Happy New Year everyone ! (Written at 1:13 am, so I'm not early or anything!)

It turns out that Helen had a party to go to, so I don't feel guilty any more!

It seems that we have a security risk on IRC. One of the regulars there seems to believe that anyone joining IRC from *.ndirect.co.uk with the nick name gerph is me and will quite happily op me. For some reason they don't seem to have quite grasped the fact that anyone from ndirect could quite happily join the channel pretending to be me and take it over. What amazes me that they don't actually listen to the reasoning, and yet still insist on opping me !

I seem to have got a reputation for not wanting to be opped because of this, and yet everyone thinks I do this just because I'm being bloody minded. The fact of the matter is that I was there on the many times that #acorn was taken over and saw the chaos it caused. I was there for the subsequent arguments about the bots and whether we should have them. I was there when people complained because the bots weren't catching the takeovers and they believed there was no point in having them. The 'security' afforded by the bots is only as strong as those people trusted with operator privilege and if those people are stupid enough to ignore the warnings that are given then they deserve everything they get.

If it was my bot I'd add the user to the auto-deop list as a security risk, but that's not my decision and it's not something I want to do. I would have thought that a little reasoning would have convinced them not to op me. Alas some people do not seem to want to listen to reasoning and so endanger others. This is their right, after all. Just as it is the right of other users to "take over" a channel. This is a free system, after all.

It doesn't make it any less annoying though.

I've fixed the diary-processing program now so that it actually gets the date right. Everyone say "Yay!". Ok then don't.

I'm feeling guilty now because Helen's going to be on her own on New Years Eve and she'd invited me up... Oh well... That's life I guess...

But I'll be here with Simon and Dad anyhow.

One thing I really, really (and I mean this quite strongly) get annoyed at is people writing things on IRC (or Email, which is worse), which are just plainly not English. Simple things like 'U' or 'i' annoy me. More so the misuse of words like There, They're, and Their, and Your and You're. I think it's Chocky's fault. He got me on to this thing with the apostrophe. And I still haven't got the hang of it, but I am trying.

In any case, my general view is that if people can't be bothered to write things that are readable then you just ignore them. And that goes for IRC just as strongly as it does for Email. At the end of the day, if someone wants a question answered then they should try to make themselves understood at least.

I watched Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997, The WB)Action and Adventure/Comedy/Drama/FantasyIn every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer. Sarah Michelle Gellar stars as Buffy Summers, The Chosen One, the one girl in all the world with the strength and skill to fight the vampires. With the help of her close friends, Willow (Alyson Hannigan ), Xander (Nicholas Brendon), and her Watcher Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) she balances slaying, family, friendships, and relationships.Buffy The Vampire Slayer tonight - well, the first episode anyhow. It looks like it might be quite amusing, but it's not quite up to the hype I don't think.

Mum came home tonight after a somewhat awful night - it seems that they had one group of people who insisted on complaining about the group they were next to, which would seem reasonable except for the fact that it is New Year (well nearly) and it was a birthday party - I mean there's only so much noise you can fail to make when there's 30 people there. But anyhow, it didn't stop there. It seems that later on there were some cars on fire in the car park... then later still, people were being chased through the park. I'm only going by what Mum said, but you'd not believe it of Center Parcs would you ?

To my knowledge nothing like that has happened there before, and I'd certainly not say that it was a place I'd avoid because of the likelyhood of violence. It's weird. "What's the world coming to ?" I'm sure I'd say if I wasn't quite so cynical as to believe that it really is changing that much.

Tonight, Ms Jennifer Ringley was on Channel 5 and I went down to watch when Julian told me. It's interesting; I wouldn't have thought she'd have gone in for the lowest of the low type confrontation thingies (I've forgotten what they're called now!). But the thing that annoys me (and I'm as bad as anyone for this) is the strange psychiatrist type woman (ok, so I came in part way through) who claimed that obviously doing it meant that Jennifer has had some problems in her past.

