Matthew's Journal

Sorry, it's a bad pun about today. Never mind, eh?

I went climbing again yesterday with arnhem, bofhcam, james_r, Cat, Elaine and L., again at Peterborough. It was very busy (there was a large group of novices on some DofE-like thing), but there was enough space most of the time. I did a few climbs with arnhem initially, including a couple of things I couldn't manage last week (and still couldn't this time), and then took a bit of a breather when my arms really started hurting. I then did a few routes with Elaine. One route I just about got up once, took another try, which felt better (much less scrabbling around, and a couple of "heave for the next hold"-type things that worked first time), and indeed she commented it had been much smoother. That was good, and I had a plausible go at another couple of tougher things.

I seem to be relatively happy to try routes that are a bit beyond me, and generally cope with the occasional swing-in-the-breeze that results. james_r persuaded me to try the roof towards the end, but I managed to tie the rope in a knot (stupid error, really), which chewed away my confidence, and reminded me of a bad moment on a bit of Welsh rock more years ago than I care to remember, which was a bit of a disappointing way to end the evening. Next time, I'm going to at least make it to the stalactite across the ceiling, maybe even try the whole way - or at least give it my best shot, since I think that'd be good for my confidence. Lack of confidence was my real problem last time I tried climbing, so I don't want to get into that same mind-set again. I think some climbing shoes might help in this regard - it'd make gripping smaller holds just that bit easier.

I'm currently really enjoying the climbing - it's a challenge, and it's a very physical activity - most evening's I've reached the point of my arms going "actually, you must stop now", which is satisfying somehow. Also, some regular all-body exercise is probably good for me, rather than just cycling.

Yesterday at work was very frustrating. I spent ages tracking down a bug, which wasn't helped by the fact that it doesn't appear until after my code's been running for 2 hours, nor the fact that valgrind doesn't deal well with input redirection if you want to use the gdb-enabling mode. I feel a bug report coming on. Today I understand where the bug came from, and have hopefully fixed it.

Somewhere along the line, MFH wanted to know what proportion of the edges include the "unknown" location (-1), so I hacked up some shell[1] which amused me:

for i in 2004-period*.dat; do echo -n "$i "; echo $(( ( 100 * $(( $( egrep -v -c -e '-1' "$i" ) )) ) / $( cat $i | wc -l ) )) ; done


Of course, it's simpler in awk as pm215 pointed out (thanks!) on IRC, but where would the fun in that be?

So, generally in a much better mood than I was this time yesterday. goth_eucharist tonight, then I'm feeding yrieithydd, before they vanish...

[1]shell hackery is one of the listed interests of this LJ :p