View Larger Map

... we had a pleasant week here. Moments from the beach, good sand plus stream and rocky bits to poke around in, generally deserted and never what you would call busy. Beach shelves gently, good for paddling, swimming, body-boarding. Pleasing walks along the coast in both directions. Top ice cream places in New Quay and Aberaeron. Dolphins! Actual bottle-nosed dolphins, swimming around in the sea.

To get there, travel due west from Birmingham, then turn left when you hit the coast. We avoid annoying hours of I'm bored/I've got no room/I'm feeling sick/He's on my side and generally are-we-there-yet-ness by travelling in two parties. Party A, Bean, Hal-baby, and I, took the train to Aberystwyth, where we wandered around a bit and had chips and ice cream. Party B, Natalie and Dogger, drove. They picked us up for the final half an hour or so's drive. I'd recommend it.

Trundled out along the canals on the bikes for 2 hours and 12 miles or so with Daniel yesterday, without puncturey incident. Zipped out this morning by myself, and ended up walking three and half miles home from Selly Oak.

Note to self: Always take spare tube and pump, even if you're only popping down the shops.

Cycling with Daniel is clearly the kiss of death for my tyres at the moment. Two rides, two punctures. Didn't have repair kit or spare tube this time, but fortunately wasn't far from home.

This one was further confirmation that I've only recently started properly inflating my tyres. When a tyre inflated to 110psi suddenly acquires a large hole, it whistles! Everybody in the park must have heard it.

When my children do something silly or dangerous I, once I've calmed down a bit, tell myself that they are only eight and four years old and so can't really be expected to know better. When I encounter adults, with jobs and mortgages and the right to vote and children of their own, I have no such solace.

• Item: A child can ride this route without difficulty.
• Item: Self-adhesive puncture repair patches are the greatest invention since the invention of the pneumatic tyre itself.
• Item: Those tiny 6 inch long bike pumps really can get your tyres close to a 100 psi.
• Item: The cafe at the Waseley Hills Visitor Centre does a very good breakfast.
• Item: It's downhill all the way back. We went door to door in just over an hour.

Now my latest gentle stroll has concluded, there are one or two platform specific build issues to resolve. With them done, I expect to be dropping a new release around the end of August or start of September. The release will include the Taggle HTML parser and improved XSLT support, along with various little bug fixes, minor build improvements.

If you can't wait, there's always the subversion repository.
[Add a comment]

After a bit of break, I've spent time hacking on Arabica again, which has been lovely. It's really rather relaxing to just nurdle around in your own code, without any particular pressure or need. My normal way of working on Arabica's XSLT processor is to run some of the test suite, pick a failing case, and fix it. If I can get a few more tests passing in half an hour or an hour, and I generally can, then that's a little step further along.

In this latest little bit of activity, I've been focussing on variables and variable resolution. I've fixed various problem with circular references, scoping, namespace resolution, and what I thought was going to be a thorny problem with import precedence.

What constantly surprises me is how straightforward most of these problems are, requiring only a few lines of code. In fact this has been the story of Arabica's XSLT development. Once the initial development push was done, almost all the rest has been a few lines here, a few lines there. I've been working away on this now for coming up three years, on and off and with digressions, and have no idea when I'll be done, but I that doesn't bother me at all. It's like an old pair of slippers, or favourite woolly jumper. It's a comfortable, gentle thing to slip into and go for a stroll in every now and again.