Judith can now change the active tab in my web browser (if the mouse pointer happens to be somewhere over the tab bar anyway). I suppose I needed quick reactions anyway while sitting with her at my desk, especially since she likes to make the occasional grab for my coffee cup ...

Apparently I had nothing better to do while shopping and so was semi-consciously analysing the key change in the theme tune to "The Gilmore Girls". I remarked to ghoti that it was unusual for a soap theme tune to include a key change, and so we were trying to remember various soap theme tunes. Later:

cjwatson: And then there's "Neighbours", which was apparently written by a six-year-old.
ghoti: How did the theme tune to "Home and Away" go?
cjwatson: All I can remember is the bit right at the end: ♫ Home and away ♫
ghoti: ♫ Together each day, home and away ♫
cjwatson (after some thought): Wasn't it ♫ Closer each day, home and away ♫?
ghoti: Oh yes, of course.
cjwatson: Why are my neurons bothering to remember this?
ghoti: Isla Fisher.
cjwatson: Point.

cjwatson.dreamwidth.org. Mostly for reading convenience for now until I decide whether I want to do anything more interesting with it.

We started Judith on solids yesterday: a little earlier than recommended, but she was HUNGRY ALL THE TIME. We gave up on the high chair fairly quickly as she was having trouble staying upright in it, and getting rather upset. Two spoonfuls (by which I mean "little bit on the end of a spoon") of apple sauce later, she fell asleep. Eating is clearly hard work.

After finishing the first feed, I'm not entirely sure how much apple sauce was inside her and how much was on the bib, but there was certainly lots of the latter. She gave an enormous burp and then managed to grab a clean bit of her bib and wipe her face with it. We were very impressed.

Today she ate about three or four teaspoonfuls of apple sauce; the guidelines for how much you should expect your baby to want when starting them on solids say about one teaspoonful. Hardly any of it went on her bib, compared with yesterday.

I don't think we're going to have problems getting this one to eat for a while!

If you'd told me in German classes at school that, twelve years later, I'd be reading German bedtime stories to my daughter (managing to read far enough ahead to put some expression into it), I don't think I'd have believed you!

("Als der kleine Nachtbär kam" is very sweet.)

"It came upon the midnight clear" to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne".

My inbox has been a disaster area for years. Even with 500+ lines of procmail filtering, and archiving quite a lot of stuff, it was approaching 12000 messages and there was no realistic prospect of me ever getting round to replying to most of that. On top of this, both work and personal mail came into the same inbox, so if unarchived work mail for the day caused some personal mail to scroll off the top, I probably wouldn't get around to the personal mail. The whole thing came up in my performance review at work, and after a friend poked me about not having replied to "hey, let's catch up"-type mails for ages, I finally pulled my finger out and decided to try Inbox Zero.

Six days later, I have: three empty inboxes (work, Debian, and personal); one mailbox containing what used to be in my inbox, from which I've archived about 2500 mails elsewhere; one to-do (or "to reply to") mailbox with five items in it; and some happy people with prompt replies from me. Moving my old inbox aside would achieve nothing if I weren't dealing with new things coming in or making progress with its former contents, so this seems like a pretty good result so far.

Thing I haven't got right so far: I'm now checking my e-mail too often because the inbox is so shiny and clean that I can't quite get over it. :-) I'm spending next week in London, so that should forcibly help me out of that habit.

Thing I don't like about Inbox Zero (but fortunately is a non-essential component): the recommendation to use very few archive folders. Aside from not especially liking the idea of relinquishing all my mail to Gmail, I find that I'm much more likely to be able reliably to identify the topic identifying its folder (and then maybe to pare that down by sender or something) than I am to be able to identify a halfway-useful set of search terms. If I went back and labelled everything to match my topic-based folders then I might be able to use a single archive folder, but I don't really see the value in bothering with that. I don't often find myself spending much time searching archive folders, and when I do it's usually when I'm running statistics on things like bug folders. I'll ignore this bit unless and until it becomes a problem.

Edit: Which all means "if you've sent me personal mail expecting a reply and I haven't replied to it yet, I probably won't, so please resend it".

Thanks for all your kind words following Mum's death.

A tremendous number of people came for the funeral (and some to view the body the day before as well); lots of family but also a contingent from our church back in Belfast, Dad's male voice choir, and others. Mum would have been pretty chuffed, I think. We spent quite a bit of time organising everything, so once the day came it ran very smoothly - just as well because of course we were in no state to do anything complicated. Joan read the first reading (Wisdom 3:1-6,9) and did very well (I decided not to try to read or sing). Canon John and Eileen from St. Colmcille's in Belfast both gave moving tributes.

Due to space constraints we couldn't carry the coffin out of the church, but Mum had wanted to be carried where possible ("And devout men carried Stephen to his burial", Acts 8:1), so we held a brief procession down the street in front of the church, and then again from the hearse to the grave; Dad, Ashley, and I helped with the second lift.

We laid long-stemmed roses in the grave.

Afterwards, we had tea in the church hall and then went back to Dad's. These days I mostly see my cousins at weddings and funerals, so it was good to catch up with some of them even on such an occasion, and I have a few more contact details than I previously had. Danny (my oldest friend, from Belfast) very kindly came over on short notice too, and I gave him a lift back to the airport in order to catch up a bit more. It's been too long.

It's seemed very quiet since then, and the hardest thing is remembering to use the past tense from time to time, or saying "Dad's house". I'm one of the executors of Mum's will, so on Thursday I had to go to a solicitor's and take an oath, which was a new experience. The will was very simple, though, so there is very little else I need to do there.

Mum passed away on Wednesday 4 June, after a 15-month battle with leukaemia. She was 67. The funeral will be on Tuesday 10 June.

ghoti, Benedict, and I had gone out for dinner with her and Dad on Monday evening, when she was by all appearances doing quite well; but she took a fever in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and we believe suffered a brain haemorrhage not long afterwards. We were all summoned urgently to the hospital on Tuesday morning, and my sister, her husband, ghoti, and I all spent the day with her. She remained unconscious all that day, and my brother-in-law had to go home to look after their children. On Wednesday morning she was agitated before we arrived and was asking for us. After we got there, she spoke to us a little, and was clearly at least aware that we were there. While she had some discomfort, she said she wasn't in any pain, and after the nurses gave her a sedative to calm the agitation her breathing became quite regular. We stayed with her by her bedside that morning, talking to her, singing a little, and praying. Around 11:45, she simply stopped breathing.

Mum was a constant figure throughout my childhood. While I'm told she was often out on her work for the church (she did a lot of work setting up Parish Pastoral Councils, and indeed lectured widely on the topic in later years; she represented our diocese on the Irish Commission for the Laity), I have hardly any childhood memories that didn't feature her. She was a loving and caring mother who was a fount of quiet wisdom and common sense, and her outstanding abilities as a teacher shaped my young mind too. My happiest memories are of running around the house as a small child with Mummy in the kitchen, a safe presence full of love and warmth. I remember her taking me back and forward to school and to music lessons, always interested in the events of my day. Even once I went to university and was, to tell the truth, often too distracted by studies or my social life to remember to call home, she always made a point of keeping in touch. After university she and Dad supported me far beyond any call of duty, helped me to build a life for myself, and nurtured and shared my happiness in marrying ghoti. I was privileged to be able to spend time with her as an adult as well as in childhood. She accepted Benedict as her own grandson without the slightest question, and was just as loving a grandmother as a mother. We were joyful beyond measure to be able to share the news of ghoti's pregnancy with her, and for her to be able to see the ultrasound scans shortly before her death, although we are deeply saddened that she will not be present for the little one's birth.

Mum, there will always be a hole in my life now that you're gone. You made me into the man I am today, and I owe you everything. I love you, and I will miss you terribly. You led an unselfish and saintly life, and I have no doubt whatsoever that you have found your reward in Heaven. Some day I hope to see you once again.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.

Dear Lazyweb:

ghoti and I were trying to explain a strange shape to xanna and Jacob in the hope that they knew the proper geometric name for it. This is the shape of the containers that the ice lollies we like come in (old but still accurate picture, search for "Jubbly"). It's the original tetrahedron shape used by Tetra Pak, now called the Tetra Classic (indeed the pack is so labelled). It's not a regular tetrahedron, though: it's constructed from four isosceles triangles. It's most easily constructed using this net (apologies for the dodgy quality of my Inkscape use):



Fold it such that edges A meet; in doing so edges B will also meet, along with edges C.

MathWorld reckons that it's a special case of an isosceles tetrahedron, but that only requires opposite pairs of the tetrahedral edges with the same length as A to have the same length, whereas in fact four edges have the same length in this shape.

Does anyone know if there's a proper name for this polyhedron? Doubly-isosceles tetrahedron or something?

Dear Sky News,

"Breaking news: NATO say two of its soldiers killed in eastern Afghanistan"

While I realise that there is some contention about whether organisations are grammatically singular or plural, I don't think you get to dodge the problem by treating them as both in the space of four words ...

(Apologies to any who find nitpicking such a statement to be tasteless. My mind just works that way, particularly in airports after no sleep.)

ghoti, Benedict, and I have just got back from Spode Music Week, our first in its new home. We had a wonderful time although I at least am pretty tired, and ghoti is sleeping so I assume she is too ...

