Pages

Monday 20 February 2012

A long day

Out to Crocklehill, Kent today. To get there I went clockwise round the M25 and over the QE2 bridge, always a pleasure, but to get home Madge sent me clockwise round the M25 again. So I circumnavigated London today.

70 caches, 1 DNF. Seven hours solid walking, probably about 14 miles, and my thighs are feeling the pain, I'm walking like a penguin. Still, I don't have much to do tomorrow; chauffeur duty for ladysolly, but I won't have to get out of the car, and then some programming. Because while I was out walking, I solved a tricky little programming problem that's been bothering me for ages. I often have good ideas while I'm out - between caches, there's not much to think about, and no distractions, so I can really ponder.

The problem I had, was in doing backups using ssh, if a filename had ugly characters in it (like quotes, spaces, ampersands, dollar signs) then I just was not able to work out the very complicated quoting system I needed to use to pass the filename unscathed to the shell for processing. My new solution - for files with ugly characters, don't use ssh or the shell, do it with ftp, which is slower, but since it'll only be for a tiny minority of files, that won't matter. I can't wait to get coding on this tomorrow. And quoting will be very very simple - I probably just sling a couple of " round the filename.

While I was out, I was approached by as lady in a car. "Have you seen any dogs running around?" Now you might think that's an easy question, to be answerewd either "yes" or "no", but I found it a bit of a puzzler. I had seen a dog running around, but that was two hours and four miles ago, so she probably wouldn't want to know about that one. So - I had to work out what radius of space and time she was implicitly asking about, apply that, and come up with an answer. No, I haven't. So she drove off, probably wondering why it had taken me so long to answer.

And I found a coal post, always good to see. But this one didn't have a cache nearby! I expect it will soon.

No comments:

Post a Comment