“We will not apologise for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defence, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.”

(Barack H. Obama,
inaugurating. Sing it, brother.)

This was my final game of six at the Australian Open:

First tournament I’ve ever been at where senior players actually came more than one at a time in order to tell me I should’ve saved the two forlorn black stones in the corner, easily worth twenty points and the game.

Y’know what? I should have saved the two black stones in the corner. Or Amelia should’ve killed them earlier. Or both. Then the protracted ko fight for the last free point on the board would’ve had meaning.

But I liked my endgame and dragon-wrangling. Not perfect, but I trimmed her lead back to six points plus komi. Also, my performance in the kyu division of the tournament (won two, lost three closely, one bye) confirmed that four kyu is converging on my actual rank.

“Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong.”
(Albert Einstein)

“It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.”
(George Kennan)

“Find out for yourself why Zombie Squad is the world’s premier non-stationary cadaver suppression task force.”

Brad the Blog Boy is alpha-testing a remix of the LiveJournal CrossPosting plugin for WordPress. The original author last updated the plugin circa wordpress 2.2, hence the remix.

And, well, I’ve got myself a Livejournal. Let’s see if this works as designed…

Update: The plugin installed and activated without incident.

Found my hobbies for the year: learn Lisp, study go, and finish my current research project. To make a start on the first, I’m reading through Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, using Clozure Common Lisp on erzulie. Bootstrapping this onto erzulie involved downloading a binary release, picking it apart for essential lumps to use in building the 1.1 release branch in subversion, and rebuilding the kernel and image in-place. The how-to-build-from-SVN document identifies some .cdb files needed to build the Cocoa IDE; these have been downloaded, but I have no pressing need to build that at the moment.

It turns out that if Windows XP is handed a USB drive to mount, it will use the next drive letter, regardless of whether it is already in use. Fortunately, it is possible to right-click on My Computer and use the “Manage” menu item (Disk Management pane) to (re)assign drive letters to volumes. So when this affected my USB stick on my work computer, this is what I did…

“Firewalls are great, until they block a port you need.”
(Dan Gunter, discussing how to tunnel XMPP through ssh)

Blix works quite well as a theme on WordPress 2.0.4, despite being advertised only for 1.5. I’ve just installed it on Stringybark and Greenhide.

Update: Also works with WordPress 2.1.3, now that I’ve upgraded S&G to it: just needed to delete most of the existing files, make a small change to BX_functions.php for the page list and tinker with footer.php to add a couple of items. I took the opportunity to flush all of the themes except Blix and Water and most of the surplus plugins.

ezstatic doesn’t, though. Takes out the plugins page entirely. The author has let it go, I supposed I’d better do so also.

“The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.”
(Tao te Ching, Quicksilver translation)

Found the eWater CRC, successor to the CRC for Catchment Hydrology, the CRC for Coal in Sustainable Development, the CRC for Water Quality and Treatment, and of course CSIRO Land and Water. I’m impressed that they managed to park the Water for a Healthy Country flagship program under CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences where it ought to be.

There’s Stuart Khan’s water recycling blog. But there’s no hydrology blogs. Anywhere.

After some fruitless and desultory searching, I have sort of tripped over ctorrent. It’s cheap and cheerful and compiles up good when installed on selkie.

Want one of these. My aquarium is medium-sized but only has two medium-small goldfish in it.

Sokar pointed me at this. Some apples sound good right now…

“Learning and doing is the true spirit of free software — learning without doing gets you academic sterility, and doing without learning is all too often the way things are done in proprietary software.”
(Raph Levien)

“So it’s got to the point where I find myself reading things written by people I respect, and deciding that I’d be generally happier if I didn’t read them.”
(Matthew Garrett, on resigning from Debian)

Just added WordPress widgets and the Regulus theme to this log. It is not as visually interesting as the previous goldfish look, but more functional and configurable.