2 Jan 1999 (Saturday) 

As well as that there was a lot of packing and some other stuff; I forget exactly what else happened. I copied a number of CDs and so now have very little (!) hard disc space free - now all I have to do is find an MP3 encoder that will happily sit in the background, encoding and can be restarted if I reboot (safely!). For some inexplicable reason the one I compiled plays back at abut 1½ times the sample rate. Not quite sure why but I'm sure there's a very good reason.

Watched Fifth Element today too. An incredibly silly film; I seem to remember Bruce Willis was in another incredibly silly film as a detective guy who seemed to be meeting a lot of very odd people in a very strange case. Well, it was either him or Peter Falk, and I'm pretty sure I'm right on this one. Which doesn't relate to Fifth Element but brings me nicely on to... Erm... no, this isn't Film '99, is it ?

But it does make the point of mentioning the year, which - as I'm sure you all noticed - has grown a little in the past few days. And what will the New Year bring then ? Well, if I remember my prophecies correctly we're probably in for a pretty rough time of it. But then again, aren't we always ?

I think this year may be be the year of reckoning for the Internet as a whole. Well, I'm hoping anyhow. It's become apparent to many people that it is a great tool, but it doesn't live up to its hype. Whilst online businesses may be getting great publicity and telling of their wonderful fortunes, many people are still using the 'Pyramid Scheme' to try to make their millions. Obviously these don't relate, but it shows the difference between the people that go out of their way to sell things and those who are just lazy enough to email millions of messages out in the hope of getting something back.

As I read that back, I'm not sure I agree with it anyhow; but it stands nonetheless. The Register today had an article about the number of hardware web magazines being produced which are rapidly outdoing their paper counterparts. It makes interesting reading because on the whole the internet is a much better place for computer-related news; particularly if you're interested in the internet itself. It makes you wonder if there actually is a place for paper magazines about the Internet itself.

Personally, I tend to stop by The Register either daily or as least every other day, just to see if there's anything which affects me in it; not that there usually is directly, but it's nice to keep abreast of some of the changes. Particular of interest, I find, is the Microsoft trial coverage which is dealt with quite fairly (at least in my opinion). There doesn't seem to be a bias either for, or against Microsoft - something which I like (and will obviously be proved wrong over the next few days, just to spite me). It seems that whatever the subject being reported it is dealt with with the right degree of humour and cynicism.

I just tried moving the stereo a bit and something bleeped at me; I think it's the phones way of saying "I'm hungry", but I've got to find the damned thing before I can feed it. It's all very well it being mobile but if you can't actually find it then it's not all that much good.

On a similar note, in Mum & Dad's room they have their phone by the bed. Cunning idea, you might think, because it means you can get to it easily. Yes, until you remember that there's a flourescent light in the room. So if you hear the phone ringing and you are in another room you end up running in there, turning the light on, tripping over clothes, the bed, cats, stereos, small furry creatures from Alpha-Centuri and any other objects that might be hiding in the darkness. Because you've forgotten that the light takes about five seconds to warm up. By which time, of course, you've just about staggered to the phone, having extracted cats from your feet, dabbing your broken nose, and (bizarrely) pulling a bambo cane from your chest to say "ed-oh ?" only to find that it's some sales person trying to sell you double-glazing.

You might like to extract the parts from that story that you believe to be true at some point. It would be interesting to know which bits people actually believe to be true. Only not very.

I'm due for an email signature change I think, so I'll just go off and do that then bid you farewell !

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3 Jan 1999 (Sunday) 

Interesting to see that my lack of women is completely and utterly dwarfed by Nialls amount of women problems. Just one of those things I guess... I was never meant to be a... erm... whatever the word is.

It seems that David McCormack has written a DrawFile plugin too. His, however, looks quite complicated and yet simplistic at the same time. If you know what I mean. I found it difficult to follow the code; on the other hand I'm just looking at mine and finding it similarly difficult.

It looks like Browse Temporary Files (in !Scrap as BTF#####) don't get deleted on quit and are reused when you reload the same page.

I felt like (it being that rest day and things) writing something foolish today; so I've written a SysLog application. Well, it has exactly the same functions in it, but doesn't deal with LogFormatted yet; I'll do that tomorrow I guess, along with modulifying it; about 4 hours work I guess so I think I'm getting slower. It's amazing how easy it is really. It does, however, concern me that DoggySoft's version is 10k long, and my application is 7k. I'm sure that modulifying it will add something to it, and I do have to write the veneers still.

