Hmmm; that's an interesting result.

Yesterday I dared to suggest that gaffer tape might not be the answer to everything. I got quite a few responses, some agreeing, some disagreeing.

Intriguingly, almost everyone who responded on LiveJournal contradicted me and strongly defended the Way of the Tape, whereas almost everyone who responded on Monochrome was agreeing with me (if not always with great conviction).

I wonder why LJ seems to have a greater affinity for gaffer tape than Monochrome. (I'm trying not to speculate that perhaps LJ itself might be held together with gaffer tape. :-)

I'm about to express an opinion which may be controversial. In fact, hell, never mind controversial, it may very well be an opinion that would get me burned at the stake in certain sections of society.

There exists at least one mechanical problem to which gaffer tape is not the right answer.

Sorry an' all, and I know that's almost an article of faith to some people, but.

(My car key has fallen apart again. Next stop, I think, superglue.)

‘Sorry I was late turning up; my bath overran.’

There ought to be a word for the moment when you realise you've made a joke by accident. It's sort of the opposite of ‘esprit d'escalier’: it shares the property that you belatedly realise there was a joke opportunity, except that in this case you find you absent-mindedly took it rather than missing it. Perhaps ‘esprit d'ascenseur’?

In other news, this has been a weekend almost exclusively dominated by Spectrum games. I slept badly on Friday night because I'd been up until late playing Exolon; I continued playing things when I got up on Saturday and by the time I went to the pub for beckyc's three-years-in-Cambridge celebratory afternoon my left thumb was killing me; by yesterday it had recovered enough to play a bit more, so I did. And I missed both the parties / film nights on Saturday, because Friday night's poor sleep had left me too tired even to watch films.

It's slightly worrying that this latest acquisition has caused me more immediate delight than any of the enormous number of gadgets I bought last year, and was entirely free. It suggests I didn't look carefully enough for the best possible value for money…

(It's also slightly worrying that of all the Spectrum emulators out there, the one Owen and I were able to run on the PS2 turned out to be written by a friend of ours. Every so often I get the strong feeling that my group of friends has written most of the useful stuff in the world. :-)

And that's been another good week.

Admittedly two of the three major reasons it's been good were the same reasons as last week (finally polished off the nasty maths at work, and actually released PuTTY 0.54); but. The third. The third reason this has been a good week is that Owen discovered FUSE, a Spectrum emulator which is able to run on PS2 Linux. I've been looking for one of those ever since I got PS2 Linux in the first place, since obviously if you're going to play Spectrum games you want to be playing them in your lounge on your TV rather than in a tiny little window on a PC in the study. So I'm happy.

It took a bit of hackery to get it to support the PS2 controller, but nothing too difficult; so I've just spent the entire morning playing some of my old favourites from 1986ish. The only reason I've stopped now is that I've bruised my thumb through overuse of the controller; what I really need is a rubber-keyed Spectrum keyboard with a USB interface :-)

Now I should probably eat lunch, before I forget…

So I've been trying to get a PuTTY release out for some weeks now; and finally I found time to actually do the deed this evening. So I worked my way through my extensive and brand new checklist of How To Do A Release and, satisfied, wandered off to the pub.

Three hours later I return to find that I failed to set the correct permissions on the actual program files, and furthermore about sixty-four people have mailed me to point this out. Up until then I was feeling pretty smug. Oh well…

So a colleague just celebrated his birthday, in the time-honoured manner of giving out cakes and doughnuts to everyone in the room. There's a semi-tradition that one also coyly hints at one's age on these occasions, by providing some sort of riddle. His riddle was simply ‘Rubidium’. (Of course, referring to an actual periodic table or using Google would have been cheating.)

So, after nearly ten years, my A-level chemistry came in useful for something. I was willing to bet it'd never happen. :-)

I suspect that today I'm going to be even sleepier than usual for a Monday.

