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1 Feb 1999 (Monday)
Bizarre... I was just sitting here trying to reply to email and the modem
suddenly started flashing at me - it looked kind of wierd. I think possibly
it's dying. It's certainly not giving me good connection speeds recently -
9k6 isn't exactly fun, unless you're just checking email and chatting on IRC,
which is admittedly all I tend to do. I just re-try if I get a cack line and
need to download something large. Anyhow, I've turned the modem off now so
it can't bother me if it wants to play its little games.
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Nothing much done today, really. Tweaks to Hexen to make it more reliable and remove all that rascally debug code.
I've added the What's new? page now, so hopefully people will be able to just look at this, rather than bothering with manually checking the pages.
All these changes have meant some new graphics for the site and a modified Perl script to handle the more complex details of re-writing the ~data.new-full file when required. You see we don't need it writing to every day, as we do with the diary, but only when it changes.
As a word of warning, I'm going away for a few days so there won't be any
diary updates in the meantime. It's unfortunate, but that's life. Since I'm
going by train and it's going to take a little while I may write some of the
diary up, but that's all dependant on whether I'm asleep or not and how much
I write to Helen 
.
It's odd how many letters I write to her are on trains. I'm sure they all read the same way too.
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Well, I'm back from my extended jaunt through the midlands now. Fun though it was, I've now got to face up to the reality that there are 58 emails for me, loads of news postings (I think I may just do 'catch up') and a nice letter from Mr Loans Company asking me if he could have his money back. On the plus side, I'm feeling quietly confident that everything will be good. Except there is bound to be something I forgot to do that these emails are pestering me about.
I know I continue to go on about this, but I'll try again in the hope that someone will actually listen (though I know from experience that they won't). IRC was very restrictive once. It used to be very difficult to write new CTCP commands to support 'new' and 'cool' features. WimpCTCP was designed to get around this problem by giving a generic protocol such that nobody need write a DCC client ever again. It was an amazing success.
That is, it was an amazing success if you use JFTerm. If you use iChat or LIRC then it wasn't all that great because their authors decided that it would obviously be more advantageous to re-write the DCC support internally. Further, Zappo decided that LIRC would internally handle FACE requests and replies, so you can't transfer face files between IRC Face and LIRC easily (granted IRC Face doesn't store these well, but on the other hand nobody else can use LIRC's Face handler whereas all WimpCTCP clients can use IRC Face).
Today I discover that not only has g0tai decided to implement MachineInfo in his client but he's also ditched the WimpCTCP protocol completely. To say this pisses me off doesn't quite give you a sense of feeling of how this makes me feel.
Consider the number of people that dislike the MS policies of taking a protocol and extending it such that nobody else can use it in the same way. Now consider the fact that the majority of Acorn users fall into this category. And yet we see this amazing short-sightedness and hypocritical in the greatest possible way.
Basically it makes me think that people really deserve everything they get with MS and program incompatibility if they think in this way. I had thought that the people writing these things would have enough common sense to not to go down the same road they appear to not advocate. I begin to wonder why I actually try to make things easier, if others are just going to make things harder on themselves and others.
The Vanish adverts reached new depths today with an apology for the fact that it's been removed due to 'excessive power usage'. Probably due to the fact that people walked out of the room and put the kettle on when they saw it.
WebJames was updated with my changes whilst I was away too, it appears. This means it now supports MimeMap and SysLog which is quite useful!
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FileCore crashed again today, and this time I got a definate address and register dump so I can actually try to find the problem. The odd thing is that it's so sporadic. It has been conjectured that FileCore itself is not at fault but that some other module is playing silly buggers. I'm willing to believe that, but am still slightly sceptical.
On the plus side today, g0tai appears to have changed his mind and doesn't mind using WimpCTCP. I think it was mostly a misunderstanding, but in that I had assumed that people understood why plugin systems were good and that fixed systems were bad.
