Notes from lidl trip

Mostly for my records so I can remember to buy it again:

1. Twinner smoked peppered salamai. V nice.
2. Smoked peppered salmon. V nice. (peppered brie from Aldi, also v. nice but I know that without making notes).
3. Grafenwalder beer. Meh.

The powers of oneechan

"Oneechan" (お姉ちゃん) means "big sister" in Japanese and Ríona now understands that she is a big sister. Many things can be explained by this. Her ability to walk along the edge of a wall or to climb up something or to eat by herself are all because she is "Oneechan"

As usual though, she doesn't think this means what we think she thinks it means. Yesterday, watching Bambi, we got to the scene where he fights the dogs and saves his girlfriend. Ríona announced "お姉ちゃんですからね" - "that's because he's a big sister". Not much you can do but agree.

Recipe: Penne ala Irish Breakfast

I hesitate to call this a recipe, it's just something I did for the first time today without much thought for what would be "right" but it was pretty cool. I probably would have added a rasher if I'd had one.

Ingredients:

• pasta (I used penne because that's what I had).
• 4 sausages - 160g (Dunnes' Simply Better or whatever you like yourself).
• white pudding 50g (again Simply Better)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 dried chillies with the seeds removed (I might use 1 next time)
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes (Lidl I think, not that it matters very much)

Method:

• Start the pasta cooking.
• Fry the sausages in some oil (I used olive oil for no particular reason) until they are mostly browned. You don't have to worry too much because they're going to cook some more later.
• Take them out and slice them into circles about .5cm long - maybe 10 or 12 slices per sausage.
• Slice the garlic and fry it and the chillies in the pan for about 30s or a minute. I just let them fry in the little bit of oil that was in the pan from cooking the sausages.
• Put in the tin of tomatoes and stir it up.
• Put back in the sausages and stir it up.
• Mash in the white pudding - you want it to break up into little grains and be spread all through the sauce.
• Leave it cook some more, stirring now and then to make sure it's not sticking to the bottom of the pan. About 5 minutes of cooking seemed to do the trick for me.
• Pour it on the pasta and eat it.

That's a nice spicy, tomatoey way of getting all the vitamins and goodness contained in an Irish breakfast. Maybe it should have a fried egg on top but I was never one for fancy presentation.

That's my daughter

Shortly before we went to Japan, we go some family photos taken - it would be unfair to Seán to only have nice baby photos of Ríona. The studio had various props, wicker baskets, dolls, chairs etc. At one point between poses, I heard Ríona crying. I turned around to find her with her head stuck in some railings. They were part of one the props, a little stand-alone fence that would be waist-high to a 6 year-old - something to lean on or whatever. Poor Ríona, I couldn't help laughing, especially when the photographer said, in a puzzled voice, "I've had that for 25 years and no one has ever done that".

Regrettably I am not a cruel enough father to take a photo before popping her head out from the bars, I actually didn't think of it at the time, I wish I had. I do plan to bring this up at her wedding though.

Japan - smoking

One afternoon I was flicking around TV looking for a cartoon or something to occupy Ríona for a few minutes. I found a cartoon, so we watched that for a few minutes. It wasn't by any means a toddler's cartoon, it was called "Gunlock (SaiYuki)" (there seem to be several seasons and variants of this anime, I have no idea which one I was watching). It's a retelling of Journey to the West (aka "Monkey Magic") with more modern characters, some guns etc. Although it wasn't a toddler's cartoon, it held Ríona's attention for while I got something else done. She seems to like any kind of cartoon at least for a few minutes.

The cartoon had some violence ("Daddy, boy fell over") but what really surprised me was that one of the main characters was smoking. He wasn't even a bad guy. I was just really shocked to see someone smoking in a kids show at 2pm.

It was actually pretty uncomfortable in Japan on several occasions, restaurants still have smoking sections, usually as big or bigger than the non-smoking sections and we sometimes had to settle for a seat in the smoking area.　We even found one that didn't have a non-smoking section at all!

