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29 Feb 2000 (Tuesday)
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Valentines day.[ "Valentines day", a poem by Justin ] |
![[Quote]](../images/quoteright.gif){kind=small} |
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I was just thinking this morning about books that we read at school. In
general they were obscure and dull, and I was trying to think of books
that I have read that would be reasonable to read at school that wouldn't
be. I'm very much drawn to "The Island Of Dr Moreau" because I think that
probably has enough material in it to bring about some discussion and is
actually rather a good book. From what I remember, the writing style is
very different to a lot of things I've read. Maybe I'm only thinking that
it would be interesting because I'm older and I'm reading it without the
necessity. An alternative might be "War Of The Worlds" (notice a little
pattern here? 
) for which parallels to later works can be drawn, as
well as discusssion about the fears of the time and then later the fears
during the famous radio broadcast in the states. All that, culminating in
modern day impressions of life on other planets. Yes, I think that would
make a very interesting mini topic to do.
I'm really sorry to say it, and many English teachers will probably think less of me, but I really don't think that I gained anything from reading any Shakespeare. Considering where I'm living that's probably blasphemy, but they were interesting in a "Oh, it's got old English in it and it's cleverly written" way. Certainly the topics covered didn't warrant the amount of discussion given to them, and they might have been better covered with a more modern text that would give more scope for interpretation.
It's easy for me to say this, because I don't have to actually do the teaching, adhere to the guidelines set down by the examiners and the government and put up with unresponsive kids. Reading Shakespeare was dull though. However hard you might try to make it interesting it took up about a term and that was just in the reading of it, with very little discussion. I've just tried to dig out the essays I did on it. I can't seem to find them, which is odd because they should have been handed in with my final coursework collection. It's entirely possible that it was hand written and therefore I don't have a record of it. Pity.
But in any case, I do think that it would have been more useful to have read something different. Maybe I expect too much of school kids though - I know I didn't pay enough attention...
Impressively, NDirect's POP server appears to be down today. Which means no mail for me. Fun. I'll try later. To be honest, the problems I've been seeing with NDirect and the support I've got off them have got to be a good example of why people dislike ISPs and distrust them. In any case, I think it's a good idea to move to another ISP. Soon. At least as soon as I can work out who I want to go with.
Please look at "The Evil Henchman's Guide". It will help you decide on a career path. "The recommended method for checking to see if the Hero is still alive is to shoot him in the head".
Linus Torvals was on The Money Program. Now I was sure that his name had a D in it.
It seems that netdirect-announce@netdirect.co.uk is a globally writable mailing list containing all the netdirect customers. Yes. That's right. Anyone can just mail spam to that address and reach every customer they have. Dim. Negligent. Incompetent. Choose your own word.
Apologies to anyone that I've not replied to by email recently. I've just
been trying to catch up with other work for a while. I promise I will catch
up soon. Really .
Oh, and by the time you read this I'll know how many valentines cards I've received. It'll be none, but at least I'll know then. Hmm...
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Spent most of today working on Zap 1.43. I'm trying to make it work like my old Zap. Unfortunately 'Standard' Zap is configured really badly. Or at least, it's not at all to my liking. So it generally takes about a day or two to get it to a state I can use. Since I'm jumping straight up to an alpha version I'm going to have lots of problems, but for the amount of bugs in 1.40 patch 8 (that I was using) you'd think that was an alpha too.
Nice comment on Katie's 'UnFAQ' :
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If I go to a site, and I don't like it, I'll go away.[ Katie's UnFAQ ] |
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Very right. She uses tiny text and javascript where she doesn't need to. I don't like it. I'll go away. Pity really, 'cos otherwise it's probably quite interesting, but I don't like to have to squint to read the text to find out, or to emulate JavaScript in my head. Oh well.
Oh. Psycho Nanny from Hell on TV tonight. "The Hand that rocks the Cradle". It's about 7 years since I saw that last. Nasty doctor. Nasty nanny. Nasty greenhouse scene.
