Are really easy to setup! No really:

1. Open Internet Connect
2. Choose “New VPN Connection” from the file menu
3. Enter your VPN server, user name and password details
4. Hit connect

This gave me a connection, but it also jiggered my routing table so that I couldn’t see the internet. route made short work of this problem however:

1. route delete default
2. route add default $ROUTER_IP
3. route add $FOREIGN_NETWORK $VPN_IP

Luckily the network I’m connecting to uses a different class C IP range, so the routes were easy to add. If there had been an address space clash I would have had to specify routes for the individual hosts in their network I guess.

Now that’s all set up, time to load nmap :-)

Interesting use of game theory in public fora. Or how to win at collaborative ratings systems.

Plus, pay £100, take a multiple choice exam, become a Sun Certified Java Programmer. Sweet. I’m going to do it.

I’ve finally got around to putting up our photos from Italy. Looking through them reminded me how great it was out there. I can’t wait until my next holiday.

Another tax return fired off. The basis period for the numbers that I submitted today ended nearly six months ago, so I had to drag lots of stuff out of my records. Luckily, as long as you keep any kind of records it’s pretty easy. I had to muddle through some of the questions, but I did the same last year and it was fine.

This year I submitted online through the Inland Revenue’s web site. The site is very good. It’s clear and simple, provides pretty good navigation and lots of help. It’s very stable and thorough, no page has more than a handful of form controls on it and each page is saved as soon as you navigate to another. I did about the first section and a half ages ago and the results were waiting for me when I started up again tpday.

The only complaint I have is that there’s no indicator of where you are within a process. For example, the self-employment form had about 10 or 15 pages, but there was no indication of how many pages had been completed or remained or a navigation facility to jump to a specific page. This meant that when I got logged out automatically I had to click through six or seven pages to get to where I was. Not a big problem and about the only one.

The amount of tax I have to pay is also relaxingly low :-).

BTW, if you are wondering what you need to keep to be able to complete a return: I needed my invoices; details of expenses paid; documentation on interest from my banks; payments from my share brokers; details of charity gifts through Gift Aid and statements sent from the Inland Revenue.

Louise won free tickets to see Finding Nemo this morning at eleven. The theatre was alive with squirming kids. There was a small amount of screaming. The beginning of the film was quite harsh really. I saw the whole place erupting in tears in a sort of domino effect, but they kept it together mostly.

The film itself was typically likeable, with a good number of razor sharp one liners. The main characters were a bit of a trial at times, Ellen DeGeneres was a bit squawky and the other character wasn’t that loveable, but the large range of supplementary characters made up for that. The story was well written, moving along quite quickly, characters coming in for only a few scenes. It’s really nice to see a kid’s film where the plot is in no way predictable. Hey, and it’s always fun to guess the voices in big animated films. I enjoyed it a lot but it wasn’t quite as good as Monsters Inc.

After the film, I dragged Louise around Rough Trade and Koobla. Picked up the new Matmos album, The Civil War, the new LFO, Sheath, and some jungle plates. I had a little mix an hour or so ago and I’m really loving Drumsound and Simon Bassline Smith’s Junglist ATM. Will report on the electronica later.

It occurred to me last night, as I was debugging some particularly tangly Javascript and Java running in several frames, that programming a complex web application that uses frames is essentially developing a multi-threaded application. You have the synchronisation issues that you get with multiple threads, albeit on a lesser scale as you usually have many more threads than frames.

On top of that, because the round-trip time to the server is so much higher than access times for threads running locally, you just can’t use a lot of the typical techniques for solving sync problems. Also, as the frames are meant to act as a coherent whole, you have to ensure that they dance together properly. They can communicate with each other and they can communicate with the server, but only in the most basic ways.

Sometimes, this makes things hard.

I’ve been working ridiculous hours this week. I’ve gone to bed as Louise has been getting up every day. Then I don’t get up until at least two. Today it was three.

The silly thing is that I’ve been working really well and not just sitting around staring at my computer the whole time.

Ridiculous.

The overall effect is like listening to a strobe light.

I can’t do better than that review, it’s ace. Indeed, <irony>Adult. DIGIROCK!</irony>

My foot hurts from tapping.

The EU parliament decides that software patents are a good thing, but in what way? It seems that the draft directive that was actually passed had been declawed somewhat, relying on the phrase “true inventions” to come to the aid of the OSS community and others. Sounds like it’s not as bad as it could have been, but that the end result is probably a fair amount of confusion. Weird.

