3. 2008-08-15

    As hinted in my last post, we've recently spent a week away. Visiting with Judi and Jonathan in Normandy in their ongoing barn conversion, failing to construct a goat-shed, appreciating unusual motor vehicles, hanging in a yurt, eating great food, drinking French beer, enjoying good company, and marvelling in some simply astonishing weather.
    France, Aug '08

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  4. 2008-08-11

    Cricket hunting



    1. Locate crickets by listening carefully to the sounds of chirping

    2. Use a nearby internet terminal to research what they most like to eat. (Iceberg Lettuce !?)

    3. Construct a cunning trap around fresh bait

    4. Wait for crickets, carefully and very quietly



    Trap designs that were tried, and rejected.


    1. A basket propped up by a bent twig, connected to twine for rapid deployment.

    2. An impromptu fishing-rod, baited with carrot peelings, dangled temptingly over a basket.

    3. A pit trap, concealed by woven grass and twigs.


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  5. 2008-08-07

    A few weeks ago, I had a day out in the country, by way of a stag 'do' for Mr. Mark Webster, whose nuptials are imminent. The main event was a piss-up in a brewery ; for a while the organisation looked sketchy enough to bring life to the hoary old cliché, but luckily enough everything came together right at the final hour, and all proceedings went swimmingly.

    As a warm up to the main event, we spent the afternoon clay shooting courtesy of Avago entertainments. My nerves, already twisted by a long minibus drive, the rented bus an antique with a hundred and fifty thousand on the clock, the driver a first-timer, who kept commenting that he found the vehicle strange to drive as it had no brakes, I was feeling rather jumpy about spending the rest of the day discharging firearms. Luckily, just as we pulled up at the venue, I discovered my fears were all misplaced. We would, in fact, be laser shooting.

    Effectively it is laser tag. The 'guns' are real deactivated shotguns, equipped with an infra-red sensor and transmitter. They communicate with the CPU in the scoreboard unit via a wireless network. The 'clays' are in fact miniature frisbees,covered with reflective stickers. You flick a switch to load your gun with two 'rounds', and if the gun receives a reflection back when you pull the trigger, it records a hit. The base unit plays sampled sound effects in sync to represent rounds fired and breaking clays, in the case of a hit. A small LED within the gun's sight flashes red or green to indicate a failure or success immediately after each shot.

    Laser shotgun posse

    It's a more effective system than I'd have predicted, and thus surprisingly good fun. The guns come across as accurate, and the full weight reinforces your suspension of disbelief. I found a real sense of development, in that I managed to improve measurably as the day wore on, and I accumulated practice, although I was suddenly, shockingly poor at the game where you had to pick up your gun from the floor, sight and fire while the clay was in flight. The event was well run, with a considered graduation of difficulty moving up from practice rounds, through to scoring, with enough changes in setting and rules to keep interest keen all the way through to the end of the session, where points were tallied, and the top scorers compete in a final shoot-off. I missed the cut, mostly due to the aforementioned speed round. Overall it's an absorbing afternoon's entertainment, and good value. I'd recommend it if you're looking for something to do with an appropriately sized group for around half a day or so.

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  6. 2008-07-24

    It seems like the iPhone 3G has been another smash hit. Certainly here in the UK, with pretty universal 3G signal coverage, there's lots of interest, and the handsets are selling out as quickly as they come into stock. Several people I know who waited out the first generation immediately signed up for the 3G edition.

    Responses to the new platform seem mostly positive, although there's already some mild grumbling seeping through across the web. There's more software glitches, unsurprising; given the rush of new third-party applications there's countless potential software combinations interacting in unpredictable ways. The new units eschew the metal casing of the original iPhone, for a return to possibly scratch-prone iPod plastic. 3G mode depletes the battery rapidly, just as Apple said it would, when they justified their initial transport choice of GPRS/EDGE. The camera is unimproved over the first generation (although I have always been rather impressed with the iPhone camera. For a phone, with no flash it takes great photos, a textbook-worthy example of why it's nothing to do with the megapixel count)

    So maybe it's not the holy grail of portable devices. It's certainly not for me. I don't like the idea of being locked to a single phone company. I don't want a smartphone that can't be used as a 3G modem - I've grown too used to being able to connect a variety of devices up to the net, using USB / bluetooth or even infra-red links. It's a little big for my idea of a phone.

    As a portable, internet connected, media player cum tablet, it can't be beaten. The mobile browser is immeasurably better than any others I've used. The iPod, photo, and movie playing is slick, and the iPod + iTunes combination still the best available digital music library implementation. The straightforward syncing of contacts and calender information beggars belief (at least for Mac users, such as myself ). Thrown in a few simple PIM applications, ebooks and games from the Application store, and you're looking at a compelling platform.

