This year, after 12 months of trying, I have finished my ESCape. With my new-found freedom I shall be separating files. I expect my husband Rob will be rebelling after his year of SUBstitution as he too attempts to ESCape. Still, at least I’m not 100000_b yet.

…Slim ShadyDaniel Silverstone.

I just thought I’d take this opportunity to back Martin F. Krafft up on the point of names and IRC. Those of you who know me on IRC know me as Kinnison. There exists exactly two people in this world who I tolerate calling me that in real-life. One is my husband and the other knows who they are. The main issue is that my brain works very very oddly and as such I don’t actually recognise the sound of ‘Kinnison’ as someone trying to get my attention. Plus it takes a conscious effort on my part to link that name to myself in anything other than realtime online communication.

So, along with Martin, I’d like to raise the point once more that unless you’re actually speaking to me on IRC or a talker, please remember, my parents gave me the name ‘Daniel’ and surprisingly I quite like it. Also note, I am not ‘Dan’ ‘Danny’ ‘Dannster’ ‘Dan the man’ or any other irritating diminutive or cutesy variant.

</rant>

The Google Summer of Code is upon us once more, and this year two projects dear to my heart are involved as mentoring groups. The first and perhaps most obvious is Debian but a less well known but equally important project to me is NetSurf which just announced that it is participating this year.

If you fancy working on a really cool small embedded browser project this summer, you could do worse than to look at NetSurf.

…or “How much does it cost to fly to Argentina? Fuff that!”

The Ubuntu developer summit (UDS-Intrepid) is in Prague this year. The Debian Developer conference (Debconf) is in Argentina (at Mar del Plata) this year.

Flights to Prague are ca. £100 for two people, return tickets, from Manchester, at convenient times. Flights to Argentina are ca. £700 – £800 per adult, return tickets, from Manchester, not particularly convenient timewise. Or around £1700 for two people, return tickets, from Manchester, at convenient times.

So, basically I have to spend less than £1500 on the accomodation and the Ubuntu conference becomes cheaper than the Debian one to attend. As such, I’ve sent an email to the Ubuntu guys travel agents and we’ll see what they say. I doubt Debian can offer me £650 each for myself and my partner in order to bring the costs thus-far into alignment. Pity really since I love Debian conferences.

(Oh yeah, and not to forget the Lua workshop this year, Washington DC, mid July. Best flights I could find for that were around £600 each also, so no Lua conference for me :-( Not that I’d fly to America right now anyway given the supposed issues with taking any form of electronic medium through customs. At will, they supposedly can take copies of any media you have with you, including USB sticks. So even though my laptop and USB stick can individually be stolen and not compromise my key, moving through US customs might force me to revoke my digital identity. So not happening.)

Via Lesley Mitchell I was pointed at Wil Wheaton’s ficlets page and unfortunately for the world, I was inspired to contribute three original ficlets to the site. As a result, please visit my ficlets page and perhaps you’ll be inspired to write a prequel or sequel to one of my wibblings.

I am in need of a C parser which I can use to detect violations of a coding standard. Particularly it must be able to be sensitive to comments (the internals of which are important also) and whitespace, over and above the usual need to be sensible about the rest of the language.

In order to be ideal, it should not need the C to be preprocessed first. I am not after a syntax checker, after all – the compiler does that for me. I want to be able to detect things like struct{ where struct { is what we mandate in our coding style. However I also want to detect more complex things such as static functions which lack documentation comments, or functions which are not declared as returntypenewlinefunctionname(arglist)newline{.

I hope someone has a cunning idea…

D.

My cat appears to like cola and also twiglets. Did I get a defective model?

If you happen to have my landline number (starts 0161) then it’s important to know that it has changed.

In order to know the new one, either ask me by email, ring me on my mobile phone, or follow these instructions to mutate the old number:

1. Split the STD off the front.
2. Split the number into a three digit section and a four digit section.
3. Subtract 27 from the three digit section.
4. Subtract 8000 from the second section.
5. Add 724 to the second section.
6. Reassemble the phone number.
7. To verify your result, the digits of the phone number, including STD, should add up to 29.

Ingo Juergensmann recently asked if there is a way to get more entropy for exim4 for a way to make exim4 take less entropy.

A while ago I posted my solution which grabbed the imagination of Steve Gran who I believe created and upload a debian package which garnered a not inconsiderable amount of back-flack from people who failed to realise that I wrote it because I wanted something which would solve my problem, and that perhaps the package needed more disclaimers or warnings.

One person actually took time to explain things to me and provide sample code which one day I will incorporate into the release copy of randomsound but for now it’s just crap :-)

So Ingo, one option is to install the randomsound package and enjoy that, you might have to backport it to stable if that’s what your server runs.

Another would be to spank the fool who wants to send huge mails through your server and tell them to get a web space :-)

1. Who is to say how large a potato can be?
2. Does this koan have the budda nature?
3. If a monkey falls from a tree, can a fruitarian eat it?

Kthnxbye,

Daniel

Today I started fencing again. After a year of swimming I felt that I could end my nine-year-long gap with a chance of not dying horribly in the first five minutes. Indeed I lasted almost fifteen before I had to stop. In two hours I managed a small warmup/stretch, a ten minute hit about to get the feel of the weapon again, a short fight, which I lost 5–2, but to be frank, that I got two points was going well by then. And then later, once I had caught my breath and the burn in my legs had gone down, I had a short following/simple-movement lesson with another of the fencers who was kind enough to provide a body and prompts. I chatted with various of the people there, volunteered to help with the Ashton Open which is coming up at the end of the month, decided to join the club, got volunteered to help look after their website and ordered a jacket in OMG-HOW-BIG-ARE-YOU?!?! size. I really enjoyed the evening, and it is scary to once again realise how close-knit and friendly the british fencing community is.