That and I’m not eschewing Lisp yet. Scary. I download Paul Graham’s On Lisp in PDF form. I just read the introduction and I think I’m starting to get it. I think the thing that everybody loves is that Lisp is programmable. Instead of writing a program in it, you end up customising the language until that program is trivial. This is demonstrated by Graham by implementing Prolog in 200 lines. I wonder how many brackets he used. Fuck loads probably.

I use a shell script run as a cron job to back up this database and the Hype database. To do this the scripts needed the correct passwords to get to the data. In an ideal world I might have set up an account with select-only access, but it’s a shared server and I only have one account per database. I was specifying the username and password for MySQL on the command line and anyone else could see it with a simple ps.

The much better way is to create a defaults configuration file. MySQL cnf files can consist of any option specified as a command line argument. They are organised by application, e.g.

[client]
user=myname
password=mypassword
host=mysql.com

The password option has exactly the same effect of putting --password=mypassword on the command line to the MySQL client. You can have sections for mysqld, mysqldump and so on.

By default the MySQL apps will look in several files for these kinds of settings. However, you can point it to a particular file with --default-extras-file. This loads your file after the global defaults. I use this to point mysqldump at two different databases.

I’ve been writing this down in bits here and there, finally I found some time to finish it all. It’s been nearly six weeks since we flew back, so some of the details might be hazy or even, sharp intake of breath, wrong. Sorry.

BTW, I have actually been working solidly since my last post, so I won’t get fired for another day at least.

Anyway:

Saturday, 9th

We were undecided about how to get Stansted first of all. It’s quite a way in Essex, which is on the side of London from us. In the end we drove, although with hindsight I would probably choose the train next time. It was pretty damn busy on the roads. We left late and instantly got stuck in Hammersmith traffic, then met more large swathes of cars on the M25. We made it in time in the end though, thankfully. I don’t know, but I don’t think Ryanair will put you on another flight if you miss your one. I think it’s one of their ways of keeping the costs down.

The flight and Treviso airport were funny. The flight was as many people as possible crammed into a 737. The airport was little more than a shed. A small shed. However, this did have the advantage that we were out of their after about ten minutes, luggage, hire car and all. We had asked them for a micro hire car, a 106 or a Punto or something. They had run out of tiny cars and so gave us a 206 instead. It was neat. Power steering, CD player, Air Con (joy!) and more besides.

Louisa and Alberto met us at the airport and it turned out they only lived about ten minutes down the road in a little town called Quinto de Treviso. A roadside settlements more than a town, but it was perfectly pleasant and their apartment was really nice with big nice-wood doors and windows, decks at the front and back and two bathrooms. It even had three bedrooms remarkably, even though it was quite small. We had our own double bed and everything.

After we’d settled in we went out to get food. Louise just starting to get the hang of driving on the wrong side whilst Alberto directed her around the countryside and me and Louisa caught up on all the water that had gone under the bridge since we last saw each other, some three years previous.

We went to Alberto’s parents home town of Conegliano for drinks. We met and failed to converse with one of Alberto’s friends, I think his name was Pepe, but I’m not sure. He was nice enough and set the pattern of speaking enough English to be friendly and to compliment London in some way. We drank Spritz, a local refresher made with white wine, something called Aperol and something else as well. It was really nice actually. In fact, I wouldn’t mind one right now. Must get Louisa to ship me a bottle of Aperol.

After drinks we drove up into the hills a bit as it got dark to a pizzeria perched on the hillside. Alberto making the decisions, but very well, the pizza was fine and the beer cheap. I tried more local drinks, a digestif which was basically and alcoholised lemon sorbet. There were lemons growing in the trees around us as we sat on the veranda.

After the meal, Alberto took us further into the hills to a little village (potentially called San Lucia Di Piave) where they were having something called a Sagra. A sagra is where the whole town opens up and events are laid on along normal party lines — drinking, music, etc. However, all the tradespeople of the town open up their workshops and demonstrate their skills to visitors. We went at about midnight and there were hundreds of people wandering about. The trades on display including glass staining, wood carving of many kinds, clothwork and lots of other bits and bobs. The atmosphere was really cool, with lots of people of all ages — even teenagers! - milling around, drinking and having a good time. We were probably the only non-Italians, refreshingly. It’s a shame we don’t have any town-scale parties like that in this country. Here we treat large inclusive parties as if they’re the end of the universe.

We met up with some other friends of Alberto’s and hung around and drunk beer and soaked up the atmosphere for a bit. Louise liked the fish craved from sponge, I liked the names of the bands that were playing. One was called “Wild Gosling” :-)

Sunday, 10th

The next day we got around to the real holiday business — the beach! We drove out to a beach at Caorle. This was far enough from Venice not to be packed. It was a big beach and the sand was very hot. Too hot to stand on with bare feet. I went straight into the sea. It was lovely. It was really nice and warm. It wasn’t too clear, but you can’t have it all. It was very shallow as well and I had to walk out for a bit before I could jump in properly. It was lovely though. I really like swimming. Then we played frisbee for a while. It was too windy, but frisbee in the sun was one of the main motivations for the holiday. We hung around at the beach all day, getting food from a little restaurant up the beach from where we were sitting and working on that tan.

