Scott flew back from Vanuatu on Fridayish, and headed down to Canberra to pay us all a visit.

Saturday night saw us at Gus’ for a bit to eat and a few beers. We bumped into Jeremy & Jess and hoped to follow them to the Hippo bar, but were denied due to Scott and my “smart-tropical” dress style. Teva-wearers of the world rise up!

We ended up at King O’Malley’s for a few more, sitting outside thank Christ.

On Sunday Scott and I decided to head out for a bike ride. That meant Scott riding Dad’s old 10-speed racer which is, well a little old. It went well to begin with, we made it all the way to Questacon without incident.

As it happened Questacon was almost exactly the furthest point from my house on our whole ride, so of course it was there that the bearings fell out of the front wheel. If you think that sounds bad you’re right, it means the wheel stops spinning in a circle and starts to sort of wobble and click a lot.

If it had just been the bearings we’d have survived, but not more than 2 minutes later the back tyre exploded. The bike was dead.

Scott was due to meet people at All Bar Nun for drinks at 4:30, in 20 minutes time. So I gave him my bike to get there on time, while I walked Dad’s bike back to Dickson. It’s only a 2 hour walk if you’re wondering.

ps. The last two sunset shots are from Monday night on the way home from bouldering at the library.

View the photos »

Last night Scott, “miss Lishka” (???) and I went and saw the Motorcycle Diaries at Lecky Shads.

It’s the true story of Che Guevara and his friend Mial as they travel across South America by motorbike. Well at least until they crash it into a cow.

I read the diaries as a teenager, and I remember being captivated by the story, it was like a Boys own Adventure or something, but true. The film was a little rushed in comparison, understandably, but still did an excellent job of telling the story.

I was worried it was going to be some sort of middle class pseudo-socialist Che Guevara fan club piece. But to it’s credit it dealt very elgantly and subtley with Che’s growing political awareness, and his sense of injustice. You also get a real glimpse of his character, what made him tick, and importantly why people would have been drawn to him as a leader, he had charisma.

If I ever get the time, sure thing, I’d love to read the diaries again, but in the meantime the film was a nice substitute.

Last week we were visited at Ozlabs and then treated to a seminar at the ANU by Nick Nethercote, one of the principal authors of Valgrind. I haven’t had much to do with Valgrind myself, and although I had a general idea of what it did, it was great to have it explained by Nick.

Ben decided that his “Christmas hacking project” would be to add a coverage analyser “skin” to Valgrind. With an hour or so to myself on Saturday I thought I’d have a quick poke around, and see if I could come up with anything. I was pleasantly surprised.

With 80 lines of C I could to a quick and dirty coverage analysis of a program’s execution. With another 65 lines of python I could take the coverage info and use it to markup the source into HTML:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    if (argc > 3) {
        printf("argc was greater than 3\n");
    } else {
        printf("argc was less than 3\n");
    }
    printf("argc was something\n");

    return 0;
}

There’s a bug in that the return 0 is supposedly never executed, and a real coverage tool will have to do a lot more, but it was still nice for a morning’s work. My only gripe is all the VG_(foo) business, but I guess every codebase has it’s quirks.

Thanks to Martin I’ve discovered the brilliantly talented Damien Rice and his album ‘O’.

It’s just a guy and a guitar, and sometimes a girl and a cello, but basically pretty stripped back simple stuff. And yet it’s just spine tingling. Soft and lovely at times, soaring and noisy at others. Every now and then you’re listening to it and you just feel like smiling, sometimes you want to cry.

It’s another album, there’s been only a few over the years, that has restored my faith in music’s incredible inexplicable ability to make you think and feel things. Just a bit of vibrating air, but boy it’s cool.