30 Aug 2000 (Wednesday) 

Really didn't sleep well last night; David rang at about 2am, and I told him to go away, but I kept waking up all night. Finally I awoke at about 7am and then couldn't get up until about half eight, 'cos I was just too tired .

Anyhow, what's my overall opinion of MpTrip, now that I've had a chance to play with it ? Well, let's look at this objectively...

Overall, I'm quite pleased with it. It's rather nice.

In his name, they could slaughter; For his name, they could die. Many there were believed in him; Still more were sure he lied. [ One for the Vine, from Wind and Wuthering, by Genesis ]

One for the Vine is a quite strange track. It's one of those that makes you think, because it is a story. It provides you with a story that you can relate to - even if you don't know the history of Christianity in a vague way (it's not necessarily even particular to Christianity, I guess). It's a very simple story of misplaced faith, and miracles. I'm particularly not saying anything that isn't already known about the meaning, because it's all been said, and it's obvious from the track. The reason I was thinking of it was that whilst I couldn't sleep last night I was thinking about the blindness of following a particular ideal because of personal, or unfounded reasons. Would it be reasonable to say that Wars in general have been fought over personal issues, rather than over principles ? Is that too vague a thing to consider it as ? I'm not a historian, and I don't know my history too well. But, I can see very good arguments to believe that a proportion of conflicts are down to personal reasons - "I believe this, and you don't" is the basest of these; "You did this to my <insert any relative, friend, or associate>" is another typical example. Another obvious one is "I want <thing that the other has>". Thinking about this, these can be the only reasons for a conflict from the aggressors side. The retaliation is generally a "If I don't fight back, I will lose" situation. What, then is the reason for conflicts in general ? Can it be reduced to always being personal reasons ? There is the situation where the instigator of a conflict is not strictly the aggressor. The instigation of a 'conflict' might be a result of extended or extreme unfair treatment. That generally covers the category of civil, and guerrilla wars.

Conclusions to draw from those random thoughts ? None really. Just idle speculation, I guess.

"And the seas will run with oil, and the land will burn" [ Comment about a world that has seas coloured black and land coloured red ]

Moving offices in a few days; that should be quite fun. We're hoping to move Friday or Monday. Matthew should be back on Sunday, too, but I don't expect that I'll be moved by the end of the week.

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29 Aug 2000 (Tuesday) 

Yes; it's finally here. My MP3 playing CD walkman. It's kinda cool. Instructions are... well, I assume they're at home, 'cos they're not here.But I've worked it out reasonably well, I think. it's a bit awkward to select some of the tracks on an MP3 disc because the selection mechanism uses a lot of very bizarre buttons. But it does work. With a CD in the player it seems to get about 5 second of violent shaking before it stops for a moment or two. After about a minute of violent shaking with MP3 playing I gave up because I looked silly and I was knackered - I can't make the damned thing jump.

I'll write more about it later.

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28 Aug 2000 (Monday) 

Watched X-Men today. Well, I'm sitting in the cinema at this moment waiting for it to start. Could be good, could be awful. Just have to see, I guess. . Well, yes, it was quite good. Nicely open-ended, too. One complaint about it, though is the lack of X-Men cartoon music. 'cos that's cool.

One thing I forgot on Saturday was to say that I went a wandering through town, trying to get some bearings and an idea of where things are. Found numerous book and music stores which was quite cool. But the thing that was most interesting was Border's selection of DVDs. Now most places put them out with the cover facing outwards. That's great if you want to see what the cover looks like, but if you're looking through a lot of them it's a pain. Borders has them side on. Just like books. Then you can see from the spine what the title is. And you can fit more into a smaller space. So much nicer.

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27 Aug 2000 (Sunday) 

Hold me now, Hold me in the dark; Can't you see I need you with me night and day ? Hold me now, Won't you say we shall not part; How I hate the thought that you will go away. Do you remember words that you said long ago ? Of all the dreams we had, the life that we would know. But they were only words, And they've drifted far away, There's a new beginning there for us to see. All your dreams are now long gone, And you know that life and love must carry on. You and I; we had a fragile, tender love; But something broke and that's the way things have to be. But if you hold me now, I remember those lost times; But it's just regret, We know it cannot be. [ Hold Me Now, from Walking down the street, by me ]

I'm sitting in the park, watching the pigeons and ducks fighting over bread. And I do mean fighting. It's a quite pretty day; there are a few clouds in the sky, but they've not threatening rain. Yet. Looks like it's bath time for the ducks. They've all decided to dunk themselves in the water and wash themselves, all at once. It's quite strange to watch. Glasgow is a quite pretty place, really.

