This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Friday 2nd April 2010 at 9.40pm
Dropbox
I'm generally a bit slow getting into cool new web-based stuff nowadays, unlike when I was at school. But one thing I do use is Dropbox. It's brilliant. You register and you get your own little bit of space "on the cloud". You then download their program to each of your computers, and it creates a folder on each computer which contains exactly the same stuff. When you change a file on one computer, it automatically changes on each of the other computers. It also gets backed up, on the cloud, every time you change it.
So, for example, I have one computer at home, and one at work. Often I want to do work at home too, and previously I would have had to put my work files onto a USB stick, or email them to myself, or put them online. Back in the day (only 4 or 5 years ago) I used to actually carry a floppy disk around with me. But now I just keep my work in my dropbox folder, and it's magically on both my PCs, and always exactly the same, and always backed up several times over. It just works.
I've just been listening to Broken Social Scene's "7/4 (Shoreline)". I saw BSS live once and they were fantastic, but I've never been a huge fan of their records. This song, though, is awesome. I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but my earphones just don't do it justice. Listening to it on proper speakers is a different experience altogether!
Posted Sunday 21st March 2010 at 10.10pm
An impossible question
Est-ce qu'il faut qu'on utilise le subjonctif lorsqu'on pose un question (comme celui-ci)?
(Excuse my French.)
Posted Saturday 13th March 2010 at 4.23pm
New som
Yes! Like George Foreman circa 1988, only without the 11-year break, I'm back.
And only to say: I've been listening to the new Joanna Newsom album, and it's long. And it's good, I think, except it's so long that I still haven't had time to digest it properly yet. It's really long. Really, really long. I've been listening to it for the last hundred and one minutes. Honestly! A hundred and one individual minutes, all lined up in a row. And I've still got 22 more of them to go. That's enough minutes, in total, to watch an entire football match, including half time. It's four power naps. It's probably enough time for Usain Bolt to run 37 miles, assuming he's super-human, which I'm pretty sure he is. It's half a Lord of the Rings movie, extended edition. It's a long time. It's a good job it's good, really.
"No Provenance" isn't good though. The album roars out of the blocks with more hooks in the first 4 songs than on the whole of Ys. Ok, so Ys only had 5 songs, and not many hooks. I have more hair than my microwave. But as I was saying - then "No Provenance" comes along and starts dragging single syllables over about 17 not-very-interesting notes. I hope the lyrics are good - all I've noticed so far is something about my arms. My arms. My arms.
Other than that though, I recommend it. I guess out of 18 mostly very long songs, one was bound to be grating. I just wish I could get the "faultlessly etiolated fishbelly-face" line out of my head.
Posted Monday 8th March 2010 at 3.00pm
The lottery of life
What does it mean to be British?
Don't worry, I haven't turned into Gordon Brown. I couldn't care less whether Britain has a national day to congratulate itself on being generally awesome. Well, I could care less. Who's going to complain about an extra day's holiday? Maybe that's why Gordy went for it. Easy points. But talking of points, that's not the point.
This article is kind of the point. I was going to use it as the inspiration to write some kind of thrilling tour of what's good and bad and getting better and getting worse about Britain. But then I realised that I'm not very good at that kind of thing, so I wrote this instead. What is special about Britain nowadays? The BBC is one thing. David Mitchell knows it. Test cricket is another. Everyone sensible (aka everyone except Chris Gayle) knows that Test cricket is the best kind of cricket (best kind of sport if you ask me), but the British are the only people masochistic enough to actually turn up to watch it. Even if it does have to involve dressing up as the pink panther, or worshipping a Jimmy Saville lookalike as some kind of long-nosed cricketing deity, or chanting BARMY ARMY for the full last hour of every day.
But really, now the Wars are fading from living memory (and being betrayed by stupid new wars), what do we have to be really proud of? Can we really be proud of our language? We invented our language like Newton invented gravity - that is, we didn't have much choice, it was thrust upon us. We just wrote the best explanations of it. It is a bit strange being an Englishman in France (probably anywhere foreign) - when people realise you don't speak French very well, they speak English to you. And then often they ask you where you're from, and you say, erm, England, because to you it's like "er, why were you speaking to me in English if you didn't know I was from England - or possibly the USA or Wales or something - anyway?", but actually they were speaking to you in English because that's the language everyone knows, and now they're looking at you like you really achieved something because you speak English better than them. In fact you were just born in England, it kind of just happened.
Like I said, can we really be proud of that?
It is difficult adapting to a smaller place in the Big Scheme of Things. I guess it is a bit tough for politicians, having to keep up this pretence that really we're still quite important and should be sticking our noses in other people's business. But why bother pretending? We're British. We know the truth and we can handle it. We won't grumble. We'll carry on.
Posted Monday 8th March 2010 at 11.11pm
Rusted metal heart
I've just read that Mark Linkous committed suicide last weekend.
Rest in peace, Sparklehorse.
Posted Sunday 21st February 2010 at 10.05am
Did you guess what it was yet?
I put a new paper up on the arxiv, called "Almost sure asymptotics for the random binary search tree" (the link won't work till tomorrow night without a password). Arxiv seemed to be playing up (well, I say that, but it was almost certainly my fault - I just don't see what I was doing wrong!), and in the end the best I could do was get a pdf version working. The images (see post on 26th Jan) are quite big in eps form, but arxiv didn't tell me they were a problem - it just refused to mention the ps file at all, and failed to make the pdf version. So I had to redo it with jpegs to at least get the pdf going. Even when I just uploaded a tex file with the images commented out it refused to make a postscript version. Bizarre. So if you hate Adobe or something like that - sorry.