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Well, what's been happening today ? Lots of things (from a 'visible' point of view anyhow) :
One of the odd things I did discover today though was that you can't turn off profiling in Hierprof temporarily. This would have been useful for giving 'more accurate' readings on the non-rendering parts of Doom. As it is I have to wade through lots of output to find the right bit. Not that it's hard, it's just tiring. Plus I have to mentally scale up the proportions of time that are given in the non-renderer from 20% to 100% which would surely be easier for Hierprof to do. I support I could go and speak to the author at some point though.
I got a little 'disc full' message today and !Alarm blew up because only part
of it's save was able to be written. On the downside, this means that I
no-longer have some of the alarms that were in the database. But, on the
upside, this means that I now know how to recover corrupt alarm files. Well,
in a vague sort of way anyhow. That's one fileformat that I think needs
replacing with something sensible. If only I could get hold of the source
.
I've been feeling ill today too, and I'm going to have to go to bed because of it; I had intended to stop up until I had the front end to a Doom 1.01 standard and then call it a day, but I don't think I will last that long. Oh well.
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Incredibly productive day. Well, from a Hexen point of view. We have a nice little front end that actually appears to do everything we want it to and, I think, looks really good. To all intents and purposes I'm done with Hexen now and when I get back on Sunday I'll be working on Heretic's front end so that it moves up to the same kind of state.
Valentine's day card got posted today too. Another year without receiving any
cards, I imagine, but then if I did receive one I would be quite
amazed and totally baffled as to who it might be from. In that respect, I
guess, it would have fulfilled its purpose of being totally anonymous .
Had another little chat to Helen on IRC today. She's on half term now, but I doubt I'll have any time free to even think about seeing her, even though I doubt I fit into her plans. One day things will turn out right with her and I'll actually get to see her properly. No doubt it'll be some time after I'm old and grey (well, grey anyhow).
Feeling horrid today though; I've got a sore throat which makes it difficult to swallow at the moment. If I'm lucky it'll be gone by tomorrow. If not then I'll just have to put up with it over the weekend, I guess.
Tomorrow, I'm back jaunting across the country. Looks like I'll be on a train for 5 hours, so it's going to be a little tiring. Oh well.
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Great.... Newsbase just decided that it should re-index all my folders. This basically means that everything I had marked as read is now unread and I need to re-mark the lot again, plus re-subscribe to the groups I was reading. Not at all helpful. I have a feeling that it's lost my configured mailing lists too. Maybe Marcel would be useful at this point.
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Does someone want to explain to me why DeathKings claims itself to be an IWAD and yet is actually a PWAD ? Are Raven just trying to make life difficult ?
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Another machine arrived from Andrew today, so that I can test networked games. As a consequence, we now have PC network Hexen working which is quite cool. However, I don't recommend playing against a 486; it's just too slow.
Network Hexen had a number of extensive tests earlier. It appears to work fine with RPC and PC variants now, which is cool. The lag on the RPC version, even on serial is not noticeable, which is rather nice. All in all, it's kinda cool.
Networn Heretic appears to work too. It's not quite as fun as Hexen for some reason. I think that's just because I've been playing Hexen more though. I was actually getting quite good at playing Hexen co-operatively with two players by myself.
A number of other things happened today, but I'm feeling too ill and tired to write about them. Sorry.
I don't doubt that Andrew will ring me tomorrow and tell me that a few things
don't work or he wants something changing, but then again if didn't I'd think
he hadn't checked them .
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I think I've upset mum. Someone rang on my phone for her, and so I called her and as she was coming up the corridor I asked (purely out of curiosity) who she had given my number to, as I couldn't think of any reason for her giving out that number. She seems to think I was being rude though. I wasn't, I was just interested in why someone would ring on my phone for her, that's all. Oh well.
