The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

Managed to get the classic Good Friday Climb (III) on the Ben done yesterday with Bob. It is currently in perfect nick, which cannot be said for the mountain as a whole. There is very little snow; most of our way to the Great Scoop under Tower Ridge was on loose scree, and various other parties we talked to confirmed that on the longer climbs the lower pitches are often in poor condition (I recall that specifically .5 and Green Gully were mentioned). There is some water ice, but the separate layers are not very well bonded, so that it tends to dinnerplate a lot, and there is virtually no snow-ice; I have never seen the mountain this bare at this time of the year — there is not even trace of the Curtain!

Also, because there is pretty much nothing to climb anywhere else on the west coast, the mountain was mobbed, and the carpark was virtually full by the time we got there (7:45am, which meant getting up at 4:30am). Already from the CIC hut we could see the crowds in Coire na Ciste, and long queues on any conceivable mid-grade climb; it felt like being in the Cairngorms, not on the Ben.

So we took a gamble on the GFC, that are of the mountain being hidden from view by Tower Ridge. Having done it a couple of years back, I was fairly confident the climb would be in condition, but we were hoping that because that part of the mountain does not sport too many climbs of the grade, fewer people would be heading that way, in case their chosen climb is not in, or just too busy. We were right. There was a party just ahead of us, but we gave them enough space, and with no-one behind us enjoyed an exceptionally good day out, savouring the traquility of the mounting and the nice weather.

The GFC offers prime views of the Tower ridge, including the Gap, with spectacular images of people crossing it, and of parties on Glover’s Chimney belaying in it. Moreover, the climb tops out at very top of the mountain, less than a stonethrow from the trigpoint marking the highest point in the land; with yesterday’s inversion the very top of the Ben was the only thing to stick out of the cloud, and the late afternoon light provided an overwhelming ambience.

It was all worthy of the 11 hour day spent on the mountain, which we concluded by traditional fish supper from Benny Fong’s in Fort William, before driving home. At least the road was quiet, and there were no deer around. I would lie if I said I was not nackered by the time I got home at 11pm, but, it was the good kind of nackered.

Done quite a bit of work on the 770 port of AbiWord during the past three days: AbiWord now runs as a multiview application (i.e., you can have several docs opened at the same time), and the ability to hibernate is in the works. I have also made changes so that the Pango-based grafics class in not used by default, considering the limited available resources on the 770, I am likely to keep it that way (it can be enabled via the AbiWord.profile the usual, undocumented, way).

It took me lot of time to work out how to get the views working; this part of the maemo framework is not much documented and rather ideosyncratic (really a polite way of saying it is a major PITA).

You can download an installable deb package here, based on today’s CVS, just keep in mind that this is unstable version, etc., etc.

Josef ?apek was a Czech expressionist painter. He came to be somewhat overshaddowed by his brother Karel, a prolific writer, who coined the word robot (from the Czech robota, conscripted labour), one of the three words that (to my knowledge) Czech contributed to the international community (the other two being pistol, going back to the Czech píš?ala and the 15th century invention of the handgun by the Hussites, and then, of course, semtex); but I am sidetracking.

As I said, Josef ?apek was a painter, but he happened to write a book — a children’s, self-illustrated, book entitled Pejsek a Ko?i?ka, Doggie and Pussycat. One of the stories in this book that made a great impression on me as a child is how Doggie and Pussycat baked a cake. It was Doggie’s birthday, and they wanted to make the cake really special, and so they put into it all their favourite food: suggar, and chocolate, nuts, milk and eggs, strong cheese and bacon, gherkins, cream and garlic, and Pussycat donated a lovely mouse and Doggie some of his spicy sausages. Having mixed together all the fine ingredience, and having baked it in the oven, they put it outside to let it cool down.

As it often happens in life, an evil big dog went by and ate the special cake; and he was sick to near death.

I was reminded of this story last night, watching for the first time ever an episode of Medical Investigation. Attempting to mix the drama of ER with House-like wit and the technology and one-liners of CSI, it does neither particularly well, the result being mediocre at best; next time, I am going to read some more Doggie and Pussycat instead.

P.S. The ISBN of an English translation of Doggie and Pussycat is 8000004488, and it is a really delightful book (it is carried by Amazon, but if you put the ISBN into google, there are plenty of other places that come up).

Tonight I started working on state saving in AbiWord so that we can handle gracefully hibernation on the N770.

GConf enforces policy through a couple of layers … the system layer … the user layer … J5

Hm, where did I see this before — I know, the Win32 registry

The problem with the win32 registry is not that it is bad concept (you youngsters might not recall the INI hell that preceeded it), but that it does not scale well: you end up with a huge database, and orphaned keys when application uninstallers are buggy; and then if your database gets corrupted nothing works any longer, because everything depends on it. People might backup their documents, but what a normal user would ever thought of backing up their registry? And even if she did, how would she go about restoring it when nothing on the system works? (Which is why WinXP does some of this for you behind your backs, but backing up things on the same drive as the originals has its limitations.)

The gconf database as is at the moment is tiny compared to the Registry (although it seems to leave loads of messages in my system logs), but if every app on the system started using it (i.e., if it was to become the ultimate policy manager), these would become issues for gconf to worry about. Do you backup your GConf settings?

Yesterday I spent a nice day in Coire an Lochan in Glen Coe, with Bob and Judith. I have never seen the Coire this bare at this time of the year, nor have I ever seen it this quiet: apart from the three of us, there were only two other people there to start with, and only another five or so turned up during the rest of the day. I do find that strange, for it was a beutiful sunny and windless day, and we do not get that many of them around here.

True, the climbing conditions are very poor; the only climb that is ‘in’ in the Coire is the Broad Gully (a grade I gully used for descent). We walked up the gully, basked in the sunshine, and then back down along the northern ridge, stopping in the Coire to play on a 20m icefall (grade II, with a short III direct start).

The ice was rather hard, and so I was whacking the tools with force, and at one stage hitting a soft spot, the whole head of the axe sunk in, and I crashed my left index finger rather badly between the shaft and the ice. Today it has been rather sore and plays with all colours, but I hope it will get better by the weekend, so I can get out to climb some more ice.