| Kitties! |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|01:54 pm] |
 ...anything you can't cope with in the presence of kitties must be srs bsns.(With apologies to the late Douglas Adams. Normality is our house name if you've not been paying attention at the back.)
As Susan just said, if all goes according to plan we'll have these two living with us from next weekend. :-) Currently the one on the left is called Biscuit and on the right is Thomaslina. We'll be changing at least the latter. Any ideas? So far I like Susan's suggestion of Brownie.
Update: They are now (from left) Heisenberg, because she tends to run around such that we can't tell how fast she's going, and Schrödinger, because she tends to hide such that we can't tell whether she's there. |
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| My take on the G20 police fiasco |
[Apr. 8th, 2009|11:41 pm] |
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| Resolutions |
[Dec. 31st, 2008|06:40 pm] |
In no particular order:
- <trad>Something better than 640x480 at 8fps in L4D would be nice (although I'm not doing too badly as is)</trad> ✓ (patched)
- Visit London more often. ✓
- Finish rocketjon's interminable website project and make it public before the end of February. ✗
- DSFW on my Debian bugs ✓
- Fix all known bugs in Android Puzzles.
- Bike more. As of 10th January I have a new bike to help with this. ✗
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| It LIVES! |
[Oct. 21st, 2008|02:28 am] |
Simon Tatham's puzzles on Android. I has released it. Before any Android devices were released (sort of). Happy now. :-) |
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| Google phone to be announced today |
[Sep. 23rd, 2008|10:09 am] |
Google and T-Mobile will be announcing (text version) the G1, the first Google Android device, later today. I might be slightly more excited about this (and slightly more optimistic about it solving my various ongoing phone complaints) than is strictly sensible. On the other hand, this gives me something to bounce about today while recovering from an ear infection.
Edit: looks good, shame about the curvy (fragile?) slide and lack of 3.5mm socket but I'll probably buy it anyway, depending on what the UK contract looks like. All I've heard about that so far is that it'll be free if you pay £40+/month. It'll be available here early November ; you can request spam about it from T-Mobile. |
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| The importance of providing clear diagnostic information |
[Jun. 29th, 2008|01:43 am] |
Telephone numbers for drama purposes (such as the Doctor's): surely these ought to return something better than [...] has not been recognised . Might I suggest: This number is imaginary. Please rotate it by 90° in the complex plane and try again. :-p I might also suggest that this show in particular, if they were going to put a number on the screen, could have used a valid one and put something interesting on the other end. Also, I would very much have preferred if there was some common substring to all the fictional numbers (like 555 in the US), such that they can be recognised without consulting that list. |
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| Picnic meme reminder: Sun 22nd June |
[Jun. 13th, 2008|09:23 am] |
This is a picnic meme. There will be a picnic on Jesus Green, Cambridge, UK on Sunday the 22nd of June, from around 2pm. We'll meet toward the town end of Jesus Green, by Lower Park Street. Nobody is organising this; it'll just happen. Please turn up, be sensible, bring food and drink, meet new people, have fun. |
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| Doctor Who - speculation about Forest of the Dead |
[Jun. 6th, 2008|09:59 am] |
I have a theory: evire fbat vf gur qbpgbe. A relatively obvious possibility I suppose, but I'm still eagerly waiting to find out if it's correct. :-) Annoyingly, Maelstrom is this weekend. This means I have to wait slightly longer to find this out and I miss Strawberry Fair. |
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| # Spammity spam, wonderful spam |
[May. 14th, 2008|03:15 pm] |
Now that I've set up that shiny new email configuration, I was interested in what actually happens to incoming SMTP connections. How effective are my various spam countermeasures? What proportion of incoming mail is genuine? Answers to all these and more, in the form of a delicious pie.  An SMTP delivery to my server will run through these checks in order, starting at 12 o'clock and going anti-clockwise.
It's interesting to note how easily I can turn a lot of spammers away. Anyone who sends a HELO hostname that isn't valid and resolvable, or continues trying to send mail when Spamhaus has listed them, is asking for trouble these days, yet spammers clearly still do so. Oh well, saves me some CPU cycles since I don't even get as far as SpamAssassin for those connections. :-)
A couple of things aren't apparent from the chart: address verification ("MAIL FROM is self or undeliverable") is only used for frequently forged sender domains where verification is known to work (including, obviously, my own). SPF before receiving the message didn't feature here because of the annoyingly high proportion of mail going through relays (my other addresses, occasionally a backup MX, etc). In those cases SPF is checked by SpamAssassin using Received headers, as is DKIM.
It's somewhat depressing, firstly that 77.5% of attempts to deliver mail to me are a waste of bandwidth, and secondly that I was expecting an even higher proportion. I don't think there have been any false positives here, except one or two marketing emails I didn't strictly ask for, which, really, aren't so different from spam and won't be missed. Obviously, shout if you've emailed me and it bounced. :-) |
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| Picnic meme! |
[May. 9th, 2008|08:06 am] |
This is a picnic meme. There will be a picnic on Jesus Green, Cambridge, UK on Sunday the 22nd of June, from around 2pm. We'll meet toward the town end of Jesus Green, by Lower Park Street. Nobody is organising this; it'll just happen. Please turn up, be sensible, bring food and drink, meet new people, have fun. |
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| A game recommendation |
[Apr. 7th, 2008|11:38 am] |
Audiosurf. It's a puzzle/racer game; it generates the track from any song you supply. Have a look at some videos (more on their site) to see what I mean. It's cheap, there's a wide range of difficulty levels (determined in part by the song you choose) and it's great fun. I'm very impressed at what they've done with such a simple idea. I've not yet had time to try it on many different tracks, but reviewers report that it copes well with their collections. It works in Wine, with a few silly bugs, but they don't affect gameplay and hopefully the Wine folks will fix them soon. |
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![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rocketjon's party, tomorrow (Saturday) 8pm, here |
[Feb. 1st, 2008|10:01 pm] |
Party! Come one come all, to Normality (near the Carlton). For those who like to dress up, there is a theme of esoteric superheroes.
