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.

$ svn commit
[...]
Transmitting file data ................
Committed revision 100001.

Bah! Missed.

Driving a carload of people to Owen's this evening, I reversed into his driveway, went a bit too close to a sharp bit sticking out of his gatepost, and tore a huge hole in one of my tyres.

This is, fortunately, what spare wheels are for. I'd never changed a wheel myself before, but it didn't turn out to be too difficult (apart from the fact that I somehow managed to break the handle off the wheel-changing tool holder while getting started!) and I've just got home in one piece. So tomorrow I suppose I'll have to go and get the tyre on the other wheel replaced; and in just a moment I'm going to go and have another try at cleaning the remains of the nasty oily gunk off my hands.

It hadn't been the best of days up until then, but that just pushed it over the line into One Of Those Days.

It's well known that endless editing and re-editing is a common activity among people who write; there's a strong tendency to be dissatisfied with your own words and always think you could just make them that bit better.

I don't often write in a creative fashion, but I do frequently find myself writing functionally, in order to convey concepts clearly to people. One of my key techniques for doing this well is to try to put myself in the position of the audience, i.e. somebody who doesn't already know whatever it is I'm trying to convey; it's very easy to leave a crucial fact or step out because you've forgotten that not everybody already knows it. Trying to imagine yourself in the position of the audience doesn't completely eliminate this risk, but in my experience it goes a long way towards it.

What seems to happen for me next is that I go a bit too far; once I've made the thing I'm writing as clear as I possibly can, I'm still dissatisfied with it because I'm imagining an even stupider audience. I seem to be reasonably good at not allowing this to drag me into endless re-clarifying; I do have the ability to think ‘right, that'll have to do’ and stop editing. But for a while afterwards I look at whatever I've written and can't help thinking it's completely incoherent waffle with no clear point and no relevance to its context (if any). And then I suddenly snap back from imagined-audience mode into me mode and realise that in fact it's absolutely crystal clear. That moment, when I suddenly realise that something I had given up on trying to make the least bit comprehensible has actually made perfect sense all along, is extremely weird.

I've been having this a lot over the past few days, so it occurred to me to wonder if anyone else gets anything like this.

When you have an opaque door with a push plate on one side and a pull handle on the other side, I'm always a little nervous when I approach from the pull side: if I'm just reaching out for the handle and someone pushes the door vigorously from the other side, it could hurt my hand, and I rely on my hands a lot. It's likely that my paranoia about this is unnecessarily strong; if so it's due to an incident when I was about thirteen and a kid at school kicked a door incredibly hard from the push side so that it swung through 90 degrees and then shattered the doorstop; nobody's hands were near the pull side at the time, but it always stuck in my mind that they could have been, and that whenever you approach an opaque door there might be a kick-happy rugby player on the other side of it.

Clearly the correct strategy given such a door is always to push it gently if you're on the push side, so that whoever's approaching the pull side has plenty of time to get out of the way, and if you're on the other side to keep your arm loose so that it will just be pushed aside rather than hit painfully if the door suddenly opens. I do both these things conscientiously, but I can't help wondering if there ought to be a better solution involving modifying the door itself to avoid this race condition entirely.

In most cases, the simplest answer is just to put a small window in the door, but that doesn't work when it's the door to (say) a toilet and half the point is that it doesn't have a window in. There must be other options, though. Perhaps if you made the door swing in both directions and put a pull handle on each side, so that simultaneous bilateral access would result in a harmless tug-of-war rather than a painful clobbering? But some people would probably push the door regardless, and I can't think of a cunning mechanism which allows a door to be pulled from both sides but pushed from neither. Alternatively, you could have the door slide open, so that you had to push sideways on the handle, and then simultaneous operation would merely cause it to open twice as fast; but that would require structural cleverness in the wall around the door, and might well turn out to be unacceptably fiddly to implement. I wonder what other simple solutions exist.

So, atreic and emperor got married yesterday, which was nice.

( wafflings on clothes, four-part harmony, ceilidh etiquette and exploding umbrellas )

I saw a web page just now which referred to Lewis Carroll as ‘the Reverent Charles Dodgson’.

I rather like that typo: ‘Reverent’ instead of ‘Reverend’. It suggests that what distinguishes a clergyman is not that people revere him, but that he reveres God more than most people. It carries connotations of humility and religious devotion; it suggests almost subliminally that the clergy are a means for exalting God, rather than vice versa. It's almost monk-like, somehow.

Of course, as an atheist I have no personal interest in whether or not God gets exalted. But even to someone who doesn't subscribe to the belief system in question, it seems to me to strike a more constructive note: ‘Reverend’ suggests ‘I know the Truth and therefore I'm great’, whereas ‘Reverent’ is more like ‘I know the Truth and therefore I'm going to get on with doing stuff about it’, which seems like a more generally well-adjusted attitude to me. And it's less intrusive to non-believers, who might interpret ‘Reverend’ as an unwanted command to revere someone they don't feel like revering, but who can't argue with ‘Reverent’ as a purely factual description of what someone does for a living.

