life

We recently received our annual spamming by Plymouth On Course, who apparently are some sort of umbrella group for the various places in the city that do adult learning courses. Last year I considered signing up for one, but didn't have the money; this year, I have the time and the money (at least, compared to next year), so I've just requested a place on a Beginner's German course. (I considered French, as they have courses all the way up to A-level, but German seems more interesting, and they may have more advanced courses by the time I'm ready to do them anyway).

It starts at the end of September, every Tuesday evening until May.

I have a new plant; it's a spider plant that sprouted from one we're looking after for a friend. It needs a name; any suggestions?

Update: danbjorn suggested Tolstoy, which I like the sound of.

Today was the first day of my second week at PML, and I appear to have survived so far. The work's pretty interesting; I spent the first couple of days writing Perl, and seem to have won; the last few days have been spent getting to grips with one of the major projects I'll be working on. It's a bit of PHP and a lot of Javascript, and my first task has been adding session support, rather than passing dozens of parameters in the URL (which will lead, hopefully, to being able to make the whole thing a lot more user-friendly, or at least developer-friendly).

This afternoon, I also started the second part of my role there --- I'll be doing some sysadmin-type stuff, on a rather more serious level than I've had the opportunity to do before. I'm setting up a brand-new (had to unpack it and everything) server to act as a master for a cluster, and then experiment with SystemImager so that we can easily roll out upgrades.

It's a pretty cool place to work, too; there's various sport and social groups (including cycling and running, helpfully), and there's also apparently an agreement with a gym nearby to allow PML staff to use their facilities.

Looking forward to the rest of the year. (Hopefully not famous last words...)

On Saturday afternoon Gem and I drove up to Dartmoor and wandered around near Down Tor; Dan, Chris Morris, Gareth, and Carl joined us later and we drove across to Hexworthy Bridge for a barbecue. We waded around in the Dart a bit, played a game of frisbee by and/or in the river, then had the barbecue on a sandbank in the middle of the river.

I took something like a hundred and fifty photos over the course of the day; not all of them are much good, since quite a few were me experimenting with macro mode, but plenty will be uploaded to Flickr. Also, if I'm feeling generous, to Facebook.

I said I'd write about it, so I suppose I'd better. A few weeks ago I heard that Richard Stallman was to give a lecture at Manchester University; looking into it, though, it seemed to be prohibitively expensive, mostly because it would require staying somewhere overnight. A little later, though, I discovered he was also giving one at Cambridge University --- and earlier in the afternoon, so it would be perfectly possible to get there and back in one day. Tickets were booked.

The morning of the 30th comes; I get up at 0600 (okay, okay, 0630), get ready, and leave the house. It's not until I'm halfway across the park that I realise I've left behind the maps of Cambridge I'd printed off. Jog back across the park, down the hill, up the stairs, into the office. One page printed, out of paper error. No paper around. Stick that one back in to print on the other side. It prints on the same side instead, but luckily both parts are mostly readable. Back out of the house, to the station, onto the train just in time. I find Gem already on board and playing with her EeePC, and spend the next few hours alternating between sleep and The Selfish Gene.

Skippy joins us at Reading, and spends the last stage of the journey to London arguing about the economics of cars versus public transport with a random stranger. We arrive at Paddington, I get something to eat, then we head across London to King's Cross, then onwards north to Cambridge.

We arrive at Cambridge with no further mishaps, and get the bus into the centre of town. As we get off, we ask the driver where to get the bus to Madingley Road Park & Ride, and he tells us it's just around the corner. After a few minutes waiting, we realise that although the bus that stops here is the right number, it's going the wrong way. We hunt around for the real bus stop, only to see our bus go right past us --- although this does mean we know where it stops now, and Cambridge has public transport that doesn't suck, so we only have to wait a few minutes for the next one.

Madingley Road is quite long; it's several kilometres from the city centre to the Computer Science lab. We spot what we think might be the road before it, and sure enough, the next road has a sign for the Cavendish Laboratory, which we know is on the same road. Skippy presses the bell. The bus goes right past the bus stop. Skippy presses the bell some more. Eventually, the bus pulls into the Park & Ride, about five minutes walk up the road, in the rain. Yay. We find our way to the William Gates Building (oh, the irony), and I get a picture of Hector by the sign before we go in.

The lecture itself is pretty interesting; rms explains that it's not about free software, but rather an answer to a question people often ask when he talks about free software --- can the same rules be applied to things that aren't software? He starts off by explaining a little of the history of free software, and then the history of copyright --- why it came about in the first place, how it has evolved, and how, although the laws we have now were perfectly reasonable a century ago, or even half a century, they're not so useful now. After that, he proposes some possible changes to copyright law, to make it fairer both to authors/artists/musicians and to end-users. He recommends that functional works --- software, recipes, textbooks, reference books, technical manuals, and so on --- be required to be Free-with-a-big-F; "testimonal works" (i.e. works which explain an author's opinions, beliefs, experiences, etc.) should be free to share and copy, but not free to modify, since that just leads to misrepresenting an author's views. Finally, artistic works need not be free to copy, either. He also advocates reducing the length of copyright; ten years, he says, might be more reasonable. He goes on to talk about ways that musicians, specifically, could earn money without the overbearing presence of the record labels, like having a "Donate" button on music players that would automatically pay the musician a small amount of money.

