So in Brazil I thought it’d be an amusing thing to do to introduce some people to a natty card game I know called Cambridge Standard Five Card Mao. It caught on really well there, and it seems that I have single-handedly caused the fall in output of a lot of Open-Source projects because now everyone is playing it. Livejournal:sfllaw seems to have been playing it at OLS and it can only get worse. Aah well, memes will be memes.

Last night I accepted a new rôle and have resigned from my position at MIPS. I’m very excited about my new position and I’d like to thank everyone who helped me to get noticed.

We thought they were being progressive and forward thinking, but no, they just took ten steps back.

Continuing in the same vein as this I would like to offer one BUG token to anyone who can give me a rune to tell mozilla-thunderbird to render the text/plain component of a multipart/alternative section in preference to the text/html component of it.

Plans for my web application framework continue. I now have a wealth of notes and ideas at http://wiki.digital-scurf.org/Aranha and I continue to add to it. I am currently pondering documentation styles and am interested in how various scripting languages document themselves. I am familiar with Perl’s POD documentation format, and also the Python docstring format (at least as far as .py files go) but I’m interested in how Python documents functions etc provided by its C interfacing layer. (I know Perl uses POD again). Also I’m interested in how languages like Ruby etc do it (assuming they do). I’ve got rudimentary ideas for documenting things in the Lua side of things using the styles and format shown at http://aranha.pepperfish.net/docs/ but I currently lack any good ideas for doing the equivalent from the C side (short of producing the Lua skeleton in a separate file and documenting the C side there).

I measured the SG of the wine as 1.035 today which means an approx abv of 9%. I also taste-tested it. It’s really rather fruity. I’m aiming for 14 to 15 percent alcohol by volume so I imagine it’ll be done tomorrow or Wednesday. Then I have to “stop” it, and let it settle

Myself and Livejournal:nunfetishist finished our first attempt at (admittedly kit-based) home-made wine on Friday. It was really quite nice, so we’ve decided to attempt an interesting recipe I found for tea wine. We’ve made earl-grey and citrus wine. We think it’s about 6% abv currently, so it should be finished fermenting in a few days. I’ll post the recipe if/when it turns out to be drinkable.

A short while ago I thought it’d be a jolly good idea for me to have a diary which I kept up-to-date with what I was doing and where. (I had some narrow-misses where I had committed to do things and then forgotten about them until I’d almost committed to do something else on the same day etc.). So I installed a simple webcal based diary at home and since then I’ve found out just how little of my time is my own. Perhaps I should go back to the old ways; except I like knowing what I’m meant to be doing and when. And webcal can email me to remind me (which is cool).

So, I finally got a replacement for my contract today from MIPS (I lost my previous one) and discovered that my notice period is… wait for it… three months. Is it just me, or would you, as a company, not particularly want a dissatisfied employee remaining for three months after they give intention to go? I mean… Sure you want a nice handover period, hell, I’d probably have offered to stay for six or maybe eight weeks if my notice period had been only a month, but three months? Fuck! On the other hand, that does mean that even if I had been interviewed for $COMPANY I wouldn’t have started there until around now. sigh To put this in perspective; when I was offered the job I was so enthusiastic about the kernel, compiler and embedded development I’d be doing that I didn’t stop to think that a three month notice period was a potentially bad thing.

Well, I finally got a reply about the application I made to the unresponsive company as detailed in this posting. It was a negative…

Dear Daniel,

Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in contacting you again.

As you know, we ran an advertisement for an Embedded/Video Engineer and it was our intention to invite you to attend an interview once we had the opportunity to consider all the applications.

The response to our advertisement was extremely successful, with many candidates having exactly the right skill set and experience. As a result, I am sorry to tell you that the position has now been filled and we will not, therefore, be pursuing your application further.

I hope that you are not too disappointed by our decision and trust that you will soon find an interesting and rewarding position.

Thank you for your interest in $COMPANY.

So, I don’t even get an interview and the position has been filled. I won’t name the company in question because I’m hoping that this isn’t indicative of their general organisational skills and that whoever it is that they have hired will be as good an employee as I think I could have been for them.

This test decided to tell me the following: You are an SEDF--Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting. Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well--even those you have known a long time--because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable. You are not to be messed with. You may explode. I always take these things with a pinch of salt, but yeep!

