I was walking back to my hotel after dinner ((Superb smoked haddock chowder at Quay’s Restaurant in Temple Bar.)) and decided to follow the route of the LUAS tramway. Near Four Courts, I encountered a woman with three small children, all chattering excitedly. One of them, a girl about eight years old, ran up to me and said, “Excuse me: are Jaffa Cakes biscuits or cakes?” Without a moment’s hesitation, I replied, “It all depends what you want the answer to be… Either can be correct.” The little girl looked pleased, but confused, while her mother smiled.
"The most absurd sentence I read today"
Tyler Cowen reads Frank Tipler’s ridiculous The Physics of Christianity so you and I don’t have to waste our time. ((Hat tip to Chas.)) Choice quote:
I am proposing that the Son and the Father Singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe.
My deepest thanks to Tyler: Vogon poetry is mild stuff by comparison…
Documentation
Never forget:
The worst person to write documentation is the implementer, and the worst time to write documentation is after implementation. Doing so greatly increases the chance that interface, implementation, and documentation will all have problems.
Michi Henning: API Design Matters in ACM Queue
Serendipity
A few minutes ago, I checked in with the BBC Sports website to see how the match between Moya and Henman was going. Quoth the commentator:
Moya 11-11 Henman
And so the epic goes on, now to Mahabharata lengths. This set alone has been going on for over an hour and a half. Moya holds to 15 with two sensational cross-court forehands.
“Mahabharata”? Qu’est-ce que c’est? And I checked the source:
The MahÄbhÄrata… is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India… With more than 74,000 verses… and some 1.8 million words in total, it is one of the longest epic poems in the world.
And how comprehensive is it?
With its depth and magnitude, the Mahabharata’s scope is best summarized by one quotation from the beginning of its first parva (section): “What is found here, may be found elsewhere. What is not found here, will not be found elsewhere.”
Hmmm. That sounds like the Wikipedia mission statement – or perhaps Jeff‘s ambition for the Amazon.com catalog! In any case, it’s an impressive citation from a sportscaster…
Wood and marbles
Enough of this semiconductor stuff: the future of computing lies in the wooden binary marble adding machine. ((Hat-tip to Alec.))
A depressing sort of milestone…
Like many bloggers, I log in to the admin pages of geoffarnold.com every day to see what housekeeping tasks need to be done. The section that generally needs my attention is Comments: moderating comments from new visitors, and checking the spam catcher to make sure that there aren’t any false-positives. In common with most WordPress users, I rely on a distributed spam detection system called Akismet, which does a really good job: I’ve only had a couple of legitimate comments flagged as spam.
Today I skimmed the latest batch of spam, confirmed that they were all correctly classified, and hit the delete button. Akismet responded:
Just to put that in perspective, my blog has received 2,394 legitimate comments, a third of which pre-date my use of WordPress and Akismet. ((I started this blog in December 2003, and switched to WordPress in December 2005.)) And to put that in perspective, here’s Akismet’s big picture…
Early blogging software didn’t include any kind of defence mechanisms, of course, and we’re still living with the consequences. Quite often I find that a web search will take me to an entry in an abandoned blog. ((And sometimes not even abandoned blogs! A few minutes ago I found myself re-reading Steve Yegge’s rant about the Next Big Language, which is still attracting comments four months after he wrote it, and I noticed a number of blogspam comments. I guess Blogspot doesn’t use Akismet.)) The entry may have attracted a couple of comments when it was posted, but since then there have been dozens (even hundreds) of spam comments attached. The search engine spiders are presumably smart enough to avoid the spam, but it keeps on coming. So if you used to run a blog that you’ve since abandoned, do us all a favour by shutting off comments. Think of it as turning off the gas and water in a derelict house: do it for the neighbours!
Still life
I just finished visiting the Jameson distillery. Before we started the tour, they asked for four volunteers, and I was picked. (Competition was fierce!) At the end, the four of us were asked to take part in a five-way taste test between three different Irish whiskeys (all made by Jameson, of course), one Scotch (Johny Walker Red Label) and one American (Jack Daniels). Among that lot, the Jameson was the clear winner. Of course we all required numerous samples to get the right answer!
