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Remobilised

I have a mobile phone again; same number as before.

I lost my mobile phone, along with various cards and my favourite coat, at the start of February. Due in part to Vodafone's rubbishness, I have only just got another phone (and another SIM card).

I did rather enjoy not having a phone. It meant I had to make definite plans and stick to them. There were fewer distractions. Eventually, when people started to mention that they had called and got "number not in use", I thought I'd better return to the grid.

What Michael Did

Monday was the anniversary of my birth. It is also nearing the anniversary of my last post to this site. What better way &c.

Now, the running order. First of all, breakfast: cereal with non-poison, and later a Red Bull to stave off a mild hangover and a newspaper (the newspaper is not for eating but it is consumed at breakfast). Chores.

Next, catch the bus to Finchley Road tube station, the tube to Paddington (one change), and buy a saver day return to Oxford. Look queasily in the direction of Delice de France.

Get ejected from the First Class carriage ("Would you like to upgrade to first class?" / "No thank you – do I have to move?" / "Yes"). Stroll into Oxvegas town from the train station and meet the very splendid Audrey, who brings a gift of champagne.

Walk through Jericho and across Port Meadow, and follow the Thames down to The Trout Inn. Make joke about spotting Inspector Morse to passing tumbleweed. Drinks: Edelwiess and Staropramen, rinse and repeat. Order, eventually, delicious lunch.

Take a shortcut back across Port Meadow, forsaking the path for a more direct line. Have muddy epiphany about the reason for paths.

Arrange sodden shoes and socks on grass and watch the sun set, swigging from the champagne.

Pub lunch at the Roebuck

Last last Sunday some friends and I gathered at the Roebuck in Belsize Park for Sunday lunch. I ambushed them with my camera (click on the pictures to get full size versions):

Mike

I chat with Pip

Hannah

Ian

Fiona and Andy

Audrey

There's a few more, these are by no means the only tolerable pictures .. maybe I post them later ..

Lists of a singleton, No. 1

Things which I have got out of the habit of doing.

1. Anything useful.

Couriers are wilfully stupid.

Roughly two weeks ago I put my ATM card in a Barclays Cash Machine that was under the weather, and it swallowed it without comment. After a few minutes of throcking the 'Return Card', 'Cancel', and assorted other buttons, I gave in to the realisation that I wouldn't be seeing my dear card again and bludged a coffee off Sarah.

When I got to work, being a suitably paranoid citizen I called Barclays immediately and reported that I had lost the card. Their policy is to cancel it immediately (fair enough) and arrange a replacement card (a pain in the arse, but again fair enough. Why take chances?). Regrettably it is also their policy to use a firm called Secure Mail Services (SMS) to deliver the replacement card. Saga, commence.

Predictably, SMS tried to deliver to my home address, which they had been given by Barclays. Predictably, as it was a week day during office hours, I wasn't there. So far so UK.

Instead of the de facto standard practice of leaving a note to explain the failed delivery, however, they sent me a letter via Royal Mail the next day; I didn't find out until two days after they'd tried. Clearly they don't trust their own couriers to deliver a note even when already at the delivery address.

When I found the letter upon returning home in the evening, naturally I called to arrange redelivery to my office. I was told the earliest they could do it was two days later—a Friday.

Come Friday I gamely set out my drivers' license and telephone on my desk, waiting for the inevitable identification check (or call asking for directions). Nothing. I called the firm at about 4.30pm asking where the courier was, and they admitted that it was unlikely anyone would be turning up at that stage. What?

I rearranged delivery for the weekend, noting that I was going to be out for large portions of it. I didn't dare hope they would even try to deliver my bank card, and sure enough, they didn't.

Yesterday I called early in the morning to make sure SMS would try to deliver it that day. "Yes," they said, "we'll be attempting another delivery today." Finally! When I asked to confirm the address, however, it turned out that they were attempting to deliver it to my home address, and that the courier couldn't possibly be given another address that late in the day (9am). It is at this point I realised that couriers are wilfully stupid. There can be no other explanation.

Today I received my bank card, a good twelve days after it was issued, in (I suspect) the last delivery of the day.

Content subject to imperceptible change

Just recently I've been working on porting this site to fuschia, which is really just some Python code I've been playing with for slapping templates on RDF. I hope to make very little perceptible difference to the site (posting here infrequently also supports this aim). But I will be pleased.

