I can't ever remember the name of the Debian package for the library manpages , I often have the same trouble recalling the names of the OpenSSL development packages in Debian.
The openssl binary and man pages are in the openssl package.
The SSL shared libraries are in the libssl package. Similarly, the SSL headers and library man pages are in the libssl-dev package.
Now I can google bing for it.
If you can read this message, it means I have properly configured blog posting by email. Is this useful? Is this a good idea? Time will tell.
As usual, beatworm.co.uk is the last site with the news.
The baby finally came. We have a daughter. She's called Ada. I love middle initials, I enjoy my 'M' so much that I thought she might like one too, so she's Ada May. Her birthday is the 23rd of October. She came one day early.
Lots of people have spotted the connection to the proto-programmer and feminist icon , or the programming language that took her name. Truth be told, these are excellent associations, but supplementary; the original inspiration came from a pop song I was very taken with. It's got Sufjan Stevens on piano, you know.
These photos are all taken at the "Woah dude, I've got a baby!" and "troops of admiring relatives" ' phases, and are a few weeks old. We're currently at the "Oh bugger, she actually isn't going to sleep for more than 30 minutes in 24 hours" phase, and photo-ops have been pushed far from mind.
In my piece yesterday, about my blog on last.fm I didn't link correctly to the article . Fixed now.
Anatomy of Japanese Folk Monsters : How-it-works style cutaway manga depicting monsters from Japanese mythology
The other day at work , prompted by a shoutbox conversation with one of our users , I did a little bit of exploring some of the artist catalogue data. The idea was to find band names that were repeating words, such as ' Talk Talk ' and ' The The '. Coincidentally, I had a freshly installed database server with just this sort of information on it, and needed a good excuse to stress test it a little. PostgreSQL's regular expression support is brilliant , and it was a very trivial exercise to quickly knock up a query that returned promising data. In the process of refining it, I got a chance to play around with the Hadoop cluster. I wrote the whole thing up over on the company blog, if you'd like further details. Fame fame fatal fame, it can play hideous tricks on the brain, as the song goes .
Back at the start of the summer, I went back to Barcelona, for a second visit to the very wonderful Primavera Sound festival. I travelled with the rather pregnant Mrs S., and (Uncle) Danny came along for the latter half of the stay, and also joined us for the festival.
Barcelona is still a marvellous city, and Primavera is still my favourite rock festival. While we were out there, Barcelona FC won the champions league . I can't pretend that I have any sympathy, interest, or even understanding of football, but I really enjoyed the electric city-wide atmosphere on the day; silent, tense and concentrating, as countless viewers watched the televised match, suddenly punctuated by sighs and unison cheers as chances were missed, and goals won; culminating in the riot of celebration erupting from every door and window onto the streets when the final victory was realised.
The festival was another success. The personal highlight, for me was the chance to finally see Lightning Bolt , unusually for them, an on-stage performance, that was one of the most exhilarating live shows I have ever seen. Shellac , playing again on the same ATP stage as last year, as good value as always, another chance to see Oneida , and sample some of the "heritage" acts, giving it some legend, like Sonic Youth , Throwing Muses , and Neil Young . A suprisingly energetic Michael Nyman band set in the indoor auditori was an unexpected highlight, as were a couple of new-to-me performances from Andrew Bird , and Gang Gang Dance . I was amused by Sunn O))) , but sadly unable to persuade either of my companions to stay and watch more than ten minutes of their set.
More disappointing were Marnie Stern , who I'd been looking forward to seeing again, seemed to be suffering from terrible sound and equipment problems, Deerhunter transforming a great album into a weak coldplay-lite live experience, an uninspired and frankly routine Art Brut performance, and a generically dull Jarvis set.
It turns out that I edited and uploaded my photos to flickr shortly after returning to the UK, but what with all the busying and rushing around re-organising and home renovating, I seem to have forgotten to switch the set to public, at least until now.
Yesterday at work , I had to clean after up a particularly freaky Slony-I replication fault. I still haven't managed to understand quite what went wrong there. So this morning, I arrived at work in full diagnostic mode, jokingly grumbling about 'howfuckedismydatabase.com'. Laurie was particulary amused by this curmudgeonly joke, and we bantered about it. I pitched a few ideas about how such a joke site might operate, and we left it there and moved on.