Why is a '99' ice-cream called that ? Was it at one time 99p ? Is it just a neat name ? In any case, it's a nice ice-cream.

Went around to Dave's again tonight, and he cooked us tea. Quite nice. It's bank holiday Monday tomorrow; so we've got to find something to do with ourselves again. Watched the end of Back To The Future tonight - I'd quite like the trilogy on DVD actually. The other one I remembered that I wouldn't mind was The Forbidden Planet - it's just a classic film.

There was a Voyager on today that I'd not seen before; with the fact that Janeway had been violating the timelines regularly featuring, to the point of sending the captain of a time-ship mad. I think that's quite cool. The idea that they have to stop trying to get home through holes in time and such like, because the touch up work is hard for those that do such things, is really quite funny. Hmm.

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25 Aug 2000 (Friday) 

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24 Aug 2000 (Thursday) 

Spoke to Paul yesterday, briefly, about how things were going. Lots of things happening with his family at the moment . All the best to him.

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22 Aug 2000 (Tuesday) 

Ok, it's a strange dream, but since when have things been any different.

I don't even think that naked women's Cricket would be interesting. [ Cricket outside the window; Matthew ]

I caught one of my toe nails tonight and it seems to have taken the nail off. That's not fun.

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21 Aug 2000 (Monday) 

First day at work today; quite fun. Introduced to people and seeing what's going on. Went out to Pizza Hut in town, which was reasonable - Jogu doesn't overly like Pizza which is unfortunate - oh well. Catherine also thinks that Pizza isn't a real meal. She's very much of the opinion that tea is a meat, potatoes and vegetables affair. She's also married to a policeman. Not that that is relevant. But she's very cute. Um. Yes, I'm sad.

Watched a bit of Big Brother last night. Gawd that's awful. I'm not sure what the premise is. Or the purpose. But it's amazingly fake.

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20 Aug 2000 (Sunday) 

There really is nothing on TV on Sunday evening. I've decided this after about an hour of searching. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get up and go to work. I probably should have organised more time between jobs, as I'm now really tired. Although, as Dad says, that's my permanent state.

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17 Aug 2000 (Thursday) 

Well, I had the morning off today to go to the dentist and have a tooth taken out. In the end it was painless, although having the right of my face totally numb for the rest of the day did make some things quite awkward - thinking being one of them. Anyhow, I'm sans upper right canine (my right) now, which will make eating a little easier as I don't have to avoid it, and I can finally eat things on both sides. I might have a Chinese to celebrate. Maybe celebrate is the wrong word.

Simon got his A Level results today. A little less than he'd hoped for - I hope he's not too upset; I think I was nasty about the fact that I beat him, but in any case, he's got into Reading, and he's going to do what he wants to do, so that's got to be good. Chloë got three A's and an AS. Don't you hate her . I still think she and Simon would make a wonderful couple, but alas that's not to be. Ah well. She'll find someone, and so will he, and in twenty years, they'll look back with their respective spouses and say "we were right not to get together". Maybe.

Last but one day today. Few. I'm really going to miss this place. It's really quite sad, but I love working with the guys here, and I so enjoy doing the things that they do. To say it's the lure of more money would be wrong. To say it's that I'm fed up with RISC OS in general wouldn't be quite right either. But really, it's all down to a lot of little things. I could be doing some really fun things up in Glasgow. Not that they're not here. It's not the lesser of two evils, more the greater of two goods.

Simon (Forrest, not my brother!) gave me a lift back home tonight too; we'd spent ages chatting about stuff at work - I feel guilty for keeping him from doing stuff. Ah, well. I hope they don't feel to let down that I'm leaving. I can say it's honestly not because things were bad, but because things weren't right for me. Maybe it's all one massive mistake and as Simon says, "I'll be back" - I'd like to think that if that were to happen it wouldn't be viewed badly. I'm not likely to be coming back soon, in any case - things would have to change a lot for that to happen, but in any case...

