Father Day 2012 – Science Festival (by sarah)

Jean woke me up at 8 o'clock to make Daddy breakfast in bed for Fathers Day. I was already awake thanks to creative insomnia. We made him breakfast and presented it too him (not entirely sure he was initially chuffed to be awoken early on a Sunday!).

The baby instantly stole his yogurt (it's an alpro one so she can actually eat it and she did!).

We had also made some planet/space cupcakes for him which Jean gave him 🙂 I bet you can guess which two the baby decorated!

The we were off to the Cheltenham Science Festival for the day. Above is me and Jean pestering the guy from the Cotswold Astronomical Society.

Jean again spent an age looking through microscopes and prodding things. The main phrase I heard through out the day was, 'I see you have a budding scientist there!'

Alaric found electronics and was happy 🙂 He also found a picture of Alan Turin and thus told a very interested (and I mean it) Jean about the origins of computing.

Mary entertained herself for a huge chunk of time with reading the science festival programme 🙂

I found pretty lighting to take photos of!

Jean found an entity called Keji. She got to generate her own little creature who's bounciness was based on her heart rate. Meaning she got to bounce on a trampoline 🙂

She then helped the Sustainable Chemists with their experiments 🙂 Though she did inform one Chemist that she didn't want to make a rubber ball because she wanted to explode more things!

Oh yes! She also wanted to start a fire with the telescope once I explained we mustn't look directly at the sun.

We then went to The Aviator at Staverton airport for dinner which everyone loved 🙂

Time (by alaric)

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
Pink Floyd - Time

I've always felt rather cursed with the fact that I have an addiction to designing things. It's bad enough knowing that I can easily design something that will take a week to actually do in half an hour, and that I can do that designing while walking or driving or in the shower or lying in bed, while I can only actually do any making when free of distractions... I try to make the best of it, writing the best of my ideas up on this blog when I get time in the hope that some of them will inspire others in some way, as I can't bear the thought of them all being lost. I believe that ideas are cheap, especially for me, so there's no point in hoarding them - I can always come up with more!

However, the past few years have been worse than ever; I've been crucially short of time, so I'm lucky to get a day a month to sit down and make things. I knew that parenthood would take up a lot of my time, but I didn't reckon on pregnancy and childbirth making my wife an invalid, or our house flooding, or all the knock-on effects of these things. I'm running a Cub pack on my own, because nobody else can spare the time to help me; I'm already barely keeping up with the basic requirements of running the pack, and I can't put in any less time without shutting the whole thing down (which would weigh very heavily on my heart, as I love working with those kids, and couldn't bear to let them down). That takes up two or three evenings a week. And I lose a lot of evenings or weekend days helping Sarah build her career, to keep her sane (I don't want her being stuck in a dead-end life of childcare) and to help relieve our financial pressures. I lose three lunch breaks a week to transporting Jean. I'm barely keeping up with keeping the house clean; it gets worse all week and I catch up at the weekend if there is time. And yet most of the things that are taking up my time are the kinds of things I can do while still designing things in my head, so the creative output hasn't slowed that much, even though the time I have to follow up any of the ideas has nearly vanished. There just really isn't much time for me in the week; my one safe escape valve is my weekly visit to Bristol Hackspace on a Thursday after work, where I have two hours.

But then a second problem kicks in: When I do get some time without pressure, I often don't actually want to concentrate on things right away. Over the bank holiday weekend I got about a day to myself (in a few chunks of several hours here and there), and I think I spent at least the first three hours playing Cyber Empires; I only felt up to doing something mindless. After that I got stuck in and did some work on a couple of Ugarit tickets (4363bc7631 and 34e21d597f)... But it's too easy to spend my two hours in Bristol each week just nattering to people!

I've found I'm starting to get self-conscious about it. I'm feeling embarrassed about telling people about the fun ideas I've had, because I know they know I probably won't ever execute them.

There are too many people who go around being smug about the great ideas they have, that they can't implement as they don't have the skill (often, these folks feel that implementation is a mindless task to be given to hired goons). But you can't design something you couldn't imagine every step of the construction of; knowing the limits of the medium is essential to designing something that pushes those limits to their best... It's no better than a child triumphantly saying they have designed the best car ever, that drives at a hundred miles an hour AND flies AND has a laser gun AND has a fridge full of cakes in the boot. That's not a design; it's a requirements document (of sorts).

I don't want people thinking of me like that. Every time I've updated the ARGON web site I've put in more and more perrimistic estimates of my hope of ever implementing it. When I started it, it looked like a tractable project I could slowly work on over several years; now it looks like something I might manage to do in my retirement, at best. That makes me sad. I'm not a person who designs things they can't build (except when I'm doing science-fiction worldbuilding, at least...); I'm a person who just doesn't have the time to build the things they design...

Vomit-induced implementations of the 9P protocol in Chicken Scheme (by alaric)

Last Saturday, I came down with what I suspect was Norovirus - the rest of the family (apart from the baby) having come down with it on Thursday and me having spent the past few days mopping up after them, this was probably unavoidable; although I'd tried my best by wearing a respirator when performing clean-up operations (it was also nice to not have to smell what I was clearing up...).

But, it meant I spent Monday off of work recuperating. I was too weak and exhausted to do any work from home, but I was bored senseless of just lying there on the sofa, so I decided to try and extend Chicken Scheme's 9p egg, which is a client implementation of the 9P2000 file server protocol, to also be able to act as a server.

This is something I want for Ugarit; it means that a Chicken Scheme app will be able to provide a virtual filesystem that can be mounted from a computer and used like your "real" filesystem. In particular, I want to be able to let people access their backed-up snapshots from a Ugarit vault as a live read-only filesystem, rather than needing to go in and manually "restore" their desired files back into the filesystem to access them. And it'll really come into its own when I implement archive mode, as it will make it possible to actually use the Ugarit archive seamlessly.

Unfortunately, being rather fuzzy-headed, I kept making rookie mistakes, but I eventually managed to get the core protocol implementation working. In doing so, I found out that a 9P server that puts incorrect lengths in the stat structures returned from directory reads causes 9P mounts in Linux to "hang" in a way that can't be unmounted and you need to power-cycle the machine as it won't even shut down cleanly... so be careful of that when mounting the few public 9P servers out there!

In order to test it, and as a utility for Chicken apps that would like to provide a 9P "control/status filesystem" in the manner of wmii et al, I started to write a simplified high-level virtual filesystem server library on top of the core server implementation. At the point where I made this status update to my friends in the Chicken Scheme IRC channel, directory listings weren't working (they now are), but you can see the idea - create a filesystem object from Scheme and register files and directories in it, and it appears as a live filesystem under UNIX.

Now I'm feeling a bit better today I've realised several other rookie errors I've made (not ones that cause bugs, I hope, but ones that complicated the code unnecessarily) - I'll fix those up before I submit all of my changes to the 9p egg's maintainer for merging in...

Then it'll be time to start on the Ugarit integration. THAT will be fun 🙂

Monster Creation (by sarah)

I have made a short film about the creation of the Muse Monsters from my Monster Writing Game - they turn out to have a complex belief system - some of which is portrayed in this video. Also I like the effect I got with a bamboo flute I picked up a few years ago.

Video is up under Creative Commons Attribution which means as long as you say where you got the material from you can use it in your own creations 🙂

Happiness is Family Shaped (by sarah)