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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More subterranean fun (by alaric)

A water expert came to look at our stream yesterday, for two reasons: the fact that water came through the wall of our house raises some worrying questions about the structural integrity of the tunnel the stream goes through under our garage, and up at the top of the waterfall, the raging flood eroded away some stones underneath a number of large heavy stones, and one day they'll come crashing down, possibly blocking the tunnel and creating a huge flood.

He turned out to be a really interesting guy, just as fascinated by underground stuff as I 🙂

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