Diary of an Information Technology call girl
 
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in (I'm not here right now, please email a message)'s LiveJournal:

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    Friday, May 9th, 2008
    5:12 pm
    Stay here for a minute whilst I go and get some ice creams.

    I've spent the last week on call, which means being paid to stay home and play with Freda. Since the weather's gone from winter to summer with about a week of spring, we took Freda to the park yesterday. Her first time on a swing, and she worked out how to lean into it to make the swing swing! She was amazed to see all the other children there running around.

    Sunday is [info]arkady's baptism. So if I'm going out it should really be tonight. What's on? What are you going to? (Oh, and I haven't read LJ in a week again.)

    Thursday, May 1st, 2008
    11:51 pm
    In love with love.

    We committed democracy this evening and saw a spectacular rainbow, a double bow with supernumary bows inside the primary. [info]arkady got a photo:

    [rainbow]

    This week at work I've been Duty Engineer, which means parceling out tasks to others. Sorting monitoring emails does your head in. (It'll fatten the CV: "supervisory duties as required.") On call as of 6pm tomorrow, laptop power socket playing up after having been fixed on Tuesday. No BiFest for me. Arse. (Or, rather, not.)

    Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
    11:15 pm
    Here's to the next five.

    Yesterday was [info]arkady and my fifth anniversary. We've both been so exhausted and/or ill that we, er, forgot. But we remembered on the way home! And of course there's a Freda to remember it by!

    Love you, Rose :-*

    Tonight, Arkady, Freda, [info]redcountess and I met up for pintage with [info]kest and [info]mattp, fresh off the train from Whitby. Liz has had a haircut and looked unbelievably gorgeous tonight.

    I envy their Whitby good time unbelievably. I am reading all your LiveJournal posts about your eldergoth hot tubbing and losing the football and so forth and envying you as well. On the other hand, I understand it was the quietest Spa ever with tickets going for £10 on the night. Top Mum can't say they haven't thoroughly earnt it. And the thieving scum still owe me a fucking bucket of money for October 2006, so don't expect a shred of sympathy from me. I'll stop calling them that when a cheque arrives. And clears. And in conclusion, Carthage must be destroyed.

    Saturday, April 26th, 2008
    11:37 pm
    Mama used to say.

    [info]redcountess didn't make it to Whitby this weekend after all, having an appointment on Monday to sort out paperwork to beat the drooling lackwits of the DWP. So we've been pottering about at home. [info]arkady is nearly over the flu and Freda is fully of bouncy baby crack as usual.

    I hope to pop out to the Pembury tomorrow evening, as I'm on call from next Friday for a week. Anyone else?

    Friday, April 25th, 2008
    5:03 pm
    LiveJournal dreaming.

    This morning's dream: I dreamt that Hilary Clinton was working in a fast food kitchen, with no-one realising who she was. She was thirtyish, five feet tall and looked like [info]rosefox. A co-worker worked out who she was and she told him "don't be silly." However, he was spreading his suspicions on a message board for fast food workers.

    What it means: The US Democrats on my friends list post too much.

    Thursday, April 24th, 2008
    10:07 pm
    Even the Free Software Foundation doesn't understand the GFDL.

    Has anyone ever gotten a straight answer from licensing@fsf.org about GFDL queries? I have never even heard of an answer from them that isn't their Magic 8-Ball imitation. "Reply hazy, read the license text and ask your own lawyer." Our lawyer is Mike Godwin and he says it makes his head hurt. YOU WROTE THE DAMN THING. WHAT DID YOU MEAN? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? ANSWER ME!

    In fairness, the FSF contact page says licensing@fsf.org will help with "questions about the GPL and free software licensing." Even the FSF has given up trying to make sense of the GFDL. The new version can't happen soon enough.

    (Provoked by asking for help with the reuse FAQ and the likely utter unfeasibility of audio versions of GFDL text. The latter is one of the best arguments I can think of for running screaming to CC-by-sa as absolutely soon as possible and throwing the GFDL into a fire.)

    Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
    2:05 pm
    It's now or never.

    Domestic life is being MAN-Man, the superhero with the powers of a MAN. Mostly distracting Freda while [info]arkady gets on with being ill and [info]redcountess does a flurry of Whitby preparation and paperwork shuffling.

    Lovely lunch yesterday with [info]tenshikurai9, over for the Whitbah weekend. I wore my Elsinore November 2001 shirt specially. Got pics on my shiny new w*rk Nokia 3110c, which Freda is delighted with. Did you know work phones double as teething rings?

    Not reading LJ much as I'm either busy at work or busy at home. Please alert me directly to anything you think I need to know.

    Friday, April 18th, 2008
    10:22 pm
    Camouflage heart.

    Madam caught a baby bird yesterday — [info]arkady thinks she must have climbed up to the nest. Arkady rescued it and kept it inside overnight, then put it out this morning (after it heard the dawn chorus and joined in). Its parents have got it back to the nest now, but we're keeping Madam inside for tonight. She got lucky when I dropped a sausage I was cooking, and then started batting it around like it was an animal ...

    Arkady, Freda and I all have the flu. There's nothing more heartbreaking than your own child ill. She's perky right now, though, and playing with a cloth with great fascination. [info]redcountess is enjoying frightening amounts of energy and hoping not to come down with it for Whitby.

    Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
    10:02 pm
    Magical mystery tour.

    I've upgraded Kubuntu on this here HP Compaq 6710b to Hairy Hardon. (What were they thinking.) It's just like Gutsy except the little things are better. Suspend works properly, four seconds to sleep or wake up. The brightness buttons work now. I'm most pleased.

    Been home all this week, and weekend, feeling progressively worse. I'll need a doctor's note soon. [info]arkady has the same. [info]redcountess will hopefully not get it for Whitby.

    Sunday, April 13th, 2008
    9:20 pm
    Would I lie to you?

    I'm at home with sinuses blocked to pain while [info]arkady, Freda and [info]redcountess go down the pub for [info]mirrorshard's birthday. Bah! I think I've run out of intarwebs.

    reddragdiva.co.uk and arkady.org.uk got hit by the SQL injection vulnerability in Coppermine. I cleared the toxic waste iframes out of every single PHP and HTML file (and the database login of "cialis") and deleted 97,000 spam comments by hand in MySQL (commenting to be re-enabled only with working captchas) and have resubmitted the site to StopBadware. The Firefox 3 badware warning page is fabulously obnoxious. If you're running Coppermine, UPGRADE NOW.

    (To check if your Coppermine gallery's fallen victim: view source, and if there's an iframe at the beginning with a ton of cryptic encoded crap, then your site may infect any IE user happening to look at it. You can check for sure by looking at the source PHP files and seeing if they have iframe code for cryptic encoded crap at the end. If they do, (1) remove the iframes from all PHP and HTML files in your Coppermine installation — and it will be all of them — (2) install either the patch linked above or all of 1.4.17 right away.)

    We now have stair gates on the kitchen and hall doors (fitted courtesy Arkady's overpowering manliness), so the lounge is a big playpen for Freda. She bangs her spoon on the bars.

    Update: 1.4.17 had a hole as well - get 1.4.18 right away.

    Friday, April 11th, 2008
    3:50 pm
    Put a little love in your heart.

    I'm home today and missing out on what started as an apparently straightforward Apache server setup. Their initial request may as well have ended "and a pony." Further "clarifications" so far have added a long neck, two humps — no, make that three — and stripes. Yesterday morning I installed the propeller. A pony designed by four-year-olds on Red Dye No. 1. Don't feed sugar to developers.

    Reading LiveJournal feels like work. My journal bores even me. "I went to work. Then I came home and played with my baby daughter, who has achieved X trivial stage of development and I am SO PROUD." I shall have to include more hot smut and so forth. Anyone got any? Getting some cock lately, which is nice.

    Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
    2:40 pm
    Regular expressions to EBNF?

    (Geek post, call for computer scientist assistance.)

    Last Thursday at London.PM, I got asked a lot why MediaWiki wikitext, as used in Wikipedia, doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor. The answer is that a WYSIWYG editor would need to know wikitext grammar, and there is no defined grammar. The MediaWiki "parser" is not actually a parser — it's a twisty series of regular expressions (PHP's version of PCREs).

    So any grammar effort requires reverse-engineering that, and lots of people have tried and gotten 90% of the way before stalling. It doesn't help that wikitext is (I'm told) provably impossible to just put into a single lump of EBNF.

    It occurred to me that there must exist tools to convert regexps into EBNF. And that if we can get it into even a few disparate lumps of hideous EBNF, there should be tools to take those and simplify them somewhat. (Presumably with steps to say what given bits mean.) Or possibly things other than EBNF, just as long as the result is parseable.

    I am not (even slightly) a computer scientist, but some of you are. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Or pointers to anyone having done anything even remotely similar? Or knowledgeable friends they could point this query at?

    (The goal is to replace the twisty series of regexps with something generated from the grammar. Tim Starling, MediaWiki's second-in-command, has said: "We can't change wikitext. Go away and write something that (a) covers almost all of it (b) is comparably fast in PHP." Which is harsh, but fair.)

    Update: [info]en_ki just made the obvious suggestion: the unit tests. Running maintenance scripts, the scripts (look for parserTests), the list of tests.

    Monday, April 7th, 2008
    11:56 pm
    Hey diddle diddle to the people in the middle.

    Freda and [info]arkady are back from Wales. Freda just indicated she thought it was bedtime by climbing most of the way up the stairs. (I hovered behind just in case.) Arkady is going tomorrow to get a houseload of stair gates.

    I was considering Bisexual Underground tomorrow, but will I think be spending a quiet evening in with my beautiful little terror. [info]redcountess plans to go if well, though.

    (Still not managing to read LJ. Ping me and I will check your journal and make witty comments.)

    Friday, April 4th, 2008
    10:05 pm
    The price of love.

    I haven't read LJ in the last week. Please let me know of anything important.

    Night down the pub on Sunday was very nice. [info]arkady's been in Wales this week and [info]redcountess and I have had a Quiet Week In, though she's been getting out and about by daytimes. A house without teenagers is a wonderful and special thing. Arkady's laptop appears to have mostly escaped the tea, though it might need a new keyboard.

    Perlmongers social evening last night with [info]pndc and James. Bus to work from Peter's flat in the morning, and I still got there on time. Adnam's Oyster Stout is fatal.

    Damn, why couldn't Bryan Ferry give "Same Old Scene" a decent pop structure. The remix doesn't manage it either.

    Sunday, March 30th, 2008
    3:58 pm
    Private life.

    [info]pndc and James popped around at random. I'm now testing the integrity and bandwidth of data transmission over a USB cable from the 80 gig disk he had in his pocket.

    We're off down the Pembury this evening. (Yes, all of us.) You?

    Thursday, March 27th, 2008
    9:10 pm
    The masochism tango.

    My work phone has started shutting itself off at random; I have found a more reliable phone on hand to put the SIM in for a couple of days, that being the old V525 with the battery held in with gaffer tape.

    Freda has the bathroom hand mirror and is fascinated by the baby in it. She also did two wonderful tricks today: grabbing a full tea cup and knocking it over her mother's laptop ([info]arkady turned it upside down and tea actually poured out of it) and pooed so much she blew out the nappy and smeared it everywhere. And her new trick is YELLING ALL THE TIME, BECAUSE SHE CAN. My head is pounding.

    (Geeks! What sort of future is a Thinkpad T23 that's had a cup of tea with milk and sugar spilt into the keyboard likely to have? If it helps, it didn't fzzt and die immediately, it turned off as normal when Arkady held the power button down for five seconds.)