It really worked as well, the next morning my face was a completely different colour.

Monday, 11th

On the Monday Louise and went to Venice. She’d been before, but it was my first time in the city. We went to Treviso and got a train. I drove, my first time on the right. It’s crazy, it was hard working out all all the Italian conventions for signs and such at the same time. The train was cheap, but very hot and had no A/C. Thankfully the windows did provide a nice breeze. The track into Venice runs across a five kilometre bridge and you can see the city sticking up out of the lagoon coming into view. It is a weird place.

The train station is on the far side of the city from San Marco square and other touristy bits, so we wandered down through the little side streets and over the little bridges across mini canals. That was really beautiful. By the time we got to the Rialto though I was really hot and sticky, it was about 37° and most humid. We had lunch at a little place in the little streets. It was too near to the Rialto and was dead pricey.

San Marco was a bit of an anti-climax, the palace at the end is quite decrepit. It didn’t help that we really wanted to sit down, but they had cops moving people on from the steps around the square! Wankers. After that I had a minor heat crisis. I was just really pissed off by being all sweaty and uncomfortable. I was also really tired from having bread and walking around (bread makes me really tired as I digest the wheat). We found a place round the corner to sit for a while and then Louise suggested that we take a canal bus down the main canal and around the island. That was cool because we got to sit and be quite cool and check out some of the sites. Well worth €3.50.

After that we decided to wander a bit more and find some food. This we failed to do on a major scale. Venice is full of crap restaurants selling “Spaghetti with tomato sauce” and other really crap food. We walked past hundreds of these places looking for somewhere better. This was stupid because we ended up walking for hours being snobbish and then when we were too tired to walk any more we sat down at a place and the food was only average. Silliness. I was very surprised by the total dearth of good places to eat. It is Italy after all, every other town or city has fantastic food.

Tuesday, 12th

On Tuesday we did nothing. We got up late and then hung around reading our books. It was good. I was reading Pattern Recognition by Gibson. It’s mostly set in London and I felt almost as if I was back home as I read. He’d researched the locations very thoroughly. Since I’ve been back I’ve visited some of the key locations, Portobello Road, Camden market and stood outside the Pilates place in Neal’s Yard. If only I could visit the locations in Tokyo and Moscow.

Wednesday, 13th

Refreshed from our relaxing, we decided to drive up to Lake Garda in the lovely hire car. It was about 2 hours drive at the 150km/h which everybody does on the autostrada. I drove. It was great fun caning it down the outside lane. I was most disappointed to find out that 150km/h is only about 95 when we got back to the UK. The car was much more shaky than Louise’s Polo and it felt much faster.

We got to Garda at about three, having hung around at Louisa and Alberto’s for too long, but it was gorgeous when got there. We sat and had ice cream first before setting off to find a relatively empty beach. Garda doesn’t have sandy beaches which is as much of a blessing as it is a curse in reality, the pleasure of not having to fight with sand is most relaxing.

We did find a nice little patch a couple of kilometres north of Garda the town. We swam. It was a touch colder than the sea, though I still managed to get Louise it. It was so clean and nice. No salt, no chlorine, just pure water. The wind was blowing the water around a fair bit and the swimming was damn good exercise. It was pretty sunny still and once out of the lake it was only moments before I was dry enough to continue my reading.

When we’d finally had enough swimming we decided to drive around the lake to look for a place to eat and maybe find a hotel to stay in. Since it had taken us so long to get up there it seemed a shame to rush off again. We set off north along the shore. The drive was beautiful, the lake and it’s mountains are very pretty and we just trotted up the road staring out of the windows as much as possible. At the northern end there is a large patch of crazy geology with huge angular blocks of rock jutting out of the silt dropped by the rivers feeding the lake. We stopped there, at Riva del Garda, for snacks and to question some hoteliers, then we continued round and headed south down the opposite shore.

Our southbound leg, through mountains on the western side of the lake, was even more terranious. The rock falls steeply into the lake and a large portion of the route is in tunnels. It was very much your classic alpine curvy little roads, though still gentle enough to cruise around. The tunnels were fun. The route was dotted with many hotels and we stopped at quite a few to ask about rooms. Often the hotels would have a car park and an entrance at the road level and then descend several stories down the mountainside to the lake front. An excellent idea, the rooms must all have had lovely views. We stopped many times to take pictures and just sit and look. We were still wandering though really and we pressed on until we reached Salo.

