Dafydd

mistress_carrot @ 7:41am: Why do you have all the snow in the world?
The snow was Narnian in proportions when I was walking home last night. I've never been more glad of my henparty hiking boots, I barely slipped, my feet were warm and I could walk at a normal pace.

I got to our cul-de-sac and found that it was covered in snow. None of the cars had made it home yet, and not many people had walked on it. So I built the biggest snowman I've ever built! He wasn't huge, but was quite big, I always missed the snow when it happened in Ashton, so the snowman made me happy.

I'm now on my way to work. My day-dream of remote commuting from bed today was shattered by the fact that the trains were running and it's not likely to snow again today. Darn, I was liking the idea of not travelling today.

Nearly Christmas. I'm all prepared, my presents are bought and the washing is getting done daily so that we have plenty of clothes to pack from to go to Owen's Mum's with. I've completely failed to do Christmas cards this year, poo.

I'm looking forward to having all of Christmas off :-)

oedipamaas49 @ 3:03pm: Rage, rage against the plying of the shite*

Enjoyably happy-angry things I've been reading, and failing to watch.

First, on RATM vs Cowell. K-Punk, my favourite over-the-top theoryhead londoner blogger, gives it the treatment you'd expect. But I prefer cannons_at_dawn, who has this to say:

I would love to see the seething boiling whirlpool of chips on the shoulder of the British public wash Rage Against the Machine to the top spot, there to earnestly quote Franz Fanon at their enemies until they give in, sobbing, and promise to buy Fair Trade
...
The collective impetus to make one’s voice heard in this particularly pointless arena is sadly unlikely to translate into participation in, say, next year’s general election. Or at least not unless some enterprising soul decides to exhume Screaming Lord Sutch.

What it will do, however, is demonstrate that there still exists a demographic which clings limpet-like to the hull of bloody-mindedness, prepared to momentarily stir themselves in the interests of nudging the seat of mainstream popularity with a heated toasting-fork

Earlier entries are also great fun. Including my new favourite description of the way the world ends: "a cardigan-wearing Geography teacher farting in a human face forever".

Meanwhile, the Independent has a surprisingly good article rant about Copenhagen, by Joss Garman. I'd not previously heard of Garman (he's young, and I've been abroad), but he seems to strike just the right balance of being furious without simply condeming mainstream politicians en masse.

And over in the day-job, we have another film out from VODO, free to download over bittorrent:

Boy meets girl -- on OkCupid. Boy introduces girl to (fictitious) social filesharing site, The Lionshare. Girl digs site, but doesn't dig boy. Boy mopes around the city, never thinking the Lionshare would be the thing that would lead her away from him.

The Lionshare is an important kind of film for all of us, because it's the kind of film 'anyone' could have made -- 'anyone', that is, who takes it seriously, writing dialogue (and in-jokes) prised straight from their own lives, the backdrop of their own homes for scenery, friends as actors and their own experiences as scenarios. These stories are ours, and this is the start of a new kind of cinema.

I confess I've not yet managed to watch it (still not in the right state of mind to settle down with a film :-)). On the whole, though, people seem to like it -- and not just because it's free. If you do watch it, I'd be interested to hear what you think about it.

*not my pun, but how could you not repeat that?

dannipenguin @ 3:44pm: this is what goes around; and this.. this is what comes around
It used to be that no applications would compile for 64-bit architectures, because everyone was trying to cram pointers into ints. Today I had the opposite. The head of some code I'm working on wouldn't compile in a 32-bit environment, because someone was trying to store 5 bytes in a long.

We have truly come full circle.

sunflowerinrain @ 9:19pm: Oh Adrian, how could you?
I'd been ignoring something called Bonekickers. The title did not appeal and I had no interest in finding out what it was.

Accidentally flicking past it yesterday I saw Adrian (drool) Lester and Wells Cathedral! Of course I stopped to watch the rest. Review: the cathedral was magnificent in its role, the Lester was under-used, and the best line was Hugh Bonneville's "Don't mess with me, I'm an archeologist!". Apart from that it seemed to be very weak drivel. What a waste.

