Chicken Soup For The Hungry

Another sketch by my Great-Grandmother - it is of someone called "Louie" I think from 1895. I have no idea who Louie is I am afraid. Some digging will be required though it might not be a relative of ours at all.

I do need to try and consolidate all the various bits of family trees that we have. We have one vertical one going back to prior to 1400, various horizontal fragments going back about 150 years and one traced one which seems to be Victorian and takes the form of an actual tree with trunk, branches and leaves. The trouble is that it takes so long to enter all this data into a family tree program. Yet another project on the stack/List/Queue/Your listing structure of choice.

Watch out for the Irony Signifier.

I am developing an application that runs on a server. I would like to know when it fails - not that it ever will fail because of anything I have done of course - but all I can do is get it to email a time stamp. However, I then do not know whether the absence of an email time stamp means that the program has failed or that somewhere down the line the email has failed. I could also write a program which would check that the first program is still running and then notify if it fails. What if the notifying program fails? It is less likely to because it is far simpler than the main program which uses API calls and threads (any word on strange behaviour there would be welcome). I am therefore stuck in a strange loop where I cannot think of a foolproof way of ensuring that any failure gets to me when I am not on the network. I just have to trust not only my own programming but the OS/Network/Apps that lie between my app and me wherever I may be. It's all sometimes just too much.

Interesting (But very old) article about API and other whizzy stuff.

Final bit of whoop-de-doo about technology. I got a firmware upgrade for The Toppy yesterday, meaning that there is now a series link and accurate recording (the Freeview equivalent of PDC) all under the umbrella of Freeview Playback, which seems to be working fine (after a few traumatic issues with the download). The whole concept of simply recording what you want with little fuss and then watching it when you want with pauses to get Marmite sandwiches and other refreshments is a fine one. It seems to mean that we watch better television. Having said this, I should really replace some of the watching with some good-quality reading. Maybe a rule - no blank-eyed goggling - only defined programmes with a reminder or a recording set. No more "Cops chasing bailiffs who have relocated to the country in order to train their dogs to eat better".

White Dot anyone?