We try to buy dry goods (rice, porridge, lentils, couscous...) in bulk, which is great for reducing cost and trips to the shops, but more of a hassle once you get the stuff home - the packaging is usually hard or impossible to re-seal, vulnerable to rodents, and a pain to pour from. For a while now, we've been using a system taught to us by dynix (and ( Read more... )

My trousers, as is their wont, have all decided to fall apart at the same time again, so I've been doing a bit of sewing this week. I'm not much good at sewing, but I offer up what little I know about the subject in the hope that others may find it useful. Most of this was taught me by stronglight, mi_guida, half_of_monty and susannahf, some of it I remember from school, some was taught ( Read more... )

On Sunday I climbed my 100th Munro: Glas Tulaichean near Glen Shee. I was with Michael and a guy called Silas who I'd met through No2ID; Michael stayed over at our flat in Edinburgh the night before, so we could set off appropriately early ( Read more... )

Yak-shaving at its finest:

• This weekend, I wanted to work on my thesis.
• But my laptop refused to boot up (inevitable, really, after this post). I had backups of the thesis, but they were a few days old.
  • Edit: First, I tried booting from CD.
  • But that didn't work.
  • So I tried some other CDs.

A while ago, I was playing about with my flatmate's shiny new eeePC. Impressive, I thought, but the keyboard's a bit of a fiddle - the keys are just a bit too small for my fingers (which are neither fat nor stumpy). Plus, the machine seems practically custom-designed to be balanced on one hand and operated with the other, and typing on a proper ( Read more... )

I got the job application in, finally: here's the revised (or rather, totally re-written) research proposal, and here's the summary for laymen. You will notice the point where I thought "Speculative? Ha! I'll show you speculative!" I'd really appreciate feedback, especially on the one-page summary: the two or three formulae in there should be ( Read more... )

• Do not try to wget -m the whole of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. There's rather a lot more there than you'd expect. Why they couldn't just provide a zipfile and/or tarball of the XML they store in the backend database is anyone's guess. I can't be the only geek who's read Snow Crash and wants to contribute.
• Other than that, I'm ( Read more... )

Current status on some of my long-term projects:

Thesis: Up to ( 36 pages )

I have a question for the CS types out there: what exactly is the point of tail-call elimination ( Read more... )

Among the many good features of terpsichore1980's New Year party was the first full read-through of (the current draft of) the Forties play, which I think I'm going to call Birdshot! for now. Some interesting things were discovered, and some good ideas were suggested.

• At least some of the jokes are actually funny - this was something of a relief to me.
• Someone ( ( Read more... )