garethrees.org

CTC ride to Barkway, Ardeley and Royston 2010-08-22 “How can I put these keen new riders off the club, I thought to myself? How about taking them down the muddiest lane in Hertfordshire?”	Zendegi 2010-08-17 A review of Greg Egan’s novel Zendegi. “An entertaining but rather slight novel that places Egan’s usual concerns—transhumanism, uploading of minds, the morality of artificial intelligence—in a democratic Iran in the early and mid twenty-first century.”
Manifold: Space & Origin 2010-08-14 A review of Stephen Baxter’s novels Space (2000) and Origin (2001), the second and third books in the Manifold trilogy. “If you’re looking for serene contemplation of disaster and suffering, Baxter’s your man.”	CTC ride to Stradishall, Lavenham and West Wratting 2010-07-25 “... we were glad to make an extra stop at Clare for ice cream...”
CTC ride to Haverhill, Clare and Ashdon 2010-07-11 “It was a tough ride on my own in the heat...”	CTC ride to Hinxworth, Old Warden and Gamlingay 2010-06-13 “The selection of destinations made route-setting quite a challenge.”
CTC ride to Stradishall, Clare and Stetchworth 2010-06-06 “After tea our luck ran out and we were caught in one last thunderstorm.”	John Sturrock is an idiot 2010-05-11 The translator of Notre-Dame de Paris gives the impression of not having read his own book.
Hexes by Stick Insect 2010-04-23 Girls, interrupted: Listener crossword 4080.	Sine Qua Non by Shackleton 2010-04-16 Symphonic Movement: Listener crossword 4079.
The Fragmentation of Reality by Lavatch 2010-04-09 Sixteen choices: Listener crossword 4078.	The Undertones? by Schadenfreude 2010-04-07 Clashing lines: CAM 59 crossword.
Forced Entry by Mr Lemon 2010-04-02 Several ways in: Listener crossword 4077.	Labour by Elint 2010-03-26 Out on a limb: Listener crossword 4076.
“End of Hibernation” audax 2010-03-21 A 207 km audax ride from Haslingfield to Stowmarket, Sudbury and back, 2010-03-21.	Square-bashing by Arden 2010-03-19 Left and right: Listener crossword 4075.
Printer’s Devilry by Qid 2010-03-12 A temporary marking slug: Listener crossword 4074.	Quartet by MynoT 2010-03-05 Ancient wisdom: Listener crossword 4073.
The Isolated Word by Ten-Four 2010-02-26 A self-descriptive puzzle: Listener crossword 4072.	Five Dots by Franc 2010-02-19 Sense, reason, and intellect: Listener crossword 4071.
The Glady Marsh by Salamanca 2010-02-12 Chercher la femme: Listener crossword 4070.	Conversion by Samuel 2010-02-05 A knockout puzzle provides a tough fight: Listener crossword 4069.
364 263 by Xanthippe 2010-01-29 A carte blanche with modified entries and a numeric code: Listener crossword 4068.	Packing the “S” tetracube 2010-01-17 In how many ways can you pack 54 “S” tetracubes into a 6×6×6 cube?
Rentokil by Jago 2010-01-15 Tricky manipulation required: Listener crossword 4066.	Saturn’s Children 2010-01-09 A review of Charles Stross’s 2009 science fiction novel Saturn’s Children, with analyses of the problems with the narrative voice and some of the flaws in the world-building.
Packing the “T” tetracube 2010-01-09 Can you pack 54 “T” tetracubes into a 6×6×6 cube? Solutions, discussion, and generalizations.	Absolute Friends 2010-01-07 A review of the 2003 novel Absolute Friends, in which John le Carré contrasts the Cold War and the War on Terror through the viewpoints of the two spies of the title.
How the anti-cycling lobby poisons public discourse 2009-12-11 How anti-cycling propagandist Edmund King of the AA promotes negative stereotypes of cyclists in order to blame them for their own deaths and injuries.	CTC ride to Wilburton and Ely 2009-11-22 “It was a day of attrition...”
Why I hate FaceBook 2009-10-25 Eight reasons why FaceBook sucks for serious discussions.	Paying for postcodes 2009-10-13 An appeal for the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File to be freely licensed to individuals and not-for-profit organizations.
Using html5lib to resolve relative URLs 2009-10-09 Python code for translating relative URLs in HTML source into absolute URLs suitable for syndication.	Is Robin Lustig prejudiced against Japanese men? 2009-10-08 A criticism of Robin Lustig’s absurd and offensive explanation for Japan’s low fertility.