Salo had lots of hotels and we’d already asked at loads, so we drove straight into town for food. We had funny pizza at a slightly crazy place where the waiters sported barcode readers and the walls were adorned with really, really soft porn. It was called Tip Tap as well, and the toilets were decorated like a 10-year olds racing car bedroom. The reflection of the black and white check in the door knobs on the toilet doors reminded me of a POV demo raytrace.

On our final hotel trawl we got sucked in by the attraction of the Grand Hotel Gardone. We stopped to ask how much the rooms were, €180 for a room with a balcony and a lake view. We were unsure so they let us see it first, after that we took it. We went out for drinks nearby and encountered the funniest and simultaneously most terrifying northern English holidaymakers ever. One of them sounded exactly like Johnny Vegas and the topics of their conversation made us giggle into our glasses.

Thursday, 14th

A night’s sleep is a night’s sleep. Though it was nicely air conditioned, it’s the morning after that counts when splashing out on a night in a posh hotel. Stacks of food and armies of waiters kicked off the day. I love the kind of breakfast you only have in a good hotel. That’s the only time I eat prunes, for good reason, but I do like them in my posh Muesli.

Then there was the lake view in all it’s glory and the hotels lake front sun-bathing and jumping in area. We could have gone for the pool, but it’s just no fun compared to Garda and we swam for an hour or so. Afterwards we stole all the moveable items and decided to try and drive up north of the lake and into the Alps a bit more.

Ah, now, picture the scene. We’re driving up a winding road and I’m still making comments along the lines of “Italian drivers blah blah blah” when we start to notice that the traffic southbound is much much heavier than that going north. We didn’t think much of it at first, but the wind started kicking up and the sky ahead looked grey. I realised that as most of the people around were probably tourists, it wasn’t so surprising that people would be heading away from this weather and towards the sun. We got a shock then, when the hail started falling. It was big hail and it banged on the bonnet and roof quite seriously. With the wind and the mountains, Louise jumped to the conclusion that it might be rocks being blown from the slopes. We panicked, I had visions of the windscreen caving in and the car being bashed to shit. Then we realised it was just ice and the car could probably take it. Soon it turned to torrential rain though and it was impossible to move at more than 20km/h. As we started to get into the first tunnels we found people stopped at the exits, hiding from the weather. We joyfully did the same and I grabbed a chance to let my shoulders drop after the bombardment.

We were able to continue at a slow speed up the shore and the sun came out before we made it back to Riva. We saw lovely views of the rain retreating down the lake. As we came into Riva we hit a second wave. Torrential rain and a slightly worrying amount of lightening, very close by as well, striking each of the highest outcrops seemingly in turn. It didn’t bode well for our drive into the mountains. We in fact spent about half an hour lost in Riva’s one-way system trying to avoid the autostrada to Trento so that we could see more. Exploring the little roads around Riva we got to see lots of the geography which made me happy.

Finally we found our way out and the weather lifted again. We cruised through valleys of vines and climbed quickly up into the hills. We passed picturesque castles, lakes and villages. Suddenly we hit a tunnel that took us down and down until we hit Trento, a small city spread across hills. It reminded me a bit of the bay area from when I visited Melisssa, with dense residential areas packed on to pretty steep hillsides. From Trento we burned our way back down the autostrada and made it to Louisa and Alberto’s house as it got dark. Just in time to steal some of their dinner in fact.

Friday, 15th

On Friday we went to Alberto’s parents house in Conegliano. In Italy, as in Germany and other European countries, it seems to be the done thing to save up for ages and then build yourself a sparkly house when you reach middle age. Alberto’s parents house was no exception. It was slightly out of town and very new and very well appointed. We played frisbee on their large lawn for a fair old while. Working on the tan and the muscle tone.

In the evening loads of Louisa and Alberto’s friends joined us for a barbecue. Mucholi (not sure of the spelling, sorry!) cooked up a ton of meat and some polenta and fish for Louise and we all go riotously drunk on various kinds of crazed Italian beverage. I started on beer, then we had spritz and wine and finally what I lovingly called Citrus Aftershock, a homemade contraption of serious potency. I seem to remember that the evening went pretty random after that with lots of drunken guitar playing and some very bad drumming. The whole thing was pretty hilarious really, not understanding a word of what anyone was saying and just grinning stupidly.

To finish it all off we went and played frisbee again. The only lights there were just served to make it even harder to see the other players, let alone the frisbee itself. The frisbee soon vanished and was sadly not seen again for the rest of our time in Italy.