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dannipenguin @ 11:42am: Melbourne Tram Tracker for the N900
So Collabora's robotic and non-robotic overlords very graciously bought everyone on staff an N900 for Christmas. In my opinion, it's actually a very nice phone (although possibly a little on the large side); but the let down is there just isn't the same host of applications for it. Still, possessing both the tools and the skills, I figured I should do something about this, rather than complain.

One of the most useful iPhone applications in Melbourne is the real-time tram tracker. For stops without a display board, you can type in the stop ID and get the upcoming arrivals at that stop. You can also find nearby stops via GPS and a bunch of other things. It turns out that Yarra Trams offer a SOAP WSDL web service that is reasonably well documented, so I've spent a few days putting together a basic tram tracker for Maemo 5 (even if only two people will ever use it).








It currently can show upcoming trams for a stop by ID or by searching for stops by road names. Could possibly also do things like search for stop by route. There is a lot of information available. It doesn't yet do searching by location; the information is in the database, I've just not yet looked at how the location APIs work yet. Also need to add support for storing favourites.

I also want to add support for tracking a tram by tram ID. I'm wondering if it's possible to use the GPS to detect periods of immobility and check the upcoming tram stop after the tram starts moving again. I habitually miss stops; so what I think would be neat is to dial in a stop number or cross road you're looking for, and have your phone notify you when you're approaching it.

The web service uses python-suds, which is unfortunately not packaged for Debian, so I can't just rebuild it for Maemo (if anyone wants to package this up for me, that would be really awesome). Then I'll find out how well my app actually runs on the device.

In case anyone cares, the source code is here.

sunflowerinrain @ 12:28pm: Trains, planes, and freeze
I have to get back to England early next week. None of the local garages could repair the car before January, so I'm going to attempt to drive it back, stopping at night because of the smashed headlight (with thanks to

sunflowerinrain @ 8:59pm: No music and music
In vain I waited for my lift to the concert. She got lost, and the phone messages were too slow coming through. At one point she was only a mile away, but then took another wrong turning and finally had to give up or she'd have missed it too. Ah well. I wasn't doing a solo tonight, and it's warmer here than in a church.

I am consoled by BBC7 having broadcast one of my favourite Hinge and Bracket episodes: the one with Rosalind Plowright, purportedly in their Suffolk living-room, singing and chatting about Snape and Dear Ben. Dame Hilda giving advice to La Diva Plowright - exquisite.

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dannipenguin @ 12:30am: a threaded processing queue in PyGTK
I'm currently writing a PyGTK client that needs to make network requests using a library that doesn't integrate with the GLib mainloop (python-suds), so I found myself wanting to be able to make network requests without blocking the mainloop, and getting callbacks in my main thread when operations were done. The pattern to use is clearly having a dedicated network thread. In C I might have used GAsyncQueue, however I've found myself quite liking queue.Queue.

The following is a fairly generic class for queuing asynchronous requests. Calling the add_request() method from the main thread queues a function to be run in the worker thread. If the callback or error keywords are provided, these will then be called from the GLib mainloop in the main thread (queued via g_idle_add).

from threading import Thread
from Queue import Queue

import gobject

class ThreadQueue(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.q = Queue()

        t = Thread(target=self._thread_worker)
        t.setDaemon(True)
        t.start()

    def add_request(self, func, *args, **kwargs):
        """Add a request to the queue. Pass callback= and/or error= as
           keyword arguments to receive return from functions or exceptions.
        """

        self.q.put((func, args, kwargs))

    def _thread_worker(self):
        while True:
            request = self.q.get()
            self.do_request(request)
            self.q.task_done()

    def do_request(self, (func, args, kwargs)):
        if 'callback' in kwargs:
            callback = kwargs['callback']
            del kwargs['callback']
        else:
            callback = None

        if 'error' in kwargs:
            error = kwargs['error']
            del kwargs['error']
        else:
            error = None

        try:
            r = func(*args, **kwargs)
            if not isinstance(r, tuple): r = (r,)
            if callback: self.do_callback(callback, *r)
        except Exception, e:
            if error: self.do_callback(error, e)
            else: print "Unhandled error:", e

    def do_callback(self, callback, *args):
        def _callback(callback, args):
            callback(*args)
            return False

        gobject.idle_add(_callback, callback, args)

