Back from the show now... Fun time !
Sorry the WebCams weren't working on Saturday; we had problems with the ISDN
connection it took most of the day to fix it  . It's unfortunate, but
it's great that it got done - Many, many thanks to Paul for that!
Met lots of interesting people at the show, too numerous to mention in their
entirety (and because I forget who was there). Off the top of my head, John
Tytgat, Dave Walker, Andrew Veitch, some of the IRC posse, Helen (of
course!), CejDav (Chris - a friend from Uni who I didn't even think was in
the UK! Really nice to see him), Robin (wearing his cool T-Shirt), David
Dade, and lots of other people who - at this time of night I forget the names
of. Thanks to everyone who came to the show, to all the exhibitors who were
there, and especially to the team on our stand - it was a fun, albeit at
times stressful (!) weekend.
Oh, the clock on this computer is an hour out. Must update it after I've
finished writing this entry !
I didn't get a chance to buy anything from the show this year. Mostly because
I was stuck on the stand for a long time. Although I do feel very guilty for
taking out about three quarters of an hour just talking to the guy doing the
Radar pictures (before the machine died ) - they do some very cool, and
mad things  .
I doubt there's too much mail for me here, but I'll see anyhow...
Hmm... Have to think of a name for my new harddrive. I've got Justin, and
Helen and Gromit at the moment. I'm not sure what to call it, although I
think it's going to have to be Justin as that drive belongs to work.
And now ndirect aren't letting me upload my web pages... . Hopefully,
that'll be fixed tomorrow...
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Come to the show and meet me... If you want, anyhow...
Bizarre... About 90% of the links from Dave Chess' website (in a /very/
quick survey!) lead me to mail the authors over the lack of text colour
settings on their page - including two that were almost completely white on
my machine.
Cool... The diary has been added to Diarist.net. Interesting...
... and Niall's is already there .
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I tried a water effect in Doom today. Let's just say that it looks more like
a shallow pond that has a low refractive index. Which is a quite polite way
of saying that it looks almost, but not entirely, unlike water.
At work we're packing for the show. More packing tomorrow, and I'm off out with
Alistair too. Probably we'll have to meet at the office as it's unlikely that
we'll be able to get off before he gets here .
Buffy's on tomorrow - cool. Even if it has to be recorded.
Bought a number of CDs today - I decided to get Face Value, Word Of Mouth,
Recovering the Satellites and Forgiven not Forgotten. Unfortunately Woolworths
managed to get me August and Everything After instead of Recovering the
Satellites. I'll take it back tomorrow. If I remember, that is.
Matthew's been playing with his PC today, and interesting though it is, it's
still just a PC. There's something different about seeing a mass produced
game that uses lots of wonderful features of the graphics hardware to
something that you know you've written the graphics bits of. Ok, so I don't
write all of them, but with Doom I'm really proud of some of the things I've
tried. I don't ask that anyone else be, though .
I misunderstood Dave Chess' comments on Slige last night - tired, me ? - it
seems that 476 is without the bugs that were in 475. And I can release it -
I'll stick it up on the webpage tomorrow, if I'm not back too late!
Oh, just remembered; the 15Gb harddrive arrived today. Which means that I've
got more room than I can shake a stick at now. Unfortunately, I'm probably
going to fill it with MP3s. It's currently got things like the disc backups
from Work on it. Hopefully I'll get to use it next week some time.
Just found a mention on 28th
January mentioning about the map resize problem. That's
still not fixed. Which means there are two outstanding issues - the
mouse fire with the plasma gun and that one.
If you fancy a giggle (and understand what happened with RISCOS Ltd) pop
along and read the entry for 26th
January about RISCOS Ltd.
Corrected a few spelling and grammatical mistakes on the January page whilst
I was looking through.
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Take a look at a piece of Green
Paper that grabbed my interest today, before I ported Slige. Ok, so
I'm writing this before I port it, but that's not the point .
David Chess, hmm...
Ported Slige 476. Seems to work reasonably well with Doom+, after minor
modifications.
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Most of today spent doing the webcam. Announced to CSAA.
I'm tired of a lot of the things that are happening in the RISC OS world at
the moment. Actually I'm tired of a lot of things really. If I wasn't sure
that I wanted to stay with the RISC OS market, I'd probably be interested in
looking at somewhere else. I don't know what I want to do, though, in
general. I enjoy the things I'm doing with RISC OS. I enjoy the things I do
on my own time. I don't, however, enjoy the general attitude of some of the
people in the market. I'd like to get on and do the things I believe to be
important. Unfortunately, one of those things is Doom. It's important to me;
that's all that matters.