What's really odd though is that it's not like smoking is entirely acceptable in Japan either. In lots of places, smoking on the street is illegal and some streets had designated smoking areas. And in true Japanese style, people obeyed these rules. I saw plenty of smokers at the smoking areas and I can't remember seeing anyone smoking in the "wrong" part of the street.

Still it's better than China. A few years ago I was in Beijing airport and I went into a restaurant. "Smoking or non-smoking?". "Non-smoking", I said. "Sit anywhere you like", said the waitress. I was sleepless and jet-lagged at the time so I didn't notice how stupid this was. For a while I was the only customer but soon some more tables filled up, including a guy smoking right beside me. It was only then that I understood my conversation with the waitress. The question was purely cosmetic - probably just for foreigners - there was no non-smoking area in this restaurant, or certainly none that the waitress was willing to enforce. I wonder if I had lit up a cigarette would I have been told to put it out because my table was non-smoking?

The snot hoover.

We arrived in Japan on Tuesday morning. All of us had colds, sniffles and coughs. Ríona had had hers for a week or two already.

On Friday, Midori decided it was time to get her checked out and brought her to a Japanese doctor. The doctor gave her antibiotics, cough syrup and aspirin. Japanese medical clinics all seem to include their own dispensary which is very handy but I wonder about the conflict of interests in terms of prescribing expensive drugs and also little things like aspirin, (maybe it's all regulated, I dunno).

The most exciting thing about the whole trip (and the bit I regret missing) was the doctor's use of a small vacuum cleaner to suck all the snots out of Ríona nose! You get to see what comes out in a glass jar too. Apparently she was not bothered by it at all.

So if that wasn't nasty enough, the doctor also told Midori that she should repeat the procedure herself. "How?", I asked, "by sucking her nose?". Apparently, yes, by sucking her nose, while giving her a bath for example. Just in case you haven't already run through the details in your head, you suck, nothing happens, you suck harder, nothing happens, harder some more... pop a torrent of hot, green snot shoots into your mouth, hitting you straight in the tonsils. Did you just gag? I know I did when I first thought about it. I imagine in real life that my mouth full of snot would quickly be followed by me puking up my own daughter's nose. Maybe if you're into live fish, sea-urchins' gonads and rancid soy-beans then it's nothing special.

Might be a good idea for Jackass...

Get a SIP phone to work with openwrt on a linksys WRT54GL

Update: I've changed this to put the siproxd.pid file in /tmp which avoids touching the flash memory for the pid file and also avoids the need to mkdir and chmod (which I typoed BTW) and thus allow siproxd to come back up automatically after a reboot.

I bought a WRT54GL today and get openwrt running on it with no hassle. More importantly I got my SIP router thing (a Linksys SPA3102) to work behind it (initially the SIP router was in front of it which is inconvenient in many ways).

To get the SIP thingy working (and also SIP clients on PCs in my home network) I just installed siproxd with

ipkg install siproxd vi /etc/siproxd.conf

The editing of the config file (like most of useful stuff in this post) comes from this page. I changed the following four entries

if_inbound = br-lan if_outbound = eth0.1 registration_file = /tmp/siproxd_registrations pid_file = /tmp/siproxd.pid

the first two were the only ones that required any "figuring out". Then I started siproxd and set it to start at boot time too

/etc/init.d/siproxd enable /etc/init.d/siproxd start

After setting up the openwrt box, I just set the outbound proxy for my SIP router and other clients to be my openwrt box and that was that.

Is the govt's Lisbon study legal?

The govt survey into why Lisbon didn't pass is out. I haven't yet tried to find the original and I wonder what questions were on the survey. I assume it was along the lines of

If you voted "no", was it because you thought Lisbon would bring a) abortion, b) EU army, c) corporation tax harmonisation?

The point being to uncover why "no" voters voted that way.

There could equally have been a survey that went along these lines

If you voted "yes", was it because you thought Lisbon a) would help fight climate change b) necessary for Croatia's entry to the EU c) would give national parliaments to ability to stop bad EU laws?

but no such survey exists.

Is it legal for this government to spend public money on a survey whose sole purpose is to help turn "no" voters into "yes" voters without also spending or providing money for a similar survey to investigate the misunderstandings of "yes" voters and correct them.

Mamma chin chin all gone.

Bathing Seán while Ríona is around always results in the following conversation, although tonight it got a bit surreal. "chin chin" is Japanese (and maybe Chinese) for "penis" by the way.

Ríona: [seeing Seán naked] chin chin! chin chin!
Dad: yes, baba's chin chin
Ríona: My chin chin?
Dad: no, you don't have a chin chin
Ríona: my chin chin all gone
Dad: yes
Ríona: mamma chin chin?
Dad: no mamma has no chin chin
Ríona: Mamma chin chin all gone
Dad: yes
Ríona: An pan man chin chin?
Dad: ehhh.. you'll have to ask mamma about that.

The end is nigh.

I was at a kiddies' playground at the weekend and I overheard one dad say to his angelic 3-year-old daughter, "now play normally, I don't want to hear you talking about taking anybody out". WTF is the world coming to?

I kept an eye out when she was near Ríona but didn't get close enough to check for the mark. I should probably have got her name so I could make sure I was on her side when the apocalypse comes!

Creative Zen: useless for listening to podcasts, books etc

Summary: if you want an MP3 player for listening to podcasts, documentaries or anything where you might to resume from you left off then avoid the Creative Zen.

I bought a Creative Zen (not a "Zen M" or a "Zen V", just a "Zen" - well done Creative on picking a name that is almost impossible to search for without finding all of your other products!). It's quite a nice little device, with a nice screen and a slick UI but unfortunately it makes we want to scream.

If you're listening to an hour long MP3 and you turn off the device, you'd expect it to resume the MP3 where you left off. You'd expect the same when you switch to the radio. Alas the Zen does neither of these. If you turn it off, it remembers for about an hour but then it turns itself off completely and when you turn back on you'll be at 0:00:00. Same when you switch to the radio or watch a video or god knows what else.

The Zen does have 10 bookmark slots but you have to go through a series of button clicks in order to mark your place and if you forget to do that before switching to the radio, tough luck.

It really is quite mind-boggling how such a basic bit of usability could have been left out. I assume they spent all their time making sure all of the album-art and other fluff worked properly. What's more frustrating is that my previous player was a creative MuVo, a far less sophisticated memory-stick style player that always remembered exactly where I was. I would have bought another if they weren't about 30 quid dearer than its video-playing cousin.

Worse still, I borrowed a Creative Zen Stone for a few days. It's a much simpler device than the Zen, much more like the MuVo except without the ability to plug directly into a USB port. In fact, the Stone seems to be pretty much identical to the MuVo in its functionality, including remembering where I am in the current track. At about half the price of the Zen, I'm really annoyed that I was tempted into buying the flashier model.

It seems to me that there are at least 2 development teams in Creative, one that does the video devices and one that does the audio-only. Unfortunately the video team don't seem to have looked at the audio devices when figuring out what matters.

While I'm complaining, I may as well point out that the Zen only works as an MTP device and cannot be used as a straight-forward USB disk and bizarrely, if you transfer an MP3 file using the linux MTP command-line tools, the Zen cannot figure out how long the track is and so you cannot seek forwards or backwards! So I have to Gonad or Gnomad or whatever it's called.

One slight bright point is that Creative's support responded quickly to my query, confirmed that the functionality was indeed missing and they had passed on my comments to the developers. Of course they could just be saying that but at least it was prompt!

When will I learn...

When will I learn to wait long enough before eating pizza? I'm almost 34 years old and I still end up burning the roof of my mouth almost every time I cook pizza at home. I suspect the answer is never and I like to think that pizza night in the Shaolin temple leaves even the most enlightened wu-shu masters asking the same question.

An interesting maths proof (to me anyway).

This is a comment I left on a blog but the comment box had no preview button and my comment came out kinda mangled, so I'm posting it here.

First of all, it's a long time since I proved anything so I may be wrong. Secondly, the markup is probably going to be terrible, there seems to be no preview button and I can't find wordpress's help section for markup. Finally, apologies if this is straying too far from the original idea of proof automation but I think this answers the question of whether this is true for Complex also. I can't really claim that this proof is discoverable by pattern matching as it's not really an epsilon-delta proof. That said, if I haven't made a mistake, the problem becomes "easy" if you consider a compactification of R and maybe looking at compactifications is a reasonable strategy for theorem provers.

Anyway, I think you can capture all of the fiddly parts and the proof-by-contradiction inside the Heine-Borel Theorem instead of using the Baire Category Theorem, which seems to be a bit more heavy-weight.

The essence is to show that for any δ > 0, there is a single N_δ such that |f(nX)| < δ for X ∈ [0,1] and n > N_δ. The conclusion follows from the fact that any Real > N_δ is something in [0,1] times an integer at least as big as N and therefore |f| will be < δ for this Real too.

Let X ∈ Real. We are given that f(nX) -> 0 as n -> ∞. More formally, ∀ δ > 0, ∀ X ∈ Real, ∃ N_δ,X ∈ Natural such that |f(nX)| < δ ∀ n > N_δ,X. Since f(X) is continuous there is an open set, O_δ,X containing X such that |f(N_δ,X y)| < δ ∀ y ∈ O_δ,X (it is the inverse image of (-δ, δ)).

For a fixed δ, {O_δ,X: X ∈ [0,1]} gives us an open cover of [0,1] and Heine-Borel tells us that there is a finite subcover. This means we have a finite set of O_δ,X, each with an N_δ,X and we can take the maximum N_δ,X and call it N_δ. This is a Natural such that |f(nX)| < δ ∀ X ∈ [0,1], ∀ n > N_δ.

Now let X ∈ Real, X > N_δ. Let N = [X]+1, where [] is the greatest integer function and let θ = X/N. Note that θ ∈ [0,1] and N > N_δ. So |f(Nθ)| < δ. That is, |f(X)| < δ.

So all you need is the compactness of [0,1] and the fact that you can generate all of Real+ from [0,1] and multiplication by Natural. So it seems that is true for Complex or Real^N etc. where you take x -> ∞ to mean |x| -> ∞ and you use [-1,1] instead of [0,1].

If Real itself was compact you could skip the scaling step entirely. I think rephrasing the question in terms of Real ∪ {-∞, ∞} makes it almost trivial but I must admit I'm going beyond what I can remember from my student days, I expect someone will tell me that rephrasing it like that causes something else to break.

I think it would be reasonable for a theorem prover to start by choosing a δ to aim for and use continuity to construct the cover of Real from the inverse images of (-δ, -δ). It would get stuck then and I don't know whether there is a reasonable automated bridge to the solution from there.

Nice beer

This is mostly just a note for myself, not knowing the first thing about beer and drinking less than a pint a month these days means my opinion may be "wrong" but I wanted to make a note of this beer so that I buy again next time I have a beer drinking opportunity.

While R<&iactute>ona was sleeping, I cooked some spicy tomatoey rib things (the butcher gave me ribs when I asked for belly and I found a recipe that seemed easy). Afterwards I had a bottle of quite nice beer. It's called Franziskaner (as in Fanciscan Monks I think) and is a weisse bier (funnily enough the photo on that page is the beer I drank so maybe it really is good). It was very easy to drink after my dinner.

I became a real parent today.

1 week after the birth of my second child I became a "real" parent. Ríona was in the buggy with her hand out, rubbing against things as she went. She rubbed against a dirty car tyre and got some nasty black stuff on her fingertips. I didn't want her to get that all over her clothes, so I did the only thing I could think of. I took out my hanky, spat on it a little and cleaned her.

Technically, the standard for "real" parenthood is to spit on a hanky and clean your child's face but that wasn't an option. I suppose I could have waited for her to rub her face with her dirty fingers. Maybe next time.