Black Dog Blog

Archive for April, 2009

I dreamed we were setting up a new board game, but I was tired and knew I wouldn't be able to take in the rules.

This dream confirms two things:

1. My Tuesday night activities are seeping into my subconscious,
2. I am feeling professionally insecure.

I also recall someone in the dream saying this was a cooperative game (i.e. "players against game", not "players against each other" – e.g. Pandemic), which tantalised me, because I've never played a co-op and would very much like to try one. If only to keep from inadvertently pwning Phil.

Currently reading: Women's Work for Weft. Just finished Elizabeth Bear's Dust, about which I hope to post more in future.

Currently wondering: if it makes sense for a hypothetical humanoid, pre-industrial silk-based economy to make some kind of toy that was a hybrid of spindle and yo-yo.

Little Shop of Horrors tomorrow night!

So excited! Must sleep!

One of my two favourite films of all time, and the musical has MORE songs! Woo! I have the Broadway soundtrack and know most of the words…

Even now, in the stillness of death, the huge jaws seemed to be dripping with a bluish flame and the small, deep-set, cruel eyes were ringed with fire. I placed my hand upon the glowing muzzle, and as I held them up my own fingers smouldered and gleamed in the darkness.

"Phosphorus," I said.

"A cunning preparation of it," said Holmes, sniffing at the dead animal.

Glow in the dark pups aid science

("Critics argue it's playing god, but scientists point out that what we're looking at is in fact playing dogs.")

This post marks the official beginning of the campaign to have "naglfar" declared the correct collective noun for thumbnail images.

Each web image gallery now comprises one naglfar, or several naglfars, of thumbnails.

So mutt it be.

A Buddhist preacher in Thailand has announced plans for new guidelines aimed at curbing the flamboyant behaviour of gay and [male-to-female] transgender monks.

Oh Buddha, not… effeminately-shaped eyebrows!!1onetynine11!!!

Children's Laureates choose best books of all time. Just William ++, Treasure Island of course, Harry Potter nowhere on the list.

Also, I want a Psammead. They're rewarding companions. Just don't get them wet or feed them after midnight.

What is swine flu?

Israel renames unkosher swine flu

About blinking time…

GRRRR

'Ill' worker fired over Facebook

The death of 100% (mostly-stupid article about something that truly annoys me)

Appeal for chocolate volunteers gets – surprise! – 1,500 replies

Berlin rejects backtracking!

If I have this right, the choice was between compulsory school ethics lessons (the current policy) and the option not to attend ethics lessons and to take religious lessons (already exist as voluntary, occur out of school hours, poorly attended) instead. I find the idea of opting out of normal life and taking a closed scripture study group instead slightly disturbing.

So, Berlin, even though it was actually rejected by default because none of you turned up to vote, have a sanity cookie on me.

Rare albino buffalo seen in Kenya

h4x! A /b/ user explains (and claims credit for) their flooding of the Time Magazine 100 poll.

Oh for a personal army of these guys. In before not.

Twitter your prayer says Cardinal

Post your tweet ideas in the comments. 140 characters or less, must begin @our-father (or @anubis, @suitov, @narasimha or other deity of your choice. Can't speak for the others, but I don't monitor my Twitter account).

Currently enjoying this Easter-themed radio interview [MP3] from Landover Baptist Church. PTL!

edit: Saw this advert on TV and liked it (what, an arrangement of This Little Light of Mine that I didn't hate?!), and the Vimeo page adds something special to it.

I spent a short while at the Backstage/Manchester FSF Ubuntu launch party, although I wasn't feeling very Jaunty and had to leave because of all the humans. Anyhow, I did manage to chat to a couple of people, including one metalhead (I spotted a rolled-up Sonata Arctica shirt he had tied around his waist – saaad!) who said he's played Bloodstock.

I'm pretty sure his band is these guys; I'm bad with band names, but remembered it was '04 he said he'd played so was able to look it up. (I'm bad with names too, but I think from the band photos it was Rick I met… yup, Twitter confirms it. I love the internet.)

So, anyway, fun as it was enthusing about Ayreon and Jørn Lande's voice (bastard, I'm still so jealous), somethng even better happened after the party, and it involved two drunken blondes.

Not like that.

I was meandering homewards as I do, alternately mulling over the Rick Cook I'd been reading on the tram and toying with my own magic system, when I saw two young ladies ahead, on the pavement, coming towards me. The pavements are narrow around my village; I checked behind me for cars and then shifted onto the road to let the girls pass, as I do.

As we passed, one, who had been squinting at me (as far as I noticed, given my habit of only ever looking at people peripherally), nudged the other and bellowed to her "Is that a man or a woman? Hey, is that a man or a woman?"

It's all right, I thought to myself, good job I've already passed them, she won't see the stupid grin on my face.

Behind me I heard the blonde turn back and once more shout "Is it a man or a woman?", aimed at me this time. I don't tend to talk to people who shout at me in the street, so I kept walking and grinning.

See, I can occasionally pass for my real gender.

