trace quantities in the second-hand smoke were enough to affect me – and enough to convince me that I don't like its effect. I certainly wouldn't deliberately smoke it; that would surely be the same thing only even worse. Also I'd be completely incapable of growing the stuff, on the grounds that I have whatever the exact opposite is of green fingers, and can't be trusted with so much as a pot plant. (Er, as it were.)

I almost wish the police had been curious enough to come and actually ask me, so I could laugh at them in person. For the moment, though, I'm going to have to settle for laughing at them from a distance.

The night before last I didn't get to sleep until 4am. Last night I dropped off fine (because I was so tired after the previous night), but when I woke up my alarm clock said 5am. I began cursing my inability to sleep for a decent length of time. So as I was awake anyway, I got up and went to the loo, and as soon as I left my darkened bedroom I noticed it was suspiciously light for 5am in May.

It turned out that my alarm clock had somehow lost a couple of hours and it was in fact 7:19, which is much more sensible. However, that alarm clock is supposed to be radio-synchronised, so I had to check quite a few other clocks before I was convinced about which one of them was wrong. That's the trouble with radio clocks: most of the time they're much more reliable and accurate than ordinary clocks, but while an ordinary clock's failure mode is to gradually drift away from the right time so that as long as you set it or checked it recently you know it must be approximately right, a radio clock is capable of completely losing the plot in the space of minutes and leaving you utterly uncertain of the right time.

Oh well; when I got to work the clocks here seemed to think I'd got it about right, so no harm done. I just hope the alarm clock was only temporarily confused.

Also when I got in to work, I opened my mailbox and discovered that I had received spam about the Da Vinci Code. Arrrrgh! I've been waiting patiently for months for the entire world to shut up about that thoroughly uninspiring book, but it hasn't happened yet. If it isn't a high-profile plagiarism lawsuit or the high-profile launch of the film adaptation, it's endless ranting about the obvious truth, obvious fictionality or otherwise of the utterly clichéd conspiracy theory, which cartesiandaemon pegged very accurately last week as being exactly the sort of thing Foucault's Pendulum was mercilessly mocking fifteen years before it was even published, so nobody has any excuse for taking it seriously, or indeed writing it, now. Nobody in the media seems to be able to stop talking about it, and I am absolutely sure it simply isn't interesting enough to warrant all that fascination. But now spammers are getting in on the deal as well and I've had enough. SHUT UP!

Ye gods. I stepped out of the office to walk to Tesco and buy lunch, protected by a small umbrella which seemed more than adequate to the light spotting rain.

I had gone about three hundred metres when the heavens opened to such an astonishing extent that I immediately declared defeat and turned back. In the course of returning those 300 metres I became almost entirely soaked from the elbows down.

I think I shall stay indoors for the rest of lunchtime and eat my emergency food. And drip.

That was a particularly good Calling. I wish I'd stayed at it longer, in fact: I left it at around midnight in the hope of getting some sleep, then came home and had insomnia until 4am. If I'd known that would happen I'd have stayed for at least another hour! Bah.

When I did my shopping on the way home from work last night, I remembered (unusually for me) to buy a bottle of nice booze to take to post-pizza. Therefore, of course, Murphy's Law dictated that this would be one of the rare evenings on which post-pizza either didn't happen or didn't tell me where it was happening. (On no evidence at all I'll take a flying guess that the beer festival might have been involved, but the proximate cause is unimportant really.)

On Saturday lnr left her mobile in my flat after my B5 showing, and said she'd come back for it at some point on Sunday. So I made a special effort to get dressed early in the day rather than slobbing about in my dressing gown until mid-afternoon as is my normal habit on Sundays, and therefore of course Murphy's Law dictated that she didn't make an appearance after all.

And on Thursday I was hoping to see somebody in the pub who I'd been trying to persuade to turn up there, and like a total idiot I put some stuff in my bag which would have been a terribly cunning thought had she shown up. You can guess where this is going, can't you?