Saturday, 16th

We sort of planned to meet up with Alberto’s gang again the next day. They were headed north towards the Dolomites and Louise and I had been thinking about going to the mountains previously. A guided tour from Alberto sounded good to us as well. Alberto was planning to take us to Capri, but apparently the traffic was really bad, so we just drove into the alpine foothills.

The drive up into the hills was cool. Really steep and windy roads all the way up and up for ages. I had loads of fun driving it, though it’s quite tiring. At the top we could see for miles. We probably could have seen Venice had it been clearer. We found Alberto’s pals and hung out for a bit, there were the Milka cows as well and Louise became acquinted with an absolutely huge shire horse and his owner. Not sure what Alberto’s friends were planning but we headed further up for a walk.

At the very top it was pretty bleak, not especially for a mountain top I guess, but people were sunbathing! Yes, there’s little polution etc, but it wasn’t warm. It was cool however :-). We wandered around the gorse for a bit and I took pictures of civilisation down below us. Louise conquered the dragons. It was really very lovely. I was happy to spend more time out in nature.

In the evening, after conquering the way back down the hill, Alberto took us to a restaurant he’d been visiting as long as he could remember. It was wonderfully located. Up a tiny steep driveway, nestled in amongst soft hills, with vines covering the dining area and a view down the little valley of more vines. It was the very definition of pituresque. I may have slipped in the world of stock photography for a moment.

The menu was pretty good to. It basically consisted of meat. They told us what they happened to be cooking that day and we opted to eat almost all of it. We got pork and chicken and lots of gorgeous vegetables with tonnes of olive oil. I’ve been trying to replicate those vegetables ever since I got back, but it never quite works out. They didn’t have any fish, but the vegetarian main course was a steak of cheese. I think it was Halloumi from the texture, but it was weird city. Louise only ate a few bites as there were plenty of other things on the table for her. But still. Cheese. Madness.

I ate a huge amount of meat, but Alberto ate probably twice as much as me. A ludicrous quantity. I really wanted to keep up with him, but it was totally impossible. Italian training. I left enough room for the digestif though.

Sunday, 17th

And on Sunday we flew back, discovered that all the trimmings on our hire car were sorely missed and found that Tom had failed to water the garden enough in the searing heat and that it was all dead. Holiday over.

(princ '|What is your name? |)
(setq a (read))
(princ '|Hello |)
(princ a)
(princ '|!|)

This program asks you your name and then says hello to you! I learnt how to do conditionals and define functions (yes, even recursive ones) too, but I’m officially worn out. I’m retreating to infix notation post haste!

Java is the SUV of programming tools.

Is the quick and dirty use of languages like Perl just quick, because the long way always ends up dirty anyway?

Why are Lisp people so snobbish? The number of pages I’ve read where people say things like “Knowing Lisp is the pinnacle of programming enlightenment is affirming a (less well-known) truth.” amazes me. What amazes me more is that nobody is prepared to take me by the hand and show me why Lisp is best. If it really is so good, wouldn’t it pain them to see people using other languages? How do they explain the proliferation of other languages? When I see people I know doing things wrong, I offer advice. I try to make things easier and save them time — it’s The Laziness of Programmers™. Why are the Lisp ranks so clandestine (yes I have seen the syntax).

I like to think I’m language agnostic. Changing languages often makes me happiest. I’ve been writing lots of Java recently, so when I opened up a C++ file the other day, it looked really good. Compared to Java, C++ is nicely minimal and hard looking. That’s just the aesthetic though. In terms of use, I’m not really sure about what I prefer. Sure my development time in PHP is quicker, but often the bugs I’m chasing might well have been caught by Java’s stronger checking. I really don’t like debugging C memory management code though.

Still, I find myself compiling clisp as I type. Hmmm. Should be working.

Look sharp!

Hardcore, stylish, brave, did I say hardcore? It’s like Peaches for non-feminists ;-). Apparently his music teacher helped out, but his breadth of influences is pretty impressive. It’s his first album and he’s young, but it’s the brittle production and simple technique that many first albums suffer from that makes this a gem, especially now that it’s really overground.

As I listen to it more, what I like most about it is it’s him. It’s not his gang, or his love, just him, alone in the world, watching.

Soundtrack to every drive to the shops, gangster style.

We spent the weekend celebrating by having a big meal and hanging out a bit. Kate cooked a chocolate meringue opus and today Louise used the plums from last weekend to make jam. Lots of jam.

Mmmm.

On Friday we saw Spirited Away, the new Miyazaki film. It was excellent, full of magic. The main character was engaging, despite being a child. I’m not sure whether I preferred Princess Mononoke, which was a bit more involved plotwise, but I really want to see Spirited again.

