I accidentally tripped over a nice optimisation when refactoring a generic exception handler in Rust which made it zero-cost. Come follow my journey into some dark corners.

After signing up to GOG to buy Superliminal, they offered me a new user discount on a chunk of games. As part of my inburgering I am obliged to buy anything marked with a 35% KORTING or better. Firewatch was "-75%" so a 40% better deal than that oven-ready satay badger with a use-by date of today.

Superliminal, the first and so far only game by Pillow Castle Games, is a first-person 3D puzzler which is often compared with the Portal series. Portal and Portal 2 were corkers, and the lack of another sequel left a void.

The Watch was commissioned by BBC America and is a live-action TV series about The Watch in Terry Pratchett's Discworld. American media companies are infamous for licensing cult British media, missing the point, and churning out the same extruded media product they do every other day. So have they unexpectedly done a good job for a change, or is Betteridge's Law holding firm?

If you can, cast your mind back to your childhood in 1980s Britain. It is Sunday. The day has dragged on for about forty hours already. Sunday dinner has been eaten, washed-up, and the vegetables have been put on to boil so they will be ready for next Sunday. The crushing boredom was nearly enough to make one consider doing one's homework. Nearly.

Fortunately, it is now 10pm and time for the weekend's swan song.

This book was picked semi-randomly out of a second hand shop's three quid pile when in a rush to catch a train. The provocative title sounded interesting, and the author's name was vaguely familiar from Radio 4, so I was expecting something moderately entertaining and/or thought-provoking like Radio 4 output often is.

There is a saying that assumption is the mother of all cock-ups. Well, I really dropped a bollock here.

I knew John Hein through some rather entertaining Usenet posts over the years. I'd formed an image of a large red-haired Scotsman who lived in a Glasgow tenement and had a bizarre fasciation with trains and telephone systems. As it turns out, I was wrong: he lives in Edinburgh.

[This post was rescued from an SQL dump of my ancient Movable Type blog. There may be conversion errors and broken links.]

On Friday evening, I went to a live performance of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank. There was subsequent discussion on the uknot mailing list, where I did a mini review. It appears below:

[This post was rescued from an SQL dump of my ancient Movable Type blog. There may be conversion errors and broken links.]

Update 2010-03-10: The bug this works around has been fixed as of DBIx-Class-0.08120 (released 2010-02-24), so it is no longer necessary to use this hack unless you are stuck with an old DBIx::Class.

There's an interesting interaction between PostgreSQL, DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader and DBIx::Class:InflateColumn::DateTime.

[This post was rescued from an SQL dump of my ancient Movable Type blog. There may be conversion errors and broken links.]

High Performance Web Sites is a book about tuning web sites to make them load faster. It presents fourteen rules to follow to make a web site load faster and is essentially a dead-tree version of the "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site" page on the Yahoo! Developer Network. But now you've read the web site, do you need the book?

[This post was rescued from an SQL dump of my ancient Movable Type blog. There may be conversion errors and broken links.]

Anybody who has worked in an office for more than a femtosecond or two will notice a certain pen-related phenomenon. Go on, have a look for your pen now. It's the grubby blue Bic that is… well, “chewed” would be a bit of an understatement.

[This post was rescued from an SQL dump of my ancient Movable Type blog. There may be conversion errors and broken links.]

Sick of the endless identikit plastic pubs full of plastic people drinking plastic drinks that plague London, we are always up for an unusual and authentic old fashioned boozer with good beer and local colour.

[This post was rescued from an SQL dump of my ancient Movable Type blog. There may be conversion errors and broken links.]

Egg Bacon Chips and Beans is a book inspired by Russell Davies' blog of the same name. The book, and the site, are dedicated to British cafes (aka a "greasy spoon") and the fry-ups therein.