Whilst I was in the dentist being jabbed with numbing needles, it seems that Helen rang. Later whilst I was chatting to Peter and Julia she rang again - that's quite a surprise. Anyhow, she was telling me her good results that she got in her module exam, whilst running to catch a train. I left her to it. I hope she made it. Well done, anyhow!

"Well it's a real long way to go" You say "Goodbye" "I thought we already did that ?" Have fun and tell the world ! [ Long Way To Go, from The Other Side Of The Mirror, by Stevie Nicks ]

Spent a little time tonight restructuring IRMan from it's nice single file format into a set of components - it had always been thought of being as a set modular routines, with the bind routines dealing with simple binding of sequences to commands, irman dealing with the activation, deactivation and input to the module, serial dealing with talking to the serial port and the general module front end that it presents to the system.

I've been not making diary entries recently, mostly because I've been up till late doing stuff, or more likely, because I've been going to bed early-ish and failing to sleep. It's just to hot at the moment.

Of course, now that Helen's rung, I'm thinking about her. Stop it. Now.

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16 Aug 2000 (Wednesday) 

Two days left now. I got home last night and just went to sleep. Pretty much straight off. Although, I seem to remember ringing Chris, but I don't think I was very coherent. I woke at about 3am, and watched the end of the DVD I had started a few nights ago. Then went to sleep again, and slept until about 10:40 when I finally awoke and had to go to work . A little late. And now it seems that I'm going to be out tomorrow morning to go to the Dentist to see about this tooth. Oh god, I hate going to the dentist .

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14 Aug 2000 (Monday) 

Dad brought me the IRMan that had been delivered to home here tonight. I was quite surprised at there being nothing with it when it arrived, although the documentation is all on the website anyhow. And what is the documentation like, I hear you ask ? Well, it's reasonably clear. Excepting the fact that I have to fight RISC OS to make it do things. The sequence I found that worked was :

• Enable the serial input buffer (otherwise you never get any data back from the OS!)
• Save status of serial port.
• Issue a break. This seems to reset things and makes restarting the system more reliable.
• Raise RTS, lower DTR. Wait a moment.
• Select no CTS, ignore DTS, ignore DCD, use FIFO, select RTS handshaking, raise DTR. Wait a moment.
• Raise RTS. Wait a moment.
• Return RTS to handshaking. Wait a moment.
• Select data format and baud rate.
• Send I. Wait a moment.
• Send R.
• Read characters until you get an O, or timeout. Hint taken from linux driver.
• Next character must be a K, so read that and check.
• If all has gone well up to here, then start your background process to monitor for input.
• If anything went wrong, restore the status to what it was prior to messing with it.

That's the initialisation; I did lots of cunning things in the background process watching for input before I discovered (again!) that the Character Entering Buffer event is pretty much obsolete, and never seems to get called ever. So, that just means you have to sit on a CallEvery and watch for that.

Total development time to get to a state where I can now control AMPlayer with any infrared remote that IRMan understands (which should be any, I guess).

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13 Aug 2000 (Sunday) 

Zeus: "Are you aiming for these people ?!" John: "No! Well, maybe that Mime..." [ "Through the park", John McClane & Zeus, Die Hard 3 ]

Bought some CDs and DVDs today. I must stop spending money like that. I decided to get the Die Hard trilogy, as well as 'What Dreams May Come'. Hopefully, I'll get to watch them before I go to Glasgow.

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12 Aug 2000 (Saturday) 

I'm in a good mood today; I'm not sure why. Well, a lot of nice things happened, so maybe that's it. Firstly, I got to lie in for a while. That was quite nice. And then I played Homeworld a couple of times to see if it was just fluke that I can beat it on its hardest setting. It wasn't. It's very unfulfilling to know that you can beat a computer because it isn't as clever as you. Or more specifically that it's not able to learn how you work. Anyhow, then Dad rang to tell me that there was a parcel for me at home. It seems that the IRMan thingy has arrived, so that'll be fun to play with. Dad's hoping to bring it on Monday. That'll be nice anyhow. I managed to get AMPlayer to compile, which was kinda cool. And once compiled, I've managed to fix the VBR bug that was plaguing it. I've got to read through some documentation before I'm sure that it's fixed, but it should be anyhow. I got to chat to Zappo about missing parts that I'd had to write to make it compile, and other issues about what to do with it. I'm really quite pleased with it - the code is relatively nice, and I actually find that I understand bits of it.