Surely it's possible to do something just because you want to ? If I look at it from my point of view, I'd have put a cam in my room quite happily. Nobody would have watched it. Well, maybe that's not true, some people would have, because they like to look at things just because they're there - I'm one of those people too, I know - but the point is that there wouldn't have been any problem with it. Not from anyone. At least, I doubt there would have been.

So, maybe I'm saying that there's all the fuss because she's a girl. Maybe. But lets look at it another way; say it's just the fact that once in a while she's undressed. Or having sex. Or playing. And I'll stress the fact that it is once in a while - or was whilst I was running the JenniPics archive. Maybe it's different now, but I can only go by what I know. The odd thing is that you can pick up porn much more easily by going to the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica newsgroups. Indeed it's even easier.

Just set your newsreader looking at a small section of those groups (say 3 or 4) and in the space of a few hours you can have ever single picture posted to them - say a couple of hundred. And then you do the same the next day and get the same amount. And if you don't get the same amount or want more, you add one of the other groups in that heirarchy.

This isn't telling people anything they don't know, it's information that's widely available and if people on AOL can do it then I would imagine that almost anyone can. The thing is that if you want porn, you can get it, and much more readily than by staring at a screen of shoes (ok, so it's a bookcase now!) for hours and hours on end.

So, it isn't for the sex that people go to see her. Well, it's partly for that, but mostly I believe it's because you get a view on to her life. You can read entries in her journal - I've only looked at two to be honest, and that was after I started doing this diary [I didn't even know that she was doing a journal!] - and read about how she feels about something.

You can email her and see if she's going to reply - imagine the amount of junk she must get; I was getting multiple of hundreds of mails per day at one point with JenniPics, so just think what she must get! - or you can just read about her and what she's doing.

This probably seems like a nice free ad for her. It's not meant that way. Possibly it's a justification for my having run JenniPics. Possibly it's just my way of saying "You go for it girl" to someone who just wants to do something. I'll say I dislike the idea of the members scheme, but I can understand the reason for it - I dislike it because the reason for JenniCam was for it to be available to all (at least that's how I viewed it).

Yes, I'm sad that I'm not running my archive any more - bizarrely, I got an email about JenniPics a few days ago from someone and it's not been running for about 6 or 7 months now!

Oddly, I can back up my belief that it's not the sex that's important but the fact that the cam is live, or at least regularly updated. Look at !Forecast (somewhere on this site or Freenet). Basically it is a simple auto-updating cam viewer. Initially it was written for fetching weather forecasts and satellite photos from Sunsite, but it will happily fetch those from JenniCam, or the Millenium Dome Cam, or any other of a multitude of sites.

The thing I always say about JenniCam was that it opened my eyes to a possibility. Not that people could have sex and the world could watch. That provoked mild interest but wasn't something that I'll remember. No, the thing that I'll remember for a long time was looking at the cam and seeing her fast asleep (under bed clothes, I'll add) but with the curtains open. And over the course of the next (about) half hour, the sun rose just out of shot, and the outside and inside began to brighten, glow orange and red and then yellowy-white.

I'm not sure why, but just watching sunrise on another continent, almost live (albeit at 3 minute intervals I think it was), was just so amazing and showed something of the power and potential of the Internet. You may scoff and say you've seen better, but to me it means something. And to those who simply say I'm rationalising by saying something that isn't about sex, I just say "Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but I know what I remember, and it's that sunrise".

As I read that back to myself I feel I've left something out and maybe I should say more about what I had to do with it, but at the end of the day, I'm not sure it really matters - I did JenniPics then, and it came to very little; someone else will be fulfilling that need now and I commend them for it.

And to drop us down to earth with a little thud, Heretic network had a pretty thorough test today. It appears that sound on the network games goes a bit funny, but given the trouble we've had with that I'm not overly surprised. Andrew's given me some great pointers as to what seems to be wrong though so I think it'll be easy to fix once I look at it properly. The frontend has a new way of working with network drivers which should be more 'plug-in-and-play' like.

