radiac.net

Although I'd be tempted to say that things can only get better, a certain political party were saying that 10 years ago, and look at us now. So, good luck with the imminent recession, bird flu epidemic, and global warming that will boil/freeze/drown us all. Happy New Year!

Why does heating always wait for the coldest day of the year before it goes wrong?

Here's a fun little one for anyone using Safari 3 under windows:

<script>
var r = /[£$]/i;
</script>

That causes an internal error in Safari's regexp logic. Refresh it enough times and you might just be lucky enough for it to crash and burn.

Do let me know if I'm doing something stupid, but looks perfectly valid to me.

Everyone loves top ten lists, and I'm now up to four on my Top Ten Reasons To Not Live In A Ground Floor Flat:

1. People walking past look in
2. You get lots of spiders
3. Susceptible to flooding
4. You will have to give witness statements to police while your girlfriend attempts to resuscitate neighbours who jump off their balconies and land on your patio

Apparently, one of our neighbours was on her way to work at about 7am this morning, when another neighbour opened the balcony door of her flat upstairs. She called to the girl across the car park, told her that she was going to kill herself, and jumped over the railings. She hit our patio.

She lay on her side, unable to move, having trouble breathing. The girl called an ambulance, and the woman stopped breathing. The emergency services told Leela to roll the woman onto her back, probably in preparation for CPR, but she started breathing again. More neighbours came out to see if they could help. We opened the gate, and let the rapid response vehicle in. Then the police arrived, followed by an ambulance. They worked on her outside our lounge for about 15 minutes. We gave witness statements while the paramedics defibrillated her. They drove her away, still covered in our blanket.

I don't know what happened after that.

• When selling a car, don't believe dealers who say there isn't a market for your car.
• When selling a car privately through AutoTrader, it is an absolutely excellent idea to get a PAYG SIM. You can turn it off when you're busy, and now that the car is sold, we can just change the answerphone message and won't have to answer 15 calls a day. Hoorah.
• If your internet connection drops when Outlook Express is halfway through checking a folder, it won't complain. No, it would prefer to pretend everything's ok, and give you a nasty surprise two days later when you discover the backlog of urgent client e-mails.
• Apache MultiViews breaks mod_rewrite rules. One of those ones I come across every so often, always forget what causes it, and it takes me ages to figure it out again.
• Just because a monitor is expensive, it doesn't mean it's built well. My power button has broken, and now I can't turn it off. Going to try my luck with the warranty.
• Everything from a train buffet cars costs approximately three times what it would have cost if you'd just got to the station 5 minutes earlier and gone into Sainsburys. Furthermore, they have a very poor selection of drinks.
• Warm Lilt really isn't at all thirst-quenching.
• Munin makes very nice little graphs which are absolutely useless if, for some strange reason, you want to know what caused that 500% CPU spike at 1am.
• Spammers suck. Oh wait, I already knew that one.

And the fun link for today is buttersafe.com. Been reading it for a few months now; it only updates twice a week, but is awesome.

How do you spot a geek at a party in the pub?

It's Leela's birthday tomorrow! I am attempting to organise a birthday extravaganza, the likes of which haven't been seen in the northern hemisphere since King Richard III took his girlfriend to the fair on her birthday, back in 1469. Although at that point he would have been a prince, which is entirely appropriate as I am also waiting for my time; I am sure that everyone in my path will abdicate, because they know what an awesome king I'll be. And I won't need no stinking horse neither, for I shall drive cars.

In other news, it has been noted that my entries here are becoming increasingly infrequent. The sad fact is that, unlike the halcyon days of yore when my client list and workload allowed me to take time off on a whim and a fancy, I now spend my days working extremely hard, and my evenings recovering. There just isn't much room left for writing diary entries. I often think of things I could post, but am usually nowhere near a computer.

However, I am taking steps to address this; among other project in the pipeline, my N95 8GB has some fancy post-to-atom app they call lifeblog, and I've written some basic code to take in the text and photos from my phone, and output them to files. Now I just need to tidy it up and tie it into this thing, and we should be back in business. And I'm going to put it on CPAN - after about 17 years programming, and 10 years developing in perl, I think it's about time I released some code. In the immortal words of Bill Murray, baby steps.