Cut — Geek Alert!
Some people offer large cash incentives. However, since I'm poor, I offer the following: Tell me how to achieve what I want without changing Gnome 2.6 and win a hug or one $BEER token depending on your preference. Fix the issue I have and get it into Debian and win twice as much. Get it into Gnome upstream as well as Debian and win three $BEER tokens. Some of the below are clearly bugs and I've filed bugs where I can. Some are usability issues and could be plausibly worked-around for one $BEER token. Several of these were pointed out to me by people like Livejournal:keybuk and have since come to irritate me. My current issue list:

1. Unable to drag/drop to create shortcuts from sftp:// (or ftp://) urls open in nautilus windows. I want to be able to create shortcuts to bits of my home directory on my server using this technique.
2. When browsing sftp:// URLs, nautilus leaves smelly zombie processes behind. I've filed a bug here.
3. Although it's cute when it's a small effect, the bug which causes the panel to wibble around can render panels almost unusable. I filed a bug here about that.
4. I can't seem to get windows to go off the top of the screen, no matter how hard I try. This is very irritating when I'm grabbing a window with alt+drag to just see what's underneath it
5. There's no UI element for turning startup notification on/off in panel launchers (or launchers in general
6. There seems to be no way to hide mount icons from the desktop. My USB key provides /mnt/keyfs and /mnt/cryptokey and I don't want the cryptokey one on my desktop.
7. If I stick an emblem on a folder, or perhaps give it a custom icon, it'd be nice if that carried through somehow into the nautilus folder window which is for that folder.
8. Nautilus should be able to distinguish XML documents based on their DTD.
9. I can't work out how to make my workspaces wrap at the edges. It'd often be faster for me to move one workspace-right rather than four workspaces left — Note, brightside does not do what I want
10. I have renamed the Wastebasket icon on my desktop to "Dustbin" because I like that name. But the "Places" menu still says 'Trash' The right-click menu still says "Move to Trash" etc. This sucks from a consistency point of view. Either don't let me rename the icon, or make sure it gets renamed across the board.
11. The whole Gnome-DB stuff (particularly the mergeant stuff) appears riddled with bugs and generally crashy.
12. I'd like the ability to hide icons in Nautilus windows. E.g. I don't want ~/bin showing in my homedir, 'tis messy enough as it is. -- Won by Thom May

Well, that's enough for now. So fly my pretties and code fixes for me.... Bwuahahaha (Or reply in a LJ comment. Please don't mail me or I lose track)

I have, over the past few months, been contemplating a change of scenery in the form of a new job. More recently this has widened to include the possiblities of changing career direction as well as employer. Particularly I have been considering becoming a publican for the past month or two. Also I have been pondering more recently the merits of the teaching profession. Unfortunately I lack a formal qualification in very much at all past A-levels. I have no degree and no formal teaching experience. This really is a problem since I’d want to be teaching at degree level, or at least teaching adults. I’m not interested in teaching children because I’m nowhere near capable of dealing with that level of pastoral and guidance responsibility. I’d be quite capable of teaching the syllabus for GCSE IT, through A-Level IT or CS up to most of a basic degree course in CS (the specialist topics I don’t know I could learn, but you never have a single lecturer at uni anyway). Running a pub needs things like publican qualifications, health and safety qualifications and a fuck of a lot of money. This kinda leaves me back at the finding a new job within the same sort of career path as I’m in right now; which basically leaves me tidying my CV, cutting it back down to two pages and then sending it off. If anyone knows of a company after a programmer who wants to be in the embedded arena in the Cambridgeshire area, then please let me know.

I thought I’d take a moment out of my already dull and dreary day to explain to people why I chose my nicknames. Joey Hess, in this posting mentioned that he was interested in how people chose their IRC nicks; so I thought I’d sit down and type out a quick explanation for my two nicks. Terryfish was chosen as a livejournal name when I realised that Livejournal:kinnison existed already and I needed something that tied me to the account. Originally it was going to be a way to make Pepperfish announcements so I chose ‘Terryfish’ since ‘Terry’ is the mascot of Pepperfish. The choice behind ‘Kinnison’ goes waaay back into the mists of time. Around 1992 I was trying to choose a name for my Doom player. In those days, your nick couldn’t be more than eight characters long. ‘Kinnison’ had the distinct advantage of being utterly unique in the circle of friends I was playing Doom with — right the way down to the fact that it was the only ‘K’ in the group. (There were three Daniels). The name comes from a series of books called ‘The Lensman Series’ by E. E. (Doc) Smith. In particular, the character of ‘Kimball Kinnison — The grey lensman’ called to me as a perfect name for myself online. You see, Kimball was a very strong character; but he was also a womanising misogynist with a particular penchant for red-heads. Being red-headed myself it kinda fitted a bit. So, with a pinch of irony, I chose the name and it stuck. Twelve years on and I’m still ‘Kinnison’ online although I pretty much refuse to answer to the name in real life.