I was woken unreasonably early again on Tuesday morning when, at six o’clock, a neighbour’s burglar alarm went off in response to a brief power cut. It was 31 C in the bedroom, so I gave up on any more sleep and got up and showered instead.

This wasn’t all bad: being up and ready early meant that I could cycle to the concrete sanctuary of Peckham Levels while it was still relatively cool outside.

I tried updating Nextcloud and it went badly. Upgrading Nextcloud is always painful, but this time it really outdid itself by deleting its database. I’m not the only person this has happened to, and it’s not a new issue: that report is from two and a half years ago.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s written in PHP. I’m sure it’s technically possible to write decent software in PHP, but in reality it seems to be a strong predictor of poor engineering practices.

I have a backup, but I think I’m going to cut my losses and not waste any more time with it. I was only really using it for the GPodder Sync plugin, to synchronise which podcast episodes I’ve listened to, and I think I’ve found an alternative for that in oPodSync.

I spent Friday cycling around Deptford, Greenwich, and through the tunnel to the Isle of Dogs. Only one lift in the Greenwich tunnel was working, a now normal level of degraded service. Apparently it’s something about them specifying some absurd custom-built lift design that makes them prone to failure and expensive to repair. Truly, nothing could be more British.

The tunnel lifts are more complex, each lift being a bespoke installation with a limited operational life. Over the last year, the north lift has been 73% operational and the south lift 80% operational.

That works out at a 58% chance of both lifts working at any time. But if we’re honest, only one lift working is functionally the same as not having lifts, because a tunnel with only one end is useless as a way to get anywhere.

I figured out a couple of new tricks in Lilypond this week, that will help me produce better sanshin scores more easily. First, I worked out how to set a line of lyrics without having to notate the melody. Second, I added my own “language” to allow me to enter kunkunshi positions directly as kanji, without having to translate them in my head first. It’s not hard to do the mental mapping, but not doing so makes double-checking much easier. I’ll write them up separately.

I love working with Lilypond. It’s reliable, it produces beautiful scores, and it’s so flexible.

Due to some failure of geolocation, I ended up with a French ad on a couple of English podcasts I was listening to at the weekend. It was the same ad both times: an excitable and breathless narrator described a new cross-platform computer game available from 11 July. The game featured new parks and something called « le shredding », but I couldn’t catch the name, which sounded like « tonioque ce proscateur ».

After a lot of puzzlement, it finally came to me: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

A few links for the week: