Author: francis

37 Practices of a Buddha’s Child

Went to a teaching from my Dharma teacher on this text. It’s amazing how so short a text can hide so much information. The whole of the philosophical sweep, including the refutation of the mind-only schools, is in those verses. A profound and excellent teaching.

Keswick

Went to a party near Keswick (Lake District UK). Very pleasant place. Got talking to an engineer who still writes in assembler, working on process control systems.

Paddling

Very tired after 6 weeks of Nomads. Won’t go paddling this weekend, probably bike it with kids.

Irritations

Still can’t get Palm pilot to work, and it won’t use the infrared either. Palm tech help NFG. It looks like I’ll have to track one down on EBay to get the disks and then resell it.

Death

Some friends lost their son (24!) in a road traffic accident on the M6. What can you do or say but be there?

Laptops

Never change your laptop without expecting to lose at least 3 days. Everything almost there now except I can’t get my Palm m505 to synchronise. It’s acting like the device isn’t there. For once reinstalling the Oracle software wasn’t too hard.

Depression and one taste

Not me this time. I was thinking about how in the Mahamudra view, where everything has one taste this is like a condition that depressed people get where they can’t taste their food. A lot of the higher (Buddhist) medative states sound like symptoms of mental distress but approached from a different angle. I wonder if depressives have reached some higher states and then fallen back in past lives because of the difficulty. It may explain why they see the world through such bleak eyes because without the compassion and wisdom that go with it it would seem so hard. This is just speculation on my part, I have never experienced one taste myself. I had a look on google to see if I could give you some URLs to point to that explain the idea of one taste, I’d stay away from the book with that title (one taste), the reviews make me feel like Weber doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There’s a good explanation in The Secrets of the Vajra World.

Wisdom and justice

This is a story idea I’ve had:

Human systems are always imperfect. As experience builds up they modify themselves. How do you guarantee that a decision will always be just and as fair as possible. Simple,  breed judges, make sure that all of their environments are identical as they grow up and then freeze them. Use them once to make a decision and throw them away. It’s a bit macabre, and, of course, like all systems it won’t work, genetic determinism is not the force everyone thinks it is (there’s the rest of the story). It needs a Cordwainer Smith or PKD title like Justice 3423 and the left left egg. (Don’t ask me where that came from)

Anyway, if you want to use this idea, all I ask is an acknowledgement.

Paddling

Swapped the Inazone 242 for a Dagger Redline (losing about £50 in the process), much better boat that behaves itself and will attain and ferry glide properly, lovely old-fashioned adjustable fittings instead of gluing in foam like the Pirhana boats.

Had a serious go in a Liquid Logic Skip which ate my feet. Tried the Wavesport Transformer but in fact it’s not much better than the EZ. Loved loved loved the Riot Air but I think I’d get creamed on big water. Looking for some coaching to help me get off my playboating plateau. Waiting for a call, in fact.

Blessings upon you all.

Well then, well then.

Went to the Everyman to see a production by Broads with Swords

who are an all-female company that do lots sword fighting and so on. The play was about Shakespeare’s female characters always killing themselves and Tara Loft (sic) getting mixed up with them and persuading them not to do it. Lady Macbeth managed to gain control and get herself a better ending at the expense of the others so reality had to be restored. If you didn’t know Bill’s stuff you’d have found it a bit confusing. Also they could have tried saying the blank verse rather than shouting it, which may have helped a bit. I still enjoyed it but the first 15 mins or so were hard work. Ophelia sticking her head in a bucket (which was then used to wash Celopatra’s asp) was very funny.

Werk like, la

Finally know who our manager is, and it is in fact a very intelligent choice. Our group is being realigned with one of the other departments and it all makes sense. Good. Getting down to some solid code delivery, always a nice feeling when things haven’t been going well.

Didn’t get paddling this weekend, still too tired. Don’t know what’s the matter with me, this keeps happening.

Changed something – unit tested it and surrounding code. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t, desk test the code, it works. Chop out driving queries and replace variables with constants, they work. Still the view I’m trying to get working doesn’t. My brain hurts. After 5 hours I think I’ve got a handle on it. It was the test, I think, where I was reusing some historical data and making a change (laziness, I confess) to run it in the new environment. AAAAAARRGGGHHH an’ stuff. I will revisit my test harness on Monday and do something else today that needs doing – had enough testing for a while.

Finally got my hair cut – no longer look like escaped wild man of Borneo from a travelling show. Regrew beard recently, not sure if it’s here to stay but Rosie and the kids prefer it because it doesn’t scratch them. I tried slicking hair back until I could get it cut and looked like Nicholson in The Shining

coming through the door with an axe, had some fun with crazy eyes and loud voice.

We had a survey from the council recently, didn’t have a chance to vent spleen at the 10 ft bus lane that will cause an accident one day because R filled it in. Wanted to put something like the person who put in the 10 foot bus lane at the library should not be allowed near sharp objects and only let out of the rubber room very occasionally. NBD.

Yesterday at Nomads went OK. Difficult to do too much because I didn’t want to scare the little ones. D&J good (hurrah and lawks a mercy).

J at child and family today, still working on difficult behaviour but he’s doing well (and so are R & I, it takes 2 to have a scene).

Tomorrow busy – R running bellboat session at Chester for Cubs and Guides. Me running round taking D to ballet and tap. Sunday off paddling, I think.

Posts

Posted a note on the Today noticeboard saying that I was tired of the blanket coverage of WoMaD on the news and wanted the incompetent, innumerate education secretary to be grilled on why my kid’s school has been forced to make all of the classroom assistants redundant as well as one teacher. It won’t do, making all those promises about education and then breaking them. It’s not there now … probably got moderated out of sight. http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/h2/h2.cgi?board=today (hey, the beeb are using Perl – I thought they were wall to wall MSft).

Stuff

Recently discovered http://www.kuro5hin.org/, and I really like it.

I’m thinking of writing an article on Java vs. Lisp after reading a Paul Graham article http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html. Not that I disagree with him, just that I think the Java crew are standing on the shoulders of giants because of all of the libraries and the open source movement. I think that Lisp would be by far the best for new problems because it isn’t so low level, but with Java you just assemble components.

No work on Jisp, too tired after my holiday.

I really admired the site http://evilempire.ath.cx/, have a look. He has a fresh view on most things, if a bit angry. I sent a mail expressing my opinion and taking the opportunity to indulge in some sarcasm about children’s names.

Paddling

Ran a 3* session at West Kirkby Marine Lake yesterday, did about half of the syllabus. People have a lot of trouble with the hanging draw, and I still don’t know why it’s there, except that it’s probably someone’s pet stroke. The youngsters need to work on their strokes, standard not high enough. Off to Nomads tonight to run a session for the paddlepower beginners.

Ah well, back to work I suppose.

Lambing

We aren’t doing as well as we hoped so 3 of my IT colleagues were sacrificed to keep the shareholders happy. One of them is the best manager I have ever worked for. We didn’t know he was going until the rumour mill told us late in the afternoon. I’ve seen better-handled road accidents. We still don’t know who we are reporting to, what the priorities are, who is responsible for pastoral care blah blah.

Holidays

Whit week just gone I went with the canoe camping club to their Mordiford (nr. Hereford) meet. Had a good week paddling and training people. Paddled the white water section of the Lugg (North of Leominister), which was a little low, but had some good play waves on the old Victorian weirs. The new weirs were very scary and we portaged round them. Symonds Yat is becoming a bit of a joke, with only one decent surf wave below the island. Hopefully now it’s been bought by the BCU someone can sort it out. There’s rumours that there’ll be a fucking committee to manage it, when all is needed is allowing the local paddlers access to build the fish gates up in low water.

Dance Show

Deborah was in a dance show organised by her dance school. It was surprisingly good, the last one was very worthy but naff. I was very proud of her but we were on the wrong side of the stage to see her properly. The video will doubtless follow.

Irritable bowels

Lovely. I know you want to read this. I lost a day at work because of pains in my guts (meaning I had no sleep) and Rosie made me go to the doctor. I’ve got/had a mild dose of IBS, not the runs just the pain. It’s responded well to treatment and I’m OK now. It was lucky I got it sorted before my holiday. I’m toning down the spice in my diet. I missed an initiation from my teacher because I felt I needed to sort things out at home as well.

Ah well, back to the SOS.

Paul Graham’s been at it again, contrasting hacking (writing “good” software)with painting. Very interesting article <Ahref=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html”>http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

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Also found some useful stuff on <Ahref=“http://www.uiweb.com/issues/issue08.htm”>http://www.uiweb.com/issues/issue08.htm – good design comes from giving people choices and working through them; “bad” ideas are good.

Forms again

I can’t get one of our internal servers to use the servlet so I gave up and went back to port 9000 with some alacrity after wasting a day on it.

Lisp

Spending a lot of personal time on this but it beats TV. I managed to get my Java Lisp interpreter (Jisp) to compile but it doesn’t do anything useful yet. It’s interesting building a parser in Java because it doesn’t have goto so writing those state machines is quite hard – I have decided to use recursion instead, as long as the gotos go back to the beginning of the function it should work fine. It occurred to me that I could do something like SAX but it seemed a bit over the top. I’ve started using Eclipse, which I didn’t like originally, but I think that it works when you are writing stuff from scratch, a la open source, but JDeveloper is very good at the old beans and that kind of crap. http://francis.blog-city.com/download.cfm?F=jisp.zip

VIM and CLISP

I’ve abandoned Lisp Studio and started using CLISP and VIM. I like Vim a lot and it works very well matching braces etc. It’s charityware and works very well, I even got it going in KDE running on top of cygwin (after compiling with the GUI switched on). http://www.vim.org

Paddling

Well, light nights here again. Lots of work with the club, most Thursdays at Llangohllen. Did the upper section of the Tryweryn again last week (2 weeks on the trot). Still pretty sore but survived OK and worked on my skills. Still need to make the breakouts near the middle of the graveyard. One tip, get into the eddy behind the tree on river right before it speeds up so you can scout before the current takes you roaring down it.

There is also a route at the bridge with the diagonal wave (Mrs. Something’s bridge?) hard on river left that drops you into the nice eddy, rather than that tricky recirculating bastard on the right.

I must fit a new back rest to the Big EZ cos the old one broke, can only get Pyrhana ones but it should do.

Diary stuff

Didn’t get to Camelot because it wasn’t open. Went to Park Farm near Welshpool. Had a good day. My mother in law has just moved up from Cambridge into a rented house. It’s near the park and the kids like it there. About 15 mins walk from home, just far enough.

Well then, well then.

Paddling the River Nene (Peterborough)

Went with the Canoe Camping Club to a meet at Peterborough. Stayed at a very weird campsite called Yarwell Mill. Costs about £10 a night and only has one toilet block for 200+ caravans. Owners had a bit of an attitude problem. I felt I was paying them so they could do me a favour, a sellers’ market perhaps.The paddling was hard against the wind on the Friday. I was in a sea kayak and one of the kids in a new Piranha Pilot, which the club (pen pads) bought recently. Rosie was in an unladen open with the wind facing. Very hard day.Rosie thinks the pilots are good but I’m not convinced why a sea boat should have so much rocker.

We took Saturday off and went for a wander around Rutland Water, stopping toget some food and stuff at Oakham. Went to Lands End outlet store and spent small fortune on clothes for Deb. Nice meal in a little cafe near Boots (you have to know its there and dow a side entry).

