Help Request (by sarah)

The builder has just left and we now have a tinsy winsy little problem - the floor has probably got to come up, the plaster striped from the walls and all the kitchen units ripped out - so no working sink etc... This is all going to take a long time.

What we could really do with is some storage space - we have books, kitchen stuff, Jean toys etc... you know all that small stuff you have on shelves etc...

Just to be really cheeky and impose ourselves on our friends I am asking if people could store like one box each of our stuff? This is mainly so that we can get a useful bedroom back for Jean 🙁

When I say the floor needs to come up - I mean they need to drill out concrete as the sealent was in shreds and its sucked up nasty water.

Wish I hadn't almost finished unpacking yet 🙁

Of Gravel and Bogs (by sarah)

I've had two falls in two days - the first was on Wednesday Al was mucking about with the spring and I felt we needed to get on with tidying the house up so I decided to go back the longer but slightly easier way across the field rather than through the barb wired fence.

this turned out to have been a bit of a mistake as half way across the filed there is normally a little boggy patch - said patch was now a little stream which me being me, still tried to get across - whilst wearing sandles. As predicted I sank up to my knee in filthy cow juice water and fell over in the bog. Sigh.

Then today I was out in the stable rotating the luandary when I hard a loud crash from the house - fearing that somehting horrible had happened to Al I ran out of the stable only to go skidding on the gravel landing hard on my right hand and hip, somehow I also managed to highly graze my left knee - not entirely sure how I managed this nor how comes I ended up laying on my back in the pouring rain with Al standing above me asking if I was all right looking a bit panicky.

Grrr... and ouch is all I'm gonna say and that this is going to make waxing my legs for the weekend interesting :/

Possibly Officially an Artist? (by sarah)

Yesturday at the Scouting Sunrise Ceromony which I'm hoping to do a more indepth post about over on the scout blog I found out that my painting of cricket gear has finially come back from the framers and has been hung in the Village cricket club 🙂 I will take a photo of it on the Feast Weekend so you know what I am talking about!

I donated it to them but was too shy so actually just pounced one of the people I knew and said, 'do you think they'd like this?' They've had it framed and basically put straight up and I painted the thing when I still 14 right at the very beginning of GCSE's!

I am amazed that its gone up and was wondering if now that I have artwork out there in the * cough * big wide world, weather I count as an artist or something 🙂

The Bowser Song (by sarah)

Sung to the Badger Badger Badger tune in an annoyingly enthusiastic way normally by me.

Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bucket,bucket,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser, Arg! A peeing Teenager, no a peeing teenager Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,Bowser,....... (loops)

There is a Bowser dance that goes with this too which involves dipping at the knees and bobbing staight back up again whilst holding a bucket or container of chioce!

Garbage collection (by alaric)

I read this paper shortly after it came out:

One Pass Real-Time Generational Mark-Sweep Garbage Collection

However, I've spent ages since trying to find it again. Mainly due to confusing it with The Treadmill: Real-Time Garbage Collection Without Motion Sickness, which describes a somewhat related algorithm that uses a read barrier to support mutation.

The algorithm described in the first paper is pretty amazing. It's simple, effective, fast, real-time, and requires no read barrier. The downside, however, is that it requires that pointers only ever point back in time to older objects. Which is fine if you have a purely functional language, since an object being created can only ever obtain references to objects that already exist at creation, and those references can never be updated to point to a newer object thereafter. However, you cannot then use any optimisations that use mutation "under the hood" such as in-place update of linear values.

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