It has been a bit of a strange week.

Last night I released a new version of PuTTY, fixing a scary security hole which has apparently been present since the beginning of recorded history. We received notification of this hole a week ago, and I've been frantically running around trying to clear up the mess ever since.

Apart from that, this week has been pretty good so far. Skipped the usual Pizza Express gathering on Monday because I had arranged to be feeding home-made ad-hoc pizza to lnr, which was great fun (if messy, in a throw-everything-randomly-around-the-kitchen sort of way) and I should make home-made ad-hoc pizza more often. Then Calling yesterday, with the surprising addition of the_alchemist, who it was particularly nice to see.

The company in the building opposite this one is apparently involved with Huntingdon Life Sciences. I can tell this because there's a protest going on outside that building right now; from my desk I can hear a lot of scary mob-type yelling, an occasional amplified voice, and a variety of parping noises which are either someone playing a brass instrument terribly badly or car horns from motorists trying to get past.

I'm finding them moderately intimidating just sitting in the next building having nothing to do with the subject matter. When I went out to buy lunch they were only just beginning to gather, but by the time I came back half an hour later they were looking worrying enough that I decided to avoid them by going back into the office via the back door.

They'd better have given up and gone away by 5:30 when I want to leave. With any luck all that manic yelling will have given them sore throats by that time.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html is Paul Graham's latest essay, on what makes a Great Hacker. In it, he writes:

The people I've met who do great work rarely think that they're doing great work. They generally feel that they're stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it's only a matter of time until they're found out.

Now if only cause and effect pointed in the other direction… :-)

Insomnia for the second night running. Bah. Yesterday's was normal enough; Sunday nights often give me a sense of ‘it's important that I get enough sleep so I can get up for work tomorrow’, which is of course precisely the kind of pressure you don't need while trying to relax.

Tonight's is unusual. So normally with insomnia I wonder about the cause; it might be an odd mood, or it might be some physical thing just below the conscious threshold. If the latter, it might be any of the temperature, or indigestion, or hayfever, or an ordinary call of nature.

As best I can tell right now, the reason I currently have insomnia is all five of the above at once. I suppose at least that means I don't have to worry about which one it is.

Dark mutterings toward my doctor's surgery, which has apparently changed its appointment policy. You now can't pre-book an appointment by more than a day or two, and there are very few pre-bookable ones even then. You have to ring up on the day and get an appointment, which means you have pretty much no chance of getting one at a time of day that's convenient to you.

Previously you could pre-book by a week or so, which was great for non-urgent appointments because you could generally arrange a useful time of day, and there were also some emergency slots for booking on the same day if it was urgent. This seemed to work very well for me, although presumably it was somehow less good from the surgery's point of view or they wouldn't have changed it.

I rang up recently and said ‘Hello, I'd like to make an appointment to see a doctor’. My old GP had left Cambridge, so I had no particular preference out of the available doctors; it seemed to me that the best thing I could do was to give the surgery the maximum possible latitude to set up whatever was convenient for them. So the above was all I said: I simply wanted to see a doctor. Whichever doctor was convenient, at whatever time was convenient. And at this simple request, the receptionist went all doubtful and said ‘Ooh, er, I'm not sure we can do that’.

I boggle. If you can't do that, why are you even answering the telephone at all?

Today, for the first time since early May, I drove to work with music playing. After about a month of faffing, Dension have finally got themselves in gear and shipped a replacement front panel to Car Audio Direct, who shipped it on to me in somewhere under 24 hours, and astonishingly it actually works – I was gloomily convinced that Dension's identification of the faulty part from my description of the symptoms would turn out to have been wrong.

Now all I have to do (apart from waiting a few days before I relax, in case it cuts out again immediately like last time) is to figure out how to get the wretched thing back into its slot in the dashboard. It goes in most of the way, but won't go in the last centimetre and lock into place properly. I think the cables behind it must be getting in the way, but I've been unable to discover the correct knack for tucking them into niches. I have a nasty feeling I'm going to have to go back to a professional car audio shop and look like an idiot asking them to do something so simple. And they'll probably charge me tens of pounds for it as well…

Still, it lifted my mood noticeably on a day which began with me getting out of bed and immediately groaning ‘oh god, I feel a Monday coming on’. After two months of absence, I'd pretty much got used to having no music in the car, and I'd almost forgotten how much I enjoy it when I do have it.

