Teodor Revolution by Mikael Altemark; CC By 2.0.

Yesterday night mostly featured Psapp at Cargo. I was expecting to have a great time, and they didn't disappoint: it was easily the best live show by a *tronica band I've seen. (Though, that's not really a fair comparison: all of their music is readily re-arrangable for a live band, particularly their more recent tracks.) Energetic, accomplished, quirky, etc. etc. Kazoos? With squeaky lobsters duct-taped to the side? Oh yes. Plus, closing on Everybody Wants To Be A Cat was a fun touch.

Meanwhile, back in a different genre, Pure Reason Revolution have just released their new album, Amor Vincit Omnia. Apparently, at some point in the three years since The Dark Third they decided that their largely guitar-based nü prog sound could be improved by, well, replacing it entirely with synth bass and some more synths and heavily processed downtuned guitars. To my surprise, it works pretty well: it's not what I was expecting, and it feels a bit overproduced, but they haven't got rid of the vocal harmonies, and the songs are still interesting. That said, for a band who go in for Latin titles and general pretentiousness, they should really have learned to pronounce all three words of Deus Ex Machina. It should be interesting to see if and how they adapt older songs to their new style live.

Which brings me to a question: dear readers, is anyone interested in seeing them play at Dingwalls on Tuesday? I have come to have a spare ticket, and it would be nice for it to be used. If so, let me know via whatever means you feel is the most appropriate.

Following the wild success of Telepathy, we're proud to announce our new project:

In what onlookers are already calling “potentially unwise”, our robot overlord ordered various toys from ThinkGeek.

Today — being as it is Friday, always the most productive of all days — they arrived! Apparently appropriate tools to control the missile launchers are not yet packaged for Debian. :(

I'm going to the Cambridge Folk Festival this coming long weekend (Thursday 31st July–Sunday 3rd August). The person I was camping with is probably not going to make it, having just had an operation; does anyone want her ticket? The face value is a hundred British pounds; she'll take substantially less. Let me know by the medium of your choice if you're interested!

It comes to my attention that Jonathan Coulton is putting his clogs back on and coming back to the UK in the autumn. His first show here was great fun; you should go out of your way to see him this time around! Tickets are on sale for a show at Shepherd's Bush Empire on October 30th, which is the city I'm most interested in going to. I'll buy some tickets in the next day or so, so if you want me to get you one (and thus sit with a mostly-known set of people) let me know!

(Oxford people might prefer to see him there two days later, but I'm moving out in 10 days. Sniff.)

I find the different onomatopoeias used for the same sound in different languages entertaining, not least for the ensuing hilarity when you mispronounce them as English words. When I was in Paris with two of my housemates in December, we found a postcard which serves as a perfect illustration of why I enjoy mispronunciation. According to the back of the card, it depicts “Le coming-out du cochon”.

In the same shop, we found another card featuring a painting of a startled-looking boy playing his accordion, with a monkey dancing on his shoulder. I can’t decide how best to interpret the monkey’s expression.

It's kind of a long story, but I have a massive pile of stamps of various denominations. Returning a keyboard to Amazon cost £6.50, so... I used a few of them.

Have you ever noticed that the Boddingtons logo features a pair of bees? I'd vaguely spotted them before, but until earlier today, when someone pointed it out while buying one, it hadn't occurred to me that they're pretty incongruous. What association with bees does Boddingtons have? The only other beer with bees in its logo I know of uses honey as an ingredient (and is much tastier than Boddingtons).

The boring explanation is probably that the Boddingtons company colours have always been black and yellow, or something. Why those colours? We just don't know. But I'd like to think that it's actually a bad pun on the Poddington Peas.

So you know all those irritating “oh hai i lost my phone” groups that people set up because it’s way too tedious to click through your entire friends list? With any luck, they should become a thing of the past. Behold the Facebook Phonebook!

But wait, what’s this? There’s no “export to VCard” button! Thanks. Thanks a lot.

First person to write a screen-scraper gets a cookie!

If you’re not a massive nerd, I was just shown a joke which you might enjoy more than the rest of this post:

What do you call the blood that comes out when teenagers cut themselves?

Emoglobin.

On Thursday, Compsoc had a lightning talk session. Four people spoke:

• Andrew, the President, spoke about LastGraph (slides);
• I talked about ikiwiki, which we use behind the scenes for Compsoc’s website;
• Luke gave a talk about virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular, and gave a demo;
• David spoke on “Windows Vs. Linux: Which Is Better?”, featuring a hilarious sketched-and-scanned graph which I would like a copy of.

I’m more impressed with Second Life than I thought I’d be. If only my laptop were speedy enough to run the thing, I’d take a look. (I tried to run it on my i855; the CPU pegged itself then everything died. Hard reset time!) I like the idea of a scripting language where everything is a state machine. It’s a bit of a shame that the only way to get code into or out of Second Life is to copy-paste between the built-in Notepad-alike editor and your proper editor of choice, which presumably does new-fangled things like “version control”. Oh well.

