A number of Ant tasks require passwords - server deployment, verson control, that kind of thing. How do you deal with them? I'm not happy about keeping them in properties files - not too secure - but I can't find any way of persuading Ant to prompt for them. Obviously, this problem has been solved long since, but I can't seem to track down the solution.

Beer makes you clever.

Or at least, it makes you think you're clever.

Roar with Laughter last night was outstanding. Ed and David, our hosts, seemed a little disappointed by the turn out, I'm afraid. But from a punter's point of view, there were more than enough people there to give the place some atmosphere, and the comics were great.

I didn't have high hopes for Brian Damage & Krysstal, to be honest. I don't do comedy songs, and the pair of them didn't look too promising, either. But they turned out to be very funny, in a rather unchallenging sort of a way. One of my favorite lines of the night came from Brian: "I'm single at the moment - by choice. Not by my choice...".

Dan Willis; what can I say? A programmer in the stand-up business! He's my hero. His story about daydreaming about saving a plane from disaster using his IT skills struck a cord. "Just turn it off, then on again." Brilliant.

Finishing act Kevin Day was the consummate professional. You can see why Ed and Anthony wanted a safe pair of hands to finish on - someone to pick up the pieces after the disaster that could have been...

Paul Foot's act shouldn't have worked, it really shouldn't. But it did. He was the high point of the evening for me.

It seemed like he was deconstructing the process of stand up as much as he was actually doing it. He would tell a (usually not very funny) joke, then explain it. "That was a double entendre - I was referring to his penis, of course." Sometimes the explanation came before the joke - something like "OK, now I'm going to move into the rant part of the act. This is where I rail on about some trivial matter for a few minutes. Of course, I don't really care about it - it's all made up. Telling you that has probably spoiled it for you, hasn't it?" Then he talked about how Chinese food has become more expensive recently. "Boiled rice used to be around £1.90. Now it's more like £2.10!"

See what I mean? It really shouldn't have worked. But somehow, it was all hysterically funny. A man who can have an audience in stitches for ten minutes just by talking about how unseasonably mild the weather had been recently has to be some kind of comedy genius.

The front row certainly earned their chocolate. Or at least one of them did. Paul spend ten minutes sat on the lap of a large rugger-bugger type. I've never seen anyone so uncomfortable in my life. I was worried that Paul might not make it out alive.

A memorable night.

A blog of pure and ultimate evil. Err, sorry, I mean here.

Update: Via Slashdot, a top comment.

Bloody hell! Apparently, I'm right of center, economically speaking. I'm still an old leftie on social issues, though.

What are you? Post your URLs...

Internet hoax of the day: ABC Teens, "the world's SEXIEST all-girl punk band". At least, I'm fairly sure it's a hoax, or a joke, or something. Look at the tour dates, for a start. The songs are actually pretty good, but the singer clearly isn't a teenage girl.

Via Spinneyhead.

Oh, and a word of advice - don't do a Google image search for 'ABC Teens', whatever you do. ;-)

I know I'm in danger of turning into a Firefly fanboy here, but I have to point out the Serenity trailer.

While I'm in fanboy mode; I wonder if UNIT can save us from the exploding toads and the zombies?

Small Values (website of the year 2004!) is three today! That's twenty one in blog years. Or something.

Help me celebrate this evening at The Horse Bar if you fancy.

A His 'n Hers blog.

And you know the worst thing about it? I'm partially responsible. I introduced Steve to the world of blogging, and he introduced Tilesey, aka 'Him'.

Steve and I will be drowning our guilt at The Horse Bar tomorrow night. Darren will be consoling us.

So, we know what kind of thing to expect from Benedict XVI then...

New system catches speeders without radar or lasers. Hah!

I don't see what people are whining about all the time. If you don't speed, you don't get a ticket. Simple.

Now, if you want to argue that the speed limits are wrong, we can talk. It's not OK to just ignore laws that you don't like, but lobbying to have them changed is fine. So how's this for a deal - you can have higher speed limits on motorways, if I can have a rigorously enforced 20 mph speed limit on residential roads. OK?

Two or three years ago, I put together a little Python app that provided shortcuts to useful places in our gruesome internal timesheet system. (The URLs aren't static, so I needed a script.) I used PyWin32 to enable you to launch these from the Windows systems tray, based on demo code by Mark Hammond. My script was a bit of a bodge, though; the UI code and the logic code were all mixed up. I always intended to go back and separate everything out, but I never got around to it...

Until now. I had a couple of changes that needed making, so I grasped the nettle and put together a general purpose module; SysTrayIcon.py. It still needs documentation, but you can see basically how to use it from the demo code at the bottom.

There is one problem with it, though - on XP, if you set up a menu item with an icon, the menu item text overlaps the icon image by a few pixels, and I can't work out how to fix it. Any pointers?

Oh, and yes, yes, I know it's not called the system tray really. But that's what everyone calls it anyway.

Rather than watch bigotvision last night, I went to see John Hegley at the Colliers Wood Library. I've read his stuff before, and loved it, but I've never seen him live. He was much, much better better that I was expecting. He didn't just read his stuff; there was a lot of interaction with the audience, and he improvised a lot. His delivery was superb.

The kids in the auduience loved it as much as the adults. I wish my girls could have been around to see him.