    Of course, you can get the majority of this behaviour in the iPod touch. Smaller and lighter than it's phone siblings. Metal back. iPhone-trouncing storage capacity (up to 32GB). Runs the same operating system and applications, same beautiful interface. No contract. The downside being that you can only use it as an internet device over WiFi, which means you need to be tethered to a hotspot. Except it doesn't mean this at all.

    There's a simple recipe to open up the iPod touch's internet capabilities to something much closer to the iPhone.


    1. Arrange a 3G phone+data connection with the phone provider of your choice. I use T-mobile , I'm very happy with the service.


    2. Choose a phone handset, with a high speed modem capability. Make sure you get a model with WiFi . I have a Nokia E51 . It's lovely. Depending on your phone contract terms, you may get this as a freebie.



    3. Configure your phone to act as a WiFi hotspot, using something like WalkingHotspot


    4. Join your iPod touch with your phone's WiFi network. Enjoy 3.5G connectivity on the go!



    Of course it's not a drop-in replacement. You don't get an in-device camera or GPS, although you may have these in your phone. You do get to spread the battery load between two devices, one with the big screen and multimedia capabilities, another with the data transmission hardware. Although WiFi use will run down your iPod battery faster, you might still find that this combination outperforms an iPhone 3G.

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  8. 2008-07-23

    Sedtris! , ( yes, tetris in sed ).

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  10. 2008-07-18

    Cesare Bonizzi, a 62 year old Capucin monk from Milan, Italy fronts a genuine metal band . They have recently released their second album<a> . According to the BBC piece it's 'hard core' metal.

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  11. 2008-07-18

    Every time I install a fresh debian derived linux, I subsequently find out that I'm missing the man pages for the C library. Usually many months later, it's not like I program in C for kicks. I then waste twenty minutes fruitlessly grepping around in apt using patterns like 'glibc'. The package name is actually 'manpages-dev' . Perhaps posting it here will fix this in my memory.

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  14. 2008-06-28

    An excellent festival. More completely organised than I expected. This came to prominence straight away, when a rather spacey lady handling our tickets failed to give us one of the essential ID cards that pair up with the wristband to allow entry and re-entry. A security guard stopped us from heading back in to point out the error. Anticipating anguish at the gate, and hoping that a single card and a friendly attitude might get us through, we were met by a super-friendly chap, speaking perfect English, who whisked us back to the check-in, where we waited for the woman to confirm that her stack of cards and tickets were out by one, and furnished us with the missing card. And then we were in. Things do not run that smoothly at Glastonbury when your credentials go awry!

    The venue is good, purpose built, although admittedly it does have a slight air of NCP car park to it. There are three amphitheatres with banked steps of seating set facing out to sea. These make up the RockDelux , ATP and the VICE stages. The other two stages, namely the CD Drome , and the Estrella Damm stage are set up on the main paved area that links the first three, with the food market between them. There are two gigantic arrays of solar cells, apparently the largest in Europe, which at least made a handy shelter during the couple of light rain showers, even if they sadly aren't used to directly power the festival itself . There is also an indoor concert hall, the Auditori, which I didn't manage to set foot inside once, a combination of not being nearby when anything compelling was happening there, plus not quite being able to figure out where the entrance actually was!

    Primavera 2008

    The festival runs over several days, Thursday to Saturday, and keeps to a gruelling schedule, starting at four or five p.m., and running through till four or five a.m the next morning. It's really all about the music, as there is little else to do onsite, other than browse a few T-shirt and record label stalls, eat functional outdoor food, or drink expensive sponsor beer from plastic cups.

    It's far less wear upon the legs and feet than the typical British festival, the proximity of the stages, along with the near-universal seating, and paved footpaths rather than clogging mud fields thankfully mean that it's just the marathon running time contributing to your fatigue, not trudging miles around countryside inbetween sets. The climate was pleasantly appropriate, a few spots of light rain but it was mild enough to be comfortable in light clothing all the way through the evening, so you could just stick to the basic set of clothes you came in wearing, not wrestle with lugging around cumbersome outfit changes to cater to changes in the weather.

    It may be just a result of the lack of crowding, but the toilet facilites were fine, little queuing, and freshly clean each day. I recommend taking a little dispenser of handwash gel, you can pick these up in the chemists nowadays.

