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.)

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.

Apparently it was a bit muddy there.

• /me is being returned to the sender
• /me is becoming visual whiite noise
• /me is the versatile baby bunting bag that accommodates car
• /me is replacing system files i delete
• /me is awarded highest quality assurance standard
• /me is into? a guide by frascella
• /me is both game and art
• /me is not touched by you
• /me is not sharing
• /me is actually the next generation of the windows 95/98 line
• /me is the safest and most convenient outerwear available
• /me is it you? hello you sexy sons o @#$% heh

The French market that periodically appears in Gloucester Green does well at stereotyping itself. The bench perpendicular to this one has the same width of onions.

The funniest anagram of "Spider-Man" that I could find was "I Sperm Dan", a title which I am not prepared to give to a blag post.

I enjoyed this film. It contained long stretches of not taking itself seriously, and a ridiculous shot of Spider-Man pausing in front of a fluttering Stars and Stripes before saving New York, as he does. It also features an emo Peter Parker, who looks something like a cross between Fall Out Boy and Peter Petrelli from Heroes. (I only realised why he looked familiar and why I kept expecting him to have more superpowers than "being a spider" after the film. Also, you should all go watch Heroes.) Anyway. It's pretty obviously not some kind of revolutionary art cinema, but as far as massive-budget, special-effects-ridden comic book adaptations go, it's not bad.

I was pleased to find that my somewhat clichéd criminal photographic exploits provoked laughter from a fairly large proportion of the cinema. I'm such a sucker for attention. The folks on the row just behind me saw me getting my camera out and were making excited anticipatory noises, which also made me happy.

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.

I have exciting news for you, dear readers! Yesterday, I told you about an item of paper spam that appeared in our letterbox. At the time that I wrote that post, I was a bit drunk. In my alcohol-addled state, I failed to notice the irony in using spam printed on paper to sell paper, thus fulfilling the "paper spam" moniker in more than one way. I would like to take this opportunity to point out that nugget of joy to those of you who also overlooked it the first time around. I would also like to mention that various people have remarked on Farcebook that they also received such a slip of paper, destroying my hopes that it's someone printing out spam for [me] and posting it through [my] door as a token of affection, in the words of diffrentcolours. Such is life.

On a vaguely related note, I'm bored of manually mirroring my blog in Farcebook via the copy-paste method. I've found a third-party tool to generate RSS feeds for a particular set of tags; those of you who care about all my Linux posts will still have to go read my blog directly.

Edit: HELLO FARCEBOOK, YOU GANG OF TOTAL MUPPETS. Ahem. It appears that Farcebook's feed importing badger adds <br/> whenever it sees a newline in the feed even though my posts are already formatted properly into paragraphs. I had hoped that this was yet another case of RSS having no way to actually define the content of a post as text/html rather than text/plain, but it seems that the same problem occurs with my Atom feed, so I'm off to file a bug. I've just gone through and removed all the newlines from this post to work around the issue, but I'm not doing that for the older posts. You'll probably survive.

Hrm, I just got home from an exciting evening of beverages, and was accosted by ken_ners, who encouraged me to read a piece of paper that was allegedly put through the letter box:

"Literates" Interpretation of Mathematical Language. Paper to be submitted for Nobel Prize. 2007

A brilliance that defines the act of perfection beyond the realms of a Hamiltonian helix! On into the Living Word. Realms of perfection that would take us million's of years, just to spell out the "word". Let alone understand it's enormity of perfection. The Universe was sufficiently great enough, to take it past all the entrapments, seen in Life. Like Cold fusion. Atomic Fision. Super Novers. Even a New Sun. Or a Red & Yellow Dwarf, for that matter. It might have pointed Ears and speak to you, in a Devilsh Toung's. Eventually the Mass has increased in size to that of an Atom. I would dread to think what the escape velocity of at this point! So on we move into the Electron. Still no anomalies. Just a Marshian, "mind melding with his numbers"! So, and on, into the pin head! Slight course correction needed! Mr Martian. is now thinking in the "x of 9" that's plural for nine planes of thought.

On we go into the Micron. Just beginning to think now. {Snob}. Heck! There we have the most Supendulas flash of light! Marvellous! Stupendulas! As perfect as the story is! And it is perfect, in every way, shape, and form. The only thing it lacks is the name of the Martian. {Our Lord Jesus Christ}.

Computer paper sold buy the ream £7.97 Each Tel: 07XXXXXXXXX

E-mail: X.XXXXXXXX@hotmail.co.uk

What in hell. All the typoes and weird grammar are transcribed exactly as they appear.

The thought occurs that the source of this roughly-torn segment of an A4 page might be the same person as the source of the unexpected visitor to my pigeon hole that I wrote about the other day. If so, I think that probably invalidates both of my suspects, since one of them would not have been able to put the paper through my door while I was out, and the other does not know where I live. I am concerned. I have emailed the address printed, and will keep you informed about any replies that I receive, dear reader.

