Westbury Court Gardens

I have to admit that I find it hard to get as excited about this visit as Joanna did. She went there with Christopher today (while I was hard at work for Queen and Country). There was a garden with some old trees, some not so old trees, a rectangular pond, some ducks, and a lot of grass. Had to be there, I guess.

Raspberries

Some might say that Richard Branson is good at making raspberries - at conventions, or politicians, or competitors, or even dress sense. But as regular readers will know, I signed up to Virgin Wines a little while ago. I think cases come every two months or so, although I declined a recent offering, so I've just taken delivery of my second batch. It gives me a chance to waffle about some that I've tried recently.

There have been lots that I haven't recorded, so although I may have been lazy in my writing-up, I haven't been quite so lazy in the actual tasting.

The first that stands out in recent memory is the 2005 Peter Lehmann "The 1885 Shiraz". It had, compared to all the recent French vins, a most intense plummy flavour, with some liquorice, and a very long, lingering finish. Despite this length, the wine seemed to disappear remarkably quickly.

The next one that deserves purchasing again was a Casillero del Diablo Reserva Privada. I can't remember the year. It didn't have the intensity and length of the Peter Lehmann, nor so much of the fruit, but the liquorice was even more dominant. Casillero del Diablo seems to be the Jacob's Creek of Chilean wine - available everywhere. The regular ones are generally acceptable, but the reserve ones in each case seem to be worth paying for.

Today, we tried the 2007 Meillade from Chateauneuf du Pape. Mr Branson vicariously alleges (through his VW staff) that this is a sexy Australian-style full-and-fruity red. Must be one of those sensitive new age types of sexy, or perhaps waifish, rather than full-bodied & voluptuous. There's barely any depth, and the only fruit is raspberry. I would have been hard pressed to call it a Shiraz (or Syrah) - it tastes more like a light & berry-ful Pinot Noir. But, having said all that, it's not objectionable. Just like red cordial isn't objectionable, maybe...

Getting started with Git on Windows

Although I'm familiar with and like subversion, I need to find a distributed source code management system, and spent some time looking into them, particularly using the info in the wikipedia article. The three most interesting systems seem to be git, bazaar, and mercurial. I decided that git would be the most mature, as it is used for managing the linux kernel development.

I had a few issues getting started, so I thought I'd describe them here in case it helps anyone else.

I decided to download the 1.5.5 preview from Google Code. The installation was very simple, so time to start working through the tutorial-ish manual.

The first step was to clone an existing repository. I decided that I'd want the eclipse plugin, so I chose egit. After trying a few variations of the checkout command, I decided that my proxy/firewall was a problem, and looked into how to get around this problem. It was unlikely that my proxy would allow the git:// protocol, so I looked into using http.

In the Git Bash, I tried using
$ git config --global http.proxy proxyname:port
but it didn't work. So I tried
$ git config --global http.proxy http://proxyname:port
that didn't work. I tried
$ export http_proxy=http://proxyname:port

and this time it (the clone operation) did work. The clone command that I used was
$ git clone http://repo.or.cz/r/egit.git egit

Note the "/r/" in the URL there. The egit page has slightly different paths:
http://repo.or.cz/w/egit.git - the home page
git://repo.or.cz/egit.git - the git: URL
http://repo.or.cz/r/egit.git - the http: download URL
I don't know if that's a standard feature of these systems, but it did slow me down!

Then, I went on to the second subsection of the manual, "How to check out a different version of the project". The command
$ git checkout -b new v0.2
failed with:
error: Entry 'org.spearce.egit-feature/.settings/org.eclipse.core.runtime.prefs' not uptodate. Cannot merge.

After some searching, I found roughly what this message means. Noticing a suggestion elsewhere in the manual advice to try gitk, I discovered that there were "Local uncommitted changes, not checked into index" as suggested by the error. But I hadn't made any changes. I remembered the Important Compatibility Notice from the installation procedure warning me of an autocrlf issue that had changed recently. The diff aspect of gitk didn't really demonstrate whether this was the issue, but I tried removing the repository, setting core.autocrlf false, and then cloning it again. This time, gitk didn't identify any local uncommitted changes, and creating a new branch worked.