Today is the day that we finally finished off Heretic and Hexen. There are some bits I'm unhappy about - partly because I've been ill this week and not had chance to tidy up the bits that are left over. The main things that annoy me are that the Heretic startup screen should really be more graphical, or in a window and that Hexen should have a fixed resolution variant but doesn't. The main reason that it doesn't is that when I tried it with partial zone-checking enabled (1000) it highlighted multiple overwrites which would not be reliable in use. It's a bit of a pity, but that's life :-(
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Hurray! Yesterday Heretic and Hexen were 'finished'. That is, they had the last bits done on them so that they were releasable and didn't contain any glaring omissions. There are a few minor omissions at present that need addressing, but nothing that can't be dealt with in the fullness of time. It's really quite exciting, because it means that the games will - on Saturday - be on sale and people will be playing them.
Unfortunately I can't be there, but I'll be around on IRC to answer peoples questions. I don't doubt that a lot of them will be complaints about one thing or another because that's usually the way.
Oh. Bother. I've just remembered. I sent that RPC back before copying HOMM2 off. That means I've got nothing to play this weekend. I guess I'll just have to do some programming, which can't be a bad thing.
I'm working on a data-converter, and so far I've done a Base64 decoder and a ROT13 encoder/decoder. Ok, so that's not the most useful pairing of conversions, but bare with me. There are some very good reasons why I've started with these, not least the fact that it makes life easier if you start by designing the system with one simple and one complex part simultaneously. The simpler one can be used to give a 'baseline' implementation, and the complex one can stretch those parts of the system which need to have more complexity (err, yeah, that sounds right!).
I'll continue with this until Monday, unless something very important comes up in Heretic & Hexen.
I watched 'The Rock' again today, which was rather fun. There are some quite fun bits in it which you have to laugh at. 'Conspiracy theory' is on tomorrow, and I think I may just have to watch that, given that I've not seen it before and it looks quite cool.
I got a rather odd email from David today too, asking me if I would change what I have written that I think of him. Anyhow, I've told him that I won't change what I've written, but I will remove his entry from the page completely if he feels that strongly about it.
I knocked up a tiny WimpCTCP program today too. I'm not sure, but I think it's the first non-Zappo written program to actually use the AMPlayer module, albeit in a very limited sense. Currently all it does is allow you to find out what MP3 is currently playing, but the facility is there to do more, I guess.
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Phew. Today I've updated a number of the WimpCTCP programs . Yeah, I
finally got around to it and began the long and laborious process of updating
each one to have up to date libraries in it and the correct contact details
in the !Help file. As well as that, however, I've also written IRCURL which
is a very funky URL management for IRC. Well, actually it's just a simple
remote queryable database, but that's all you need for what it does.
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Oops. I imagine that a number of people are quite cross at me right now. Heretic expired this morning. Damn. Yeah, I left a tiny line of beta-test code in the makefile and so when it built it I didn't notice that it was still building part of the beta system. Although it's not amazingly difficult to get around (I've posted a patch for it to the newsgroups because of my incompetance), it's very irritating and shouldn't happen.
I've got ear ache this morning that kept me up all night so I wasn't looking what I was doing and spilled hot tea all down myself and the wall as I tripped upstairs this morning too. All in all, it's been a fun start to the day. On the other hand, I've now got SysLogD working correctly. Remember, don't compile staticly linked code into modules. They don't work like that.
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What a fun day today has been. It didn't start out too well, with just some tinkering to the Doom+ FrontEnd, but it's been quite profitable overall. We've now got a lovely set of bi-linear filtering floors (and linear too if you want them) which allows you to see things a little more smoothly than previously. Plus it gets rid of the irritating 'N/A' option in the smoothing menu.
Whilst writing this entry I tried out Doom+ with low resolution because I just remembered that I hadn't explicitly supported it. It seems that I should have saved the entry first as the computer crashed on returning to the desktop. Anyhow, I'll fix that tomorrow.
I also spent a little time (and /little/ is the operative word here!) in copying the routines from Doom+ into Heretic and Hexen. I thought I'd start with Heretic because it's simpler so copied the new assembler file across, opened the file with the routine setting up for the floor drawer, and made the changes needed (about 8 lines). Then I ran Heretic. Nothing happened to the floor when I changed the resampling level.
