taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Well, that was a really scary few days.

On Monday, the lovely C was nearly 2 weeks overdue, and was scheduled to come into the Rotunda for induction the next morning; then contractions started on Monday afternoon. We were happy, as avoiding induction was good news for a natural birth, allowing the process to be run through the excellent Domino scheme, etc.

So we went in, arriving at the Rotunda ER for 3.45 or so. They put on the CTG to monitor the baby’s heartbeats, and the first 3 contractions were strong, but everything seemed OK. The next one, however, the baby’s heart rate dropped dramatically — to a very low 40bpm; I called the ER nurses, they ran in, put C on oxygen, and that seemed to help, returning the rate to normal — but on the next contraction the baby’s heart rate dropped even further. Once that happened, the shit hit the fan. In seconds C was on a trolley heading for surgery. It was clear this was serious trouble.

I was left standing outside the theatre while she was operated on — as an emergency Caesarean section there was no time for luxuries like hapless husbands stumbling around the background. Probably just as well. The midwives and surgical staff kept me as well informed as was possible, though.

After a terrifying 10 minutes, the prognosis improved a little. Initially they were worried that the baby had put pressure on the cord, but this was discounted — in fact the baby had emptied its bowels of meconium in the womb, which irritated it enough to cause enough distress and cause its heart rate to crash. After 10 minutes, the baby was out (and was a girl!), and C was going to be OK at least. however the baby was at quite a lot of risk from aspiration of meconium and possible brain damage due to reduced oxygen in the womb. holy shit. :(

The baby had indeed aspirated some meconium, causing a collapsed lung. Over the next couple of days in an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, the little mite had surgery to introduce a chest tube into her pleura to re-inflate the lung, and was treated with a variety of treatments to deal with meconium in her stomach.

The best bit was this afternoon when we got news that the results of her cranial ultrasound were in — all clear, no brain damage. Then C got to feed her and hold her — and she latched on like some kind of milk-seeking missile. what a little trooper.

Anyway, with any luck, 2 or 3 days from now they’ll both be able to come home in one piece.

We were lucky btw — if we hadn’t been in the ER at the time, it was very unlikely that the prognosis would have been anywhere near as good. And I have to give credit to the Rotunda staff, they did a great job.

pics on Flickr!

Update, 7 June: C was released from hospital yesterday, and Mae got the all-clear this morning. We’re now all back home, healthy and in one piece. Now we can just get on with the usual second-child excitement-slash-drama! phew!

Tags: baby, birth, life, mae, medicine, scary

• ExMH dependencies in fink : a few bits and bobs required to get this excellent (though ugly) UNIX mail reader app working on MacOS
  (tags: exmh mail macos porting fink)

• metamail for OSX patch : fixes this ExMH dependency to build on OSX
  (tags: metamail macos exmh)

• Salon.com Life | Old people Facebook disasters : “The funny thing about Facebook is that you’re there with your colleagues and your friends [...] and the next thing you know, you’ve forgotten that your status update is all about how hung over you are.”
  (tags: salon funny facebook privacy generation-gap age 30s online-life life social-networking)

• Stanislav Petrov Day : last Friday, but worth celebrating. on 26 September 1983, a little-known Russian military officer averted global nuclear war, by disobeying procedures and correctly identifying a missile-launch report as a false positive. phew!
  (tags: stanislav-petrov war nuclear russia cold-war 80s anniversaries history)

Tags: 30s, 80s, age, anniversaries, cold-war, exmh, facebook, fink, funny, generation-gap, history, life, macos, mail, metamail, nuclear, online-life, porting, privacy, russia, salon, social-networking, stanislav-petrov, war

I recently came across my record at the Commodore Scene Database, and was happy to find that someone had found and uploaded two demos I had written, back in my days as a member of the C=64 demo scene between 1988 and 1990:

• Stercoraphasia

• Mastocephaloid

(I was a member of the groups ‘Excess’ and ‘Thundertronix’ / ‘TNT’, going by the handle of ‘Mantis’.)

With the help of CBA, I was overjoyed to track down another long-lost demo, my crowning achievement on the platform:

• Rhaphanadosis

If you’re curious, feel free to go read those wiki pages or download the .d64’s — they run fine in VICE, the Commodore emulator (amazingly). If you’ve only got time to check one, check Rhaphanadosis; it’s much better than the others.

I’m very impressed with VICE. As far as I can tell, it’s perfectly bug-for-bug compatible with the real hardware, playing all of the demos perfectly (apart from a little additional speed due to differing hardware performance). If you haven’t already got VICE set up, bear in mind that after installing it, you’ll need a copy of the C=64’s ROM images; here’s a local set.

Also, the Commodore Scene Database is pretty awesome — it’s a full-scale IMDB-style setup, tracking the history of the Commodore demo scene in massive detail. Nice work guys!

The demos were written 100% in 6502/6510 assembly. I developed them using an Action Replay cartridge’s built-in monitor; it had an assembler, but one which didn’t support symbolic addressing. In other words, every piece of assembly used hand-computed branch offsets, and every variable and subroutine was tracked — on paper — by memory location, rather than using symbolic labels. If you want to know what the monitor was like, the VICE built-in monitor is almost identical!

I wrote these when I was 16; part 4 of Rhaphandosis notes the date as being 20 May 1989.

It’s interesting reading the scrollers, and doing web and CSDB searches in follow-up to see what happened next — one of the other Excess members, Raistlin is now Robert Troughton, a successful game developer in the UK with several major titles under his belt.

A Google search for Thundertronix finds a copy of “sex’n'crime” zine, issue 17, July 1990, which notes:

one of the new groups formed in 1990 (jm: slightly off, I think) is THUNDERTRONIX, better known as TNT. they are based in ireland and are doing very well for themselves. they have, in my mind, one of the best coders in the uk, namely MANTIS. he is currently coding a game with many new routines, etc… hopefully he should get some demos out soon!

woo! Er, unfortunately that game never went anywhere. ah well. ;)

BTW, it’s funny reading my scrollers in those demos. At the time, I was convinced that the c=64 was a dead platform — yet here we are in 2008, and there’s still a thriving demo scene on the Commodore. Incredible!