A wise man once said something about not reinventing the wheel. I think even foolish mem such as myself have quoted that too. I do have a reason though but I'm not going to tell you because you will only laugh.

I've actually had an opportunity to listen properly to "August and Everything After" today. It's an incredibly good album actually. Admittedly it crackles a bit if I waggle windows and stuff, but it's not bad nonetheless.

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4 Jan 1999 (Monday) 

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6 Jan 1999 (Wednesday) 

Helen's back at school now - I've just got an email off her from yesterday - so I can chat to her there on an irregular basis. Still, it's better than mailing her at home, because she replies to mails to school .

I dunno; when I was at school I had to fight to get access to the external connection to email people because computer science were so warey of it. Now it's a case of anyone using it any time ! And I for one think that that can only be a good thing - so long as it doesn't interfere with either study or being social. Actually if there had been internet capable computers at 6th Form I'd never have been as sociable as I was - and that's not saying much. On the up side though, I'd have not met Caroline. Erm, that's just a tad bitchy isn't it ? And really only said for comic effect, so don't pay too much attention to it

I've placed RecErrors and Squiggly Pipes on my software pages now. I'm hoping that I can just direct people to RecErrors and no longer have to worry about them reporting bugs with unhelpful error messages like "it said something about an unknown procedure".

Chris phoned up again today, but he thought I was out, so hung up. I wasn't. I'm pretty sure he does this so I ring him . He's actually written to Loretta today. I always think this is rather odd because she's such an irritating woman and he still puts up with her.

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7 Jan 1999 (Thursday) 

You do realise that I've not had any time to practice my handwriting recently, don't you ? Well two days so far I haven't. Tomorrow - I promise!

Nothing interesting to say today really... A couple of phone calls today about work, but nothing really special. Oh, and Heretic and Hexen got their first tests on NCs today. Apparently they work fine, aside from a minor problem with the beta version timeout.

I've quickly HTML-ified the ChoicesDoc for my pages, but it is unlinked from the main pages as yet because I'm trying to add some more things there first.

I've also split up my diary now, so that there is last months entries in one file and this months in another. If I keep the diary up - something which may or may not happen - then it is likely that I will be able to do this again next month too (ooh, excitement huh ?).

A number of people today were asking if I've any work sorted out after I finish Hexen. The answer to that is that I'm still looking for things. Although Oregan did sound like a good prospect, they need someone 'urgently' so I'm not really in the running. I'm sure Andrew can find me some more work though. At least, that's the hope. Every so often I toy with the idea of applying to Microsoft, just for the laugh. I doubt they'd even consider me!

I'm also beginning to doubt the sense in leaving the Bookworm patch on the freenet site. I think that probably it's a bad idea and I will probably have an attack of nerves soon and remove it.

I actually spoke to Jonix today for the first time in ages today... I got rather confused by him and didn't know what he was talking about; I thought he meant JFTerm and he actually meant my FTP client... Pity that I'm unlikely to release it really... it's all a case of a minor conflict of interests so I'm happy to leave it where it is for the time being...

CD of the day: "The Key Part 1: The Prophecy" Strangers on a Train

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8 Jan 1999 (Friday) 

Mum and Dad are out in France today on one of these special deals; I wish I'd gone too now, but I've work to do so I can't really justify it.

I got a rather cool circular today. To quote the front of the envelope: "Warning: Contents may offend non-lager drinkers". So I put it in the bin. Apart from being from Carling I know nothing more about it. What a wonderful marketing strategy it must be to preach to the converted.

I'm on Hexen now. One of the more spectacular changes is going to be the startup time. Previously this was of the order of 30 seconds. It's now about 2 seconds. It's somewhat easier to develop a program if you don't have to wait for the results of your changes and that's a big difference .

Out goes the Hexen zone management and in comes the Heretic one. They're identical in use, but the Heretic manager has much more powerful debugging qualities and allows me to see at a glance who is using up all that precious memory. Plus I can do some nice consistency checks on it. I say 'The Heretic Memory Manager' but really it's just the Doom one that Raven took and changed very slightly and then I bolted on a load of rather nice checks and suchlike to make my life easier; it's really my changes that make it useful, not Raven's.

I'm actually really impressed by the way that Hexen deals with things like the (rather trendy) blowing leaves. Just looking at them on the map says how much more processing goes into them - there must be about ten separate mobjects created, one for each leaf ! Better still is smashing the panes of glass and watching the fragments shatter everywhere. I've no idea how many there are but the whole area just fills with little triangles!

