2016 — 9 March: Wednesday
It seems very unlikely1 that the rubbish collecting chaps have, as it were, "bin" and gone already. I assume therefore that the current misalignment of my black bin with respect to my gate at the side of the jungle out there owes more to the rapid passage of clumps of air overnight. The bin, after all, is fairly light on its little wheels and only rarely more than 25% full even by the end of each collecting fortnight.
While I would dispute...
... any claims that I live a life of monastic simplicity — though pleading guilty to periods of contemplation and study — most of my clutter these days is of the intangible binary variety. It's become the defining characteristic of this perfectly pleasant phase of my life.
As soon as Uncle ERNIE's...
... repayment cheque has "cleared" (my current bank distrusts HM Treasury2 and is keeping me waiting for a whole week while they see if the payment turns out to be a fake one [and, doubtless, make good use of the extra cash while it's on its way through their fingers]) I shall put some of this final part of my legacy to jolly good use here in Technology Towers.
In odd bursts in between other duties I've been amusing myself by slowly forming a clearer view of the shape, size and prowess of my next Finite State Machine. The design of "BlackBeast Mark IV" — or do I mean "Deep Thought"? — is now more or less finalised, and will be turned into a tangible lump of computing machinery over the next couple of weeks.
I picked up...
... one of its key components — a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD — at the new branch of PC World courtesy of a good "opening day" offer last Friday in Soton. Given the prevalence of data streaming, the "Cloud" and the long-posited "Internet of Things" in the shape of a plethora of more mobile and/or miniature devices, the writing certainly seems to be on the wall for the continued long-term use of desktop PCs in the home. Indeed, BB Mk IV may well turn out to be the Last Gasp of this fascinating endeavour. I shall thus aim to make it a good one. Chaps (monastic or otherwise) need their retirement hobbies to keep them on their toes.
Oh dear!
It seems the cookie may be about to crumble. How very ego-depleting. (Link.)
Job description...
... and rationale, I suspect, for a modern-day philosopher!
As we move away from the center of the spreading circle, its area, representing our secure knowledge, grows. But so does its circumference, representing the border where knowledge blurs into uncertainty and speculation, and methodological confusion returns.
Philosophy patrols the border, trying to understand how we got there and to conceptualize our next move. Its job is unending.
Easy as (2 x "R" x the proverbial slice of) "pie". But now tell me about the "pay". And are these border patrollers armed?
Thanks, Mr Postie...
... I'm looking forward to watching this "mostly true" story:
I first read it in the London Review of Books back when I was rich enough to afford a subscription! — and before it appeared in Bennett's memoir "Writing Home". I'm also hoping it will be better than the rather bland film adaptation of Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" that I tried the other night.
Cleared for take-out...
By ordering my next box of PC bits from good ol' Novatech they are perfectly happy to have me drive down and collect the build in a week or so and only make me pay for it then. Thus the ERNIE clearance time becomes irrelevant. I'm holding off from specifying a graphics card at this point as my present fanless Radeon delivers a perfectly satisfactory result on the 34" Dell at 60Hz via DisplayPort. Mk IV's Linux system disk will be another tiny, ridiculously fast, Samsung 950 Pro M.2 PCIe NVMe format exactly as I put in the i5 Skylake NUC. Fingers crossed, the Asus motherboard will be better-behaved than the Gigabyte one that seems to be intent on making life tricky for me in BB Mk III.
Here's a sneak preview.
It's always fun...
... to tease a programmer. Spurred on (possibly?) by this satirical exchange yesterday about the laudable speed with which his Python can recursively traverse, and update, the entire 'molehole' set of web files in just under a minute...
Me: For any future scanning, you could consider a test that says
"does the "<a href=" part of a hyperlink that ends in .shtml" also
have the string "molehole" in close proximity to the "href=" bit?
If it does not, move along, there's going to be nothing to see or do here...
Brian: Oh, but I already do, as per this line of code
if any(x in tag['href'] for x in (['molehole', '~david'])) or not (tag['href'].startswith(('http'))):
... Brian set to work early this morning. He removed a lump of Python function called "Beautiful Soup" (which had made a tiny mess when re-assembling some bits of my JavaScript as it parsed its way though my hypertext links). Then he knocked up a simple Regex to hunt down my (many) SHTML hypertext links, change just the internal ones (these can simply be re-named to be of file type HTML rather than SHTML) and ignore all the rest since they were obviously pointing to other web sites.
Just look at the difference in the running time: