People leave cool things on the kerbside in London (by alaric)

Like this rather large power supply, spotted on Tottenham Court Road:

I'm glad I didn't have the van, or I'd have felt compelled to take it home and try to fix it!

Backup Power (by alaric)

As I have mentioned before, we have a petrol genset that we use to keep things going during our frequent power cuts. Immediately after the flood, too, when we had to shut down the house power since one of the outlets was submerged, I ran the computers off of the genset.

However, it is a pain to have to run the nice cable I made around the house, reach behind a filing cabinet to unplug the UPS that feeds the computers from the wall and plug it into the generator cable, unplug the fridge freezer, stretch cables about, etc...

So the logical next step would be to fit a second consumer unit, move the 5A lighting circuit over to it, and run a 15A circuit to a few strategically placed sockets around the house - where fridges and freezers are likely to ever be, and of course, up in the office where the computers live, and where the incoming phone lines are (where the ADSL router goes).

This consumer unit can run from a single 30A fuse in the main consumer unit (the slot currently taken by the lighting circuit will do nicely), but via a pair of 32A IEC 60309 connectors. The circuit from the main consumer unit would come out via a female socket, and the feed into the new consumer unit via a male socket.

Then the two can be connected by a short length of 32A cable with appropriate plugs on each end. And when the power goes down, I can turn the emergency circuit off with the master switch on the secondary consumer unit (because it's bad to use a plug and socket as a switch, interrupting a flowing current and arcing in the process), unplug from the useless incoming circuit, and plug into the genset's output... The genset can only produce about 10A; in practice, that's more than enough to run everything, and it has a 16A outlet on the front, but I'd feel compelled to see if I could find a 10A circuit breaker nonetheless, since with proper sockets stationed about the house, it might be easy to accidentally overload it. But I'm designing the system around a standard 15A socket circuit and a 5A lighting circuit, so that in future, I can get a bigger genset and power more stuff without needing to rewire it all.

What I wonder, though, is if this arrangement would actually be legal under the stringent UK wiring laws. As far as I know there's nothing wrong with having a 32A socket coming from a 30A fuse (after all, a standard 15A circuit feeds many 13A outlets); the question is, is it OK to have a lighting circuit and a set of outlets coming from a consumer unit fed from a 32A inlet socket?

I hope so, since it'd really make switching over to backup power easier than it currently is. And since anything I connect between those two sockets isn't a fixed part of the house wiring it would, I presume, not be governed by regulations, so fiddling with alternate power sources (such as turbines and battery arrays) would be a lot easier.

CSS (by alaric)

I read this interesting article, which I found via reddit:

Lexical File Names in Plan 9 or Getting Dot-Dot Right

I found I liked the styling. At first I'd assumed it was a PDF, since it looked like the output of TeX or Lout, but it was suspiciously in a web browser rather than a PDF viewer.

"Oooh," I thought, "I wonder if the CSS they used for that is freely licensed? I'd quite like to use it to give my own writings that academic feel, so that people trust them uncritically, thus advancing my world domination plans."

But upon viewing the source, I had a nasty shock - every element was individually styled with its own style= element. Ugh. Looked like something had autogenerated it, most likely from something intended to be turned into a PDF. The result looked lovely, but was implemented terribly.

So I decided I'd sharpen my decidely rusty CSS skills a bit by cloning it properly.

The end result isn't a perfect copy, but looks good enough for me, and I'd like to share it if anybody else wants it. Here's a sample of it in use. And feel free to download and copy the CSS, subject to the nice license at the top.

C (by alaric)

I spent a lot of time programming C in my youth. I went through the canonical route; BASIC on an 8-bit home micro, moving up to Pascal then C when I managed to obtain access to implementations of either. At the time, conventional wisdom was that C was the best language about; the easy access to the underlying model of memory as an array of numbered bytes allowed the programmer to write efficient code to perform low-level data processing operations. The mantra was that there was a tradeoff between expressive power and safety; languages like Pascal made it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, at the cost of preventing you from doing interesting things.

But, with the advent of an Internet connection, I gained access to non-mainstream languages, and my explorations of the wider world of programming language technology began. I still dabbled in C or C++ from time to time, when the situation demanded it, but never on very complicated projects.

Recently, though, I've been working on a large C project. And I've found that I'd quite forgotten just how horrible it is in comparison to the languages I've been using recently...

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Moff! (by alaric)

We picked Jean up on Saturday, and she's staying with us again now. Since we have the van, we can manage her and her stuff, even though we're still staying with friends in London...

Apparently when she saw the van appear outside Sarah's parents' house, she was all excited and was asking if we were there, since she associates the van with us, then was sad that we weren't. But we turned up a bit later!

However, we were puzzled that, when she disapproved of something (an inedible stone or stalk inside a bit of fruit, for example) she's scowl and shout "Moff! Moff!"...

But then Sarah's parents explained that Jean had been upset by a big moth that had landed on her foot and scared her, and ever since then, anything nasty has been referred to as "Moff" 🙂