Nothing much today; very tired

Updated AMSpectre to have dithered bars, which makes them look much better. I wonder if it would be worth collecting all the AMPlayer using programs together using a links page ?

Wrote up some more to the Doom pages. Whether I'll have finished them before I go on holiday tomorrow I don't know. Dave's coming tomorrow, so hopefully he'll settle in quite well with just Matthew here. Hopefully when I come back off holiday I won't have too much email.

I don't think I'll get the docs on networking done for Owain now; I've just been too tired, but hopefully when I get back I'll do that.

Ok, I think I've covered all the windows in the front end for Doom now. I may have missed something. If so, please mail me and let me know.

Anyhow, I'm very tired now. I go on holiday tomorrow, so... well, I've got to have some rest.

Too tired to write a diary entry tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

Wrote AMSpectre today. That's cool.

What's been done today ? Nothing much; watched FireFox on telly. Oh, and Bugs too. Bugs was quite fun really .

Computer-wise, I've compiled GD (which is in C) and id3lib (which is in C++) using the pre-release GCC from gcc-chief . Which I'm quite impressed with. I've added a new switch - -aabackgrounds to Doom, so you can now have the title screens anti-aliased. The main thing about this is that it is really slow. But it looks good. Oh yes, it does.

I wonder who exactly reads these diary entries. They never make any waves at all really. And I'm still waiting for someone to comment on the 'silent release' of JSLib.

Yay, the RGB thermo's are shown again in Doom; and I've fixed the F2/F3 hotkeys for save and load now. Previously they just opened the main menu because of the way the menus have been restructured. Plus, the Red slider actually works too.

Zappo is a god. He's done some cool things with AMPlayer; I thought it was merely excellent, but it's actually god-like in it's coolness. The 'examples' he's written to go with it are so good that you don't need anything else. And yet we have things like RiscAMP which is... well, ok but it's not 'right' for me. I'm not that bothered that it looks like WinAMP, because in general I'm not after that kind of thing. Skins are great, but when you clutter the window with useless junk it becomes hard to see what is what. Personally I like my AMPlayer modifications - I'll release them soon.

However, I mostly be use ControlAMPlayer to do the majority of the things I need. Since CAMP gained the queue capability it becomes very obvious that there is not much need for a front end, except when you want to know the track name, or the distance through the track. Which I may add soon too. If I can work out how.

Anyhow, back to the business of the day - I've written two more little modules to go with AMPlayer, and I'm hoping that Zappo will confirm that I've written them right from the code I had to study... Let's just say that they're not as cool as his plugin module, but they're nice nonetheless .

Well, today ControlAMPlayer gained the amazing feature that it can now handle queueing all on its own. So you never need load any front end any more. And if that's not cool then nothing is .

Today I wrote Eclipse. It's very cool.

Richard's funeral was today. I think I made a bad decision in not going. Oh well. Another one of many.

More Doom updates today, mostly changes to WadWhat and Slige themselves, but updated the webpages a little to cover a little more of the plugin system and a little more history. I'm wondering if I should make an announcement about the pages, but I'm not sure it's worth it really. Too many people put out announcements about things that are so amazingly trivial that the important things get missed. Therefore, I'm not going to make an announcement until my pages are actually worth the fuss. There's nothing on them that is really worth the fuss yet though.

Actually, I've never announced anything about these pages because they have had what I would call major changes made to them. However, given that I've set this precedent, I can't go breaking it really.

Parents are in Cornwall, as I speak. I do hope that things stay nice for them, otherwise I'll feel bad...

Well, it seems that Acorn Arcade have now played with Slige a little and been suitably impressed. What I could really do with is a program to record the Seed number used to produce a particular PWAD - then they would only have to cite the number, rather than distributing the whole level. Although they would have to specify the options required to generate it. Oh well, scratch that idea then.

I feel very, erm, tired this weekend. I think it's just... tiredness...

Oh, I spent a couple of minutes to port ACC to RISC OS. It's not a brilliant port, but there you go. I've not had time to do anything else with it, but there you go.