The talk ends, and rms answers questions from people who, it seems, don't quite get where he's coming from. After that, Gem and I purchase some stickers and whatnot to support the FSF, and rms signs my copy of Free Software, Free Society --- but refuses to sign the O'Reilly Emacs book that Gem had brought, because it's not free. Hmm. We head out to the bus stop, and debate the hackability of networked bus stop signs that tell you when the next bus is due --- though this one, for all it's right next to the computer science department of one of the top universities in the world, insists that there's no bus due when, in fact, there is. Oh well. Back to the train, grabbing a cup of coffee on the way. On the train, Skippy and I debate the value of free software for reading data from the onboard computer in modern cars. Back in London, Skippy takes us to CCK (very nice coffee and cake, even if the artwork is, um, "interesting"), and Gem discusses the website with the manager. This is followed by a mad dash across London as we try to get back to Paddington on time for the last train before the sleeper service --- we make it, but barely.

Skippy abandons us again at Reading, and we're left to sit around while the train waits for engineering works. We finally get back to Plymouth just before 0100.

So, as I mentioned recently, I had an interview for a placement at Plymouth Marine Laboratory. I heard back from them a couple of days ago, and so from July I'll be working in the Remote Sensing and Modelling groups. I'll be developing software to deal with scientific data, I think mostly satellite images of Europe and the north Atlantic, for measuring things like ocean surface temperature, chlorophyll levels, etc. Rather cool stuff, and I'm looking forward to it.

So, the last piece of coursework is out of the way and, barring two exams and a demo, that's the end of another academic year. Whether I've passed or not remains to be seen, of course.

On Monday I have an interview at Plymouth Marine Labs, for a year-long work placement with the Remote Sensing and Modelling groups. If I get the place, I'll be developing software to deal with various scientific data. They use mostly GNU/Linux, which will be a nice change from the Uni's Microsoft-whoredom (they use Fedora Core 6, from the looks of their mail headers, but it's better than nothing :).

If I don't get it, I'll just get a temp job over the summer again and carry on to my final year, but it'd be cool to work there and good to get a break from academic work for a while.

On the 30th of April, I'm planning to head up to Cambridge to hear a lecture by Richard Stallman; details here, or TermiSoc plans here. Since I've never been to Cambridge before, and getting from the station to the building in which the lecture is to be held involves a 3+ mile trek across the city, I predict fun times to be had for all.

On the 1st of May, I take over as TermiPresident. Scary. I have plans for the society over the coming year, but they're sekrit. TermiSoc's end-of-term celebration is the 18th of May, though we're not completely decided what's going on. It will likely involve a) beach, b) drinking, c) music, d) burning of foodstuffs, or e) any or all of the above. Attendance is mandatory for TermiSoc members, except for the bit where that was a lie. Non-members are also welcome to come along, though why you'd want to is beyond me. :)

As far as techie stuff goes: I want to get vox populi into a useful state, and get termibot past the prototype stage. I've had ideas for a few other things I could do; more details forthcoming once I have slightly more concrete plans for them.

TermiSoc's annual general meeting was Tuesday; against my better judgement, I put myself forward for the position of president. Showing a lack of common sense that's astounding even to people with experience of TermiSoc, they actually voted for me. So basically, I'm screwed.

I've been teaching myself Haskell; I found a tutorial that doesn't assume you already get functional programming, and it's really quite a nice language; I was going to try learning Scheme, after Dan's tutorial on Monday, but the parentheses were driving me insane. The main problem I'm having with Haskell is dealing with its type system and the IO monad; I keep getting told that I can't do things because my variables are IO strings or whatever, instead of normal ones. Other than that, it's a really nice language; maybe I'll do a tutorial on it next year.

Smalltalk and C++ are still on my list, since they're mandatory for the final-year course I want to take (Plymouth has a system whereby you can get a "Computing and Such-And-Such" degree instead of plain Computing, if you choose from a specific subset of the normally-allowed final-year modules; I'm going for Computing and Software Development). I'll spend some time on both of them over the summer, if all goes to plan.

Just for kicks, the latest psychotic dribble from the Roman Catholic Church: apparently, abortion offends "the dignity and rights of women". They'd be more credible if pro-choicers hadn't been saying for years that banning abortion does exactly that. Bishop Girotti, you fail.

Apparently I don't spend enough money, because for the second time since Christmas I've ordered something, only to realise it's shipping to my old address in Radnor Street---where I haven't lived since last June. D'oh. Hopefully, Nine Inch Nails will be more responsive than the random Amazon seller it happened with last time (who did, to be fair, deliver to the new address, but I had no idea whether they would or not until it actually arrived).

Happy Tuesday, or whatever religious festival you happen to be celebrating now, in the near future, and in the recent past.