Another cool one is the weapon that freezes the monsters and lets them shatter to kill them; that makes me laugh rather a lot .

Mum and Dad are back from France now with loads of drink and croisants and stuff; looks like they might be gone tomorrow - well... maybe not tomorrow

I think that Hexen has parallax sky textures. I'm not 100% certain about this but it certainly looks like it from the code, and if that's not it then it's something very similar - maybe sky textures that can be overlayed to give (say) a cloudy sky, or a misty sky or something... Maybe... it's just a thought anyhow.

Great! I had Fnagaton going on at me today, telling me I should put out an ad on one of the internet dating things. I don't think I will, although the idea does appeal vaguely. The real reason I don't do that kind of thing is that I can't think what to write, and if I do write anything it's got to be completely honest and truthful. People don't like honesty, in general. Plus, if you want to be seen you have to (generally) think up a cunning 'advert line' which either sums up you, what you want, or is just eye catching.

This, of course, is where things fall down. You see, to sum me up you can't say much more than the fact that I program. "I think, therefore I program" or something like that - it's not exactly encouraging, and I know it wouldn't be something that I would look for in someone. Of course, if the right someone came along it wouldn't matter that I program because I'd want to be with them more than programming. That's true of Helen; there's no time I would turn down seeing her (although see 31st December 1998 for reasons why this isn't strictly true), and what she asked I would do. But that doesn't exactly count really.

I guess I'm just not looking for anyone right now. I'm not desperate for a girlfriend or anything. I think I'm not quite in any state to be seeing any one at the moment, because I've not exactly got that much of a future plan and I'm happy to drift by. I may think much of the time that I should be able to get a good job, but I'm too lazy to do anything about it. Pathetic, isn't it ?

So, you see there's all that you've got to contend with and (as you'll have noticed) my relatively low self-esteem, which kinda means I'm both not worth anyone's while to go out with, and I don't feel I'm worth anyone's while going out with. That makes sense, honest.

Distributed.Net are running 'tests' on DES at the moment to see how well co-ordinated their system is in preparation for DES-II which intends to prove that 56-bit DES encryption can be cracked in under 56 hours. This takes place on the 18th January. I'm not sure of the exact time, but I will try to set my system up so that it gets blocks in the first few and then try to keep updating at the time. The chance of my cracking it with one machine is very low - is it 72 Billion keys or something that we're searching ? Or is it 72 Trillian ? I dunno... But it's pretty big. The chance is much less than that of winning the lottery I think, but as it goes it'll be fun.

Thinking about it, it would be wise to turn on the 'moos' whilst the competition is running and periodically check it so that they get uploaded relatively quickly. Otherwise 'I' end up holding up the process - blocks that are tied up on one machine won't be known about by the proxies and therefore can't be re-allocated until some other time. I would not have thought that the proxies could re-distribute keys that had already been allocated but hadn't been returned because otherwise the prize might be allocatable to two people, although it depends on who returns it first I guess.

Todays diary seems to have been something of a mish-mash, but I think that's because I've been updating it through the day. I think I'll try to avoid that in future unless there's something special to say.

Note to self: Don't run service call loggers if you want your machine to be usable afterwards.

Help! How am I meant to work with both cats sitting on my lap?! I can just about cope with having one on there, but two is just too much and you can't move your arms! They are cute though .

Added CCUndoc to the 'info' pages on my site. This isn't much, but it's quite useful to me. Maybe I should include links to the 'original' forms of the documents. On the other hand, maintaining just the HSC version is more sensible really.

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9 Jan 1999 (Saturday) 

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10 Jan 1999 (Sunday) 

Helen's updated her pages recently, but I'm not sure that they're public yet. She's been playing with Tables. She seems to have put up the stuff we were discussing on IRC about things she hates. It's actually rather fun, although I have a feeling that my continually beating around the bush in the past with her probably falls into category number 9 and doesn't please her.

Odd. Today whilst on IRC I was chatting to Voodu and from that- and previous (public) chats we've had - he seems to think that Helen has a grudge against him. I don't know if she has or not, but (for a change) I felt uncomfortable talking about Helen with him and Zhadnost. I don't know why really; I've always been OK about talking about her with other people, even ex-boyfriends and other people who like her, but... well...

Maybe this means I'm getting over her. Well... I don't know really. I'm not going to worry - it'll sort itself out and either we'll be together or we won't. There's no point in worrying about it. Taken logically, of course, Helen has told me enough times that she's not interested in me, and has made it very plain that she doesn't want to see me so I shouldn't really continue even thinking about her. I also shouldn't really be writing this with a big smile on my face. I'm sure that can't really be normal.

Spanners spotted a bug in JFProxy today too. Looks like I forgot that the array index isn't the proxy number, but the proxy number minus one. Therefore it was possible to get 'Started -1 proxies' when in fact it had started none. Anyhow, new version is up on Freenet now.

Looks like I had a minor run in with Mr Paul Allen again today (at least I think it was him; it's confusing when people start talking in the third person about themselves - I know I do it so I'm as guilty as many others). I guess I will never see straight with him, but he did make some incredibly good points. I must be very careful not to forget that people don't always know the authors in question (and even if they do may have differing opinions) and may base their judgements on what they see in front of them, and in that case it was probably quite justified given the information available. On the other hand, I think Niall's technical expertise in the area is without question.

Regardless, I do wonder why I bothered to argue. The thing is that Niall can say what he likes for himself - and he does! It's odd that he's using a dejanews address; something I usually associate with people that don't want to say anything because they might be considered to be inflamatory and they want to be able to remain away from any flames that might head their way.

I think in future I may just stick to technical arguments. At least then I truely believe myself to be correct.

Anyhow, I will await the 20th with anticipation and hope that I have a chance to play with the preemption model. There's really no good reason why it shouldn't work. However, I do feel it's interesting that he claims it will work on all versions of RISC OS from 2 through to 4. It implies that he has a copy of 4, or at least 3.8. However, given his contacts it doesn't exactly surprise me .

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11 Jan 1999 (Monday) 

As you might imagine, I've not done much work today because of this. There's something quite scarey about seeing flames crawling up your clothes and I really don't want to talk about it.

On the other hand I found out a lot more than I knew previously about ISO9000. Which basically means that I knew before that it exists and now I know something about what it involves and stuff. John Shaw said he'd try to send me some details about it in the next few days, so maybe I'll know even more soon. It's just a pity that there is no electronically available form of it otherwise I could have found out more.

Spent ages on the phone to Chris too, partly because I was still quite shook up, and partly because I needed to know a little bit more about the current problems that schools experience with setting up networks. This seems to have been quite productive so maybe the situation will change in future with regard to this.

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13 Jan 1999 (Wednesday) 

Before you ask, nothing interesting has happened today. Although X-Files was rather fun to watch - Scully and Mulder giving slightly differing accounts of their little vampire hunt. Possibly the funniest moment in it was Mulder saying that 'Shooting the tires of a runaway RV isn't as easy as it sounds', although there were quite a number of amusing bits in it. This series certainly seems better than the last - I think there was far too much emphasis on the Alien Conspiracy Theory.

Hmm... Speaking of which (well, writing), I wouldn't mind watching Conspiracy Theory, but I think it's been and gone on Sky so I'll just have to wait for Terrestrial to get it. Similarly I'm going to have to wait for Terrestrial to get the new series of Friends as I've missed the first few on Sky. No matter.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer was on today too - Wednesday is good again - so I was watching that 'over my shoulder' which trying to write up some software specifications. I hate software specifications. I'm not good at them, and they look awful once I've done them usually. For a change, though, I'm quite pleased with the ones I did today.

I discovered someone else using ESockets today (and I must learn to call them EasySockets, as I went on at g0tai about not using their correct name !). Nice Mr Iain Truskett appears to be using it in his IndentD servers which means that not only do we have another IdentD server, but that the use of EasySockets is increasing. I was wondering if sending it to *Info would help distribution but I don't want to lose 3 months of 'net distribution just to get that side of the market.

Niall... well, I don't know what to think about the Niall, Paul L Allen situation. I think that PLA can be incredibly critical of things about which he has knowledge and isn't willing to give even a little on. On the other hand, Nialls response - even with the later apology - was more abusive than PLA's. It's a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. And no doubt if I said that they'd both come back at me to convince me that they are indeed correct. I no longer really care; it's too tiring.

The mail unspammer was set to work for the first time today. It seemed to work as at least 70 articles appeared in the right newsgroups (along with their associated notes at the head stating the email addresses it believes to be valid). I'm sure that when I reply to one of them including their decoded email addresses they'll complain but to be honest that's there tough luck, because if I managed to write a program to auto-decode them after only about 4 hours work then surely that says something. The whole idea of spam-trapping is irritating anyhow.