Tags: c-64, commodore, demo-scene, demos, hacking, history, life, teenage

So, as I’ve hinted previously, I’ve left Vast to work full-time at a new gig: PutPlace.

I’ll be working on more EC2/S3/SQS-related large-scale cluster stuff, and on their open-source plans… looking forward to that. They’re a great team — lots of familiar faces from the Iona days — and it finally gets me out of telecommuting from home, back into an office again after 5 years ;)

Joe has put up a nice blog post welcoming me. Cheers Joe!

Now to get to grips with Python. (I still love Perl though. ;)

Tags: job, life, putplace, vast

So, we were all set to name our new arrival Cosmo, assuming it was a boy. We were certain it was going to be a boy. Guess what? It wasn’t… so now we have to narrow down the girl-name shortlist in a hurry!

Isn’t she lovely? Lots more photees at Flickr.

Anyway, I may be hard to get hold of for a while… this lady will be keeping me busy I think ;)

Update: Looks like the name is Beatrice Lily Mason, although there’s still a fair bit of indecision, unfortunately ;)

Update 2: Beatrice Lily Gray Mason. Final answer!

Tags: babies, cute, kids, life

Hey — I’m back, rested and full of tasty, tasty Niçois and Provencal cuisine.

I got back just in time to vote, for what good that did with Bertie’s gang leading strongly in the current counts… argh!

For what it’s worth, I gave Patricia McKenna a preference, in the end. I was reminded that she’d been entirely on our side on software patents during her time as an MEP — so credit where it’s due, there; on top of that, a vote for the Greens is better than a vote going to Sinn Fein, after all, no matter what. ;)

Tags: holidays, life, meta, voting

Check out what’s cooking chez Mason:

Thrills and spills! I may have to cut down on the extra-curricular activities for a while, so we’d better get SpamAssassin 3.2.0 released before August 21st ;)

Tags: baby, drama, kids, life

Tagged by richi! drat. OK, here are 5 things you probably don’t know about me:

1. I’m a certified SCUBA diver, at PADI Advanced Open Water Diver level. (oh, look, so’s Tom Raftery!)

2. I generally try to avoid meeting my heroes, since I get quite tongue-tied in the presence of people I admire — I once stammered “I think you’re brilliant” at Alex Paterson, instead of anything more witty or interesting.

3. I met my wife at a student occupation in university, where her knowledge of the science and nature questions in Trivial Pursuit, and amazing looks of course, got me hooked ;)

4. I could listen to Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and Here Come The Warm Jets on repeat for several weeks, if necessary.

5. I was a child model, modelling (among other things) underpants for Dunnes Stores! It’s all been downhill since then, really ;)

Passing it on: go for it, Brendan, Colm, Lisey, and Jason.

Tags: 5things, blog-tags, five-things, life, memes, richi

Via Lean comes this, I think from the Irish Times:

One-half of Dublin drivers would never use bus - survey

One-half of all car drivers in the greater Dublin area say they would not switch to travelling by bus, even if services were improved, according to a new survey.

Unreliability, long waiting times and poor connections were cited as the main reasons for not taking the bus in the survey carried out for the Dublin Transportation Office (DTO).

As many as four out of five people expressed dissatisfaction with traffic congestion and access to the Luas.

Just over 35 per cent of those surveyed were satisfied with the quality and upkeep of roads, and with facilities for cycling. Over one-half said they were happy with the reliability, frequency and cost of buses.

Almost 2,500 people were interviewed for the survey and a similar number of travel diaries were compiled. The car is the main form of transport in the region, used by 45 per cent of respondents. Some 18 per cent relied on the bus and 16 per cent said walking was their main form of transport. Just 2 per cent used the Luas more often than other modes of transport, and 3 per cent used the DART or local train. Two per cent cycled and 1 per cent relied on taxis.

Of those who said they might switch to the bus, over 60 per cent said more frequent services was the main change needed. Accurate timetables and stops closer to destinations were also called for.

Respondents linked transport by car to comfort, convenience and reliability. In contrast, buses were viewed as being for older people and people with no other choice. Bus transport was favourably viewed for going out socially and for being reasonably priced.

The Luas was seen as modern, while DART and train services were viewed as fast and safe. Cycling and walking were viewed as healthy and environmentally friendly, but for young people.

Great figures — they sound pretty accurate.

The novelty of being home in a (relatively) bike- and public-transport-friendly city has worn off for me by now — I’m now more familiar with buses that aren’t a dumping ground for the homeless and mentally ill, and that do actually tend to pass both your origin and destination in a single journey. But that was in Orange County, possibly one of the most public-transit-hostile societies in the developed world, and compared to a more sane standard, Dublin still has a major problem.

By the way, it’s interesting to note Ireland’s move OC-wards on many fronts. When I got back, I was shocked to see tubby children being driven to school by mobile-phone-wielding, SUV-driving parents — the very worst aspects of US suburban-sprawl life being happily parrotted over here. :(

Tags: cities, cycling, dublin, life, public-transport

Observant taint.org readers might recall me complaining about a bout of food poisoning back in June during ApacheCon week, which, along with a poorly-timed work trip, unfortunately managed to stop me attending ApacheCon altogether.

Turns out that that “food poisoning” never went away — four months later, I’m still having digestive troubles. However, I’ve been lucky enough to figure out a way to minimise it, which I’ll mention here for posterity (and Google).

So, basically, the symptoms were general stomach unsettledness, nausea, cramping, a sharp pain in the right side, and heartburn — all waxing and waning intermittently. (There were issues at “the other end” I’ll leave out, in the interests of good taste.) On top of that, my level of stomach “calmness” was way off — nausea from travelling in cars, buses, taxis etc. became an issue.

Thankfully, it didn’t interfere with work much at all — since I work from home, it was pretty easy to deal with. But it certainly put a damper on trips like ApacheCon, or BarCamp Ireland… it became quite difficult, in particular, to travel any kind of distance during the daytime. (Luckily my ability to partake in pints of Guinness during the evening was not affected, however. ;)

I did the usual thing of visiting my local G.P., and was referred to a gastro-intestinal specialist — that’s all still going on, slowly. But fortunately, in the meantime, I had a breakthrough in terms of dealing with the symptoms.

Initially, the waxing and waning of symptoms seemed pretty random, but after a week or two, a pattern emerged — on a normal day, it’d typically be worst at about 11am in the morning, then ease off before lunch, then worse again after lunch. During and after dinner, it’d be fine, and the evenings were almost symptom-free. On an empty stomach, there was similarly virtually no problems whatsoever.

Of course, having a link with quantities of food makes sense for a GI illness. But it eventually occurred to me that the symptoms were increasing and waning in time with specific types of food, in fact. The pattern of symptoms were tracking my drinking of milk, in cereal, and in tea or coffee, delayed by about 2 hours. Now, I’ve always been a total omnivore — I’ve never suffered from allergies, had any issues digesting food, or suffered travel illness. My sea legs were rock solid; one trip to the Great Barrier Reef saw myself and C being the only tourists not to vom over the sides despite some heavy waves. Also, as an Irishman, tea is the core component of my diet, and tea with milk at that; and dairy is similarly at the heart of Irish cuisine in many ways, plenty of milk, cheese, and butter. I was raised on the stuff, and love it!

But the signs were pretty solid, so I gave up dairy for a week or two to try it out. It took a week to “clear out” initially, but since then, the results have been fantastic; some of the symptoms (the sharp pain, cramps, heartburn) are almost gone, and levels of the others (nausea, stomach ‘unsettledness’) are way down most of the time. If I eat something that contains milk, cheese or whey – such as a packet of crisps recently — I can tell within 10 minutes, since the pain in my right side “twinges” noticeably. It really is astounding.

The wierd thing is, this came out of nowhere. A week before that bbq, I was glugging milk without a single issue, and feeling perfectly fine; I’ve never had issues with dairy. Then all of a sudden, it just hit me, seemingly after a short bout of food poisoning, and it still hasn’t gone away.

Talking to people, though, it appears this is more common than one might think; I now know of several people who’ve become lactose intolerant, suddenly, in their 30s.

Anyway, the core issue is still there, but while the wheels of medical science grind on, I at least have pretty good control of the nastier symptoms again. yay.

Tags: dairy, food, life, stomach

It’s been a while since I’ve embarked on a DIY job around the house with quite as much success as the most recent one — laying and tacking down some new carpet in the front hall. The last job was a bike rack, which had to be abandoned after the 4-inch screws proved too loose and threatened to fall out of the wall, leaving gigantic plugs of Polyfilla in their place (I’m sure bad drilling had nothing to do with it).

This has all now been forgotten in the glory of the freshly-laid carpet. Now, every time I walk past the front hall, I have to stick my head in and check out the perfectly-fitted carpet with pride. This can only last so long before my next botch job, of course…

Tags: diy, house, life

Well, I’m back in Dublin in one piece, after a great honeymoon in Corsica. Lots of stuff to catch up on, so if you’re waiting on a response, sorry, it might take a little longer…

Tags: honeymoon, life, meta, wedding

Well, the second half of the wedding — the fun part, with dinner, dancing, friends, and family — went off without a hitch. Our hippy-crap-laden humanist ceremony, celebrated with the aid of our friend Gerry, was a great success; the pianist and various DJs provided fantastic aural accompaniment; and the venue, Markree Castle in County Sligo, was fantastic, taking care of the entire party in every way we hadn’t foreseen and putting up with us far into the early hours of the next day.

That was the most fun I’ve had in yonks, and thanks to everyone who came. (And those who didn’t, due to the whims of US visa conditions — you were much missed.)

Photos will follow once we’re back from the honeymoon, which starts tomorrow morning. later ;)

Tags: fun, hitched, life, married, wedding

Quick note — I’m off on vacation next week — so I probably won’t read any email while I’m there ;) Talk to you after the 17th.

Tags: fun, holidays, life, meta, vacation

I gave up smoking last year on May 26 — that anniversary isn’t too far away. Here’s how much money I’ve saved, courtesy of QuitMeter.com:

QuitMeter Counter courtesy of www.quitmeter.com.

Wow — I could buy myself another iPod! ;)

Tags: addiction, health, life, quitting, smoking

As of yesterday, I have a new day-job.

I won’t be working on email spam as part of the job, which is an interesting turn of events. However, I’ll be sticking with the open-source Apache SpamAssassin project, and keeping up the rate of work on that [*].

I’m not sure how much I can blog about the new place just yet, but I will say it’s certainly looking like it’ll be very interesting work ;)

[*: modulo the next couple of weeks while I'm waiting for my bloody DSL to be installed. argh!]

Tags: jobs, life, spamassassin, work

So, I’ve been back in Ireland for several weeks now. How goes the culture shock? Well, let’s make a list of the stuff I’m missing from California:

• C, who’s still back there finishing up her contract. Hurry up, C!

• All my friends I left behind in the US :( Come visit!

• The weather (well duh)

• Trader Joes: low-cost, high-quality organic and near-organic food

• The excellent Mexican and Southern food. Mmm, Taco Mesa

• Super-cheap cocktails — although having good Guinness makes up for a lot of this

• The back country — desert, mountains, snow, national parks. Ireland may have more surviving history dotted about, but it’s just flat. I miss the mountains

• Netflix — haven’t spotted a replacement for this yet. There are companies in Ireland that use a similar idea, but it appears every one just about manages to screw it up and render it useless, generally by introducing throttling, late fees, or slow turnaround. meh

• The way my Irish accent meant I could get away with pretty much anything. That trick doesn’t work in Ireland ;)

In other news: the broadband choices situation has pretty much gone to shit.

