My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree.

This just popped into my head:

Many years ago I was listening to a sermon. The priest held up two pieces of paper. "What makes this one worth five pounds, and this one not?"
(I don't know what his text was; something like Ps.145:13, perhaps.)

The same man kept calling out:
"It doesn't have the watermark."
"It doesn't have the hologram."
"It doesn't have the silver strip down the middle."

Eventually, the priest peered down at him and boomed, "Are you an expert forger, sir?"

So suppose there was a spod client for the N900. Suppose it had a dialogue at the start to pick a talker. Which talkers should it come preloaded with?

(Snowplains, obviously; what else is still around?)

HECK YEAH

IT IS ELITE

ON THE N900

THAT IS ALL

I didn't make any resolutions for 2009.

I am thinking of what to make for 2010.

I think I will try to write a sonnet every week.

I think I will try to write another children's novel.

I will certainly do my best to get the programming book I'm working on finished.

But perhaps I'm too close up to myself to see with the best resolution. If you could wave a wand and make a resolution that I'd keep-- that is, change something about or for me-- what would it be? Comments are screened, but anonymous ones are fine. Say if you want your comment unscreened.

I am going to contact my parents tomorrow and ask for the source code of Avaricius and Avalot so that I can release them as free software. (It was written in Turbo Pascal.) This may mean finding a way to read 5½" floppies. I wonder if I can just buy a very cheap very old computer and hook it up with a serial cable.

Some of the nifty things about Avaricius and Avalot, just from memory:

1. Compilation. One of the odd things about Avvy is that only the code was compiled, not the data. The data was a significant part of the whole, and these days I would have created it in some easy-to-edit format and compiled it. But in those days, with a few exceptions, I first designed the binary format in which it would ship, and then wrote an editor for it. So I think, in order to make it at all useful, one of the things I'm going to have to write is a decompiler for all the data formats, so you can read them as XML or something.
2. How the images got included. This actually extended to having to write a general image editor "hiz" for Avaricius, because I didn't have any information on the save file format of any image editors I had access to. But for Avalot I wrote a screenshot program and my brother used Dr Genius to edit the images (he drew almost all the images in Avalot, which is good, because the images I drew in Avaricius rather sucked).
3. Why EGA? The game required EGA (and used sixteen colours) because we didn't have VGA when coding started.  By release time we had VGA, but the only concession to it was to use its ability to redefine colours to make change "bright magenta" to be more Caucasian-flesh-coloured.
4. Codename. Avalot was codenamed "Project Minstrel" during development.
5. Dogfood. One of the jokes that was so laboured that I never explained it: the minstrel who plays games against you was briefly called "Winalot", because almost all the characters' names ended in -alot; "Winalot" is a brand of dogfood, so he was soon renamed "Dogfood".
6. Cameos. Dogfood, Spludwick, and Baron du Lustie were cameo appearances by the development team.
7. Beta testing. We had different beta testers complain that both the Dogfood and Jacques puzzles were both incredibly difficult and ridiculously easy.
8. Scroll drivers. You could embed ASCII control codes in what was effectively standard output (the "scroll drivers"), which would otherwise have gone into dialogue boxes on the screen, and affect lots of things about the game. Much of the moment-to-moment control of the game happened in this way.
9. Wordwrap. The scroll drivers in Avaricius didn't do wordwrap, so I had to do all the wordwrap by hand. Big mistake, rectified in Avalot.
10. Bootloaders. "avalot.exe" was merely a bootloader that allocated a few kilobytes of empty memory and ran "avalot9.exe", which was the real program. It pointed one of the user interrupts to the empty memory, and by manipulating this memory the child processes could instruct the bootloader either to load a given other child process after they quit, or to quit itself. This meant that a lot of the cut scenes could be implemented in separate executables. There was also space in the empty memory to store the current game state, so that you could seamlessly return to the game. One of the possible subprocesses was command.com, so that you could shell out to DOS and not have Avvy resident in memory, so there was actually space enough to do something.
11. Edna. The save-game format ("edna") had generalised header information which meant that if you attempted to load a file from any other Avvy game, the correct game could be loaded to handle it.
12. Chunk. Each room had a set of associated sub-pictures in a format called "chunk" which could be set to display at set intervals, meaning that animations could be put together without changing the code.
13. Also. There was a resources format called "also" which allowed you to define things about each room such as where the doors connected to the next room and what direction you'd be walking in when you got there, and it had a set of opcodes which could be made to run a given cut scene, put up a given piece of boilerplate text, etc, when you walked into a given area or touched a line between two given points. Strangely, I never unified these opcodes with the scroll driver control characters.
14. Skellern. There was the usual routine which hooked the clock interrupt to slow the game down.  Around the time I was writing it I heard a song called Slow Down by Peter Skellern, and the whole subsystem is littered with references to that song.  In particular, the slowdown routine couldn't be enabled during debugging, and therefore was disabled during development in general, so there was a standalone terminate-stay-resident utility called "skellern" which stood in for the real thing.
15. The onion puzzle.  This is the puzzle I'm most proud of.  People were still asking how to solve it almost a decade later on Usenet.
16. Avalanche. The whole magic opcodes system was going to be generalised in the third game "Avaroid" into an architecture for a virtual machine called "avalanche". I had no idea about virtual machines; I pretty much made up the idea. But the third game never shipped because I went to university.
17. Z-machine.  I've occasionally thought of doing a Z-machine port, as a plain-text adventure.  I've never actually started it, though.  I think it would be ineligible for the IFcomp.

I am wondering what else I'll discover when I finally find the source.

Update: I just phoned my parents:

• My brother Andrew knows where the disks are and will find them when he comes home for Christmas vacation
• My brother Mark is one of the copyright holders so we have to clear it with him as well, so there's no knowing what'll happen until he decides.

More news as we get it.

You know how sometimes people on your friendslist post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

Well, here is some completely irrelevant information about me. Copy it to your own journal if you like, delete my answers, and substitute your own.

1. What toys did you take to bed with you when you were a kid?

A teddy called David, a squirrel called Mrs Squirrel, and a cat called Joanna. I wish I knew where Mrs Squirrel is now. Here is a picture of me with David.



2. What is your favourite colour?

Orange, then black, then green.

3. What was your first experience of computers?

When I was about five, my parents took me along to a computer course they were attending at Hitchin Technical College, for which I will be forever grateful.  A short while later, my headmaster bought a BBC Micro for the entire school, and invited me up to his office.  "I've noticed", he said, "that your handwriting is the worst in the school.  This computer has a thing in it called a wordprocessor that might help you."

4. When you were a kid, who did you want to win the Boat Race?

Cambridge, honestly!  It was because they lost about a dozen times in a row and I always cheer for the underdog.

5. What was the title of your first book?

"The Squirrel Army".  I was about seven.  It was the first of a series of four.  I'm sure my mother still has them.

6. What was your favourite Christmas present ever?

This thing.  I spent hours solving all the levels.  You had to solve ten addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problems in four different levels within a certain time limit.  I loved it.

7. What clubs did you join as a kid?

The Puffin Club; Mensa; the National Association of Gifted Children; the Vegetarian Society.

8. What was your favourite part of Christmas?

I was asked this by a teacher once, and after some thought I said it was Boxing Day, because you had plenty of time to look at all the things people had given you.  She stared at me and said "That's rather boring."

I can't promise to give five good questions to everyone who comments, though.

1. Who would win in a fight, Delirium of the Endless or Cthulhu?

This is one of those "irresistible force meets immovable object" questions. But thinking over it carefully, I reckon it would go something like this:



2. How would you explain copyright/copyleft and the open source movement to a slightly slow 16-year-old?

That's a great question.  I think I will actually try to write something up as a good explanation aimed at middle-school kids.  But a good start on the answer was already made by Chumbawamba:

The Boy Bands Have Won, and All The Copyists and The Tribute Bands and The TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture To Be Shaped By Mimicry, Whether From Lack Of Ideas Or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try To Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother’s Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don’t Just Regurgitate Creative History, Or Hold Art And Music And Literature As Fixed, Untouchable And Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try To ‘Guard’ Any Particular Form Of Music Are, Like The Copyists And Manufactured Bands, Doing It The Worst Disservice, Because The Only Thing That You Can Do To Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It’s Over, Then It’s Done, and The Boy Bands Have Won.

3. Which was your favourite Narnia book?

"Dawn Treader", because of all the wonderful geography and the living stars.  It's followed closely by "The Magician's Nephew", but that's not surprising:  I realised many years ago that most story books hold my interest insofar as they are similar to the works of E. Nesbit, and "Nephew" is almost entirely ripped off from "The Story of the Amulet".

4. Are there any recurring themes in your writing?

Both personal autonomy and Cambridge University Library tend to crop up over and over.

5. When will Joule be back up? (Sorry, sorry!)

Well, I need to wind back the database to the old format.  Then I need to decide whether we're going to host it; we possibly will, but someone else has also quite generously offered us space, so maybe it'll go there instead.  The weekend's coming up, which would seem to be a good time to put in the last few hours on it.  I know a lot of people are being very patient.

I have a program for the N900 called "Belltower" which finds belltowers. Currently its main screen looks like this:

( Read more... )

But there are several apps for the phone which have a common design of front screen: a set of icons arranged horizontally with captions beneath them, all in front of a gradient fill. I wondered about making the front screen look like this:

( Read more... )

(but with better-drawn icons; these were pulled off the net in ten minutes). The idea is:

• By name allows you to type the name of a tower, e.g. "nicholas norton";
• By area gives you a list of countries to choose from, and then counties within that;
• Nearby uses the GPS to list all towers within fifty miles, in distance order;
• Bookmarks is a list of towers you've bookmarked;
• Recent is a list of the towers you've viewed recently.