It's a bit hard to work out how the config business works. At the moment, if I try to find out all the config settings, I get a list that includes two values of core.autocrlf:
$ git config -l
core.symlinks=false
core.autocrlf=true
color.diff=auto
pack.packsizelimit=2g
gui.recentrepo=C:/Documents and Settings/jyesberg/...
http.proxy=http://proxyname:80
core.autocrlf=false
core.repositoryformatversion=0
core.filemode=false
core.bare=false
core.logallrefupdates=true
core.symlinks=false
remote.origin.url=http://repo.or.cz/r/egit.git
remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
branch.master.remote=origin
branch.master.merge=refs/heads/master

I tried the following commands to remove the first line, but none seemed to work:
$ git config --global core.autocrlf false
$ git config core.autocrlf false
$ git config --unset-all core.autocrlf
The final command removed the second variable, but not this sticky first one. But perhaps the first one isn't being used. I decided to edit (with vi) the global config file (.gitconfig) directly in case it was a safer option. To be sure that I was in the right directory, I started a new Git Bash (from the Start menu). That first value is still there, but seems not to be a problem.

I thought it would be nice to make some mods to the manual to provide this advice, and (after guidance from the mailing list) it seems I need to git git. Unfortunately, although
$ git clone http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
always seems to start, and go through dozens of gets and walks, it always seems to fail, either by freezing or with an error message:
error: Unable to find 1f405709e7341c27e20c0159fb7c17efbf85975c under http://www. kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
Cannot obtain needed blob 1f405709e7341c27e20c0159fb7c17efbf85975c
I'm not sure how to get past this barrier - maybe I'll get some help from the list.

Update:
From my home computer, I was able to git git with http, so perhaps it had been the work proxy that had been causing (or contributing to) the problem. Out of interest, I also tried using the git protocol, and it was at least twice as fast (approx 2 mins instead of 5 mins) although I wasn't timing carefully.

Trooping of the Colour

As representatives of a foreign government, we were advised that there was a good chance of any application to a Royal Event being successful. Joanna applied for a ticket to the Trooping of the Colour rehearsal, and was duly rewarded.

She and Helen left on Friday afternoon to catch a train to Paddington. There was a little messing around when the train was cancelled, but no real problem. They found themselves at their hotel in St James Park that evening.

On Saturday, they walked through the park to Horseguards, and watched the rehearsal. She was impressed with the precision of the drill, and the different uniforms - even some golden armour. Afterwards, lunch was at Downing St (not inside). The afternoon walk took them past Buckingham Palace, Constitution Hill, Wellington Arch, and then Wellington's Apsley House. Then along Knightsbridge, through Harrods, to the Natural History & Science museums, before catching the tube back to the hotel, where there was a pub dinner. Afterwards, another walk past Westminster Abbey & Palace, a look at the London Eye, and back home.

Sunday was a day for visiting the Zoo. Tube to Baker St, & a walk through Regent's Park (carefully noting the impressive roses in the Queen Mary's Gardens). All the animals except the penguins & butterflies were asleep or otherwise invisible, but the bouncy castle and carousel were fun. Then the waterbus on Regent's Canal down to Little Venice, right next to Paddington Station, where the train was waiting to take them home.

News from Moorlands Road during the weekend included Christopher's swimming experience (he actually liked it this time - even being thrown in!) and Stephanie's & Dad's bike path trip to the shops.

Canterbury Tale

I went (with 3 colleagues from work) to visit the PERMIS team at University of Kent at Canterbury. Although it was a long drive each way, the visit was very interesting and I'm optimistic that it could be the beginning of some very exciting work. We had a very pleasant dinner at Cafe de China, which I'd recommend to any visitors to the city.

I also squeezed in a quick visit to the Cathedral before Friday's meeting, but I don't think I can cross it off my list since there was no Choir at 8am.

Scitilop - backwards politics.

And now for a word from the department of amateur political scientists. In a gross over-simplification, two-party politics can be modelled as a game where each party has to position itself on the well known left-right spectrum. Each person has a preference for a position on that spectrum, and will vote for the party that chooses the spot closest to that preference. The rational strategy sees both parties rush towards the centre.