‘What do you eat?’ I was asked the other day. This is not an uncommon thing to be asked by people thinking of cooking for me[1], but it's something I always have trouble answering coherently.

There aren't many things I really won't eat, so telling someone what to avoid is quick and simple. But sometimes people also want to know what I particularly like, and that's the bit I have trouble talking about. I think it's psychological: if I tell someone who's planning to cook for me that I like (say) parsnips, it feels as if I'm somehow morally obliging them to cook something involving parsnips, and that makes me uncomfortable because they're my host, not my servant. I feel a lot less uncomfortable once I've listed so many things I like that you couldn't possibly fit them all into the same meal (because then even my conscience can't believe I'm placing a detailed order), but getting over the initial hurdle is really hard.

On the other hand, if I'm not actually talking to someone who's imminently planning to cook for me, I'm perfectly capable of going on for ages about what I do and don't like to eat. I did this into a text editor yesterday, as an exercise, and I now have a three-page document describing my food tastes in ludicrous detail – which probably means it isn't suitable to be waved at people who ask me this question, because now there's so much of it that they'd lose the will to live half way through!

I wonder what a sensible solution is to this dilemma. I suppose I ought to be able to take the three-page document and ruthlessly edit it, but I'm naturally verbose and ruthless editing doesn't sit well with me…

[1] Interestingly, I don't tend to ask ‘what do you eat?’ myself, when it's me doing the cooking. I'm more likely to suggest a particular meal and see if it meets with approval; but that's probably just because I have a rather limited recipe collection.

‘Why are they chasing you?’
‘I don't know.’
‘Oh, come on! There must be a reason.’
‘Oh, there's plenty of reasons. I just don't know which one.’

– Terry Pratchett, ‘Sourcery’

I really, really wish that more people understood the difference between ‘I don't know what the answer is’ and ‘I don't believe there is an answer’.

If I ask, for example, ‘How are you going to do this?’, I don't mean ‘this is impossible so you would be ill-advised to even consider trying it’. At least, sometimes I mean that (and I'll usually make it clear), but just as often I mean ‘there are several ways to do this and it might make a difference which one you pick’, or ‘I would like to do this myself and would be interested in your opinion of which way is better’, or ‘I don't doubt that if you say you can do this then you know of a way, but I haven't managed to think of one myself yet, so I want to know what I missed’. A question is not necessarily a challenge. Sometimes it's just a question.

I remember an infuriating conversation I had once while in the grip of a painfully strong crush on someone. She had said something ambiguous and I wasn't sure what she'd meant by it; I was agonising about this to a friend. Well, said my friend, she might have meant <this>. Yes, I said, she might have. Or, said the friend, she might have meant <that>. Indeed, I said. Or perhaps, my friend added helpfully, she meant <something totally opposed to both of the above suggestions>. Yes, I said, she could perfectly well have meant that too. The friend looked puzzled. ‘Then,’ he asked, ‘what's the problem?’

Not knowing the answer to a question doesn't necessarily mean you lack any possible answers. It may equally well mean that you have too many possible answers and can't choose between them. Or, indeed, that you have exactly one possible answer but are unconvinced that there aren't others you haven't thought of.

Somewhat to my relief, I feel OK this morning.

The past week has been a little bit hectic. There was the Marillion gig on Tuesday, which involved driving up to Norwich; this meant that, pretty much straight after getting out of work, I spent seven solid hours either driving or standing up, and ended up getting to bed late. Then the Carlton Arms had its own beer festival, causing me to drink alcohol two nights running (which I usually try not to do, but a Carlton beerfest struck me as an exceptional circumstance), and I suspect that didn't do wonders for my sleep. By Friday evening I was pretty much good for nothing except wandering around like a zombie going ‘uurgh’; so naturally I let myself get talked into helping lzz sort out her ailing computer, stayed at the Gallery nattering and went to bed late again, and the next day drove Gareth down to London (through some fairly horrifying traffic) for Vicky S's random gathering-in-the-garden, then drove back again in time to go to pjc50's party as well.