Except Laurie didn't. Despite my attempts to dissuade him, he registered the domain, and started knocking together some pages based on the earlier jokes. I chipped in a couple more suggestions, and suggested some error messages, and within twenty minutes or so he had an operational site . Then we shared it with a couple of like-minded people, and left it be. A few of the other people at work passed it around, and a couple of people submitted it to reddit.
Within an hour or so things had started to really snowball. One of the reddit submissions gathered hundreds of upvotes, and for a period of time we were the number one story on hacker news . Laurie added a twitter button and a comment form to the site, and retweets and emails started accumulating fast. By mid-afternoon the site was approaching 200 hits a second, which it handled with aplomb, because he had coded it efficiently, and
configured the server sensibly.
It felt great to watch so many people comment positively about some of my dumb jokes, pretty much in real time. It gave me a really direct experience of something I'd always innately understood about the internet, but had not yet witnessed close to home; the ability to quickly reach an appropriate audience for almost any content, regardless of how specialised. Our little shared joke quickly reached out to thousands of people, who found something within it they also related to. This really amazes me.
It also showed me something about my own character. While I was perfectly happy to joke about the idea, it needed somebody like Laurie, with the skill and enthusiasm to pick up on it and make it into something tangible and exciting. I'd instinctively shied away from broadcasting it further than my desk, and my initial reaction was that developing it any further would be a waste of time and money. I was very wrong about that, it turned out to be an interesting experience, and enormous fun. I think this means I should endeavour to be a little less cynical.
Wasps punish fake fighters : Science demonstrates that wasps made up to look tougher than they are receive punishment beatings.
Dodgem Logic : Alan Moore is preparing to launch a new "underground magazine", with a mixture of content, including comics, and an intriguing sounding eight-page swappable insert for "local content"
Vegetarian spider : A spider that dines almost exclusively on plants has been described by scientists.
I ran into some problems while I was trying to install python bindings for the Growl notification framework on my MacBook Pro. My Mac is running the current release of Snow Leopard ( 10.6.4 ) and I'm using a python.org installed binary package of python, under /usr/local/python. Building using distutils and the supplied setup.py failed, seemingly because the compiler was unable to find quite routine include files, such as stdarg.h and float.h .
/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdarg.h:4:25: error: stdarg.h: No such file or directory
This error message both confused and perturbed me, because stdarg is a fairly fundamental component of a working C library, and I am pretty certain that my compiler isn't that fundamentally broken.
Picking apart the build output from the generated Makefile, I see that it is setting the -isysroot gcc flag, to /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/ . I presume this is because the python installation is built to use the OS X 10.4 compatability SDK. This is why it's pulling in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdarg.h . That header is a stub, and included the following stanza
/* GCC uses its own copy of this header */
#if defined(GNUC)
#include_next
#include_next is a gcc extension to cpp, and instructs the preprocessor to start searching for the include file again starting with the next directory on the include path after this one. Standard libraries like stdarg and float can be quite compiler specific, and as the comment indicates, GCC is expected to have it's own copy of this header file, which would be put away somewhere under /usr/lib/gcc .
At this point, a nagging memory of building cocoa apps with XCode resurfaced, suggesting that the 10.4 SDK isn't compatible with gcc-4.2 ( the system default gcc under snow leopard ). GCC 4.0 is supplied though, for use with building against legacy SDKs. On this whim, I tried exporting CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.0 and rebuilding, and everything worked as it should.
From inspection, it seems like the snow supplied leopard python is built to use 10.6 SDKs and gcc-4.2 and may well be a more sensible python to use. Further googling ducking , turned up this bug report .
We have recently had a wood-burning stove installed. With a baby on the way, I understand it's traditional to frantically embark on home improvement. Our house is old and draughty, as homes built around open fireplaces, one in every room, must be. The current central heating isn't very optimised for heat delivery, especially since we removed a good portion of the internal doors, and have yet to get around to replacing them.
The chimney breast, in what has become the main living room needed some attention, having suffered some water damage long ago, due to leaking. The leaks are gone, but the brickwork and surface plaster were left saturated and continued to deteriorate. Rounding it all off, it was mounted with a bulky, mantelpiece of slate, with ugly pseudo-wood veneer, and filled with garish orange ceramic tiles.
Installing the stove was a way of addressing these issues simultaneously. When fired up, it should produce a generous heat in the centre of the house, well suited to the original building design and airflow. As part of the installation, we've had the chimney lined, the fireplace and hearth reconstructed, and the chimney breast re-surfaced. We ordered the stove from Kindle in Bristol , and they also managed all the installation work, which only took a couple of days.