What happens if we postulate some new behaviour: some people, especially those with preferences towards the extremities of the spectrum, may become "rusted-on" voters. A rusted-on voter won't ever vote for the other party. If each party suspects that its rusted-on voters are loyal, but that those opposite could be tempted to change, then we might find that the parties actually cross over. A left party might start to introduce more right-leaning policies, and vice-versa.
I think I've seen this in a number of situations. In the UK, the (left) labour party has decided to remove the lowest tax bracket, meaning that people on lower incomes have to pay more tax. One might suggest that progressive taxation is a left policy, whereas flat tax rates is a right policy. The left government is moving to the right.

In Queensland, the (left) labor government looked at daylight saving - moving the clocks an hour forward in the summer. Its prime constituency is in the highly populated southeast corner of the state, the most populous area, and the part with the most to benefit from daylight saving. But the government has refused, not wanting to alienate the more conservative (right) country areas.

The relatively new leader of the UK conservative party is much more left-wing than others in recent history.

The Australian federal Liberal (conservative, right) party has elected Brendan Nelson as its leader. He was once a member of the Labor (left) party. He has dissociated the party from many (but not all) of the previously right policies, including some in industrial relations, gay rights, and an apology to the Aborigines.

Ok, so it's not clear that on any single one of these positions, the right party is to the left of the left party. And of course the whole left-right spectrum is very artificial, and becoming less useful. But maybe that's the point.

There must be other articles/blogs about this. Maybe someone will send me some interesting links.

A Holiday at Wilson's Farm

It's half term at school, so there's another week off. We decided, along with about 20 million other Britons, that the best place to spend it would be on the M5, near Bristol. I suppose it's not too difficult to believe that a lot of cars can make the traffic slow down, but I do find it very weird that there's so much traffic that it just stops. For up to 10 minutes at a time. And then again, a few minutes later. I remember (with some pleasure) some interesting applied maths lectures in second year studying partial differential equations modelling traffic flow and heat flow. But I don't think the models we used could have described this.

Anyway, after a slower but not particularly unpleasant or frustrating journey, we found ourselves at Killerton House, a National Trust place near Exeter in Devon. It's got rather nice gardens, a nicely done up inside, with a costume museum, and importantly for Devonshire, tea rooms - two sets, even. I enjoyed stitching together these pictures of the girls in the garden. Maybe I should try to tune it up to make that join disappear.



After a quick cream tea (they don't seem to call them Devonshire Teas here), we were on our way to the farm. Depending who you ask, the best feature of this place is either the number of tractors, the lambs, the dogs, or the chickens/ducklings/goslings/egg-hunt.

We did a little exploring of the local area - to the Tarr Steps, and to Dunster/Minehead. We had driving rain, drizzle, low cloud, lots of combinations. The Exmoor Ponies were of great interest too. We had a couple of quite tasty dinners at Exebridge's "The Anchor", which was in a very nice setting.











I made an early departure from the farm, so that I could return to the pleasures of work, while the others stayed on holiday. There's absolutely no truth to the rumour that I can't survive 3 days without Internet connectivity. (We took the laptop to the supermarket because there would be coverage there!)

My train trip home was interesting. My first Taunton - Malvern Link ticket was offered at £51.50, but I explained that I'd seen it for £28 on the Internet. So, I was given a ticket for £28. The penalty for such a cheap ticket was that I wasn't permitted to go through Birmingham. Oddly enough, that didn't make any difference, given the trains I was planning to travel on. I suppose it might almost be reasonable to offer a flexible ticket first, but I don't really think so. Anyway, after the others drove back to the farm, I made it onto my train. Bristol Temple Meads was the first stop. And we waited a little while. There was an announcement explaining that the new Train Manager (conductor) would be a little late, as there were delays on trains coming from Birmingham, due to trees blown onto the tracks. A little while later, it was explained that the new train manager wouldn't be coming after all, and that this train was now terminated. "All change please, all change." We were advised to head over to a different platform, to get the next train in a generally northerly direction - this one was aiming for Manchester Piccadilly. It was only two stops to Cheltenham Spa, where I was to change for a Malvern train. But those two stops took some time, and of course the train was very crowded, having two train-loads of passengers at the end of a bank holiday weekend! When we arrived at Cheltenham, it turned out that we'd just missed the Malvern train, and the next one wouldn't be for two hours. I had hoped that perhaps I were allowed to catch a Birmingham train, I might have been able to connect somehow. But things turned out even better. There were four of us on that train who were now trying to get to Worcester, Malvern Link, Great Malvern, and Ledbury. After some animated (almost heated, from one quarter) discussion, and some consultation to the Fat Controller (by phone - I don't really know if he/she was fat, it's just a stereotype, and I'm not responsible!), the nice people at First Great Western agreed to send the four of us to Worcester and Great Malvern in a taxi. It cost them £72. As it turned out, I was only about 30 minutes later than I would have been by train, so that was quite good.

