Older blog entries for dgh (starting at number 3)

Phlebotomy

When I was last in hospital, some tests needed running on my blood. I wasn't overly excited about this, but when the doctor told me that a phlebotomist would be with me shortly to take my sample, the loveliness of the word did much to distract me from my discomfort.

Of course, at the time I did not reflect on how near in sound are "phlebotomy" and "lobotomy".

Syndicated 2007-03-09 00:03:13 from Dafydd

dgh @ 2007-02-15T02:17:00

Tonight I saw Attila the Stockbroker and David Rovics at the Loft: both of them informed, topical, policial, angry, wonderful. There was a lot of joining in on the choruses, especially on songs like Burn it Down, I'm a Better Anarchist than You and Guy Fawkes' Table. I can't resist quoting from Attila's Asylum Seeking Daleks: it captures so well my feelings re Daily Mail xenophobia.


Asylum seeking Daleks
are landing here at noon!
Why can't we simply send them back
or stick them on the moon?
It says here in the Daily Mail
they're coming here to stay -
The Loony Lefties let them in!
The middle class will pay...

This satire on crass ignorance
and tabloid-fostered fear
Is at an end. Now let me give
One message, loud and clear.
Golf course, shop floor or BNP:
Smash bigotry and hate!
Asylum seekers - welcome here.
You racists: emigrate!

Syndicated 2007-02-15 02:34:17 from Dafydd

dgh @ 2007-01-30T07:19:00

The other night, I went to see John Cale. We had a great time, though somewhat disappointingly, he stuck to his more rock-y songs. We were pretty excited when we saw the violas on stage, but they never got played. (It turned out that Venus in Furs was first on the set list, but it seems John decided it wasn't the night for it.) The songs I enjoyed were the ones in which he visibly lost himself, which also tended to be the ones with a less conventional sound.

One thing I really appreciated: the venue was non-smoking by John's request.

The main thing I took away was: I hope I have as much vitality when I'm 64. Some 45 years into his musical career, he's still kicking bum. Dal ati, John!

Syndicated 2007-01-30 07:19:33 from Dafydd

challenge

Despite having seen Kathy Sierra speak at GUADEC last year, her keynote at LCA was still engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking. One thing it tied nicely with was Rusty's talk about Wesnoth, in particular the part about stats.wesnoth.org, which collects information about players' progress through the game. Kathy talks about how important it is to get the amount of challenge in the things we make just right­ — the Goldilocks rule. If something is too easy, or too hard, people lose interest.

The Wesnoth statistics allow campaign developers to see when players give up on the game levels they write, or when they complete them too easily. This kind of feedback makes it much easier to get the difficulty just right. Perhaps we should be thinking about other feedback systems we can use to let us know when we're putting the wrong amount of challenge into our software.

Syndicated 2007-01-28 11:07:04 from Dafydd

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!