There are some other things I want to work on that will make very little difference to anyone but myself. I want to make a JavaScript-and-DOM implementation of an Atom client (this will help me post stories). I want to revisit the styles, and reform that Dreamscape theme. I want to be a fully-functional member of the semantic web (by providing all sorts of feeds and metadata).

Inevitably though, there may be some gee-whiz stuff. There may also be some new content. Or—dare I say it (dare! dare!)—a podcast. I'll try not to surprise anyone.

Here's to The Dog

Our local, the Dog and Six Stories (variously 'The Dog', 'The Dog and Yellow Sign', 'The Dog and Four Horsemen', ad infinitum), has shut down. I think it is being rebuilt as flats.

The Dog wasn't your typical London pub; or rather it was, in the sense that it had idiosyncrasies that we as locals came to almost delight in. The usually sparsely populated upstairs was a blessing if you wanted a quiet game of pool (on one of the five tables). They didn't serve food — but then they didn't mind if you brought some yourself. Even oily, smelly pizza from across the road.

More often than not, we'd be passing the Dog on the way to or from West Hampstead and step inside for a one. There are recycling bins just beside it as well, in case one needs an excuse to be going that way.

Elsewise: Web vanity

There have not been many updates here for a while, have there now .. however, I have not been entirely inactive:

LShift

Things continue apace at LShift, and we've started a blog to chronicle some of the interesting things we find, play with and talk about. Most of my entries are short, unfocused rants, but there's some great technological speculation, code snippets and software reviews from everyone else.

80/20

Again, I'm a bit slack in posting here. TonyG keeps it well up-to-date with progress on his experiments and projects. If and when I get results from mine, I'll post too.

flickr

I found flickr, and I've been uploading a drip-feed of pictures for a few months. I've not really got into the community bits and pieces (I was invited to join a group about fire hydrants, but had to decline on the basis of projected lack of input).

Groups and lists

I got a bit interested in TiddlyWiki a while back, and wrote some half-finished plugins and what-have-you for it, and posted regarding those to TiddlyWikiDev.

I've also been following the development of Chiba, a Java XForms engine.

SuprGlu

Despite the silly Web 2.0 name, I think suprglu works quite well. It's a fair way to pull together the scattered traces one leaves over the web. In fact, it's got me thinking about Fuschia again.

Dreamspace theme

I have made a new theme. It is called 'Dreamspace' as it uses a picture I took of an installation by the same name.

Yes, I know (well, I strongly suspect) it is hopelessly broken in Microsoft Internet Explorer. The good thing is, you can change to the old theme. In Firefox you can do this anyway (it's in the View, Page style menu), but for MSIE users the links in underfoot should work.

There's still some sharp corners to round off: the lower-right ones, for example.

Startlingly, after actually testing the site in MSIE, I see that not only is it broken but hopelessly confused. Internet Explorer, that is. I don't want to get on my high horse, so all I'll say is I've fixed it I think so it at least is viewable. The style links won't work after all, so you're stuck with a weird-looking page layout.

Here's a link to Firefox, for no particular reason.

Code archaeology

I got down to looking at the directory that holds my code checkouts the other day. There's a progression of version control software: CVS -> Arch -> Darcs; and several false starts (some without corresponding starts).

For example, there's PIJ, which amounts to the bare bones of a process-calculus based kernel in Java.

... All data implements Channel. The channel provides a process view of data. Most primitives (which are in turn just banged continuations hanging off ports) will access data directly rather than going via the process reflection. ...

Then, there's an implementation of join calculus (concurrency again!) with some syntax-case madness from TonyG, and a very simple scheduler from me.

  (define (scheduler-step continue)
  (and (not (queue-empty? *SCHEDULER-QUEUE*))
       (begin (call/cc
	       (lambda (k)
		 (set! stop! (lambda () (k 'dummy)))
		 (if (not (queue-empty? *SCHEDULER-QUEUE*))
		     ((queue-pop! *SCHEDULER-QUEUE*)))))
	      (and continue
		   (scheduler-step continue)))))

Then, Sake, which is supposed to be our answer to both Ant and Make but fails through lack of working ... anything. I do like the idea of it though.

Rather than being discouraged by all this unfinished, possibly abandoned code, I'm now feeling a little bit enthused about reviving, redeveloping, and redacting.