…and Father’s day, if applicable. I’m actually over a day late now… I spent a pleasant day with the family, and trying to keep a cold at bay.
Things You Didn’t Know Had Another Name
Under the general heading of “Oh, so that’s what it is! I never realised,” picture this. It’s late 70s/early 80s Britain. You can’t sleep, so get up at some infeasibly early time, grab your morning stimulant of choice and settle down in the lounge to see what’s on TV. Not…
Ow
While the mini-Elbeno and I were horsing around today, he managed to get me in the eye with a fingernail. Luckily our next door neighbour is an optometrist, and she took me down to her office tonight to check it out. So I have a scratched cornea, not too bad…
I’m Jaunty
A pretty smooth upgrade – Freeciv(-client-gtk) seemed to barf, so I just uninstalled it. The new Amarok is nice, even if the jaunty version isn’t totally up-to-the-minute. I did have to install phonon-backend-xine though. LLVM is v2.5, hurrah! GHC is still v6.8.2, boo.
Fixed gate
Today we had a new automatic gate opener/closer installed, so our driveway gate will now stay closed as a rule. This also means that we can let mini-Elbeno out into the yard or the driveway to play or trundle about on his trike while we are nearby, without having to…
Battle of the Bands
The buildup started 5-6 weeks ago with band formations and rumours of entries. Then came the posters stuck up across the campus advertising the various bands. Finally, at 5pm today it all kicked off – the second annual Blizzard Battle of the Bands. When I worked at EA, we had…
Book Festival
This weekend we all went to the LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA. The number of stalls was noticeably smaller this year: a whole row of children’s publishers was gone. We saw the following panels: Real Science (K. C. Cole moderating, with Carl Zimmer, Leonard Susskind and Avery Gilbert)….
Re April 1st
Dear Internet, I refer you to my thoughts of 2 years ago about April 1st. yours grumpily, Elbeno
How a Bug Made Me a Better Programmer
This is the tale of a bug. A challenging bug I encountered some time ago, and which changed my career for the better. It was late 2004. I was lead multiplayer engineer on Goldeneye: Rogue Agent, a title which could charitably be described as mediocre, but I like to think…
I wrote my first Python program
Last Friday. Knowing almost no Python at noon, by 5pm I had some code to munge XML and do something useful for my current project. So it’s not bad. It’s good for productivity. Mostly because: It has useful libraries. Bread-and-butter data structures are built in, i.e. lists and dictionaries. I…