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14 Jan 1999 (Thursday) 

On the other hand, looking at the root page of that server displays absolutely nothing of any use. Whilst the site does correctly specify the colours for the page (and so I can read it), it manages to break the table by not using the correct <td> tags around the table data. As such the image which would be used is in a limbo state where it is inside the table but not inside any cell. I'm not actually sure on what the HTML specification says you should do in this situation, but I believe that Browse is not incorrect for simply ignoring it.

Cunningly, this means that I have to read the imagemap by hand to get to the feedback page because there is no other way of getting to it. Fun.

There's a film on next week. I thought it was on tomorrow, but it's not. It's called 'The Unnamable Returns' aka 'That Film With The Naked Girl And The Guy From Sliders In'. It actually has a sensible name, but do we really care ? Forget the nudity itself (though at the time it was rather fun) and just watch how bad it is. From what I remember it was rather amusing watching the student with the girl wandering around, waking people up and them getting killed whilst he's almost unconcerned. Plus you do get to see a monster turn into a chair which isn't something you see every day. Oh, and whilst I remember, the police are suitably useless too.

Obviously the fact that I'm going on about this film won't make sense to anyone - even mum looked at me like I was mad - but Julian knows what I'm on about - I'm sure I must have sent about ten mails to him in the course of that film.

Researching today into Clares PCA. Looks like a relatively easy protocol to implement, even if it is somewhat of a strangely described system (the message names really need changing).

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16 Jan 1999 (Saturday) 

One of the people of the colony asked why people should tell such an awful story, and Deanna replied that perhaps it was to prepare themselves for later in life. I don't know if that's true of anything but it started me thinking about other rhymes. Take 'Rock-a-bye baby' :

Rock-a-bye-baby, on the tree top; When the wind blows the cradle will rock; When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall; And down will come baby, cradle and all. [ Rock-a-bye-baby, by Traditional ]

It's a pretty little rhyme, but you could take it to mean that a little of something is a good thing, but a lot can be dangerous. I'm sure there's a number of books out there of nursery rhyme origins, but I don't have one so I can't check. But it is rather interesting nonetheless...

On the Hexen front, I've just doubled the redraw speed in the test case, but I really could do with another four times the speed to be even barely reasonable.

On a totally different front, I've just about finished encoding the 'August And Everything After' CD. It just takes too long really. Even though I leave it running whilst I'm writing code it's still too long to be worthwhile. The only good reason is that Julian has his CD at uni so I can't quite pop downstairs and pick it up. Of course, when he's back in the summer I'll be able to, but I may have a job elsewhere then. Well, it could happen!

Sounded out my ideas for auto-filetype-conversion on IRC. RJW and Spanners seemed determined to pick on the technical aspects of it and refused to actually give any kind of opinion on whether it would be useful - or if they did, I missed it completely. I refuse to let this lie though; it's been about 5 years (nah, it's more than that!) since I started work on it and I believed in it then but nobody had any interest in it then, and I didn't believe that the take up would be worth it.

I don't just want another protocol that people look at and then ignore (or worse still, aren't even aware of). It should be a system that people can go out and use, without even thinking about it - it should fit almost seamlessly into the system of file transfer. For RISC OS it should be nearly perfect.

If all you've seen there is 'I'm brilliant and you should this use system' then don't worry, that's part of what it is about, but at the end of the day, the system I propose would work. At the time I thought of it I had no real means of implementing it all. Now I do. Gosh I sound a little like Niall now.

Speaking of which, I'm doubting Mr Allen's technical expertise (again!) after some comments he made on csap. It's entirely possible that I've misunderstood what he is getting at, but I really don't see any problem with using the stack whilst pre-emption is occurring. The stack, although it uses transient callbacks, does not affect the use with pre-emptive callback handlers. At least, so far as I can understand it. In the past when I've used callback handlers I've never had any problems with such code and I don't see any reason why there should be any. I'm hoping that Paul will set me straight in this regard because if there is something wrong with it then I would like to know, because it means I have misunderstood.

If that's the case then I'll just have to apologise and say he was right all along, but that's the case with anything, isn't it ? He's also got a thing about the serial port and pre-emptive code. I'm not exactly sure where he's coming from there though. The only problems I know with the serial port are that if you remain in IRQ mode for too long you stand a chance of losing data, and I think that was only really a big problem on the A5000 and earlier. Later machines use a different chip with a buffer so it's less like to happen unless your IRQ routines are spending extortionate amounts of time. Since a pre-emptor is going to want to exit IRQ mode about as quickly as possible then I would imagine that this is not going to be an issue.

