London 0 Hull 4

Still no Rega P3 - the few shops that actually sell Rega products seem to be just as quirky as the products themselves. One place that I went to in east London didn't want to sell me one without me first making an appointment even though I was in the shop and had the money.

Hopefully this or next week I will manage to buy one. Then there is the delicate matter of buying a suitable amplifier.

Went to Spitalfields market yesterday and came home with a copy (vinyl of course!) of HouseMartins old classic "London 0 Hull 4". Now I really need buy the equipment to listen to all the records I've bought the last few months!

Staring at the sea, Staring at the sand

Last night I woke up after having a dream where I shot a man. I wondered why I would dream about such a horrible thing but then I realized - the evening before I had finished Albert Camus' book "The Outsider". "The Outsider" is about a man (Meursault) who kills an arabic man on a beach just outside Algiers. Instead of feeling guilt he just accepts the fact that he has shot a man and according to the back cover he "is prepared to face the indifference of the universe courageously and alone". Camus himself wrote about the main character that "Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun that leaves no trace". Why? Because Meursault refuses to lie. Lying is not just about saying what isn't true, but also saying more than one feels. ("The Outsider" is of course the book that inspired the Cure's first single, "Killing an arab")

Today I'm going buy my Rega P3!

Half a person

After an hour of hacking while watching Big Brother (yes, I can multitask :-)), Kaspar the robot behaviours can now be specified using Python. Still no way of actually adding the behaviours to the gui or running them in gui but that should be fairly easy to add.

I haven't really watched Big Brother for years (apart from Celeb Big Brother with the mighty Bez from Happy Mondays) but now I feel that I'm getting sucked in again. Not sure why but it's always nice to have something to talk about in the kitchen at work. I've also been quite fascinated with Tourette's syndrome ever since my military service where I had a good friend who had a mild form of Tourette's.

Waiting room

Ever since Mike unfortunately left Herts I have been working in my spare time on the low-level software and programming environment for Kaspar the robot. Now that the servos can be controlled and the camera images captured I am faced with the task of making a gui and a nice and easy method to create custom behaviours. Most of Kaspar's code is written in Java with some low-level control of the servos and camera in C. One option for creating custom behaviours would be to let the user write small Java classes that could then be loaded and executed. This is maybe the easiest way but is annoying since it requires compilation of the behaviours which makes it less user friendly. Instead I have decided to let the user define new behaviours using Python, using Jython for the Python-Java bridge.

Keep the aspidistra flying

My head hurts! Not from the intellectual challenge of the Viva itself but rather the post-Viva workshop at the Beehive pub in St Albans. The Viva itself lasted about 2 hours and was quite enjoyable - no superevil questions and the result was pass with minor corrections that I expect will take me around 10 hours to finish.

Today I felt quite tired and for lunch I needed something seriously fatty to recover. Me and Nick from work went to the Builder's Arms, the pub right next to the office. This being Chelsea I expected a burger to be a little bit more expensive than normal, but after ordering I had a slight shock when I looked at the price on the board - £10.80 for a burger with chips! Ok, it was a nice burger - but still - £10.80 for a lunch burger!

Three feet high and rising

This is it. Tomorrow I have my Viva. It's weird - I don't really feel nervous at all about the Viva itself - just worried about having to spend months making corrections.

If I pass with minor corrections I'm going to give myself (I love buying presents for myself) a nice present: a Rega P3 turntable (of course I'm going to get the black one and not the miserable green one). Rega is one of these lovely nice English companies making charming and quirky products - the motor of the P3 can only spin with one speed and in order to change from 33 to 45 rpm you need to change the belt and wheel! This is of course a pain when you want to change from Balzac's "Came out of the Grave" LP to Stone Roses' "Fool's Gold" 7 inch but definitely worth it!

Maha Kali

When I first started this blog my plan was to write someting everyday, but it has turned out to be more like once per week. Will try and write more once the Viva etc is done.

This week was really busy at work. Some huge companies are testing our product before buying and the bugs keep on coming at an alarming rate. This is not weird, though, as we never can set up and try all possible weird network and OS configurations in our test lab. The week was also quite challenging for me personally as I was responsible for releasing the latest version of our product. This mostly involved overseeing that various things like testing got done in time, merging various bug fixes to the current release from other CVS branches (we have at least three different main branches at any given time), various CVS trickery, and building the RPMs and Windows installers (yes, our appliance runs on RedHat :-( - but at least the underlaying Sun hardware is quite sexy!)). It was quite stressful with a few late merges of features from other branches, but fun and after a two week process the release was done with two hours to go.

Apart from work I haven't done much. Still reading 'Collapse' - the chapters about Iceland and Greenland are definitely the most interesting part of the book! Maybe the most interesting fact is that the vikings on Greenland didn't eat fish - almost no fish bones have been found in excavations even though the waters and rivers of Greenland are full of fish. In the biggest excavation site 36.000 animal bones were found, of them only 26 came from the single tail of a cod. How come they didn't eat more fish? Probably some weird religious taboo. Watch out kids - this is what religion can do to you.