It has everything I want, i.e. a garden long enough for the kids to reach top speed before they smack into the fence at the end.

It's the time of year when I try and pimp the ACCU Conference. If you're working in C++ for any amount of time, it's probably worth your while going. If you work in Java or C# or Python, you should certainly have a think about it. It's less that half the price of something like DevWeek, with that added bonus of actually being useful for the stuff you're doing now.

Obvious highlights include Herb Sutter on Concurrency, Scott Meyers making a rare UK conference appearance to talk about threading and about design, and chum Kevlin on STL patterns, TR1 and design.

My own meagre effort has been scheduled for the first session of the first day, so at least I'll get it over and done with. I'm scheduled against sessions that, to be honest, I'd quite like to attend so might end up talking to myself. Either that or a handful of XSLT2 gurus who've come to pick holes. Best make sure I do my homework.

It's very difficult to explain why I enjoyed myself so much at Bob Mould's gig last night and back in September. I just did. It was wonderful. Last night's solo show had, as you'd expect, a rather different mood to the full band show last year. He was much more chatty, for a start, talking about his wacky immigration experience and even giving one over-enthusiastic (and possibly alcohol-refreshed) guy a bit of slap-down.

For the first half he played acoustic guitar, doing several tracks from Workbook, including Wishing Well, Sinners and their Repentences, and See a Little Light, and from the new Body of Song album. At one point he mentioned this was his third gig with this guitar and it was fighting him a bit, I noticed Tony make a bit of a face although I couldn't hear what he said. Later, he explained that he wished his guitar sounded so good so quickly.

The volume, already loud, picked up rather when Bob swapped to the blue strat, and he really started to attack his guitar, barely stopping between songs. There was more Body of Song, a couple of Sugar tracks, and some Husker Du, I Apologise, and, of course, Celebrated Summer. The encore - hardly left the stage, explaining "I think my knee is fucked, haven't done leg extensions for ages" - finished with Ego Override. I could be wrong about any or all of the songs mentioned - I didn't take notes, didn't want to, didn't need to, I was just happy being there.

Bobbed into Waterstones on New Street at the weekend. Needed to get a book for work, but didn't know what I wanted without looking at a few first. One Pete's Andys was at the checkout, but I didn't immediately recognise him nor him me, and by the time we'd both realised I had a little conversation about chip & pin going with the guy serving me. On the way out, down the all the splendid staircases, I couldn't fail to notice just how bloody marvellous the comics and science fiction sections now were. Big, interesting selection of comics. Big fat import rack of science fiction. Super! I haven't been in that shop for at least a year, doing my real-life book buying at Waterstones on the High Street or at Borders as they both have really good children's sections, so I don't know how long it's been like this but I was delighted by it. I could feel my book buying centre of gravity shifting even as I browsed.

Pete - could you use your shadowy bookseller connections to pass on my thanks and congratulations to whomever is responsible?

My spider is missing. He was there last night when I got in from Bob Mould's gig in Bristol, but I can't find any sign of him now.

Gig was top. Bristol's such a lovely place to visit - it's easy to drive into, but once you've parked up, it's a really pleasant place to walk around - so you don't arrive feeling all cross. I met up with my colleagues-in-code Ewan, Tony and Kevlin, all long-time or one-time Husker Du/Sugar/Bob Mould fans. They constitute the entirety of my Bristolean friends, and are all vegetarians too. Weird, huh? We had a beer at the next door Seven Stars and went in.

The Fleece is rather a pleasant venue - an old hall or church perhaps, flagged floor, high ceiling - for the crowd. Not so much for the talent, apparently, as the dressing room is the size of a postage stamp. Turned out I was the only one in our little party who hadn't played The Fleece. Just call me Jez 'No chops' Higgins.

More to follow, got to work now

Just been cold-called by someone claiming to be from BT Wholesale, asking to speak to the person who deals with my "BT line". I don't have a BT phone line. I don't just mean I use another phone company, I mean the actual bit of wire from my house to whereever the hell it goes was installed and is run by another company. You'd think BT would be able to work that out. Further, this call had the worst audio quality I've experience for years. It crackled and popped, I could bearly hear the woman at the other end, although I heard myself echoed back about half a second after I spoke quite clearly. Top advert!

My spider has, I've concluded, taken up permanent residence on my monitor. As long as he doesn't get in the way too much, he's welcome to stay.

Walking down Hurst Street, the throbbing heart of the Gay Village, two things occurred to me. First is, when all the other billboards are advertising cabarets with X-Factor finalists, stripshows and Leather & Bear evenings, a big poster advertising Bones is liable to a degree of wilful smutty misinterpretation.