Now I have a bug list that needs to have no P1 bugs on it by tommorrow, but currently has about 10 on it.

I went and had a look at the Ark today. It’s a big ark-shaped building on the A4, just at Hammersmith Broadway. It was pretty cool. I was just cheekily looking around the side when a 50-something white suit guy stopped me and asked what I was doing. When I told him however, that I was just looking at the building, he agreed that it was pretty cool and we talked about the inside a little bit. It was a pleasant encounter with a nice guy.

Looking at the pictures on that site, it looks even cooler inside. I have to get in there!

It’s Monday in the UK.

I spent the week working in Norwich. It was great to fit back into the old pattern. Thanks to everything being based at Thickthorn, there was none of the stress that made City Road so hard at the end. I got lots done, designed an intranet. I’m even quite proud of my design, although I think later pages in the set may be tending towards link chaos a bit much. Got to tidy that up.

Insane as it may sound, what we are trying to acheive with Arena4 and this new intranet project is to get people to interact as well as they do in social situations like down the pub etc, when they are really relaxed. The key, as we see it, is to drive a core of social features through the usual business tools. Both are as important as each other.

So anyway, that was what I was up to last week. On Saturday we went to the cricket at Chelmsford to see Essex vs Warwickshire. It was an excuse to drink beer and have a picnic really. The picnic was great. Mart made a metric tonne of sandwiches. I made a big tub of cous cous and a batch of pigs in blankets and brought a bunch of crisps and a pork pie. Then Louise and Adam and Charlie turned up with even more sandwiches and all manner of exotic delights, stuffed vine leaves, antipasto, Green & Black’s and much much more. Topped off with beer and good conversation, I think we annoyed the people near quite a bit. It was great fun though, and the weather just made it an incredibly pleasant afternoon.

After we went to Norm’s Nan’s house to chill out. We drank and ate more and collected loads of plums from her trees. She’s in a home now and the plums were ridiculously ripe, they would have gone to waste if we hadn’t turned up and gladly started munching on them. We came away with a fat bag of them. We’re going to make jam. How civilised can you get!

Many many thanks to Norm, Martin, Lisa, Rich, Helen and Mat for letting me stay last week and making the whole thing great fun. I miss you guys already.

ssh -L 5548:127.0.0.1:548 user@host

If the box you’re SSHing to is the machine you want to Appletalk to. Awesome. Otherwise change 127.0.0.1 to the name of the server you want to talk to as the remote machine sees it.

The initial 5548 part is a port on your machine that will become the gateway to the remote box. I chose 5548 because you don’t have to be root to bind to it and it’s moderately memorable. In the style of 8080. Anyway. To connect go to Finder and do Apple-K as normal. Then enter the URL afp://localhost:5548/. The SSH terminal session must be active for the forwarding to be open, unfortunately.

And now here I am, stuck in the wilds of Norfolk. I’ve been sequestered to Norwich to work on a project.

I spent all evening drawing a Routemaster bus in Photoshop. I used a image off the web as a template and the final result looks quite good. The problem is it needs to fit into a design somehow and I can’t get the other bits right.

I miss Louise, who is bed back in London now. She came up for the weekend, but seems to have left me behind!

I swam 1500m today, with stops every 300m. It took nearly an hour and a half, so whilst I can sprint at a good 3km/h, I can only maintain a pace of 1km/h and probably not for much longer than an hour and a half.

I found a place in Fulham that sells running shoes and actually bothers to fit them so I don’t kill my feet. I may well head down there tomorrow and check it out. I might end up running more than swimming because I don’t have to spend ages dechlorinating my hair afterwards. Plus I’m more likely to just speed out for half an hour than go for a swim as when I pay to get into the pool I like to stay for a while. Running and then going into the pool sounds pretty good though.

Louise’s ex-personal trainer friend the lovely Megan says that I could burn off my relatively small beer gut by doing 20 minutes proper exercise three times a week. I don’t care that much about the podge. I’m more concious that as I get older it’s more important to be in the habit of being proactive about exercise. As I’m freelance, I have to plan it into my day or I start getting fidgety.

I just had a conversation with one of my managers about the need for project managers and specifications. He totally understood the need for careful management of projects and I was very happy to hear that it sounds like he will be taking steps to take the weight of management off my shoulders.