At about 6am my smoke alarm went off. Not in an isolated-blip ‘my battery is running low’ sort of way, but in a full-on BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP ‘get your carcass out of bed and look for the fire’ sort of way. So I did so, with something approaching alacrity, and could find nothing in the flat that was either on fire or imminently about to be. (Except the gas flame in the boiler, which was entirely under control, as I checked by turning it off and on twice.)

A difficult dilemma about whether to wake up beckyc and see whether anything in her flat was on fire was resolved when I found she was already awake, so I got her to come upstairs and see if she could smell any smoke. (One of the rare occasions when my lack of sense of smell has made me feel seriously disadvantaged; if something had been smouldering, I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint it for myself.) Nothing; so I went back to bed, still a little uneasy but at least feeling that if I did burn to death in the next half hour I'd be able to look back from the afterlife and say I'd done my best.

Half an hour later, the smoke alarm went off again. That's the trouble with not finding any cause the first time: you may have assured yourself you aren't going to burn to death, but you haven't solved the immediate problem of a loud smoke alarm keeping you awake… So I've changed the battery, on general principles, and if that doesn't hold it I suppose it's new-smoke-alarm time. Bah. Final score: I'm down two hours of sleep and the price of the drink I owe Becky, and I still have to come in to work and at least try to behave as if I'm awake.

Sometimes technology just annoys me.

At work, I have been struggling for months with a particulary large and nasty piece of maths-related coding. This week I finished all the hard bits, moved into the home stretch, and although it wasn't actually quite finished by the time I went home on Friday, it will almost certainly be finished in a couple of days. That's an enormous load off my mind.

In free software, I've just this moment completed all the pre-release faffing, and placed an initial release tag, for the long-awaited PuTTY version 0.54. Owen has been (rightly) badgering me about this for a month or two now, so that's a good feeling as well.

And finally, a rather silly side project I've had for a month or so has come to fruition. Now that I have a program which automatically prints out nets of polyhedra, it occurred to me that it might be rather cool if the program could take a picture designed to cover the surface of a sphere (for example, a globe, or a star map), project it on to the polyhedron, and print a net with the picture ready-drawn on it, so you could fold it straight up into (for example) an icosahedral globe. Yesterday I produced the first successful output from this process, which was a dodecahedral model of the Gallery's resident small panda, Amble (see tartarus.org/~gareth/people/eek/).

So I call that a pretty good week, really. Now I think I'll mow my head and then go to the pub…

Quite often these days, when I get home from work on a Thursday night, I find myself thinking it's been a long week and I could murder a pint or three of beer. So I go to the pub, and the first pint is bliss, and lots of lovely people turn up and I have a good evening; but increasingly I'm finding that by the end of the evening I'm wondering why I drink beer at all. I seem to stop enjoying it somewhere around the end of the second pint, which I'm sure never used to happen. Odd.

This morning my car key began to disintegrate: the loop that holds it on to my key ring has broken. I'm frankly staggered at this. Although my car engine remains extremely reliable, practically everything non-essential or vaguely peripheral has managed to fail in the past year (battery, thermostat, exhaust, horn, two of the doors, that sort of thing), and I had started to think that it might have run out of creative ways to inconvenience me while still claiming to be a basically reliable vehicle. But for the key to fall apart is an act of sheer malevolent genius which makes me worry that perhaps, after all, it's only just getting started. I need a new car.

And finally, I figured out the other day why I occasionally get confused mail about my port of Monochrome's puzzle game Enigma[1] which appears to be talking about a different game. It's because, two years after I wrote it, someone else wrote a puzzle game also called Enigma[2], and people are mailing the author of the wrong one. This is annoying; on the one hand I'll cheerfully admit that ‘Enigma’ is a very bad name for a puzzle game because everybody is going to think of it, but on the other hand Amf and I had our one out there on the web two years before this other upstart thing, so they could at least have checked first. Hmph.

(And the other game is awful, as well. I downloaded it the other day and had a go. No wonder one of the people who mistakenly mailed me about it was complaining about the mouse control: the mouse control is utterly dire and lets the entire game down.)