Ingleborough and Whernside 2009-09-24 A walk from Ingleton to Ingleborough, Chapel-le-Dale, and Whernside.	Emacs 23 2009-08-19 Emacs 23.1 was released on 2009-07-29. In this review, I describe some interesting and useful features of this release, and give some historical background to multilingual support in Emacs.
The fractal dimension of Mellon Udrigle 2009-08-19 The BBC programme Coast bravely tackled the fractal nature of coastlines but missed the historical origins of the subject in Lewis Fry Richardson’s statistical study of warfare.	Commuting and health in Cambridge 2009-07-18 While taking part in this study (run by the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the Institute of Metabolic Science) I amused myself thinking about possible sources of bias.
Advanced Photo System 2009-07-16 A brief history of the Advanced Photo System and some photos I took using it.	CTC ride to Hare Street 2009-07-05 “After tea we split up...”
Cycle tour to Warsash and Staines 2009-06-29 A cycle tour from Cambridge to Warsash and Staines and back again, with photos and some discussion about how I planned it.	BNP press office on mixed-race marriages 2009-06-02 An e-mail exchange I had a few years ago with “Dr. Phill Edwards” of the British National Party.
Punctures 2009-05-31 A ride with the Cambridge Cycling Club suffers a visit from the puncture fairy.	Pillars of the community 2009-05-26 Some comments on the sabotage of the Étape Caledonia and the lorry driver who nearly killed Boris Johnson.
CTC ride to St Neots, Keysoe, and Caxton 2009-05-10 “We were a few minutes late setting off, which was my fault because I rather incompetently tightened some loose spokes in my back wheel...”	Improving road safety 2009-05-08 A look at the National Audit Office report Improving road safety for pedestrians and cyclists in Great Britain. “You can see that the normalized figures are not nearly so flattering to the UK. Is this just plain incompetence, or a deliberate attempt to mislead?”
Manifold: Time 2009-04-08 A review of Stephen Baxter’s 2000 novel Manifold: Time. “Baxter completely lacks control over his material in this novel. He has potentially powerful themes and ideas, but handles them so inconsistently that they lose all their power.”	Roberts on Incandescence 2009-03-20 A commentary on Adam Roberts’ review of Greg Egan’s novel Incandescence in Strange Horizons.
Colliding balls 2009-02-17 Several approaches to implementing a system of colliding balls, ranging from quick-and-rough to painstaking-and-slow.	Snow preparedness 2009-02-08 The cost of and responsibility for snow preparedness: “it’s not just a matter we can leave to government, we all have things to do.”
Validating XHTML 2009-02-07 A program to allow you to run your XHTML document through the W3C validator and step through the errors and warnings conveniently in Emacs, and a brief discussion of why someone might want to do this.	Apple Mail crash: “bad external relocation length” 2009-02-02 A serious crash in the Apple Mail application, with some analysis and a possible remedy. “It’s a bit worrying that the entire world can make my mail application crash just by sending me some junk mail.”
User interface asynchrony 2009-01-31 Implementing a match-making user interface for an ad-hoc wireless networked video game shows us that a user interface needs to be able to run asynchronously with respect to the implementation.	Super Paper Mario 2009-01-22 A review of the 2007 Nintendo Wii game Super Paper Mario by Intelligent Systems, directed by Ryota Kawade. “Super Paper Mario has two significant innovations. One is graphically and conceptually spectacular, and was hyped in the game's advertising, and is somewhat of a failure. The other is subtle, little commented on, and a big success.”
ISA decision-making 2009-01-19 If you have a debt and some surplus income, under what circumstances should you pay down the debt and under what circumstances should you invest in an Individual Savings Account (ISA)?	Einstein and Eddington 2008-11-26 A review of the BBC/HBO television drama, with particular attention to the accuracy of the depiction of the science. “If these stars on this photographic plate of the eclipse overlap with the comparison plate, Einstein’s theory is wrong and Newton’s theory holds. If there is a gap between the two images, then the sun’s gravitational field has shifted the stars’ position, and we have a new theory of gravity.”
Crash II 2008-11-06 A look at house prices in November 2008. “The first figure attempts to suggest where the bottom of the current crash might be by comparison with the bottom of the last crash.”	Anatomy of a manufactured controversy 2008-11-03 How a harmless piece of advice to the staff of Bournemouth Borough Council was inflated by The Telegraph into a nationwide cultural crisis.