The stove is a ClearView Pioneer 400 . A clean-burn design, and the installation is certified for use in smokeless zones, such as Bristol. It's a multi-fuel configuration, which can be used to burn (smokeless) coal as well as firewood. We've built a small log store in the back yard, and filled it with a metre-cubed of sawn firewood.
Due to the unseasonably hot weather, I've not had too much of a chance to get it up and running, aside from a few test sessions. I'm not yet sure what our practical fuel consumption will resolve to. In my tests, I've so far determined that it is capable of generating a startling amount of heat after just a few hours of operation.
On a less practical note, it is simply enormous fun having a large burning fire you can fiddle about with, sitting within easy reach. It's very easy to get hypnotised by the thing, when it's burning. I find it considerably more interesting to watch than most things that are on the television.
Salamanders are amazing creatures : Could they really be photoysynthesising symbiotically?
Life behind glass : Photographer Michael Wolf captures human exhibits in their natural environment of downtown Chicago.
It's Not 50/50 : Pigeons outperform humans at optimising the Monty Hall problem
The man who guarded the secret of the Beatles : David Hepworth knows his onions.
Beehaus : Urban dwellers are being encouraged to keep bees by Natural England , with the launch of the Beehaus, an new user-friendly urban beehouse design from the firm Omlet .
Male fish in Mexico sports sexy 'moustache' : Scientists have measured the way female Mexican mollies (Poecilia sphenops) respond to males with varying top lip furniture, and discovered a clear preference for a moustache.
Electric suicide ants : Colonies of lasius neglectus , the poison-resistant "Asian super ant", whose magnetic compulsion for electricity sources is so strong they can represent a fire hazard, have been identified in the UK for the first time.
It's been a good long while since I've been able to blog anything of substance. Some of that is down to lack of time, I've been frantically busy the last few months, much as you'd expect. There also were some dull technological barriers that were making it awkward to update and maintain this site. <br><br> I've moved the hosting to a new location, it's currently residing on a xen virtual server instance provided by <a href="http://linode.com">linode</a>. While I was migrating things around, I've tried to package it up a little more portably, and in future I ought to be able to move it easily to anywhere I can run a linux host. I also took the opportunity to tidy up the page templates, and cobble together a new theme. I'm still poking that around a little bit, let me know if you find any rough edges.<br><br> <h4>New job!</h4><br><br> Aside from adjusting myself to my <a href="http://beatworm.co.uk/blog/ada/im-a-rapper-with-a-baby/">wonderful new daughter</a>, I've gone and got myself a new job. I wasn't really aware that I was looking for one, but life can surprise you like that sometimes. I'm now working as a Database Architect at <a href="http://last.fm/user/colins/">Last.fm</a> and I couldn't be happier about that. Not only is last.fm an awesome site, which has long been one of my favourite things on the web, but the intersection between high volume web services, big databases, and music nerdery is very definitely my kind of niche.<br><br><br><br> <h4>Move to London</h4><br><br> One small drawback with this full-time role was that it was based in London. We did weigh up the various commuting options, but after some deliberation, decided to take the plunge, and relocate, at least temporarily to London.<br><br> This meant finding somewhere to rent. Somewhere to rent that would take a baby and a dog. A location in the city with suitable dog exercise routes close at hand. Ideally a place from which I could daily commute to <a href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=last.fm&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=16.450021,44.428711&ie=UTF8&hq=last.fm&hnear=&ll=51.528457,-0.086882&spn=0.004052,0.010847&z=17&iwloc=A">Shoreditch</a> without too much trouble. Obviously we'd have to be able to afford it on one salary, whilst still maintaining a mortgage on the house in Bristol in the interim. Rather a tall order.<br><br> After balancing up the variables we settled on the Balham/Clapham area. After a few complicated expeditions up to view properties with little success, we managed to secure something with only days to spare, just down the road in Tooting Bec. A rather roomy <a href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Elmbourne+Road,+Wandsworth&sll=51.434735,-0.150461&sspn=0.008628,0.015535&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Elmbourne+Rd,+Wandsworth,+Greater+London,+United+Kingdom&ll=51.434655,-0.150611&spn=0.008575,0.015535&z=16&layer=c&cbll=51.434733,-0.15047&panoid=hH03gMlSJRXaMcWDe_cQ_w&cbp=12,273.93,,0,6.37">ground floor flat facing right onto Tooting Bec common</a>. It's just a short walk to the Northern line, which leaves me with a manageable half-hour or so trip to work, door to door.<br><br> So the last few months have seen quite a furious pace of changes. Mostly I've been finding it all invigorating, and exciting, rather than incapacitating, but things can seem to be wooshing by, and there <em>definitely</em> aren't as many hours in the day as there used to be. Five years ago I'd have been amazed at what the me of 2010 would be getting up to. Interesting times. Ultima V running on TI calculators : Presumably they already have nethack.
