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.

To head off this question (already been levelled at me umpteen times)...

It feels exactly the same.

Yes I now wear a ring, but then again, I did before from time to time. Yes I have a bit of paper saying it’s all legal, but then legalities never meant much to my relationship before so why should it now?

In fact, the only thing that’s different is that people keep asking me if I feel different, which makes me feel slightly irritated :-)

My mother out^Win-law has put up a blog posting all about yesterday.

It has only just begun.

Today, myself and Rob Kendrick got married^Wcivilised^W^Wentered a civil partnership.

A while ago, I ended up using the term ‘drug fucked narcissistic megabitch gymbunny’ in a conversation about gay stereotypes and how I obviously fit them all so perfectly. Those words got jotted down in my “words” file where I keep interesting words or phrases which trigger a desire to write.

Here’s what poured out of my fingers when I let them ruminate on the above phrase for a few minutes…

It was early morning. Scrabbling madly within his pocket, his shaking fingers finally grasped the errant key. Slowly, painstakingly, the key was inserted and turned. The front door swung open, creaking as though in protest at the late hour of its use. He raised his aching red eyes to the mirror opposite the front door. 'Why oh why did I put that there' he lamented as he gazed distainfully at the visage which greeted him. 'Drug-fucked narcissistic megabitch gymbunny' he thought, 'Yep, about right'.

(What it slipped my mind I can’t be sure, but it made it fuzzy)

I was pondering this morning about names. It struck me that even eleven years on from when I left that particular set, I can list my entire class’s surnames from when I was in years 7 to 11. I can probably tell you the first names of most of them, but I can’t be sure on a couple.

Yet I cannot, for the life of me, tell you the surname of my first crush, nor my second crush, nor indeed the surnames of most of my fencing or clubbing friends from before I went to university. I can barely remember the surnames of those I was friends with at university, indeed only those I’m still in contact with do I really know properly.

So, if you’re Sam, Liz, Sarah, Joe, Russell, Ian, Dave, Steve, Jeff or Andy, and you remember who I am, perhaps you should remind me of your names; it’s bugging me now.

With apologies to Garbage, and with sniggers at Mark Hymers, I hereby present the latest techfilk from my perverted mind.

GNU Make is not enough

I know how to ant
I know how to scons
I know what to cook
And what to jam
I know when to imake
And I know when to myke
No one ever died from building too much

GNU Make is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start, my love
And if you're strong enough
Together we can make the world again, my love

People like us
Know how to build code
There's no point in coding
If you can't build the app
We know when to fork()
And we know when to kill()
If we can't build it all
Then nobody will

GNU Make is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start, my love
And if you're strong enough
Together we can make the world again, my love

I...i feel sick
I...i feel scared
I...i feel ready
And yet unprepared

GNU Make is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start, my love
And if you're strong enough
Together we can make the world again, my love

GNU Make is not enough
GNU Make is not enough

Seen tonight on a talker I’m on:

mouse       :my mate is having problems with Vista. Is it usually crap?

Now, that just says it all.

John Goerzen recently made a positing about Git, Mercurial and Bzr in which he states “bzr doesn’t support tags and has no support for emailing changesets whatsoever”. Just so you know John, Bzr 0.15 is carrying a form of tags support written by Martin Pool and also has had for some time now support for bundles. Bundles are easily emailed around and can be used to merge from. The main Bazaar development list uses them for this. All you’d need would be a trivial plugin to allow you to mail the bundle from the command line. And that’s just needed if you can’t cope with bzr bundle | mail -s “Here’s the feature you wanted” recipient@domain. You can even use BundleBuggy to monitor a mailing list and look after merge requests.

Of course, tags are not actually needed for bzr. After all, in a repo, a branch is practically free, so simply making a branch for a release is easy enough, although I can understand a desire for tags from people who are used to them. As for sending changesets by email… bundles are easy, but I prefer to push my branch to my server and send a reference instead.

Sometimes I get to think of myself as my own person, independent in thought, word and deed.

Then every now and again, I’m reminded that I’m part of a braincell collective which controls my mind. As an example, here’s something which happened on sunday with a friend of mine while shopping for lunch…

Daniel: <thinking>mmm cranberries and macadamia nuts</thinking>
Lesley: mmm cranberries and macadamia nuts
Daniel: Stop giving voice to my inner thoughts goddamnit!
Random other shoppers: <intense-confused-stare />

And then something else occurs which just reinforces that actually we all live in the matrix and nothing we do is our own independant activity. Specifically I discovered that not only am I re-reading the same set of stories as my father right now, but when we discovered this, we also discovered that we’d both just finished exactly the same book in the series. ARGH