A tail of two cats (by sarah)

I have received two messaged whilst being in London this week about the cats back at the Mill - Poor Betsy, Barbara's old black cat who looks like Minnie, our black cat, was off colour - not eating and the such like but still purring away and sitting merrily by the fire. Just to make sure she was fine they took her to the vets and it turned out that the strange coughing she was doing wasn't hair balls but lung cancer 🙁

So Betsy is no more :'(

They buried her this morning and Al says he took Jean to see her to explain but not overly labour the point. Jean initially asked when Betsy would wake up. It was explained she wouldn't - Jean has apparently spent the day mulling this fact over.

The second cat message is on a slightly lighter note - Mystery Cat was harassing one of the kittens so Alaric picked him up and tried to throw him gently to the other side of the stream so he'd have to walk to a way to get back to where the kitten was cowering up a tree. However Alaric slipped and accidentally dropped the poor cat into the stream - it instantly leaped out and instead off running away padded wet and miserable over to Alaric - meowed pathetically and rubbed up againt him - just to make sure he felt completely responsible and guilty.

Alaric was mortified - my dad is always threatening to trebuchet the cats Mystery Cat so he has named Alaric the Cat Soaker!

Al feels very guilty.

Smelly Cat (by sarah)

Poor Minni has been getting abit smelly and then I noticed that her bottom looked a bit odd and she kept cleaning it all the time. She was also beating up the poor kittens and turned out to be prime suspect for poor Heliums injuries last week.

I picked her up to look at her properlly and lo! She appeared to be leaking the brown stuff which was to say the least skuzzy plus it had me worried - I thought she might be having a prolapse and got very unhappy as I thought she was going to have to be put down.

Al took her to the vet this morning and much to our relief it was an infected anal gland so after some rough prodding/cleaning out of the gland by the vet (resulting in icky brown slime) and some antibiotics injected into the infected area she seems quiet happy and far more even tempered than she has of late.

The down side is that obviously this was another £30 odd quid and she is going to have scar tissue there making her more prone to this sort of infection in the future :/

Still all in all we now no longer have a Smelly Cat!

I saw something sad today (by alaric)

My train to take me to London for the week leaves from Stroud, a small town near us with a train station. It was me, Jean, and Sarah in the van; Sarah's father was coming down on one train, then my train was heading back about an hour and a half later, so we'd hang out in Stroud for a bit, then he'd take my place and drive Sarah and Jean back in the van.

The journey from our village down to Stroud goes via Painswick, a picturesque village frequented by tourists. Because of this, it has a commercial area along the main road through it, with lots of tea shops and pubs. Well, that makes it sound like a thriving metropolis - it has a few tea shops, two pubs, a post office that also functions as a stationer and newsagent, an excellent little chemist, and various antiques and crafts shops. Which is a thriving metropolis compared to our village of Cranham, which has a single pub and a post office that opens two mornings a week (soon to close).

If you don't want to read a graphic account of a cat being seriously injured by a vehicle - stop reading here.

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Insomnia (by alaric)

yawn

5:30am and I haven't slept a wink yet! I really need to sort out my lifestyle so I get (a) exercise and (b) time to think every day. Time to think is important for me; if I don't get enough, then when I go to bed, I lie there and think. Lots.

Tonights thoughts have included:

1. Some ideas about how whole-program transformations (eg, the macroexpander/partial evaluator and the OO system) in CHROME might be handled. The OO system needs to be a whole-program transformation rather than just some macros using the normal macroexpander since things like inheritance graphs and method lists for generic functions need to be accumulated together; most Lisps handle that with macros that destructively update data structures, but I'm trying to design a system without rampant mutation, so need a whole-program code walk to do this. Clearly, since we want to be able to write macros that produce generic functions, methods, and the like, we need to do this AFTER normal macro expansion, but before the compiler gets its hands on it.
2. Some ideas about separating the generic function/method system - the dispatch part of Lispy OO - from the classes-inheriting thing. Subtype relationships that are used to dispatch GFs should be doable with plain predicates - pair? my-record-type? etc. Or more complex predicate expressions on groups of arguments, so we can support multivariate typeclasses in the Haskell sense, as a rich interface/implementation system as well as a traditional records-with-single-inheritance class system. To do this properly we also need declarations that one predicate implies another - (number? x) -> (integer? x) - so that a method on numbers will be used for integers, yet a more specific integer method can override it. I'm not sure how decidable the "most specific method wins" thing can be with complex multivariate type predicates, though. Must experiment and ask knowledgeable formal logic folks.
3. Thoughts about future computer architectures. The drive is for more speed, but these days, most CPUs are idle waiting for memory to feed them code and data, or (much more often) for the disk, network, or user to feed them. The only places where the CPU maxes out tend to be highly parallelisable tasks - server stuff handling lots of requests at once, games and other audiovisual things, and scientific number crunching. This suggests to me that a future direction of growth would be one or more high-bang-per-buck MISC processors embedded directly into SRAM chips (sort of like a CPU with an onboard cache... but the other way around, since the CPU would be much smaller than the SRAM array) which are bonded to the same chip carrier module as a set of DRAMs. One or more of CPU-and-SRAM and some DRAM chips are then all designed together as a tightly-coupled integrated unit for maximum speed due to short traces and the lack of standardised modular interfaces between them (like DIMMs and CPU socket standards) meaning that the interface can evolve rapidly. The whole CPU+SRAM+DRAM unit is then pluggable into a standardised socket, which motherboards will have several of. The result? Lots of cores of low power consumption reasonably fast CPU with high speed access to high speed memory. And for those demanding games/media/scientific tasks? The higher-end modules will have FPGAs on as well...
4. Forget nasty complex unpredictable memory caches: have a nonuniform physical address space (with regions of memory of varying speed) and let the OS use the virtual memory system to allocate pages to regions based upon application hints and/or access statistics. Not having cache tag and management facilities makes for more chip area to put actual memory in.
5. We've been wondering about getting goats lately. Goats are useful creatures; they produce milk (which can be turned into cheese) and they produce decent wool (just not in the quantities sheep produce it). Their milk and cheese don't make Sarah ill the way cow-derived versions do. Plus, we need something to come and graze our paddock. We've been doing a little bit of research and apparently two goats would be about right for the space we have. We'd need to put an inner layer of fence around the paddock to keep them in while still allowing the public footpath, and we'd need a little shed for them to shelter in. But thinking about setting things up in the paddock, I'm now wondering if it would be a good idea to build a duck run in there too, down at the bottom by the stream, all securely fenced against foxes and mink and with a duck-house up on stilts in case of flooding, but with a little pond dug out for them (connected to the stream by a channel with a grille over it to prevent escapage). It would be a convenient place to have the ducks, and it would make a good home for them, I think.

It's now 6am. Do I try and go to sleep, or try and last the day out? Hmmm...

Of Ice and Sheep (by sarah)

I am frozen at the moment - the ice just isn't going so here in the valley we have ice all day leading to slabs of ice and icicles all over the newely instated waterfall and riverlets of ice near the road.

On the plus side we finially have sheep 🙂

The field is full of wooly bar sheeps and there even appears to be some with the characteristic woolly faces meaning that we think we have the villages Cotwold Lions! The farmer who's sheep they are is the current designated looker afterer of the Cranham villages flock so we are very happy 🙂