Call me on 07786 888749 (or contact me some other way) if you don't know where Normality is. |
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| Ruddigore, Pirates, The Orange Box |
[Nov. 14th, 2007|12:20 pm] |
 Ruddigore, Wednesday to Saturday next week, 8pm at the Robinson College Auditorium, £7/£5. Also, if you play an instrument and are free on any of those nights, get in touch with Debbie Murray (email dfm30) as we'd like a slightly bigger orchestra. I'll be in the chorus as usual.
Also, next term's show is The Pirates of Penzance, which was my first encounter with G&S back at Warwick and is, I think, my favourite of those I've seen. This one will be at the Arts Theatre and will be a lot of work, but very much worth doing. :-) Auditions, if anyone else wants to take part, are 7:45-10 tonight at Catz Chapel, and tomorrow (7:45-10) and Friday (7:15-10) in the Lloyd Room at Christ's. Not sure when I'm going yet.
In other news, I can thoroughly recommend The Orange Box. I recently finished Portal, and loved every minute of it, especially the ending song, Still Alive. Even better, that and Half Life 2 (so presumably the other games too) work fine in Wine; I've been playing them on Ubuntu. :-) |
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| Software idea for the day |
[Jul. 11th, 2007|11:36 am] |
Friend Wheel (a facebook extension) + Planarity = ?
Somebody needs to write this. :-) This, or any better way to explore that data, really. I'm curious (for no particular reason) about who knows whom, but can't pick much out of Friend Wheel's output. |
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| My .name is my own |
[Jun. 25th, 2007|01:15 am] |
( Changing cmb.is-a-geek.org to chris.boyle.name soon; mammoth braindump about why; poll for the terminally interested )
Final Thoughts Ultimately, I'd like to see the end of spam in my lifetime (wouldn't we all?). I think it can be done. I think our two best hopes are systems like SPF that, somehow or other, restore correctness and therefore reputation to Sender addresses (note that reputation need not imply everyone knowing who you are, only that you are the same person who sent many previous legitimate emails) and systems like HashCash, which add a computational burden per recipient address. Nobody wants to pay money for email, but paying in CPU time might just work. The only losers there are people who want to email large sets of users outside their own mail servers, and they can be whitelisted. Then all we have to do is finally get serious about cleaning up the botnet problem, which we want to do anyway, and spamming will become a lot more difficult. |
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| Offered without context |
[Mar. 20th, 2007|11:04 pm] |
| [ | Mood |
| |  tired | ] |
- Greenfield Shores politics appears to have become even more, um, innnnnnteresting. I hope House Lyrus remains at a safe distance from it.
- Ocelot \O"ce*lot\, n.
- Metasyntactic marsupial.1
- I have the dubious honour of allegedly having the best wrist action in GothSoc.
1 (I know it's actually a feline.) |
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| Iolanthe |
[Oct. 24th, 2006|12:33 am] |
I'll be performing in the chorus of peers for G&S soc's production of Iolanthe, or The Peer And The Peri, by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. The show provisionally runs from Wednesday 29th November to Saturday 2nd December; the society website ought to have more information nearer the time.
In other news, work… continues apace, is the appropriate phrase, I think. This wouldn't be a problem, except that I almost never get to sleep at a sensible time. I'm still very much enjoying it though; indeed, I can think of no way in which I'd rather earn a living. On the first aid front, I am now theoretically qualified to be unsupervised on duty, albeit somewhat in need of revision, so I don't intend to exercise that capability any time soon. In Maelstrom, if this downtime goes according to plan, my character should be wearing and selling armour of his own manufacture at the next event. He wouldn't be much of an armourer if he didn't. Last but not least, I shall be gothy tomorrow later today, as I haven't been to the full evening's events for far too long.
The flat is finally approaching an acceptable state, except for the contents of the kitchen. I don't even have tea at the moment, which clearly Won't Do. Proper hospitality, and all that. I'm terrified of getting it to a state which I can actually declare finished, because I'm sure it would then instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable (such as Clive's current house trouble). |
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| Stereotype explosion |
[May. 12th, 2006|11:11 pm] |
I have pizza. I'm on IRC. I'm wearing sandals. I dread to think what would happen were I to grow a ponytail…
Worse still, I'm blogging this and pointing out to my neighbour that I'm doing so. Yay self-reference. :-) |
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| Hedgehogs |
[Jan. 4th, 2006|03:27 am] |
| [ | Mood |
| |  silly | ] |
*bounce*... Earlier today I really, really hated Matlab, but thought this was probably mostly due to not having used it for anything meaningful yet and thus not knowing my way around. It seems I was right, because now that I'm finally making progress with the cursework... I kind of like it, a bit. Well, the code will actually *do* something soon (an attempt at de-noising audio using TIW).
There is just one slight problem. I need to see my personal tutor at noon. As the lovely jedusor has iconified for me... oh hedgehogs. G'night, world. :-) |
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kitties!
discontent
resolute
giddy
sick
cheerful
frustrated
surprised
impressed
rushed
geeky
curious
pensive
exhausted