Traffic flow on Hurst Street is a little strange. It's one way from each end toward the junction with Bromsgrove Street, which bisects it. There are also cycle lanes on each half, which run against the flow of car traffic. On occasion, this can be rather alarming. The only explanation that came to me is that some traffic engineer somewhere though it would be funny to make people "go the other way".

Sorry, it was late.

My spider is heading east. Slowly. He's now hanging two inches in from the right hand side of the monitor.

anonymous said have you tried catching any flies for him yet? Do spiders eat anything else? Breadcrumbs? Coffee Grounds? [added 19th Jan 2006]

The average housefly would crush him like a bug - he's only a couple of millimetres long - so I've no idea what he eats. I guess he can look after himself, though. He's been doing ok so far. [added 19th Jan 2006]

anonymous said How about a return of the webcam facility so we can watch all this in real time? [added 19th Jan 2006]

The Attic Cam is where it's always been, but my cheap-arse webcam isn't really up to following my little spider. Here's a quick snap of him though
[added 19th Jan 2006]

wunderwoman said Thankyou! [added 19th Jan 2006]

[Add a comment]

My spider is back. He's hanging pretty much in the middle of the screen this time, about four inches down, and wiggling his little spidery legs like a crazy person. Oop - as I type his shinned back up his thread, and settled back on the surround.

Perhaps he can read.

Noticed a tiny spider rappeling down my monitor as I clocked on this morning. It stopped about an inch in from the left and four inches down, and hung around. A couple of hours later it was still there, and I realised it had actually spun its web across the corner, and was waiting for whatever it is that tiny spiders eat (tiny insects?) to be trapped in it. I'd have been happy to leave him there, but unfortunately for him (but happily for me) I have work to do, and I had to shift him. I feel kind of bad about it though, because he can't just stomp off and make another web. It's quite a draining process needing lots of protein, so he'll have to eat the remains of the web he just made before he goes. He's perched up on the top of the monitor at the moment. If spiders could glower, I imagine he would be.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a costume redesign is inevitably crappier than the original design, no matter how crappy the original costume was.

You'll notice I haven't done any of the harder stuff yet, like xsl:param/xsl:with-param and xsl:variable, but I don't think that'll be a problem. Pushing stack-frames is hardly difficult, and I think that stuff should all just drop out. The tedious stuff is likely to be the extra XPath functions.

Rock!

ChezJez has been on the market for months now, since some time in the summer. We'd had a few viewings, but nothing that amounted to anything. We had looked at a handful of places, but they were either too expensive or required too much work. Everything seemed to be stagnating.

Perhaps lots of people spring out of bed on January 1st and shout I resolve to buy a new house. Whatever the reason, the estate agent's been ringing the phone off the hook arranging viewings. Simultaneously, four (count 'em, four) new houses that we think we might like the look of (won't actually get inside them until later this week) come up for sale. This lunchtime, there was some kind of mini-bidding war going on, and now we've got a buyer. Hurrah.

A few months ago, at young Matt's post art-school graduation show soirée (if you follow), Pete and I were quizzed on the what the next big thing in comics would be. I boldly asserted that Indian comics would be the thing. Based solely on India's pretty enormous population, I reasoned that even if only a tiny minority read comics, that would still amount to a fairly whopping number. Douglas Adam's once explained that the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy was A minor cult in Europe and a minor, minor cult in the USA. The difference however is several zeroes on my bank balance – something fairly minor in the US can be larger than something rather large in Europe. Looks like I might even have been right -

Virgin Books, founded by Richard Branson, has announced a partnership with author Deepak Chopra, director Shekhar Gupta and South Asia's leading publishing house Gotham Entertainment for creating original comic books and animation characters for a global audience.

It's juvenile I know, but it tickles the hell out of me that he's tied up with a publisher called Gotham. Disappointingly though, their main business seems to be reprinting American comics,

Committed several changes to Arabica::XPath today to finish off compiling and executing XSLT patterns (with the exception of the id and key functions). Tweaked dev code to use these changes and rebuilt.

One of the nice things about implementing a spec which is going on seven years old is that there are existing implementations you can use for reference. Most peoples XSLT implementation of choice is Saxon, so I'm mainly using that. I'm thrilled to announce then, that for a very, very, very simple stylesheet

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">yes: & poo + </xsl:text>
    <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="no">no : & poo + </xsl:text>
    <xsl:text >def: & poo</xsl:text>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="*">
    hello
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>