Vanessa Carlton
August 28, 2004
I have taken a great liking to the music of Vanessa Carlton (the site is crap though). I’ve only heard her first album, but there’s not a weak track on there in my opinion. I’m looking forward to her next album which should be out soon (in September, I think).
RSS feed at last!
August 28, 2004
I’ve played around with Perl’s XML::RSS and now this have culminated in there being an RSS 1.0 feed available for this diary/blog. Setting it up was not at all hard; I had to do some minor infrastructure changes on my site to facilitate it though.
Games::AlphaBeta & Games::Sequential
August 28, 2004
I’ve been looking at these again lately. Being very generic modules supporting a wide range of games they obviously cannot know how to manipulate positions and moves in every one of these games, since board-representation and how to perform a move, not to forget evaluating the “fitness” of a position differ wildly between games. Users of the modules therefore have to provide some domain-specific functionality.
Despite claiming to use an OO interface these modules’ first incarnations required subroutine references to be passed in and stored in a hash. This has now been changed so that users are instead required to inherit from the modules and implement the missing methods.
There’s still some way to go though.
It occured to me that all the methods work directly on positions, so the methods should really be provided by a position class for which a reference is passed in. I hope to have this, including a simple base position class users can inherit, implemented over the weekend.
Quiet breakfast
August 28, 2004
After a hectic week at work it is great to sit down for a nice and quiet breakfast for a change. I used a slice of bread, buttered, with two large slices of ham. On top of that I put majonaise and brie before I topped it off with two fried eggs. Mmmm….
Debian packages
August 22, 2004
What is the best way to provide Debian packages of my software to stable, testing & unstable when the packages are not in Debian?
I’ve played around quite a bit today trying to find a way to automatically build my debian packages on woody, sarge & sid. I used debootstrap to build three clean chroot environments, and dchroot to run a command in each of the defined chroots in turn.
I’ve already been using mini-dinstall and dput to maintain my existing debian archive. It’s been working great until now, but mini-dinstall had me almost going ballistic earlier today. It turned out, of course, that it was merely my missunderstanding of how it worked that was the problem.
I see why it works like that now, but I’m a bit uncertain what to do about it. I’ve not yet come up with a workable solution. I’m not sure yet if I should build packages for both sarge and sid, but I’m sure it’ll come to me at some point. I just need to work on it a bit more.
Morning after (cycling) blues
August 22, 2004
I still have pains in both my hands and my backside after yesterday’s cycling escapades. So far this morning I’ve not managed to do much apart from eating breakfast and checking my mail and news. I guess I should get started.
Now, where did I put that Tiger Balm…?
more like a blog…
August 21, 2004
I’ve improved and added some more functionality to my diary. It’s actually starting to get rather feature-full now. Most notably, only a fixed number of the most recent entries will show by default. There’s a link in the right sidebar you can click to see all entries. Additionally, the date header is now a link to a page showing all the entries for a given day.
uh. right. cycling
August 21, 2004
I just came back from going out cycling. I basically stole Nadia’s bike with the intention of taking it for a short spin. It didn’t quite go down the way I had planned. I was just thinking of going around the Stanmore golfcourse, thinking “that’s probably a nice 30 min lap”. I ended up being out for almost two hours.
Once I got a bit past the golf course there was a nice slope downhill that I followed for a while. After 10-15 minutes I realised that I could see Wembley stadium not too far ahead of me. So, I decided to see if I could bike there. I could.
It actually didn’t take me more than 35 minutes from I left the house until I was at Stanmore Park, where I work. That’s less time than it takes me if I’m lucky with the tubes and busses, and that included the time it took me to get on the right track after I got a bit lost (I lost sight of the damn stadium…).
I bought my favourite ice-cream (Solero), then headed off home. I took a different route home which, naturally, took me about twice as long as the one I used to get there. That’s okay; I probably couldn’t find my way back that route anyway. I navigated solely by aiming at that pesky arch over Wembley stadium until I got close enough to Wembley central that I recognised the area.
The only real downside to this rather pleasant outing is that my hands and backside are acheing. I now understand why cyclists use those funny half-gloves and bikeshorts. No wonder my backside is aching though: I’ve probably spent more time on a bike today than the last five years combined…
Posh
August 21, 2004
I must live in a fairly posh neighbourhood. This is the second or third time I’ve seen a Harrod’s delivery truck in our street (not a through road) the last couple of months.
Categories
August 21, 2004
Quickly put together a component to create a listing of categories in the right sidebar. It is fairly heavily inspired by the way del.icio.us works. This is just a first stab; it still lacks support for unlisted entries. I might also change the way they appear from a list to a more free-form style as this would take up less space.
