readme:james's blog

I'm trying to work up the courage to throw my camera.

If it works, then I might get something like this. If it doesn't, I might get something like this.

# posted by Digehode @ 3:05 pm 0 comments

The world is going mad.

A poll of dog owners is used to deduce that 26 percent of UK dogs are "stressed". As a dog owner, I can confirm that when it comes to talking about our mutts, we tend to go a little batty (Awww, babba, watcha want? OH! Ooo's a clever monkey!) Microsoft introduces properly Free licenses - at least, the FSF and Lawrence Lessig think they're free, and who's going to argue? And our celestial neighbour is peering over the fence again.

I'm going to hide under my bed until it all goes away.

# posted by Digehode @ 12:48 pm 0 comments

I've written a tiny little patch for the latest version of CheeseTracker (0.9.9).

It adds extra information about the real-time capabilities of LADSPA plugins.

It's quite handy, because it makes it easy to identify plugins that aren't really intended for using "live", or real-time.

Of course, it would help if all of the plugins identified themselves correctly. Some pretend to be real-time but cause chugging, while others make no such claim and work perfectly well with 5 or more instances.

Anyway, most of them behave.

The patch is on this page, along with instructions for applying it.

# posted by Digehode @ 12:34 pm 0 comments

Steph has a strange, occasional, but medically verifiable problem with anaemia.

As a haematologist, it's easy for her to keep track of her own iron levels, but since they're usually well within the normal range she doesn't do it that often.

Sometimes, however, she seems to have a sudden drop in energy. Just the other day, she became very tired and had trouble keeping herself from passing out.

So, more iron-rich stuff in our diet for a while. I'd make it permanent, but she really doesn't like liver, spinach, cabbage or even beef.

Vitamin C is important in the body's iron processing, so to help Steph make the most of all this food she pulls faces at, I made about a litre of fruit juice. Here's a glass of it:

This stuff is so healthy, it gets up before we do to jog around the block. There's a punnet of strawberries in there, a couple of kiwis, a lemon, an apple, grapes, watermelon and more.

The only ingredient that wasn't fruit was a glass of water, and that's only because it was so thick you had to chew.

# posted by Digehode @ 9:30 pm 0 comments

This one's called blubber.

I've been listening to the Sneaker Pimps' album "Splinter", but didn't really notice until I listened back to this track just how much it was influenced by them. Oh well. One day, I'll do something original.

Many of the sounds in this came from the great XSynth.

Download from my music page in ogg or mp3 flavour.

# posted by Digehode @ 11:24 am 0 comments

The awkwardness of predictive text on my mobile and the practically uneditable result of posting with picoblogger has put me off "moblogging". Until I find a better solution, anyway.

# posted by Digehode @ 6:23 pm 0 comments

Moblog from my mobile phone

# posted by Digehode @ 10:24 am 0 comments

Moblog from my mobile phone

# posted by Digehode @ 10:19 am 0 comments

My first day is over. Education happened. At least, one half of education happened. Hopefully the students were paying attention and did their part, too.

I saw a group of students from last year's Z04CS module in the corridor. I stopped to say hello and find out how things were going. Before they left, they thanked me for teaching them last year.

It's things like that that make the effort, stress and the occasional bout of running in circles with your hands flapping madly in the air worth it.

Being at the mercy of the train opetators, I have plenty of time to tap out blog entries without feeling guilty for not doing something important. here I am, trapped on a train with no way to do very much work related, but I'm just too tired and hungry to take advantage of it.

Oh well.

# posted by Digehode @ 9:42 pm 0 comments

Moblog from my mobile phone

# posted by Digehode @ 4:31 am 0 comments