Looking out the window just now I saw a pheasant (!) crossing the road. There’s a shag drying its wings in the distance, a crow (or rook or raven — bearded, in any case) investigating a rubbish bin, and a magnificent goose surveying the lakeside. I should bring my bird guide to the office. (And until I do, no I don’t know what kind of goose it is. Would feed about four or five though is my estimate.)

Curious about the instruments?

To Dutch students starting out in Artificial Intelligence!

It’s going to be great fun, shaping their innocent beginning-programmer minds. The course is about half Prolog and half AI-as-search; and I’m completely In Charge. (There will be assistents for the lab sessions, we expect about 30-40 students so it’s a bit much for one person to give individual help.)

Anyone who has talked to me in the last six months will know that I’ve been a bit stressed about my prospects after graduation. The job market for programmers is depressed, and for recent philosophy-of-language graduates it’s nonexistent. Not being from the EU makes life even more difficult — indeed, for a while I was worried that I might have to leave the country even before my defence. All those problems look set to evaporate now, at least for another half-year. If I do a good job they might even want me back, who knows?

Pretty neat. More details plus legalities plus why-they-did-it-that-way at the book site.

Notes:

1. The same John Holbo who writes Squid and Owl. Multi-talented, that man.

First night there Olga’s brother Giorgos took us to Sjätte Tunnan, a medieval-themed mead bar. It’s a cavernous candle-lit place, shields on the walls and the staff in generic medieval costume. Mead is delicious, but the effects can be startling. Here’s Giorgos before and after his first quaff:¹

Apparently they have a lot of live music there, and probably quite a lot of mead-fueled impromptu singing. These signs greet you as you enter:

And indeed, we were treated to Skrömta, a decidedly Swedish five-piece. On the left is Matti Norlin playing the nyckelharpa (a mad crossbreed of the violin and hurdy-gurdy: bowed, sympathetic strings galore, and keyed rather than fretted); on the right an audience member sporting period dress and cameraphone.

We spent most of the weekend being proper tourists: wandering the old center taking photos of everything, including each other. Here are: Babis and Anestis (cousin of Olga and a friend, whose travels coincided with ours); a statue of St George and the Dragon; and a smiling lion that can be found (and sat on) all over the city.

Other activities included playing with Olga’s cousin Olga’s birds,² rowing, and emphatically not going to the amusement park with the terrifying rides. Well, actually the boys did go, but I stayed well away. The hangy-swingy-thing you sit in runs all the way around that track and you have to strap yourself in because it rolls and turns upside down at some parts. What’s fun about that, I ask you?

The highlight of our touristy adventure was a visit to Skansen, Stockholm’s zoo and historical park. We arrived after all the historical stuff had closed down for the day (they have a whole lot of buildings set up as they would have been two or three hundred years ago) but we got to enjoy the animals.³

I took a trip through the ‘aquarium’: first a walk through the lemur cage, then past the baboons, then fishtanks and controlled-environment enclosures for snakes and the petting zoo for enormous spiders (sadly that was closed by the time I arrived). Oh yes, and incomprehensible turtles.

Here’s a puzzle for you. One of the objects in this crop is a sweet potato, and one is a naked mole rat. Can you tell the difference? Click through for the full-size version, but be warned: naked mole rats are pretty durned ugly.⁴

I caught a squirrel somewhere he shouldn’t have been (rubbish bin), doing something he shouldn’t have been doing (grifting):

The Swedish really know how to work with wood. It’s visible all through the city, as a construction material but also in edgings and finished surfaces. I was particularly taken by the construction of the fences all through the zoo. The ‘horizontals’ are laid at a constant angle to the ground, a wonderfully elegant way to avoid having to bind them together. Even stacking a woodpile has to be done elegantly. Of course not all the aesthetic decisions are equally successful…

Most of the historic buildings were closed, but we poked into what we could. I mean ‘historic’ literally, they’re not reproductions; some parts of the first structure here (a storage room) are supposed to date from around the 15th or 16th century. I don’t know the age of the other, but those stairs are absolutely beautiful.

Olga kept herself amused while I admired the architecture:

Notes:

1. Quaffing is pretty much required if you’re drinking mead. If I remember my Pratchett correctly, it means you spill most of it.
2. Olga’s cousin’s name is also Olga. Just to keep us all on our toes.
3. That nose had me in fits of giggles for a good half-hour afterwards. I have spared you the picture of her using it to snuffle at her privates, but believe me it was an extraordinary sight.
4. Incidentally, one of our DIP speakers some months ago tried to make a point about norms of truthfulness in philosophical discourse by telling us that Stockholm is full of naked mole rats. I found it somewhat bizarre at the time, and seeing them there hasn’t improved matters.

