# The Bean (well Naomi, his key worker) made biscuits at nursery today. He gave me one - it was fab. Really crisp and fresh. Also, the animal man came and showed them his tarantulas, scorpions, rats, gerbils and who knows what else. Going to nursery rox!
peteychap said What's a "key worker"?
[added 30th Sep 2002] ajbattrick said No one knows, but she brought _me_ biscuits today, so no more questions already!
*munch munch [added 30th Sep 2002]
At nursery, your kiddy's key worker is the person who is primarily responsible for their care. At the Bean's nursery it includes keeping track of his number/letter/colour/shape recognition, how he plays with the other kids, all that kind of stuff. Persumably, they are also the person who's charged with informing the police if your child starts turning up with bruises all over them.
All the really matters as far as the Bean's concerned is that he thinks "Omi" is brill. [added 30th Sep 2002]
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# It wasn't a nutter. It was a rather nice Nigerian woman who lived just round the corner.
The worst thing about selling your house is the nutters. Our house in Coventry was a three bed terrace, not dissimilar to every other three bed terrace in Coventry. I showed a guy round (here's a bedroom, here's another bedroom, ...), then left to him to own devices. He wandered off upstairs for a few minutes before returning to declare, rather ponderously, it isn't very big is it?. I was so completely stunned by his utter stupidity (it's a three bed terraced house, what the hell did you expect? State rooms and an east fucking wing?), I just couldn't get him out quick enough. I didn't want him there any longer. If he'd have made an offer I would have refused it. Aaaargh. Makes me fume just thinking about it.Marc said Been there, been annoyed by that. Makes you wonder if it occurred to them to read the details before booking a viewing and wasting precious hours (well minutes anyway) of your time getting the place ready and showing the buggers around. Grrrrrr. [added 26th Sep 2002]
smellygit said I normally arranged to be out so that the agent had to do it - make them earn their monster wedge!
[added 26th Sep 2002]
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# Erg! We have viewing today! In half-an-hour. Hope it's not a nutter.
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# Two more viewings in the pipeline. Let's hope they all love the place and get involved in a crazy-arse bidding war.
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# The estate agent's board went up yesterday afternoon. We've just had a call arranging a viewing for tomorrow. Blimey.
smellygit said You've got time to get the coffee brewing and the bread baking b4 they turn up then ;)
[added 26th Sep 2002]
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#
Earthquake hits UK - The tremor began at 0053 BST and its epicentre was in Dudley in the West Midlands.
Being woken up by a loud rumble and everything shaking was a bit alarming, and then very eerie. The Bean wasn't woken, Badger didn't bark, and nothing seemed to have broken. For a while, we thought we'd imagined it. In the end, the only evidence we found of having had any effect was once Nat cut a slice of melon for her breakfast. All the melon's seeds had shaken loose and settled in the bottom of the cavity.
planetcutie said I was barely awake. I was just about to get up (this is me, remember) and I heard some stuff on my PC desk bumping a bit. I thought 'Nah, can't be an earthquake'.
Last one we had round here was a few years ago - a 2.8 Richter one when some local mine workings collapsed. Now that was mildly disconcerting. [added 23rd Sep 2002]
stu said One of our software testers is working for an ovoid banking company in Dudley. She had a dream she was on a train and only realised that it was an earthquake when she watched the news in the morning.
[added 24th Sep 2002]
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# At Ric's trying to fix his sound card, but without the aid of speakers.
prashton said What is a sound card? (signed Mac user with smug grin!)
[added 23rd Sep 2002] angry_john said Surely it's already working then :-)
[added 23rd Sep 2002] I think works now. Ric's PC is a strange little machine - Dell, built like a tank, with a built-in sound card and fitted with a modem. Except the sound card drivers weren't installed, and the modem had been set to operate at 9600 baud max. I unthrottled the modem and installed the drivers, so it'll probably all collapse in a heap in about a fortnight. [added 23rd Sep 2002]
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#[Arabica] I've just installed
GCC 3.2. It generates a number of warnings while compiling Arabica, which I'm going to sort out. After that, I'm going to have another crack at autoconfing the build setup. At the moment, Arabica builds a number of seperate libraries, because there are some bits which are useful beyond the parser toolkit. As I get the autoconf stuff going, I'll probably migrate all the headers into one directory and all the source into another. Combining all the header makes installing the build package easier. The various libraries can still be build, it's just that the source will all sit in one place.