When I woke up on Sunday morning I felt so utterly shattered that I seriously wondered whether I still had lingering traces of last week's illness. However, a concentrated programme of doing very little indeed all day seemed to help matters; hosting the Doctor Who gathering was useful as well since it meant I didn't even have to make any effort to go to that. This morning I felt surprisingly OK, so I think I might have survived after all.

The Carlton beerfest was good though. I said a few weeks ago that in all respects other than the nice beer, the ‘real’ beer festival utterly sucked as a drinking venue; so, of course, on this basis the Carlton must be an absolutely ideal place to hold an alternative one. And it was good; admittedly in two visits I only found one beer I was particularly interested in continuing to drink, but that one was very nice so that was OK. (Entertainingly, mobbsy, sion_a and I all independently picked that one off the programme within about ten minutes of each other. Evidently its description was by far the nicest-sounding one on the sheet. And the beer wasn't bad either :-)

Last year, I wrote a diary entry mentioning that I'd hacked a better mode of job termination notification into bash(1).

I've just got round to fixing the major bug in this patch, putting it up on the web, and mailing the bash maintainers about it. So if anyone who hasn't already got a copy of this is interested in giving it a go, you can get it from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bash-notify/.

Oddly enough, when I went back and checked my original diary entry on the subject, I was rather startled to find that it was actually written on 1st July – precisely a year ago today. That wasn't even intentional! How silly.

Drove to Norwich with Gareth and Owen last night, to see Marillion playing live at the UEA.

I'm normally not much of a fan of live music. For a start, there's the inconvenience. It's invariably a total pain to get to the gig you want to go to, including figuring out how you'll get home if it goes on until after the last train; when you get there, you typically have to stand up for the whole time you're listening, which gets tiring pretty quickly. Plus it costs more to get into a one-off gig than it does to buy an album you can play over and over again; so given all that, I tend to feel that a gig had better be a mindblowingly wonderful experience to be worth the aggro. Which they're usually not: the music is often so loud my ears max out and I don't get to hear it properly, the sound balance has a nasty habit of sucking royally so that the instruments (especially the drums) drown out the vocals, any feeling of awe at being in the same room as a famous band in person is rapidly outweighed by annoyance at the sweaty punk next to me elbowing me in the ribs constantly, and if there's anything worth watching going on on the stage then I can pretty much assume that someone's head will get between me and it at the crucial moment. I find live gigs are particularly bad when the band is one I haven't heard before; on the one occasion I tried this, I came out with very little more idea of what their music is like than I had when I went in.

Despite this, I still go to gigs on occasion; I think I've now been to … um … between seven and ten, depending on which borderline cases you count. Mostly I'll only go if it's a band I like a lot and I expect to recognise a lot of the music played, because then my brain can fill in the details when all I can actually hear is a vague thumping noise in roughly the right rhythm.

And just occasionally it is worth it. Marillion's gig last night had an actually sensible sound balance, so that the music actually sounded like music played by Marillion; but it had more feeling and more energy than hearing the same songs on studio albums. The first half of the gig was from their latest album ‘Marbles’; I had already heard several of these songs coming out of Gareth's CD player and had largely felt that I could take them or leave them, but the same songs coming out of the live band did a much better job of grabbing me by the throat and making me enjoy them. Then they went back over their earlier stuff (i.e. albums some of which I actually own) and managed to make my spine actually tingle a few times, which generally takes some doing because I don't tingle easily. As it were.

I think the real low point for me was when they encouraged audience participation in ‘Cover My Eyes’, because the audience were utterly not up to the job. (A sharp contrast with the last NMA gig I went to, at which the band played the opening riff to ‘Poison Street’ and let the audience roar the whole first verse back at them unaccompanied, and it came out in time, with intelligible lyrics and in a clear consensus key. Evidently some bands have talented fans, and others don't.)

But overall, an enjoyable evening. Now all I need is to find an extra hour or two of sleep from somewhere (it didn't finish until 11:30 and then I had to drive back to Cambridge and drop off my passengers)…

Curiously small pizza gathering yesterday; instead of the usual 8-12 people we had nobody except me, Owen and Ian.

There had been an incident the previous week with a threatened boycott of the place (owing to the manager pulling up outside and parking antisocially while talking on a mobile phone), so we wondered briefly if a genuine boycott had been arranged and the three of us had somehow failed to hear about it. Apparently not, though; it seems it really was just a large coincidence that everyone else happened to have something else to do on the same day. How odd. That tends to happen on Bank Holidays, but I've never seen it happen purely by chance before.

Ho hum. Got up yesterday, felt moderately awful, had recovered twenty minutes later so went to work anyway. Got up today, felt utterly horrible, went straight back to bed, and apart from crawling out briefly to email in sick didn't emerge until nearly noon.

Hot baths are very good when you're ill. They're the closest thing to still being in bed that also gets you clean.

Now I feel basically human, though still moving a bit slowly. Probably best if I stay on the sofa for the rest of the day and rest myself thoroughly rather than trying to make it back to work for the afternoon.

Ho hum. That was a very nice evening up until about 10:30, at which point things began to go wrong.

Up until then I had been at Chris and Yasmin's in rainy Sawston, helping Chris celebrate his birthday. The invitation had said ‘bring a pizza’, so on a random whim I had instead brought a pizza base and Much Stuff to pile thereon, and in a fit of supreme confidence had even brought a second pizza base so I could feed Owen as well. This went mostly OK, and our pizzas were piled by far the highest of anyone's in the room, so yum. Then we all sat down and watched Amelie, which is still a thoroughly lovely film. So far, so good.

Shortly after 10:30 I drove back to Cambridge with the intention of dropping in on the Calling for an hour or so before going to bed. Leaving my bag in Sawston through sheer muppetry.

Curiously, several of the people I usually expect to see at the Calling seemed to be absent, and instead quite a few people who aren't normally there were present. So I chatted to those instead, and just when I started looking around for people to say goodbye to, then one of the former group turned out to have been there all along but invisible to muppets like me who don't look hard enough. Did I feel foolish.

In addition, at around this point my stomach started to hurt, making me remember my hand-made pizza efforts and start to wonder if I'd inadvertently poisoned Owen.

This morning things look a little more sunny, since it turns out Gareth has rescued my bag. And since I felt fine this morning, I imagine my stomach hurting was more likely to be stress over my multiple muppeticities late last night. Though I won't know for sure until I hear from Owen…

Hmm, I seem not to have written anything in here for ten days.

I think I'm currently going through a boring phase. I'm finding it hard to think of topics of conversation, because every time I look back through recent things that have happened to me, they all seem like non-starters; and I suspect it's for much the same reason that nothing much has seemed worth writing about in here either. It's not that I'm not doing things, just that all the things I've been doing are – for one reason or another – unsuitable for random conversation. Either they're so technically specialist that even other geeks wouldn't be particularly interested, or they're things that only make sense inside my own head, or they're things I actively don't want to talk to people about.

The Dension is still broken. I mailed the shop I bought it from, and they talked to Dension themselves, who claim to have managed to figure out which part was faulty simply from my detailed description of the symptoms; so they said they'd just send me a new part. Incredibly convenient if it works, since I wasn't looking forward to the hassle of sending the entire thing off for diagnosis and repair. I just hope they've correctly identified the fault … Anyway, the shop mailed me back this week to say that they'd received the replacement part from Dension, but it had been damaged in transit so they'd sent it back again. While on the one hand it's nice that they're actually paying some attention, and it's certainly better than them sending the part all the way on to me just so that I could find it was broken, it's still somewhat annoying.

Also this week I did a good deed and saved someone some money. Prue, my Scrabble-addicted colleague and friend, had recently seen someone playing ‘Upwords’ (Scrabble-like game with the gimmick that the tiles can be stacked so you can overlay new letters on existing words) on a train and was considering buying it; now I'd actually played it before and didn't think it was nearly as good as Scrabble proper, so I tracked down the copy I'd played, borrowed it from (as it turned out) drswirly, and invited her round so she could have a go before spending money. She was as unconvinced as I'd been, so probably won't be wasting her disposable income on it.

Upwords is strange. The first time I played it, I was left with the strong impression that the scoring system didn't encourage the right kinds of play; most of the strategies that scored serious points didn't feel like worthy exercises of ingenuity, but more like cynical exploitations of loopholes, while really clever moves went largely unrewarded. Playing it for the second time this week, I still felt that, but in addition it got very hard to make any moves by the end of the game. It's all very well being able to lay a whole new word on top of an existing one, but when you have to preserve the wordhood of any words you intersect on the way, you end up rather depending on the first half of the game having involved lots of words that could be turned into other words by changing only one letter. If it didn't, all players are scuppered equally and the game becomes frustrating.