    Another benefit of the close site is the number of acts you can practically watch. As the stages are just separated by a minute or two's easy stroll you can mix and match to take in as much, or as little of a set as you fancy. It's quite possible to watch the start of one artist's set for a couple of songs, and then wander around another three stages watching a couple of numbers at each, and still return to the start to catch the final few of the original. This all makes it incredibly easy to sample new or interesting acts on spec without having to miss out on much if any of your must-see sets. Over the three days we easily managed to see dozens of acts, with comparatively little effort.

    It would take too long to run through them all in detail, so I'll just group the highlights into some buckets.



    Just Superb:




    • Shellac completely rocked my world. I really only knew their material circumstantially before watching this set, but I'd marked their card, as they don't seem to play that often within easy reach. They were just spellbindingly awesome from the start through to the end of their set. By the time they wound up, they had the largest crowd I ever saw at the ATP stage, it seemed like more than half the festival had turned up. Converted me into a raving Shellac fan on the spot.


    • Devo were a complete surprise. I only knew the two or three obvious Devo tracks, and I figured they'd be an entertaining novelty for at least a couple of tunes. They were far more tight and enthusiastic than I'd expected, great fun to watch, and had a surprising amount of the crowd singing along to pretty much everything. As the Friday evening seemed to have more Spanish attendees than I noticed at the other nights ( the festival audience seemed to be at least 30-40% English speaking foreign types like us, I'd reckon ), I was forced to wonder whether Devo had been absolutely huge in Spain back in the day. An unexpected joy.


    • Dr Octagon aka Kool Keith aka The Ultramagnetic MCs . Another legendary name I'd be unlikely to see in any other context, who seemed worth at least a look, and kept me there for the whole of the set, and certainly provoked the most enthusiastic and sustained dancing. Kutmasta Kurt set it up brilliantly with the warm up DJ set, and Keith must be one of the few rappers I've watched who seem to rhyme as sharply and clearly onstage mic, as they do on record.


    • Okkervil River. I really liked The Stage Names , when I got it, and I went along assuming they'd be one of my favourite sets of the weekend, but they far exceeded my expectations, with great sound, lots of audience interaction, big songs, and impeccable manners, including banter and songs in Spanish. They're playing the Trinity in a couple of weeks.







    Great:




    • Boris: One of my shortlist of must-see bands, I've really been enjoying Boris' varied output lately, and this live set didn't really disappoint. Conveniently loud enough to be heard starting up over Portishead 's set on the adjacent stage, this was high-volume, high-energy noise rock, with added spangly costumes, extravagant percussion equipment and crowd surfing.


    • De La Soul : De La Soul do their thing to perfection, every time I've seen them. It's amazing how well they can conjure up a party atmosphere in front of a giant outdoor audience, with all the call and response, and hands in the air, and picking people out of the crowd to shout out the words (wrongly as it rather embarassingly happened in the case of one young lady). Essential.


    • Caribou : (Formerly Manitoba), I hear a lot of Beta Band in this intriguing Canadian outfit. Had to miss them at Dot To Dot the weekend before, but made sure to catch the majority of their set in Barcelona. Loops, multiple drummers, folky vocals and an excellent light show.


    • Man Man : Crazy monkey energised tribal circus jazz , with no track breaks, instrument swapping, and leaping over drum kits.


    • Prinzhorn Dance School : Shouty chants, angular riffs, big beats and a lady bass player.



    • Fuck Buttons - loud noise loops, distressed vocal monkey dancing, synchronised bowing and drumming fuelled more by enthusiasm than precision. Rather a one trick act, but it's a pretty good trick played large, at volume by the seaside, aside a Spanish sunset.




    Not Great:




    • The Go! Team , are party by rote, second time I've seen them, and they don't do anything for me.

    • Strange Death Of Liberal England just came across as a poor Arcade Fire tribute act, trying way too hard.

    • The whole 'Legends of alt.-rock' segment, with Dinosaur Jr. , Buffalo Tom , Sebadoh etc. just left me cold, reminding me of why I never really cared much for that family of bands in the first place. I'll let the Bob Mould band have a free pass though, as I like quite a few of his songs, and he rocked.

    • Likewise, I think Portishead don't really bear up to repeat viewing, on stage I find them dull rather than atmospheric. Beth Gibbons was on the same EasyJet flight we took back to Bristol, disconcertingly, which made me feel a bit embarrassed to be wearing a Primavera T-shirt.





    Disappointments:




    • Tindersticks were boring, and seemed unenthusiastic. I wasn't that surprised, because I've struggled to get much out of any album since 'Curtains'. I don't think they really suit a large outdoor show, especially with sound spill from noise bands on adjacent stages.



    • Om were a bit of a let down, I think a combination of my high expectations, along with a difficult slog through to wait to the start of their 3:30am slot, and the fact that they seemed to be playing much more briskly live. I only managed a couple of songs. I may try and catch them at ATP release the bats 2008 , later this year ( Shellac! ).



