Hi, This posting is just to remind you lot that Livejournal:digitalscurf was created by Livejournal:spodlife so that you can follow my new blog which is at http://blog.digital-scurf.org/ D.

Hi, After a long ponderous process I have decided to move my blog to a pyblosxom installation on my own server. As a result; I won’t be posting much on here any more (although I will retain the account and the possibility of posting to here in friends-only type capacities) My new blog is at http://blog.digital-scurf.org/ and the syndication feed is at http://blog.digital-scurf.org/?flav=atom Please update your syndication feed URLs if you syndicate my blog. For those of you used to reading my blog via livejournal; remember that if someone creates a syndication feed onto livejournal; I won’t be reading any comments you post via it.

http://www.tribulaciones.org/blog/computers/geek/traffic-jam_20–09-2004

(Note, this is a political posting related to the UK and I’m not going to force myself to be impartial when I feel so strongly about the argument) Today the house of commons voted for a ban on ‘fox hunting’. Many MPs (most commonly from the UK Conservative party) seem to believe that banning this barbaric “entertainment” will be unworkable and more importantly to them at least unfair. Several pro-hunting people have raised the comment recently that were fox-hunting a “middle class” activity the government would be leaving it well-alone. They are trying to claim that this is a ‘class’ issue. Yet is bare-knuckle fighting permitted any more? What about cock-fighting? Or dog fighting? No. Yet the upper-class barbarism of ‘fox hunting’ has been permitted until now. Some pro-hunting people are speaking up and saying that this will cause unemployment in the countryside. I’m sure that when the slave-trade was banned the same issues were raised; yet would we want a return to the slave-trade? I’m quite willing to hear well-reasoned arguments against the ban; but I have to say that so far I’ve not heard a single one. BBC News are carrying lots of useful articles on the matter.

Today I was handed a wonderful document which included this piece of text:

(1) Our pre-sales collateral is not geared to supporting impersonal access to material – rather it requires high touch in order to provide technical data needed in the decision process;

Anyone telling me, succinctly and without use of buzzwords or management-speak, what this means, will win a prize.

terryfish's LiveJournal Slut Stats The below percentages indicate what terryfish has done with the 34 people on his friends list!

met 82.4% hugged 64.7% dated 5.9% kissed 5.9% seen topless 5.9% seen naked 5.9% phone sexed 2.8% made out 5.9% oral sex 5.9% fucked 5.9%

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I bet you I can't use these words when I'm blogging I bet you I can't use these *bleep* words It's not that they're *buzz* or *beep beep* controversial Just that the *dinging* words are awfully strong. You can't say *honk* when you're blogging; Or *shot* or *twang* or *bleh*, You can't even say I'd like to *creak* you one day Unless you're a doctor with a very large *boing*. So I bet you I can't use these words when I'm blogging I bet you they daren't *scratching* well allow me I bet you their *ch-chinging* old blog aggregators Will think it's a load of horse *raspberry* -- With apologies to Eric Idle

Reminded by a talk on Guerilla marketing today, I’d like to take a moment to recommend that people who hack on dbus related stuff consider a few basic ideas for generalising services. As an example… Colin Walters has been working on a CUPS thingy (blogged here) and he says:

<quote> Eggcups will respond to a D-BUS request for a password by popping up a dialog. It uses libgnomeui for the dialog, and also uses gnome-keyring to optionally store the password. </quote>

This demonstrates one of the things which I personally find irritating in people’s use of dbus. In my opinion, popping up a dialog and asking for a password; then using gnome-keyring to store that password is completely the wrong way up. The utopian view of things involves services. D-BUS is all about services and services should be generic. So what Colin should be doing (in my opinion) is getting gnome-keyring to provide some form of org.gnome.keyring service with a GetPassword method call. That could look up the password by some key in the keyring and reply with the password (or prompt as appropriate for the keyring master password etc). Asking for a password should not be a behaviour of a printer management system. Especially given that it is using a password management service. HTH… D.

A new userpic has been uploaded (used on this entry). Pretty ginger monkey from London Zoo!

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