I went back to the files and the changes had all gone. It turned out that I'd
changed Hexen and not Heretic, so Hexen had all the changes I'd just made, and
looked kinda cool. The same changes then went into Heretic and it works too
now. It's nice to see anyhow .
We've also got an identifier on the cache files now so it shouldn't be possible to get corrupt cache entries any more - they used to slow the renderer down to a crawl or crash quite violently.
I know there's not been a diary much over the past week, but I've been ill and going to bed relatively early (it's 6am now, so I must be feeling a little better! Though I doubt I'll think that in the morning).
On the family front, Simon's gone to Wales for the week, so I'm here on my own. Well, I say on my own but Dad's home tonight and Mum's been here for Monday and Tuesday, so I'm not exactly on my own. Plus I've got the cats to pester me... sorry, keep me company.
I'm trying to train Grendel to only try to get attention by waving his paw at me when I ask, rather than just when I happen to be near. I know I'll fail because cats are far too intelligent to take orders, but it's amusing anyhow. It's mostly after he tried pawing at me whilst I was picking up a sock and I ended up with a lovely paw shaped set of holes in my head. Ok, so I exaggerate, but it did hurt!
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Wednesday night is reunion night! Well, it felt that way. Chocky's back from the states, Zappo's here (well, he hadn't gone away but he was around at a sensible hour), Spanners popped in for a quick chat, TheMoog returned to IRC after an incredibly long absence, and Helen came on to tell us she was going to bed. If only N and CMJ had been there it would have left me with very few friends I could have wished for seeing again.
In amidst all of that I ended up trying to discuss life with TheMoog, proposing to Helen, file conversion with Spanners and the bizarre bugs in RISC OS 3.8 with Zappo. Ok, so proposing to Helen again was just a bout of sillines, though I must admit that after typing that and then seeing a message pop up saying 'Well, you are a good catch' did surprise me for a moment until I realised that it was from someone else.
I gave TheMoog (Matthew Godbolt for those who dislike nicknames) a ring too, and had a chat to him for a while before he got tired and had to go to bed. I have a feeling that I ranted on for rather a long time, but it was fun nonetheless. TheMoog's one of those people I feel I can talk to about most things even though we've not spoken in ages.
Also, I've managed to (finally) get unscaled status bar into Doom+ so it no longer takes up a large proportion of the screen, which is quite cool. Bilinear and linear filtering have been tested thoroughly now in each of the executables as well as low detail mode, which no longer crashes the machine. I had a play with using missiles as mines today too, but I'm not sure that they're a good idea because they're not usable over network games, meaning that the place it's most useful isn't that where it can be used. But that's not too much of a worry. It's looking good, overall.
X-Files was suitably weird today, although I was continually wondering who was who. Probably I'm still just too tired to take these things in. I'll kick this cold if it kills me !
Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a bit disappointing. Oddly most things to do with computers are. I think that's just because I know something about them. If I was a hardened vampire freak (erm... if there is such a thing) then I'd probably think the whole program was disappointing, but there you go. It's fun, and Willow is nice.
Yes, today has been good.
Anyhow, I think I scared Helen off to bed by proposing to her. I was just in too silly a mood I think. Ah well... One day I'll be over her... Pity...
Final thing tonight is to send Andrew the copy of Doom+ as is and hope that everything works right on his machine. Given that it's about 1Mb, I don't really want to be re-sending it. The changes from 2.01 to 2.03 really don't seem that great on paper, but they are worthwhile I believe. Admittedly most of the features have been there for about two months, but I just haven't had the time to do anything about it. I imagine that Andrew will decide to ask people to return their discs and he'll update them. It's a little large to be putting up on the website, plus it gives too much data to people to give no incentive to hack it.
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Guess what ? I'm moving out on Saturday. Yeah. Honest. It's true.
Well, I'll actually only believe it when I see it, but I'm just feeling really really silly and mad now. Wow!
Programming wise I've managed to re-implement the DarkHorse screen saver
system so that it can be used with the RISC OS 4.0 screen saver system. Ok,
so I only did this so that I could have Rosette working without loading
DarkHorse, but there is always a reason for things .
