Brief winter days, frost on the ground, but most days it's just above freezing and damp. As weather goes, this is utterly worthless.

Still, winter solstice is tomorrow (21st) and it starts to improve hereafter. The snows, of which it looks likely that there will be at least one, should arrive in the new year. So a white Crimbo looks unlikely. I'm off on leave from Friday.

On Saturday I updated the code formatter, fixing an embarrassing serious bug that a kind but anonymous user pointed out. The lesson is obvious in hindsight: if you think that a class is difficult to make an automated test case for, is internally more convoluted than need be, but you don't want to mess with that because it works, and has just had a feature added, then try making a test case anyway – it might turn out to be easy to do, and help you simplify the convoluted code. And fix the glaring deadly bug that crawled in with the new feature, word up.

On Sunday we trekked up to Camden for a quite pleasant nodermeet for Heisenberg, who was unable to make it over from New Zealand for his own gig due to an unfortunate meeting of two cars driving in opposite directions at high speeds. Here's hoping he's on his feet soon. We put up pjd and BaronWR for the night, and I walked down to the station with them at 8:30 on Monday morning.

They have given me work at work this week – poking through and adding features to a large body of code, but at least it's something to do, and I'm getting the feeling that exceeding the standard set by the others here won't be too hard. The one file contains 16 slightly different versions on the same SQL query. These are created by drag and drop, cut and paste, and the controlling function's flags and options decide which query to invoke, without any attempt to consolidate them into one query with parts generated depending on the flags and options. I have made an update, and repeated it in 16 places. Hello people: that is why cut and paste is a bad idea! Don't repeat yourself. I'll say it again: don't repeat yourself when coding. Repeat yourself when trying to get people to grasp stuff.