We can then inherit this class to provide setup for our specific application:

class WebService(ThreadQueue):
    def __init__(self, guid=None, **kwargs):
        """Initialise the service. If guid is not provided, one will be
           requested (returned in the callback). Pass callback= or error=
           to receive notification of readiness."""
        ThreadQueue.__init__(self)

        self.guid = guid
        self.add_request(self._setup_client, **kwargs)

    def _setup_client(self):
        print "Setting up client"

        ...

        return self.guid

Which we call from our program like this:

class Client(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.w = WebService(guid=guid, callback=self.client_ready)

    def client_ready(self, guid):
        print "client ready:", guid

gobject.threads_init()

Client()

gtk.main()

What's really cool though is adding methods to the API that are called asynchronously for you. Python makes this possible through the power of decorators. Add the following decorator to a method, and it instead of it being called directly, it will be added to the processing queue.

def async_method(func):
    """Makes the given method asynchronous, meaning when it is called it
       will be queued with add_request.
    """

    def bound_func(obj, *args, **kwargs):
        obj.add_request(func, obj, *args, **kwargs)

    return bound_func

class WebService(ThreadQueue):

    @async_method
    def GetStopInformation(self, stopNo):
        print "Requesting information for stop", stopNo

        ...

And that's it! If you can't follow it, don't worry too much. This is possibly the most Pythonesque bit of code I've ever written, but I've tried to make it generic enough that other people can use it for whatever they need. It's currently part of my app that's beginning to take shape, but the source is here.

Incidently, Maemo people: are there Glade definition files allowing me to use Hildon widgets, GtkBuild and Glade 3? That would be super awesome if there were.

sunflowerinrain @ 12:00pm: Stones and stars
Brendan is here this week, doing some more work upstairs - the last of the really messy work, I hope. He's hacked and scraped huge quantities of low-grade cement and crumbling mud from between the stones of the upper living-room walls, and is now pointing them. It's a horrible job in the current temperature, especially as the cement mixer (for the chaux, not for cement) is out in the garage. Yesterday was cloudy and cold; last night was clear and extremely cold; today we haven't yet achieved zero Celsius, and the sun is brightly reflected from the white lawn.

Last night was very cold, but so clear. The sky was stunning, so bright with stars that it was hard to pick out constellations. Sadly, much too cold to take out the telescope!

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sunflowerinrain @ 4:30pm: Vocabulary is curious and fascinating: local usage, specialist words, and the "false friends" of words which came from the same ancestors but haven't been on speaking terms since that row between many-great-grandfather and his brother. I can read Voltaire, Dumas, and Mallarmé pretty well; the reading list at university included many mid-twentieth-century works and a dictionary of Argot. Two days spent in a French school on an exchange visit left me with some grasp of the difference between poetry and verse and an ineradicable ear-worm of the first four lines of La Cigale.

Colloquial speech is sometimes easy, and sometimes not so easy (remember the English wine-dealer and old-house-owner who said his conversational French wasn't very good but he spoke excellent Building). For example, trying to establish what animal was hit by Y's car had me lost after she and C decided it was too small for cerf or petit sanglier, and too big for lapin[0] - I didn't recognise the names of any of the others.

I've been meaning to check some musical terms, particularly the term for "sheet music" aka "the dots". Note that English doesn't have a word for it: the fact that we commonly refer to it as "music" can be very confusing when trying to define "Music", a hard enough task anyway. It turns out that the French use one word rather than a phrase, and I now know what it is.

At Monday's rehearsal, the director commented that I was ranging my partitions.

[0] deer, baby wild boar, rabbit

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mistress_carrot @ 9:11pm: Am full of suck, and not in a good way
I'm feeling distinctly full of suck. Shelly's having a girl's night and I'm not going, again.

I love to do a girl's night on a Friday or Saturday, but I just don't feel that I can go out on weeknights unless it's somewhere near me. Town I can manage, it's on my way home, but going anywhere off-route isn't possible without either a) being shattered the next day, or b) having to leave really early.

Could I have gone? Yes, I could have not had any dinner and gone for an hour or so before I had to leave. I decided not to go.

So, I need an honest opinion, am I being shit?

sunflowerinrain @ 6:34pm: Tutoie or not tutoie, that is the question
I've mentioned before the curious thing about the use of "tu" in this area. People are all kissy-kissy as soon as they are on first name terms, but still use "vous". The French person with whom I travel to choir-practice clearly doesn't know me well enough to kiss, though he kisses the other co-chorister who is English: but then, they've known each other for about 5 years. However, he addresses me with "tu".

Ah. Of course. He's not from round here. :)

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mistress_carrot @ 12:09pm: Such fun! Such fun!
We're definitely on for the all-ladies 7th Sea game on Saturday, and I have to say, I'm very excited. I could bounce, and I may well bounce before Saturday comes around.

The Christmas shopping is well underway, I think that I only have Owen, my brother, Grandma and Auntie Elsie left to buy for, with Owen being the most difficult of those.

dannipenguin @ 1:30pm: Been doing a pretty poor job of blogging my life lately. Mostly it's been photos and no text.

Took a week off from work (the week before last) because a number of our Perth friends came to visit. I've never dropped someone off and picked someone up from the airport in the same run before.


It was a fun, but exhausting week that culminated with my 25th birthday. Not as traumatic as I might have anticipated 6 months ago. Ended up eating every meal out that day, breakfast at Grigons + Orr, lunch at Friends of the Earth, and dinner at the East Brunswick Club.

Went to Prahran on Monday for Jo's birthday (who is actually 2 days older than me). Turned out everyone there was vegan (I think?) but there weren't really that many vegan (veganisable) things on the menu. There somewhat of a dearth of vegan food south of the Yarra. Felt bad for the people who still ended up paying full-price for a seafood noodles minus the seafood.


Also went to Fitzroy twice on Monday, once to have lunch with Steph between her meetings and then later that day with Furry (before heading on to Prahran). Thankfully I still managed a couple of early starts this week, and a few late evenings, so somehow I still managed to finish all my work by Friday (even with all the distractions). Worked on the telepathy-gabble codebase for the first time this week.

We became just that little bit more Victorian this week. The registration and insurance on our car was running out, so we had to transfer the car to Victorian registration. This meant new license plates.


I've personally been very slack with doing any Christmas shopping. Although we have been to a lot of markets, at which I've seen a lot of great stuff, for the same couple of people, there are people who remain notoriously hard to find something useful and meaningful for (I hate just buying crap).

I think I'll propose family-based secret-Santa for next year. Steph's cousins do this. The way it works is everyone writes down a list of stuff they want, and it all gets put into an (electronic) hat, and then you buy a bunch of stuff for just one person. Plus instead of buying 10 books or DVDs or whatever you buy the person a larger present to the same cumulative value, allowing them to ask for something they want but may be unable to afford (without the hassle of asking everyone if they want to go shares in a gift).

Went to the Walk Against Warming yesterday. Estimates place the attendance at 40,000 people. Looking down Swanston St was kinda amazing. I didn't take any pictures, but given the number of cameras, I'm sure lots exist. We walked from the State Library down Swanston St, past Federation Square, to the Princes Bridge (which spans the Yarra), where we formed a human sign photographed by blimp (safe climate - do it: looks like this).


by takver, CC BY-SA
The sign took a while to make, so I was amazing sore and hungry by the end. Caught the tram back to Friends of the Earth for lunch and to see Steph (who had to miss the walk because of her FotE shift). Ended up wiping down the tables and packing things up so they could close for the afternoon before coming home to have a nap. SJ dropped by later that evening to drop around some Christmas noms, and have a cup of tea and a catch-up.