We'll have more photos and details of the holiday soon. Now that Joanna knows that Australia won the test by 95 runs, I may not hear from her again (the farm house isn't in range). Berenice is off on her Egyptian Escapade tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, which means that I've got to manage 3 nights on my own. This calls for some immediate prioritisation of culinary establishments!

A calm weekend

I managed to get to 2.5 services at Gloucester today - they sang Howells Collegium Regale Jubilate and Te Deum for matins for Pentecost, followed by Darke in F for Eucharist. Then evensong in the middle of the day (3pm, 6 hours before sunset!) had a fancy Magnificat by Swayne, and the Nunc by Holst, with an Elgar anthem. I was disappointed not to hear the plainsong Veni Creator Spiritus - unless it was disguised in the recessional improvisation.

Berenice left today for a week of walking in Wales, with other walkers by the coach-load destined for Criccieth near Cardigan.

The others went to Snowshill Manor in the Cotswolds. Unfortunately, the camera eluded them, so you'll have to make do with the wiki pictures.

The weather this weekend has been like a mild Brisbane summer's day. The only negative is that there's a bit of haze around, otherwise the pictures would be amazing. I saw dozens of people paragliding from the ridge of the hills - the easterly wind (which more often brings the haze) in the heat would have provided some good updrafts over the ridge. While I've not really been tempted to parachute (from an otherwise perfectly good aeroplane), I could easily be tempted to try this. Maybe one day...

Yesterday (Saturday) was our first day with nothing on for some time. Helen had spent Friday night with Lily. The girls did their orienteering (S) and fashion design for first hobbies, followed by horse riding together. The afternoon was spent playing around on the road, the common, and the creek, on bikes & scooters, with Matthew and Tom from up the road. Joanna played with her flower garden, inspired by the previous day's visit to the Spring Flower Show at the Three Counties Showground. It also inspired her to buy a ticket for the Chelsea flower show, later in the month.

And while we're going backwards, we had a lovely dinner at Beau Thai on Friday night to celebrate the birthday and retirement of a Dstl colleague. Peter and others had many interesting stories that kept us going well past the restaurant's advertised closing time. I haven't known him long, but I hope he continues to come to our Friday lunches, which I seem to be running.

Now that things are a bit calmer at home, we're thinking about our next holidays. There's a mid-term farmstay week later this month, and Joanna's sure to write about her imminent Scotland trip, and Berenice is going to Egypt and Iceland. But what I really mean is holidays that I can take! There's a Scandinavia plan for July. My main aim had been to get into the arctic circle to see a long day, but that's looking increasingly difficult - too far to drag everyone. So we'll probably end up visiting places like Esbjerg, Køpenhavn, Bergen, Ålesund, Oslo, and Stockholm. If we've got time, I'd also like to pay some Bach homage at Leipzig. And Mike suggested that since we're in the area, we should head over to St Petersburg - but that seems way too far away. After a northern sojourn, the only option would be to head south, and there's two such adventures on the cards: an adults-only winetasting at Bordeaux (cheap flights from Birmingham direct to Bordeaux) with Géraldine and Bernard (maybe) for a few days, with some touring around the Dordogne; and also a family Riviera extravaganza, including some fraction of Barcelona, Carcassonne, Marseilles, Cannes, Nice, Monaco, Rome, and Pompeii. All in one week?!

Lucky I've got some work to keep me occupied in between the holidays!

One quick photo. I'm glad that Christopher watches out for traffic when he's driving.