However, that in itself could be wrong. I'm tired and need some sleep. Oh, God, someone sent some specifications to me to proof read... I suppose after finishing Wyrd Sisters I can probably scan them...

Night!

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18 Jan 1999 (Monday) 

Ok, so I was a little un-optimistic there. Hexen got full sound effect handling and music as well. This time I know what I'm doing and managed to get it all in there - rather cool . Hexen really does sound cool - the background ambience is much better even than Heretic.

In other news today, I took an hour out for a break today (after seeing something in the newsgroups) and ported Tidy. It's a kind of HTML validator that can re-write the HTML as well so that it is slightly more readable or whatever. All I did was compile it for RISC OS (a very trivial task, considering only two changes were needed) and added Throwback support. I'm sure anyone could have done it, but I needed a little break (the sound handler seemed daunting at the time, but when I returned it was very clear what needed doing - perhaps even because I took the break) and anyhow, it gives me more justification for having a 'HTML' directory in my Library now that I don't only have HSC to work with the code.

Tidy tells me that I'm not being correct in using <br></tr> at the end of tables. I do this because in non-tables browsers it gives newlines which mean the table is readable. On tables browsers it should be ignored because it isn't given a data cell to 'live' in, so all should be well.

There was a clunk from downstairs just then. I think the cats knocked something over. I'd better go see. If I don't come back you'll know I'm lying in a pool of blood after burglars hit me over the head with a large metal pole.

Hmm... Looks like it must have been something in Simon's room. No matter; I'm sure he'll find out tomorrow.

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19 Jan 1999 (Tuesday) 

This raises the question "What can we do with this power?". I don't know of many users for such a widespread project other than encryption cracking, but NASA (I think it is) have a good idea by distributing the processing of their data on to PCs. This returns me to the question of Contact (a question which was posed long before I began the diary!). If or when contact is made with an extra-terrestrial intelligence, a dedicated effort will be required to decipher and interpret the data - it is unlikely to be a physical contact, but more likely a radio message, much as we have sent out to other stars.

The collected power of the idle time on the planet can crack a commonly used encryption system in a relatively short space of time. Once a message has been identified, decoding it - given that it should be something that is designed to be simple - should be, well, simple. However, it isn't exactly likely that any aliens would simply send a message to say 'Hello, we're here'.

Baring that in mind though, that's all we sent really. Surely we should have sent something useful - a message about technology, or our culture, or religion, or something. In essence, we've been telling everyone we are here for many, many years now. If they are listening to our babble at the moment they will know what we're like, but sending a definite message to them would be like having the radio on in the background and suddenly hearing a personal message from the announcer.

I'm amazed by how much of a prat PLA can be at times. Whilst technically knowledgeable, he refuses to admit even slightly that he might be wrong. I am getting increasingly irritated by his 'I'm right, you're wrong' attitude. I'm usually very forgiving and happy to go along with anyone who seems to be right, but PLA really consistently gets things wrong, and attempts to use others stated views against people by mis-stating them. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I pray I don't ever meet him, because if I do, I'm just not going to talk to him.

Oddly though, it's now the 20th, and Niall has not got Wimp2 on his pages yet. Admittedly it is 4am, so I think I may just let him off . I'll have no time for it later today anyhow.

Oh, Andrew sent rather a lot of his holiday photos today. Attempting to download a large sparkive is somewhat fun on a 14k4 modem, but it was worth it. Oddly though, they weren't much different to what I expected. Ok, so the scenery is slightly different, but all the usual problems with holidays are still there. Well, that's what it looks like. It looks like fun though, even if it's not much different from other holidays.

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20 Jan 1999 (Wednesday) 

Oh, yesterday I did a tiny bit of work on MP3Encode before bed; it's got a nice little status window now to tell me how much it has done and some statistics on the encoding (as generated by the cmpa program). It's actually quite cool really.

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21 Jan 1999 (Thursday) 

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22 Jan 1999 (Friday) 

Touched up the last tiny bits of MP3Encode too. Only a minor change to the last version so nothing to worry about. It just failed to warn you if you tried shutting down the machine whilst there was an encoding in progress. Hopefully this should go up on the site tonight.

Tonight is 'The Unnamable Returns' night. Muchly fun!