My quadriceps really need a lot of work, they’re where all the burn is/was, so I guess I’ll be practicing standing en-garde and lunging. My balance is way off as well, but that will come back with time and practice. The two people who helped me this evening both commented though that I appear to have retained the finger and wrist technique, so as soon as I can marshall my elbow and shoulder into behaving properly again, I stand a chance of actually being able to fight more effectively.

I really must go and get my eyes re-tested though, I fenced without my glasses this evening and it was quite difficult at times to judge distance, despite not being terribly short-sighted.

Still, all in all an excellent experience. So I’ll be heading back next week.

This filk has been kicking around in my head for some time. I recently took the time to gather some info about the Dmitry Sklyarov case and formed this little ditty.

With apologies to Tracey Chapman…

Three weeks in a Las Vegas jail
For this software, for this software.
Fifty thousand dollar bail
For this software, for this software.

And everybody thinks;
That I’m the fool.
But they can’t read
Any docs from you.

The things we won’t do for docs?
I’d climb a mountain if I had to;
And risk my life so I could read you.
You, you, you…

Every day I’m psychoanalysed
For this software, for this software.
They dope me up and I tell them lies
For this software, for this software

I follow my heart;
And leave my head to ponder,
Deep in these docs
No man can read.
I follow my heart;
And leave my mind to wonder,
Are these docs worth
The sacrifices I make?

Using the low order bit of the ADC output of your sound card, randomsound gathers entropy, debiases it and offers it up to your kernel's random pool.

It’s cool, it’s funky, it’s probably hideously insecure, but what the hey… download randomsound and have a play today.

Mostly, I wrote this to toy with the “exim4 eats all my entropy” problem which some of us who haven’t been able to upgrade to the very latest exim4 packages suffer from. Also it solves the problem of world peace; feeds all the starving; and magically resurrects the parents of every orphan ever, while curing everyone of HIV.^*

I’m interested in anyone who wants to tell me why I really shouldn’t run this, but thus far, it has been a life-saver for my mail infrastructure.

---

^* Some of these claims may be lies.

A few days ago I decided it’d be really handy to have a tool which would take a description of a structure as it apears on disk/flash/network (I.E. packed, not necessarily aligned, perhaps wrong endianness, etc) and provide as output a C header file containing an appropriate struct definition for manipulating the data and a set of functions for packing and unpacking the data. The idea was to be a little more efficient than the utterly generic pack/unpack routines which are out there, but perhaps not as efficient as a custom packer/unpacker would be. Indeed the intention was also to be robust in the face of madness rather than quick but explosive.

I now have a fairly stream-of-consciousness set of notes about what I am calling Yue Fei for want of a better name. Yue Fei was one of the more famous chinese generals who held a rank similar to ‘Field Marshall’. Given the purpose of the program is to marshall fields of data, it seemed appropriate and also conveniently two syllables and easy to remember.

What I am after is comments and ideas. Anything from “Pah, your idea is already implemented <here>” through to “Here are some ideas to improve things” or “It won’t work unless you do <foo>”. Anything useful basically. If you care, you should know where to find me.

If enough people think it’s a good idea and worth having, I’ll start work on it fairly soon and create the usual software page on my website etc.

Please do have a read of the notes and let me know what you think.

You know who you are, oh yes. Perhaps you’ve forgotten to email. Perhaps you posted something instead of emailing, perhaps you’ve lost the info sheet (you idiot) and haven’t quite gotten around to getting the common sense together to email me about it. Whatever the issue is, I need to know now!

I spent a lovely weekend with my family, unfortunately I was informed that the party’s rsvp address was not being flooded with responses. Indeed we did some maths and worked out (excluding family since that is kinda being handled out-of-band) that of 32 invites sent out covering 47 invitees, we have received only 14 yes I’m coming messages covering 18 (including a +1 we hadn’t expected, and lacking two +1s we had been expecting) people. We have received four ‘no’ responses covering 7 people (fortunately we’ve managed to have a mini party for five of those up here in Manchester) so that’s a mere 18 replies to 32 invites.

This isn’t just poor-showing, it’s causing problems. I can’t invite more people who perhaps weren’t on the first list because of space, without knowing whether or not people are planning on turning up. My parents (to whom the reply address goes) can’t book catering, plan for the bar, etc, without knowing who is coming.

I know some of you just don’t know yet, but a mail saying “I want to come, I’ll be doing ‘foo’ and will be able to tell you for sure by ‘bar date’” helps a hell of a lot.

If you’ve lost the inlay sheet, either email me and I’ll send you a PDF, or else find me on IRC.

At this rate, there won’t be much of a party :-(

As a reference, people who still haven’t replied include: a couple who used to (and presumably still do) own a cute orange snake which loves belt loops and pockets. An angry young man who lives near a Zebra. A chemist/astronomer’s namesake. Someone who owned a launchpad long before Mark did. An Audiophile. A brit in america with an american who is a brit at heart. Someone who simply doesn’t know. The suckee. A frenchman in spain. A Cambridge educated walker in London. La Femme, et sa Femme. Leif’s parents. An ex-uni friend of mine who works for the dark side. A release manager and his wife.

If you recognise yourself in that list, please email in your reply NOW.