Other than that, it's been a very hot day today and I've been inside most of it, 'cos I'm lazy and have no life.

I've finally bitten the bullet and renamed the drives, and I think that the new names are going to stick.

As you can see, I've got a backup drive now - Athena, godess of Wisdom and Learning. I decided that keeping everything on one drive, whilst easy to do, isn't exactly useful, so I'm going to use Athena to backup all my work and things that have accumulated over the years. There's email from when I was at uni, all my uni work, general JFPatch, C and BASIC things that are just strewn all over the place at the moment, and lots of other things which just have no replacement at present. That's almost organised. Thanks to Simon for the naming - we had a long chat about what names to use and he helped me out selecting them. Whilst chatting to Chris, later, I noticed that I could have called them Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but I think I quite like the more impressive sounding names.

Chris is also interested in going to Picsel, which is good news. Hopefully he'll be more than 'interested', but that's up to him. I've only got a week left now... Trying to get things finished is to be the order of the day, I think. Which reminds me, Dave Upstairs looks like he's going to go work for Pace, which will be quite interesting...

It looks like I'm missing two Genesis albums now - I've got a little list of all of them that I put together whilst I was at home last to see what was missing and I've finally looked at it. I'm missing 'From Genesis To Revelation', and 'Selling England By The Pound' it appears. Oh, and I don't seem to have 'Seconds out', either...

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11 Aug 2000 (Friday) 

One of my teeth is loose. It's probably my own fault for not looking after them, but it's annoying. I've only myself to blame, I guess, so I'm just cross at myself. Basically, one of the transplanted teeth is finally giving up, I think, and it's going to fall out - I bit something hard and it hurt and now the tooth wobbles quite a bit.

Really tired tonight; playing with MPEG things. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be more awake.

RISCOS Ltd EGM tomorrow. That should be fun. I'm not going - it's a hell of a long way to go just to go to a meeting. And I'm not that bothered anyhow. I'm only a shareholder, and that's all - I'm not too worried about what goes on there.

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10 Aug 2000 (Thursday) 

Apparently the Subterranea video has arrived at home, which is kinda cool . And I've found out why my copy ends abruptly for disc 1. It's because I'm missing the last track. That tends to make it a little abrupt.

DVD/MP3 Player arrived two days ago, but I've not had time to write about it. This is the Scan SC2000 player, and it's quite funky. It's certainly a lot prettier than the Lasonic player. The UI displays are a lot nicer, no blocky text - nice rounded helvetica type fonts used throughout. It's got a nicer remote - the Lasonic one was a quite nasty grey thing, I'm not sure I liked it although it did the job. The layout of the Lasonic remote was also quite nasty. The SC2000 has a much nicer remote. The facia on the Lasnoic player was quite sparse really, functional, but nothing special. The SC2000 is not much better, but seems better laid out, and the front LCD display is a little cooler than the Lasonic. Menu setup with the SC2000 is much nicer - those fonts I mentioned earlier help, as do the number of options available, although I've not tried them all. The 'Secret' menu allows you to select region bypass which is handy .

Now we get to using it. Let's see about the MP3 playback first. It seems about the same as the Lasonic, to be honest. For playback quality anyhow. The selection for tracks is much better, though, using the names of the tracks and directories to navigate through the CD. Much nicer, more intuitive and cool. It also displays the ID3 tags on tracks, so far as I can tell, whilst playing. It doesn't display Joliet filenames, though so you're a bit restricted there. Not that that's really much of a problem anyhow. Like the Lasonic, it doesn't support scanning through the track with fast forward and rewind. I'm a bit annoyed at that, as it's not too hard to do - hell AMPlayer does it - but it's not a major issue really. It also has a nice 'shuffle' option which is very handy if you don't want to listen to the same things over and over again. Program doesn't work with MP3s. It also plays MP2s as MP3s, which the Lasonic doesn't.