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I'm packing up today, so I guess that the I'll be incommunicado for a time. I'm not exactly sure how long, nor whether I will be back, but I'm hoping that I will and it won't be too long a break.
My ears still sore, and I'm incredibly tired, but I get a sleep tomorrow on the train to... erm... Sandy. I didn't know there was a place called Sandy, but it's useful nonetheless.
I'm hoping I can be replying to emails by about Tuesday or Wednesday, possibly from my new workplace, or possibly from home. You never know ...
I'm just about to pack the computer away, so I'll write my last goodbyes here, upload this and then it'll go into some box. Somewhere. And I still need to find out where the tupperwares are.
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I moved in yesterday . There was really too much to tell that happened
yesterday, but I'll try to go through it, just so that I remember in the
future.
First thing I managed to do was oversleep and miss my train. A quite good start to the day really, although to be fair it wasn't too much of a problem and just meant that I arrived there slightly later than anticipated and couldn't sign the lease with the others. Moving in was fun, in that Matthew and Andrew's parents ended up doing most of the cleaning and sorting out of the house whilst we checked the inventory. Nothing in particular seems to have been bad though. Apart from the boiler, but there you go.
Andrew went off last night and so Matthew and I took his parents out for a meal at the Beefeater in Stratford. Which reminds me, I owe him for that yet. Then we came home, chatted for a little while and went to bed.
It may not seem like much happened but it was a pretty busy day. I got to meet Matthew's parents and spend a little time with them. They're really nice and I think I could really get on with them.
Andrew sorted out the phone yesterday too, so we should have been connected by monday. We're ex-directory, so hopefully we shouldn't have people ringing us up at strange hours to find out things. I'll just have to pass on phone numbers to those nearest and dearest to me. Anglea says she'll have to be getting a new address book soon as I've managed to fill the 'F' page. Considering the number of places I've lived in the past few years that's quite unsurprising.
Today was the first morning in our new house. It's nice. Ok, so that's such an overused word it doesn't mean much anyway, but you know what I mean. If not then it's just that we're living in a house that we are renting. It's not something our parents have done or the university doing it for us. Anyhow, apart from the water problem, the morning was pretty good. Then Mum and Simon arrived. There's something odd about either my, or Mum's, mobile. For some reason they don't want to talk to one another. It's not a big issue, but if I try to ring her I don't even get 'Connecting...'; it just goes back to the 'UK Voda' message which isn't exactly helpful.
Anyhow, they unloaded and distributed my stuff around the rooms, so I've
actually got the computer now to write this on 
. They've dropped off
an amount of food too so I've actually got things to eat. I think we're going
to have to be careful about milk (amongst others) as there is a possibility
that we'll run out if we're not remembering to buy any. Once we're working it
shouldn't be an issue as we're going to be travelling straight past Tesco's
each night.
Had a quick look at Delirium today too. To be honest it's pretty naff (in my opinion) but people like it. Technically, I can't fault it, but it just isn't a screen saver but more a glorified demo with a configurable trigger. Not what I would think was too useful as a screensaver. Andrew also showed me the fireworks screen saver from 'Hangfire' which was ok, I suppose. It doesn't look too hard to wire in to the system though. A few changes and we're away with that one I think. The rest of Hangfire should be similarly easy, given the easy with which you can hook them together. Andrew doesn't think they're up to much, but that's not really the issue.
Also had a (very cursory) look at a RISC OS port of CVS which seems quite interesting. Without using it in a 'live' environment though I can't say how stable I think it is. From the FrontEnd point of view, I'm not sure if that will be any use, but at least we have the option. I imagine the main use will be in Makefiles.
I feel quite guilty because the family computer isn't quite set up for internet access yet. I'll just have to sort that out when I get home, I guess. I'm going home for the IQ concert next month and I have a funny little dentists appointment some time next month too which I've got to go to otherwise my mouth will fall apart and I'll have to eat through a straw. Which wouldn't be good.
Anyhow, that's about it. Night.
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