djm's scribble

Baby Hugo is going great so far. He has one terrible “witching hour” in the everning when we requires a lot of attention in the form of rocking, patting, being sung to, being walked, offered visual stimulation and frequent food (I’m told this is very normal). Apart from this he is a very happy and contented child who loves to observe the world around him, and the faces of his extended family.

A collection of Hugo photos is online, covering roughly the first two weeks of his life. More to come :)

Umberto Eco’s essay on proto-fascism should be read by every thinking person, and re-read until the horror of how much of it we already tolerate sinks in.

I just stumbled across this paper (via Charlie Stross’ weblog): A False Sense of Insecurity by John Mueller. Here is a taste:

Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

(the “War on accident-causing deer” just doesn’t have the same ring to it). This quote slightly misrepresents the paper as whimsical, it is not - it is a very sober assessment of terrorist threats and appropriate policy responses. Like other such comparisons, I expect this to to be completely ignored by our leaders. The Power of Nightmares it just too tempting for those who want to retain control.

For the last week, I have been receiving spam emails with titles such as “eigenstate is?” and “What?? biconnected?”. Unless these are targetted, I can’t possibly imagine what audience would respond to them.

After a lot of futzing around with .NET SDKs, environment variables, platform SDKs and Python, I have finally been able to build Windows binaries of most of my Python modules. The path was smoothed greatly by this guide, but it still needed additional tweaking. As a result, py-bcrypt, py-editdist and py-radix now all have Windows binaries available.

The porting problems were a mix of the mundane (missing integer types) and the stupid (no snprintf?, why “winsock2.h” instead of “sys/socket.h”?). Everything works except for IPv6 addresses in py-radix: the Windows getaddrinfo function flatly refuses to parse them. I suspect that if I had an IPv6 stack installed then it would magically work, but IMO that is broken behaviour - parsing numeric addresses should work regardless of what the user happens to have enabled.

I just finished reading Scott Aaronson’s NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality (also known as quant-ph/0502072). With excellent humor, Aaronson dicusses various comptational models ranging from the merely strange (Soap bubbles and quantum computers) to the completely wacky (Anthropic computing, where you kill yourself if you don’t get the right answer). He makes a case that the hardness of NP problems should be considered as a physical principle, with interesting predicive consequences.

At 10:56AM on Friday 28th July, our son Hugo Benjamin Miller was born after a long but uncomplicated labor. I was lucky enough to be able to spend the first few nights at the hospital with my wife and Hugo. This was a great pleasure and I think it made things a bit easier for Simone as she recovered from the birth, as she did not have to get in and out of bed to change nappies or settle baby.

Hugo is a wonderful baby (all 4.16kg and 53cm of him) and has so far displayed a very easygoing temperament. He is easy to keep satisfied too, and seems to have only four reasons to cry: nappy, burp, cuddle or food. If I can’t figure out which of these is the cause then I can do a brute-force run through the first three and and then hand him over to Simone, confident that the solution is the one that I can’t deliver. May it stay this way for a long time!

Some pictures of the little man: