Miscellany

Make of this what you will. Some of it is complete; some isn't.

I think http://xkcd.com/2006 should be seen by far more people than it will be.

I'm pretty sure that I have a certain degree of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Personally, I don't consider it to be a disorder, but it's certainly a part of me as a person. Maybe I just have Obsessive-Compulsive Personality.

I seem to have a habit of buying multiples of things; somehow I seem unable to be happy with just one of something.

Programmers, database creators, and web form designers should all be required to read Patrick McKenzie's excellent article about people's names.

It's pretty interesting even if you don't fall into one of those categories, but for anyone building computerised systems which need to refer to human beings, it should be a required study.

I wonder why UTC (the compromise abbreviation for Universal Coordinated Time between French, English and other language speakers) is called "Universal".

After all, it really only applies to Earth, the World, humanity's home planet. It's not "universal" in any way at all. "Worldwide", yes, but not "universal".

UTC follows a 24-hour day, with each hour containing 60 minutes of 59, 60 or 61 seconds each (if the 59 and 61 puzzle you, you should learn about leap seconds), and this really only makes sense for a planet with an approximately 24-hour period of rotation, broken down into humanly-convenient subdivisions (for example, one second is approximately the duration of a resting human's heartbeat).

These things mean absolutely nothing (as far as we know) for the rest of the universe in general, so why is UTC "universal"?

I run a business which is registered for VAT in the UK. Between around 2017 and 2022, the UK Government decided that customers would no longer be allowed to submit VAT returns using the online web interface which they've provided since paper returns were abandoned around 2014.

The new system is called Making Tax Digital and here are some notes of my experience (and others') with the transition.

Midnight is not the end of the day. It is the start of the day.

How can you tell? Well, it's simple: midnight in hours, minutes and seconds is 00:00:00.

That fairly obviously is one second before 00:00:01, and the rest of the day simply follows on from there.

The final second of the previous day is 23:59:59, and the changeover to 00:00:00 tells you that this is now a new day, and therefore 00:00:00 is the start of it.

If you're still not convinced, bear in mind that 23:59:59 is the last second of some date such as 2024-05-17, and 00:00:00 is the first second of the following date: 2024-05-18. Therefore midnight is the start of that day.

I am British.

I live part of the time in England and part of the time in Germany (because I have a house in England, and some of my family lives there, and I have a girlfriend, a dog and an apartment in Germany).

I'm self-employed and work for my customers over the Internet, so I can run my business from anywhere with an Internet connection.

On January 31st 2020 I ("Brexit day") I thought Britain leaving the European Union was going to be the biggest challenge I had to deal with in the next few months.

I was wrong.

There is, as far as I'm aware, a common stereotype of Germans and Germany that:

• people follow the rules
• there are rules for everything
• trains etc are punctual
• things are done efficiently
• bureaucracy exists everywhere, but at least it's efficient

Nearly all of the above are completely wrong (except perhaps for the bit about there being rules for everything).

My most recent (in 2024) example of German bureaucracy (specifically involving local government, although not only that) is that:

• in 2021 I obtained a German residency permit, which allows me (as a UK citizen) to remain living and working in Germany for as long as I like, just as I was allowed to before Brexit, when the UK was part of the EU
• I specifically asked at the time I obtained this permit whether there was anything else I needed to do in order to continue living as I had been in Germany
  • the answer was "No; this residency permit is all you need; you can carry on as before - but it only applies to Germany; you can't live in any other European country (as I used to be allowed to do)"
  • no problem; I don't want to go and live in another European country
• fast-forward to 2024, when someone reverses into the side of my car whilst I'm driving along a city street
  • the German system with RTAs (Road Traffic Accidents, in case you were wondering) is that someone phones the police, and they come along and have a look at things, talk to the drivers, occasionally draw lines on the road where things happened, and ask to see the documents you're supposed to carry with you in Germany:
    • ID card (or, in my case, residency permit)
    • driving licence
    • vehicle registration document showing who the vehicle belongs to
  • in this case the other driver admitted liability without any discussion, and the police told him what the likely penalty would be (about €150 fine and one point on his licence)
  • however they then spent a remarkable amount of time in their vehicle before coming back with our documents, and it turned out to be because they couldn't quite work out whether my UK driving licence was valid (and even phoned their regional office to discuss it)
  • they decided on balance that it wasn't valid, and (very sheepishly) told me they couldn't let me drive my car home, and that I would have to contact the local city council to get my licence converted to a German one (such things are done locally rather than centrally in Germany)

So, zero points to the German immigration office ("Ausländeramt") for failing to tell me I would need to get my driving licence converted (which, as an EU citizen, I didn't need to do before Brexit, which was the cause of me needing to see them in the first place).

Oh, and whilst I'm at it, this reminds me that Ausländeramt didn't send me the letter they were supposed to early in 2021, telling me how to get the residency permit. I had to phone them to get things going.

It turns out that the reason was that they didn't realise I was British; they thought I was Irish (and therefore still European, without any requirement for a residency permit). This was because Meldeamt (the local government office you need to go to in Germany when you take up a permanent address, no matter what nationality you are) back in 2008 had looked at my passport, which on the front cover states that it is issued by "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and only bothered with the last word, so they had registered me as being Irish.

Zero points for Meldeamt recognising a British passport when they see one, then.

Unfortunately, the story continues.

• going to the local city council office (in 2024 again now) to get my driving licence converted into a German one (oh, and by the way, when they say "converted", they really do mean "we will give you a German one and we will take your British one away", which I think is over-stepping the mark of their jurisdiction a bit) resulted in a requirement to get the classification of the vehicles my licence allows me to drive converted into the German equivalent. Fair enough, you might think - they should have a list of the most common licences they encounter (British, American, Australian, South African, just to cover the English-language ones) and a summary of "this foreign thing means that German thing"
• Oh no. You have to take your licence to the German equivalent of the AA / RAC, they take a photocopy of it, and send it away to a translation company, who then take a week to translate it into German (as though nobody has ever seen one of these things before, and can't just take the text that was created the first time someone presented one, and send it back within an hour), charge you €65 for the privilege, and then you can take this to the licensing office to get it converted into the German equivalent
  • The grumble on my part this time is that ADAC (the German AA / RAC) failed to send the entire document correctly (I don't know the full details, but that's as much as they told me so far) to the translation company, so they're taking more than a week to deal with it.
  • This is turn buggers up my attempts to renew my UK passport, since the German driving licence issuing office needs to see my UK passport at the same time as getting the translation of the UK driving licence (goodness knows why, since my Aufenthaltstitel is sufficient German evidence of who I am, and I had to present my UK passport in the first place in order to get that) before they will in turn issue me (after 2-3 weeks, of course) with a German driving licence.
  • I knew I had to renew my UK passport, of course, but I had plenty of time to do this before the Germans suddenly came up with a requirement to get a German driving licence, and not send my passport away for renewal in the meantime
• Fortunately (for the long term), it turns out that the UK is not so selfishly nationalistic as the Germans when it comes to driving licences, and so even after Brexit, the UK allows me to drive for as long as I like in the UK on a German licence, whereas the Germans no longer recognise a UK licence.
• I'm still strongly tempted to tell DVLA that my driving licence has been stolen and I want to get a replacement. I just won't tell them that it was stolen by the German government.

The most bureaucratically annoying part of this is that you can find on the official German website for the German Department of Transport (Bundesministerium für Digitales und Verkehr) the statement that "British people who live in Germany for fewer than 185 days in a year do not need to obtain a German licence".

This turns out to be bollocks. They do not mean "live in Germany" - they mean "registered as having a German address". They don't care whether you're living at that address, or in the country, at all. If you have a German address and live in another country, Germany regards you as living in Germany.

This, in my opinion, is both silly and unreasonable. I live in two countries, agreed, but not both at the same time.

#define SIX 1+5
#define NINE 8+1

int main()
{
    printf("%d\n", SIX * NINE);
}

I find many things about words quite fascinating.

Technical documentation can occasionally be amusing (it can also occasionally be useful, however neither is guaranteed).

• Hewlett-Packard Proliant Microserver Remote Access Card removal

This is the story of the end of a dog's life. I've written it mainly as a cathartic process for myself. Read it at your own emotional risk.

The television series Lost seems to have some inconsistencies. For example, Rose claims that her husband Bernard went to the toilet at the back of the plane just before it exploded and the tail section got separated from the centre of the cabin. So, why was Bernard found sitting in a row of seats which landed in a tree, still with a seatbelt on, in series 2 episode 7 "The other 48 days"? Maybe one of the cabin crew told him the plane was about to explode, and asked him to sit down and put a seat belt on…

Other than that, if I ever find myself with a multitude of hours spare time (not necessarily consecutively), I'm intrigued to see what the Lost series would be like if the whole thing were watched in chronological sequence of when the events happened…

That could be an interesting video-editing activity.

A lot of people ask questions on mailing lists (or forums) without giving what I think is obviously basic information to help people provide useful answers.

There are many guides on the Internet about how best to ask questions; some of these are quite lengthy and therefore unlikely to be read by newcomers to the situation.

I find I keep on posting my own recommendations as part of the answers I give people, so I decided it was time to summarise them with a URL.

Here are a few notes on playing some well-known (IMHO) adventure games.

I like using IFM, the Interactive Fiction Mapper, to create maps of games as I play them. The notes above contain source files and output so you can see (some of) what it can do.

Many years ago I wrote a few (very simple, basically just proof-of-concept) adventure games using Advsys. It's a pretty simple language to get started with, but it has the drawback that it requires a special interpreter to play the games.

I've now finally got around to having a go at writing something more meaningful (well, I hope so, anyway) using Inform6, which creates standard Z-code, and the games can therefore be played by any interpreter which can play the Infocom games (such as frotz or gargoyle).

My game is called Hex.

Some of my opinions on a (very) few of the books I've read.

Some of my opinions on a (very) few of the films I've watched.

Some of my opinions on some beers I was given as an advent calendar in 2020.

I use several of these as random appendages to my personal emails.

Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing left to add,
but rather when there is nothing left to take away.

Measuring average network latency is about as useful as
measuring the mean temperature of patients in a hospital.

Software development can be quick, high quality, or low cost.

The customer gets to pick any two out of three.

Of course, this applies to plenty of things other than software, too.

It may not seem obvious, but (6 x 5 + 5) x 5 - 55 equals 5!

Having been asked to give a reference for this person,
I can surely state that you will be very lucky indeed
if you can get them to work for you.

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