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

Er, what?

2009-12-28T17:00:17Z

Someone's taken our coat of arms, added various twiddly bits, and made it into a shirt on spreadshirt. Found with a random Google search. Not really sure what I should do about that, if anything.

Thomas-tide

2009-12-21T14:36:41Z

Today is St Thomas's day-- Thomas the Doubter, not any of the other saints who bear that name. Here is the sonnet I wrote earlier this year for Thomas Cantilupe.

I have no patron saint. But if I should
I doubt that Doubting Thomas would be him.
Though well he worked with what he understood,
I cannot emulate my eponym:
too squeamish still to press your bloody palms,
too cowardly to bear the cross you bore.
too blind to fall and sing believing psalms.
With other saints called Thomas, all the more.
But then there's Thomas Cantilupe's career,
So concrete: he was born in 1218,
was chancellor of Oxford for a year,
gave countless counsellings to king and queen
and years of selfless service to his see;
and lives today recalled by God, and me.

Meep

2009-12-20T15:57:14Z

This story rather reminded me of chess. A US school district threatened suspension to all students who say the word "meep".

Answers to crossword clues

2009-12-20T00:14:25Z

2A. Part of it's a turning body (6)

SATURN, guessed by many people. This is a very traditional sort of clue. "Part of" indicates a substring search. "itSATURNing" contains the substring. "Body" is the surface clue: Saturn is a heavenly body.

The other two don't follow the traditional surface/deep model:

3A. What the town of Titipu was to the Mikado (8)

SUBTITLE, guessed by a few people. The operetta's full name is "The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu". I like this because it leads people up the garden path: they spend hours trying to figure out the proper term for a city ruled by an emperor, and how to fit it in eight letters.

1A. Get rid of the stuff legally (4, 4)

TAKE SILK. Nobody got this. It's a pun on "stuff", which also means the substance that entry-level gowns are made from. Lawyers in the UK (and some other Commonwealth countries) wear stuff gowns until they reach the exalted heights of Queen's Counsel, when (in the same way that PhDs do) they exchange their stuff gown for a silk one. This is known as "taking silk". Again, garden path: you are supposed to think of some contraband substance which you must "get rid of legally", but that's not what it means at all.

A thing I don't understand about Project Wonderful

2009-12-20T00:05:28Z

I have three sites currently running Project Wonderful ads. One of them is Joule; another is shavian.org.uk.

Joule has a "skyscraper"-size (160x600) sidebar on every chart page. It gets about 800 hits a day.
shavian.org.uk has a "button"-size (117x30) image at the top left. It gets about 50 hits a day.

Consistently, the shavian.org.uk ads have been selling for 20¢/day and the Joule ads for around 1¢/day.

I don't get why people are willing to pay twenty times as much for the shavian.org.uk ads. In fact, of course, the bids are mostly placed by bots which are given a certain sum of money and told to go and spend it, but that doesn't decrease the mystery.

If I had a lot of spare time I would try running control experiments. Is it the fact that the lack of available space makes people want it more (i.e. in general people are more likely to bid higher for buttons than skyscrapers?) That seems strange. Is it that shavian.org.uk is a site under "books and writing", whereas Joule is about "blogging tools"? Is it just coincidence? I don't know, but I'd like to.

The Secret Garden

2009-12-19T07:12:29Z

So I'm currently reading The Secret Garden to Rio. In the first scene, the protagonist is rescued from her house by the army after having slept through a cholera epidemic that killed everyone she knows:

"I fell asleep when everyone had the cholera and I have only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?"

"It is the child no one ever saw!" exclaimed the man, turning to his companions. "She has actually been forgotten!"

"Why was I forgotten?" Mary said, stamping her foot. "Why does nobody come?"

The young man whose name was Barney looked at her very sadly. Mary even thought she saw him wink his eyes as if to wink tears away.

"Poor little kid!" he said. "There is nobody left to come."

At this, Rio mumbled, "Everybody's dead, Dave. Dave, everybody's dead."

Crossword clues I have set

2009-12-18T19:58:18Z

These are some of my favourite crossword clues I have set.

1A. Get rid of the stuff legally (4, 4)
2A. Part of it's a turning body (6)
3A. What the town of Titipu was to the Mikado (8)

Want to guess? If you don't get them I'll tell you tomorrow. In case you are totally befuddled by what this might mean, I will also explain why. :)

Time for a silly poll.