I rather enjoyed that encounter, interactive as it wasn't, and it's quite set my mood up for the evening. It's a bit hard to explain this psychological boost to people who don't have to engage in subterfuge in order to be mistaken for what they really are, but trust me, it felt nice.

Oh, and I'm still going to install Linux Mint Real Soon Now. Help if I had a system that was not in bits enough to run it.

I met a workmate today whom I've only ever emailed and phoned, based as he is in London. He randomly brought me a box of Celebrations. Therefore I randomly spread this around, with the result that I, my colleagues and very probably my brothers thank him most kindly.

You may have heard the origins of "geek" as a circus sideshow performer and wondered "what's dentally decapitating live chickens have in common with sitting in darkened bedrooms?"

"Geek" in the carnival sense is supposedly derived from "geck", an object of derision or a dupe. That makes things a bit clearer when we fast forward to "geek" in the '90s sense of someone socially unskilled and unpopular.

Anyway, what's made me happy today is the discovery that Shakespeare used my species' name. Here it is, in Cymbeline 5:4, in which the ghost of the hero's father has a good old complain to Jupiter about how the lying Iachimo stirred up trouble between the hero and his wife:

Why did you [Jupiter] suffer [permit] Iachimo,
Slight thing of Italy,
To taint his nobler heart and brain
With needless jealosy;
And to become the geck and scorn
O' th' other's villany?

Jupiter is not one to take constant cadaverous carping lying down, and appears in high aquiline dudgeon to scold the complaining ghosts and send them packing. Gotta love Shakespeare.

So, geeks, the "geck and scorn" of villainous others. Rather good, I feel. It doesn't excuse the chickens, though. There's no excuse for that, not even if you're Ozzy.

If you're a Wikipedia editor (or a member of other Wikimedia projects) and have a preference on GFDL vs Creative Commons as applied to Wikimedia content, please go and vote on their proposed licensing change. (Note that you'll need to accept cookies, and it may take a little while to redirect you to the secure vote.)

Personally I'm strongly in favour, both being very keen on Creative Commons and instinctively disliking and distrusting the use of the GFDL for anything other than its original intended application (software documentation). I have never understood how to use a GFDL-licensed photo, for example, and many such exist on Wikimedia Commons. (I take the only honourable course, which is not to use them.)

Note that the Creative Commons licence in question is CC-BY-SA, so still a copyleft ('viral') licence. They have good pages explaining everything, which I recommend you read before voting.

I have conflicting feelings on copyleft licences. For example, I've been cautious and banned the use of anything virally licensed at Pro, other than usage that unequivocally comes under fair dealing law in the UK, because we can't and won't comply with the requirement that we release all our stuff under the same licence. Our copyright, simplistically worded as it is (which is actually for legal protection, because I'm not a lawyer and you can get into all sorts of not-so-hilarious scrapes if you try to write like one), isn't compatible with copyleft.

But aside from the occasional headache copyleft stuff causes me, I'm keen on the principle of anyone licensing their things as freely as they feel is appropriate and I don't consider the licence restrictions unfair. People don't have to let you use their stuff at all and if they let you do so with provisos, that's generous. You don't like, don't use!

Class. The Google doodle of the day celebrates St George's Day and Shakespeare's birthday in one.

More about Saint George, with fun details about the dragon on page 3 (disclosure: that page was compiled by me).

Having no idea it was St G's day today, on the way to work I saw a typical-looking red builderish van flying a George Cross and I have to admit my first thought was "Well, he's not necessarily racist…" Sad.

Why can't Happened To Get Born In England Pride be like Happened To Get Born Gay Pride? Gay pride marches don't necessarily imply that everyone born anything else is rubbish, so why in the case of nationality do we have to have twerps like the BNP fouling everything up? *sigh*

I and others are amused by the whole idea of this Turkish tribune who never visited England and whose spurious claim to fame took place in Libya. You've got racist twerps waving his flag with abandon while, in the words of a colleague, "if they met the real guy in a pub, they'd have bottled him and had him deported!"

If anyone cared a whit for us punsters, George would have been called John, because "St. John" as an English forename is pronounced "singeon". Ssssmokin'.

When I was a young child, on one occasion I became afraid that Count Duckula would get me in my sleep.

(Yes. Duckula. The vegetarian vampire. Yes.)

I got myself out of this by convincing myself that my bedside lamp was the functional equivalent of sunlight and all I'd need to do was turn it on to repel a vampire. This was no less logical than the original fear, and worked.

There, that's my embarrassing childhood admission. Your turn!

Incidentally, these days I'm able to deal with vampires by dual-classing atheist-suitheist. As atheist I get an automatic huge bonus to all rolls to disbelieve, while as self-proclaimed deity, everything to do with me is holy, yea, even unto mine farts.

Um. OK, that was a little odd. I just got the strong urge to buy a mobi phone or other cheap camera so that I could start a Flickr blog of five-word food reviews.

I don't even eat that much bought/packaged food!

Can't even blame the water cooler for this one. (It's only 1.5 arm lengths from me, but I'm known to get crazy ideas during the couple of steps to it, which my brain appears to categorise as "my time" rather than "company time".) This one appeared while I was sitting at my desk eating a Sainsbury low-fat Moroccan butternut squash wrap.

Nice. Right side of spicy.

Can anyone reassure me that it's normal to be mobbed by low-flying ideas at any time of the day or night? (Either that or I'm turning into my mother…) Have you had many doozies while at work/at college/meant to be doing other things? Mine generally tend to be better subconsciously-thought-out than the whole tortilla photoblog thing…

Yes! I want to be a slush reader while I work on one or another of my embryonic novels. :D

(Actually, I like my current job a lot.)

Artist sculpts massive sand tiger

Sewing machine hoax hits Saudi Arabia (I suspect Snog of involvement.)

I never knew real wombats were so cute…

New limits to Antarctic tourism

Parties to the Antarctic Treaty agreed to limit the size of cruise ships and the number of tourists taken ashore at a meeting in the US city of Baltimore. That's… great, but I'm not sure what it has to do with Antarctica.

Obama to regulate 'pollutant' CO2

Oh Obama, we all wish you'd got in 8 years ago when there was still some kind of hope. At least thank to you our ecosphere may yet leave a good-looking corpse.

Amazon opts out of Phorm

Cult author JG Ballard dies at 78

Fixed the MoinMoin issue, at least the old markup problem. Full props to the folks in their IRC channel (shout-outz Thomas) for handholding me through it. I would NOT have found any of the functions on my own in their… rather special documentation, although full marks to them, the info is there if you know how to read their minds enough to know what to search for. ;)

I obviously didn't, so was a bit miffed to be told at first to RTFM. I'd tried doing so, both that day and the previous day. Google and I weren't having much luck, if you remember; everything seemed to assume I was running it on a server, or at least a Linux 'top… until someone pointed me to How To, at least, which gave me a glimmering of light. After that, batch files and cmd ftw. I don't like Windows particularly, but if you claim to support it, it's nice to do so.

Anyway, pages are now imported/processed/migrated/whatever you want to call it, and I took a backup, so HURRAH, never have to do that again!

Before starting the automatic migration process I had to rename a lot of pages called Dogegory|Whatever into Dogegory:Whatever, because the migration process used the pipe character as a separator for something else and that would have mucked it up. The whole reason I used pipes instead of colons in the first place was MoinMoin's 'special' markup circa version 1.5 that used colons in page links.

What this boiled down to was that in the process I ended up manually editing a whole load of pages so I could run the automated script that was supposed to save me manually editing a load of pages. ;) Recursion yay. As a result, in the IRC channel I was accused of being a magnet for markup problems. I can dig that. Markup-Breaking Man, best superhero evar!

What the heck, I did thank them politely and will reward them by trying not to ask them anything horribly convoluted again. ;)

I still have to learn how to use Portable Python enough to be able to run the thing off my portable drive, though. That should be fun… gulp. Apparently the demise of the stand-alone exe that I found so convenient is down to the lack of Windows developers on the project. Shame that.

The katt woke me up nicely this morning with purrs and not too much drool, but spoiled it by revealing that he was only being friendly to me so I'd let him into his mistress's room. Now he's jumped up on the desk and is howling at me, so I'll leave this here and go to work. Yay, work! *dance dance dance*

(Oh, and btw, my hair is short again, even to the point of natural spikiness. I'm sure this will appal my goth and metalhead friends.)

[EDIT: for anyone else looking for help with this, see How To.]

Does anyone know offhand of a way to batch-convert old MoinMoin pages (circa version 1.5) into the new markup?

Until tonight I didn't even know they HAD new markup. This afternoon I downloaded the latest version and was quite surprised. Firstly, the Windows offline version is no longer a stand-alone exe (BOO, means I've got to learn to run Portable Python to continue using my wiki on my portable drive).

Secondly, they've changed the markup syntax, especially the links, so that it's much closer to the markup used by MediaWiki (what Wikipedia runs) – and hence also the markup used by MediaWiki's older brother, UseMod, which is what I run on my site. Good move. Apart from its being (in my opinion) a more logical markup scheme to begin with, I will now be able to copy and paste from one of my wikis to the other. Which is great! I never particularly liked Moin's silly let's-be-different-for-???-and-profit markup anyway.

The only problem is that all my offline pages use Moin's silly let's-be-different-for-???-and-profit markup…

Hence my original question. My Googlefu hasn't turned up anything yet and MoinMoin's support wiki has, well, never been the greatest.

If I find no lazybones way to do this midtimes, I'll see if Notepad++ has a global find and replace that uses regexp. If not, HomeSite definitely does, so a lunch break next week will be usefully spent. I have edited a lot of pages the long way in the past, when I didn't have nearly as much stuff in my wiki, and don't fancy editing EVERY page link in there now. Nope.

First sketch of Sankmarray ninja and pirate (crewpir, not king)

I'm not happy with the pirate — pe needs to be a bit more doggy as well as chimpy — and I still have no idea about head hair growth on either of 'em. Luckily you can't see the ninja's hair anyway, thanks to ner headscarf.

Petpet Park load test = slashdotted. There's a surprise…