Today, it started. Exams: the scourge of any self-respecting student. My first exam was today and it did not go well. So I’m going to get my head into the books for the next few exams (I have 9 in total). Ah, the joys of studying until your eyes twitch.

This, of course, means that I’ll have less time to devote to this corner of my life. Updates will be sporadic to non-existant until the 13th or so. I have a little gap in between exams that I’ll try to make some serious updates in. However, I’ve been prepared for a dry spell for quite some time. Living on my desktop is file full of quick ideas for posts, should the need arise to fill some space. Expect quite a few entries from that over the next few weeks.

Anyway, I have to get some sleep now. Another exam tomorrow: Information Management, AKA databases, web design, professional issues and HCI. Hooray for the hideous mish-mash that is computing!

So, you’ve listened to all your music enough to be able to reproduce every word, identify every instrument (make and model) used and wonder if there’s anything left for you? Well, of course. Try some new music from the BBC live sessions. it’s basically tonnes of new bands playing songs, live. I especially recommend JetPlane Landing, Biffy Clyro and Bis.

Now, while they’re all real media files only available for streaming, I’m sure certain elements among you can figure out how to download them using a program like StreamBox. Actually, forget I said anything about that program. Dodgy stuff. Yep, forget.

I’ve finally gotten around to updating the Archives code. Now when you look at a specific month (for example, March 2003), you’ll get a list of entries and descriptions, rather than a list of days.

This makes it a million times easier to find old items, since you don’t have to trawl through every single day in the archives to find something. It used to take roughly 30N/2 to find entry N. It now takes N/2. Just a slight improvement, then.

From Philipp Lenssen, the same guy who made the MemoMarker I mentioned a few days ago, is a brand new new toy: The EgoBot.

Ask it a question and it will query Google and make up an appropriate answer. For example, I asked it “What is your quest?”, and got back “My quest is and has always been: to create music, dreams and words that dance through sound”. Very impressive stuff for a chatBot-style script. Like most scripts of this nature, it’s fun for a while.

Tying in with what I’ve already mentioned about abstractions, Joel has written up The Law Of Leaky Abstractions; something that I’ve known for a while, but have never managed to consolidate in my head. This is why too many layers of abstraction are dangerous: if something leaks (and they do), it takes an age to track the problem through the layers and then figure out why it leaked.