2009-12-16T21:08:38Z

Time for a silly poll. Human perception is a fascinating thing.

View Poll: Thinking of...

Feel free to copy this into your own journal, so I can answer it for you!

Clearly the Internet wanted to know

2009-12-14T18:27:46Z

Joule

2009-12-13T15:06:24Z

So, is http://joule.marnanel.org working for you? If it isn't, tell me. If it is, tell your friends.

A few reports are coming in of Twitter/identi.ca support reporting that valid accounts don't exist. I'll be investigating.

Updates:

- There's definitely a problem with Twitter. Looking into it.

- We'd love some signal-boosting. Could you post and tell your friends that Joule is back?

- Some folk have asked whether they can give money towards hosting fees. I know nobody has much spare money at this time of year, but if you'd still like to paypal us a few dollars, here's the button:

- If you like magical realism, you can also make me happy by buying a copy of my book (it's US$1.99 for the e-book and US$7.99 for a paper copy), and telling your friends about that in turn.

- xkcd seems to survive on selling t-shirts. I wonder whether anyone would be interested in Joule shirts...

Fixing Joule

2009-12-13T02:48:30Z

So let's see if we can have Joule online again by midnight. I'll be liveblogging it here.

We need to:

get coffee

DONE.

back everything up

DONE. It's 2.1Gb.

find out how many users are on the raisin system

DONE. There are 18760 (about 5% of the total, but the most regular users are on it)

convert them back to currant

DONE

roll back the comparator to use currant

DONE

turn everything on again and hope it works

DONE...

Here is a question: how will people know when it's back? Should I just leave it to word of mouth, or announce it somewhere? And if I should announce it-- where?

Not Ordinarily Borrowable on Smashwords

2009-12-12T20:19:01Z

Those of you who don't read me on Twitter may like to know that Not Ordinarily Borrowable is now available on smashwords.com, where you can pay US$1.99 (about £1.20) to read the whole thing in HTML or PDF right in your browser, or download it in a variety of ebook formats. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

(And it's passed manual inspection there, which means that the book will be available on Barnes and Noble's ebooks site, in a few days.)

Links roundup

2009-12-09T22:01:48Z

It's been a while since I made a general post, but here are some of the links that have accumulated since then:

I've often wondered what Amazon's distribution centre looks like.
The Punchtape Letters. Like Screwtape, only for programming.
The Simpsons, as they would have been drawn by various artists.
It's a velociraptor skull. Or a bell pepper.
"Ditto".
Cooking Q&A. This is stackoverflow used for recipes.
Post this macro if people confuse the words "vulva" and "vagina". Probably NSFW.

Sermons

2009-12-02T18:33:14Z

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?"

Talkers

2009-12-02T13:27:10Z

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?)

Elite on the N900

2009-11-28T07:23:46Z

HECK YEAH

IT IS ELITE

ON THE N900

THAT IS ALL

New Year's resolutions

2009-11-27T06:16:05Z

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.

Making Avaricius and Avalot into free software

2009-11-27T00:33:00Z

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:

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.
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).
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.
Codename. Avalot was codenamed "Project Minstrel" during development.
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".
Cameos. Dogfood, Spludwick, and Baron du Lustie were cameo appearances by the development team.
Beta testing. We had different beta testers complain that both the Dogfood and Jacques puzzles were both incredibly difficult and ridiculously easy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Completely irrelevant information

2009-11-27T00:04:29Z

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."

Questions from sabotabby

2009-11-20T03:05:01Z

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.

Belltower UI

2009-11-15T13:17:28Z

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

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:

(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:

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

"At the bottom of the garden"

2009-11-12T18:05:41Z

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!"

"You seem to have a taste for adventures," said Carmen. "It's good that you're with Maria, really. You're both the adventurous type."

"Everyone seems to think that," said Jennifer, "but when you get to know her, Maria's just as happy sitting alone with her books as she'd be on some quest or other. Not like me. I'd go crazy living a settled life."

Carmen had first met Jennifer and Maria when they had moved in to their new house, only the week before, but what she knew of them did not seem to match with Jennifer's words. "How are you finding life with Simon, then?"