Long ago, I heard that someone had once said that in any disagreement you
should compromise on the major issues and the lesser ones will fall into
line. I like that idea - be as accommodating as you can for anyone else's
beliefs. On the other hand, if you believe something is right why should you
compromise on those things. Indeed, if you know yourself to be saying what
you believe in, should you prostitute yourself merely to get the job done,
even if you know full well that the job will be done less well because of it
?
[ As an aside, I can't seem to hit the u and t keys properly at the moment,
so if there are any missing then I'm sorry ].
It's like the argument between what is right and what is wrong. It's
something I just can't settle. If something is right then it is right.
Otherwise it is wrong. That's not the way things work though. There are
degrees of wrongness, and you have to find the level at which you feel
something is unacceptably wrong.
Take the example of webpages. I believe that, to produce webpages that are
right, you must correctly specify the background, text and link colours if
you do so at all. That is the right thing to do. Indeed it is the only thing
to do. That is my belief. How many pages fall short of this standard ? About
90%, going by the number I complain about. So does that mean that popular
opinion wins and that if you are a member of the majority it means you are
right ?
Is it right that you should do what others believe you should do, even though
you know them to be wrong ? How do you bias that against when the situations
are reversed ?
[ The keyboard is working properly now. I merely reinitialised PS2Driver and
it works now. I'm relatively positive that I'm restoring something I should
not be in ControlAMPlayer, but I can't see what. A typical example of the
failure is that the 'load file' option pops up in a Zap window. Look into
it tomorrow, along with CVS. ]
What I have problems with is that I can't decide what should be my
standing on deciding what to do about the dilemmas. I know what I believe and
I would like to articulate it. Sometimes the thing I want to say is that that
is the way things are and we just have to live with it. Sometimes I think
that you must make a stand if you believe in something.
I'm tired of trying to work out what I should be thinking and when I make a
statement on something, whether I'm not overstepping myself.
I have a problem. When I'm tired, or annoyed, I pull at my hair without
thinking about it. As a consequence, there was quite a bit of hair floating
around my desk today when I tidied around.
I don't want to be annoyed at people. I don't want to think that people are
annoyed at me. I want to just get on with what I do and present a 'thing' at
the end of the day that I can say 'there you go, that's what you've got'. And
they can say 'Good, that's great' and that will be it. No 'wouldn't it be
nice if x, y and z' because that's not how it was done. No 'you've done it
wrong there'.
So where's the problem ? The problem is that those two standpoints can't
coexist. Because one is completely the counter of the other. Or you can argue
that you should compromise and find the middle ground. I'm fed up with the
middle ground. I've always been the middle ground. I don't
make a stand on too many things, and I'm quite happy for people to make
decisions about things that I don't worry about, but when I
do make a stand I would like to think that it's well
reasoned and sensible and accepted as such.
I don't feel that that is the case for many things. I think that because of
that, I expect too much. I don't think it's possible to just be the way I am
because what I think and the way I do things are contrary to those of others
(and to some of my own).
The market in which RISC OS lives is probably quite unique. It consists of
computer users who want more from their machine than the average. Because of
this, they expect many things of the system for which it was not designed. To
cater for any one subgroup is to annoy another. Myself included in these
groups. So it would seem safe to walk the middle line, thus partly appeasing
both factions. What if, though, (as is the case generally) the middle line is
one that is being opposed by a third faction ? You can take action on one of
the fronts in the hope of not annoying one group more than another. You
should try to find common ground between the areas and provide a
forum for which the differences can be settled. But, in general, the groups
have such a set of beliefs that they won't find a common ground.
What of an example ? Two groups argue over the ownership of land. One says
that they own the land. Another says that the land belongs to them jointly.
How can you find a common ground there ? Neither is willing to budge on their
claims, and neither wishes to accept a subsidiary offer. The two groups can't
be helped, so you should leave them alone. What if they're killing one
another over it ? Do you intercede and risk starting an almighty war because
you're interfering in a private dispute ? Or do you let them get on with
their own problems ?
Ok, so that's an example in 'real life'. Another example rests on the middle
party. The two opposing groups believe different things should be done by
the third. The third can either do the more sensible (as it feels) or the
more popular (again, as it feels). What if they are one and the same ? All
is well. But if the less popular one has a bigger mouth than the other ?
What if it can say it across more forums than the other ? Does the damage
that can be acrued from that attack outweigh the benefit from the action ?