    The girls are still here. I have someone to practice Dad Humour on. It's enormously enjoyable having trapped subjects to be consciously tedious at. Dads do this deliberately. (Apparently their dad didn't do this — his humour was actually funny — so it's clear I'll have to make up the deficiency in their lives while I can.)

    Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
    11:58 pm
    Green river.

    SNOW!!!

    Thirty seconds of it, and it melted the moment it hit. But SNOW!!!

    Thursday was spent wandering about with the visiting [info]rufus — pub, V&A, hotel, pub, visiting the house. Apparently I got her more liquored up for her birthday than she has been in months. Thursday was also when [info]arkady's older two daughters arrived for the week. The house is very crowded.

    [info]redcountess has started on Lyrica, which is one of the few drugs ever to do a damn thing even to alleviate the symptoms of fibromyalgia. She is now playing loud metal and headbanging to it. \m/

    I am listening to the Michael Hutchence solo album. Not Max Q, this one is dated 1999. The reason you haven't heard of it is that it's appalling shit.

    Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
    11:43 pm
    Both of us knowing.

    I have this laptop booted into Windows specifically to use AutoWikiBrowser. Minefield is precisely the same as on Linux. I'm just amazed how much hotter it runs, though.

    It's been a rollercoaster week. Where we once had four cats, we now have one — Tom went missing last year, Neo went missing a month ago and last week a neighbour found Kynaston dead in her back yard. Scuffs on his back claws — he'd clearly been hit by a car and only made it to the first safe yard he could. We presume Tom and Neo went the same way. We'd like to get another kitty for Madam to play with, but not while we live on a main road — that's the third cat I've lost to a main road.

    [info]arkady's daughters are coming to stay with us for a week! So I've just had to cancel an evening with [info]pndc and come home to clear out the spare room. I hope they enjoy their first taste of London, (ugly, cramped, smelly, expensive) and walking several miles around museums!

    I'm on call from Friday evening for a week. Visitors welcome, day or evening.

    Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
    9:45 pm
    Come on and touch me.

    • Stories from the 8-bit days. When all programming might as well have been embedded.

    • iPlayer MPEG-4 download — the BBC unlocked the content just for the iPhone users, but anyone with VLC can play it. Without DRM or expiry.

    • If a certain quad keep doing interviews, people will start to think polyamorous relationships are required to be in units of four.

    Pleasant *pint* or three at BU last night, though I was utterly buggered in the not nearly as fun metaphorical sense and left at nine. Ate lots of [info]pndc's chili chocolate and chocolate-coated coffee beans.

    [info]rufus arrives to visit next week and is MINE all MINE for a day. So there. Then I spend Easter and the following week on call.

    Monday, March 10th, 2008
    10:13 pm
    Fucking children inexplicably fails to make new Catholic sin list.

    MY FAVOURITE ROOM, Vatican City, Monday (UNN) — The Vatican has brought the traditional seven deadly sins up to date, and added seven modern mortal sins for an era of "unstoppable globalisation." Sins risking eternal punishment now include drug pushing, accumulating excessive wealth (excepting of course large organised religions based in Rome) and violation of fundamental rights of human nature, such as wanting to fuck children.

    Officers of the Church raping children, and the organisation systematically covering it up, has, inexplicably, failed to make the list. Archbishop Gareth Glitter brushed off the huge number of documented cases of such worldwide, where the priests' defence lawyers were even paid for by the Church, as "exaggerations by the mass media aimed at discrediting the Church. It was them that did this! LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

    The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell, except of course child-molesting priests, who are moved to another parish."

    Catholics are supposed to confess their sins to a priest at least once a year. The priest absolves them in God's name, and then fucks their children.

    "We are losing the notion of sin," said Archbishop Glitter. "If people do not confess regularly, they risk slowing their spiritual rhythm. So to speak."

    "I eagerly await the religious trying to paint me as some sort of extremist yet again," commented Richard Dawkins.

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