What's the player like as a DVD player ? Well, I've only really tried it briefly to play things, particularly the Kindred DVD that came with the player. That had nasty green/red wavies that floated across the black sections at some points. I think that's the scart input or my telly, rather than the DVD player itself, but I can't be sure. Playback scanning with fast forward and rewind is much better tan the Lasnoic player, in that it doesn't display selected frames as it scans forward, but actually plays things quickly. Which means that in 8 speed things look very silly. The speeds that it will step at are in multiples of two, up to 64x speed. The Lasonic only got 32x speed, although this really isn't much of an issue, as there are very few times you care about going through a film at a rate of one minute per second. Unless you want to find a scene and don't know where in the film it was, only what it looked like... The zoom feature on the player is interesting; it allows you to zoom in to up to 8x scale, which is quite blocky, obviously, but it does also allow you to pan around the picture, either whilst the film is playing, or whilst stationary. That's quite cool, although not too useful unless you're playing Where's Wally on it, I guess. No I don't know if you can.

Audio output. Now this is curious. It's only got two channel output, which means it has to downmix the 5.1 sound if present. There's nothing wrong with that, and it even provides two modes for downmixing, as well as a number of 3d sound modes to choose from, but... the Lasonic had 5.1 sound output. I've not got good ears., as you may know, but I do enjoy music lotsly, so I would like to have a good stereo at some point. It's not really a problem right now, but it might be in future.

Other features - hmm... well, the Lasonic has two games built in - Othello and Tetris. the SC2000 has... um... nothing. But I don't think I played the games really except when I was very bored, so that's not all that great. What's my verdict, then ? Well, I like the Lasonic player because it was the first one I got and it has 5.1 sound output, even though I can't use it yet. The SC2000 has zoom, MP3/MP2 playback, directory selection, ID3 tag display, snazzier menus, and a much nicer remote. Oh, and a screen saver (yes, it bounces the DVD logo around the screen - sad, huh ? ). So, the SC2000 is pretty neat. I'll have to try it more with DVDs, but it seems pretty good so far.

I've got only about a week left now at Pace, before I go up to Glasgow. It's quite scarey, really. But I'm really looking forward to it.

Spent about an hour and a half talking to Chris about life, and how he should email Picsel. Bizarrely, he was actually emailing Catherine when I rang. And not through any prompting of mine. Which is quite neat as coincidences go.

I've been really tired recently, so I'm going to be trying to get to bed earlyish at the moment. Not sure how well I'll be doing; it's so hot at present that it's hard to sleep. And there's obviously some bugs in here that have taken a liking to my left leg as I appear to have had it gnawed off recently. Ok, maybe not gnawed off, but still it's very raw and has about eight bites on it .

Are you going to Scarborough Fair ? Parsley Sage, Rosemerry and Thyme; Remember me to one who lives, She once was a true love of mine. [ Scarborough Fair - Canticle, from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, by Simon and Garfunkel ]

Spent a fair bit of time today reorganising the MP3 collection. I'm still undecided on how to treat certain things in the collection, to be honest. I'm not sure if I prefer writing (x) at the end of the album name to mean it is part of a set (eg Subterranea(1)), merging the tracks from the multi-part albums (eg Subterranea, with the tracks inside renumbered), or to retain an identifier on the end (eg Subterranea(Disc1)). I think I prefer the first and second methods. It's not always sensible to merge the discs, and in those cases it's wise to just keep them separate. There are other issues, too, but I'd prefer to go to bed now.

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8 Aug 2000 (Tuesday) 

Matthew's given me a little module (616) to release on my site, as he doesn't have one at present. It's nothing particularly special, but it might be amusing if you want to try to speed your machine up a little more. Basically it copies your ROM into RAM so that it runs faster. It's not exactly hard to do really. It was always intended that Phoebe do this by default, but it never happened for various reasons. I've tried it on my machine, and it seemed to work. I've had a quick glance at it; it looks about right, but the same caveats apply as dynamite whilst smoking a large cigar. Um. That is, don't come crying to me if it trashes your system, emails your account details to an offshore account, butchers your family and sells your internal organs on the black market. Um. That's not likely to happen. But it's not my fault it if does.

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7 Aug 2000 (Monday) 

I had another strange dream this morning. There was a boy called Billy, and he was sitting on his bed upstairs when an FBI guy came to ask him about the strange things that had been going on recently. Whilst he was being questioned, though, the building began to shake and the the agent was knocked over (hmmm... X-Files and buffy last night, that might have something to do with it ). The bed and the boy went sliding down the now inclined house and into a large hole that had opened up in the middle. As the bed hit the bottom, Billy was flipped over so that he was then facing the agent and a wall from the floor above finally collapsed, leaving Billy's body on one side of the wall and his head on the other. And for some reason a sign by his head like an emergency exit saying "Exits can go many ways".

Next day, the agent was in town, (oh, hell, let's just call him Mulder, 'cos it's easier, although he was never Mulder in the dream) and he met Billy. He asked him about the strange things again and what happened the previous day. Billy said he didn't know about yesterday. But people had died when he was little. It seemed that Billy had vanished a few years ago and the deaths had stopped. Mulder asked him how people died when he was little (although he was the same age then as he is now). As they walked through the supermarket, Billy said that people died easily. He pointed to a woman by the groceries and she keeled over, the same thing happened to a mother carrying her child and a couple of teenagers, as they passed them. Mulder asked if anyone noticed, and he said that he didn't, and Mulder suddenly stopped worrying about the dead people.

Mulder asked if there was anything else Billy could do. Billy pointed to a bag of crisps from the top shelf and it floated where he pointed. One woman standing nearby noticed and stared, but Billy stared at her and she continued like nothing had happened. Then they started to Billy and the Agent began to walk out of the store and people began shouting at the floating crisp packet. Billy said that there was nothing wrong, and although some people continued what they had been doing, many continued shouting. And then everyone noticed. Mulder thought this was interesting, as the effect didn't stretch to many people.

He asked Billy what had happened to Billy's sister. Billy said that she had been beaten and burned and buried in pieces in the shed at the bottom of the road. There was a flashback to see where she lay, and that the places where she had been buried glowed as if they were hot.

And then I woke up. Quite a strange dream, all in all.

Politics is a nasty game. Don't get caught in the crossfire.

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6 Aug 2000 (Sunday) 

I had a quite scary dream last night. It seemed somewhat based on the idea of a deadly virus being released on to the surface of the planet - I watched Twelve Monkeys a litle while back, remember. Whilst out looking for something, in my suit I realised that I'd not got my inner sealing suit on, along with someone else in the same family. So, to make sure that it was safer I decided to put tape around the joints of the outer sealing suit. For some reason I decided to do that by getting out of the suit and it's only when I did get out that I that I was now going to die because I'd breathed in the virus. Unfortunately my friend had done the same. So, we decided that instead of stuffer a little madness and then watching ourselves slowly rot (or whatever it was that happens) that we'd kill one another.

We walked out of the garden we were in and into an open plan kitchen and started beating one another with frying pans. That didn't appear to do any good, it just hurt like hell. So then we went out of the other door in the kitchen and tried to decide if we should jump into the reservoir. But it had been drained for cleaning and so that was out (quite why just jumping off into hard rocks wouldn't work, I'm not sure).

And then we found that we'd survived. I don't remember the middle section of the dream. I do remember the end though, because that's where I woke up. One of the women in our group was pregnant, and had been throughout the dream, and she had to give birth with only me around (I'm not sure why, I don't remember the reasons for getting to that point). So I ended up delivering the baby, but when it arrived it was dead. That's the point at which I woke up. I'm not quite sure of the reasons behind things, or some of the details, but I do know that the image of that little baby (albeit looking somewhat stylised in the form of dreams) being stillborn, really scared me .

If we're to draw any interpretation from that, feel free, but I'm not sure what to think. Maybe it's just a dream.

Later, I fell asleep again and I dreamt that myself and my brother were soldiers and outnumbered in a fight near a road in a forest. I remember that I got killed (although it wasn't me that was being focused on) and that Julian was also killed. Julian, I remember thinking, was being a coward and wasn't fighting very much (a very sensible and wise person, hiding and running when he got the chance, now I'm thinking about it). But as I'd died I think I told him that he's got to do something to make sure that he didn't die in vain. So, he ran into the middle of the opposing force, strapped with large amounts of explosives, jumped on their leader and blew it up, killing pretty much everyone.

Whether that's good, bad or indifferent, it made a reasonably impressive ending to that dream.