It turns out that all the good options are quite dependent on local-loop unbundling, which — somehow — still hasn’t gotten around to my local exchange. As a result, guess who’s going to be stuck on the wrong end of dialup, no less, for “2 to 3 weeks” until Eircom deign to switch on the bitstream access for my new BT-resold ADSL connection? Here’s hoping there’s a neighbour with broadband and wifi when I move back in. Joy.

Tags: broadband, california, food, ireland, life, lists, llu, netflix, travel, us

I don’t do silly blog antics much, but I got tagged by Mat for the Four Things meme. Looking around, it is indeed a bit more interesting than things like the usual LJ quiz, so why not!

I wrote this on the plane from LA to Dublin, which may have affected some of the selections in 4 places I would rather be right now at least ;)

4 jobs I’ve had:

• I was Iona Technologies’ first employee, and stayed there for no less than 7 years. I got to see the company grow from a handful of people, most of whom weren’t getting paid (hence how I wound up as the first employee ;), all the way up to a 300-strong multinational, while the company itself formed a core of Ireland’s mini dot-com boom. That was fantastic fun, and educational to boot.

• my Dad’s gun/fishing/sporting-goods shop. Was it really a good idea to have a teenager working near firearms? At least I wasn’t the one who unplugged the fridge where the maggots were kept, so that they all hatched over the course of one weekend…

• A horrible teenage job — picking tomatoes. I can still feel the orange dust under my fingernails every time I smell fresh tomatoes :( I didn’t last very long at that at all.

• writing an Amiga-based kiosk system for virtually no pay whatsoever, at the age of 18 or 19. Ah, exploitation.

4 movies I can watch over and over:

• Koyaanisqatsi — it’s dating a little now, since every ad agency through the 90s ripped it off. But still, the invention of a new format. I remember looking at the 405 freeway in LA, and thinking “looks like something out of Koyaanisqatsi” — of course, it was.

• Princess Mononoke — either that, or Nausicaa. I just love the way the characters are coloured in shades of grey, rather than black and white.

• the Lord of the Rings trilogy — oh dear I’m a hopeless Tolkien fanboy.

• Spinal Tap — pure genius.

4 places I’ve lived:

• Melbourne, Australia; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The Secret Lives Of Us;

• Newport Beach, CA; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The O.C.;

• Dublin, Ireland; no annoying TV drama — so far

• University of California Irvine, CA; while Irvine itself is the most soulless suburban hellhole I’ve ever visited, living on the UCI campus is quite fun by comparison. Take about 1000 grad students, post-docs and lecturers from around the world; put them all in the same square mile or so; remove all fun (and bars!) from the surrounding areas; watch them make their own entertainment, or go mad.

4 tv shows I love:

• The Day Today

• Brass Eye

• Black Books

• The Office

4 places I’ve vacationed:

• Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal; we trekked our way up to there, then trekked back down again. Unforgettable. I really want to do another Nepal trek as a result

• car-camping around the Australian state of Victoria; they have some fantastic national park campsites, which most tourists overlook

• learning how to dive in Ko Tao, Thailand; great setting, great dive sites, pretty cheap too!

• Yosemite; amazing, world-class natural beauty. Californians don’t realise just how lucky they’ve got it ;)

4 of my favourite dishes:

• A good Thai green curry

• Laos-style green papaya salad with sticky rice

• a good meaty cassoulet, from Fandango in San Luis Obispo. At least, that was the tastiest meal I’ve had in recent months ;)

• Mangosteen — the queen of fruit, according to the Thais. I could, and probably have, eaten hundreds of these

4 places I would rather be right now:

• spending New Year’s Day with a bunch of friends in rural West Cork or County Galway; until I moved to the US, this was one of my favourite annual traditions.

• the Stag’s Head Bar, Dublin, in the snug, again with a bunch of friends

• sitting on the grass outside the Pavilion bar in TCD, on a sunny summer’s day (hmm, that’s a lot of bars!)

• Chiang Mai, Thailand

4 sites I visit daily:

• teh FP

• Waxy’s Links

• The Hype Machine

• Robot Wisdom

4 people I’m tagging:

• Doc at the Old Rottenhat group blog

• Craig

• Yoz

• Sarah Carey

Tags: four-things, fun, history, life, memes, weblog

On Friday, I got my lower-left wisdom tooth extracted. That’s the last one that should cause any trouble; there’s only one remaining, and it’s fully out so shouldn’t act up. After a few years of on-again-off-again twinges, and lots of irresponsible putting-off of surgery, I’ve finally taken care of it.

The downside: I’m totally zonked on painkillers, so I won’t be doing much for the next few days apart from what’s required for day-to-day day-job stuff.

Tags: life, meta, ouch, teeth

Antarctic: Happy Midwinter’s Day!

I’ve just finished reading Big Dead Place , Nicholas Johnson’s book about life at McMurdo Base and the US South Pole Station, with anecdotes from his time there in the early years of this decade.

It’s a fantastic book — very illustrative of how life really goes on on a distant research base, once you get beyond romantic notions of exploration of the wild frontiers. (Like many geek kids, I spent my childhood dreaming of space exploration, and Antarctica is the nearest thing you can get to that right now.) A bonus: it’s hilarious, too.

Unfortunately it’s far from all good — as one review notes, it’s like ‘M*A*S*H on ice, a bleak, black comedy.’ There’s story after story of moronic bureaucratic edicts emailed from comparatively-sub-tropical Denver, Colorado, ass-covering emails from management on a massive scale, and injuries and asbestos exposures covered up to avoid spoiling ‘metrics’.

Here’s a sample of such absurdity, from an interview with Norwegian world-record breaking Antarctic explorer, Eirik Sønneland:

BDP: I was working at McMurdo when you arrived in 2001. I remember it well because we were commanded by NSF not to accommodate you in any way, and were forbidden to invite you to our rooms or into any buildings. We were told not to send mail for you, nor to send email messages for you. While you were in the area, NSF was keeping a close eye on you. What did the managers say to you when you arrived?

