Yes, I do confuzzle even myself, sometimes.

No, I'm not bored.

Yes, I have been in trouble for getting in the way.

Yes, I will soon be in trouble for not helping - you can't win 'em all. ;)

Happy Christmas everyone. :D :D :D

Take that plate of spaghetti (now cold), stir in two cans of worms and some chopped string, and then run it through a blender to get a feel for the number of lose ends I've had to deal with. Every time I thought I was finished, there'd be something else. It was soul breaking. But hopefully, everything is tied together. At least, it looks like a ball of string from the outside; unravel, it and it might not be quite one continuous strand. But it's close. Now all I've gotta do is finish my tax return. *Gulp* Hmmm. You may see quite a few comments from me on blogs... ;)

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, you wore out your shoe leather tramping from shop to shop, and then town to town, in order to find the exact present someone wanted, thereby proving how much you loved them. These days you just order on-line. It's not the same. :(

That aside, I'm, hopefully, entering the final week of my ephemeris project. I've just lose ends to tie up, of which there are lots, look:

Any sense of the beauty of the sunset (like today's melbur delight - I love winter) has been replaced by spaghetti.

Well, my "gear change" is complete. Working Tax Credit was paid into my bank account last Monday, and the paperwork came through at the end of the week. (I didn't dare touch the money until I was in receipt of some written confirmation; they are just are so intent on clawing back the money if they've made an error.)

The other half of the equation is not going well so well. I'm still struggling with my ephemerides. It's getting there, but I've massively underestimated the amount of work. If I was paid by the hour, that wouldn't be a problem. Instead, I dream of the minimum wage... :(

Today's graph is a case in point:

that double-humped, bluey-turquoisey line should be perfectly smooth. It was last Wednesday. But I've introduced some, *ahem*, defects. And the 183 tests probing the code’s internals are all “A-okay”. So I've got to pull everything apart and spend time treading water today.

BTW the turquoise line is the Equation of Time; that’s the difference between the time shown on a sundial and that displayed by a clock or your wrist-watch (assuming you're in Greenwich and your wrist-watch is set to GMT, or equivalent). If the Earth’s orbit was a perfect circle then clocks and sundials would perfectly agree. But the Earth’s orbit is somewhat squashed, and so the day is only on average 24 hours long; it can be thirty seconds longer or shorter. For that reason we set our clocks and watches to Mean Time (like Greenwich Mean Time). The Equation of Time describes the difference between mean and "real" time (solar time).

Practical upshot? Well, not only do the days get longer and shorter during a year, but the "window of daylight" wobbles backwards and forwards about noon. In January, for example, the daylight is moving into the evenings. From the Winter Solstice to the end of January about 15 minutes of the extra evening light are due this shift; for me, that's a quarter of the total gain in evening daylight.

Oh, and December the 25th is one of the days when mean time and solar time agree.Sol Invictus indeed. ;)

UPDATE: I got that bit back on track about 1pm:

And in case I over simplified: the curve is the difference between a sundial and a clock over the course of an entire year; each vertical square is 5 minutes.

On Monday, I went down to the job centre and "signed off". It was a bold move, given I've not got a job. And trivially easy to do: I walked in, signed a bit of paper and went on my way. I walked home thinking the world should seem different. Radically different. But it wasn't.

However things have come together since Monday.

This morning I received writen confirmation I don't have to pay a £100 National Insurance bill hanging over my head. (A pickier person might have found the Revenue's language swinging. But not me.)

I've also received my P45, so it looks like the DWP are going to let my benefit stand, as is, and not try and claim back any "overpayment". They've even given me an extra £100 to keep me going until this:

gets finished, and I get paid. (The green tracks are the moon's orbit round the Earth; the yellow and blue curves allegedly show the sun’s altitude over the course of a year.)

The last piece of the puzzle is Working Tax Credit, which, despite it's name, isn't a loan, just a benefit for poorly paid working people. Assuming I get it, it should come in around £13 less than my Job Seekers' Allowance - about what I'm making freelancing.