    • Six Organs of Admittance were not what I was expecting at all.


    • Public Enemy just looked a bit panto to me, with all the marching and shouting and uniforms. They weren't helped by an extended intro set from the Bomb Squad that was really excellent, leaving them a bit upstaged by their own DJs when they finally arrived.



    • The Vice stage was a bit of a pain to get to, with the steep steps down, narrower than most of the linking pathways forming a bit of a bottleneck. The setting was nearly worth it, a stage surrounded by water, with sailing boats cruising past the acts as they played, but it was a tiring climb, and tended to clog up with people just deciding to take advantage of sitting on the steps, as the evening marched on.





    On balance, it's a superb showcase for the live music, and so long as you're mostly motivated by that, I'd recommend it to anyone. I'm already making sketch plans for 2009! If you're more interested in soaking up some outdoor festival ambience, then not so much.

    It took me a while to figure out the best approach to a city festival like this. I was still a bit consumed by the idea of kitting up trekking out to a remote site, and staying onsite and within the compound for the duration. I think a better approach may be to attend in two or three waves. There even seemed to be a few natural pauses in the lineup, a couple of times around about 8-9pm on various days, I found brief windows where I was wandering between completely empty stages.

    It's trivially easy to pass in and out, assuming you have the pass card with it's barcode for scanning, it's just a breeze through the turnstiles. The site is incredibly easy to get to via the underground train. Even though it looks like it's on a remote stop, it's really just ten minutes or so ride out from the centre and the trains are very regular. You could easily manage an early session catching the opening acts for a while and enjoying the sun, wander off for refreshment, dip back in for a couple of hours, take a break again, and then head back to dig in for the headliners. You can get transit tickets that cover ten journeys of any length on trains and buses from vending machines in the metro station.

    Getting home at the end initially seems more tricky. The event runs through till 4 or 5 am in the morning, but the handy metro stops at either 2 am or midnight(on Sunday), apart from Saturday night which has a 24 hour service. There is a night bus system, but I didn't manage to figure out either the routes or the numbers. A definite mistake was trying to walk back along the coast - although it's not a huge distance, and the early morning climate is accommodating, the terrain is not very friendly at all, it's a poorly lit mixture of rough tracks, unpaved land, and arterial roads.

    There's a festival sponsored bus service that takes you from right outside the gate to the Plaça de Catalunya, every fifteen or so minutes. As well as the terminus for all the unintelligible Night Buses, this is fairly central. We did this one evening, and then walked back through Barcelona to our apartment, which was far easier going than the coastal route. Too late to take advantage of it, we realised that the Metro opens for service again at 6 am in the morning, I would say that the easiest option may even have been to hang on through to the end of the event and then wait for the metro to start up again. If I go next year, I'll definitely give it a try.

    Annotated Map of sites and routes mentioned.

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  15. 2008-06-07

    Sometimes you run programs in xterm windows that try and do you a favour, by setting the xterm title property. Potentially useful enough, but aggravatingly some of them don't restore the previous title when they exit. If you're using some scheme of your own to set meaningful window titles, this is annoying.

    Here's a shell one liner that you can use to grab the current title in an xterm. You could use this to write a wrapper script that gracefully launches any such rude application, and restores the rightful title property when it's done

    /usr/X11R6/bin/xprop -id $WINDOWID | perl -nle 'print $1 if /^WM_NAME.+= \"(.*)\"$/'

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  16. 2008-05-30

    Barcelona '08

    We arrived in Barcelona a few days ahead of Primavera, to give us a chance to see the sights and relax a little. It's a compact city, although larger than I thought it would be, with a wide variety of flavours to the various districts. The weather has been variable, but never unpleasant.

    It is a very clean city, they seem to constantly empty the bins on a daily cycle, and there are recycling stations everywhere. The architecture is wonderful. Not just the Gaudi, which is as astonishing as you'd expect, but there's an adventurous sense to public space everywhere, interesting modern building nestling up against 14th century alleyways, and giant lumps of sculpture sprouting everywhere, in a manner you only rarely see in conservative old Britain.

    We've mostly been rehearsing our body clocks for the ever so slightly mental 5pm-5am Primavera schedule, and so we've not done so much cultural sightseeing, or eating out. I figured it can wait until the now inevitable follow-up visit.