I had a quick chance to pick up mail and news last night, so I tried to get through the backlog of the past few weeks. I've not yet uploaded the diary, though. One amusing news posting had the line "I'll bet you can get it *much* cheaper once RO 5 has been issued" in it (with reference to RISC OS 5). I love Usenet. People are either amazingly lacking in clue (you know who I mean) or have an insatiable belief in things that aren't true and have no foundation of fact. That goes both ways, of course - people believing bad things and speculating, and people believing good things and speculating. Neither of which are any use if they're completely false.

One other thing that is amusing is everyone's belief that there should be a way of identifying if you are 'online' or not. Without any understanding of what that actually means (well, now there's a common trait, then...) The fact that 'online' means nothing is quite irrelevant to most people. That you can have multiple interfaces installed, and that there might be no concept of 'online' on the system you're working with because it's constantly active, or sporadically active based on an event out of your control, does not seem to be something that they can understand. However many times it is explained to them. Idiots.

I've had an idea for User-Agent strings. Although I generally use Justin/1.0 or Human/1.0 when I connect directly myself, I think it would be useful (in a not-very-useful sort of way) to provide a 'full' user agent string in one of the browsers. How about : Mozilla/3.04 [en] (Compatible; Acorn RISC OS 4.11; ARM; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98; Win98; Oregano 1.05; DigExt; en-US; m15; ANTFresco/2.00; WebTV; Opera; Lynx/2.7; libwww)

Anything I've missed there ? I can only go by what I'm using here, so there's a lack of any other browser information to add. Fortunately Fresco lets you change it explicitly, which means that I can use whatever I like. I've forgotten now which site it was that looked for 'TV' in the javascript declared application name and presented a different page based on it. Basically, that line will pretty much guarantee confusing any software that reads it, it's going to end up not knowing what is the real browser and presenting you with an arbitrarily selected browser based on the algorithm it uses. In essence, it makes the string useless. But I'm only stretching the string to a greater extent than is currently used. It's not like there aren't browsers that lie more convincingly than this.

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5 Aug 2000 (Saturday) 

Today was a very lazy, day. I've been sorting through my music in light of the new stuff I've got. There's quite a bit, so it's taken a little while to sort it into the correct categories and such like. I know, it's a bit sad to actually go out of your way to set time aside for sorting, but it's more annoying to find at some later point that you can't find something that you wanted to listen to.

It's also the first time I've heard some of the tracks on the Season's End remaster disc. The opening Uninvited Guest version is quite impressive, in that it's very much the final concert version. Finally I have the full collection of Mike And The Mechanics albums, which is quite cool. I'd been missing the first album for ages.

"I think we should be leaving now." "Yeah, that's probably a good idea." [ Last lines in Pulp Fiction ]

I now have two hard drives which need names. Previously one was Music, but that's going to become a backup drive, I think. That's probably the best thing for it, as it's quite a big drive, and I don't currently have any backups. So, we have :

Slige 488 ported tonight. Well, I say that. I basically just compiled the code that David had sent me and it worked just fine. I did try diffing against my last versions to see what the changes had been, but just about everything had been folded in, and the only unfolded changes were those that were purely stylistic and I really don't care about .

I guess that means that my work with Slige is now complete. Well, from a porting point of view anyhow. The only thing now is to leave it to David to get the other updates he wants and release it. It's the first porting project that I've done that actually went right through to having the changes integrated into the final version. Yay!

William: I don't remember how they got the peanuts off the production line at Rowntrees... Richard: Elephants ? [ AI image recognition; William Turner and Richard Warren ]

Comment in the diary from someone : "I can't believe William wants bacon trifle". Someone I believe is either in Pace or works for Picsel.

"Is there anything that Tesco's aren't selling now ?" "Sex toys" [ Not sure where that one came from. I think it was work. ]

Scary User-Agent string turned up today in the diary comments email : User-Agent: Mozilla/4.00 [en] (Compatible; RISC OS 4.00; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98; Oregano 1.05)

The only reason you 'know' what browser it is, is the fact that you know that no Windows browser would pretend to be Oregano, or to be using RISC OS, and Oregano doesn't run on Windows machines. Unless, it's a comment from someone at Oregan who has a version that runs on Windows. Which might happen, I guess...

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3 Aug 2000 (Thursday) 

Mum, Dad, Julian and Andy were here today. Andy's a friend of the family from long ago. Went into town and had a look around, and stuff. Reasonably fun.