If the third is already on rocky ground, it may decide to go for the popular
option (regardless of its sanity) for short term gain. Or it may choose to
minimise the loss due to the 'bad press' from the bigger mouth. Either way,
it loses. Why not take the route of doing nothing ? Both groups attack the
third for being indecisive.
So where does that leave me ? Confused and tired. Trying to juggle my own
decisions as to my actions, and my morals for doing things at the same time
leads to losing track of where I am. I end up going around in little circles
as the morals try to follow the consequences of the actions and so affect the
actions themselves.
I know that I'm merely questioning my own actions and having
problems deciding what I want to do. The questions, at the end of the day,
are just overwhelming, and each involves its own individual minefield. It
makes things easier just to go and do things and not worry about the
consequences. But then you run into the scenario above, where someone else
of the same opinion is directly opposite you in viewpoint - they hate your
blindness to the obvious.
What do you do when you can't decide what your own opinions are, because
most of the time they contradict themselves...
Aww.. Dave Chess has sent me a lovely archive of Slige for DeathMatch and
I'm just too tired to work on it. I hope he'll forgive me just for tonight.
I promise I'll port it tomorrow.
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Spent most of today writing KeyBind, and playing with ControlAMPlayer. They
look rather nice now. Basically they - between them - do everything that the
Airboard Manager does for my keyboard which means that I can launch things
more easily, and - more importantly - play MP3s more easily.
However, skip track just totalled the machine whilst I was writing this. Now
some might say that was a little irritating.
Anyhow, I've got things like WWW mapped to 'run Browse', Close to 'Close
window which has the focus, or the one under the pointer if none', and Mute
to 'turn off the sound system'. Which all seem to work.
What else happened today ? Um... Watched Cold Feet - another really good
episode. Even if it can be a little too romantic at times and leaves me
feeling all sad and sorry for myself. If you know what I mean.
Must send the Les Miserable CD back to Dad soon. Before he gets to missing it
too much . Mum's in Spain at the moment. Erm... Nothing much else to
say really about today. We had pasta and ham and sauce thingy today - it's
got the flat past like spaghetti that is pronounced tag-li-a-telly but I
can't at this very second spell, and it would mean getting up to find out...
Unfortunately, we did a lot. Well, maybe not - maybe I just got a massive
portion. I did try to take the smallest, but I was still last to finish. I
just don't eat quickly.
I had a play with the Diary today; I wanted to make it remember the
name of the previous entry on each page, but HSC doesn't seem to want to let
me do that. Annoying. Oh well.
What I'd like is a simple way to remember the last <a name> value.
.
John Tytgat sent me a new copy of CVS today, but I've not had a chance to
try it just yet.
Oh, and someone sent me a bug report about Doom not handling plasma fire in
the same way between the different versions if the mouse is used.
I'm not sure just yet why this is.
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Today has been spent working on the WebCam, mostly. It's been quite fun
really. We've got people coming to look at the house tomorrow, so we've got
to tidy up a little .
The album of the moment is Les Miserable, which - I'm surprised to say - I
really enjoy. I wouldn't have thought I would have liked it, but Dad's to
blame. He it a little while back and I had only listened to a little of it
and thought it 'interesting'. I think that Matthew thinks it odd for me
to listen to something like that, but there you go... One of the other things
I'd like to listen to more is Swan Lake, but it changes a little too
much in its volume, so it makes it hard to listen to at work.
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Spent ages talking to Alistair today. Hopefully I'll get to meet up with him
next week some time if I'm not too busy getting ready for the show. I
think that Paul's coming up on that day, so it might be quite
difficult to get off, but if not we can always reschedule to after the
show... if he's not too busy .
Spoke to Helen a lot today too. She says she'll try to come to the
show on the Sunday - which makes me feel really guilty because I think she'll
be coming mainly because I've badgered her. Oh well... But, like she
said, I'll actually just be really pleased to see her, like normal. She does
know me too well, after all...
Spoke to Sue yesterday for ages. She seems to be well - I must get around to
popping over to see her sometime. She's graduated now, which is cool... And
she's got a mobile too... which is weird .
Spoke to Mum today; had lots of news about family - Uncle Michael and Janet
are in the states, Mum flies out to see Grandma tomorrow, and Simon's just
had his driving theory test.
Spoke to Angela briefly a few days ago; mostly to ask who Heironymus Bosch
was, but she didn't know. Indeed nobody I know knew. Turns out he's a 16th
century Dutch painter. Now all I need to know is why his name was floating
around my head for three days.