Quest for the 2m cycle lane 2008-10-22 Some bullshitting by a Cambridge City councillor prompts the question of whether any of the cycle lanes in Cambridge meets the official recommended width anywhere along its length?	Why doesn’t Google Maps use OpenStreetMap? 2008-10-20 OpenStreetMap has better coverage of Cambridge than Google Maps. Google Maps combines mapping data from many sources. Why doesn’t it make use of OpenStreetMap?
Financial crisis: Northern Rock’s balance sheet 2008-10-18 Like every other fool with a blog, I’m trying to understand what caused the financial crisis. I start by looking at the collapse of Northern Rock in some detail and trying to work backwards from there. What happened to this bank?	Database state 2008-10-16 A letter to David Howarth MP, asking him to work to defeat Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s proposal to create a government database of telephone calls and e-mails.
Incandescence 2008-08-25 A review of the novel Incandescence by Greg Egan. “In a genre dominated by fantasy dressed in a spacesuit instead of a wizard’s robe, Greg Egan stubbornly sticks to extrapolations from the physics we know. He rules out from his fiction faster-than-light travel or communication, or spaceships that couldn’t possibly be fueled by any form of energy we know. This self-denying ordinance deprives him of the props and conventions of the genre: no galaxy-spanning empires or interstellar wars for Egan.”	What commuter cyclists can’t learn from Chris Hoy 2008-08-20 I demolish an absurd article about cycle commuting from the BBC.
Fourteen years of e-mail 2008-08-11 Counting and graphing e-mails. With a digression on non-standards-conformant mail user agents and how to use Perl to parse their non-conformant Date headers.	How deep is your build pipeline? 2008-08-09 Discussion of video game build pipelines and the development difficulties that they entail.
Constant, qualified, and less attemptable 2008-08-06 The const type qualifier in the C programming language, and the consequent impossibility of implementing some common operations in a type-safe way.	Make my day 2008-06-24 The trouble with the build tool make is that because it uses file modification dates to determine whether a dependency has changed, it often rebuilds targets unnecessarily.
Royston audax 2008-05-18 The 2008 Royston audax: a short ride (as audaxes go), of 107 km, from Royston to Longstanton via Chrishall and back via Gamlingay.	Newlands valley watershed 2008-04-26 An account of a walk I did back in 2002, from Little Town in the Newlands valley in the Lake District, to Buttermere, and back. (In the form of a map with mouseover text.)
Three times is a pattern 2008-03-31 Three cases in which a motorist hit a cyclist, there was CCTV or eyewitness evidence, and yet the police took no action. “The message that cyclists are getting loud and clear is that the police are not interested in protecting them from assault by motorists.”	Multi-way mortgage calculator 2008-03-24 There are many thousands of mortgage calculators on the web that compute the monthly payments based on the capital sum, interest rate, and duration. But this one lets you compute any of these four values based on the other three.
None of the above 2008-03-01 A merciless nitpicking of the 2006 Edexcel GCSE Science: Physics P1b exam paper. “This paper covers waves, electromagnetic radiation, astronomy, cosmology, and seismology, and features some really, truly, horribly poor questions.”	Megalotropism is the key insight 2008-02-01 A review of the novel Matter by Iain Banks, the seventh of the “Culture” novels. “The book initially appears to be about the political and military conflict between two humanoid civilizations. But a kind of pull-back reveals that this conflict is a small event taking place in a corner of a much vaster canvas, like two colonies of ants fighting over a mound of earth in a city park.”
Paper Mario 2008-01-15 A review of the 2000 Nintendo 64 game Paper Mario by Intelligent Systems, directed by Ryota Kawade. “Paper Mario is deliberately designed to be an RPG for beginners, and after playing it I can glimpse what people see in proper RPGs.”	Crash 2007-12-09 A look at house prices in December 2007. “I’ve been wondering about what the UK housing market crash is going to look like, and how far prices might fall.”
Smallest possible transparent PNG 2007-11-15 A detailed look at the encoding of bitmap images in the PNG file format, leading up to the discovery of the smallest possible transparent PNG, only 67 bytes long.	Smart quotes in Emacs 22 2007-10-17 Smart quotes mode, a minor mode for Emacs 22 that makes it convenient to type ‘smart’ “quotes”.