In the unlikely event that I ever get round to doing something about one of my SF novel ideas, I might stick a religious order in the book and use ‘Reverent’ as the official honorific for its priesthood. The more I think about it from any angle, the more I like it.

(Hmm. If a religious order couldn't decide which of the two honorifics to use and wanted to avoid a schism, would they hold a reverendum?)

Happy birthday, Niccolò Machiavelli!

(Oh, and me too.)

When I was at school, I had a decent run of being the best mathematician in the school. One of my good friends was the second-best. (Well, so I thought at the time; in fact if I remember rightly he turned out to do better at Cambridge than I did. Perhaps at school I just had the advantage of being a year ahead.) He was a more naturally sporty type than I was, and he once observed that it always made a refreshing change to spend time with me, because while to everybody else in the school he was primarily a mathematical genius, from my point of view he was first and foremost a rugby player.

I too fall between two obvious categories, in various contexts. For example, I'm a hybrid mathematician and programmer; so to my colleagues at work, I'm often the person they think of when they have problems of a mathematical nature, whereas my mathematician friends tend to think of me when they have computing-related problems. For another example, I dress in a way that makes me look somewhat like a goth at work but somewhat like a normal in a goth club.

I don't imagine this sort of thing is in any way unique to me; it seems obvious to me that very few people are going to fall at the extreme end of any spectrum you can name.

However, there are a few spectra of which I generally consider myself to be at or near one end, and on those spectra it's occasionally disconcerting to encounter someone even further towards the same end. One of those spectra is the one ranging from pure maths through applied maths to physics; I've always considered myself to be a pure mathematician through and through, with a general distaste for the sloppy and approximate world of applied maths and no time at all for the uncertainties of actual physics. I avoided all the applied courses I could during my degree, and never regretted it.

So it's been rather a surprise this morning to find myself being consulted on a physics-related maths topic, on the grounds that I was more of a physicist than the mathematician consulting me. I couldn't actually do the maths in question, but I was able to explain intuitively what it all (well, most of it) meant in physics terms, which was what I was actually asked for. Evidently I'm further away from the end of that spectrum than I'd previously thought.

The sentences ‘I don't care’ and ‘I don't care one way or the other’, used so often as near-synonyms, are just occasionally completely different.

This has probably been obvious to everyone else for ages, but I've only just noticed it. It's perfectly possible to care in general about a situation, so that the pain it causes becomes your own pain and so that you wish to lend your strength to help achieve the most favourable outcome, without having a strong opinion one way or the other about which of the mutually exclusive possible outcomes would actually be the most favourable.

(I'm having those half-asleep long thoughts again, I'm afraid. When I'm sleeping in until nearly noon and lazing around all day, they don't seem to be restricted to the early mornings any more.)

Way back in 1999, the_alchemist persuaded me to read ‘Paradise Lost’. For a while afterwards I found myself thinking in iambic pentameter; Milton's poetry warped my brain into a rigid column ten syllables wide. I got over that after a while, but since then I've had something of a fascination with sentences in normal speech which just happen to come out in perfect iambic pentameter. I always notice them when they go past; I point them out (and irritate my friends). I naturally speak them quite a lot; I've always wondered what this fact portends.

Just now I had a fit of silliness. I wrote a short program to go through a piece of text and pick out all the sentences it thinks are in iambic pentameter. Then I ran it over the entire archive of my various online diaries, to see what it would find.

It doesn't function quite reliably. It uses a pronunciation database I downloaded to tell it the stress patterns in each word, but without a lot more intelligence it won't ever be able to determine the inter-word stress pattern given by the sentence's overall meaning. So the output needs filtering by a human, to get rid of junk like ‘I do hope it gets its act in gear soon’. However, about 50% of its output turned out to be plausible, which I thought was pretty good for a first attempt.

It turned up a number of sentences which made surprising sense out of context and were pleasingly poetic as stand-alone iambic pentameters:

Another day; another interview.
I wonder if it's something in the air.
I have a microwave and no food yet.
At least there are no known bugs any more.
Intense peeve of the day: the Halifax.
Excuse me while I go and kill some things.
I've had a victory at work this week.
The port had cleverly run out, you see.
Suppose I'd better go and do that, then.
Well, that's most of the chaos sorted out.
And then it goes completely off the rails.

As you can probably tell from the above, frustratingly few of the sentences I turned up rhymed with one another, but just enough did for me to be able to put together this almost coherent piece:

Hello out there and welcome to the show!
For starters, getting here was half the fun.
Another interview has taken place.
But probably a fairly normal one.

I oscillate between two states of mind.
I've learned to canter, mostly by mistake.
That's the whole kitchen up and running now.
Last Saturday, I baked a ginger cake.

She tells me they were selling gothic rock.
I wonder why it didn't just say so.
It never happened and it ain't so hard.
Shame it had milk in it, but there we go.

I might not even get it back today.
I shall be happy when it's gone away.