It’s hard because managing all the phone calls and collating demands and verifying problems takes up a lot of my time, but that’s because it needs somebody who’s very familiar with the project to do it and nobody else has been available. I spent as much time on the phone last week as I did coding. Software is complicated and good seperation of roles helps simplify the development process. I get much more done when I’m given a list of tasks and I can just get my head down and do them. It also means that if things need to be rescheduled, it’s not a case of me saying sorry I didn’t get it done, because the project manager is so close to the developers they hold a stake in getting it done right and will help take the responsibility of updating the project plan and make sure it stays workable.

I also sent my first invoice since June. My shares earnings have alleviated the urgency of invoicing. This one was the biggest I’ve ever sent, by a factor of three.

Dear Ben

Directive Patent law: patentability of computer-implemented inventions COM(2002)0092

Thank you very much for your letter expressing your concern on the issue of EU software patenting.

I share your concerns on this Directive. Current proposals to extend patentability to basic elements of knowledge and to mathematical operations are extremely worrying and a potential danger to a variety of sectors (such as the software industry and the education and charity sectors).

Pretending to protect inventors and their inventions, the Directive instead allows predominantly US corporations to lock up the market at the expense of the open-sourced software industry which, by more than a coincidence, is primarily a European sector.

Patenting software is as absurd as patenting a novel or a recipe. The Directive goes against the expectation of the public and stakeholders including the Economic and Social Council, the Industry committee, the Culture committee, 140,000 people and 30 leading software scientists who signed two petitions to the Parliament, as well as the 91% of the European citizens who took part in a European Commission public consultation.

The Commission admits in the preamble that the public consultation of 19 October 2000 received 91% negative answers. However it considers the position of economic key players such as the UNICE as determining. The influence of the Business Software Alliance (whose main members are Microsoft and IBM) behind the project has been widely condemned. It is interesting to note that companies that have lobbied for patenting do not necessarily produce software themselves.

If this Directive were implemented, it would conclude the transfer of our data-processing control to the US. In the wake of protests by computer scientists, economists and the Greens the vote has now been postponed and will take place between the 22-26th of September. You can be sure that the Directive will have a very bumpy ride when it goes to vote in the Parliament in late September but please keep up your pressure on other political groups in the Parliament as there are still many who support the directive. The Greens believe that copyright on software is a far more reasonable alternative, which protects a certain solution, while not preventing the development of alternative programs on a similar basis.

The Greens will continue to lobby the Parliament in this way over the voting period. Thank you again for your letter.

Yours sincerely,
Jean Lambert
Green MEP for London

Office of Jean Lambert MEP
Suite 58, The Hop Exchange
24 Southwark Street
London, SE1 1TY
Tel: 00 44 (0)20 7407 6269
Fax: 00 44 (0)20 7234 0183
Email: jeanlambert@greenmeps.org.uk
Webaddress: www.jeanlambertmep.org.uk





Office of Jean Lambert MEP
European Parliament 8G107
Rue Wiertz 60
B-1047 Brussels
Tel +32 2 284 7507
Fax + 32 2 284 9507
Email: jelambert@europar.eu.int
Webaddress: www.jeanlambertmep.org.uk

Help defeat the proposed EU software patents!

• Sign the petition
• Link to the petition site and urge others to sign it
• Write to your MEP, the easiest way to find out who they are is to Google your area and the phrase “Member European Parliament”, like this

I’m writing to each of the MEPs for Hammersmith and Fulham. There follows the text of my email but it’s a bunch of crap hacked together too quickly by stealing bits of the petition.eurolinux.org site and a few others. Do your own one better than me!

Dear <MEP>,

I am writing to you because I am concerned by current plans to legalise software patents in Europe despite the damaging effect on innovation and competition.

I am a resident of Fulham and a software developer myself. Software patents prevent me from exploring my ideas fully and creating derivative works which further the knowledge of the community, both in my work and in the greater context of the IT industry worldwide. It acts contrary to the public interest and provides another avenue to increase the power held by large private corporations. These corporations are the economic powerhouses of Europe, but they must not be allowed to stop or slow the advancement of knowledge.

Current EU law expressly prohibits patents on computer programs. Patents are often abused to prohibit or restrict the dissemination of computer programs and intellectual methods in other parts of the world, e.g. the US.

I can not express the ramifications of this decision as well as some of my friends and so I urge you to consider the following websites and articles:

Phil Salin’s letter to the US PTO

http://philsalin.com/patents.html

Free patents, protecting innovation & competition in the IT industry

http://www.freepatents.org/

The EuroLinux petition site, with well over 200,000 signatures

http://petition.eurolinx.org

Thanks for your time,

Ben

Hands up who’s DSL connection has been down all day. Just me? That’s OK then. I’d hate for everybody to have to suffer the humiliation of being an ice cream man without an ice cream van. Audible-frequency modems simultaneously suck and blow. I can’t believe I used to live in a house where about five of us shared a V.90 modem!

