I am a software programmer working at RealVNC with many interests including singing, and am a Christian. Many of my friends remember me as a Part III mathematician at Peterhouse. Find out more or contact me!
A fantastic article about stream-based functional programming with composition but no application. Very interesting and clear.
Wow! Seriously creepy little fight with my system just now. In a moment of madness, I mounted my FreeBSD host system’s home directory as the home directory in an Ubuntu VM, thinking that I could conveniently use all the same app settings between the two. Not a bit of it! This was last week, and I somehow managed to get through several days of programming without coming to my senses. I did spot some problems which I was expect and just worked around them, like the binaries being in different places on each system; vlc couldn’t play anything because the Ubuntu machine uses alsa, which of course is linux-only. It wasn’t until today though that I was taught my lesson that this is seriously dangerous: my host’s .Xauthority was overwritten when I ran startx (rather than kdm) in the guest, which meant I suddenly had to stop what I was doing and scrabble to a VT in the host before the host Xserver suddenly stopped accepting keystrokes (which it shortly did…). I then treaded very gingerly indeed, sending controls to the guest and gradually disentangling the systems so I could kill the host X without losing any data and boot the VM up again without damaging anything. Not an experiment to do again! I’ve symlinked the appropriate dotfiles in my guest home directory now to the ones I want them to follow, after carefully checking that there aren’t any locks or sockets in the directories I’m linking! This one isn’t going to bite me again. I count myself lucky nothing got lost. The silly things you do without thinking…
Every time I walk through Old Court, I feel intensely homesick. Particularly at night; I’m more soupy then.
Loving our product: it’s got parameters, “Expert Parameters”, “Super Expert Parameters”, and “Super-Duper Expert Parameters”.
There are two halves to a seminar: the talk, when you have loads to say but no desire whatsoever: it’s his party; why should I dictate the direction or try to make his point for him? And, the chat afterwards: even more to say, an itch to get it out, no compunctions about hijacking the speaker, but no way to get a word in edgeways.
Full of a flood of thought after a seminar on the mind, one of my big obsessions. Plenty of stimulus, and I’ve come up with a couple of new ideas already over supper. Good times.
…you start correcting people for saying byte when they mean octet.
Very helpful. I never really understood process groups before. Required knowledge.
I hate Xlib too. It’s got just enough ugly bits to make me upset. XSetIOErrorHandler has me very upset; it’s simply unacceptable not to be able to cleanly exit from a shut down server without leaking. I want to transparently reattach myself to another X server! I did some more tinkering today with this for x11vnc (or rather, our proprietary improvement of it, vncserver-x11), and it’s just not possible to get it working reliably. Deep inside Xlib, it crashes randomly when I try to re-attach to another server. Very unsatisfactory. I think the best bet will be to split the code into three processes, the server using only XCB to access its shared handle to a pixbuf from an SDesktop slave (Xlib), and an Xlib UI client. What a mess. It’s easier to prototype that way than trying to port the whole of our code, a big historic Xlib application, to the new XCB bindings. It would also have the advantage of prototyping an SDesktopIpc/SServerIpc coupling, which is a required part of the solution on Windows to maintaining connections over session changes.
Many important lessons learnt today. Firstly, that BSD sed inserts an extra newline when appending the hold space back to the pattern buffer; secondly, that autoconf doesn’t exactly make it easy to deal with different packaging and POSIX levels for time.h; thirdly, that POSIX failed and standards don’t work; fourthly, that Mac has buggy libstdc++; fifthly, that, as well as being a great injustice inflicted on the world by AT&T, the existence of GNU is a technical aberration; and sixth and lastly, I really should learn to do perl one-liners instead of my long sed command-lines anyway.
Is English countable? Depends what machine you run it on. (Shortest real-world argument ever for justifying formal linguistics.)
Also just found a counterexample to a lemma I was trying to prove last night (sublanguage by subgrammar is clearly not invariant under choice of grammar, I now see). Good morning!
Junglespeed with Gravatars! Yes! Epic moment of the day from Daniel. (Deeply moving St Matthew as well.)
No news; nothing posted for a while and no intention of changing that. Not enough I can trust myself to describe honestly.
Some slightly late news, but these things don’t get picked up by most newspapers. The ITU-R group recently published an update to the proposal to de-link UTC from UT1 (ie abolish leap seconds). As long as member states keep moving this forward, this highly welcome change should come into effect in 2018. Watch this space.
This is the funniest thing I have seen for quite some time. I was snorting with laughter the entire way through. (I found it after watching some press technique videos.) There’s certainly plenty, and more, to laugh about.
(Source: youtube.com)
Here’s another one for Hannah on formal linguistics…