They asked us what plans we had for getting home. The manager at Scott Base (jm: the New Zealand base) was calm and listened to what we had to say. I must be honest and say that this was not the way we were treated by the U.S. manager. It was like an interrogation. Very unpleasant. He acted arrogant. However, it seemed like he started to realize after a couple of days that we didn’t try to fool anybody. He probably got his orders from people that were not in Antarctica at the time. And, to be honest, today I don’t have bad feelings toward anyone in McMurdo. Bottom line, what did hurt us was that people could not think without using bureaucracy. If people could only try to listen to what we said and stop looking up paragraphs in some kind of standard operating procedures for a short while, a lot could have been solved in a shorter time.

One example: our home office, together with Steven McLachlan and Klaus Pettersen in New Zealand, got a green light from the captain of the cargo ship that would deliver cargo (beer, etc.) to McMurdo, who said he would let us travel for free back to New Zealand if it was okay with his company. At first the company was agreeable, but then NSF told them that the ship would be under their rent until it left McMurdo and was 27 km away. Reason for the 27 km? The cargo ship needed support from the Coast Guard icebreaker to get through the ice. Since, technically, the contract with NSF did not cease until the ship left the ice, NSF could stop us from going on the ship. At which point NSF offered to fly us from McMurdo for US$50,000 each.

He also maintains an excellent website at BigDeadPlace.com, so go there for an idea of the writing. BTW, it appears the UK also maintains an Antarctic base. Here’s hoping they keep the bureaucracy at a saner level over there.

Tags: antarctic, base, book, exploration, happy, life, manager, nsf, story, time, way

Life: seeing as yesterday was World No Tobacco Day, it’s worth noting that I gave up smoking last Thursday.

This is the first time I’ve taken the step of quitting with any seriousness. I’ve been smoking since I was 18 or 19, without any real attempts to quit before now. It was a gradual process, but imagining a smoker’s future, with the diseases and reduced life expectancy it involves, makes it quite sensible in the end. So far, it’s going pretty well — lots of occasional pangs, but nothing I can’t say no to… especially with the aid of Liquorice Altoids. wish me luck!

Tags: day, life, process, seriousness, smoking, step, thursday, time, tobacco, world, yesterday

Life: Alec Muffett quotes an Economist opening line:

We tend to meet any new situation in life by reorganising, Petronius Arbiter, a 1st-century Roman satirist, is supposed to have remarked. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.

As apt today as it was then.

(I was recently talking to a mate who’s a post-grad in the classics. She noted that classicists aren’t the fastest-moving academicians around, speculating that maybe it was because, in studying the classics, you realise the same problems and the same solutions have been around for over two thousand years regardless of change in other aspects of life.)

Tags: confusion, economist, illusion, inefficiency, life, line, method, progress, satirist, situation

Life: I’m moving house — I’ve just filled about 20 boxes, now to get moving them! Sadly, there’s no wifi in range of my new house, so the upshot is I may be offline for a few days. Boo.

Tags: boo, house, life, offline, range, upshot, wifi

Life: Luke writes:

Lean and I were joined by Lara at 6.10pm on Saturday 28th September. Lara is a little (8lb 7oz, so not _that_ little) girl. And she is gorgeous. Of course.

Congrats! I’ll be dropping in on the three of them next week, looking forward to it…

Tags: congrats, course, girl, life, saturday, september, week

Tech: So Danny O’Brien’s ‘Life Hacks’ talk is one of the most worthwhile reflections on productivity (and productivity technology) I’ve heard. (Cory Doctorow’s transcript from NotCon 2004, video from ETCon.)

There’s a couple of things I wanted to write about it, so I’ll do them in separate blog entries.

(First off, I’d love to see Ward Cunningham’s ‘cluster files by time’ hack, it sounds very useful. But that’s not what I wanted to write about ;)

People don’t extract stuff from big complex apps using OLE and so on; it’s brittle, and undocumented. Instead they write little command-line scriptlets. Sometimes they do little bits of ‘open this URL in a new window’ OLE-type stuff to use in a pipeline, but that’s about it. And fundamentally, they pipe.

This ties into the post that reminded me to write about it — Diego Doval’s atomflow, which is essentially a small set of command-line apps for Atom storage. Diego notes:

Now, here’s what’s interesting. I have of course been using pipes for years. And yet the power and simplicity of this approach had simply not occurred to me at all. I have been so focused on end-user products for so long that my thoughts naturally move to complex uber-systems that do everything in an integrated way. But that is overkill in this case.

Exactly! He’s not the only one to get that recently — MS and Google are two very high-profile organisations that have picked up the insight; it’s the Egypt way.

There’s fundamentally a breakage point where shrink-wrapped GUI apps cannot do everything you want done, and you have to start developing code yourself — and the best APIs for that, after 30 years, has been the command-line and pipe metaphor.

(Also, complex uber-apps are what people think is needed — however, that’s just a UI scheme that’s prevailing at the moment. Bear in mind that anyone using the web today uses a command line every day. A command line will not necessarily confuse users.)

Tying back into the Life Hacks stuff — one thing that hasn’t yet been done properly as a command-line-and-pipe tool, though, is web-scraping. Right now, if you scrape, you’ve got to do either (a) lots of munging in a single big fat script of your own devising, if you’re lucky using something like WWW::Mechanize (which is excellent!); (b) use a scraping app like sitescooper; or (c) get hacky with a shell script that runs wget and greps bits of output out in a really brittle way.