Sorry about the pun…
Walking the streets of Dublin
I just spent a happy four hours walking the streets of Dublin, just soaking it up. And “soaking” here is purely metaphorical: although some ominously dark clouds rolled overhead, the morning was dry and mostly sunny. My favourite bit was walking through and around St. Stephen’s Green, a beautiful city park. Dozens of local artists were displaying their paintings on the railings around the park, and I was both impressed and frustrated; there were some stunning pieces for sale.
Having started out at the Guinness brewery, I eventually wound up at the corner of O’Connell and Abbey Streets, getting a little footsore ((I was wearing the sandals that I’d flown over in)) and hungry. I decided to check out the LUAS tram, and rode it the few stops to Smithfield, where I’m staying. It’s an excellent system, and obviously very popular: most trains are full.
And finally, when I returned to my hotel I found that my missing suitcase had just been delivered. So now I can change into some real shoes, and upload the pictures from my digital camera, and recharge my cellphone, and…
Oh yes – and have some lunch. Then this afternoon I’m going to visit the Old Jameson Distillery, just across the street. ((Web site is here, but turn the volume down before you click it; it’s a tacky, noisy Flash thing.)) Apparently visitors are encouraged to indulge in a “practical” assessment of their quality claims! And (weather permitting) I’m planning to eat at the Bull & Castle this evening. It’s a self-described “gastro pub” recommended by Mike McHugh.
UPDATE: The Bull & Castle was a great choice. I had a pint of Guinness (what else?) followed by a superb steak – possibly the best I’ve ever tasted. Highly recommended.
Travel woes
As I was walking down the steps from the aging Air Canada 767-200 to the shuttle bus that would take us to the main terminal at Dublin, I was mentally composing a blog entry about the flight. It was going to expand on my thoughts that even though nothing really went wrong, it felt like a mediocre experience. Mediocre food. (Dinner was four different ways to deliver fat; breakfast was four different ways to deliver sugar.) Mediocre seats. Mediocre, 1983-style in-flight entertainment. (The feature film was an art-house flop, and one of the supporting pieces was a random episode of the BBC’s Top Gear from 2003. I enjoy Top Gear, but it’s less interesting when they’re featuring obsolete car models.) No duty-free. (Not that I usually buy stuff on the way out, but it was as if they didn’t care.) And mediocre communications: the flight landed 32 minutes late, but the crew didn’t even mention this fact, let alone apologize…
That was before I realized that Air Canada had lost my bag. When I checked in at SeaTac, I checked my bag all the way through to Dublin. Somewhere (Seattle? Toronto?) they lost it. That kind of thing overshadows mere mediocrity.
If all goes as well as possible from this point, they will put it on the next flight and deliver it to my hotel in Dublin tomorrow (Sunday) morning. If it doesn’t go as well as possible… Well, sufficient unto the day and all that. Meanwhile I just walked up to the nearest Marks & Spencer and picked up some things to tide me over.
I was trying to remember the last time this happened. It might have been that terrible trip that I took in the mid-1990’s, when British Airways managed to lose the same bag twice! (The first time when I was flying from Heathrow to Stockholm, the second when I was flying from Lyon to Heathrow a few days later.)
UPDATE 5:49PM: A few minutes ago, I called Servisair, the company that handles baggage at Dublin for Air Canada, but I just got a recorded message. So on a hunch, I plugged my file reference into the Worldtracer tracking page, and it reported:
Bag 1 Status RECEIVED AT AIRPORT / DELIVERY PROCESS INITIATED
Which airport? Oh, well: this seems like good news, so I’ll try to be patient.
Doin' the Maple Leaf Rag
I’m at the Maple Leaf Lounge at Toronto airport, killing time until my evening flight to Dublin. I’m not flying business class or anything like that, but my United Red Carpet Club card was good enough to get me in. The facilities are w-a-a-y better than any RCC that I’ve been in recently – the booze is free, ((though my consumption so far totals 4 cans of club soda)) there are fresh veggie snacks, and the staff are really attentive.
My reading material for the flight is the Ruby “pick-axe” book. My impression after the first couple of chapters is that the language has lots of convenient features but there’s a certain amount of ad-hockery about how they’re brought together. When I’m learning a language, I like to establish a clear relationship between the concrete and the abstract levels of interpretation, and the concrete syntax of Ruby feels all over the map to me. Nothing that a few sample programs won’t clear up, I’m sure. Meanwhile the pure OO features are sweet…