RealAudio is improving slowly. Generic sources code now works.

Spoke to Chris today too; He says I should have said Yes to seeing Helen too. Kick (me kicking myself). He also explained some interesting stuff about CDs which threw me; I think he's been reading up .

I think that's enough for tonight though...

Another night that is too tiring to write much. <sigh>

However, lots of things happened today; for one I watched TVDB Lookup: Soul Music (unset) GetSeriesDetails: Soul Music Soul Music. Actually that happened last night after I went to bed but it's near enough. Those people at Channel 4 should be shot for doing that. I mean, 3 and a bit hours (or was it more?) of Pratchett in a night. And then very cruel to do the same the next night (ie just a little while ago). Rather amusing nonetheless...

In programming news today, Heretic now has network drivers which I've tested to be relatively sane. Without an A5000 version though it'll be a little hard.

In 'spare time' news today, RealAudio now plays sound without using the nasty JavaSupport module. Surprising the number of mistakes in there. Suffice to say you should never, ever call JavaSupport_AudioStatus. Unless you like the machine hanging, that is. It's all nice and modular now so hopefully ra288 will benefit too. Jogu and Kira have been very helpful on this front. Kira's still battling with 28k8 so I'll just let her fiddle with that; next thing is the pnm protocol (or whatever it is) and then getting true streaming to work.

One thing that springs to mind is that we can't actually do much with it once it's 'finished'. Because it's based on freeware sources we can't make a commercial release. On the other hand, it is one thing we can say "Yeah, we can do that now". Another addition to the freenet site, I feel <grin>

You know it's odd... sometimes I'm lying in the bath in the morning and I think of so many things I'd like to add to the diary, but I don't because by the time I'm actually writing the diary it's all gone. Ah well.

We had a nice game of Chocolate Monopoly today, and rather fun it was too ! Surprisingly, I came second, but only because Dad quite cunningly arranged to get hold of the cards I needed and then sell them me for a ridiculously small fee. I think Simon was a tad put out by that, especially as Dad had just obtained the cards from him! Anyhow, Julian won, so nothing changed there.

Afterwards we played one of the quizes from the Sunday paper (I don't know which one) which basically had a load of numbered squares with multiple choice questions on. You answer the question and look at a little table at the bottom of the page to tell you the square to go to. Eventually - if you answer enough right questions you get to 'square 22' which is the finish and you win. Rather fun it was, because I'm usually awful at current affairs (it annoys me because I used to be pretty good - maybe I should start up that automated news service again ? Better still, use that rather cool Ticker application) but I actually won. Wierd. In reality though, I think it is partly to do with the fact that I could actually see how the game was organised and spot what answers were likely to be right after a couple of times through them (because, of course, you don't know if the question is right or wrong, only that it takes you to another square). Even still, looking through the answers afterwards (they were given, but on another page) I still managed to do pretty well.

I mentioned to them that Helen had asked if I wanted to see her for New Years Eve and had turned her down, and Mum and Simon both wondered why, Simon saying that he'd not have minded. I begin to wonder myself actually, but at the end of the day I wanted to be home. Maybe that's because I didn't want to be in the way of her family - it is a special time! - or maybe it's because I preferred to be here. I'm not sure, but that's what I said, so that's what's happening. Damn.

Note to self: Remember to add Auto-Ignore to JFTerm.

Oh; and I now go to upload the diary and find that Kira's sent me her version of ra144 with resampling in it; more sighing... I've just updated this one to incorporate hers but I get a low hum... I think I did something wrong, but I'm too tired to care.

I'm too tired to do a full diary entry tonight, so I'll just give you a quick summary of the days events. Very quick. Updated StrongHelp manuals a little with docs from past few months (thanks peeps). Played with RealAudio a little, with Kira and Jogu's help; I'm not sure I know what I'm doing but I can work it out I think. Managed to annoy people on IRC by triggering the protect command which I thought only deopped people, but kicks, bans and remembers them. Rather impressive really.