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# Just received the latest
C/C++ Users Journal, the only serious C++ publication on the market. It's got 64 pages. This time last year it had twice as many.
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# We've chosen the estate agent we're going to go with. They seem very keen that we'll get a buyer quite quickly, which is good I suppose. Harmish, our mortgage-broker friend, has got a plan sorted too. If we clear our mortgage now, we'll be liable for a load of redemption charges, so we're going to take it with us, wait six months, and then clear it and get a new one. We're getting details through for places already, not in the part Paul mentioned as that's still very desirable and so rather expensive, but across the high street and along Wake Green Road.
All I need to do now is find another fucking job.planetcutie said I hear (insert a certain supermarket with whom I have connections) have some vacancies. Apply now to become a Christmas temp on the BWS section! Earn about £5 an hour for hour upon hour of back-breaking labour! Then be given a swift boot up the backside come January 3rd! Then listen to them beg you to come back because 6 people have left by the second week of February!
[added 20th Sep 2002]
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# We decided over the weekend that we're going to move house. We're going to sell up here and move a few miles over the city to Moseley. Moseley a much more residential area than where we are at the moment, and it's much easier for lots of fun stuff for kiddies (and grown-ups). The roads are quieter, and seem to have an enormous number of trees planted along them. We'll be getting somewhere a bit smaller, and we so should be able to hammer the mortgage right down too. And it's nearer to Waitrose. Bonus!
We've taken some financial risks that didn't come off in the last year, and somethings which shouldn't have been risky turned out to be. The contracts market is improving, but it's still very much a buyers market. No matter how strong your technical skills, if you haven't previously worked in a bank for instance, your chance of getting one of the many jobs in the City of London are verging on nil. The rates are down too, and also getting the age where I'm actually starting to look to old for a lot of jobs. IT isn't always somewhere that values experience. So getting the mortgage down would be a good plan.
In many ways, this can be a really good and positive thing to do. It's sad to be leaving after all the work that went in. I still find the kitchen a novelty and it's been in a year. It's also difficult not to feel forced out - perhaps if our invoices had been paid we'd have battled on through. But it's done and we've decided. The valuer will be here in about twenty minutes. We're on our way.batty_bee said No more dog and wife jogging around the 'wood hood? I'll miss that.
[added 17th Sep 2002] prashton said Now, please understand, my recollections of Moseley are dated - about 45 years - but I remember signs advertizing the rugby at the Reddings, and thinking, as I drove with my mother from Earlswood to the family business in the jewelry district, that Moseley was an all right place.
At that time my brother and sister-in-law lived in Edgbaston (my sister-in-law still lives in the same house!) while my father's cousin, spinster Aunt Lizzie, lived nearby on Jacey Road. Parts of Edgbaston were considered to be "less desirable" in those days, and it was the Moseley side that was considered to be OK (around the cricket ground and Cannon Hill Park.
April underwent an operation a year ago at the Nuffield Hospital and I was struck by the beauty of this side of Birmingham (once the taxi had gotten me away from that hell-hole of sixties architecture, New Street Station). Good luck in your search for a new home! [added 18th Sep 2002]
Stu said My Mum's house is up for sale in a very nice part of Moseley. Not your traditional Edwardian stuff though.
Near Canon Hill Park, good schools, good neighbours (and good fences), des res. in need of a little updating. [added 18th Sep 2002]
batty_bee said <stalker>
And also, not seeing Jez running errands with headphones (and the dog) will be a loss in my little life.
</stalker>
How much is the house valued at? We're looking to buy atm. [added 18th Sep 2002]
Angie [e] said Good luck Jez and family.
[added 19th Sep 2002]
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#[Arabica] Two questions -
what are you using Arabica for, and do you need any help with it?
I ask the first question simply out of interest. If I know what it's being used for, then I know what it might useful to work on next. The second question is rather more mercenary. I'm don't currently have any work, and it looks like my most recent client is going to default on my invoice. Frankly, I'm in a bit of hole. If you need any short term C++ and XML consulting - design/development/review/whatever - then I'd really like to hear from you.
Let me just emphasise that Arabica is free and will remain free. If you've got any questions, then don't be afraid to ask. By the same token, if you need a few days or weeks consultancy, then please get in touch.
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#
Writer Will Self puts head on the block - Novelist Will Self is to lock himself in a one-bedroom flat on the 20th floor of a Liverpool tower block and allow the public to observe him while he writes a short novel.
Life imitates Monty Python.
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#
Saskatchewan farmer loses to biotech company - A federal court ruled Thursday that Schmeiser violated the company's patent on the seeds. Monsanto has spent billions of dollars developing and patenting the special canola. ... Alan McHughen, an author and plant geneticist, said the ruling clarifies that farmers can't grow genetically modified seed they haven't paid for, and if they find it growing on their land, they must destroy it. ... Schmeiser admits the canola was growing on his 1,400-acre farm, but argued the seeds blew over from a neighbour's farm or from passing seed trucks. ... Monsanto argued that it owned the plants since it owns the patent on their altered genes. It says farmers must pay each time they use seeds containing the genes or destroy their crop.
Saskatchewan farmer violated patent, court rules - The Federal Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling that a Saskatchewan farmer violated a patent held by Monsanto on a herbicide-resistant canola.
So if genetically modified seeds are growing on your property, regardless of how they got there, you are liable to prosecution for violating patent laws? Even if you leave aside the safety issues of growing GM seeds, if this is the case why would anyone want to grow them. You can't keep the seeds from one harvest to plant next year without paying again. If the GM seeds cross pollinate with non-GM seeds, you'll have to pay for those too. Why not just hand over all your farm to the seed companies and have done with it?
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#Yay! It may not look like much, but it is.
planetcutie said Yay! The reappearance of the old 'there's only one of these things but this program assumes there are more and pluralizes anyway' thing!
[added 10th Sep 2002] Typical user comment. Looks at the surface and ignores the depths beneath. [added 10th Sep 2002]
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# Rather that twiddle my thumbs while I wait for
new jobs to be advertised, I'm having some programming fun hooking up my XML differencing code to an XML editor. Seems a reasonable thing to do, afer all. If you're editing some enormous (or even not so enormous) XML instance, you might at some point want to see what changes you've made compared with a past version. You might, who knows, even be prepared to pay a few euros for a bit of software that does it.
The XML editor is designed to be extended with this kind of tool. You can add new menu items or toolbar buttons or whatever, and so your code becomes a seamless part of the editor.
My differencing toolkit is designed to be used as part of some larger program. It doesn't have an user interface of any kind, it doesn't even write to a file. The program using it tells it where to find the data it needs, and is responsible for presenting the results - as a graph, writing to a file, as a funky webpage, or whatever.
A match made in heaven surely. Almost. The XML editor uses a Windows thing called COM (also called OLE or ActiveX, depending on which way the wind is blowing in Redmond that day) to let you plug new bits of code into the editor. It's the same mechanism that lets you embed an Excel spreadsheet into Word. My toolkit is written in Java, which lets me write on a Linux machine and have it run on a Windows box, a Mac or just about anything else. Getting COM and Java to talk to each is a bit like mixing oil and water and chalk and cheese, all at once. No, it's not. It's like turning chalk into cheese, using oil and water, then turning it back again. With a bag on your head.
If you know the incantations, it's straightforward if longwinded. The end result should be worth it though.
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#
Honorary award for glam rockers - Or roit Noddy? Jewanna tek this onrary degree, loik?
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# Just rung up a client to find out why they hadn't paid, and the chap on the other end of the phone said
We've been let down by [our client]. At the moment we can't pay anyone. He continued on to tell me how he hoped they would be sorted out by the end of the week, and that I am at the top of the list.
