There was a story in the news recently about fake handicap parking badges. In particular, someone said something about Rich Bastards[tm] in particular abusing this concession.

So, when I turned the corner into Barony Street this evening and spotted a very, very shiny Bentley with a blue handicapped parking badge, this story floated through my mind. And then when two clearly-able-bodied men exited one of the establishments on the corner and climbed into this car, it asserted itself more firmly in my mind. I stopped and watched as the two men sat there for a moment. Perhaps they were waiting for an elderly relative to exit the establishment too? Perhaps, but I didn't really feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt.

So I walked back up to the car and, conspicuously, peered at the handicap parking badge for several seconds.

I then walked to the back of the car and, as they made ready to pull out, took my phone out, and (conspicuously? I hope so) photographed the back of the car including the license plate, before walking home.

Of course, when I got home and checked my phone, it seems I had neglected to actually save the picture.

So, I went in to town today with the intention of buying a lot more little transparent plastic CD sleeves to rearrange my music collection in to, in order to make it take up much, much less space than it currently does. Bloody jewel cases.

First port of call was Brown's, who only had 200 of the fellas, and would have charged me twenty quid for them. Ten pence each! No thanks, I said, and wandered on to the next port of call: Maplins, where I knew for a fact I could get them for about 6 quid per 100. Still a bit pricey, but... well, damn jewel cases, how I hate them.

Maplin, it turned out wanted to charge me 8 quid per 100. Sigh. I added that all up in my head and decided that maybe boxes are better. On the offchance, I walked across the street to Silicon Systems, and spotted them selling packs of 100 sleeves for 4 quid. Perfecto! I grabbed 5 such packs and meandered up to the desk, where the bloke pointed out that they were selling wallets which would hold 240 CDs each, for the princely sum of a fiver each. I'd only need two of those, so the whole endeavour would cost only ten quid! Sold, and I walked out a happy bunny with two large CD wallets stuffed into my bag.

And then I remembered, on the street, that I hate these things.

For three reasons. Firstly, they seem to have a tendency of falling apart. This displeases me. Secondly, they don't have anything handy for keeping the back covers of CDs. This also displeases me, because I'll have to cram them in the back or some such.

The third reason, though, is the killer. They make finding CDs an absolute pain in the arse, because if you arrange them in a sensible way (eg. alphabetical order) and then go and buy more CDs, where do you put the new CDs? In the right place? Hell no, because that means you have to, on average, move half your collection down one place. You could leave gaps to mitigate this effect a little, but that wastes space and ultimately you have to reshuffle them all at some point anyway.

So, how to arrange them? Or, to put it in data structure terms, how do I arrange them in order to support insertion in an efficient manner, preferably one that has search characteristics log(n) or better, and involves only one insertion?

Anyone care to take on the challenge?

Please?

My current best solution is a len(title)-hashed scheme:

Each wallet has 31 double-sided pages. So, we can allocate a page per letter, maybe a couple for the popular letters, and some overflow space.

We think of everything in terms of the key (artist, title) with artist having the surname first. It actually doesn't matter that much. So, we find a given CD (or place to put a CD...) by starting with the first letter, and turning to that page. If it's there, we're done; if it's not there, we look at the second letter of the key, and turn to that page, repeating that process until we run out of key space.

Overflow stuff goes on the spare pages at the end.

It's far from an ideal re-hashing system, but it has the benefit that it doesn't need an ASCII table and a calculator to find a CD. Simulating in perl with a fairly recent list of my CDs shows that it gives a system with an average search depth of about 7, although in reality the average would be less because of duplicate letters. But the worst case is still going to be pretty bad, particularly when things end up in overflow.

Anybody got any better ideas?

Horrible server maintenance over the last couple of days.

All sorts of things went wrong. For example, I'd manually installed a 2.6 kernel, but as far as Debian was concerned I still had a 2.4; which meant that when I did an apt-get dist-upgrade, debian "upgraded" the 2.4 kernel module utilities by overwriting my manually installed 2.6 ones.

Then I discovered that my hardware RAID card doesn't actually support RAID under Linux, meaning I had to resort to software again.

