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Mostly this month I was working on Hexen, various little snippets about Helen and some odd notes about RISCOS Ltd.
31 Jan 1999 (Sunday)
Had a little chat to Jonix today. He appears to like SoundTest |
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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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. I did try to do a webget of his site but there's just too much there
for me to look at really...
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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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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