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  17. 2008-05-26

    Appearing as part of Dot to Dot , an excellent city-wide music hullaballoo, spanning multiple venues. As the schedule didn't really sit very comfortably with my travel plans, flying out to Barcelona the next morning, I didn't really get a chance to see many sets, just some of Fight like Apes ( excellent ), Montreal's We are Wolves ( good stage moves ), Two Gallants ( dull enough to make me wander away and play Sonic the Hedgehog tennis on a nearby X-Box demo machine. Two thumbs up for Sonic Tennis, though ).

    In fairness, the latter looked like they might be quite interesting, given enough familiarity with the material, and I'm tempted to chance an album, but I wasn't really feeling it. And the main reason I was actually in the Trinity, was to catch the headliners, Spiritualized, one of my all time favourites.
    Spiritualized at the Trinity

    I thought they played a blinder. The Trinity is fast becoming one of my favourite Bristol venues, great sound, good bar, and it's incredibly handy to reach on foot. And they keep booking my favourite artists.

    The band were really together, there's the welcome return of the gospel backing singers, excellent lightshow, and J. Spaceman is looking great and singing better than he ever has, at least to my ears. New album out now-ish.


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  18. 2008-05-18

    It's been a few years now since I last went to Glastonbury, and the last few summers have been festival-free for me, save for local city-wide affairs like Venn . I came very close to attending the 'End of the Road' festival last September, tempted by a very me-friendly line up, but it wasn't very compatible with school term dates, and last summer's terrible run of weather just left me procrastinating about it until it was far too late to bother.

    In the U.K. there's almost too many to choose from now, spread right across the summer, with something happening seemingly every single weekend from May to September. This means that it's now becoming something of a stadium tour circuit, and with a depressingly production-line feel to the majority, it's increasingly hard to differentiate them.

    End of the Road didn't seem to have as many must-see bands this year, and so my attention wandered a little further afield. A couple of years ago, I noticed the Primavera Sound festival, in Barcelona had a line up of acts very much in tune with my way of thinking. I've wistfully looked at it every year since then, and this time around I've actually decided to go.

    It seems to be built around the music, with a thoughtful and genuinely alternative line up , very much my sort of thing. There's a great mix; bands I currently like very much and would really like to see ( Boris , Animal Collective , Okkervil River , Prinzhorn Dance School , Six Organs of Admittance , Om ), significant 'legacy' acts ( Devo , Public Enemy , Dinosaur Jr. , Shellac ), critically favoured 'name' acts ( Portishead , Cat Power , Rufus Wainwright ), favourite acts I've seen before ( De La Soul , Tindersticks , British Sea Power , Explosions in the Sky ), and, perhaps a new trend, bands with amusingly rude names ( Holy Fuck! , local outfit Fuck Buttons , and the charmlessly named Pissed Jeans ). My single line up complaint is that it's a European festival, and there's no dEUS , even though they have a new album out to promote.

    Like every festival, it's sure to be pointless attempting to programme any kind of strict itinerary. Events will indubitably conspire to wreck it. Given my estimate of at least 70% of the acts being the sort of thing I'd go and check out if they were playing locally, I think the best policy is to be mostly be guided by serendipity. Suggestions for things to check out are welcome!

    The festival site is next to the sea , and just a couple of km out of Barcelona itself. We're going for the whole week, flying out on the 24th and returning on the 1st of June. I've rented an apartment, right on the waterfront in Barcelonetta , which looks like it ought to be within fair walking distance of the site. This gives us a few days preceding to acclimatise, relax and see the sights before the festival properly starts.


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  19. 2008-04-20

    A party to celebrate Mrs S's impending 30th birthday.

    1978 party

    Lots of fun. Lots of great costumes. The standard of costume was high, people really made an effort. Even Andy wore a vaguely 70s T-shirt.

    I took plenty of photographs, but my tiny little Canon IXUS is tragically poor at indoor and low light photography. Here’s most of the ones that are worth sharing.

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  20. 2008-03-30

    Ever wanted to combine multiple individual PDF files into a single PDF document? Say you were scanning a paper document, a page at a time, and wanted to collate the digital pages back into a single document. Or collect together a number of similar PDFs you'd generated
    via 'Print to PDF', perhaps to send via email.

    You can do this incredibly simply in Leopard, without resorting to any additional software. PDF is such a fundamental component of Mac OS X, you can script operations like this using a very simple Automator workflow.

    Just build the following sequence of actions.

    1. Files & Folders: - Get Selected Finder Items
    2. PDFs: - Combine PDF Pages
    3. Files & Folders: - Open Finder Items

    Select all the individual pages in a Finder window, and then run the workflow. After a short wait, while the actions are run, a multi-page PDF will open in Preview. Choose 'Save As', to create a new file. Notice the optional Quartz Filter operations you can apply to the new document when you save.

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