Spent all of today so far in my PJs. Taken some photos. Have made an attempt at fruit bread, but I think our yeast is stale. I had to put it in a warmed oven to get it to rise. It's just cooling now, so we'll see how it went in a bit. My brother is meant to be showing up tomorrow, having been in Melbourne for a University motorsport event (they built a car!).

mistress_carrot @ 5:22pm: Life got better at around seven last night
Had a lovely night last night playing games at Eclectic to celebrate D's birthday. I won Pitch Car, which I'm quite proud of, I like winning games of skill; actually I like winning in general, but games of skill are so much more satisfying than games of luck.

Stayed up late with Owen after we got home *grin*

*double grin*

*triple grin*

We got up early this morning to go see New Moon at the cinema. I have to admit, it was a bit poo. The action was better in the film, loved the fight scenes, but the books get the feelings across an awful lot more than the film does. Also, I'm in the Team Jacob camp, I think it would have been a lot better if Bella had gone to save Edward and then dumpped his skinny whiney emo butt for being a loser and leaving her "for her own good". That's bollocks, you only ever leave someone because it's right for you, not because it's right for them. But no, he's her soulmate, so it doesn't matter that Edward left her alone in a wood with a heart so broken that she didn't even notice three or four months pass, or that Jacob's a nicer guy, warm to cuddle up with and can grow old with her; no one could ever beat the unbreakable soulmate bond!

I love the books, I really do, so much so that I went to see it in the cinema, but I hate that young girls might be reading them and thinking that love and relationships are really like that. Mostly because I was stuck in that little fantasy between the ages of 17 and 20, and in the end all it got me was a whole heap of depression, a bunch of anger and masses of missed opportunities.

Cry more.

After the cinema we did a little Christmas shopping, trying to get the shops that don't open tomorrow. On the way home we dropped into Moondogs, which I love and wish I could go to more often. There was a live band playing, Brassneck, they were quite good.

bookly @ 7:36pm: LaTeX question: Is it possible to use the \textit{} command within the \footnote{} command? LaTeX is producing an error message and I think that configuration is the cause of it. Thanks!

ETA: I love the way I always figure out the answer to LaTeX problems shortly after I post the question. Maybe the thought that someone will be coming to my rescue soon helps me calm down so I can think things through more carefully.

mjg59 @ 6:33pm: Nook update
My nook arrived today, along with an email asking for my shipping address in order to be sent a CD with the source on. So that's progress. The nook itself is an interesting device - it comes in impressively well produced packaging, which looks easily as attractive as any Apple product I've laid hands on lately. Except that it then includes a double-sided sheet of instructions in the outer packaging to tell you how to get the damn thing out.

And so far, that seems like a pretty good summary of the device. There's a huge quantity of form here, but the function is lacking. The initial registration was made infuriating by the lag between hitting a key on the keyboard[1] and anything happening. I'm not talking about the understandable lag due to the latency of updates on e-ink screens - I'm talking about the seemingly non-deterministic time between tapping the screen and it indicating that I've pressed a key. The coverflow feature for books is better than selecting from a menu of items (e-ink lends itself badly to interactive displays), but slow and jerky. Worse, it's limited to B&N content. Anything you obtain elsewhere and then copy onto the device (which presents as USB mass storage) ends up in a separate menu without any coverflow. And, even more infuriatingly, you can't catagorise the files you copy on there. It's just one big list, sorted alphabetically by author (surname) and then title.

Once you're in a book, things aren't bad. It reformats the text every time you enter a book (no caching), but that takes much less time than my Sony did. The default font is very readable, even at small sizes. But there's clearly something horribly wrong - various epub files I have take up to 4 seconds to perform a page turn, which is way longer than the second or so my Sony took. There's no way to skip to a given page number, which seems like an insane oversight. And, though it's a minor point, the next/previous page buttons are the opposite way around to the Kindle or Sonys, and it's taking a while to get used to that.

