We're planning a major house renovation this summer - this last winter has been just too cold for words, and so we're re-insulating the upper part of the house. Which means we have to clear our loft of the 10+ years of accumulated crap. (This also means cutting back on my book collection - about 60% is airport schlock and is destined for the Shelter charity shop in Montrose). All this has to happen after the Marykirk Raft Race as we're having a houseful of folks for the weekend. 

Which in turn means that I had to spend the weekend in the Barn, recycling two carloads of accumulated stuff. Now I can see the floor again (and its a big barn), and was able to finally get the bike out for its first run of the year. All seems on track for the MOT tomorrow.

And in a moment of amusement, SWMBO's Citroen C3 decided to break. Precisely the electric window control decided that the window should be DOWN, and I had to spend two days driving around with it open (in the freezing weather) and parking it against walls (and struggling to get out the passenger seat). Nice. Should you ever want to get a car, and you think 'Mmm Citroen, nice', just repeatedly slam your fingers in a door till the feeling passes. Its like owning a Citroen.

So now we're looking at arguing over showers, bathrooms, wetwall, the whole nine yards. And I'm just wondering what my darling wife is planning in terms of decoration. It will have to been seen to be believed, no doubt..

This resulted in a melancholy night in after watching 'Capitalism - A love story' which meant i got to find out that of the four amazing dudes from EDI, I was the only one not to get fatter, lose hair or turn grey. 

Pffffft!

He spent five days and night alone on a barge. By the time he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship, he was dehydrated, hallucinating and close to death.

He ended up in a camp in mainland Japan. He was there when the war ended. But his prison camp was a few miles from the city of Nagasaki.

So a very good ISP - for instance BE/O2 - can be turned into a very bad ISP - by simply snooping on your customers and 'traffic shaping'. They will bleat 'Oh yeah, these nasty P2P people are consuming all the bandwidth, so we'll make everyone suffer'. And sometimes they'll hit something important like port 1352.

One way to find out if your ISP is a cock is by running 'TrafficShaper'. It'll show you if they are.. Even if they claim they're not.

In my case O2 had to admit they were traffic shaping as they destroyed bandwith for everyone for months. So not only snoopy cocks, but incompetent snoopy cocks. Nice. 

A defence agent for Grigor said: "When police were first called, they were concerned it might be a terror incident.

"But when they arrived Mr Grigor was seen wearing a pink cowboy hat, straddling an airplane with a fire extinguisher and covered in foam. They soon realised what was going on."

And I'm proud to say that this pair are friends of my daughter...

I'd laugh, but then I'd just cry.

Why cancel ? Well, since they implemented 'traffic shaping' my average broadband throughput has plummeted from 4mb to around 1mb, with troughs around 500mb. At one point it was running so slow that I couldnt actually do a remote-desktop session. I called up, and it transpired that there was long-term congesion in Perth (What this has got to do with me, God alone knows) and the traffic shaping had been completely cocked up.

Their customer service for Broadband is good, and the price okay. But the network is unreliable and the bandwith draining away. So thats another O2 service I'm going to cancel. As soon as I can.

Zen, here I come (again).

We originally tried to test this out on Domino 8.5.0, and generateXml() failed completely. Not good. We're now doing regression testing on 8.5.1, and have found to our pleasant surprise that generateXml() works well. At least, we thought so till we hit a document that had been through a particular gate in the process. We were getting a notes error: lotus.domino.NotesException: Error 4395, Not implemented

and a java dump, which included lines such as:

Caused by: javax.xml.transform.TransformerException: java.lang.RuntimeException: [ERR 0368] The string '%PARENT%' was used where a QName is required.

at com.ibm.xtq.xslt.jaxp.TransformerImpl.transform(Unknown Source)

and:

at GregorSamsa_Common_P0.GregorSamsa$0x24$main(<generated>)

And you think 'Who in gods name is Gregor Samsa'. And then you google and find this. Gregor Samsa is the central character of Kafka's 'The Metamorphasis'. Where a man turns into a bug. Hey - ten out of ten for humour here, but WTF?

Once you calm down and look at the source document. And find that there's a notesitem called '%PARENT% - which was put there by an errant piece of code from another process. And in fact, has always been there.

Its just that now DXL reports this instead of ignoring it. Hence the 'discovered check'. We fixed the item name so that it wasnt illegal, and it all works beautifully.

I guess the moral of the tale here is that if you see Gregor Samsa, you are truly in a maze of twisty little corridors, and you should investigate till your head hurts.

Mind you, it gave me the excuse to stay in bed for six glorious hours today and finish the last of the Steig Larsson books. 

I really couldnt start anything else this weekend before doing that.

Sometimes its just good to spend a day in bed, doing absolutely nothing of note. Slacktivism at its best.