I’ve been considering a ‘next-generation sitescooper’ a little bit occasionally over the past year, and I think the best way to do it is to split its functionality up into individual scripts/perl modules:

• one to download files, maintaining a cache, taking likely freshness into account, and dealing with crappy HTTP/HTTPS wierdness like cookies, logins and redirects;
• one to diff HTML;
• one to lobotomise (ie. simplify) HTML;
• one to scrape out the ‘good bits’ using sitescooper-style regions

Tie those into HTML Tidy and XMLStarlet, and you have an excellent command-line scraping framework.

Still haven’t got any time to do all that though. :(

Tags: brien, command, everything, hacks, life, line, pipe, productivity, stuff, tech, way

Conferences: I’m going to LayerOne; it looks interesting, and I’ve been hoping to bump into Danny O’Brien (who’s there doing his Life Hacks talk) for a couple of drinks and a blather for quite a while. Other speakers look similarly interesting, in an ‘offbeat hacker conference’ way, so I think it’ll be fun.

Conflicts with The Streets playing the Wiltern though, but c’est la vie ;)

Tags: blather, conference, conferences, couple, hacker, hacks, layerone, life, talk, way, while

Life: I’ve learned one thing this weekend — humans are not designed to function in the desert. I went bush-camping in the Anza-Borrego Desert state park with a few mates, and we quite simply baked in the 45C/113F degree heat. Walking 3 miles in that heat was easily equivalent to 15 miles in normal temperatures.

We did manage to catch a good look at one of the endangered bighorn sheep that live there — the poor sheep was clearly trying to get to some water, but those damn humans kept getting in the way!

On the way back, we passed the aftermath of a forest fire near Temecula. Scorched earth.

Security: via IP — a very scary article at Bruce Blair’s Nuclear Column — apparently, the secret unlocking codes on the launch control mechanisms of Minuteman nuclear missiles were deliberately set to ‘00000000′ throughout the height of the cold war, because the Strategic Air Command ‘remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders.’

Green: A couple of good /. comments on renewable power sources: one from a wind farm designer, and some anti-FUD figures for solar panels.

Music: The full text of
The Timelords’ The Manual (How To Have a Number One the Easy Way) is online:

        THE JUSTIFIED ANCIENTS OF MU MU
      REVEAL THEIR ZENARCHISTIC METHOD USED
        IN MAKING THE UNTHINKABLE HAPPEN.

                  KLF 009B
          1988 (YOU KNOW WHAT'S GONE) 

Tags: anza, desert, heat, launch, life, park, sheep, state, thing, way, weekend

Weblogs: Greenpeace: Mysteries of the Deep — ‘the SV Rainbow Warrior left Auckland, New Zealand, on a voyage around the surrounding waters. Our mission: To highlight the irreversible damage caused to deep sea life by bottom trawling.’ Official weblog maintainer for the voyage: one Daev Walsh. Nice one Daev!

Tags: bottom, daev, damage, greenpeace, life, mission, rainbow, sea, voyage, warrior, weblogs

Antarctica: I’m obsessed with the wierd collision of out-of-control bureaucracy, strategic-interests-disguised-as-science, and normal life in a way off-normal place, that is the US Antarctic program. It’s fundamentally a microcosm of what future space exploration bases will be like — lots of high-faluting science talk, quite a bit of ‘making sure we have a strategic foothold’ reality, and people getting on with life in one of the most amazing places they can.

Via MeFi, Sandwichgirl.com is a great journal site describing her life way down under — full of great little tidbits like describing Antarctica as ‘the island’, ie. ‘we are all taking bets to see how long it will be before he’s kicked off the island’.

It’s great, although thoroughly overloaded from all the attention right now.

File alongside Big Dead Place and The Symmes Antarctic Intelligencer — highlight:

‘Once you shelter one magic elf, you gotta shelter ‘em all’, says NSF Representative Jack Hjorth. ‘I’ve seen it before. Pretty soon all science comes to a standstill and you’re runnin’ a magic elf halfway house.’

Tags: antarctica, bureaucracy, collision, elf, island, life, place, science, shelter, way, wierd

Funny: The Guardian’s got a new agony aunt — Buck up! Ann Widdecombe’s no-nonsense solutions to life’s knotty problems.

My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. Am I right? (Name and address withheld)

(Ann’s response — best read in a shrill schoolmarmish tone…)

He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Also, overheard: ‘(European companies) employing US-based contractors these days is a shrewd business move due to the strength of the Euro – America is like the India of Europe.’

Tags: agony, aunt, child, divorce, ex-wife, funny, guardian, husband, life, relationship, wife

Work: Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks, Danny O’Brien’s ETech talk.

Amazingly, despite not being an alpha geek ;), I already use all these things:

• a todo.txt file (anything else is inconvenient).
• everything incoming comes through email, including RSS (thanks to rss2email). Again, anything else is inconvenient; I couldn’t be bothered with another desktop app.
• I hack scripts for every repetitive task I run into
• I sync instead of backup; everything has a CVS repository running on a remote server, even my home dir
• I have a nasty tendency to web-scrape data

These tips definitely are good advice. Although I have a feeling the result is optimised to a weblogging UNIX geek who spends hours hacking perl/python scripts. ;)

I’m looking forward to LifeHacks.com when it does eventually go live… should be interesting.

Tags: anything, email, etech, everything, geek, hacks, life, overprolific, secrets, tech, work

Food: So I’m reading Fast Food Nation, which looked well set to put me off burgers and beef products for life.

Then I get to the epilogue, and find a glowing write-up for In-N-Out Burger, our local chain; they provide healthcare for their workers, use quality-assured beef, and have received top marks in food quality and cleanliness for years! Hooray! And they even have a secret menu (although the 4×4 seems a bit Elvis, if you ask me).

Beef’s back on the menu!

Society: The Age: They are afraid, very afraid: ‘it would seem that terrorists have
succeeded in frightening a nation. They may be aided by several decades of over-reaction to the social malaise that is endemic to the poorer and disenfranchised parts of America. It seems that at least one generation has already grown up in the grip of largely irrational fears.’

Misc: some snippets:

• When showing visitors around, watch out for the electric fence
• Why .biz is the Spam TLD
• Mountain lion attacks bikers in Orange County, body found . Yikes.
• For Nishad, Your Band Sucks: Indie’s Sacred Cows

Tags: beef, burger, epilogue, fast, food, in, life, menu, nation, reading

Code: Rod writes: ‘I have had a bunch of fun today, gleefully playing with a new source-control package. I truly lead a sad life.’

I’d guess that was our fault, moving SpamAssassin CVS to subversion at apache.org ;) Happy to oblige, Rod!

If I wasn’t so jet-lagged (still!), suffering from a cold, and busy with the day job, I’d be having that fun myself; SVN is very, very, very nice from what little I can tell so far. Only time will tell if it can beat the lovely Perforce, though, the virtues of which I have extolled on many occasions (earning myself a freebie T-shirt in the process, payola!).

But yeah, SVN looks really cool.

Tags: bunch, code, cvs, fault, fun, life, package, spamassassin, subversion, svn, today

Software: I’m a huge fan of Perforce, the best SCM system I’ve ever used; it thoroughly kicks the ass of ClearCase, CVS, RCS et al.

I’m also a fan of Half-Life, one of the few first-person-shooter games on the PC platform to provide a reasonably good plotline.

However, until now, they’ve remained separate; how do you reconcile source-code management and blasting alien invaders? Presenting P4HL:

Does SCM ever start to seem flat and two-dimensional? Have you ever felt the urge to browse depot history while beating up on your friends with a crowbar? Then check out P4HL, a fully 3D depot browsing interface built on the Half-Life engine.

Tags: clearcase, cvs, depot, fan, half, life, perforce, rcs, scm, software, system

Science: Fantastic article in New Scientist volume 180 (4 Oct 2003), covering how science is beginning to identify the keys to a happy life, and perform studies measuring people’s happiness.

That’s a subscribers-only link unfortunately, but I’ll excerpt a few choice snippets:

First off, money:

Can money buy happiness? The short answer is, yes - but it doesn’t buy you very much. And once you can afford to feed, clothe and house yourself, each extra dollar makes less and less difference. … In the past half-century, average income has skyrocketed in industrialised countries, yet happiness levels have remained static (see Graph). It seems absolute income doesn’t make much difference once you have enough to meet your basic needs. Instead, the key seems to be whether you have more than your friends, neighbours and colleagues.

Looks:

First the bad news: good-looking people really are happier. When Diener got people to rate their own looks, both with and without make-up, there was a ’small but positive effect of physical attractiveness on subjective well-being’.

But don’t compare your looks with what the media puts out:

In a new study, Laurie Mintz and her colleagues from the University of Missouri-Columbia found that women who saw advertisements featuring lithe and flawless young models for just one to three minutes rated their own bodies more negatively and showed an increase in depression. Mintz was alarmed how quickly the women’s self-esteem was undermined. And she believes people are becoming more dissatisfied as new technology allows the media to create ever more unrealistic images.

Mintz recommends less drastic steps to contentment: avoid unrealistic media images; understand that such pictures are airbrushed and ‘Photoshopped’ to perfection; appreciate your body for what it does rather than how it looks.

Friends:

It is hard to imagine a more pitiful existence than life on the streets of Calcutta or in one of its slums, or making a living there as a prostitute. Yet despite the poverty and squalor they face, such people are much happier than you might imagine. ‘We think social relationships are partly responsible,’ says Diener.

And a global comparison:

The latest global analysis of how levels of satisfaction and happiness vary from country to country shows that the most ’satisfied’ people tend to live in Latin America, Western Europe and North America. Eastern Europeans are the least satisfied.

… There is plenty more about national happiness levels that has researchers scratching their heads. One of the most significant observations is that in industrialised nations, average happiness has remained virtually static since the second world war, despite a considerable rise in average income (see Graphic). The exception is Denmark, where people have become more satisfied with life over the past 30 years - no one is quite sure why.

and the effects of consumerism:

A growing number of researchers are putting the static trend down to consumerism. Survey after survey has shown that the desire for material goods, which has increased hand in hand with average income, is a ‘happiness suppressant’.

One study, by Tim Kasser at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, found that young adults who focus on money, image and fame tend to be more depressed, have less enthusiasm for life and suffer more physical symptoms such as headaches and sore throats than others (The High Price of Materialism, MIT Press, 2002). Kasser believes that people tend to embrace material values when they are feeling insecure (retail therapy, anyone?). ‘Advertisements have become more sophisticated,’ says Kasser. ‘They try to tie their message to people’s psychological needs. But it is a false link. It is toxic.’

Lots of good bits. Pity it’s subscribers-only!

Tags: article, difference, fantastic, happiness, income, life, money, new, science, scientist, volume

Life: so myself and C took a one-night-only trip up to Idyllwild this weekend, hiking up to that rock formation and camping overnight. Great fun.

The rock is called ‘Suicide Rock’. It’s good to see morbid naming is international, but I should note that the prize for best placenames has to go to Victoria, Australia’s Mount Buggery, though.

(I drove past Mt. Buggery last year, and, disappointingly, it seems they’ve renamed it on the official maps. But the other ‘I can’t believe we’re still crossing this bloody mountain range and haven’t made it to Melbourne yet’ placenames still exist.)

Language: Riverbend blog notes interesting trivia in passing: Winnie the Pooh, in Arabic, is ‘Winnie Dabdoob’.

Open Source: GROKLAW on the WSIS fiasco earlier this summer. Briefly, the WSIS — the World Summit on the Information Society — came out with a position pro-open-source, and quite a few large companies seemed to say ‘eek!’ and promptly lobbied as hard as they could to give that line a vasectomy.

Interestingly, they did the same to the spam-related positions, cutting ‘a number of proposals, including prosecution of spammers’ down to a watery ‘take appropriate action on spam at national and international levels’. Snore. Fantastic work, guys.

Weblogs: When did Boing Boing stop taking comments? (looks) seems to be around about this entry of Sep 10. As far as I can see, this is the last comments page.