It seems that Dave McEwan has done another of his emulators - he seems to be madder than me when it comes to doing a ridiculous amount of work on his pet project.

I can't go to see the Eclipse. I've tried very hard to organise it, but I just couldn't work it out in the end - trying to juggle it with getting to the funeral and getting back in time to do some decent work... It's just not possible. So, I feel guilty because I can't get to the funeral either. Why can't I seem to get things organised properly .

One thing that's keeping me amused at the moment (because the above is making me feel awful) is the fact that I've got the Clutching At Straws Remasters disc, which includes some tracks which were recorded by Marillion when Fish was with them - it's a wonderful mix of the two styles and something I miss from that period. The tracks seem so... alive, even still... for example, "Story from a thin wall" is "Family Business" to the sound of "Berlin" which is really quite a nice mix, but my particular favourite must be "Beaujolais day" which nearly "Seasons End" with very nice fish-like lyrics. "Tic-Tac-Toe" is nearly "State of Mind" but with a very different sound - I can't quite place it, but that's possibly because I'm tired...

I found a rather nice site giving their version of the lyrics for the second discs tracks. Now that I read what they believe the lyrics to be I think I believe that they are much better than I had thought... There are some very clever lyrics - as you would expect from Fish. Some of the tracks could have been very different to the way we know them, and having this little insight into the history is... sweet, if you know what I mean...

And if that wasn't enough, it is possible that in an alternate reality Marillion and Fish did actually record that album; of course that would have to be a strange reality where a lot of my life would be different - without some of the Marillion and Fish tracks, some things would have changed in my life. Maybe it's placing a little too much importance on the music I listen to, but a lot of what I've done, and what I believe is based in part on the music I have heard to date. If I were to 'lose' a particular subsection of my life, then something would have to fill that gap. The tracks from Sunset hill might fill the gap left by Fish lyrics and Marillion music, but what of the Steve Hogarth lyrics, and the Fish music ? These might have come through later as ideas from the band, but I do wonder. Cliche is one of the more romantic tracks I know by Fish, and a soft track I come back to when I need to - what would fill that space ?

A Gentleman's Excuse Me - what would replace that ? That track was... well, it was just my track for first and second year really - would I have got Angela interested in Marillion then ? Would we have gone out for a little while ? Possibly - there's more than just music to things like that - but how different would it have been ?

Pah, I'm wittering...

Released JSLib for the laugh, and because I'm feeling bad.

Too tired to write anything today... I've got to go to a funeral on Monday, so that's going to be fun; I found out today, so I'm feeling a bit bad really.

On the newsgroups recently there's been a lot of discussion of the use of <p> tags as spacers. Part of this degenerated into a 'why not use <ul> as an indent' discussion, and a number of people - myself included - said that was structurally wrong. Why do I say this ? Because I've just changed my web pages on that advice. Good advice really, and it makes my pages a little better structurally.

I've also updated the Doom section of the site so that it's a bit more interesting, along with releases of Slige and WadWhat, which might be useful to people. Dave Chess is hoping to get my diffs integrated for the next version, but I'm not going to worry too much - I'm sure he has better things to do, but if he can then great .

What's been done today ? Nothing much. I've spent most of the day working on Doom, it seems. Well I say most - I basically ended up writing a highlighting routine and found I didn't like it. Although in the morning I did get the remaining bits of the plugin support to work and passed the files out to people. There should hopefully be some comments for me tomorrow. DoomPS still needs a front end, and all of them need icons.

I've also written a few more changes to the WimpCTCP protocol up - basically just clearing up points and documenting things a little more clearly. Hopefully that will make life easier for people. Also, IRCMP3 is now released on the freenet site, so hopefully I'll be able to play with that too. Oh, and I've updated the DCC auto-launch configuration so that it's a lot cooler .

Matthew's finally got the IMM and PPA drivers going, which I'm very impressed with. Hopefully we'll get them into 'real' drivers this week. If the Psion doesn't distract him too much!

Anyhow, it's late. Must sleep.