MaW’s Blog

Yes, Jonathan Coulton in London! His first time performing ‘over here’ and yes, he did sing Over There — he sang it first, after saying he thought he should get it out of the way and then not being able to start because he was trying not to laugh.

The atmosphere prior to the start of the concert was absolutely incredible. I’m going to keep comparing it to Loreena McKennitt at the Barbican, because there was the same sense of being part of a group of really dedicated fans, and of extreme anticipation. In her case it was because she’d not toured at all for nine years. In JoCo’s case, it’s because he’s never been here at all.

With a group of people from JoCo’s forum, I was right near the front of the queue. The doors didn’t even open until the advertised start time, which is not how I usually understand these things to work — the time on the ticket is usually the show’s intended start time. Therefore the concert started later than expected, and the whole transport situation became rather more stressful than it should have been.

However, the show itself was worth waiting for. After Over There — complete with derisory boos during the ’saved their asses in World War Two’ line — we were treated to a good cross-section of JoCo’s music, although unfortunately not including the new Lady Aberlin’s Muumuu. Particular highlights included Skullcrusher Mountain with virtually everyone singing every single word and the last chorus as an audience solo; Re: Your Brains as a concert-ender with audience participation (as if we hadn’t been participating already, as he acknowledged) where we had to learn to sing it like a mob of zombies, not like a Viennese children’s choir which has been turned into zombies. ‘Perhaps your mouths don’t work properly since you became zombies’.

I can’t recount all the wonderful moments as I’ll be here all day and I need to go shopping and do some cooking, but we did get the world premiere of Code Monkey sung with the accompaniment of JoCo’s new Tenori-On.

What do you mean, you don’t know what a Tenori-On is? Get thee to Google! Away, away!

I’ve moved. If you need updated contact details (address and landline have changed, everything else remains the same), get in touch and I’ll give them to you.

Also, if you’re around and at a loose end, come over for dinner. I’ve got a dining table and four chairs, but you might have to bring a plate.

Some people might think this is a post about being nice to redheads. It isn’t, although I suppose I could write something about the ridiculousness of that particular much-perpetuated image.

No, this is about drink!

Non-alcoholic, before you get too excited. It’s quite simple really. It goes like this:

1. take a decently-sized piece of fresh ginger
2. peel it
3. slice it thinly
4. tip it into a small saucepan with some water and a generous amount of sugar
5. heat it gently, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar to form a syrup
6. continue to cook gently until it tastes quite strongly gingery
7. add more sugar if it doesn’t seem syrupy enough
8. strain
9. allow to cool a bit, then place into a jar, bottle or other suitable lidded storage vessel

When you want to drink it, dilute some down with water. For strength, you’re aiming for something like commercial ‘high juice’ squashes. You could make it weaker, but then you just need a bigger helping in each glassful.

I have no idea how long this keeps, but if you make the syrup really sugary it should keep until you drink it, because it’ll get drunk fast, sugar’s a preservative and ginger’s antibacterial.

Okay so maybe not three steps. I got Dasher linking - hurrah! It turns out there was all sorts of fudging in the configure script to get it to work on the original Maemo for the Nokia 770, which is now unnecessary on OS2008. Hurrah for SDK improvements, but boo for not spotting that earlier.

The problem now is that libglade isn’t finding half the widgets in the glade file, and returns null pointers for them instead of the widget pointers. Every single one of the ones it’s failing to find is definitely in the XML, and the file’s definitely in the right place. I’ve checked - lots of times.

This might just be what makes me start to go bald.

After literally half an hour of further effort, I managed to get Dasher to link when built against the Maemo Chinook SDK. Hurrah!

Okay so it took a manual edit to the Makefiles. I think I’m going to have to consult somebody who knows this whole autoconf/automake business a bit better to see how I can get the Glade libraries referenced properly.

Then I need to get it to actually start up as it currently tries to dereference a null pointer and segfaults. This is probably due to my fairly cavalier #ifdefing out to get it to compile. Now I need to go back and figure out which bits are actually needed and how to get them to work.

Ultimately of course the UI under Maemo is going to be a bit different, especially once I get the thing working as an input method, but for now I just want it to work at all!