Meeting today. Lots of people spoke. I didn't much.
So, the last few days have involved a lot of people talking, for me... Whether
that's a good or a bad thing, I dunno, but there you are. I feel a lot better
for it - particularly the fact that I'm catching up with old friends. Tomorrow,
I'll ring Phil and see how he is, which should just about cover everybody I've
lost touch with who I knew reasonably well, baring Caroline. But then that's
probably a good thing .
Doom+ release, beta 11 was a few days ago with jump and looks in. Plus the
menu dims and fades. Some good responses as yet... Still trying to decide
what new things to add... I have some ideas but you won't like them  .
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Today was another dull HTML day. But I got a few interesting emails (not many
though) and I had a quick glance again at David Chess' log. A "counter rant"
at the "Why X sucks", aka "Why Essays with Titles like 'Why X sucks' suck".
Why mention this ? Because I quite often write in the diary, defending why
I write in the diary. Pah. So this time I won't.
Discovered a very cool thing about jumping today. If you jump near the edge
of something you're walking up, you can do a 'super-jump'. Interesting. Yes,
I'm talking about Doom again.
Added support for configuration files preserving 'unknown' options, which
should allow a little interworking, I hope. Wrote up the
Configuration files page to
document this.
New section as part of the diary, to give a summary of the entries each
month. This should make looking at the diary easier for others.
Really, though I only did it to because it's a fun bit of perl to knock up
. And I've just checked the pages in all the RISC OS browsers and
found no problems. For a change, even WebsterXL worked fine with them.
Admittedly I had a problem with Webite giving me some form of abort - but it
survived. Webster displayed things most oddly, but I'm not too worried. I
don't think anyone uses Webster any more. It was still readable anyhow.
NCFresco wouldn't load so I couldn't test it. But that's not surprising; I
think it's got a zero page problem in the version I have.
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Finished off compiling libwmf. For some reason it blows up violently on one
of the test wmf files (test/wmf actually!) but all the other examples I have
work fine.
Unfortunately I can't source my own WMF files from here; I'll have to wait
until I get into work to try some more real life examples. At present, I'm
only outputting to GIFs, because that works (well with the above exception).
Bother. Turns out that I'd included April's entry in the August diary. Oops.
A quick upload will change that though . Thanks Dave!
Wrote the desktop version of AMP32 today. It's not got the right name really,
but it's a 32 band desktop graphic equaliser for AMPlayer. It's quite cool
really, though I think I prefer the full screen version still. But having
it in the desktop is cooler. Sent Zappo a copy to see whether he's
interested...
I've tidied up some more stuff in Doom now; nothing much extra added.
Oh, I bought some mince pies today too... it's not overly interesting, but
it just goes to show how far from an event we need to be before the shops
start to capitalise on it - two months isn't that bad really though...
I still didn't get around to sorting out my photos this weekend .
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Coo... Today I was introduced to the multitude of diaries that seem to have
found their way to diarist.net.
As usual, I didn't find this by myself, but through a bizarre maze of twisty
passages, all alike, of which the terminus was David Chess' new log...
It's bizarre. I pop over to his page once in a while to see what little
snippets of life go on elsewhere - you know, like you do - and found that
there's a place for diary authors at diarist.net (something of an odd
concept, but if we have to have diaries, we may as well organise them ),
as well as a new link to a his log. Then I find a link to my diary
from there.
Whilst I'm looking at it, I'm not sure I like the idea of being an 'online
exhibitionist' but that's all that they are really. Well, let's just give a
quick summary of how we got to the here and now...
It all started (how many things start with that sentence ?!), I guess, with
Jennifer Ringley. Now, don't take this the wrong way here because this isn't
going to go the way you expect. In the beginning, Kozzey 'introduced' me to
Jennifer's pages - this was back in first year, I guess. I was interested
because her pages were... well, interesting - they were updated reasonably
regularly, and had a good presentation about them. At the time, that was
something lacking on the Internet as I saw it. So I kept following the pages
as they moved around. Later, Kozzey mentioned that for a few people she'd
put up a webcam that people could see her on, so off I toddled. A rack of
shoes was all that I was presented with. But I kept watching over the next
few months.
At this point it's worth saying that during this period there was absolutely
nothing of much interest outside 'coo, it's a camera on the other side of the
world'. Particularly interesting was one day whilst watching, the curtains
were open and you could see - over time - the sun rising. That was something
that I found quite cool - watching the sun rise over another continent.
Around this point I decided to put together the disaster that was JenniPics.
It was interesting, it gave me something to do, and more importantly, it
allowed me to use Perl in a productive and visual way - for a change, people
could actually see something I'd done in Perl. And it looked really good,
followed the style of the JenniCam pages and needed virtually no maintenance.
Then JenniCam went to pay-to-view, and JenniPics went to Guest access only -
sometime previously JenniPics had managed to get linked from an AOL search
page (which is odd, because there were no links to it from anywhere - someone
I gave the address to must have used it somewhere...) and was getting lots of
hits.
Anyhow, this isn't the story of JenniCam, or JenniPics. Jennifer's gone on to
appear on TV, the papers (hence why JenniPics vanished!), and probably makes
more money at that than I can imagine. But. The point was that it was a view
into someone else's life. That's what interested me; the current state of
affairs seems to go against what it was set up for, and what I watched it for.
Jennifer also had a diary, but I read it infrequently - when you've got a page
of pictures of every three minutes, why look at a diary ? The answer is that
the diary tells you something about how a person feels, whereas the pictures
are just raw data - they may tell a thousand words, but I don't think that's
what you get from JenniCam nowadays .
It got to the point where IRC was annoying me in general because I didn't know
anyone there, and nobody actually gave two hoots about Acorn computers
anyhow. Also, around the same, I was working on Doom (or one of the others -
hey, I just looked back and it was Heretic; see... it's useful ) and
came across the finger daemons that people at the games companies had and
thought that that was a good idea to restart. I'd always had a finger message
changing program at uni which told you which lab I was in, but giving some
details of the work that day sounds quite interesting.
So, instead, I decided to move to my own little world where I don't
disturb anyone and I can say what I want without anyone caring. Which is here.
The diary is just a means by which I say what I want to say.
Look at today. I got up, did some washing, looked at libwmf. Downloaded libxbm
and then found that I already had it. Found out that I'd actually managed to
get hold of xlockmore - I had forgotten I was looking for it! Looked at David
Chess' news page, and then started writing this.
Would anyone care that I did that ? Not really. Do I care that they don't
care ? No. Why ? Because sometimes - just sometimes - people find things on
here that they like to know.
I don't write about work much. Mainly, it's because a lot of the things I
think about at work are either unprintable, or would be in breach of licence
agreements. So, I keep to what I can talk about. I can talk about
generalities, so - as recently - when we've been working with the PRMs, I can
mention about that. But I can't say that x company is never going to
produce y hardware because they made a mistake and accidentally fried
one of their engineers. Well, actually that would make a very cool thing to
say but it is (fortunately!) untrue.
As you've seen, I talk about Doom a lot. Which reminds me, there's a problem
with DoomPS - I'm not sure it gets the right level when it tries to map Doom2
levels. Hmm. Oh well, look at that later.
There's also lots of other little things going on. I'm working my way, slowly,
through the ECMAScript final draft now; it's got some interesting stuff in it,
but I'm not sure how soon I can get it up and running on RISC OS, because of
the general problems in using CVS over a modem. I know there's a problem there,
and I know it's in UnixLib or something that UnixLib calls. But I can't see
what it could be. It's got to be something simple, but why it totals the
machine, I don't know .
I've just been glancing through last years entry for 25th December :
![[Quote]](../images/quoteleft.gif) |
We had a little mini-countdown on IRC to midnight; I do wonder what
will be happening on new year next year - will there be people on IRC ? Will
I be at home or elsewhere ? Will I be sad enough to spend new year on IRC ?
[ Christmas, 1998 ]
|
![[Quote]](../images/quoteright.gif) |
I'm no nearer answering that question, except that I probably won't be on
IRC. One other thing that I've just noticed that for 28th December I've got
a 'Note to self: Add Auto-Ignore to JFTerm'. It's amazing that after all
this time, I've still got to write notes to myself to add that - I
think I wrote one only last month!
Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. It appears that when I updated the boot
sequence here to be a more recent one (ie, not Ursula!) about a month ago, I
deleted all my funky screensavers that I'd made. Which means that I don't
have copies of them anywhere now , or at least that's what it looks
like from a quick glance. I may have them at work, I guess... it's
very unlikely though.
In any case, I've just finished another ScreenSaver which I rather like. I'm
not sure that anyone else will, but that's life I guess .
David tried ringing tonight, but I couldn't ring him back because nobody was
answering at the switchboard. . I'll try again tomorrow during the day,
well, if I'm awake .