Picture the scene: it's a windy afternoon beneath the dreaming spires, the sun gradually fading as the city begins its daily transformation from a place of "learning" (heh, heh) into the strange juxtaposition of drunken people and red-eyed, coffee-chugging procrastinators (incessantly flicking between their blank word processor window and Farcebook) only too well known to those unfortunate inhabitants of university towns. ken_ners sweeps gracefully into Worcester College's pigeon hole room, her attire somewhat out of place in that dark, grimy room, and checks various people's mail. Last on her list (she promises it's alphabetical) is yours truly. I rarely have post, but she glanced into my pigeon hole anyway... ( Read more... )

I went to a craft and stuff fair at Blenheim Palace yesterday. I think I was the youngest person who was there by choice rather than being forced to go by a parent. I saw such a coerced younger person failing to eat a gingerbread man in an entertaining fashion! Cast yourself back to when you were about 5. (For some of you that'll be fairly straightforward!) When given a tasty thing, what was your reaction? I think mine was generally to put it into my mouth, chew it, swallow it, and demand MORE, but this child seemed to have different ideas. She placed the gingerbread man flat on her palm, gripped the edges with the tips of her fingers, then repeatedly smacked herself in the face with it. She seemed totally happy to be doing this, but I honestly have no idea what she was trying to achieve. (One suggestion was that she was torturing the thing, but everyone knows that the correct way to torture a person-shaped foodstuff is to eat its legs, then its arms, then...)

(I would have made a video, but laughing out loud got me a dirty enough look from her coercer, and I'd probably have been arrested.)

So off I trotted to kill someone, and on the way remarked to designergall that I don't expect anyone to understand why I'm wearing a towel today (except you, dear readers). To my considerable surprise, as I attached the "Assassinated!" sticker to my target, he did not say "Ack! You killed me! Damn". No! He said: "I totally forgot to wear my towel!"

That made me happy.

Okay, so I appear to be playing in Deptford Mice at Vertigo tonight at about 8.30 at the Cellar, and those of you who can come along should do so, if only to see what happens when you add a bassist to a band 24 hours before a show. I will now steal descriptions of the three bands from Mark's last imsoc email. I'm sure he won't mind.

The Suffrajets

The Suffrajets are three spunky young women from North London with the world at their feet and the stars in reach. Trust me, they are going to be MASSIVE... with big, BIG riffs, raw-as-skin-scraped-on-sandpaper vocals, tribal Babes In Toyland-esque drums and tunes you can take your clothes off and DIVE into!

— drownedinsound

Mr G and Rich

Forlorn, enchantingly laid back vocals cast shadows upon something beautifully Queens of the Stone Age, and a meandering, inquisitive pace and direction tastes quite distinctly Interpol. The lyrics cast a perverse sneer in their wake and the careful use of sound effects and beats leaves an intelligent scornful burn to the skin.

— drownedinsound

Deptford Mice

Apparently their moniker is a reference to a series of children's books, although their music certainly won't appeal to a similar demographic. If you're into Mogwai infused, ambient noise sans vocals then these boys will be right up your street; if not they might be somewhat infuriating.

— OxStu

When I saw Deptford Mice last Tuesday, my socks were shaken to the core, so I'm pretty excited about this show.

I just sent out the following email. However, I don't know a bunch of people's surnames/colleges/email addresses for sure, so I thought I'd blog about it also. Sorry to the various Planets to which this is not relevant.

Subject: Party tomorrow night, yes.

Ahoy everyone,

So yeah, I thought that there should be a party tomorrow night, and it
looks like I will be organising it. Come along to the place I sleep
from 20.00, bringing beverages of your choice, and people will be here.
Yes.

I can't promise that it'll be the place you should go to stay up all
night before participating in ridiculous Oxford customs at dawn on May
Day, but it might be. We'll see how it goes.

(I wonder if someone's ever leapt from Magdalen into the river?)

We could probably play some kind of ridiculous drinking game, or indeed
Eat Poop You Cat. I think we should play Eat Poop You Cat. Yes I do.

Anyway, come along! Feel free to bring folks (within reason) — I've
almost certainly forgotten to invite people. It'd be vaguely nice to
know who's coming, but don't fret about it.

wjt

Woo house contract signed yay last day of term yay work to do nay stupid bug in logjam whereby two UI elements have P as the accel nay coffee yay collections nay wine drinkage this evening yay installing chili.ox.compsoc.net-to-be in the Worcester server room yay packing nay watching ridiculous amounts of Dark Angel tonight yay. *gasp*

(Oh, and I know, eww, New Found Glory.)

...I took a bunch of stuff out of the sink for a reason. Don't just pile it all back in there. I'm about to wash it up, and I fear breakage.

Furthermore, I remembered that this had happened three days ago, so today, I told you. I'm going to go and eat this porridge, but in ten minutes I will come back and finish the washing up. So please don't put everything back into the sink. I even mimed as I spoke, because I know that you basically don't speak English. But no, as I walked out of the room to break my fast in a deliciously oaty fashion, I heard you tipping away the still-essentially clean water from the washing-up bowl, and piling shit back into it. Please don't do that. Fool.

You made me all angry now. Damnit.

On a lighter note, I should thank D for being generally awesome. I now have four (count 'em) Java textbooks on my shelf, including the intriguing Micro Java Game Development. Now all I need is a J2ME phone. (Thanks are also due for adding my lovely disembodied angry Britpop singer-style mugshot to the Planet. Whee.)

...I took a bunch of stuff out of the sink for a reason. Don't just pile it all back in there. I'm about to wash it up, and I fear breakage, and just ... no.

Grr.