Still, on the plus side it made a good excuse to practice my new mushroom risotto recipe again, so it wasn't all bad :-)

It occurred to me the other day that I completely forgot to publicly mock the crackers who attacked the PuTTY website late last year. (Some of my readers will have heard this story already.)

Whew, my GameCube still works.

I booted it up last night for the first time after it crashed the other week; whatever was bothering it then appeared to have been only temporary, and it now seems to run fine. This is a relief, since it's my diversion of choice while I'm airing the house out at night, because I can play it without the lights on which means the open windows don't attract legions of insects.

In other news, hmm, what have I been doing? Went to Strawberry Fair on Saturday, rather against my better judgment since it's been entirely tedious in recent years. The purpose of going was to track down a particular T-shirt stall for drswirly, which turned out to be absent; the rest of the fair was exactly as tedious as we'd feared so we left it in a hurry.

In a break with tradition, pizza yesterday was at Zizzi's, a new pizza-and-pasta place a few doors down from our normal Pizza Express. On the plus side, the food was very nice. On the minus side, it was very loud, the seats were uncomfortably hard, the waiters really couldn't get their heads round the amount of iced water eleven Camgeeks can drink, and the service was slow. On the neutral but somewhat odd side, the garlic bread starter was the same size as a normal pizza, and the pizzas larger still; this would have been less puzzling if the other starters and the pasta dishes hadn't appeared to have perfectly normal portion sizes. Having one starter three times the size of all the others just struck me as weird.

Subconsciouses are amazing things.

Mine is astonishingly good at all sorts of stuff. It will frequently prompt me to do some moderately random thing, or to do something in a particular way, and it will later turn out that doing that had some fantastic consequence such as completely avoiding a potential large problem, even though that problem hadn't consciously crossed my mind at all at the time my subconscious prompted me to make the decision.

Sometimes this gets taken to extremes, and I find myself behaving strangely and apparently erratically for an hour at a time, and I'm consciously thinking the whole time ‘I shouldn't be behaving like this’ but I keep doing it nonetheless because the hunch is too strong, and about 24 hours later I suddenly realise that there was an incredibly good reason for me doing so which my subconscious didn't bother to explain to me.

It's an absolutely amazing achievement; a tour de force of prediction, pattern-spotting and (on occasion) pre-emptive tactical planning. It's a much better driver than I am and has saved my life at least once behind the wheel; it programs at least as well as I do when I'm consciously thinking about it; I rely on it implicitly in so many circumstances that I'm sure I'd be completely helpless if it were swapped with someone else's.

I just wish that, once in a while, it would SHOW ITS WORKING.

Cooked mushroom risotto for myself and lnr last night. I had cooked this once before in November, and it was a perfectly edible meal then, but this time I made some modifications to the recipe and it came out distinctly yum rather than merely edible; one of the most mushroomy-tasting things I've eaten in quite some time.

I must rapidly find excuses to cook it for some more people :-)

Hectic weekend just gone. Yesterday I drove down to Oxford for hilarityallen's birthday party; partied, stayed overnight in a B&B, then next day drove the remaining group out to Uffington White Horse where we did a six-mile walk. Just come back to Cambridge.

Put like that, it doesn't sound too hectic, does it? Well, it gets a lot more so when you're transporting a different passenger in each direction of the journey, several other people have entrusted luggage to you that would have been more hassle to take on the train/bicycle, that luggage is again different in each direction of the journey, and you couldn't be bothered to travel light so you threw everything into the car and reckoned you'd sort it out when you got there. The logistics alone were as much effort as anything else in the whole weekend :-)

Made a welcome change from the week just past, though, in which I've mostly been spending my evenings at home sulking. (In principle what I was doing was avoiding the beerfest because I couldn't be bothered with the crowds and chaos, but in practice I think ‘sulking’ is a much better word for what it felt like.) I spent a lot of time working out some general annoyance on the GameCube, until Friday evening when the GameCube made worrying-sounding noises and then crashed. This didn't help my mood either! So it was just as well to get away from absolutely everything and have a weekend somewhere completely different. Now I'll see if I can start being usefully sociable again…