Oh, and I played with MIDI a little bit today too (mostly working with the documentation I was adding).

Other than that, nothing really useful.

I didn't bother to write up the diary last night because I was far too tired to really bother. We spent the day with our cousins and it was 'ok'. Not as bad as I anticipated anyhow. But, that was Christmas.

Nothing much has happened today, though. I've been messing around with some source code for real-audio and trying to speed it up a little; it's not slow at the moment, but you just look at the short conversions and think "Urgh".

Annoyingly, Helen invited me to hers for new year, but I think it's a tad unfair to go along and leave Simon and Dad alone on New Year, however much I might like to go. So it ends up that the first time in ages that Helen has actually invited me down to see her and I have to say no. Typical, huh ?

Oh well...

Other than that; it's been a normal-ish day. I think Dad's back at work tomorrow.

Grendel's sitting on the floor at the moment washing himself. For about quarter of an hour he was just sitting on my lap trying (and succeeding) in getting attention. It is rather hard to work though when you have a cat nuzzling into your cheek all the time!

Oh; Luke Graham reported a bug in Doom+ today, relating to TNTs 'Icarus'. It appears to have a F_END lump but no F_START lump. This shouldn't cause problems, but appears to. I'm not exactly sure what on earth it going on just yet, but I will find it.

Nothing special happened today really. I've done a tiny bit of work on Heretic, but that's really only been testing little things because I just can't be bothered today. Spent a while updating the FTP manual and reading up on some of the other RFCs.

I would have watched 'It's a wonderful life' today, but as usual I forgot it was on and nobody reminded me, even though both Julian and Simon watched it. Other than that I can't actually think of much else that's happened today. I've started work on part of the freenet site changes I want to make in the hope that I can do something constructive with my little portion of it.

I'm hoping I can get a kind of standardish layout for the things on there and make it relatively easy on myself to update things, rather than having to use !FTP or whatever each time. FTPUpdate is definitely the thing to use here, I think.

Phil rang today, and I cut him off to go watch Jonathan Creek (1997, BBC One)DramaJonathan Creek follows the story of Madeline Magellan, an investigative journalist. Like most journalist she sticks her nose in where it isn't wanted, but this is what makes her such a great journalist! While writing a piece about the death of a prominent artist, she happens across a man named Jonathan Creek. Jonathan makes a living inventing magical tricks for magician Adam Klaus, and has a brilliantly lateral mind. Starring Caroline Quentin as Madeline Magellan and Alan Davies as Jonathan Creek, the show has quickly become a hit in the UK and around the world.Jonathan Creek. I feel kinda guilty for that, but there wasn't much choice as Simon was recording something on the other side. Good job it was a good one really. Anyhow, I'll speak to him tomorrow, if I remember - and I'm home... We're going to go to Jaqui's (I hope that spelling is right!) and Lucy's tomorrow for Christmas. Hopefully, it'll be good fun; usually there's something to upset people, but I'm hoping its not me this year. Family is usually fun, but sometimes... just sometimes... we really annoy one another; maybe it's because we know one another so well, or maybe it's because we're under one another's feet. I have a feeling it's because we all have our own little self-centred views as to what Christmas day should involve and it never happens just as we want.

Reading that back I begin to wonder how Americans spell Centred. I think it must be centered, but that doesn't half look odd. Not that it matters; in normal writing I find that the words 'both' and 'the' become joined to give 'bothe' which doesn't quite read right. Plus, it doesn't help that the h tends look like an l.

Spent a little while talking to Alisdair Bailey today; well, after midnight anyhow (we had a little mini-countdown on IRC to midnight; I do wonder what will be happening on new year next year - will there be people on IRC ? Will I be at home or elsewhere ? Will I be sad enough to spend new year on IRC ? These and other questions will be answered... well, in just over a years time I guess [which reminds me of something that Phil said - what are we going to call the next decade ? I mean it's all very well living through the Eighties and Nineties, but the Zeroties ? or the Noughties ? It just doesn't sound right, does it ? I guess we'll just wait till we get there; I'm expecting the decade after it to be called the Teens, which could lead to a little confusion with people in their teens at the time, but I think that's something for other people to worry about - I'll be... erm... 30-odd then, so I don't think I'll care about it quite so much]).