Snowed under

It's been so long since I last wrote. Things that I need to report:

• Trips we did with the Grandparents
• Dinner with Helen and Keith
• Trips we did with Glennn and Megan
• French Battlefields tour
• Paris, Champagne, Reims
  
• Trip to Germany to visit my 3rd cousins and the girls' 4th cousins - not to mention Castle Jesberg! (can't resist putting in a picture here)
  
• Grandparents return to Australia
  
• Choir competition coming up (and I have a cold)
• Joanna's upcoming trips to London and the Orkneys.
  

I've been playing around with a Sudoku solver as a hobby programming task. I could rave on about the structure for pages, extolling the virtues of my loosely-coupled event-driven design. I will confess that it wasn't entirely test-driven, but I'm getting better!

The extended daylight at the moment is interesting - I mowed the lawn between 7:30 and 8:00pm. I've had to put up an extra layer of curtain to help the girls sleep - they giggle to see the daylight after 9pm. And there's still about 6 weeks to the solstice...

Did I tell you the one about the airline fares? I rang Qantas to ask about a 1-way economy class trip London-Hawaii-Brisbane. They said that it would be £3300! I know it's not a very obvious route, but that seems crazy. Then they admitted that I could do it as part of a round-the-world ticket for only £1300. It must be fascinating to see all the factors that these people consider when they set their ticket prices & conditions.

Weekend with Glennn and Megan

The basic plan was Bath, Stonehenge, and Salisbury Cathedral. We left Malvern aiming for Forest of Dean, but found a road closure. We found ourselves heading into Wales, towards Monmouth. Those street signs are unpronouncably interesting. Raglan Castle loomed on the horizon, and although there was some concern that we didn't have time, and also that the weather was not very clement, we paid up and went in. Despite being in ruins (compared to Tower of London), it's still an imposing place.

From Raglan, we headed back past Tintern Abbey (no time to get out there), and made it into Bath. We didn't really have a detailed plan, and it was the weekend of the Bath festival, so trying (with only a tiny map) to decide which part of the city we should search for a car park resulted in an extended tour. But we found the Abbey, and almost went into the Pump House - only detered by the queue and cost factors. It was certainly a nice place to walk (and drive) around - fine weather would probably have only increased the crowds.

There was time to visit Stonehenge on our way to the Salisbury accommodation. It was quite impressive for my third visit - but we found it too cold to enjoy the full benefits of the audioguide. Only Joanna had gloves handy (is that a pun?), so the rest of us couldn't hold them up to our ears for long enough to hear the stories. But I'm sure Megan and Glennn were pleased to have visited, despite the temperature. I understand it was a significant contrast with Jerusalem, where they had been three days earlier.

After installing ourselves into our B&B place, we went for a walk in the Salisbury city centre. Having seen his poster in the south, the four wise guys went searching for the Messiah. (It was remarkably funny at the time.) We asked three different people (a taxi driver, who said that the church didn't exist any more, but basically had the location right; a bartender; and some senior citizens smoking outside a bingo hall) where St Martin's Church was, and got three different answers - each in a different quadrant. We tried the closest place, but it wasn't right. And so we decided that there wasn't time to acquire both culture and dinner, and the latter had priority. It did take quite a lot of walking, finding no room in the Haunch of Venison, and ... negotiating ... to finally choose a place. And it turned out well. The Red Lion had been built in about 1220 for the people working on the Cathedral, which was started the same year.

The next morning we attended a service at the Cathedral. I was a little disappointed that it wasn't the Cathedral Choir, but the repertoire was good, including the Howells Paean as a postlude. (Interestingly, I heard my other favourite Paean - by Leighton, the only other paean I know - on the radio that afternoon.) Then we went off via Nether Wallop, Middle Wallop, and Palestine to Avebury, where there is another stone circle. This one had smaller stones, but was a larger site. It was perhaps more interesting, since we could walk all around them and touch them. Lunch at the village pub was slightly disastrous - two meals arrived after 20 mins, but after waiting for an hour, the others didn't. We cancelled them and left hungry.

The trip home was via Cotswolds - in particular Upper and Lower Slaughter and Bourton-on-the-Water. They were all very pleasant, and I think Glennn would need no convincing to come back for a relaxing romantic getaway.

We had an interesting conversation about Footpaths.

(This post written from memory on 11 May about the weekend of 19-20 April.)