[1] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/enigma/
[2] http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/apps/enigma/en/

Ho hum. I'm sitting at home feeling unexpectedly annoyed, for no particular reason.

I would be wandering out at this point to find out whether people are in the pub or at the Winter Ale Festival, but I'm unconvinced that I'd be good company if I did; and also Mary points out that this feeling of general grumpiness might be the tail end of my illness from earlier in the week, in which case I should probably stay at home and rest just in case.

*sigh*

I fear this means I'll miss the Winter Ale Festival entirely this year, owing to one or more prior bookings both tomorrow and Saturday. Oh well; such is life.

In other news, I'm now back at work, which is a relief; there's only so much time I can spend lying on the sofa watching nonstop Blake's 7 before I start to feel restless. (Strange as this concept may seem to some of my readers :-).

And it has snown. Oh joy, oh rapture, oh treacherous footing, oh extensive faff with clearing it off the car, oh happy days of kids being extra-specially noisy for snowball-related reasons as they walk to school past my bedroom while I'm still trying to sleep. Yes, I know plenty of people enjoy snow, but bah and furthermore humbug to the lot of you. I shall be happy when it's gone away.

I seem to have a free evening tonight (so far). I'd almost forgotten they existed.

If a goth were so morbid as to drape actual shrouds over their furniture …

… would they be death throws?

I felt even worse this morning, but after another day of lying around not doing very much I'm feeling almost energetic. It seems to me there's a good chance I might make it back to work tomorrow, which would be a relief.

This morning drswirly unexpectedly visited me and lent me the first season of Blake's 7 on video, which was a welcome alternative to lying on the sofa reading books I'd read before and feeling uuurgh. And this afternoon lark_ascending gave me a lift out to the garage to collect my car from its MOT, for no better reason than that I asked her nicely. It's at times like this that I feel surprised that I'm surrounded by lovely people. (I shouldn't feel surprised, but I do every time nonetheless.)

Good job I feel better, too, because in just under an hour and a half I've agreed to be on a random IRC server I've never heard of to hold a meeting about Arabic support in PuTTY. I'm not remotely sure how that will go, but at least it doesn't look as if I'll have to do it with my brain out of order…

In the previous entry I also intended to mention that I feel ill as well as tired, and to speculate that perhaps I was putting off actually becoming ill until I'd finished all the hectic dashing around last week. But I completely forgot to say all that before posting the entry. I think that adequately illustrates my level of competence right now :-)

In other news, last week was possibly the busiest and most hectic week I've had in some time. This was partly due to work (impending release), and partly due to PuTTY (impending release). I've felt absolutely shattered since about Thursday, and today I couldn't face going in to work at all (it was taking me thirty seconds to get from one end of a single coherent thought to the other).

I would ideally go back to bed, therefore, but I know I wouldn't be able to fall asleep anyway. I suspect a relaxing bath might be the next best thing.

When I was about ten, I remember having a very hazy idea of what I would eventually end up doing when I was grown-up and didn't live with my parents any more.

I hadn't quite twigged that the majority of my time would be taken up by a regular job; and also I wasn't so much into programming at the time (since I'd sort of taken a two-year break from the whole idea to play computer games instead). One of the things I had just discovered, on the other hand, was the fun of building polyhedra and other models and objects using cardboard and glue.

I vividly remember wondering, in an incoherent sort of way, what I'd be doing around the year 2000. The best idea I could think of was that I'd be doing roughly what I was doing right then, which was sitting at home making cardboard models of things; only since I'd have grown up and left home, I wouldn't have a family around to wave them at once I'd finished and say ‘ooh, isn't it pretty?’. I remember the sudden chill as I realised that having a house to myself and lots of spare time actually didn't sound nearly as fun as it should have been.