It occurred to me that it was somewhat strange that he was writing the games column. Well, I say occurred to me. I've been thinking it for a while. It's probably just my getting older, but it seems that so many younger people are thinking they can make it big in the world - I'd say bigger than they are. Maybe it's just jealousy because I'm not there, or wasn't at their age, but it does show at times that they seem too young for what they are doing. I'm not going to give examples because I know this is a public thing and people won't appreciate it, but nonetheless that's what I think.

Anyhow, I must get some sleep or I'll still be up when everyone else is getting up.

Night.

Cool day today. Erm. I think. It feels good, but I'm not sure what's been so good about it. Oh, Helen rang ! Nothing special; they're having problems with the floppy drive and I was trying to fix it over the phone. To be honest it just sounds like the drive having problems with the disc. For some reason PC discs are sometimes unreliable on Acorns. No good reason. Just the way they are, I guess. It's odd; she only ever rings when she wants something; I might take that to mean something, but I won't.

Heretic has got a front end now. "I'm a programmer, not a template designer, Jim!". I doubt the style will remain too long, but it does look rather cool I think. Plus, it means I don't have to edit Obey files to run it any more which is very calming, I can assure you...

More minor things fixed inside the game; mostly things coming from the change over to Heretic from Doom though rather than coding problems. I'm still not happy with the speed but there you go.

Not sure what's happening over the next two days, but I'll be here tomorrow. On Christmas Day I might be here; I might be with family, I actually have no idea ! Boxing day, I'm hoping to be here, but I've absolutely no idea really. As you can tell I'm in complete control of my life.

Simon and I were listening to the demo's of Misplaced Childhood today, so that we could compare it to the original. One of the things that you do notice - apart from the different track order - is that the lyrics are 'cleverer' in places on the demo over the final version. Particularly on Kayleigh, but also on parts of (I think it is) 'Bitter Suite'. I'm not sure, but the line Kayleigh, I would promise you "forever"; and Kayleigh could we promise this time seems to work rather well. There's a few others like that, but I find it hard because I'm now knowing the real lyrics, rather than those that you just sing along with because you don't know the real ones. I think I'll refrain from citing any, because I embarass myself that I could think that that was what they were.

I rather like the start of the 'Alternate mix' Kayleigh too, it's just a lot simpler and sounds so much cleaner really. The instrumental 'Childhoods End ?' is interesting to.

I'm beginning to wonder what I've got for Christmas, in an idle sort of way. I was going to get Helen a present, but I didn't think it was worth it at the time. Now it is a little closer, I think maybe I should have. I know I was right not to, but I still think that. Never mind.

Hmm... Looks like I've lost two of the little plastic pads off the bottom of the mouse. It kinda scrapes along the mat now, which is slightly disconcerting.

I've done a little more work on FTPLib today; it now supports rename and delete which is rather neat. There's a number of things it needs still, of which a 'simple' catalogue routine would be useful (as the RFC says) for a multiple get routine.

I got to see the whole of "Speed (1994)Action, ThrillerBomber terrorist's elevator plan backfires, so he rigs a bomb to a LA city bus. The stipulation is: once armed, the bus must stay above 50 mph to keep from exploding. Also if LAPD Officer tries to unload any passengers off, Payne will detonate it. Joe Morton co-stars as Jack's superior, and Jeff Daniels supports Jack helping him try to defuse the bomb.Speed" today. Oddly I'm sure I'd seen the beginning, but from about 20 minutes in it was all unfamiliar. Possibly I saw it whilst I was with someone, but... well, I just don't remember. Quite a fun film though, if a little corny in places !