screen /dev/tty.Bluetooth-console ' import audio " audio.say('I never realised my phone had a built-in speech synthesizer') "Honeybees sterilise their hives : The bees use a mix of resins with antimicrobial properties to sterilise their environment.
Jumbo Flying Squid Invade San Diego : Meanwhile, less cute squid are causing problems on the coast of California.
Smiley Squid : This piglet squid has been making waves, because of the arrangement of its pigmentation.
I've not posted a gig write up in a long time. One day I might get around to post-documenting some of the backlog. However, here's something very fresh.
Last night I went to see Fever Ray . Fever Ray is the assumed band name of Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of the strange and compelling Swedish brother-sister art-electronica duo, The Knife .
The ticket price for this one was fairly steep. Seventeen pounds is a lot to ask for an debut act, on a Bristol weekday evening. Knowing the Knife to have something of a penchant for staginess and performance statements , I figured that the cost of admission might indicate a more elaborate performance spectacle than the routine Academy show. It wasn't a terribly full crowd, which may have also had something to do with the ticket price. Luckily my expectations of an interesting presentation were met, more than satisfactorily.
A stage swathed in as much machine-made fog as I've seen since I last watched the Sisters Of Mercy, decades ago. For readers unfamiliar with the Sisters' stage ouevre, let me clarify; this means a lot of fog . The five-piece band only identifiable as bizarre silhouettes suggestive of a dark circus. Improbably tall hats, shadowy pierrot faces, frock coats, hunched shoulders. Karin, stage center shrouded in an enormous cowled cloak , the headress simultaneously suggesting fur and antlers and briar-hedge basketwork, her peculiar outline only really humanised by oversized white gloved hands. During the second song, she cleverly unfurled her cloak a little, a sudden backlight creating a surprising stained-glass panel effect that seemed to shine from inside her.
The whole performance was a meticulously staged progression, slowly opening up the initial murk. At the start the overhead fog was scissored dramatically by a pair of slow moving laser beams. By the second song, they'd each expanded to a pair of fan shapes. Later on these picked up oscillating movement, and eventually traced out colour shifts in the waves of fog. Within the on-stage gloom, the odd sight of a dozen or so standard-lamps, pulsing away in time to the beats through thick lampshades. I didn't have my camera with me, although I expect it would have struggled to capture any of this well. Quite a few people have submitted photos of previous shows to flickr .
As the show progressed, the stage was slowly up-lit from the back with soft blue and yellow glows. The cloak was shed, placed on a stand just behind front of stage, it still loomed, like some kind of shadowy spirit-familiar. Gradually we could see a little more of the performers, jigging around, wildly shaking shamanistic totem-sticks, pounding away on congas and toms, yet still the lighting and smoke effects kept them essentially obscured and anonymous.
The short set stuck solidly to the album, without encores, which was fine by me. My attention didn't wander, nor did I tire of standing in place. My only complaints would be with the slightly murky sound, which isn't that unusual for the Academy, and that the music didn't really connect as terribly live, aside from the vocals; pitch-shifted, yet weirdly still human and very real. I think this was probably down to a combination of the very programmed sounds, and the distancing effect of the theatrics. It was something more like watching a stage-show display set to a musical playback, than a rock music show. I took it as an opportunity to watch something a little out of the ordinary, and enjoyed myself.
The album is ace, and I recommend it to anyone. You can find it on spotify .
The video for "Triangle Walks" gives an impression quite close to the live show. There are some other videos available on the band site which give a good sense of the Fever Ray aesthetic.
Triangle Walks from Fever Ray on Vimeo .
Stingray migration : Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea, thousands of Golden Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico.
Eutetramorium mocquerysi : This image is composed of 400 pictures magnified 400x using a scanning electron microscope.
Prehistoric bloodsucker in Thames - a schoolboy has discovered a rare sea lamprey on a Thames riverbank.