Matthew Walton’s Blog

So here’s Christmas. Got presents. Laptop case (designed especially for the 12″ Powerbook and very nice indeed), a gorgeous hand-painted teapot and cup from Deborah (painted by Deborah’s very own hand) which is perfect for a cup of green tea for one, even if everyone else thinks the tea looks like urine. I don’t care – it tastes considerably nicer. Uncle Geoffrey gave me a ten pound note in a cardboard box. He seems to find such things amusing. Nana provided a CD of classical music devoted to the subject of cats, which is really rather nice.

Oh, and Mum and Dad provided the BBC Radio dramatisation of Phillip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, on 6 CDs. Have listened to some, and it’s excellently done.

Dad was a little bit surprised to receive a DVD player from Mum. He clearly wasn’t expecting that — but then Mum wasn’t expecting the lovely silver necklace which he bought for her, especially not after he bought her a very impressive (and expensive) pair of boots a few weeks ago.

Christmas dinner saw the table groaning with food, most of which actually got eaten — probably because only half of the turkey was carved. A huge beast, it has to be the best turkey we’ve ever had. Rectory Farm Shop on the A10 just outside Milton, Cambridge is clearly the place to go for your Christmas turkey. It’s not the cheapest, but it’s worth the extra investment, especially at a time of year when the cook will be most upset by a dry, flavourless bird, and expectations are running so high.

The Christmas pudding was stupendous as well.

Having so many people around does get a bit wearing though. Kevin had one of those logic puzzle things based on a street of people with certain known facts… didn’t fancy figuring it out in my head so I attempted to write a Prolog program to solve it for me. Somewhere along the way I seem to have forgotten most of my Prolog, so things didn’t go particularly well and I couldn’t get it to infer any but the most obvious of things about the problem space. I suspect I didn’t provide the system with enough information, and since it’s clearly a constraint problem over symbolic finite domains, I don’t think GNU Prolog is particularly well-equipped to handle it.

Although having said that, I see no real reason why I shouldn’t be able to solve it in Prolog — I’m just not a good enough Prolog programmer to pull it off. Also tried it in Haskell, attempting to take inspiration from the way Dr. Graham Hutton solved the Countdown numbers game, but the situation’s a bit different and I haven’t quite got the hang of that yet. Might try again today though, as I’m sure people have attempted constraint programming in Haskell at some point. If they haven’t, somebody should.

As everyone probably knows by now, Linus Torvalds and the other kernel hackers gave us an early Christmas present yesterday with the release of Linux 2.6.0 final. Last night I installed it upon my Gentoo box, discovered that the keyboard mappings are still rather screwed, but that X handles things properly. I’ve got almost everything I need on the console, except for #, which is a little worrying. I guess for the time being if I can’t use X for something I can ssh in from my Powerbook and do things remotely, at least until I get the keymaps sorted out.

Framebuffer console works to a point, but it doesn’t like me trying to specify modes. I need to look into that one.

The other night was the company Christmas do, excellent food, excellent company, good venue — couldn’t have been much better really! Here’s to as good a one next year. Assuming I’m still working for them next year, that is… no plans to leave just yet, but you never know.

Well here I am. Pulling myself out of playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic in preparation for another week at work. It’s a very engrossing game, and easily one of the best I’ve played for a long time. Also somewhere up there with the most beautiful. The rendition of the Wookie homeworld, Kashyyyk, is quite spectacular. Tatooine comes over as hot and dusty, and Dantooine is something of a lush paradise. I’ve not seen much more than that yet, but I’m sure the rest will live up to the start. Long live Bioware!

What else? Ah yes. Towel is almost ready for a 0.2.0 release. I’ve decided to follow Murray Cumming’s advice and ‘release early, release often’. He may not have come up with that, but he says it a lot, and he’s right. It does give one a sense of achievement to see one’s release announcements come up on Freshmeat.

My new story is also gradually starting to take shape. I even have a partial map!

This weekend seems to have mostly consisted of games of Worms 3D, periods of excessive Towel hacking (for which I must be grateful to Jonathan, who’s appearance on MSN the other day helped me get going on it even after a week of C++ programming at work), and periods of inexplicable lethargy and tiredness.

As it turns out, the best way to get over the latter is to spend a while going for the gold cup in Super Sheep Challenge 2, then to spend a while drinking wine and hacking Towel. Fixed a bug in the random track selection code today, did lots of work yesterday, and overall it’s becoming increasingly more useful. In fact, there’s not much more stuff on the list to go in before 0.2.0 can be released!

Woohooo!

And I’ve got a new idea for a story! It quite exciting, definitely inspired by Terry Pratchett but hopefully it won’t come off as a clone. It shouldn’t do, as I’ve only read about three of his books. I also expect to be taking inspiration from the late Douglas Adams, Tom Holt, Diana Wynne Jones and various other authors, including a few who might even be writers of serious books.

It’s not going to be a serious story though.

In other news, we released Towel 0.1.0 yesterday. Nobody’s downloaded it yet, but it doesn’t really matter… if we got loads of users at this point, they’d all decide it’s dreadful and never come back, when all it really needs is some love. Hopefully over Christmas I’ll get time to fix its random crashes.

Oh yeah, and the company give us an extra 2 days off at Christmas (one day, two half days) without taking it out of our holiday. All hail CacheLogic.