I got a 'DIY christmas card' from Spanners today too, which was quite fun to put together. Well, sort of. If you like messing with Draw, which I do. I also drew a CD in Draw. Actually I started in Artworks, but it appears that there is a bug in Artworks causing it to blend between two objects badly. No idea why, but even when the path is perfectly correct (I even auto-generated it using a program) it produces rubbish. Rather odd really...

The whole point of drawing it was to do some covers for some CDs - I've now got some nice cases for the Doom ones with little Artworks-ified 'Doom' logos on them so they look a bit better. Plus there's the 'backup' disc that I got Chris to turn into a sensible format (not that nasty packet format that Essex uni's CD writer spat out !).

I started taking comp.sys.acorn.apps yesterday, and already I've found something that is actually useful. Well, to someone anyhow. Someone, I forget who, wanted a copy of 'DDA' so I've gone and put a version up on the site now. I had to tidy it up a little though, 'cos it was a mess before, but this version is much later than the last release (1.13 compared to 1.07 I think!) and works much more reliably. Its still not great, but then again there's nothing else quite like it. Actually there's nothing even vaguely like it apart from buying a Risc PC.

Today was also 'print out the christmas cards for Center Parcs' day. Julian did up a card for Lucciano's and they're going to have this on every table on Christmas day, all personally addressed (by hand!) to the customers. It is at this point that I wonder why we didn't put a © Fletcher productions or something. But we can't think of everything I guess...

Cor, I just remembered; Phil sent me a photo of himself today - I wondered what the massive email was - and he's still the same as ever ! Well, that is if you've actually met him you'd know that. If you'd seen the other photo I had of him you'd notice that he's got colour now, and doesn't have a baby attached to his chest <laugh>. I'll not put it up on here though because it'll only embarrass him, and I know I'd hate to do that...

I gave up on Newsbase today. It just does NOT like the Ursula long-filename FileCore. So, I've now got NewsDir on the boot disc in the hope that my problems will go away. I'm hoping anyhow. Matthew Bullock is looking into problems like this so it is possible he'll find it, but then again he's busy with other things.

Nothing interesting on IRC today (except Spanners spotted a few bugs in !DCC which I must plug some time soon), and no real news about Acorns little release of everything on the developer site.

Heretic work has just been lots of trudging through fixing minor things; interlude screens, testing under odd circumstances and stuff like that. Nothing really visible. Oh, except that people in water no-longer have feet which is good.

D'oh! No sooner have I written a long email to Phil telling him about this diary and some stuff than I read his next email telling me that he knew. Don't I feel stupid ?

Today sees the splitting of Heretic into multiple executables. Basically it means a large makefile which can potentially build the 8, 24, 8HR and 24HR versions - saving me time when I need to build others because I can just type make 24hr, make 8hr, or whatever and get it to build the right one.

DeHackEd support needed a minor change to the format for it to do anything useful in Heretic, so we're not on version 4. I'm sure that Luke can handle these anyhow. In reality, only version 3 and 4 will be common; 3 being that in Doom+ 2.01, and 4 being in Heretic and Doom+ 2.02.

I'm concerned that Doom+ managed to 'lose' the ability to draw transparent walls today though. This seems to be a problem with the smoothing code but as yet I've not had an opportunity to look at it more closely.

Interestingly, (on another front) it appears that Acorn have decided to give public access to the developer site. Rather odd really. I know Acorn are taking great steps to distance themselves from the 'enthusiast' market, but even for them, this seems like a courageous move (consult 'Yes, Minister' for a definition of this word).

One assumes that they know what they are doing. Oh, no. It's Acorn, isn't it ? Sorry, for a moment there I slipped into another universe. I'll try not to let that happen again.

I've updated my software pages a little now to include a slightly later version of !Forecast. The one that appeared on the ARM Club disc at the Birmingham show was incredibly dire and old, so this one should look pretty good by comparison.

Also, we've now got a link to Julian's pages, and I've put Kath's pages in too - even though they're really "under construction".

