My brother William just went to a piano course for a week. Here’s something he played, from memory just before he left:

Liszt Sonetto played by William Porteous

All that practice is really paying off.

I want to be able to send someone a package containing a Python script and the bare minimum for them to run that script on Windows. In Perl, this is quite easy, I believe you can just send your script with perl.exe. This is how I did it in Python. Continue reading »

Lots of stuff’s happened over the last couple of weeks. It’s been one of those years when I’ve booked off most of the year’s holiday in two day bursts.

Last week was the Green Man festival, where the was no green man, but there was a big tree ent who was happy to let us walk under him and write wishes on his legs. Doves were too loud and the singing was out of tune. I reluctantly quit early. The Flaming Lips played mostly new stuff, which was quite psychodelic compared to some of their recent output. The return to their earlier vibe was marked by the inclusion of She Don’t Use Jelly. It was fun and unexpected to see the band turn up in the morning to do their own sound check.

The week before we were up at Edinburgh for this little festival they have each year. Turns out, there was quite a lot on. We caught mostly small theatre shows, like Deborah Pearson’s little piece to a handful of audience in a tiny video shop where she had worked after immigrating from Canada. She had used her camcorder for it’s only outing to film her last days hanging out with her friends before leaving her homeland for good, and repeated verbatim every word that she said in the home movie of the end of her old life.

There was also a bloke walking to space. Well, the same number of steps, anyway. I love Live Art.

My bro came over to visit this weekend. He’s just come back from a gruelling five day residential piano course where he rubbed shoulders and had lessons from some of the best pianists in the world. We celebrated his survival by having an amazing curry in Lasan in Birmingham. Mmmm.

We also went to see The Illusionist, a beautiful hand drawn animation by the director of Bellevue Rendez-vous.

I’m a big google fan. But I’m open minded, so let’s check out the competition, bing. Let’s see how they score on a popular, and a not so popular website… Continue reading »

I’m really impressed with Flipboard, an app which really uses the capabilities of the iPad to deliver a novel and compelling reading experience. It manages to make your facebook and twitter feeds look like they were designed by a skilled magazine layout editor. I can see it being controversial as it also strips out all the adds. Makes me glad to be an “elitist” iPad owner.

We’ve started a board games group at the Studio where Katie works, and last night after a few pizzas, we played Jamaica. It’s a race game, but you don’t win just by crossing the line first, you also have to have sufficient gold. There are also cannons to collect and fire at opponents, and food to spend if you want to land on a square. Snakes and ladders on steroids.

I just scared the heebee-jeebees out of myself by innocently trying to use a shortcut in eclipse to copy a line into the clipboard. Instead, it turned my whole screen upside down! As a commenter on stackoverflow said:

Presumably flipping your screen upside down is not something you want to do often (unless you’re a vampire/bat).

Quite right.
In the end I found exactly what I was looking for in google code.

Rafi ready for a game.

On the edge of the Edinburgh cliff, we went to see the warm-up for Tom’s new show which he’s performing 23 times in the festival. He’s shortened it by a few minutes since I saw it last time, and it’s energy level is threatening to cross the red line. I don’t know how he’s going to manage the full month. I wish his audiences luck and enjoyment as they are trapped in the goldfish bowl of his dream for just over an hour.