I've obsoleted the -aabackgrounds switch now in Doom, because it's a
bit pointless to have it as an external switch. Actually -diminmenus
is also a reasonably pointless switch now, too. In any case, that's the wipe
and dim's working in both 24 and 8 bit, and I've fixed the showfrags display
when tiny text is off too. I feel I ought to go to bed now...
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Nothing special. Still HTMLifying the PRMs at work. That's fun.
Added dimtype and wipetype to Doom. They seem to work, but they do need a new
menu especially for them. In any case, it gives you a little more
configurability over what you can do. It's getting to the point where I'm just
adding things because I've not looked at a particular section for a while. In
theory, that means that the Auto-map is due for a touch up soon. But not
tonight because it's far too late. Again.
Oh, and the addition of the new wipe and dim types means that a
second file is now controlled by the perl pre-processor now. This is
actually very useful because it means I can start sticking great big macros
around things so that they give me a different effect without changing much
code. Ok, so it bloats the output code anyhow. Oh well.
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Nothing much happening today; some abusive mail about Helen from someone,
though not as bad as the one a month back... Some people just have nothing
better to do. And don't have shift keys either.
Found out that I had managed to break addr last night; just a minor
indentation problem, that's all. Spoke, briefly, to both Forrey and Speckles
today too. Speckles should be over here in 4-6 weeks, she says, but then I
never know when she's likely to be coming over... Forrey's enjoying work in
.ch though, which is nice. He's doing some image manipulation or some such, so
he'll be in his element.
I've spent the day tidying up the remainder of the ShareFSFiler source. It's
still something of a mess but no longer involves that single whopping great
function, so it's a little easier to work with. More to the point though, it
means I can actually maintain it sensibly rather than having to search through
lots of ifdef'd out code to find the bit I want.
My cold's pretty much gone now, thank God. Oh, and watched Tomorrow Never Dies
and Ally McBeal tonight. Interesting, but Ally McBeal was a bit... less good
than usual. A lot of cringing bits, but not so many funny bits. Oh well.
New web browser coming from... erm... RiscStation, was it ? I dunno; I just
remember the announcement in csa.*. Odd though that it's going to be based
on Netscape in part. Very difficult. I look back at the FAQ I wrote a while
back at the estimate of 3 years for something useful. I suppose that if you
say 6 people working on it, you might get something useful inside
of 6 months, but then you've got to take into account the drop off of general
productivity as you add more people to an individually cohesive project.
It'll be a push is my opinion. And they're aiming at the moving target, too;
not the somewhat fixed and ageing one I had as my aim (ok, so not really 'aim'
but you know what I mean ).
Regardless, once it is released we'll get to see the Netscape derived code
that they've used, and that can only benefit everyone really. Which reminds
me - I ought to release the JSLib source... I'm still playing with it though,
so I'm not keen on a release just yet. I don't want to end up like Martin
Piper though - always going for the 'perfect' version and never releasing
anything until that is attained. No offence, Martin, but it does look that
way from here .
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I've been ill recently, so no diary for the past few days. I'm almost better,
but too tired to write an entry right now.
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I had a very strange dream last night. Let's start at the top. I'd gone home
for a holiday to get away from things for a while, and I was just popping back
home to say Hi then I was going to go and stop somewhere - a B&B, or a tent
or something. Home was in Doncaster, for some reason - we left there years
ago but there you go. Anyhow, I decide to go, so I say my good byes and start
off out of the back door (which is the backdoor in Weeting, oddly!), and down
the side of the house (back to Doncaster). As I'm walking down the side of
the house I remembered that I'd probably need some money, so I wandered back
for my wallet. Whilst there, I decided I'd probably need a tent if I intended
camping - I've not been camping for ages, so where this came from I've no
idea - so that, and sleeping bag and other things got collected and put on
the garden lawn. For the past few days (dream days, not real ones) I knew
there was a girl next door who I wanted to talk to and didn't have the nerve.
I knew that she looked so much like Caroline, but different, so I was sort of
scared to go and see. Well, you know how it is with these things.
Anyhow, I decide that I've stalled enough and I went and rang the bell. The
door was quite big, and made of black-brown wood. To the right of me there
was a black metal light - I was sort of looking at it from the side. A thin,
business-like guy opened the door and I asked to speak to Caroline. He
invited me in and called to her. I was in a hallway, just inside the door.
To the right of me there were the stairs heading away from me, on the left
the door to the living room, straight ahead the kitchen, and a store
room-study ahead and left...