Today has been very relaxing. Being a Sunday, I've been trying to catch up on some of my own work. Basically this means some serious testing of !DCC and getting the FTP library a little more stable. I've got a recursive FTP upload utility 'just about' finished now. I'll be trying it out later on, but for now it seems to be uploading to the local server quite happily. It's not too slow to calculate CRCs of the files either, so it's actually reasonable to use for regular updates I think.

Hopefully I'll be consigning me website to it pretty soon, so it should get automatically regenerated on a daily basis. That's the hope. The only question is whether it will work, of course - fingers crossed!

Otherwise, today has been pretty uneventful; a little chat with Alistair Bailey on IRC, and a few other people who are interested in the FTP stuff. There was something I was meant to add in here that I discussed with people, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was...

Also, I watched "Toys (1992)Fantasy, ComedyAn eccentric toymaker's last wish is that his brother takes over the running of the business. The brother is a military General, and is out of touch with toymaking, and out of touch with reality too. The business should really have been given to Leslie, who was much more like his toymaking father. When the General starts making weapons instead of toys, Leslie decides to take action.Toys" today. I'll admit that initially I thought "Why should I watch this ? It's a kids film", but after a few minutes I decided that it isn't exactly a good excuse and I really should be watching it for its own merits. And I enjoyed it. I was rather surprised, but it actually was rather good in places - ok, so it wasn't brilliant, but it definitely made me giggle.

Oh, I've remembered... People were asking when the Doom+ update will be available and what it will have. Well, I can say that it might be available from the RCI web site before the end of the year. Might is the operative word there. I'm trying very hard not to do work on it so that I can finish off the main project.

What's new though... Erm... well, there'll be a few more cheats - nothing too special though - and some nice smoothing effects, plus the few bugs that have been reported should all be fixed. Although there haven't been many, they do include a fix for the problems with Osiris which stopped it from loading, a minor mistake in the multiplayer key-giver (you could end up without any keys) and a small fix for the infinite visplanes fix. I hate having to do fixes for fixes, but that one was purely an oversight from tracking another bug. Alas I can't remember everything!

Ah; well, having just uploaded merely the sections of my site which have changed I can relatively safely say that the updater works. The only thing I have a tiny problem with is that it fails to create directories over those that are already there. But I don't think I'll worry about that too much.

All in all, a quite profitable day.

Well, what a fun day today has been. And a long one too. What exactly have I accomplished today though ?

Well, first (and most impressive), Heretic now 'works' in 24 bit modes. It needs rather a tidy up, but I think that's not going to be quite an easy task really. I must admit it was rather impressive to just change the compile option 'PIX24' to be on, fix a few problems with casts being wrong, and suddenly have 24bit colour Heretic staring at me. Better still a few minutes later when I added the cheat for resampling and suddenly all the textures and objects became bilinearly smoothed. Quite impressive, I feel... Just a few 'minor' bugs to iron out now.

Oh, today was the day I finally got FTPGet, FTPDir and FTPPut working too ! Finally, I've got my own little library to (simply) handle FTPing in BASIC, which means that - all being well - we might just have a very simple recursive file uploader some time in the near future. If I have the time of course.

And, of course, I wrote this page. Well, I say I wrote this page; actually this page is something of an oddity because I edit one file and (hopefully) it gets processed automagically into a whole web page. That's the idea anyhow. I'm not sure it is going to work, but we'll see.

Other fun things today... Erm... Well, I watched the beginning of Twelve Monkeys - Chris rang half way through, so I missed the end, but I'd seen that. Unfortunately mum managed to talk through the beginning of it so I missed what they were talking about in their cells. No matter, I'll catch that next time around.

Oh, and I got a letter today too! From... erm... 'Foster Roswell' on behalf of a Cancer relief charity to say 'Thank you for [...] writing the computer program'; John Shaw - an uncle - rang me one night asking for a program to do a display at a charity auction he was doing, so I wrote one and sent it him - it wasn't much, but it was obviously enough. I'm rather proud of that really, because it wasn't at all expected !