• Last night done, and it was fantastic! Now it's time for the aftershow party! (23:25:58)

• Opening night today. Eek. (18:06:08)

• Sitting in the concourse like the intervening 22 years never happened. Can't reprogram this coffee machine, though. (16:51:54)

• Well, that was weird. I've just been to a couple of first year lectures. (14:32:31)

• The Sunday rehearsal of Doom... (17:23:20)

Stuck, at last, in the sand. Mind you, they've given it a good go trying to get it out for the past nine months or so. And what's really amazing is that it was supposed to last only 90 days, and has been going for six years. And it hasn't stopped yet - most of the kit on board is still working, it's just stuck. An amazing feat of engineering.

The last word, though, has to go to Warren Ellis on twitter: "Martian rover Spirit stuck in sand for good: which is of course what happens when you give a human's job to a skateboard."

• Just saw student production of Lorca's 'Blood Wedding.' Great stuff. (22:04:27)
• Ah, I love Casa Miguel. (00:30:58)

• Yay! Karmic installed and working well so far - seems quicker on this old and clunky laptop. Took nine hours, mind.. (22:59:13)

Charlie Stross, in the comments on this post (on why he uses a Mac) explains:

the thing about the iSlate is ... we know Steve Jobs is just a little bit mad, right? I'm pretty sure Steve is chasing a vision. He's been chasing it since at least 1984, when he insisted on marketing the original Macintosh as a closed box -- perfect unto itself. He's polished this vision through successive products, and it gets a little bit more visible each time, culminating -- so far -- in the iPhone. What Steve wants is: a single, smooth, shiny device, like a sea-washed pebble. One control, and one only. You stroke it and it comes to life and light. It does what you want -- whatever you want -- smoothly and instantly, so intuitively it doesn't need a user manual, yet with incredible, unfolding, flexibility and power when you call for it.

This device does not exist. Arguably, it cannot exist. But Steve Jobs is trying to bring it into existence, because anything short of perfection irritates him to the point of throwing temper tantrums.

The iSlate is Steve's fifth attempt at giving birth to this Ur-device. #1 was the Macintosh. #2 was the iMac, or maybe the Titanium Macbook. #3 was the iPod. #4 was the iPhone. #5 ... will probably be the iSlate, and if it delivers even 10% of what Steve wants it to be, it'll be an eye-opener -- not because of any single thing, but because the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

See where the buzz is coming from?

• Attempting the walk down the hill. Maybe I should just slide down. (16:39:21)

Ooh, it looks messy in there. Some of the stuff about how they're resolving the DLL dependencies is interesting, although I suspect it'll make DLL Hell even more complicated.

I loved this particular gem, though:

Microsoft observed that 15 per cent of all user-mode crashes and 30 per cent of shutdown crashes were caused by heap corruption: applications that try to access freed memory, or memory beyond what is allocated. Its solution was a feature called the Fault Tolerant Heap (FTH).

If an application crashes a few times, Windows will automatically apply a shim that intercepts its memory operations. FTH will over-allocate memory, and keep a copy of freed memory so that attempts to re-read it will succeed. The user gets better reliability at the expense of performance, which suffers by up to 15 per cent or so, while buggy applications work better than you would expect.

Developers expressed some concern. Were their mistakes being disguised so that they would remain unfixed? It is a risk, though if Windows detects a debugger the feature turns itself off. You can also disable FTH, though not on a per-process basis.

Or you could write your operating system correctly the first time so that an application crash doesn't bring the whole bloody machine down.

• In obligatory weather news, the slight hill into the close is now black ice. Any attempt on may leave the car in the marina. (17:22:55)
• McVities' Chocolate Digestives, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. *nom nom nom* (17:22:10)

• Rassilon? RASSILON? (19:36:46)

• Right, off out for our evening's entertainment. Happy New Year's partying! (19:27:53)

• And home again. Argh. (20:48:29)

• Doctor Who: Guh? (18:59:32)
• Catrin says Merry Christmas too, or she would, but she's currently doing the heavy Christmas lifting. (10:53:15)
• Merry Christmas one and all! Dolig llawen i chi gyd! (10:52:08)

• Safely arrived on Anglesey. Engaging Welsh circuits. Wedi cyrraedd yn saf yn Ynys Mon (15:11:59)

• Sitting in an empty pub waiting for the rest of the crew to turn up. Come on you sods... Good beer though. (13:03:45)

• I make the mince pies, Catrin sets fire to them! (13:53:40)

• Won 2-3, having been 2-0 down at half time! (21:23:29)
• We're in time added on for petulance. (21:19:13)
• At Park Avenue watching Aber Town FC. Bloody freezing, but very festive. (20:30:47)
• Amanda Palmer, a webcam and a uke, making a point. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9dxDREaCyjE&v=9dxDREaCyjE&gl=GB (19:00:16)
• listening to a recording of the Piae Cantiones. Gorgeous. (14:54:07)