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23 Jan 1999 (Saturday) 

On another note - I found that damned bug in the Hexen optimisations early today. Basically I had optimised something like :

x0=mo->x+mo->radius;
y0=mo->y+mo->radius;


into :

fixed_t x,y,radius;
x=mo->x; y=mo->x; radius=mo->radius;
x=x+radius;
y=y+radius;


which I very easily missed the first three times reading through it (there were a lot of other corrections in that file that had been changed since and I had to check that they weren't the problem too). Simple thing, but somewhat irritating.

Getting code right first time is infinitely better than having to debug it .

Pat and Steve (Claire's parents) are here today, so it's quite fun to chat to them after all this time. It's odd - I've got a letter from Claire today too, so I'll have to read that as well before I go to bed. It probably tells of her sordid love-life with all her men fighting over her, the cellar with her secret City destroying weapons, and her evil cat that's going to maul the next secret agent to try to stop her. Ah. No, I'm getting her confused with the villains from James Bond, aren't I ?

A frontend got written for Tidy today in those off moments. It's not too great, but it appears to work. And there's a 'special' build of it that allows you to use URL:<url> as the filename and will fetch the page. It needs the URL_Fetcher module to be present, but that's freely available. The only things that are problems with it are that it doesn't like throwback for URLs, and you can't put errors in a file or modify the original file, because it won't recognise the new form of FILE *'s I've used.

Oh, and RJW says he's going to send me a tape or two for me to have a listen to. Might be nice to have a change of music .

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26 Jan 1999 (Tuesday) 

You actually begin to wonder who might be doing the work on RISC OS when the discussions are concluded. Will e-14 supply a full working version to RISCOS Ltd and then let them sell it ? Will RISCOS Ltd subcontract to finish what has been done ? Will there be new programmers brought in, or will ex-Acorn people work on it ?

On the Hexen front, I'm starting to re-write the renderer because it should be faster than it is, and (basically) it isn't. Very irritating and given the amount of assembler it will need it could take time. Time I don't have.

Over the past few weeks there have been a number of 'public service adverts' about drinking and driving. Quite cleverly they have been following two people who go to work each morning - one walking, and one by car - and in the past they've always 'missed' one another. It's been a point for us to watch these carefully as they have changed and it's been 'interesting' to follow and see what happens this time.

Today, the girl was hit as the guy drove by. What is scarey to me when I think about it is /why/ we watch the advert. The content is disturbing, the point it's trying to raise is a very real one, but the reason you watch is because you don't know what's going to happen. The question is whether you are 'right' to watch for that reason and if the end justifies the means or not. Is it 'right' to give entertainment if it gets the message across.

It's the only non-funny advert in a long time that I have actually stopped to watch. Why ? Because I wanted to know what was going to happen today. All the time you know that she's going to get hit at some point, and yet you watch. Is it any better than slowing down as you pass an accident to see what happened ?

I don't know. What I do think though is that the advert was a very good twist on a touchy subject which has very cleverly made you pay attention - you know that its a drink/drive advert. You know that it's telling you to reduce your speed. Whatever may happens it has been a focus of attention and therefore has been worthwhile. I don't drive, so I'm a bad person to comment on it, and I don't know if I'd be 'thinking' of it if I were a driver.

It's difficult, because at present I'd say it was the best advert currently on TV, but I don't feel right saying that because it is such an important message.

I got around to watching one of the Friends Videos I got for Christmas today - Series 3, Episodes 1-4 - and I'd forgotten how good some of the bits were, and first time around I did miss a few things (or I've forgotten!).

I got an email from Helen at School today too... It's nice to know that she can just mail me from there (or I can mail her) even if there's still going to be a delay of about a day until we get the replies because of the way that is.

Oh! I just got an email from Matthew Godbolt today; I've not got time at the moment to reply (sad I know, but I'm falling asleep just sitting here now). He seems well, but says he's feeling a bit down (for various reasons). If I can find his bloomin' work phone number I'll give him a ring - I'm not even sure the one I have is current anyhow!

CD of the day: 'Moonchild' by Celtus.

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27 Jan 1999 (Wednesday) 

And I wondered why they didn't include the startup screen on non-PC systems! Well, it appears that the work spent on there won't be appreciated, because the caching system means that the game starts in around 2 seconds - barely giving you time to see the screen before it vanishes to be replaced by the first game screen. At least people who have seen the PC version should be impressed by that.