Jennifer laughed. "Well, motherhood is an adventure all of its own. I really did think I would go mad for the first few months after he was born, with Maria finishing her thesis and me stuck at home all day. But you know, he learned to smile, and he learned to talk, and he's never really stopped. And..." she stopped to think, and continued. "I suppose for someone like Simon, there's an adventure every day. I think he gets that from me. And even if I'm at home looking after him, I live the adventures through him."

"Do you think you might take him along on some quests when he's a bit older?" asked Carmen, but before Jennifer could reply, the door flew open and a pudgy dark-haired child of perhaps three burst into the kitchen. His hair was full of grass, his clothes were spotted with mud, and his smile extended well beyond the end of his face. In one hand he clutched a cardboard shield with an indeterminate animal drawn on it in blue crayon.

"Mummy Jenfer, I met a strange man in the field," he said breathlessly. "He wants to get some babies, and a pony."

Jennifer's sunshiny expression was replaced by clouds of concern. "What have I told you about talking to strangers?"

The child's face fell. "I sorry," he said.

"Show me where you met him," said Jennifer sternly, and excusing herself to Carmen she left with Simon for the field which ran along the bottom of the garden of both houses. She was back within five minutes. "There's nobody there," she said to Carmen, and to Simon she said, "You must play in the house now."

"I'm a knight," said Simon proudly, and at the top of his lungs he added, "With a sword!"

"Oh dear," said Jennifer, and ran her hand through her hair. "You mustn't disturb Mama Maria. She's got to finish this paper."

"I could look after him?" offered Carmen. "If that would be OK?"

Jennifer smiled again. "Oh, would you? I don't mind him playing out in the field, but I'd rather someone was looking after him if there was anyone nasty about. Simon, Carmen is here, she's going to look after you."

"Hello, Carmen," said Simon, giving her another of his room-filling smiles. "I like horsies."

Carmen looked puzzled and then remembered the green and white abstract pony design on her shirt. "I like horses too, Simon. Knights used to ride them."

"Yes. I'm a knight," repeated Simon. "Come and see."

Out in the field and the sunshine again, Simon gave Carmen a long lecture on the rules of knighthood as only a three-year-old can understand them. Carmen nodded patiently and walked along beside him for a few minutes, until Simon stopped prattling, dived down into the grass, and seized something lying there.

"My sword!"

"Good grief," said Carmen. Simon was dragging a fairly solid-looking sword covered in runes after him. "Where did that come from?"

"I found it in Mama Maria's room," said Simon proudly, "but I losted it. It's my sword. I'm a knight."

"May I have a look?" asked Carmen, and when Simon assented, she picked it up and began examining the lettering which covered it. The sword was damp from the rain and the blade was dull, which was to be expected, but more oddly it seemed to be humming.

Carmen looked up. A man stood before them, with a long face, a white robe, and a golden necklace. He began to intone a phrase, over and over, staring beyond them into the middle distance.

"I seek the good corn, and many babies," he chanted. "I seek Epona."

"This man wants a pony," said Simon helpfully. "And babies."

Carmen coughed to attract the man's attention. He ceased his chanting. "Excuse me," she said. "Who are you?"

The man's eyes focused on Simon, and then on Carmen, and then on the sword. He fell to his knees. "Is that iron? My god, take it away from me!"

Carmen did not loosen her grip on the hilt. "Who are you and what do you want?"

"I am the sacrifice. I died that we might have the good corn, and many babies."

"You... died?"

"My god," began the man, and with some shock she realised that he was addressing her. "I died for the good corn, and many babies. I died so that Epona might bring us fortune. I greet you, Epona."

Carmen was a great reader, but none of her books had prepared her for what to do if mistaken for a fertility goddess. Either this man was insane and possibly dangerous, in which case she should humour him until some kind of backup arrived, or he really was the ghost of a Bronze Age sacrifice. Either way...

She stretched out her hand. "Good corn there will be. There will be many babies. Be at peace."

The man fell forward on his face and was gone.

"Can we play knights now?" asked Simon. He picked a buttercup and made a theatrical display of smelling its scent.

"Let me give this sword back to your Mama, and then of course we can."

Simon sneezed explosively.

"Bless you," said Carmen, and caught her breath.

April in Paris

2009-11-07T19:53:25Z

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.)

Another triolet for Fin

2009-11-05T18:34:35Z

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.

Chapbook

2009-11-04T06:35:06Z

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.