+-----+-------+ +--+
| | |
| S | Kitchen |
| t +-+ +-----+..|
| u +C [|..|
| d [|..| Key
| y + [|..| ===
| | [|..| | - Walls C Caroline
|-----+ [!..| + Joined bits G Guy
| | G :..| . Stairs M Me
| L | :..| : Banister LR Living room
| R + :..| [ Shelves FD Front Door
| M |
| + |
+-----+---+ FD +-----+
Ok, you see now why this was a strange dream ? The carpet was blue. The
banisters were a light brown (lighter than the door). The living room was
somehow lit in red. The study was dark, but from where I was standing I could
see boxes and a desk. The kitchen is out of view in the diagram, but I must
have got it wrong because I could see the backdoor and the sink on the right
of it. The proportions are all out too. Anyhow, Caroline was wearing a light
yellow dress (light coloured) and shyed away from me into the corner of the
room as if I was dangerous or something. I asked if we could talk or be
friends and she said nothing and just kept trying to get further into the
corner. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I left anyhow, and went
back next door, home. When I got there, someone, I don't know who, said that
I should go and try to talk to her again if I really wanted to talk to her.
So, I went back out; for some reason I knew they were leaving, and they were
in the car in front of the house. I said something, but she looked happy and
seemed to be off on holiday, or to get married or something - it wasn't
really clear in the dream. And they drove off.
There's a blatant meaning in that, obviously. Even I can see it, but it's odd
that I should dream that after this time. Anyhow, that was the dream. There
was more, I'm sure, but it just went very strange after that and I can't
remember it because it doesn't follow a good pattern.
Oh, and David Chess has a link in his 'News' page back to this page, making a
nice circular link. It seems that Word URL will grow by its own energy
through hearsay. I seem to recall a certain Jennicam archive that grew out of
control in the same way. However, Word URL is slightly less... erm...
controversial.
Julian's off to see Deacon Blue and Celtus next week. Lucky git. Actually
they're (Celtus) playing at HMV on Tuesday in Birmingham. Hmm... it's just
up the road, dontcha know . No, it's unlikely I will be able to go,
because of work .
Anyhow, he also pointed out a Counting Crows site to get some MP3s from -
including a 15 minute version of A Murder Of One .
I've got the handlers almost working in djinn now. For some reason though I
can't do obj.func = function() { print("Function called"); }
without it giving me a 'realloc failed' error. Obviously I've no idea why
this should be.
Oh... I've just one thing to say...
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If you take a collection of small objects, maybe marbles, maybe different
colors of marbles like that old metal box up in the attic, and if
you take these marbles, or small objects anyway, and shake them
around in your hand, well I guess you can't really tell what will
happen for an arbitrary, that is to say an unspecified collection
of small objects (why am I reminded of Derrida at this point?)
but if they really were marbles, say, or something else
sufficiently like marbles, and if you were to (well, sufficiently
like marbles in the relevant sense, but you don't yet
know enough to know what sense is relevant so you should
probably wait until you get to the end of this sentence before
trying the experiment yourself, and by the way if you do try
the experiment and anything bad happens I take no responsibility;
this information is provided for educational purposes only and
no conclusions should be drawn as to the basic beliefs, opinions,
understandings, preconceptions, misconceptions, prejudices, or
eccentricities of the editor), and if you were to shake them
around in your hand, they would go "rattle rattle rattle
rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle
rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle
rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle
rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle".
[ Rattle, rattle, rattle; David Chess ]
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But I didn't write that. It just looks cool. Look to Theogeny.com for... a lack of
explanation. But who needs one, when you've got a sentence that long .
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If you look back to July 25th this year, you'll find an entry about the
cookie of the day, attributed to 'Gustave De Windt'. Now, I didn't enter
all the cookies - Julian, my brother, did. And so I've no idea who these
people are... It turns out - he mailed me today - that Gustave
is purely a fictitious character created by H.G.Wells for 'The Shape Of
Things To Come'. Seems that I've got some reading to do, doesn't it ?
Oh, something I remember from today. We need some way of printing a large
amount of 'stuff' to test !Printers. About half a kilometre would do. So
now we're looking for a printer capable of printing on to fanfold road
tarmac. Obviously this is going to be a problem because we'll never find
anyone to tear off the perforations on the edges.
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Mail from Sue today; Angela rang yesterday - she's got a mobile now... well,
should have by now anyhow, it was arriving today. Spent lots of time today
reorganising bits of the build so that it's a little easier to control.