Also, I fear an impending disk failure, since there were quite an alarming number of head-reset clunking sounds (but no actual errors...) I couldn't quite work out which drive the sounds were coming from, so I replaced the root drive (which didn't solve the problem, but at least now I know...) and everything else is either expendable or mirrored now, so I'll deal with the failure when it occurs.

All done now, at last. At last. Frustrated. Tired.

I find this quite an exciting development. Not quite as pretty as the propeller-style wind turbines, but nonetheless a very exciting development.

In other news, I've taken delivery today of a couple of new hard drives which will, mirrored, replace at least 4 of the 6 drives currently in our server. This means there'll be a spot of downtime at some point, tonight or tomorrow morning. Fault tolerance and increased capacity! This means that I'll have a couple of spare 120G drives kicking around, or alternatively, I'll leave them in the machine as backup / archive space and leave them spun down for most of the time. Ideally, I'll have only the two new drives spinning constantly, so making the system significantly quieter. Or that's the plan anyway.

Although now that I'm thinking about the noise issue, it occurs to me to wonder where in the new flat the server is going to live... hee! :)

Been somewhat busy the past couple of days. Having handed in our notice and committed to moving out of Littlejohn Road by the 3rd of December, before swanning off to Spain, we returned and began panicking about where we were going to live in a month's time.

Dorothy is amazing at Finding Things On The Internet. It's something I'm just not good at, because I don't deal well with incoherency. And sources on the internet are very incoherent. But Dorothy found some very promising places and managed to get us same-day viewings.

The first place we saw was almost perfect. One bedroom, on the Canongate, nice kitchen, gas fire, double glazing. Except no washing machine, and all the letting agent could tell us about lease terms was that all she could give us for definite was a 6 month lease. So, we suggested she phone the land lord, and offer that we'd put some money towards buying a washing machine for the flat, and she promised to phone us back.

We were abuzz.

A couple of hours later, before we went to see the next flat, the letting agent phoned us back to say that no, the landlord would not help us buy a washing machine at all, and that the reason the lease was only 6 months was that the whole block was in fact due to be demolished sometime in the next year.

With that horror hanging over our heads, we went to see the next place, on St. Patrick's Square. Which was horrible. And tiny.

You know that scene in episode 1 of Spaced where over breakfast Daisy bursts into tears about the lack of flats? That was almost me.

Next morning, we went to see another place, on Leven Street. It was a bit out of our ideal price range (ie. it was #50 more expensive than our current place). It was up in the top floor, 2 bedrooms, with roof bay windows and interestingly higgeldy piggeldy shaped rooms. It was brilliant.

The flat was actually owned by the same guy that owns the letting agency that's letting it out. That seemed like an ideal arrangement to us, almost as good as a private landord (think of it as a private landlord, but with minions to do his bidding) so we went off to the letting agency to talk with him (after a little bit of waiting around for a scone at Peckham's). After being initially a little hostile seeming, he warmed up, and we cleared the cats with him, agreed to sort the few issues we had with the flat (carpets needed cleaned, roof has a minor leak, which he knew about and said was in hand, and the shower needed a shower curtain rail), and talked him down on the rent by 50 quid pcm to parity with our current place.

Perfect.

We agreed to take it, and filled out some paperwork with the agent on the 'front' desk, who was possibly the perkiest person I've ever met, and then went for celebratory brownies in Coco of Bruntsfield (which was conveniently next door), and bought a small package of chocolates for the agency staff. I suggested (and this may have been the brownie's idea rather than my own) that we cross the street, wait until the front desk agent was away from her desk, deposit the chocolate on her desk and run away.

Come to think of it, that was almost definitely the brownie's idea.

We dismissed the idea, and simply walked in. To find that the girl wasn't actually at her desk, so we did indeed leave the chocolates on the desk, and then legged it, giggling "Chocolate ninja!".

So, it's done. Sorted. 21st of November we take it over. Which will be rather neat because it puts us within 5 minutes walk of marrog and adrenalineanima, and almost literal spitting distance (sorry guys) of coffee_lifeform and electronblue. So we have absolutely no excuse whatsoever anymore for being antisocial.