The course music was, on the choral side:

• Britten: Hymn to St. Cecilia
• Brahms: Fest- und Gedenksprüche
• Tallis: Puer natus est nobis (Mass setting)
• Davy: Salve Regina (sung at the end of Compline)

... plus a good deal of liturgical music. In orchestra:

• Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade (third movement)
• Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio espagnol (fifth movement)
• Tchaikovsky: Waltz from The Sleeping Beauty

The string orchestra had rather less preparation time :-), and played:

• Holst: St. Paul's Suite (Dargason)
• Grieg: Holberg Suite (Sarabande and Gavotte)
• Handel: a movement from a Concerto Grosso, though I've forgotten which one

We did a scratch performance of Show Boat, and I sang Schubert's An die Musik (accompanied by Charles) in the last night concert, which seemed to go reasonably well.

As usual, there was lots of impromptu/sight-read music-making, the highlights for me being a five-voice arrangement of the Londonderry Air, some rather good six-cellos work (which unfortunately I couldn't join because I picked up a stinking cold a couple of days from the end and had to retire to bed), and I'm told GSJ's nine-part recorder arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody was amazing.

I doubt I'll have much of a voice for the next few days, but it was definitely worth it!

Some random bloke just asked me "are you going to scoop that up then?" upon seeing my dog urinate. He was behind her, too, so I'm sure he couldn't have been confused. From his tone he just felt like having a go.

Sadly the reply "what should I use, a hairdryer?" only occurred to me afterwards.

I had a considerable amount of inconvenience when moving house due to being unable to contact my ADSL provider, Metronet. Eventually I ended up changing telephone number (because I couldn't get a MAC, and because I work from home and therefore needed to ensure almost continuous ADSL service) and switching to a new ISP. Recently I found out that I'd forgotten to cancel the old telephone number, and did so; this finally got Metronet's notice, or at least the notice of one of their computers. Here's my response to their e-mail, in the hope that it will be useful to anyone else who might be considering using this ISP.

(This is a bit intemperate, but, given the history, "If you wish to cancel your broadband service with us, you must inform us of your request" got on my nerves, and I wanted to see if anyone was at home in their sales department. I wonder what they'll do once credit card requests start being denied due to the expiry date changing?)

( response )

It's very foggy here at the moment, and just next to the trees in front of our house (and elsewhere, although it's particularly noticeable in front of our house because there's no road noise) there's a really cool rainy-crackling kind of sound. I can't quite tell whether it's leaves freezing, water condensing inside the bark and forcing the bark to expand, water condensing onto the leaves and dropping as a sort of localised rainstorm, or something else. Does anyone know the answer?

In one day's time I will be in the church waiting for the wonderful and beautiful ghoti to walk up the aisle. I'm three parts excited, two parts a shivering pile of nerves, and at least seventeen parts deliriously happy. Hooray!

New Ubuntu Foundation Announced

Since I've been named to the advisory board, I might not be exactly the most unbiased observer around here, but hey. Opinions obviously my own and not necessarily those of Canonical or the Foundation, etc., etc.

I'm pretty happy about this development, really. Once the press-release gubbins is stripped away, the greatest benefit I see is that it explicitly calls out the rationale for the Foundation as the "philanthropic and non-commercial" nature of the Ubuntu project. Any time a company decides to contribute to free software, or perhaps especially when one starts up that way, people - rightly or wrongly, but naturally - have concerns about its motives; I hope it will alleviate many of those concerns to have Ubuntu explicitly separated out a bit more from Canonical, and perhaps attract more developers who previously didn't want to feel as if they were doing unpaid work for a company. There are a number of precedents for the company/foundation model: Netscape/Mozilla and Red Hat/Fedora come immediately to mind. The Mozilla Foundation is in good shape these days (after a somewhat shakier start), and while it's too early to tell in the case of the Fedora Foundation it's certainly got considerable momentum behind it.

The five-year support thing is something we've been talking about since the very first company meeting, but it didn't make sense to introduce it until we'd been around long enough and doing a good enough job that people would actually believe that kind of talk from a start-up. I'm hopeful that it will get us into the sorts of mainstream corporate environments where they won't open the door to people who only do support for 18 months. Plus, from a purely selfish point of view, it's good to know that my employer plans to be around for the next five years! :-)

I don't know yet whether I'll be employed by the new Foundation or continue to be employed by Canonical/Fieldwave. Obviously I'll still be accountable to the same man at the top no matter which. Still, interesting times, and - with any luck - in a good way.

My respiratory system appears to be full of gunk. I'm currently wondering if a good healthy dose of cleansing beer would help clear it out, or at least make me less uncomfortable ...

I at least had a lovely morning with ghoti, and have got a reasonable amount of OpenSSH hacking done this afternoon to reduce the guilt quotient of my to-do list. I think it's probably time for some Lemsip now.

Just when I thought I'd cleared out all the showstoppers for my current goal at work by means of some late-night hacking yesterday, another one pops up and as an extra bonus is four times as hard to solve. Anyone know anything about futexes, preferably how to make them go away damnit?