1. Choose a nice complicated mystery novel you haven’t read before. One where you’ll have to keep track of lots and lots of clues and remember who knows what when and so on.
2. Buy it as an audio book, with chapters as separate tracks.
3. Shuffle.

(B.S. Johnson wrote a book designed to be read this way, The Unfortunates. It was published with the chapters separately bound, in a box.)

This, on the other hand, is.

I’ve used GNU screen for ages to keep my working environment set up the way I like it, wherever I am. I have a screen session permanently running on my office linux box, which I ssh to from wherever I happen to be.

That all changed this week, when my branch of our research institute moved to a new building. My linux box was taken offline and loaded into a truck; when it arrived at its new home, due to various cock-ups among the administration, it had no network access. (Word is they’re not going to let us ssh in anyway, sigh.)

So I’ve been playing around trying to set up my eee pc as a useful working environment. Step 1 was just copying all my configs from the desktop over to the netbook, and running everything from there instead. Imagine my surprise when some applications did not work the same way as they used to!

Specifically, screen has gained a purely awesome addition: screen-profiles provides something like the mode bar in emacs, configurable to add all sorts of goodies (battery monitor, wifi strength, lots of bits and pieces).

My other new discovery, which rather overshadows the first, is StumpWM. If screen and emacs had a baby, and brought it up to be a window manager, that would be stumpwm.

It’s a window manager written in lisp, like emacs,¹ and like emacs it’s configurable on-the-fly by lisp hacking.² Also like emacs it’s highly keyboard-driven, but more along the lines of screen: there’s a prefix key that diverts input to the stumpwm keymaps. (Actually I never realised before how similar the emacs and screen models are here; the only real difference is that screen gets away with only one keymap, hence only one prefix command. Stumpwm lets you define more if you need to, naturally.) Like screen, and unlike most window managers, you only see whatever you’re using at the moment (although you can tile windows the same way you can split emacs frames).³

I started messing around with stumpwm because the display of the eee is so tiny, and I was frustrated with the amount of space being wasted on menu bars and panels and whatever.⁴ I didn’t get very far at first, because I was trying to do everything by hand: shut down the Gnome display manager and restart X, pointing it at stumpwm. Of course all sorts of things stopped working, most importantly audio. But then I followed XSteve’s instructions for adding stumpwm as a session type under ubuntu, and magically everything worked.⁵

By “everything”, I mean everything. Audio works (I’m listening to Bettye Lavette in Amarok right now). Two-finger touch-pad scrolling works. I can split a stumpwm screen into two panes, pull firefox into one pane and emacs into the other, mouse-select text in firefox and drag and drop it into emacs. It not only works, it shows the text being dragged (otherwise I never would have tried the experiment). Global shortcut keys defined in Gnome work (so I can control the volume Amarok plays at).

I am a complete convert: stumpwm is fantastic.

I have two complaints.

The first is that I want better ways to switch windows: a list across all groups, that works like ido in emacs: filter the list of possible targets by any sort of match, rather than just prefix-matching and tab-completion.⁶

My second complaint is that both stumpwm and ido are written in (dialects of) lisp. Meaning that it’s conceivable that someone could hack bits of one into the other. Meaning that I’m awfully tempted to give it a try, instead of working on my dissertation. Shame on you, developers, for not protecting me from my instincts.

Notes:

1. Well, stumpwm is written in what emacs would call an inferior brand of lisp…
2. Yes, you can change the source code of your window manager while it’s running. And yes, once you can do this you’ll discover all sorts of reasons why you might want to.
3. And just like screen, now that screen-profiles exists, there’s a configurable mode line.
4. Emacs with no scrollbars and the font set to 8pt fits 80 characters twice, in a two-column split, which is magical for LaTeX. Viewing the pdf in Okular is less pleasant.
5. XSteve is the author of the psvn package (which adds excellent subversion support to emacs), among many other software projects. His config tips are worth checking out too.
6. Ido (’interactively do things’) is another recent discovery; I’m completely sold on buffer-switching, and the fact that it lets me prefer .tex over .aux when opening files might be enough of a draw card to force me to get used to the way it treats backspace and tab.