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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Not Kevin and Perry but Jean and Teddy (by sarah)

So Jean is now two - at the time of writing this post whcih will probably be vastly different to the time of posting it on the actually blog, she has been two for under 24 hours and her behavour today has been attrocias.

I will not reiterate every single thing but just the main one - there she was looking all angelic on a park bench when an elderly lady came over to coo as they have a habit of doing - the result?

Jean through her bekker at the woman then hit me when I intially told her off, the old woman retreated rapidly looking scandalised and Jean dived off the bench and tried to run away from me. I caught her, which she wriggled and protested about, forced her back into the puchchair and straps with an explanation of what she had done wronge. She was still going, 'Nononono.' and scouling at me so I crouched down and told her off in a more structured way where upon she grabed the finger I was waggling at her and made chopping actions at me, I told her she better not bit me and she hesitated, I told her I'd trust her - at this point she bit me.

She got a light tap on the back of her hand and told that she had hurt mummy at which point she said, 'No!' I showed her the teeth marks which she then proceeded to look upset about and kissed the finger repeatedly.

I have never seen her behave so badly before 🙁 Once she realised she'd actually upset and hurt me she was much better but still! Of course it probably didnt help that I had lost track of time and it was about an hour after she normally goes down for her nap 🙁 Also if she has the cold I have then she is probably feeling really really grumpy but I cant let her get away with it. :'( Terrible Twos here we come 🙁

A Bloody Tail of Blades and Teeth (by sarah)

As some people already know we are currently staying in Hammersmith with Andy Bennet and it was in his kitchen that the grizzly horror story begain.

He was cooking us dinner and I was feeding Jean I wasn't paying attention whilst feeding her a piece of thinly sliced italian sausage a sharpe pain shot through me and a started Jean sat back looking worried. She had accidently bitten the tip of my finger, and her sharpe little teeth had scraped off some of the skin next to the nail and was proceeding to bleed annoyingly. We then established that Andy and no plasters and settled for holding it with a wetwhip cleaning pad thing.

There was then a conversation about Andys food processor and the fact that the blade he was using to make the pesto was uber uber sharpe and was kept in its plastic casing still becuase it was that sharpe. He make the pesto with no trouble or injury but then he decided to wash it up so it wasn't lurking around being dangerous. I'm afriad I was chatting to him and hence distracted him whilst he was drying it resulting in one sliced finger. He pressed it shut in the hope that it would start bleeding which we thought had worked until it come to dishing the food up when the strain of being moved about must have been to much for it.

Two peoples blood in the kitchen in one night! Good job the only other person eating was Al (besides there wasnt actually much blood and non of it got into the food).

A Flaffle Disappointment (by sarah)

I discovered a new food that was YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY last week - me and Alaric were taken to Goldersgreen for dinner and there we discovered the delight of flaffles in a sort of cross between a pitta bread and tortia with some with some really nice humous and other sort of aubagine dip thing.

So yesturday imagine my joy when looking for food for me an Jean I come across a chickpea flaffle, in a medaterrian style flatebread in the first I came across that I could get into easily with the pushchiar (Happened to be a Starbucks so things werent exactly cheap!). Now I knew it wouldn't be as good but I was severlly disappointed with it so now I'm thinking I have two options - a) hunt around for the best flaffle there is or... b) find out how to make them myself and get good at it? Oh well looks like it'll be about ten yrs before I get the yummy again 🙁

Still the flaffle tasted very familiar to me which has been puzzling me since I first tasted (Well actually since the second time I tasted it as the first time I'd accidently got Alarics and therefore could taste nothing but chillis!). I think it is a taste remaniscant of something that my nan used to make but I really don't have a clue.

I'm also awear that I have probably spelt stuff wrong as I'm running on phonetics here!