I'd completely forgotten this rather depressing childhood vision of my future; but as a result of my recent venture into automated polyhedron construction, I actually have recently made two polyhedra using cardboard and glue, and this suddenly jogged my memory. I thought back then that I'd spend my adulthood wandering aimlessly around a house too big for me, trying not to feel lonely at the lack of a bickering family to share it with, and resorting to increasingly arcane hobby activities in a desperate effort to stave off boredom.

Good job it turned out to be almost completely wrong, really. Instead of that, I have so much stuff I either want or have to do that it's a constant struggle to find any peace and quiet; I know I prefer living alone to having a bunch of housemates and wouldn't have it any other way any more; and I may not have a family, but when I create something useful or pretty I'm decidedly not short of people to wave it at and impress.

Suddenly I want to go back in time and show my ten-year-old self a vision of this lot, to reassure him that it wouldn't end up being nearly that bad. This is unusual, since normally when I think of my ten-year-old self what I mostly want to do is go back and thump him.

Ahem. Yes. Well, this seems like an appropriate time to look back on the year just past and review what I've done in it and how I've spent it; or, and this is more to the point, what I've spent in it.

This, for me, has primarily been a completely ridiculous year for gadgets. In the course of this year my techno-toy acquisitions have included two enormous flat-screen monitors, an even more enormous TV, a GameCube, a set of DECT phones, an MP3 car stereo, an indoor hardware MP3 player, a load of additional computer hardware to support my new MP3 habit, and a digital camera. And that's just the gadgetry; it doesn't count the new pair of glasses (for the first time in ten years), the totally unnecessary long leather coat, and moving to a more expensive flat.

Combined with other incidental expenses such as an unexpected car breakdown, this has actually caused me to go over budget; for the first year in as long as I can remember, I've ended the year with less money than I started out.

Although I don't have much truck with New Year's resolutions as a general concept, and certainly don't approve of people finding random things to resolve just for the sake of having one, it has recently been the case more than once that I happen to find I need a behaviour modification around this time of year; so in light of the above, this year my New Year's resolution is to STOP BUYING TECHTOYS. Perhaps in 2005, if I've managed to find anything else I really want, I might let myself have one or two treats, but this year I went completely out of control so I plan to tighten my fiscal belt for 2004.

(I decided a couple of months ago that this would be my New Year's resolution; it was rather scary the way my brain immediately started suggesting that perhaps I should buy a couple more gadgets, quickly, before it came into force at the end of the year…)

I think I'm going to interrupt the generally festive mood I'm seeing in other people's diaries around now, take a total change of direction, and muse for a while about the concept of leadership, specifically leadership as it applies to me personally.

Merry Christmas!

For what I think is the first time ever, I'm spodding on Christmas Day. This is because, for what is definitely the first time ever, I'm spending Christmas Day in my own home, on my own. Shortly my family will show up here, we'll do Christmas Day type things, and then they will go home.

This feels on the one hand slightly odd; ever since I left home, Christmas has always been a time for sleeping in strange beds, on parents' floors, or suchlike; it's been part of the standard routine. But on the other hand, it's also always been a part of the standard routine that's really annoyed me; and now that enough of my family live in Cambridge and within walking distance of my place, I hurriedly seized the opportunity to organise a one-day Christmas event so that everyone could sleep in their own beds both before and afterwards.

The downside, of course, is that this means I have to cook the Christmas dinner :-) But I managed that last year with Mum's help, so I'm reasonably confident of managing it again…

Oh yes, and I've just added some more Stuff to my website. It's now getting to the point where I might have to fiddle with the front page so that it has a usable index; all this chatty text introducing each of my subpages is fine if you're reading it because you want to know about me, but even I'm increasingly finding it a pain when I actually want to find a specific page.

Still. For anyone with any interest in polyhedra, or even simply with a desire to look at some pretty pictures or see what weird mathematical things I've been up to recently when I should have been lying on my sofa watching DVDs, you can now go and look at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/polyhedra/.

Now, with any luck, I ought to be able to actually relax for a bit. These momentary obsessions tend to take me over totally for a week or so, but then leave me in peace after that…