Category: Ramblings

Ah, the humble yet immeasurably satisfying McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive biscuit. How could they possibly be improved? Well, how about sticking a layer of caramel between the biscuit and the chocolate? Mmmmm…caramel digestives!

And the McVitie’s classic Ginger Nuts? Surely no-one could fiddle with its timeless recipe and make it even better? Well, how about leaving the ginger nut as it is…but topping it with chocolate? Oooohh…chocolate ginger nuts!

Big yay to the food scientists at UB for advancing the cause of biscuitry, and satisfying cookie lovers all over Britain.

This is a gem: Forthright’s Favourite Words is a short collection of obscure yet beautiful, descriptive and still useful English words. (Via Matt Jones, whose favourite is “Ultracrepidate”)

Abi and I are both itching to do some spring cleaning. Over the course of the winter, our garage has been a dumping ground for all kinds of junk. Until we got rid of our old washing machine, you couldn’t even walk clear from one end to the other. We still have six wooden doors there that we bought two years ago to replace the hollow-core doors in the house. There are odd tables, packing boxes, toys and tools, leftover paints, varshishes and solvents from the last time we did any work around the house. Oh, and my drums, too.

So the garage is going to get a thorough overhaul sometime soon. We’ll definitely be doing the doors some time in the next couple of months. At the end of last year we were planning to put in a new bathroom suite, but we never got round to it: that’s now on our “must do” list for this year. We also want to put in wooden floors upstairs to replace the carpets, and redecorate the hall, and both of the big bedrooms. It’s not even out of the question that we might start thinking about replacing the kitchen, also. New double glazing to replace the existing windows and frames, which are starting to creak and draught. And if we get all of that done, we’ll probably consider getting bricking and glazing our porch.

I don’t think all of this will happen. For a start, it’ll cost a bloody fortune. But come May we’ll have been in this house for five years, and it’s time to do some serious work on it.

If I were to write a Java-based blogging tool that allowed you to post to Movable Type weblogs, I’d call it JaMTomorrow.

Gettit?

Fortunately I have better things to do with my time.

I suppose this is the right occasion to mention how excited I am about the thought of Movable Type Pro, which Ben and Mena Trott say is coming some time in the summer. Here are some of the features I can’t wait to get my hands on:

• Custom entry fields
• Integrated spellchecker
• Category hierarchy
• Workflow

The custom entry fields and category hierarchy in particular are going to be invaluable for the Bob Shaw site I’m planning. Workflow could be useful, but it depends what they mean by it.

Pricing is going to be another interesting question. Mena recently talked a bit about the cost of the NetNewsWire RSS aggregator:

“Pricing software — especially software that has previously been free — is a pretty taxing task for the independent developer. It’s an incredibly difficult game where you have to put your personal feelings aside and consider what people will be willing to pay.”

Movable Type is free for personal use, but it has a suggested donation price. If you donate more than $20, you get a license key which makes your blog show up on the Movable Type home page whenever you write a new entry. If you donate $45 or more, you become entitled to support over IM. A Movable Type commercial license, however, costs a flat $150.

Movable Type’s policy has always been that when they eventually release a fully paid-for edition (MT Pro), they will subtract the cost of any donations you’ve made from price. I’m starting to wonder now how much MT Pro is going to weigh in at.

I’m guessing it’s going to be around $145.

I think that while the Pro features are just plain lovely all round, they are going to appeal most to the people who already love and use the software. If you fall in that category, then you’ve probably already made a donation. And if you’ve laid out the $45 (we have), then upgrading to Pro would be a nice, round $100.

Would I pay that? In an instant. Movable Type is one of my all-time favourite pieces of software. It’s a sheer joy to work with.

As both Mike Booth and my wife pointed out, my solution to the 23 Prisoners Problem is flawed. It works if the warden takes one prisoner into the switch room every day, but the puzzle explicitly says that this isn’t the case:

“After today, from time to time whenever I feel so inclined, I will select one prisoner at random and escort him to the switch room.”

Damn. I’d felt so pleased with myself for figuring it out. I even sent David Weinberger a link to my solution. He posted a link to it on his blog, which means that I can’t go back and destroy all evidence of trying…. Curse the permanence of the web!

My solution tried to solve the problem by allowing the prisoners to add some extra bits of information to the problem. But the problem is phrased very carefully to ensure that no extra information beyond the state of those two switches can be inserted. The random selection of prisoners, and the random interval between them being picked, effectively destroys any attempt to pass state information in any other way.

Mike’s solution is wonderfully elegant, but I can’t help feeling that there is another way it can be done. The fact that problem emphasises the evenness of the random distribution (“But, given enough time, everyone will eventually visit the switch room as many times as everyone else.”) makes me think that there is a probabilitistic answer somewhere. Also, with there being exactly 23 prisoners, I can’t help but wonder about a connection with the Birthday Paradox.

Or maybe the number 23 is just a coincidence stemming from the Law of Small Numbers (i.e., there aren’t enough small numbers for each of them to have a unique purpose).

More pondering is required.