It's a promising device. The hardware's clearly capable and the software is mostly there, with the features I'm really missing being ones that shouldn't be hard to implement[2]. But those features are pretty glaring, and right now they make this less functional than the Sony, let alone the Kindle. I'm also kind of surprised that it doesn't ship with any kind of cover at all. There's ample opportunity for physical trauma to turn one of these into a paperweight.

Side note: My nook managed to include the QA checklist slip, presumably by accident. The nook's internal manufacturing designation appears to be "X2", and mine was built on 2009/11/25. Which would seem optimistic for an intended shipping date in the US of 2009/11/30, which does support the idea that the shipping delay was due to some kind of delay in the hardware production.

[1] Presented on the LCD panel
[2] Of course, this being closed-source, I can't do so myself. Sigh.

oedipamaas49 @ 7:15pm: University protests

Student protests: have there been an unusual number of them going on this year? I've seen next to nothing about them in the media, although from word-of-mouth they seem pretty damn huge:
In France, strikes effectively shut down the entire university system from February to May. That's the longest student strike ever in France -- longer than '68, for instance.

And now, Austria and Germany are on the go. It started with with the occupation of the University of Vienna in late October. That sparked a large movement across Austria and Germany, which is claiming occupations of 80-odd univeristies. Today they've also been protesting at a meeting of state education ministers in Bonn -- apparently with some success.

Obviously there's always a low-level simmering of student protest, and it tends to be a dog-bites-man story that doesn't much inconvenience anybody. The protesters are also monumentally incompetent at simplifying their message (which, very roughly, is about education becoming more driven by exams and money, to the detriment of actually learning anything). And I'm not convinced by attempts (common around here) to connect it to the protests in Greece and Iran; those aren't really 'student' protests, no matter how prominent students are in them.

[this was going to be a post about going to the occupied Freie Universität yesterday, but I got sidetracked. Briefly, there was excellent music, and I got to re-meet my ex-housemate Lara -- who, apart from being generally fantastic, has drawn the most wonderful picture of me. I will post photos, just as soon as I find somebody to take them for me :)]

aldabra @ 9:53am: I thought this UEA e-mail leak was a storm in a teacup. There was nothing in the e-mails which didn't seem entirely expectable for an academic department, and science works because it doesn't rely on its practitioners being honourable.

But, this suggests the problem is very much greater:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

Summary (it's long): there are several series of climate data in existence. But they're all reliant on pre-processed data, and the data pre-processing is done by UEA. They take in the raw data from all over the world and clean it up and make it consistent and then pass it on to the other groups.

So, this guy has looked at the raw data and the cleaned-up data from an isolated weather station in the middle of Australia, and the "cleaning-up process" appears to have converted a downward trend in the temperatures into an upward trend, which then gets fed into all the models all over the world. It looks like the pre-processing has some kind of smoothing input which makes the data compatible with the "known model".

It looks to me like a fair analysis, and also like a direct hit on the climate science, in a way which nothing else has yet.

Tell me, O Interweb: is it a fair analysis? Is this a reliable site? I know I've been pointed to things on it before.

I don't see any evidence that they've been falsifying satellite pictures of melting ice, though.

[ETA: The Economist explains what's actually going on with the Darwin adjustments, here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/12/trust_scientists ]

dannipenguin @ 6:53pm: GTK+ is crushing my spirit
I want a widget that is the combination of GtkComboBoxEntry and GtkEntryCompletion that can display a tree of options in a nice, indented way without the expanders (but with the rows expanded). Basically, a search box with a drop-down and hierarchical entries. I think I'm going to have to write my own, thought it sounds like something that might be more widely useful than just my application.


Visited nixwilliams and daniel_bethany for a cup of tea, which become lunch (which was delicious) which became more tea, which became waiting out the rain and watching Nicholas Crane trip over a lot. Got wet going home anyway. Now waiting out the rain again before going to the shops. It's a good thing that I like rain; though mostly I like wearing a giant, warm jumper while it rains outside.