We'll also be away from all the damn SUVs and lawyers that live out here in the suburbs. Oh, how I will not miss them.

I should start packing sometime soon, perhaps. As well as shedding some of the useless and unused bits of Stuff™ I've accumulated recently. Anyone want Windows/X11 terminal? I keep thinking that I should remove all my CDs from their jewel cases, too. Jewel cases are a real waste of space.

This feels good.

Before the wedding, my mum and dad's liver-and-white springer spaniel, Rory, wasn't doing too good. He'd torn a ligament in his back leg, and so wasn't getting much exercise, was stressed and lost a lot of weight.

The vet replaced the ligament with something which was, I think, made of GoreTex. Fantastic stuff, and he was on the mend, but not quite up to his old speed quite yet.

Apparently, it was only the end of last week that my parents noticed that his general composure had started getting worse, and he was losing weight again, and thought perhaps he'd picked up some kennel-flu from having been in kennels over the wedding weekend, so they took him to the vets.

The vet discovered on ultrasound something tumour-ish in... oh, I can't remember, some organ. She thought it was operable, but on investigating, it turned out it had spread to surrounding organs, and wasn't operable.

So, he's gone. We'll scatter ashes sometime in the next week or so, up in the trossachs most likely.

Can I go all sappy for just a moment? I remember when we picked him up, bouncing around the back seat of the car, curling up on my lap in a tiny ball of ears, teeth and the most disproportionately large paws I've even seen on an animal. He never really did calm down properly. Daft as a brush.

He was a sweetie.

Mood: sad

I spent half an hour or so this morning being terribly excited after reading this. Five hundred euro for a conversion kit, and it's the sort of thing that my dad and I (but, who am I kidding, mostly my dad...) could easily install in a weekend.

Then I read about the awkward tax situation, and suddenly the idea didn't seem so appealing anymore. How very backward.

Now, if we happened to have a diesel-fuelled car, I'd have no problem with filling in the registration and all that, but since we have a petrol-fuelled car... I guess I just have to wait for methanol solutions, and in the meantime resolve that our next car (heaven forfend anything terminal should ever happen to the ladybug...) should be a diesel. If all else fails, there ought to be biodiesel on supply somewhere... somewhere. Surely. Dammit.

Never mind. In the meantime, I'll just entertain myself with the notion of trying to teach Singh and Runa to use the toilet properly..

We've been playing catch-up with our popular culture this weekend. cohomology is up a-visiting, and so we were going to go out and see Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit on Friday. I phoned up and got Gold Thingummy tickets at the Dominion. They made a big deal about the tickets being non-refundable when we booked, but that was okay, the cinema was only about half an hour away by bus and we had plenty of time to get there.

Then, through a bout of feeling-unwellness, we couldn't use 'em, and instead we came home to watch Firefly (which Dorothy had borrowed on DVD from a colleague), and tried to see if anyone we knew wanted the tickets. Nobody could use 'em, so we let it slide and settled in to watch Firefly. About halfway through the first episode, the Dominion called us up to say that they'd move our tickets to Saturday night instead of Friday night for us.

Which was nice.

So, we continued watching Firefly, until Saturday evening when it was time to go and see Wallace and Gromit. Which was really very funny and highly recommended. And so now, having reached the end of Firefly, we've decided that we're going out in a little bit to see Serenity. I'm just hoping that the film doesn't use the title tune of the series, since the cinema, unlike DVD, doesn't have a 'skip forward' option. Alas.

Oh, also, I was thinking of having a little Trafalgar Day party on Friday, but since we have to get up at the ass-crack of dawn the day after to go to Spain, it didn't seem like a terribly good idea. Hm. Hm.

...we also have tickets to go see Neil Gaiman talk and stuff on November the 9th. Which totally makes up for the time I decided that I really, really ought to go to my Circuits lecture rather than blow it off to go and see William Gibson at John Smiths' just down the road. Cammy, take note :p

I can't work out whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Time will, I imagine, tell.