2002-04-08 10:38

Woeful weekend

Woeful Weekend

I was in the office most of the weekend. I've been trying to port some code to the Big Computer and to master the art of the queueing system on that machine. It was intensely frustrating even by the standards of dealing with computers; for each failed attempt the only feedback was an email saying that it didn't work.

So I now have a script that writes two scripts for each case and submits one (which invokes the other) to the queue. I'm not at all sure how much of this indirection is strictly necessary, but I have a renewed appreciation of the importance of ending a shell-script with a newline character.

Since each attempt took a while to fail I became fed-up and hypercaffeinated and annoyed that almost noone blogs on Sundays to take my mind off things.

Eventually, of course, I got it working. And my reward for this diligence? I now have a (metric) shedload of data to post-process.

Sigh.

French finance

We've established that I yearn for celebrity tittle-tattle in a form that allows me to pretend I'm really broadening my cultural horizons, right? So over the weekend my desire for an actual physical magazine overcame my ambivalence about the French language and I bought myself a copy of l'Express.

And it turns out that I still know French better than Swedish, which is slightly annoying, and also that the �uro hasn't yet evened out all the price differentials in the �urozone; in a sidebar L'Express quotes its cover-price in France (2,80 �), in the Netherlands (3,70 �) and in Finland (4,50 �) among others. What's that all about, then?