He went off afterwards to do a gig at Shepards Bush. I'm keen to see him again, at a big venue if necessary, but I can't help feeling that he wouldn't be the same in a less intimate venue, where he couldn't look you in the eye, ask the audience questions, and count the glasses wearers.

Steve Lake also did a set. "Interesting". Not interesting, but "interesting". Lighten up, man.

It was, in my opinion, only right and proper that the BNP party were granted a Party Political Broadcast. After all, free speech is only free speech if you give it to the arseholes too.

None of which means that I had to watch the bloody thing, though. I had better things to do...

Jeff, one of my directors, has just started blogging.

It might catch on you know.

Anyway, it might be worth keeping an eye on. He's an amusing writer, and he has, uh, lots of personality. Lots and lots. Unlike me, he feels free to mention the name of the company that I work for. After all, who's going to sack him?

Google Local comes to the UK.

My locals. Shocking, the lot of them.

Via Random Acts Of Reality.

Update: See also Google SMS UK.

Last night's Roar was a good one. Sol Bernstein was, frankly, a bit crap, but Paul Chowdry (a last minute stand in for Colin Cole) and Andrew Maxwell were both great. Two hits out of three isn't bad at all.

Bizarrely enough, Colliers Wood seems to be going through a strong patch at the moment comedy-wise - the incomparable John Hegley is doing a reading in Colliers Wood Library next Thursday.

Home at two this time. Too hungover to blog. Gallery here.

Update: More pictures, courtesy of Edward.

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Your actual outcome:

Labour -12
Conservative -19
	Liberal Democrat 38
	UK Independence Party 8
	Green 17

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Not much surprise there. Except, that is, that the UKIP came out positive. I can't imagine how that happened...

Via badly dubbed boy.

Tonight's London Python Meetup at The Stage Door will be the last one organised via meetup.com, due to a rather unfortunate decision of theirs. If you want to be informed of future London Python meetings, you'll need to join the Python UK mailing list - or just subscribe to this blog.

It occurs to me that a moin page would do everything that we need - new events could be entered there, and people could subscribe to the page to be kept up to date. Perhaps I'll install a moin instance here on SVoC - or perhaps I could just add a page to the Python Wiki?

Oh, and don't forget the London Java meetup on April the 20th. I'll be there!

Gallery here. It was too dark for video - thank Christ.

Last night was fun. My dancing was every bit as horrendous as expected; I elbowed Tulna hard in the head on one occasion, and I lost count of the toes that I trod on. The lessons started off easy enough, and I could follow the first few minutes. But they proceeded extremely quickly, and I was soon left behind. It was the spins that got me.

El Presidente baled out of the dancing very early. A poor show. I think we might go again. Perhaps if El P's better half comes along, she'll keep him on the dance floor.

Congratulations on the birth of your first child, Charles. I hope mother and baby are doing well. If Donald brings you half the joy that my children have brought me, you'll be a lucky man.

Clearly, you're going to take a bit of time off; it's the right thing to do. But time's tight right now, so we need you back as soon as possible. We're relying on you to beat the liars and the bigots. (Or to give them a bloody nose at least. I know that hoping for a win is a bit unrealistic.)

My desk as of today:

Compare with this image from a couple of weeks ago. Note the new telly. There's a new PC under the desk, too - AMD Sempron 2.4 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, 80 GB disk. XP Pro, but you can't have everything, can you?

Stuart Langridge's Your own Conservatives poster is just superb, allowing you to build your own vile appeal to peoples' baser instincts.

Here's another:

Don't forget the London Python meetup tomorrow night at The Stage Door near Waterloo. If it's anything like as much fun as the last one, it'll be great.

Tonight, Samba. Wish me luck.

It's still not showing any signs of tempting me away from Python/Jython, but congratulations to James, Jez et al on getting the Groovy JSR 01 release out of the door.

My first stab at the Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is out. What do you think? Did I miss anything?

Oh, and Freja is famous, too!

Joel has written some very insightful articles in his time. And as a writer, he's very talented. But then again, he's not right all the time. He doesn't like exceptions. He's not investing time in his toolset.

There's worse to come. He and his people build their FogBugz product using ASP. Well, it's not what I would have done, but clearly they are an MS shop with a considerable investment in MS tools and skills, and if they are happy to run on Windows servers, then it's an understandable decision.

Err, no. It turns out that they do want to be able to run on Linux. So, they have written an ASP to PHP converter. Madness, I tell you, madness. Even if it works.

Deciding upon the platform that you want your software to run on is pretty fundamental. If you want a cross platform application, write it in a cross platform way in the first place.

While Freja and I were playing with some Python last week, it occurred to me that the biggest problem that she (and presumably other kids) was having was how unforgiving computer languages are. For instance, after changing the name in the 'you_smell.py' script, she decided that she wanted to have it react to "daddy" or "ella" in certain ways. Without prompting, she tried:

if your_name.lower() == "daddy or ella":

Now, that doesn't actually work, but it's not a bad stab, I reckon. But you get no positive feedback for getting close - stuff just doesn't work. And many of the changes she made were plain syntax errors.

This wasn't a problem - I was with her, and I didn't allow her to become frustrated. But I doubt that you could leave a child of her age on her own to play with this stuff, really.

I only do one of these - the babbling on the phone one. I think that we are planning a bring-your-children-to-work day later in the year, though. We'd better give Tracey the day off. The current theory is that she eats children.

Via greenfairy, who also sounds like she might eat children.