Cram101 2007-10-11 A publishing scam using misleading bibliographical data to fool Amazon customers into thinking that a study guide might be good substitute for a real textbook.	Rulebound 2007-10-06 Why rules can’t tell us how to make good video games; we need understanding of their purpose and effects as well. With an extended digression on neoclassicism and John Dryden.
Stars, I have seen them fall 2007-09-28 A tongue-in-cheek look at the metaphors in A. E. Housman’s poem starting “Stars, I have seen them fall...” and whether they really make sense.	Murder in the cathedral 2007-06-10 An analysis of the dispute between the Bishop of Manchester and the video game developer Insomniac over the use of Manchester Cathedral as a setting in the game Resistance: Fall of Man.
Zendoku puzzle generation 2007-06-10 The technical challenges involved in implementing a sudoku puzzle generation algorithm on a handheld video game console, and how the developers at Zoonami solved them in the production of Zendoku for the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.	Zendoku tactics 2007-06-07 Tactics and tips for winning at Quest Mode in Zoonami’s Zendoku, a video game for the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. With lots of diagrams.
The Python Challenge 2007-05-07 The Python Challenge is a website of puzzles compiled by Nadav Samet. The puzzles are a mixture of riddles, codes, and programming challenges, with the Python language being a recommended tool. Here are some of my notes and solutions.	Relational macros 2007-04-24 A C programming language technique for embedding relations (tables of data) into programs in a way which is easy to check, safe to update, and requires no tools other than the C preprocessor.
Powers of two 2007-04-19 Bram Cohen poses a programming question for job applicants: it’s easy to solve by searching but how can you be confident that you’ve searched far enough? Trying to answer this question leads to interesting mathematical analysis.	PSP loading times 2007-01-18 Why video games on the Sony PlayStation Portable take so long to load, and what game developers can do to reduce loading times.
Mechanics spread over too much game 2007-01-11 Why are so many games based on movies no good? The answer lies in the time and effort required to perfect each game mechanic.	Juno in Hades 2006-09-05 Commentary on an extract from the television series Miracle Planet II, portraying a collision between a small planetoid and Earth, of similar scale to ones which occurred during the “late heavy bombardment” of the Hadean era (about 4 billion years ago).
Excel 2006-04-25 It’s common and convenient to represent relational databases in the form of spreadsheets, especially using Microsoft Excel. But it’s surpisingly hard to carry out relatively simple database operations on such spreadsheets. This article explains how to implement simple selects and joins as Excel formulae.	The puzzle structure of Ocarina of Time 2004-12-01 The structure of the puzzles in the Nintendo 64 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. With diagrams and maps.
Type inference for Python 2002-02-26 A sketch of a type system for the typeless programming language Python. The system would allow a limited form of type inference that would detect some type errors at compile time.	The errors of Christminster 2001-12-15 A study of the errors found and fixed during the development, testing and release history of the adventure Christminster, together with a suggested categorization of defects in adventure games.
Statement coverage for Python 2001-12-04 A tool to support statement coverage testing for Python. It accumulates coverage data over many runs, generates coverage reports, and annotates Python source showing which statements have been covered.	Statement coverage for Python: design and analysis 2001-12-04 Lists the requirements for a statement coverage tool for Python, describes some issues in design and implementation, and compares coverage.py with other statement coverage implementations.
Can we ship yet? Using Perforce fixes to measure product quality 2001-09-01 How to use Perforce to efficiently measure the quality of a product in a software development environment where there are many branches, customers, and product versions. Presented at the Perforce User Conference 2001.	Perforce Defect Tracking Integration 2000-05-24 Software that integrates Perforce software configuration management with defect trackers Bugzilla and TeamTrack so that issues appear in Perforce, can be edited and transitioned from Perforce, and can be linked to changes to the source code. An open commercial project: all the requirements, designs, documents and source code are online. Includes a kit for developing new integrations.
Christminster 1995-08-08 A text adventure game set in the ancient university town of Christminster. A telegram from your brother Malcolm, a teacher at Biblioll College, draws you in to investigate the mystery of his disappearance, the history of the college, and the ambitions of the scheming Doctor Jarboe and Professor Bungay...	The Magic Toyshop 1995-07-26 A text adventure game on the theme of toys and puzzles. Looking for a birthday present for your niece Isabelle, you wander down a dim Victorian arcade and come across an old toyshop, with a peeling rocking-horse behind a grimy window...