Shame — I’m with Jeremy on this one.

Dublin: is this entry, by London’s 3W the real winner of the competition to design the new U2 studio in Dublin’s Sir John Rogerson’s Quay?

Tags: boing, entry, formation, fun, hiking, idyllwild, life, rock, trip, weekend, wsis

Wow — this guy won $250,000 on WWTBAM, and blogged it up, in excruciating detail. (His ‘Phone a friend’ friend also details his experiences, too). It sounds terrifying…

Hacking: Real-life UNIX disaster recovery.

Commuting: Guardian: A Life Inside meets commuter hell. The author of ‘A Life Inside’ is a convicted felon, undergoing a gradual release from prison; recently he’s been permitted to commute to a day job outside the big house.

‘I’ve had a good run, I suppose. More than a year of almost incident-free commuting.’ — until this episode, where one of those space invaders – the type who is perfectly happy to push you out of the way to make themselves comfortable — arrives…

I leaned farther away. Soon my back was hurting. Hang on a minute, I thought. I’ve paid the same as him for this seat. I was entitled to sit up straight. So I did. Back came the elbow. I wasn’t budging. And so battle commenced.

A glance at his computer revealed little activity. He was obviously too preoccupied with trying to make me budge. I was determined to resist this blatant act of aggression. I couldn’t help thinking it would never happen in prison - not without ensuing combat. I thought about my pal Toby Turner. This laptop lout was lucky he wasn’t sitting next to him in his heyday. I could just imagine Toby’s reaction to the elbow treatment.

Paying no heed to the mass of silent bystanders, my shaven-headed friend would have been on his feet in a flash. ‘Do you know how many fuckin’ anger management courses I’ve done?’

‘Er, no,’ his startled tormentor would stutter.

‘Six fuckers!’ Toby would yell, ‘and I still ain’t passed!’

Tags: detail, elbow, friend, guy, hacking, life, phone, prison, real-life, wwtbam

JA forwards a link to Veronica Guerin, the new movie by Joel Schumacher, based on the life of the eponymous Irish journo. It boasts this beaut on their official ad website:

In the mid-1990s, Dublin was nothing short of a war zone, with a few powerful drug lords battling for control. … Based on a true story, this powerful, emotional film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (jm: oh no) … and producer Joel Schumacher … gives unique insight into a fascinating and complex aspect of the Irish conflict …

My emphasis. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Somehow or other I must have missed all the warzone stuff… I wonder if they’re confusing it with Bogota?

Tags: beaut, journo, life, link, mid, movie, nothing, producer, war, website

Life imitates Father Ted. It seems the Irish Eurovision entry sounds very similar to the Danish entry from 2000, which, if true, is almost exactly the subject of a classic episode of cult comedy TV show Father Ted, My Lovely Horse.

Dougal: ‘So we wouldn’t be stealing the song then?’ Ted: ‘No, it’d be more like we were keeping their memory alive.’ Dougal: ‘So if we won we could give the prize money to their relatives?’ Ted: ‘Yeah, we’ll play that by ear.’

The full low-down on the episode is here. Classic…

Anyway, I’m now in sunny SoCal, set up with more bandwidth than I’ve had in over a year. In fact, I’m swimming in bandwidth. Plus a decent pair of speakers for the ol’ MP3 collection, at last (my last set are in storage and have been for 3 months)… happy happy joy joy.

Myself and my cat had a 16-hour flight, and somehow or other, he seems satisfied. Well, I suppose as long as the catfood and lots of petting is forthcoming, life is grass for this fella. Easily satisfied!

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 17:09:01 +0000
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: My Lovely Horse

http://www.irishnews.com/access/daily/current.asp?SID=428546

Real life repeat of Father Ted feared

By Staff reporter

IRELAND’S Eurovision hope Mickey Joe Harte has rubbished claims that his song bears a close resemblance to Denmark’s winning entry of 2000.

Eurovision fans were complaining of deja vu yesterday when listening to We’ve Got the World, which will be sung by the Lifford father-of-two. The song - written by Mark Brannigan and Keith Molloy

• is said to sound eerily like Fly on the Wings of Love, sung by the

Danish Olsen Brothers three years ago.

Mickey Joe last night said he ‘honestly couldn’t see the similarity’, but added that the first line of the chorus could be said to resemble the Danish entry.

Phil Coulter, one of the judges who watched thousands of young hopefuls perform in RTE’s You’re a Star talent show - which Mickey Joe won on Sunday night - also insisted any similarity between the two songs was purely coincidental.

But RTE’s Joe Duffy radio programme was inundated with calls from listeners who were terrified that Ireland was setting itself up for a Father Ted-like fiasco.

Listener Frank O’Reilly told Duffy that his daughter Claire, a Eurovision fanatic, spotted the similarity immediately and revealed that the words of one song could be sung over the melody of the second.

A second listener, called Margaret, also said she and her children had started singing the Danish song in their sitting room on the first night they heard We’ve Got the World.

Ironically, an episode of the hit Channel 4 comedy Father Ted featured the title character, played by Dermot Morgan, and his sidekick Fr Dougal, bidding for Eurovision glory with a ‘borrowed’ song from another Scandinavian country in a previous year.

Phil Coulter admitted that the Irish song was reminiscent of the Olsen ditty, but insisted there ‘was nothing intrinsically original’ about the Danish song.

‘There is no question that there is going to be any kind of objection and there is no question that any objection would be upheld,’ he added. – Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large :: http://www.flaneur.org.uk

Tags: bandwidth, dougal, entry, episode, eurovision, father, joy, life, show, song

Returnadores: a New Life in the Old World. ‘Imported from Argentina to help save the village from a decades-long decline in population which threatened its very future, the Paez family has travelled backwards along the path of the first conquistadores and the generations of Spanish emigrants who followed them.’

Tags: decline, imported, life, new, old, paez, population, returnadores, village, world