Bought some stuff in town. Nothing much, really. Twelve Monkeys, Pulp Fiction and a live CD of Yes music (Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman & Howe). Dad was quite surprised I liked Pulp Fiction. So was I when I first saw it, I guess. Also, I asked at HMV about Buffy on DVD - I thought it might be worthwhile to get a reasonably informed opinion, instead of guesswork. The guy I spoke to said that there was a "Rumour" that it would be out in November, but he's seen nothing to confirm that, and said it seemed likely that Joss wanted to voice over all the episodes. If he did that, that would be quite amazingly cool.

The guy I spoke to did say, though that X-Files first series would be out in November on DVD. Now, I didn't ask about that. But I'm glad he said. Because now that I know, I'd be very interested in trying to collect all of those. So, that means that I'm going to be buying X-Files from November and I'm going to have no money for food. I'm going to die, aren't I ?

In the big dream, We are heroes, We are dreamers, Of the big dream; Someone told me, There are brothers, Live forever in the big sky; Just hear your voice, Sing all the songs of the Earth, Nothing can come between us, You're a brother of mine. [ Brother Of Mine, by Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman & Howe ]

Updated !RSS today; it's now got the ability to save pages and links to those RSS pages. I'm going to need an icon for RSS files - they're XML so a generic XML icon will suffice. I'm also going to need an icon for XML itself because I've got nothing for that either. I'm hopeful that Jason Tribbeck has an icon already.

No work really done on the Parser tonight; I'm not really in a mood for that, really... I'd like to have a rest tonight.

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2 Aug 2000 (Wednesday) 

Parents are coming tomorrow with Andy, which should be interesting.

The parser works reasonably well with macros now. I had a minor problem that macros were taking an infinite amount of time to parse as they added all the information about the expansion of the macro to the end of that macro. Slightly time consuming. Local labels need special casing, but I'll have to work out how to do that when I get a little closer to having a working code generator, I guess.

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1 Aug 2000 (Tuesday) 

Downloaded Ulead Video Studio today, as it was recommended for making VideoCDs. Why make VideoCDs ? Because I want to have a copy of the Buffy's I have which are playable on the DVD player - if it can do it. Anyhow, I tried it out. The trial version will deal in 30 second clips. Ok, that's fine. But, when I try cutting a section out that is that long so that I can put it on the CD, I find that it's very jerky (~1 second of stationary images every so often) and almost impossible to watch. It looks almost as if the MPEG data is failing to be processed at the right rate. I'm not really sure. Anyhow, it doesn't do what I want. Which is a bit of a pain. But no matter.

Scan (well, CityLink) tried delivering to home today. The wonderful thing about next day delivery is that there must be someone at home to receive it. And if they are at home, they have to be conscious . Unfortunately, Simon was fast asleep and everyone else was out when they delivered today. Unfortunate, but hopefully they can deliver tomorrow or Thursday .

More work on The Parser today. My number processor can't cope with complex things like hex numbers. Oops. But I've now got a macro processor. Or rather a macro processor that understands how macros look, if not what to do with them. And there's a file processor, too. That can understand includes and such like, which is quite interesting - and more to the point it's useful.

I've done numbers in binary, hex and some additional parsing for variants on the variables, too. The main thing that is missing from the variable parser now is macro arguments. However, the macro processor is only half finished. It stores macros, but doesn't do anything with the data. There is also the issue of conditionally defined macros that contain conditionals. That makes life quite amusing. Forward references, too, are bit of a pain. Indeed, I'm explicitly not supporting forward references. If you really need a forward reference then you can just go away.

I destroyed my CDR today. I think that's reasonably good going out of about 30 CDs being written successfully. The only mistakes I've made have been what I put on them, and out of interest today I tried inserting a CD into the other drive in the hope that it wouldn't stall. Unfortunately it did, so I ended up with a broken CD. But that's life I guess. It does mean that the CD case for "Forever Live" is now fixed, because it can have the bits from front from the broken CD's case.

I think RSS was broken up to today. I'm not certain, but I think it only updated when there was a new day, so RSS would have been a day behind the real entries. I think it's fixed now. However, since the diary hasn't been updated to the site in a while, I guess that's not really important at the moment.

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