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.
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Too tired to write a diary entry tonight. Maybe tomorrow.
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Wrote AMSpectre today. That's cool.
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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.
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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 .
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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 .
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Today I wrote Eclipse. It's very
cool.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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