Posted Tuesday 16th February 2010 at 2.28pm
CCATSL with Crimson Editor
I mentioned a few posts ago that I still use CCATSL for programming work. CCATSL - which I think stands for "Cambridge CATAM Software Library", where CATAM means "Computer-aided teaching of all mathematics" is just C with some nice graphical and mathematical libraries, and is put together to make it easy for second and third year mathematicians to do computer projects in Cambridge. Unfortunately it's not really made for very hardcore stuff and so the graphics output is very easy to use but not hugely customisable. I'm working on getting something better working but I'm not very good with proper computer stuff, and the people who write guides for these things seem to assume you know what you're doing before you get started. So, for now, it's CCATSL.
The catch is that the people who maintain CCATSL have the job of teaching 150 people (ish) a year how to program, and thus just set up everything so that one can download the windows installer, tell it to go, and start immediately. But this assumes that you want to use their favourite text editor - emacs. And I don't. They do include a makefile, but given that you have to dig that out and send it the right arguments, you might as well start from scratch. It's a bit of a palava. And I got a new laptop the other day (Acer Timeline 1810tz - liking it so far), so had to go through the palava again. So for future reference, here's my guide to setting up CCATSL with Crimson Editor in Windows - and I guess it works the same with other text editors too.
Download the CCATSL installer (google will find it), note what version it is (currently 2.3b), run it. It may tell you to restart - if so, restart.
If you're running Vista or Windows 7 you may have to download a different startup.bat file from the same page. Right-click the link, save target as, and put it in the folder you just installed CCATSL to - it should replace the old startup.bat.
Run startup.bat, follow the instructions up until you've compiled intro.c.
Now change the word "main" to "MainCL" in intro.c. Compile it again, and you should get a message telling you that you're trying to compile a windows program in dos program mode, or something like that - and asking if you want to change to windows program mode. Tell it that you do.
Once you've compiled you should see a long message starting with "gcc" and inluding words like "/library/winmain.o" and -DCCATSL2D. These (well, after "gcc") are (if you take out the line break symbols) the arguments that we want to use in Crimson.
Open Crimson Editor. Go to Tools > Conf. User Tools. Menu text can be anything you like (I use "CCATSL"). Command should be something like:
C:\CCATSL2.3\cygwin\bin\gcc.exe
Argument should be something like:
"$(FileTitle).c" /library/winmain.o /library/catres.o -o "$(FileTitle).exe" -Wl,--stack,8000000 -DCCATSL2D -DCCATSLWIN -mwindows -I/include -Wl,--strip-all -L/library -lccatsl2.3b -lcomctl32
but you may have to change this - look at the message you got in emacs when you compiled intro.c in windows program mode and try to change the above to make it like what emacs said - for example, you might have to change -lccatsl2.3b by changing the version number 2.3b to whatever your version is.
Initial directory, as usual, should be
$(FileDir)
and I usually have save before execute and capture output checked.
Now, the final important step. You can try it and see if it works, but it probably won't. Close crimson, close emacs. RESTART YOUR COMPUTER!!! I didn't do this yesterday and I could not for the life of me work out why things weren't working. I tried loads of different changes to the arguments. Gave up and went to bed. Woke up this morning, tried again, and it worked fine. Gah, stupid forgetting the oldest trick in the book - restarting!
I'm back in England this week. My gran is very ill. She has Alzheimer's, and has had virtually no cognitive function for several years (wow, that sounds cold put like that! I can't think of a better way to describe it). She seems to recognise people vaguely but she can't speak so we don't know if she actually knows who everyone is. She still reacts to things - one of her catch phrases used to be saying "cold hands, warm heart" whenever anyone touched her with cold hands, and that's about the only thing that's left of her old self now - she doesn't say it, but she reacts like she knows she's supposed to say something, and sometimes starts murmuring some gobbledegook. Or at least she did, till yesterday. Yesterday she stopped reacting even to that.
I heard a horrible cover of REM's Everybody Hurts yesterday in the car. I know that song was written for different circumstances - about a young girl committing suicide - but there's a line that goes "When you feel you've had enough of this life / Well hang on", and I thought, well, no. Well, yeah, if you're a healthy teenager, sure. But if you're an 80-plus-year old woman who doesn't know who she is - if you feel you've had enough, then maybe it's time.
Update, Saturday 20th Feb: She died today, after putting up a valiant battle over the last week. Bye, Grandma.
Posted Sunday 7th February 2010 at 5.22pm
Sad Sack
So, you're a servant at what seems to be a very important feast. I mean, look, that guy in the middle has some kind of halo! And you've been given the task of pouring wine from a big heavy stone vat into a lightweight, lop-sided, narrow-based metal jug. Do you:
a) get someone to hold the jug for you;
b) take it out to the kitchen where it's a bit less crowded and pour very carefully;
c) hey, what's the worst that could happen? Just balance it right on the corner of a raised section of floor, within easy reach of a menagerie of small animals, and put your back into it. That guy with the halo is probably Jesus anyway - if you spill it all, he can just miracle it back into the vat, right?
I went to the Louvre today. This picture is on the wall opposite the Mona Lisa. It gets a lot less attention, despite being a lot bigger and more interesting. But you've got to wonder what that guy's doing in the bottom right. He really didn't think it through, did he?
This guy is my favourite. Strange man with giant eyes, made out of sackcloth and dogs' teeth. What's not to like?
PS The Louvre is big.
Posted Sunday 31st January 2010 at 9.43pm
2010!!!
I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
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I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
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I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
I must remember that it is no longer 2009.
On my CV and all my blog posts. Wow.
Posted Saturday 30th January 2010 at 10.11pm
The sweetly sleeping sweeping of the Seine
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