Looking Out To Sea

Last night’s sign language was an optional extra lesson, to make up for the one we all missed when the Deaf Action building suffered heating loss on a particularly bitter November day. We didn’t do anything particularly challenging — some random bits of conversation about Christmas shopping and holiday plans, and a bit of descriptive work (describing the layout of rooms) which we were supposed to have been practising but, inevitably, had not done.

It wasn’t all earnest work though. We all bunked off early to go to the pub (including our tutors). Knowing how to sign in a noisy pub is incredibly useful. Seriously, if I don’t ever use it again, being able to communicate with people in a noisy environment is a big plus. (I find it quite frustrating that other people don’t know BSL. In fact, I’m sure people must think I just wave my hands around a lot when I’m speaking. But that’s their loss, frankly.) I found out that this blog has two (only two?) lurkers. So, hello Emma and Emily.

Continue Reading »

I’d laugh, if I thought I could stop once I’d started.

Rustum Roy says:

As it happens, there is agreement among all those who have studied liquid water that it is, in fact, the critics, who are totally wrong. Proof? Diamond is the planet’s hardest material; graphite one of the softest. They are absolutely identical in composition, and they can be interconverted in a millisecond with zero change of composition.

Whereas Wikipedia says:

Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, Chef’s attorney would certainly want you to believe that his client wrote “Stinky Britches” ten years ago. And they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself! But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!

The defence rests.

Fugly trees for the win!

We fetched our first ever Christmas tree yesterday. We got down to the decoration job this afternoon. First thing: the trunk was too damn big for the stand. And we have no saw, so we ended up borrowing a piddling little thing from a neighbour. In future we need a real saw. And some foresight. We’ve run the borrowed saw down to the nub — luckily the tree had been sitting in water overnight, so it wasn’t dry and tough.

Once we passed that obstacle and the tree would stand mostly-vertical of its own accord, it was decoratin’ time. Yay fairy lights! Boo fairy lights. Fairy lights not work.

We had to abandon the proper lights and use a small string of “pink heart fairy lights”. We now have the campest Christmas tree in the street. By quite some margin, I’ll bet. The pink lights also clash hideously with the red tinsel (one piece) and the decorations (four pieces).

This is a really poor show, and we’ll need to try a bit harder in future. I’ll be looking for better stuff tomorrow.

I’ve finally got it together and installed Markdown here on my blog. It took a bit of effort to get exactly what I wanted so I thought I’d document.

I wanted:

• Markdown syntax (or similar) for writing blog posts. I’m sick to high heaven of WYSIWYG editors pretending to know what I’m asking for.
• Syntax highlighting for code snippets.
• Minimal effort to actually use both of the above.

The third point is pretty important because Markdown on its own doesn’t support any particular varieties of code, though it has good means of separating code from other information in a page. You can’t specifically say, “this snippet here, it’s written in Python, so I want you to highlight it accordingly”.

Continue Reading »

Last week I was discussing choosing music for a “skiing playlist” (or some similar mood-based list) with Helen and her dad. It’s a really hard task if you’ve got gigabytes of music at your disposal to find the exact subset that’ll you make you feel on fire as you woosh down the pistes. (I’m going entirely on the opinions of others and idle speculation here. I have never been skiing so I don’t know what it feels like.)

Is there an automated way to make the computer create a suitable list for you?

Continue Reading »

I’m still recovering from last night. I drank rather more wine than I am accustomed to, and my taste buds quickly capitulated to waves and waves of red wine. My ‘notes’ from the latter part of the evening were sporadic, insensible and consisted mostly of the flavours from various crackers and cheese I was eating at the time. That is unless there is a wine that tastes of “digestive biscuit”.

We each had to supply a variety of wine and then we were given a paper label to cover the branding on the bottle when we arrived. Each label had a number on it so we could identify them properly. It’s just a shame that the labels were already numbered before, so I knew which one was mine because I wrapped it. Not properly blinded! :-)

There were six known varieties in a list, with some typical descriptions cribbed from the intarwebs, and seven bottles. The joker in the pack turned out to be a bottle of local elderflower wine. Thankfully we all agreed it was a pretty rubbish wine and we would be very disappointed if we’d bought it in a restaurant.

Somehow, I managed to get five out of the seven correct. Mostly guesswork, I promise you. Thankfully I didn’t go home with the accolade of wino of the day because someone else managed to get six correct!

Well, you can tell I was a bit far gone last night as I agreed to take a couple of goes on Singstar 80s. Once on a song I don’t even know… I don’t think I’ll be pressured into doing it again though — they’ve learned their lesson.

I was talking to someone the other day about infected Windows machines, and I mentioned the fact that it takes just minutes for an unprotected machine to succumb to something on the big wide web. Three separate studies produced different numbers, but in none of them was the average infection time more than 35 minutes. It was only four minutes in one trial.

It seems these numbers are not so well known as they should be, though they have been around long enough (and have been argued back and forth by enough people). Does this kind of information find itself into the hands of the computer-buying public? Obviously not.

I’ve tried convincing people to use something more usable (or at least, something less outright dangerous) than Windows. That’s not easy when people use some non-portable software. But Windows Vista has been such a break, for software compatibility and hardware, that a lot of people seem to be eyeing up alternatives.

In my optimistic moments I feel as if this might be the beginning of the end for Windows. Vista has been so thoroughly disparaged and ridiculed.

And in my more pessimistic moods, I think that Windows is like a software prolefeed. It keeps people happy now so they don’t think about how miserable they are at the same time: viruses, spyware, the need to even think about these things.

There’s a rich history of user-centric interface design in computing research; whole fields devoted to strengthening machines against attack; and several inter-operable but varied systems in use around the world. The road we’ve travelled is littered with the abandoned remains of glorious and terrible machines… and yet here we are, rumbling along in the slipstream of some hulking smoke-belching juggernaut.

Sometimes it feels like looking back at the history of an alien culture: a civilisation so advanced it sped off to stars, leaving behind its detritus for us to marvel at. And then we find out that all this was made by us. All these seemingly advanced machines were once in daily use by real people.

Seeing the Metro with the headline Terry’s Alzheimer’s Fight yesterday made me feel really angry. It was horrible and exploitative. It’s obvious to anyone who’s read the letter announcing his diagnosis that he’s not “fighting” anything. He’s remaining quietly optimistic and in good humour.

I object to the lazy editing of his single statement to make it appear as if he had actually been interviewed by that or any other journalist. I object to the chummy, have-a-go-hero, local-boy-makes-good, long-lost-twins-reunited tone of the headline.

Maybe I should expect less of the Metro. But I’m pretty sure the rest of the papers had similarly nauseating coverage.

For some reason (I blame Jeff at Coding Horror) the talk of the day is list sorting. I know, I know: you don’t know if you can take the excitement.

His principal complaint is that people expect file names to be sorted in a different order than they are. Alphanumeric seems wrong because numbers collect together in perverted lists: 1, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4.

Jeff argues that because people expect the list to be in a different order, the list is wrong and the users are correct. That’s certainly how it should be. But I believe that in this case, it’s the users who have a wrong idea of what they are being shown and that their expectations don’t actually make any sense.

Normal alphabetical sorting, as you would find in the dictionary, prioritises substrings over strings: car, cart, cartilage. By extension, digits are listed: 1, 10, 101. Normal sorting also groups by individual letter, not by meaning: car and cart are not next to each other in the dictionary even though they are both vehicles. Carbohydrate and carnival are pushed in between them.

This is not always the case. A lexicon where words are sorted semantically rather than lexically is called a thesaurus. And they’re useful as far as they go, but you wouldn’t expect all your files to be grouped by what the words mean.

But sorting things by what they mean is exactly what people expect when they use numbers. The number 10 should obviously come after 2, which should come immediately after 1. People don’t see the individual characters like ‘1’ and ‘0’, but the notion of ten-ness. Mixing up numbers and letters means you have to make a choice, between what people say they want (alphabetical sorting) and what people expect (‘natural’ sorting).

Other programs have interesting sorting functions. I seem to recall that iTunes displays ‘The’ in bands that have a definite article, but ignores it while sorting. So The Beatles comes in amongst the Bs rather than at the end along with all the other The something bands. That’s quite clever, but I wouldn’t argue to add that to file listings.

On Friday we’re going to a birthday party in the form of a wine tasting (or maybe it’s a wine tasting in the form of a birthday party?). I know nothing about wine. I once went to a “proper” (ie, organised by wine sellers, with experts on hand) tasting and was surprised by how much I could detect in a glass of Rioja. I think that was largely down to not eating anything with strong flavours. So unless tomorrow is a stale-bread-and-wine party, I’ll be just as lame as always.

Everyone invited has been asked to bring a particular variety, so we’ve got two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon ready. Thresher’s have a three-for-two offer, so we had part of the third bottle this evening. You might consider this cheating, but you’d be wrong because now we’re tipsy and inexperienced, instead of just inexperienced.