In case you care what I said about ikiwiki, I stuck my slides on the ’tubes. I’ve figured a few things out since the talk, such as how to get post-commit hooks working in Mercurial. Dom has some plans to add branching to Ikiwiki, so that you can make a test instance of the wiki to play with a new plugin just by making a new branch in svn or whatever. I like this idea.

S5 is pretty slick. I’d not used it before. (I didn’t actually use it directly, though: I relied on Pandoc to convert a file written with [Markdown] into an S5 slide show.) Anyway, there’s a lot to be said for having a slide show that you can just fire up in any web browser. (Except Andrew’s Konqueror apparently didn’t understand it. I wonder whether this is S5’s fault or Pandoc’s fault.)

Pandoc is a highly slick piece of software. It converts from any of Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML or L^AT_Eχ to Markdown, rst, HTML, L^AT_Eχ, man pages, ConTeXt, DocBook, RTF, or S5. It does all kinds of nice things along the way like curlifying quotes, making proper en-dashes, rendering L^AT_Eχ expressions as images so you can use it inline in Markdown and have it exported properly as HTML, and so on. It turns out to be a better Markdown processor than markdown itself, and supports extra things like tables, footnotes and so on. It turns out that the output from a practical I finished today was very nearly valid Pandockian table markdown, so I got a well-formatted project report pretty much for free. Oh, and for extra winning, it’s written in Haskell. I like the idea of being able to write man pages and documentation in something other than raw groff or DocBook XML.

I think the lightning talk format worked pretty well for Compsoc; it strikes me as a good way to get people involved. Nice work, committee!

I have a spare ticket for the Zodiac this Friday (19th October). Oceansize are good. You should come see them.

In other news, I'm thinking about going to see God is an Astronaut in London on the 30th. Anyone up for coming along? Also, Porc!

I'm still not sure whether to pretend to be a goth and go see The Birthday Massacre.

While eating brunch, I decided to make a lolegg. May I present:

(or "Burger, Boris, Isis!")

So last night I saw Isis, Boris and Oxbow at Koko. ( Review! )

Also, beforehand we went to one of these ridiculous posh burger places. It was okay. Also, they had a wine list. I don't have much else to say about it.

Grr. My iRiver H340 has decided that it's bored of its life of service to humans, and has ascended to Silicon Heaven. I am, unsurprisingly, a bit irritated, because I was decidedly not bored of its service to me. It's got a 1.8" ATA disk inside it. I would like to salvage data from said disk. Does anyone have a 1.8" <-> 2.5" or 3.5" converter handy that I could temporarily snaffle? If not, I guess I'll hand three of my hard-earned pounds to an eBay vendor!

The algorithm killed Jeeves. The whole information-revolution.org advertising campaign is ridiculous anyway. They were giving out free mice in Leicester Square last time I was there, and offering people the chance to enter their truck and use their search engine. Uhm, I'm really enticed. Particularly since the mice were shit. :-)

Hrm. I fed “65trucksoftreerobots” to wordplay, and it generated 64590 anagrams. I don't regard “64585. BTU COT O'ER TRESS FORK” as a reasonable answer.

Giggity giggity. Posting 15daysoftickets and then using eBay has gained me a ticket to 65daysofstatic on Monday. Happy face! Also, I seem to be going to Truck. Woo.

Does anyone want a ticket to see Porcupine Tree on Thursday 26th April (that's first week, for those of you who measure time in those terms) at the Forum in London? I bought it for designergall having told her that it was the 21st because I am a muppet. It's £17.50, or £20 if you like paying booking fees.

Finally, you should all go listen to Robot Goes Here. The album's excellent (and I seem to have bought it for about £1.50 thanks to my eMusic subscription). Imagine Atom And His Package, but with a singer who can even slightly sing, and more refined music. A certain Mr Taylor remarked that “this is quite new rave! This is VERY new rave!”. I'm not sure whether this is a good thing. I am, however, sure that laptop geek-punk songs about the environment and humans failing the Turing Test are good things.

I am, in the words of Ratz, a "tit", and totally failed to actually buy a ticket for 65daysofstatic at the Zodiac on 16th April. I don't suppose anyone knows of a spare?

(or, I enjoy live music.)

Hello, dear friends and acquaintances. I like going to gigs. There are a number of gigs in the near future which I would like to attend; I like company! Let me know if you're going to any of these, or if you want me to get you a ticket when I get mine (thus avoiding a double dose of booking fees!).

• 65daysofstatic are playing at the Zodiac in Oxford on 16th April, and at Koko in Camden on 20th May. I fear that the latter is too close to exams, though. I would like to draw your attention to the video for Don't Go Down to Sorrow. I particularly enjoy the literal 5/4 switch.
• Explosions in the Sky are playing at the Astoria on 19th April.
• According to their myspace page, Kill Hannah are playing the Zodiac on 20th April. The Zodiac's listings disagrees! In any case, I can't make it. They are also playing at the Islington Academy on Saturday 21st.
• Porcupine Tree are playing at the Forum in London on 26th April. I have braved their myspace page, and have found a trackful of samples from the forthcoming album Fear of a Blank Planet. It sounds like it might be fun! It's coming out in April.

I think I am done now. I am sure that there are gigs I have missed.