But I will miss the social contact. Maybe I'll sign-on again in time for the Christmas party.

Below is my entire week's work: Yes, I have found an elaborate and computationally expensive way to draw skew-whiff circles. Still, it beats this earlier effort: which depicts the Earth crashing into the Sun. Although perhaps the world has come to the end and I'm too exhausted to have noticed? :(

While doing my weekly round of job applications, I noticed the recruitement site had loads of bookmarking buttons - y'know "dig this". Well, if I find a really great job I'm not gonna bloody share; I want it all for myself and I'm not gonna cripple my chances by telling the whole sodding world. Capisce?

I'm working on some celestial mechanics software at the moment (sunrise and sunset times, dates of eclipses, etc...) and one of the papers I need is in French. Well, I say «French», in reality it's lots of numbers, equations, and mathematical symbols, joined together by English words redendered à la Franglais, with the odd French preposition; to wit:

Le plan x0y du repère de DE200 est, selon les auteurs, dans le plan de l'équateur du FK5-J2000.

(And that's one of the more comprehensible sentences. ;) )

That I can follow the argument leads me to one conclusion: (astro-)physics is its own language.

Go to http://scrubber.freehostia.com/friends3b.pl, and enter your TV.com username, and you'll get a frame listing your tracked blogs and the number of (new) comments down the right hand side. I get this info from your list of tracked blogs, which can be slow to update, but is faster than visiting every blog and figuring out the info directly. Hopefully the fonts are big enough for everybody. ;) If you like the script, I ask that you register an account with www.freehostia.com, and run it off your own account (I'll provide instructions) - otherwise we'll blow my bandwidth limit and nobody'll have access to it. Suggestions for improvements will be considered, but I've got to go and try and earn some money... :(

Play with any Apple or Dyson product: and you'll realise there is more to inspirational design that looking cool. A web site should bring you the world with the click of a mouse. TV.com's new design may ape the vacant white of del.icio.us, but there's a world of difference in usability. Del.icio.us, with its astonishing attention to detail, is packed with functionality and thrums like a Harley between your legs. By contrast TV.com is is more of a kid's tricycle. So, without further ado here are five areas for improvement. 1. Bug Reporting/Feature Requests. I use a lot of free software. And the quid-pro-quo of doing that is taking the time to document and report bugs; it's just polite. These days every app uses a bugzilla-derived tracking system to manage bug- and feature-requests. Each request or report is issued a "ticket" and assigned to a developer; bugs can be discussed and the status can be tracked from beginning to end. It's not the bee's knees, but it is a helluva lot more attractive than wading through piles of forums, or happening to know the right blog to comment on. C'mon TV.com, implement a decent bug tracking/feature request system. There are a ton of bugs and features I'd like to add, and you need proper management. (My apologies for repeating this.) 2) I eat, sleep, breath and defecate HTML. (The last one's a bit of a bummer.) Like Neo in the matrix, the web dissolves into HTML before my eyes. But I'm the exception; people shouldn't need a degree in computer science to discuss TV. So bring back the WYSIWIG editor and allow the non-designers to express their, *ahem*, "taste". ;) 3) Smilies have become part of the modern culture, they regular feature on Mock the Week and I expect to see them in the respectable dictionaries within a decade. Thanks to TV.com, we'll all need a dictionary, too, because they're no longer rendered as pretty faces in the comments. So restore emoticons throughout the site. 4) It helps in having a conversation if you know when somebody has spoken. I need the blog summaries on my home page to list the number of new comments, and ditto for the list of blogs up the side. I'm sure that wrecks your caching: tough; that's how I wanna use the site. (But, hey, you could use ajax to fetch the numbers.) 5) Nowhere near enough blogs. I want twenty of my friends blogs - that's how I navigate the site. Scrap the shows panel; scrap whos on line now. Give me friends. And that's just for starters - the merest delineation of the coastline. How about the ability to discuss a review? User defined topics for blogs (since the site never remembers the tags) and an index of blogs by topics? And for goodness sake, squash the bugs: if I wouldn't get paid until these issues were fixed.