Anyway, to attempt to return to normal blogging practice, what did I get up to this weekend? My little baby sister, now 16, came to visit me. When I was still living at home she and I used to spend virtually all of our free time sat watching telly in the front room at my mum’s house, strictly her domain these days. I used to force her to watch Star Trek on Wednesdays and everything. My relationship with her hasn’t been quite the same since I left for Norwich, which saddens me a bit. When I left she was young and we were very close, now she is a teenager and I’m just a walk-on in her life. That’s fair enough I guess, and just shows yet another way that I’m getting suckered by nostalgia.

On Friday Louise and I went and met her from her train at St Pancras and then took her to the Conran by Tower Bridge, demonstrating some pretty good sights along the way, including the best view of the gherkin building I’ve seen since I went and explored the great buildings of the city and stood at it’s base and stared up. We had a nice meal and then copped out of going to the cinema and got Solaris on DVD instead. Tom came home riotously pissed and shouted a bunch. I don’t know how familiar Nell (my sister) is with very pissed people, but she got to see Tom on full form.

On Saturday Nell wanted to go to Oxford Street/Soho/Covent Garden etc and we tripped in on a packed Piccadilly. She liked the little streets but it was Topshop on Oxford Street, the world’s biggest fashion store, that really hit the mark. Even Louise had four things to try on. It really was huge. Then we went to Selfridges and meandered around. I found that the cheese counter in the food hall there sells Reblochon, my Mum’s favourite stinky french cheese and a love of my own as well. It will do well as part of a birthday present. My mum is fifty in 15 days time.

On Saturday night I finished setting up my old iBook for Nell. It is to be her A-levels computer. She’s quite into her art, so I loaded her up with Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Dreamweaver. I’m not sure how she will be able to learn to use them though. They have little in the way of internet access at my Mum’s house, something which has annoyed me for some eight years now, though much less these days. I have a plan to convince them to invest in ADSL and I give it 50/50 odds at the moment. I need to sit down and work out the costs actually. It all hinges on the fact that they can buy an Airport hub to supply my Mum’s iMac and Nell’s iBook and then use the ethernet port to provide for Bernie’s PC. This would be an ideal set up pretty much and the fact that there would be no cables might just sell it to my mother. We shall see…

Yesterday, Nell and I went up the London Eye and then on to Camden. The London Eye was great the second time around as well, although I don’t think a third trip will be necessary! I got much higher res pictures of the scenery this time, being equipped with my shiny new Fuji rather than, um, my crap old Fuji. I took a bunch of pictures of the South Bank as well.

Nell liked the London Eye not just because of the cool view, but because of it’s scientific achievement. I like that, it’s something we have in common — an appreciation of objects on both scientific and aesthetic levels. It’s lead me deep into computing. For Nell, she’s kind of occupying both ends rather than any middle ground. She’s been doing GNVQ art for the last two years and got a distinction for it, but her A-levels are all full-on sciences. I’m interested to see where she ends up.

Camden seemed even busier than usual. We ate geographically diverse food from the market and drank fresh lemonade — tangy! Nell bought a cool pink printed bag and I hunted for fashionable t-shirts, but to no avail. In the process, however, we did discover tracts more market. The whole bit around by Cyberdog and up to the old horse hospital was completely new to me.

Camden Market is pretty much teen girl heaven. There are three Punky Fish stores dotted about and this pretty much sets the theme for many of the other stalls. This isn’t a bad thing though and there is a fantastically diverse range of sub-culture stuff to be had. One of my favourite aspects of the market is the amount of home made or small business stuff about. If you make your own hats or t-shirts or bags, you just go up and grab a stall. It’s sweet. I’d quite like to have a go really.

After Camden I stuck Nell on a bus to Oxford to go and visit my other sister. She seemed pretty happy with the way the weekend had gone and I had a really nice time hanging out with her as well.

One of our old Norwich cohorts and Tom’s ex-housemate, Al had flown into Gatwick yesterday and stayed with us last night. We got drunk down the sloany pony and watched Almost Famous, the Cameron Crowe story. It was excellent, a sequel in spirit to Dazed and Confused. Not sure quite how the virtually pornographic front cover related to the story though, but that’s marketing for you.

The oddest thing that happened this weekend was on Friday night at dinner when Nell was talking about one of my two step-sisters, Anna. Apparently she’s seven months pregnant! Shows how good I am at keeping up with the family.

Anna is a nursery nurse and has always liked being with children. The father, Tom, is a teacher apparently. I can’t really think of a better couple to bring up a child and I’m sure they’ll all be very happy. All the best, Anna!