This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

The Register reports that David Blunkett is introducing "voluntary" ID cards after all. Hang on, though, didn't 5000 responses to the Government's public consultaton get submitted through STAND? Swinging the vote from 2:1 for the proposal to about 5:1 against? Yep, I remember that. Then again, Beverley Hughes, Minister of Truth State for Citizenship, said in Parliament that only 2000 responses had been received, and later on it was theorised that all the 5000 votes relayed through STAND might be being considered to be one big petition, thus counting as one vote.

Do you get the impression that no-one over there in Minitrue cares what the public think? They say they're introducing the cards, we all mail to complain, they decide to not count our votes and do it anyway. And make us pay for the privilege, to boot.

England('s government) prevails.

I am really unhappy about this.

As recommended to me, and perfectly justifiedly so: Farewell Buffy, and fangs for the memories, an Independent article that's a loving retrospective of Buffy over the last seven series.

Buffy's finest episodes made the jaws of jaded viewers drop...Dennis Potter once dared to stage such narrative coups on British TV. No writer does now. These days, we're encouraged to treat hammy drivel such as Cambridge Spies as the benchmark of our "quality" drama. Could that be a sepulchral laugh I hear through the Hellmouth?

It's good to see a mainstream guy who gets it, I think.

Only three episodes to go now, I think.

The Guy I Almost Was, a comic. Really good.

Depressing as hell. But really good.

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Dorothea's fifth wedding anniversary is next Friday, which means that I've been married longer than her and David, which surprises me slightly. Meanwhile, Mark's got married as well. Congratulations to both of you.

Aside: would it be unworthy of me to mention how dodgy Mark's phrasing sounds when taken out of context? "My ring feels very strange. I've been twiddling with it all day and now it's chafing." What's that? It would? Oh, I won't mention it then. :-)

In other news, Niamh, my daughter, has come up with a new trick, which allows me to unleash my fearsome powers of child psychology. Most recent example: I said, "what's this mess all over the TV screen?", and she replied, "I don't know, I didn't put cream on it."

Ah-ha. That explains that, then. Similarly, "What's wrong with this cake?", responded to with "It didn't go in the bin!" Again, bit of a giveaway, there. Apart from being heartstoppingly cute to listen to, I think that this comes about because she sees two answers to the question "What's wrong with the TV?", one of which ("There's cream on the screen") is a thing of reality, and the other ("I did it") is a thing of guilt. Now, she thinks she might get into trouble for doing it, and she doesn't want to get into trouble, so she's not going to admit to doing it. But the first thing, that there's cream smeared on the screen, that's just reality; lying about that would be silly, because it's obviously true. To lie about that, you'd have to say that there was something other than cream on the screen, or that there wasn't anything, neither of which would be believed, so she tells the truth about it. I don't think that the "third option" of denying all knowledge even occurs to her: she does know about it, and can therefore either tell the truth or directly lie: a black-and-white decision. Sort of like those puzzles where you're told that one of the people always lies and the other always tells the truth; you can logically work out what's going on, but that doesn't work in life because most of what people say isn't the truth or the exact opposite of the truth but something else. It's interesting to watch her picking up these sorts of adult attributes like lying in a sort of ill-formed way. Child psychology must be fascinating.

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The Grauniad reports on the top 100 books, as decided by a BBC poll. I was gratified to discover that I've read 51 of them, so clearly I get my intellectual tosser badge for 2003. I was also rather pleased to have pointed out to me that Donna Tartt's The Secret History is on the list, because it's one of (if not the) best book ever. And I will read Anna Karenina one day, promise. Why did the His Dark Materials trilogy only get one entry while J. K. Rowling got one for each Harry Potter book, I wonder? Oh, and every time Gabriel Garcia Marquez turns up on one of these lists he should be replaced by one of Louis de Bernieres' Cochadebajo books, ideally The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts.

I've updated scg.py, my port of Maciej's Perl Search::ContextGraph module to search on a pre-built TDM, to actually work properly in the face of multiple search terms. I've also updated my TDM build script to do weighting on terms as Maciej suggested to me. I feel a short essay on this all coming on.

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PyMeld is an interesting thing; it allows you to take a piece of HTML and access it, change it, and generally fiddle about with it using a Pythonic sort of model. In essence, you create a Meld object from a piece of HTML, and then all elements in the HTML with an id become sub-objects of the Meld. You can then add new HTML just by adding things to the element, so on and so forth. Very neat. I think I may have a play with this -- I can think of how it might be useful for Vellum.

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• NITLE and Maciej are indexing weblogs with a crawler to give themselves a decent base of data for search testing. I've thrown together a very quick search engine for Kryogenix based on Maciej's Search::ContextGraph code, which I've ported to Python. It's a hack, though, because at the moment I'm not doing any weighting at all, so results aren't that good. Once I've sussed out how to do weighting it'll be real, and then I'll have a link to it and stuff. In the meantime, scg.py is an initial Python port of Search::ContextGraph for you to play with.
• Paul talks about Python unit testing. I must do this. Must must must.
• Revel at Paul's bitter comments less than a month ago that Arsenal would win the league...
• Mark jumps out of a plane. Nutter. I'd have called it "diveintoinfinity.org", too. That aside, you get to hear Mark's voice too and see if it's how you imagined. :-)

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Blimey, I go away for four days and all sorts of exciting things happen. Firstly, though, I went to an 80s club this weekend. You know the sort; pictures on the wall of women with spiky hair and mountains of blusher and legwarmers, that sort of thing. This one even had a plastic foreshortened 3d model of the front of the Knight Industries Two Thousand. Anyway, the music choice annoys me: they only really play 80s synth-pop. Duran Duran, Tiffany, Robert Palmer, chart stuff. What about all the other things that were being done in the eighties? Hip-hop, say? Metal? 70s clubs annoy me for the same reason; it's all disco. There's very little funk, no punk at all, so on and so forth. Substitute in your own favourite maligned musical genres.

However, all that said, it was great. Really. I forgot how much I liked all that music. Yeah, yeah, kitsch, whatever. In 70s clubs, OK, I can sing along with the music, but it doesn't really mean anything -- not the lyrics, but the sound of the thing. There's no evocative memory, no nostalgia, which is unsurprising for someone who was only four when the seventies ended. But the 80s stuff: a memory on every chord! Dancing really fast with Paula Busby. I wanted to be wearing a tie so I could put the thin end outwards. I spent half the evening thinking about and talking about people I haven't thought of in years, like Julia Newbury, who I fancied rotten nearly fifteen years ago. So, in general, suppress that anti-kitsch urge. It's great.

On to more mundane matters:

• Sign Builder: produces PDFs of all those warning signs you get in warehouses and whatnot with your text on them (via someone, but I've lost the link)
• I ended up condemned to Dis, one of the cities in Hell (and final resting place for heretics and heresiarchs), in the Dante's Inferno Test (via someone I haven't lost the link for)
• Danny O'Brien is justifiably worried that Beverley Hughes, the Minister of State for Citizenship, has quoted a figure of 2000 responses received for polling in the Government's solicitation exercise for the introduction of identity cards, when at over 5000 (mostly negative) responses were sent through STAND's Fax Your MP service. I do hope that this is just an innocent mistake, although our beloved civil service does appear to make a lot of these mistakes in their own favour on issues like this and very rarely makes one in our favour.
• Sam Buchanan quotes the American government saying that Canada "places too much emphasis on civil liberties", and acerbically observes that he is "interested in why concern for civil liberties has become a threat to freedom".
• I got 136 on the BBC Nation IQ Test 2003, which I was pretty pleased with. Even if I didn't get the one about litres and kilograms.