You know what ? It takes hours to encode a 98Mb MP3 on a SA machine. Somebody ought to write a nice little MP3 encoder that uses fixed point or optimise the current one more. Of course, that's easy to say but when you look at the code you just begin to wonder if it's even worth the bother. The simple answer is 'not really', unfortunately. It's in the background anyhow, so I can quite happily compile and use the machine normally. And if I need the speed to compile (rather than when just editing files) I can always pause it. The front end is quite cool, if I do say so myself. If I can't do anything else, I can write a cool front end to the Taskwindow module!

Apparently, the 98Mb MP3 took 6 hours to encode. That's not good. However, it does mean that I can now delete the original file that it came from, thus regaining about 90Mb of disc space. I'll soon be up to over half a Gb free, at which point I'll no doubt copy another CD and fill up all the space I have.

Well, Hexen just got the next taste of the Doom+ engine. Although there do appear to be bugs in it, we do have the linear and bilinear resampling in 8bit working correctly it seems. And it does look cool. Oddly, I've got a 50% increase in the frame rate from the new engine so I can't really complain. Well, I can because the redraw problems tend to crash the game, but that aside, it seems to work rather well :-)

Next job - fix the bugs in the new renderer so that we can look at stained glass windows again. Then I guess it'll be time for the more complex 'ensure that everything works' - something that's not actually that easy because I haven't actually finished the game yet ! :-)

Helen was showing her mum 'The Helen Rayner Gallery' today, apparently. I imagine that she thinks I'm a strange person she doesn't want her daughter to be with if I'm that obsessed, but then again I am a strange person, so I guess there's nothing too wrong in her thinking that...

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28 Jan 1999 (Thursday) 

Nothing else new today really. Spoke to Helen a little bit on IRC; she's not feeling too good at the moment (sometimes I just want to be nearby so that I can give her a big hug and make her feel better - although it'd probably make her feel worse actually!). Fixed (possibly) a long standing bug in Doom via Hexen - initial tests show that I've made it worse, but that's part of the fixing process in my opinion. Added CD support to Hexen (quite easy really!). Oh, and someone (I forget who) reported a bug in Doom+ whereby if the map is rotated you can't resize the map so that it fills the screen. Needs some special casings using root 2 and things I think. Oh, and I encoded a few more MP3s, saving myself a little bit more disc space. Plus I found a large news archive (28Mb) in !NewsDir which goes a little way to explaining why that drive has no room on it!

I'm going to have to start a new page for the Diary soon - it's nearly the end of the month ! Which means, I guess, that I've been running this for over a month now (actually quite a bit over a month, but I've only just noticed). So I think I should talk a little about what I think of the Diary.

Well, in general it is fun to say what I've done today. I'll admit I was initially inspired by the rolling .plan files that the various games developers seem to have. And quite a nice idea that is too. If people want to find out what I'm actually up to then it might be useful to them, but in general I think it's useful to me because it gives me a chance to put my thoughts in order instead of lying in bed just thinking in circles. Actually, I might make that a priority. If I am lying in bed thinking and can't sleep then why not simply write it down in the diary.

Hmm... I'm thinking that maybe that would end up slightly incoherent, but it would be useful to me. Oh, just remembered, I got a new copy of Toolbar today (and I've not tried out Wimp2 0.31 yet) and I've returned the author a copy that doesn't use that nasty StringUtils module. I'll admit that I hadn't meant the attachments would be 'inside' the window bounds, which is the way he's taken it, but doing this as a child window certainly takes a lot of the effort out of it.

If I get time I'll write an 'outside' window version using filters, but at the moment I'm too tired - I thought I might have time tonight, but apparently not. Oddly the thought of Majordomo has just entered my mind, partly because I was discussing mailing lists with the author of RCS. I could really do with a mailing list processor, but I've not found any that are useful yet.

I also need to get the internet software list uploaded to freenet at some point, but I've just not had time to finish the bits I've left undone. Time - why is there never enough?!

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29 Jan 1999 (Friday) 

Now, I'm pleased to say that I really am happy with the rendering engine in general now. I can't think of anything that is wrong with it that could cause it to do odd things. I believe the same problem may have occurred in level 3 of the PWAD Requiem too. Yep. Just confirmed that that's fixed too. Cool!

Hexen now 'runs' in 24bpp. I've not yet sussed the colour mappings and have a somewhat psychedelic background because of it.

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30 Jan 1999 (Saturday) 

Well, it appears to work and gives smooth fog and normal lighting. However, for some reason it always starts with the colours set to the inverse colour map. Not quite sure why yet. On the other hand the final bits are now done in the map so that is now 'good' I think. There's a few other little things still to be looked at, but nothing major.

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31 Jan 1999 (Sunday) 

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