There is no spoon...

My virtual server materialised, after an initial frellup regarding the question of my authenticity. The sign-up process required that I enter a phone number. The phone number field on the form was validated against my postcode, which was a little tragic, given that I have a mobile number and a Skype number, neither of which tie me, geographically to my material locale. Nothing daunted, I entered the Swansea STD code and a random, visually telephonic number.

Hey presto, it worked!

Later that day, I received an email asking for proof of my place of residence, so I quickly assembled a package containing rocks from Mount Snowdon, the festering corpse of a local Christmas reveller, and a retinal scan of someone else's eye that I found behind a dumpster on the way home last night. I figure that the elemental makeup of the corpse should be enough to tie me to this local supernova remnant.

So, yes, I now have a server. I'm going to move my stuffs across from my Google Site site to the new server, and then I'm going to update the javascript and css on this account to point to it.

Meanwhile, I've done a lot of work on the genetic algorithm: it's now *much* faster courtesy of my now rather lower level of python cluelessness, and I added an option to switch between sexual and asexual reproduction, and an option to terminate on a perfect match. I fixed a minor bugette in the fitness function, and introduced a class to manifest the idea of an organism, which makes the code more coherent in terms of the system it's trying to describe. A nicety of this class is that, given a target string, it'll synthesise a genome which could generate it which means that you can contrast the 'natural' genome produced by the evolutionary process and the ideal, generated genome. One is clearly designed, the other is full of dead wombats and ear hair from passing perverts. Oh, and I tidied up the print code...

I've also added a new mutation type - jumping jeans! I mean, genes!

Which reminds me, actually; I need to visit the laundrette to avoid the dread spectre of the aforesaid jumping jeans.

Holy Jumping Squirrels, Batman!

Is there anything this girl canna do? Apart from laundry?

The only thing I really have left to do is to add CSV data logging. Oh, and I have a bug in the mutation rate code which is eluding a fix because with astonishing levels of autistic focus I've been fooling with this shenanigans for god knows how long, and at some point I'm going to have to fall over.

I'm not completely sanguine about the virtual server as it costs about £18 a month, and I can't really afford that. However, I'm viewing it as a marketing cost. Which makes everything fine.