I felt a little deflated, as I'd assumed I was the victim of cock-up or oversight, rather than the end link of a we've got the pain, so you've got to share it chain of creditors. There seems to be a nothing I can do except wait. Unfortunately, my creditors (read mortgage and car finance) aren't the type to meekly join the end of the chain.
Thanks for letting me know, I said, in a tone I hoped would convey my deep unhappiness at not being told earlier, my concern that they might go into liquidation leaving me at the bottom of the receiver's list of debts he might pay one day, and my disbelief in the promise that I was first cheque out of the gate when the money did arrive.
Pleasure! he replied cheerily.
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# Why is writing your CV so hard?
batty_bee said You may find it easier to write your own CV rather than mine
[added 6th Sep 2002]
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#[Arabica] Yay! Arabica is now listed on the W3C's
DOM Bindings page.
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# Today, I downloaded and installed Microsoft's
.NET Framework Software Development Kit. The End User License Agreement it asks you to agree to is displayed in a box so small only 5 lines at a time are visible. It takes 197 presses of the Page Down key to get to the end. Did I read it all before I agreed? No.
smellygit said So you didn't read the bit about agreeing to be Bill Gates's towel boy?
[added 5th Sep 2002] I gave after the bit about shining-up Steve Balmer's bald patch. [added 5th Sep 2002]
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#[Arabica]Arabica Sept02 Release
This is the first 'full' Arabica release.
It has a number of incremental improvements over the previous SAXinC++ release - building the library is now less fiddly, the MSXML support has been improved, it's been checked with Xerces 2.1 and expat 1.95.4, and there are a few minor bug fixes.
The release now includes a DOM Level 2 Core implementation. Like the SAX implementation it is fullly templated on string type and string construction policy, meaning it can deliver std::string, std::wstring or your choice of string class on top of any of the supported parsers.
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#[Arabica] Starting changing these pages to reflect the project name change to Arabica.
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#[Arabica] Tested against Xerces 2.1. There's a change in the DLL name again, but apart from that it all just drops in.
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#[Arabica] Tested with Expat 1.94.4. On Windows the DLL name has been changed to libexpat.dll, but that was the only change required.
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#[Arabica] Just tested and committed Andrew Stagg's set of MSXML changes. I exposed an unrelated bug if you tried to read from an existing istream, but sorted that out relatively easily. MSXML4 can handle lots of different inputs, and my rather poorly written QueryInterface function was confusing it.
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# Into my third week of "resting". Getting a bit cheesed off with it really.
I spent the last couple of weeks working on a bit software licensing code for the XML differencing toolkit that might one day make me amazingly rich or not. (Currently not is winning.) Software licensing basically means you're trying to stop people using your stuff if they haven't paid for it. It unpopular with your clients (they have paid after all), generates a disproportionate number of sales calls, and is often seen as unfair, restrictive and an attempt to extort extra cash.
So why do it?
Software licensing generally this involves generating a license key containing some magic data - often a date and the machine network name - and checking that it all makes sense when you start the program. In Java this is a bit futile, as anyone with half a brain can circumvent whatever controls you build, but for those with less than half a brain, or who arn't intent on cracking your software, it can be an effective tool. Our toolkit isn't a standalone application - we're trying to sell it to people to integrate into their own products. To make sure we get paid properly for each one they ship, we have to have some way of verifying the sale. The easiest way to do that is to fling in a bit of software licensing code. It's not that I believe our clients would be out to gyp us, but having been in their position too, I know that keeping track of the third party paperwork isn't always your top priority. By making sure they need to get a license key for each one shipped, everyone can be happy about who owes what to whom, which end-customers get their support calls answered and all the rest of it.
Doing that work does kind of assume that we'll eventually secure some clients, of course.
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#[Arabica] Got myself together to do some more work on making the library a little less fiddly to build. I've just committed a set of changes to CVS which mean you configure your choice of parser when you build the SAX library. You no longer have to specify a particular parser when you build an application that uses the SAX library. You still can if you need to, but most people don't. This is an important change, and should mean that most people never have to worry about it. (Especially on Windows platforms, where you don't even have to link anything else if you use MSXML.)
I've still got some outstanding changes to merge, which I hope to do tomorrow. Once they're done, I think I'll cut a new release.
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