After the 5x5x5 cube, the obvious next step is to build a cube in more dimensions.

Fortunately, someone has already done this - four- and five-dimensional versions have been written and, apparently, solved.

Very cool.

The word "trellis" to me means the little old lady from North Wales who sent bizarre postcards to Humphrey Lyttleton on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue rather than the garden feature used to offer screening and a framework for climbing plants.

Suffice it to say that when I proclaim that we are going to build a trellis I do not mean to announce a robotic experiment in geriatric Mornington Crescent play.

We saw a design in Family Handyman magazine which quite caught our eye, a simple slatted bench with attached trellis-work. We need some screening in our garden to replace a recently pruned tree, and we decided to build the trellis portion with the uprights set into the ground rather than attached to the bench.

Yesterday I went and bought the wood for this project, and the plan is to build the thing over the Memorial Day weekend (24th to 26th May). It will involve mixing concrete, which will be a new one for me.

Look for the inevitable frustrated howls as I prove unable to set the posts true.

I collect pictures I can use for wallpaper.

I doubt that I am unique in this, but I like to stick to pictures I have taken myself.

The real challenge is in getting the pictures to the computers that I want the wallpaper on. Although I use my iBook all the time, I don't change its wallpaper very often because I so rarely see it - with its relatively low resolution screen, my windows are maximised pretty much all the time.

It's the work machines that I usually have interesting wallpaper on. Currently I have a choice between some aquarium shots (a slipper lobster or a spiny crab), a close up of some driftwood , and a picture of Crater Lake that I like.

But I have many many more on my machine at home, and I keep forgetting to bring them in. Like the Japanese maple leaves against a blue sky, or the green moss and orange leaves picture, and so on.

My thinking was that I need to start building an archive file with my favourite pictures in it so I can grab them more easily.

Do others have this problem? How do you address it?

Update - well, here are the ones I have on my work machine at the moment (these are resized from the originals, otherwise they are just too big to upload):

- slipper lobster

- spiny Japanese crab

- driftwood closeup

- Crater Lake through icicles

A great deal can be gleaned about the culture of the computer hacker¹ that after what language to write programs in, the most virulent arguments to be had are around which editor to use. These arguments usually centre around whether to use vi or emacs.

I have mostly ignored the controversy over the years, at least at work. I used the editor supplied with the platform (VMS edit) or the compiler (Intel aedit) for most of my early career, then started using the editors supplied with the IDE I was saddled with for that week (Microsoft development environments before they became bloated and slow; JBuilder briefly and disastrously; Eclipse most successfully).

At home I have used a mishmash of different editing tools - microEmacs on my Archimedes, a tool called PFE on Windows that I still use for its printing features - but about ten years I settled on vim for three reasons:

1. it worked the same on every platform I used (my fingers were tired of changing which keys to press for different functions depending on the machine I was sitting at)
2. it used journalling so I wouldn't lose edits even in a power failure (I had lost a full day's work in just this way)
3. it was modal, that is the meaning of a key press varied depending on whether you were in text entry mode or command mode (the editor I had been most productive with was aedit which was also modal)

I've been happy with vim for most of the last decade. I have used it to edit text, source code, and web pages on every machine I work on.

However, I have lately become dissatisfied. I have been considering emacs.

Now, emacs is a weird editor by the standards of any normal human being. So is vim for that matter, but its weirdness is perhaps explicable. But still I find myself drawn to the other side of the great religious divide.

Well, there are two main ones: vim isn't powerful enough, and vim doesn't support Lisp very well.

To be sure, vim is powerful. I am lost in editors without regular expression support, for example, and its list of features is ever growing (and not fully understood by your author). But it is not, and has never been intended to be, very scriptable. The "global application" command is great, but you can't chain them together to isolate a smaller subset for application. It is not obvious how to save a common search/replace sequence in a named command.

And vim does have some support for Lisp. It obviously has a Lisp syntax mode, and there is some navigation support too, but all the really cool Lisp integration has been done within emacs.

So I am going to start using emacs. It will be interesting to see whether my distantly remembered microEmacs key commands will surface from the distant past.

[1] by which I mean "enthusiastic programmer" rather than "vandal".

I rode my bike into work yesterday. This is only worth remarking on because of the extraordinary incidence of my having a puncture when I first ride a bike into a new place of work.

I didn't get a puncture yesterday, although my cube neighbour did.

It was a nice ride for me yesterday - there was a slight sprinkling of rain on the way home, but otherwise dry. And I feel great today.

I will be doing this as long as I can, although the knee surgery is now booked so that will only be for about five weeks before I will be off the bike for a month.

I have been using OpenOffice.org and its derivatives as my primary office suite for years. Latterly this has been NeoOffice since that is a native OS X app - OOo required running under X, which looked weird and was slow to startup.

So I was quite excited to read that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is available. One of the things they have been working on is a native OS X UI, and I was keen to play with that. I kicked off the download, opened up the disc image, and...

It was then that I noticed that the image was for Intel Macs. Since my iBook is a G4 PPC Mac this did not get me anywhere.

I went back to the OOo site and found a PPC image. Apparently my glass of wine with dinner confused me though - I downloaded the latest stable build, which is 2.4, rather than the 3.0 beta I wanted.

Truly, I can understand the OOo folks only supporting Intel Macs. The binary download is big enough to make a universal binary prohibitive, and all the excitement in Mac Land is around the Intel machines - it has been the best part of two years now, I believe, since they were introduced. But I am still disappointed that I won't get to try this out, at least not for a while.

News today that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is offering free access to bloggers, but apparently you have to qualify by not being a personal diary kind of blog.

Never mind then.

Maybe I should aspire to be like Andy Updegrove or Pamela Jones, but I don't know that I want to.

Apologies to all for my lack of drive on this matter.