Questions for you lot:

1. Do you think the mockup is an improvement?
2. Can you think of any better icons I could use?
3. Any other thoughts?

Carmen is staying home ill, and I said I would write her into a short story for her to read to cheer her up. This all happens many years after the events in "Not Ordinarily Borrowable".

Jennifer opened the oven to check on the bread, nodded, and closed the door. She looked up at her neighbour, stood up again, and smiled, wiping her hands on her apron as she continued talking. "But we rescued the dragon after all. And then there was the time I was trapped in the library tower. All those recipe books and nothing to eat!"

( Read more... )

The sea lies solid under ice,
The blizzard seldom stops;
The glögi's running freely
In friendly coffee-shops;
The trams still run and life goes on
And still I can't remember
Why no-one ever calls a song
"Helsinki in November".

(it's actually far more like this in December, so maybe I should make that the month; but then you'd all know that I was employing poetic licence. February even more, but then it wouldn't rhyme.)

To sleep next to you
when the weather is cold
is trusted and true.
To sleep next to you
is decades from new
yet it never grows old
to sleep next to you
when the weather is cold.

I'm putting together a chapbook specifically of the poems I wrote for Fin. There are currently about 25 of them, though I know there are others I haven't been able to find.

Fin thinks I should divide it, though, and make two chapbooks, one for poems I'd written for zir while we were apart, and one for all the others. I'm not sure I'd have enough in either book yet if I did that, though.

It's really sad being apart from people you love. In a way I'm always apart from people I love, because people I love live all over the world. But being apart from them does remind you of how much you miss them, and of why you love them. Today I'm thinking of Fin and how much I miss zir. I know zie loves me because zie tells me so, and shows me with zir life, and because zie thinks of me, often before I think of things myself. And right at the moment I really miss zir and zir hugs.

I'm happy to announce the first experimental version of Metacity with support for CSS window borders ("Cowbell"). This work was largely supported by Collabora Ltd.

You can:

• download the tarball;


• read the documentation (it's not as boring as you might imagine);


• review the source history.

This diagram should explain everything, perhaps.

I would especially like to hear from:

• theme artists, to let me know whether it's adequately powerful;


• anyone else interested in hacking on this with me;


• the GTK client-side decoration people, so that we can harmonise the way we represent things;


• people who know a lot about CSS and can offer insights into the suitability of the way we represent things;


• people who know a lot about the Dublin Core and can offer insights into whether our metadata system uses it appropriately;


• maintainers of other window managers (especially Mutter), so we can talk about including CSS support in other window managers;


• everyone else, to suggest which of the directions for future development are most interesting.

I think it may perhaps be helpful to set up a Cowbell mailing list, so that we can compare notes on implementations. For example, I haven't written down anywhere how to place an image to the right of the title, which is commonly needed (you use border-image).

Photo © Craft*ology, cc-by-nc.

Leave a comment on this post. If I've ever dreamed about you, I will tell you about the dream. Otherwise I will make up what a dream with you in it might have been like. You can guess which it was.

Frances Cornford wrote a triolet:

To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?

G. K. Chesterton replied for the woman:

Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves and such?
Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?

Someone asked about handwritten Shavian.  There are a number of letters which can possibly be confused.  Just wanted to jot this down and come back to it later.

• The worst group: 𐑲, 𐑳, 𐑶 can all turn into one another if written fast.
• Also some pairs: 𐑯/𐑷, 𐑥/𐑭, 𐑱/𐑬.
• 𐑯𐑥 can be written as straight diagonal lines and 𐑷𐑭 as zigzags.
• We could perhaps suggest that 𐑶𐑬 be written crossed to distinguish them from 𐑱𐑲𐑳.
• That takes care of everything except the confusion of 𐑲 with 𐑳.  I'm not sure what to suggest for that.  Any thoughts?
• There are many more possible confusions if you don't take care to distinguish tall/deep and short letters: 𐑓/𐑨 𐑝/𐑩 etc.

I haven't posted for a while. Here are four things:

1. Collabora have been supporting the CSS-on-window-borders project recently by letting me work on it during work hours. Here is a status update.


2. Recent updates to shavian.org.uk include a gentle Shavian tutorial and translations of all the recent XKCDs into Shavian.


3. Many years ago, I wrote a sonnet for use on a server's custom 404 page:
   

   So many years have passed since first you sought
   the lands beyond the edges of the sky,
   so many moons reflected in your eye,
   (familiar newness, fear of leaving port),
   since first you sought, and failed, and learned to fall,
   (first hope, then cynicism, silent dread,
   the countless stars, still counting overhead
   the seconds to your final voyage of all…)
   and last, in glory gold and red around
   your greatest search, your final quest to know!
   yet… ashes drift, the embers cease to glow,
   and darkened life in frozen death is drowned;
   and ashes on the swell are seen no more.
   The silence surges. Error 404.

   
   It's been spreading itself around, mostly without my permission, so I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons licence. Fly free, little sonnet! Please feel free to copy it onto your own sites, and if you would, let me know you've done so.


4. I need to write more of the Maemo tutorials. They will be coming soon. Sorry; things have been busy.