Sunday we did half of the main paddle and got out.

Monday Rosie took Howard and Deb paddling for the morning and I chilled out.Jon went playing with the other kids and said he wanted a fishing rod. Nope. Too cruel.

Lisp

Finally got my hands on Paul Graham’s Ansi Common Lisp book. I’vebeen working with Lisp Studio (see earlier blog) and found a windows version of the Harvard Common Lisp interpreter (which has much more helpful error messages). Also been using good ‘ole Emacs. Paul has also made the text of hisOn Lisp available <Ahref=“http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html”>http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html. I love Lisp,even after a short exposure to it. A lot of the ideas in object orientation aresimply to shoe horn the stuff Lisp has always had. I was working my way through one of the examples and wanted to sort a slightly odd data structure. No problem, just call the system sort with your own inline function that does the comparison for you. I know this can be done in other languages but in Lisp it iseasy and you don’t have to name the function or anything. It just fucking works.

I’ve started looking at building a Lisp interpreter in Java, I found a C example but its full of horrible C- and Unix-isms like setjmp if you get anerror. It’s odd but the C version is only 900 lines of code. Have a look at ithttp://www.civilised.com, there’s also a.ps of a document describing how it was built. Of course, once initialised, it loads a lot of Lisp definitions to get you the rest of the functions. To get asimilar Java thing will take a lot more effort (and you can’t use crap like setjmp to handle errors either). I think Java’s exception handling will work well underneath but hey, it was ripped out of Lisp in the first place methinks. I really hate it when the C code has #defines for == and other standard operators, tho’, totally daft cleverdick stuff. (You can tell I used tohack C for a living, don’t get me started on what makes good and bad style).

At last, the tooth

Finally got it out of my head last Friday 25th. The pain stopped, what can I say? It took a couple of attempts with different calipers from the ones my original dentist used. Now I have a broken filling for repair. The biggest problem was the injections, particularly when one was administered directly into the hole where the tooth used to be and I didn’t expect it.

Treweryn tour (sundae)

Not much to report, did the usual tour down to Bala. A good day.

A surprise

A new sale of the product I work on has been taken away from us and given to another office on the other side of the world. I should be really annoyed but to be honest I’m bored to death with the bastard; let ‘em have it, maybe they’ll finally work out how to write software that actually meets the requirements and even has something approximating an architecture. After the dog’s breakfast they delivered last time I can’t wait.

Off to Camelot tomorrow with the kids, their school is closed because of the local elections.

Very interesting article on <Ahref=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html”>http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

, I had a wander around the site. It inspired me to want to have a go at Lisp again. Got a nice IDE at <Ahref=“http://www.ufasoft.com/lisp/”>http://www.ufasoft.com/lisp/ (freefor non-commercial use). Found an online tutorial at <Ahref=“http://grimpeur.tamu.edu/~colin/lp/node1.html”>http://grimpeur.tamu.edu/~colin/lp/node1.html.

I suspect that I do a lot of what he talks about anyway. I use recursion alot, even in Oracle PL/SQL as well as Java and I tend to write things that are reusable and stuff them in libraries, o-o just makes this easier. I love the Lisp idea of being able to write macros that change runtime behaviours. Lisp seems much easier than Ruby. Like a lot of languages I think its simplicity is what makes it so powerful. Writing a language in itself is also good because it makes it easier to understand.

It was interesting that PG puts down his success and rapid software development down to using Lisp, which gives you the power to do prototypes quickly and then get them working. Java is very low-level and the power actually comes from all of the libraries supplied with it. PL/SQL is based on Ada and starts with better constructs (from a Pascal rather than C++ heritage) and much better database binding. For me Java should be calling PL/SQL procedures, I think this would be very fast and allow you to build anything on top of the procedures. Leave the data in the database, how radical.

Ah, maybe a little project for a Lisp interpreter in Java (probably find one in 5 secs on t’internet)…