You have fallen in love with me.
To the wind shall I scatter you.
Listen to me.
I warn you now, build up no hopes,
Believe me, I shall destroy you.
Listen to me.

If, like the bee and the ant, you now
Were to build two hundred houses,
Oh, I shall still make you homeless,
Oh, I shall still make you lonely.
Listen to me.

For me, you are like a dead bird
Held in my hand, at hunting time.
And I, the hunter, will make you
A lure for all the other birds.
Listen to me.

You are guardian of a treasure,
Oh, just like a sleeping serpent,
And you shall see; I shall make you
Spin around like that sleepy snake.
Listen to me.

On All Souls Day

Last night they lit your glass with wine
And brought for you the sweet soul-cake,
And blessed the room with candle-shine
For the grave journey you would make.

They told me not to stir between
The midnight strokes of one and two,
And I should see you come again
To view the scene that once you knew.

"Good night," they said, and journeyed on.
I turned the key, and - turning - smiled,
And in the quiet house alone
I slept serenely as a child.

Innocent was that sleep, and free,
And when the first of morning shone
I had no need to gaze and see
If crumb, or bead of wine, had gone.

My heart was easy as this bloom
Of waters rising by the bay.
I did not watch where you might come,
For you had never been away.
For you have never been away.

Using OpenLayers with PhoneGap on iOS: On iOS, the web view that PhoneGap provides doesn't handle about:blank. I was playing with OpenLayers and this caused the map to just not appear and the following error to appear in the console:

PhoneGapDelegate::shouldStartLoadWithRequest: Received Unhandled URL about:blank

To fix this is a two-step procedure (one which will work for other things which require about:blank, too). Firstly, create an html file in the www folder called blank.html, which contains something along the lines of:

Secondly, look in the AppDelegate.m class under the Classes group in your Xcode project. There will be a method which looks like this:

This method is where one is able to rewrite requests on their way through. To rewrite about:blank to point to the blank.html file, it is first necessary to find the path to the www folder and thus to blank.html:

And then to generate a new, empty request to pass through to about:blank. As about:blank should literally be that and shouldn't attempt any processing, one doesn't need to worry too much about loss of state.

Thus, the whole method should look like:

This should allow web components that rely on about:blank to work correctly. It's trivial to extend this to make any about: url return a blank page - change the if() line to use the hasPrefix: selector:

Luminous Experience of a Brain Scan: (from "The Secret Reader")

An hour ago the nurse shot technetium
into my arm. At last this human mud
is light itself - no eye seeking a crumb
of mystery elsewhere. Radioactive blood.
Rigid I press my face against a screen
and gamma rays reveal the pilgrimage
through every catacomb, scanning unseen
vessels and deadly pools. A squiggly page
shows me inside: ravines of fear, a hill
of wordy hope, a squawking bumpy map
of love, the starry motorcycle spill.
"Nurse, what news from my inner tree of night?"
"You're scintillating!" But the glowing sap
can't see itself. Only the mind sees light.

I've been thinking about people being tricked into doing things by web pages.

How about a sort of distance metric from user decisions to help filter out things like the idiot FaceBook video spam that's been going around?

I warn you: this is currently on an incredibly vague conceptual level.

Let's take a webapp as an example, with a number of widgets that have onClick handlers; and let's say that some lovely lovely person has worked out how to exploit some XSS hole in order to programatically simulate a series of user actions to - for example - spam all their friends.

So - how about each time an actual UI event (or at least a UI event generated by partially trusted code, such as the kernel mouse driver, or something authorised to send messages between applications [1]) occurs, we set a dynamically scoped variable which nothing can ever increment to be 1.0; and then each time an event takes place which deals with alters the user-visible context [2], it gets halved. So - a piece of Javascript that loads a new page, fills in a form then submits it generates a distance from agency of about 0.25, compared to 1.0 if the form submission directly results from the click, and 0.5 if there's one piece of JavaScript in the way.

This metric is then sent back with every HTTP request.

Thoughts? I know this is hopelessly naive, but it may be a starting point worth examining?

[1] I know this is ducking the problem slightly, but it's a thought experiment, dammit!

[2] Obvious examples: anything that causes a reload or relocation of the window; anything that changes the DOM; anything that performs an action on a user's behalf.

Ophelia in the frozen river: you breathe and the soundless bubbles are trapped beneath the cold surface. They burst inconsequentially, all soaked in half-hidden revelation. You are covered in leaves: "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember." There's Salvia. That's against sanity. Fingertips melt the surface, but there's no arguing with ice. There's Yew, that's for churchyards. Your face is white, and close, and far.

The far-flung eyes of Orion are closer than you are to living breath. On a winter's night steam from my lips can reach upwards and make them shiver. I have spent hoarfrost midnights singing to Jupiter rising, and he has moved across my sky to reach me. But breath cannot fight winter; warmth cannot fight cold; and a single momentary presence from which you turned away cannot fight a defined absence. Entropy is the last dance spoken, in the greatest and the least; and if you drift away from me in complex currents, your hair caught and fractal with the weed, I can do nothing, not even follow.

Here's ash.

I would cut into living stems to find you, curled up like a pearl, in the seed-pod of a poppy, and bring you back. A ghost in the rings of an oak; a conversation I had with a distant autumn morning, 4 AM and sodium. I would have come to you or brought you home or filled your heart with grammatical dreams, had you let me. But you are Ophelia in the frozen river; your silences are your ice, and your flowers.

A hallucination: The floor tears like paper and he screams. Every change in tone becomes another mouth as it leaves his, and they float around him like moths with lips cold, feathery and hungry. One takes a hefty bite from just below his left eyesocket. He jolts, but one of his ody remains where it was, and another follows his proprioception upwards and then cannot re-merge, so his back is lying on his torso, and his heads lie next to each other. He slides towards the rip in the floor which is now the wall through which a dark wind blows in C minor, withering the tiny sweet golden meanings which had fruited from the cactus by the side of the bed. He reaches up with one of his four arms and hurls a notebook at the circling lips; they gibber and vomit onto its pages reams of aromatic blasphemy, then devour the cactus and one of his spatial dimensions, so he is trapped flat against the wall. He feels it rip, again, behind him. He lets out a howl as heavy as Jupiter. His heart hiccoughs.
A new poem - a ghazal: "Quiet".

Bright laughter of the river in this quiet;
He dangles feet in water, in his quiet.

The thin and frozen mist, the morning light;
The calls of homebound geese in breathless quiet.

My Lady wears her clothes of words well-ironed;
Language is the robe she wears, Miss Quiet.

A Godly silence; limestone in the night,
Electric blue and golden stained-glass quiet.

We trip the light syntactic, waves down fibre;
A solitude of numbers, pulses, quiet.

Rob is an abstraction, bits and bytes:
Water, Carbon, Iron. Noise, hiss, quiet.

A ghazal is a poetic form which generally explores themes of love and loss in a set of disjoint couplets joined by a common refrain and rhyme. See "Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English" for more details on the form and some better-written English ghazals.

Java should not look like this: code from the undergraduate archive.

A vision of the end of the world on the aeroplane to Arlanda: British Airways' GPS screen just showing a blue screen with NORTH SEA in the middle of it; and outside only clouds, so all that could be seen was a bright featureless luminous whiteness, cutting the world inside the fuselage off completely from the world outside it. Maybe the end will come as an all-pervading luminous mist, thicker and thicker, dividing everything from everything else until one is alone; and then dividing oneself from oneself, part by part, in reducing awareness until there is no self left to experience, and no world left outside for it to experience either.