I was very worried just then that I could use emacs-shell (eshell) in conjunction with emacs-tramp (tramp) to access my laptop’s hard drive as though it was local. Just thought I should share the pain. grin

I hate hayfever season. Particularly since now I work on a converted farm, there’s loads of grass pollen around. sigh

I have decided to actually try and follow some of ‘Big Brother’ this year. Unfortunately it seems to be quite hard to follow without E4 or a subscription to their broadband feed service. Oh well. None of them have come out yet (as gay or dyke) and it’s a sad thing to say, but the presenter of BBLB is actually cuter than any of the housemates this year.

Spring is here! Spring is here! Life is skittles, and life is beer. I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring. I do. Don’t you? ‘course you do!

Bloody OpenMOSIX MFS has inconsistent handling of fstat() and stat() with a 64 bit dev_t Irritatingly, GNU CP and GNU MV notice that difference and refuse to do things, complaining that things are changing under their feet because when they go stat() open() fstat() they get different device numbers. cry

Bloody pension documentation is next to impossible to understand. Plus I’m not certain, but I think that my directorship in Pepperfish might bugger it all up. sigh

http://www.petoffice.co.jp/catprin/english/

Why is it that the format produced by this grotty Bill-Of-Materials program has to be the only format utterly and completely unparseable by regular expressions? Gah!

Again a stolen meme: This time it’s from Livejournal:mikosquirrel via Livejournal:gerald_duck and Livejournal:gwendraith. The rules are as follows: Five questions. Pick one you don’t like, drop it. Replace it with one you want to answer that hasn’t been asked, and that doesn’t usually get asked. (Favourite colours, favourite foods, and other insufferably dull things are banned on pain of having a coffee table nailed to your head.) The next person does the same. I’m following on from Livejournal:gwendraith‘s question set, and I’m dropping the question she answered about obscure book/dvd etc, and am replacing it with the final one in the list. So, here goes: What is your favourite children’s book?—Somewhere at my parent’s house, buried in a pile of goodness knows what, will be my copy of the Seuss classic “The Butter Battle Book”—regardless of the Enid Blyton and Beano which was spoon-fed to me as a child, my lasting memory of a “chidren’s book” (since I used to read Asimov and Tolkein once I could cope with the words) is that of the Seuss book in which a battle, strangely analagous to the interactions I observed between the adults of my world, raged over a trivial and utterly daft issue—namely that of whether one should have ones bread butter-side-up or butter-side-down. If your life was a maudlin country and western song, what would it be called?—Unfortunately I think it’d have to be called Ain’t that a shame which is a song title already used, but I think Dolly could pull off a damned good rendition of it in which we’re not entirely sure what the shame was about, but we’d know how ashamed she was of it. Pick one phrase, movement, or scene from a book, poem, movie, song, or other work that Really Gets You. This one is quite hard, but here goes: book: I always end up dreamy and confused whenever I read Asimov’s passage about the robots recovering Elijah after the accident in the hover-car outside the robotics institute on Aurora. poem: Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden always gets me. movie: I always cry when E.T. (nearly) snuffs it. Which place or object, that you’ve never been to or seen, is most important to you? I’d absolutely love to visit outer-space. I feel that it represents the next-major hurdle outside of managing our own globe, and perhaps a more tractable problem than dealing with our more “local” issues. Now for my new question: If you found yourself independantly wealthy (and thus without a need to work for money) what would you do, and why?—I have often imagined this scenario, generally when slightly tipsy and melancholic after a long day at the office during my summer internship at Creature Labs (now defunct). With the nice cars, castle in Scotland, good food, personal trainer etc all taken as read—I’d like to think that I would create a space in which free software could be actively developed and maintained; providing a service to what I see as an increasing user-base. I want to see the promotion of a far more pragmatic approach to computing within industry; a better understanding of what computers can be used for, and, perhaps more importantly, what they should not be used for. I’d like to see security understood by more than the few; and properly dealt with by more than the fewer. Erm, I’m sure I had more to say about this once… Oh well. Phew—glad that’s over. D.

My mother is trying to persuade me to let her and dad visit when Rob and I go on holiday ( if we get the chance that is ). Unfortunately I’m now told that it’d involve letting my 12 yr old nephew (fiddler) and my 5 yr old niece (who thinks there’s nothing better than rearranging stuff) also visit. Now, I wouldn’t have a problem except that it’ll take Rob and me many weeks to render the house “kid-safe” and I’m not sure whether or not I’m prepared to put that sort of effort in. It’d take ages to render the bedroom parent-safe as it is. sigh

Bob and I just rearranged our entire rack. It took us just under 40 minutes and liberated loads of power and network cables. We also managed to add a shelf, move the switch, and only have a total of about 60 seconds of downtime on our invisible-networks node. Now, why can’t we be so efficient at tidying the rest of the house? pout

I’m not evil, am I?

Why is it that people seem to expect me to solve their programming problems, and then complain when I say “But that one is plainly simple, just do it yourself” ? I mean, it’s not as though I get asked complex questions like “How do I write a microkernel OS?” I just get daft questions like “Where is the documentation for GDBM?” sigh

Why is it that when Rob doesn’t want nautilus to manage his desktop, it does. Yet when I want nautilus to manage my desktop (so I can evaluate it and decide if I like it or not) it won’t ?