Last night I did a quick botch in Doom to make it replace all FixedMul()
calls with SMULL's in place at run time. Unfortunately this wasn't any
faster. Bother.
Tonight was Ally McBeal. Odd; there's three programs I watch on TV at the
moment really - Ally McBeal, Friends, (bother, that makes four!), Cold Feet
and Spaced. I could probably lose Friends quite easily, but I don't think
I'd cope without Cold Feet .
Today I started work on djinn. It's going to be an interesting program, but
I'm not saying any more than that because... well, if it comes to nothing
then I'll look silly. Must get card for Helen tomorrow. I'll look for a
present some other time as I couldn't find anything suitable today .
I spoke to Helen yesterday, which was quite nice. Oh, we handed the tenancy
application form things in today too. Must ring Phil. Haven't seen much of
Dave recently; he pops down now and then, but not as often as before. It's
not so easy though, now that we have more people in the office. I wonder if
he's still interested in helping out at the show - it would be very useful,
as he knows a lot more than most about the OS development and features
.
Ok, so today's diary entry is a little jumbled, but I'm missing
prime djinn development time and I really want to get back to it. Actually
I want to go to bed. So if I finish this quickly then I can upload it and
then go to bed.
Paul's in on Friday. That'll be interesting. I need a new CDROM. Mine's too
awful really. I could also do with large hard drive. And a Psion. And Helen.
 Yes, I'm tired !
Oh, I've just remembered (like you do!); there's someone - I think it's
Stefan, I'm not sure - who seems to read this diary quite often. Oh, and I
found a cool URL a few days ago. From the same guy that brought you Slige
(David Chess), we now have 'word url' - the
perfect toy for when you're bored. Instead of wasting your time thinking
up silly words to stick as parts of URLs, it does it for you ! No more
staring into space thinking of words and then coming up with things like
'www.brown.com'. Ok, so it's a simple thing to have written, but he did it
and it's those simple ideas that are important .
He's also got his own little news page of things he's been up to. Busy person
.
Anyhow. I've implemented 'escape' in djinn now, so it's bed time.
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Again, nothing special today; I would tell you about the thoughts I've been
having on the validity of thinking in rights and wrongs, but I'm too tired to
write things tonight. Odd for me to be like that, don't you think ? Given that
I'm never tired. Oh yes.
Um. Did some more on Doom tonight; nothing special there. Oh, we found a house
we want today - it's very nice. Well, it's a bungalow and it's... interesting.
Um. Tested NetPlex a little. I think Dave thinks I'm a little too opinionated
about the networking things - "thou shalt do it this way" sort of thing. I am,
really, but that's mostly because I've not had somebody saying "No, you do it
like this. And this is why..." Which is partly because nobody has known, or
been willing to say. MimeMap and Resolver should go out as public downloads
once we have a chance to package them up. In theory we just pack them into a
!System structure and let the !SysMerge util get on with it (well, it's
Installer now, but you know what I mean!)
What else ? Matthew's playing with sticky borders which is fun. Breaks simple
things in new and interesting ways, so it won't quite be implemented like
that. We've just split off a new branch at work now for the main development.
Either it's going to be a big mistake, or something we should have done a while
ago. I think the latter.
I've still not added checkpointing to ControlAMPlayer. Which is very annoying.
I'll get around to it. And still no ideas why ESockets is killing other
applications when it scans its list. I don't /think/ it's my fault, and the
code is so short...
I'm toying with the idea of weapon modifiers for Doom, like you get in XPilot.
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It looks like one of last months diary entries went a little awry and decided
to forward date it by about half a century. Oh well. Just goes to show that
these things go wrong once in a while.
Anyhow, yesterday we were looking at houses again. A bit dull, and not at all
encouraging. Last night and today, though, I've been working on DoomPS so that
there is a decent plugin for it. Merely *Filer_Run'ing it is a little
nasty really. Anyhow, that's done now.
Whilst I was at it, I've added lots of 'parent' attributes to my webpages so
they should be a little easier to navigate. Most of it was done
automatically by HSC, so I'm hoping it's all come out right.
Oh, I've added 'jump' to Doom, experimentally. Basically I just wanted to see
how hard this would be. In theory it should work on network games, but we've
not tried it yet. Small text now works for the clock. I've got to change the
warnings and map information yet, but other than that it seems to be going
well.
Woo... Interesting... Doom source code is now released as GPL. This basically
removes the restriction of 'educational use only'.
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