In summary: within the past seven days, Murphy has defeated me three times with the same trick. He must think I'm a complete idiot. I'm not entirely sure I disagree.

Yesterday I did a lot of cleaning and tidying. I tidied my living room in preparation for people to come round and watch B5, at the end of which the room was almost unrecognisable (I haven't had more than one guest at a time in quite some months). I did huge amounts of laundry, and I dealt with some software-maintenance backlog and actually cleaned out my inbox. (It's always scary to see an empty inbox; some Bayesian subsystem in my mind tends to decide it's more likely that my mail client has gone mad and deleted all my mail than that I've actually managed to keep my inbox tidy!)

Also I ate the last portion of the stew I cooked at the start of last week, which had the feeling of more tidying-up because this particular stew came out so awful that I very nearly threw it all away as soon as I'd cooked it, but couldn't quite bring myself to waste all that food. I've been suffering through it for the whole week, so it felt very good to finish getting rid of it; another chore done, another annoyance cleared away.

By the time I'd done all that, and shown some B5 to people for the first time in over a year, and inflicted my homegrown PS2 games on lnr and Mike for an hour or so afterwards, I decided it had been a sufficiently full day that what I really needed to do was sit at home and have an evening to myself rather than go out to any parties. It always feels slightly odd to do that on a Saturday, the traditional party night of the week, but I get sufficiently few evenings to myself at the moment that just occasionally it does seem to be the most sensible day for one. Still feels odd though.

This morning I've just noticed an odd wording on the back of a tin of sardines: ‘Our sardines have been hand packed using fresh Portuguese sardines.’ Huh? Using? Did they get the sardines to pack one another, or use one sardine as a shovel with which to bung others around the place? What a strange piece of English.

xraycb points out that my personal web page, just after giving the link to my article on how to report bugs effectively, used to contain a comment along the lines of ‘Yes, I know that writing pontificating essays is the first step on the free software author's road to pomposity. I'm going to try not to make a habit of it’, but that this comment seemed to have been removed since he last looked.

In my defence, I will point out that the two lengthy wafflings I've posted in this diary in the past 48 hours have both had the form of questions and were largely aimed at furthering my own understanding, rather than attempting to shout my own set-in-stone opinions to the world. But fair enough, Charlie, point taken. I probably need to watch myself :-)

(And no, I didn't remove the comment because I intended to, or had resigned myself to, become more pompous. I removed it because the page on which I talked chattily about myself was no longer the same page as the one containing that link. Hmph.)

While I'm musing about programming and programmers, there's another thing I've been wondering over the past few years, which is how the next generation of programmers are going to learn.

( This gets pretty verbose. Again. )

There's a thing I've always wondered about programming, which is what exactly it takes to do it.

( lengthy, geeky, and might be offensively elitist to some )

A few weeks ago I decided that after taking a break from free software writing in November, I seemed to have recovered sufficient energy (and was going sufficiently stir-crazy) to have a go at doing something non-critical in a relaxed sort of way. Therefore, I started work on a general physics engine for Breakout games (since there are three different Breakout-style games I've been wanting to write for ages, and I thought it'd be obviously sensible to share as much code as possible between them).

Today I sat at the computer for four solid hours, writing a startlingly large amount of worryingly complex code to make this physics engine handle bouncing the ball off the sharp corners of bricks (as opposed to bouncing off brick sides, which I did last month and which is much easier). When I began testing it, there were a couple of really trivial segfault-grade bugs such as using completely the wrong variable as an array index, and I feared that if I couldn't even get that right then there was surely no hope of all the complicated maths being even nearly right. So I was expecting to spend at least another four hours debugging it.

But in fact, after I fixed those few tiny teething troubles and got the new code to actually run, the whole of the rest of it turned out to work perfectly. First time! (Well, there was one actual maths bug it took me a while to track down, but it turned out to be from my last coding session, not from today.)

It's at times like this I begin to think that perhaps I haven't completely lost it.