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.

Today we get the keys to our new house! Woo. Well actually we’re not that excited, our current house is pretty lovely. But given that we have to move it’s better to get it over and done with so we can start settling into the new place, and make it ours.

The new place is in Dickson, 3 bedrooms, mid to late 70’s perhaps? It doesn’t have the gorgeous front porch of Scrivener St, but we’ll sort something out. Other than that it’s probably better as a house. It’s a bit newer, it’s brick (not weatherboard), has a new bathroom, and a nicer kitchen/lounge area. We just have to give it some character.

Those of you who’ve been to Scrivener St recently will know that it’s pretty well furnished and decked out for a sharehouse. That’s one of the things that makes it nice. Unfortunately all that crap has to be lifted onto a trailer and carted across town.

Wish us luck!

Today some os us OzLab’ers had the pleasure of going to the National Press Club to see Professor Henry Chesbrough talk about Innovation. Owing to the fact that we have a pretty relaxed dress code around the office, the invitation made special mention of the fact that shoes and a collared shirt would be required for lunch.

I remembered my shoes, well if you call sandles shoes, but forgot the shirt.

So I had to do a dash home about 10am to get a shirt.

That’s a pretty boring blog entry you’re thinking. Well the exciting part is that because of some ridiculous section of the Tax law, it’s cheaper for Kelly if she drives her car more KMs over the year. Yes, we’re encouraging people to drive further – use more fuel etc, nice one.

Now I’m not much of a car head, but Kelly’s car is pretty cool, so I obliged. Here’s a pic of it outside my house.

Oh yeah, the Innovation talk. It was interesting listening, and an interesting crowd, we were more or less the only techies, which felt a bit strange. There were some interesting questions, including one that went through the keeper about the XXX XXXXXXX.

Apparently I was on the Tele too! Although one person said I looked bored, I claim that I was deep in thought.

As I drove past the local church this morning, I noticed that they’ve changed tack a little with their message board. Normally it sports something like “Jesus died for your sins”, or “Satan is coming to eat your baby!”. But this morning it said simply:

If you can read this, thank a teacher!

Hear, hear.

This weekend marked Canberra’s biggest congregation of drunken uni students for the year. As enticing as that sounds I probably wouldn’t have gone, except for the seriously excellent line up they had this year.

Friday night’s draw card for me was Groove Armada, and they didn’t disappoint. They played most of the songs I’d hoped for, and from what I could see were doing most of it live, or at least there were lots of musicians on stage. Dj Dexter, of Avalanches fame, was also pretty cool.

Saturday arvo Jeremy and I went for a Boulder at the NL, and so I just caught the end of the Beautiful Girls. Then came Rocket Science, who are pretty underrated I think, they put on a great show.

The Von Bondies, or is it Van Bandies (thick accents), from somewhere stateside also put on a good show. The lead singer in particular had been taking his rock pills, and pulled off a particularly cool move where he followed a bout of screaming by dropping straight to the floor, while continuing to play his guitar. One for Chris to practice.

Some people were about intrigued by the choice of Something For Kate as the final act, but when they want to they can put on a really good rock show. They soldiered on through two power failures, something which Paul Dempsey later remarked was actually good because it gave him a chance to do an Electricity joke.

They played most of the old favs, plus a few newies, and everyone sung along. The organisers must have told them not to do an encore, because they crowd were definitely up for it, but the band never returned. Oh well, we were all dog tired anyway.

Last night the Cat Empire returned to ANU refectory. I saw them at the ANU earlier in the year, and a couple of times at Woodford, all of which were awesome gigs. Despite that, I was kind of prepared for them to be not as good this time, basically just ’cause the novelty’s warn off.

But it turns out they don’t need no stinken novelty, they were fully sick. Pretty much every song had a long drawn out bridge, which often evolved into a completely different song before coming back to the original melody. But they always kept the crowd going along with them.

After about 2 1/2 hours they finally let us stop dancing and we all stumbled to the pub to recover. Let’s hope we’ll see them at Woodford again this year, although I fear they might have become too popular.

Headed to Point Perp again on the weekend. Drove down Friday night and got there reasonably quickly which was nice, needed some sleep.

Weather was awesome on Saturday and we managed to hit the cliff by about 8:30 which was quite impressive I thought. Some of the others had a minor incident with a Wombat late on Friday night and were a bit late getting in, they’re all OK though thankfully.

After 10 minutes searching for my damn contact lens after it blew out of my hand (a bit windy!), I jumped at the chance to second a 19 with Clancy. Actually to be fair Maurice seconded it, I thirded (?). Great climb, and a nice start to the day.

Later I managed a nice 16, although I think I was off route, and did Elspeth again just for the view.

After lunch Clancy decided he wanted to lead something next to Room With a View which was 21 and didn’t have much gear. I volunteered to second, just for the thrills. He breezed up it in the end, and I managed to second it after one “rest”, oh well.

Most people headed home on Saturday night, but not until after we went to Zac’s in Currarong for fish and chips. Nice. Me, Maurice, Truc and Derek camped again at Honey Moon bay. We went to bed early, both tired and depressed at events in Canberra.

Sunday we took it pretty easy, just lazing around on the beach until about noon. I tried to stay in the shade due to a slight mixup on Saturday with sunscreen (burnt!).

In the afternoon we headed to Thompson’s Point for a quick run around. Maurice and I both led Santa’s Little Helper (3* 15, very nice) and then mucked around on the Descent Gully side wall where there was a breeze (damn hot elsewhere).

View the photos »

Last night I went and saw Stringmansassy play at Tilley’s. They were awesome, as usual, but it was extra lovely to see them at Tilley’s.

Kacey, the singer, is my 2nd cousin, or something like that, and it was great to see her again, and meet Aaron (the excellent guitarist).

They’ve still got some touring to do if you like a bit of folky jazzy, laid back sorta stuff. And if you’re lucky you might hear the worlds best version of “A Land Down Under”.

And they’ll be at Woodford this year too! Woot.

Stumbled across this great piece by Douglas Adams (by way of Martin Pool’s blog), titled “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”.

Not only did he write some of the stupidist, funniest books ever, he was also a smart guy. The point that grabbed me most:

What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.