Speaking of that, Angela rang last night for a chat. She seems to be missing
out on some kind of social life. I don't quite know how because she does more
than I do socially, but then again it's all relative . I hope that
after exams she is a little less stressed.
Music today from Mostly Autumn (The Spirit Of Autumn Past), Tristan Park (Looking Homeward) and Genesis (Duke). Mostly Autumn is really great. I can't really describe it, but it's very Celtus like in places, quite Galleon and a little bouncey in places. Shindig (track 7) is a gorgoues instrumental build up which is just amazing. I may have said that a few days ago, but it is. Tristan Park is very Galleon. I'm not into it much yet; it seems a bit samey, but that might just be because I'm not listening to it as much as Mostly Autumn. Duke is very light by comparisson to the others.
I've just about got Zap's templates sorted now. I need to work on its menu structure, because it's very naff at the moment. Once that is done I can go back to the Keymap and the colour scheme. Although the colours may have to be done at the same time because they really annoy me!
Oh, Jason rang tonight ! He's having a day out with Chris - he's at Essex Uni again for no apparent reason apart from the fact that there are generally cute women there. I miss it too.
That's what Mostly Autumn remind me of! Barclay James Harvest! Hmm... I'll
just return to Zap'ing shall I ? Hmm. It's 2:30. Maybe bed is a better idea.
Yes, I think so. Zap menus are done for now anyhow; I'll start on the keymap
and colours tomorrow and see how things go. First thing - Ctrl-A is select
all .
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Oh, LastMinute.com got back to me with a standard reply, so I've probably been ignored. On the other hand, I got loads of mail from Tesco yesterday about the problems I was having. They seem to be genuinely helpful, which is nice. If nothing else, I'll be happy to go back there because I got some response from their support people.
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25 to midnight is too late for Ally McBeal; I'm just too knackered by then (well, now) to be watch it with any real interest.
Music tonight brought to you by
![[Artist]](../images/artist.png){kind=small}
John Wesley...
"The Love Songs Album - the greatest love songs of all time" Oddly, it contains only tracks from about the last ten years. I'd be surprised if it wasn't so expected. (ok, that sounds obvious, but there you go)
Updated StrongHelp to use a Dynamic area today. No work on Slige. Sorry.
Four days.
One commentator today mentioned to me that they would suggest using splitf
and joinf instead of using zip across discs. Yes, I'm quite aware of splitf
and joinf and have been since I had to use them to transfer ARMLinux from uni
- possibly the worst experience with DOS discs ever. It's not a case of using
Zip for splitting files now, but when I originally archived Turbo C in '94,
the only thing I had to archive such a large thing was PKZip. That's all. I'm
probably going to offend the author but... come on, I generally know what I'm
doing. There is a difference of six years between archiving that and my next
use of it. There's been considerable change since then. My point was to say
that it can sometimes be very hard to use yesterday's technology in today's
world. 
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There are some problems, it appears, with Slige generated levels from my RISC
OS version when Dave Chess compiles it on his PC with VC++. Which is curious.
But what I'm going to try and do is to compile it under DOS with Borland
Turbo C++ and see what happens. Since this is the only compiler I have for
the PC at the moment I'll just have to cope - I'll download djgpp tomorrow if
I get a chance. Admittedly I've had to download an updated pkunzip because
nothing else supports zips split across floppies and that's how I archived it
last time. There's a load of old things I wrote in that archive too. Weird how
you forget these things .
Ok, so that's not a good idea; I can't seem to get it to do anything useful as it only appears to have about 380k free and doesn't want to use extended memory. This is what you get for using ancient DOS programs, you see.
I'm watching gcc take a 500k C file and munge it into something resembling code. It's odd how the visual representation of that is a flashing cursor.
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Let's just get this straight. I've just been looking at The Register's article about about some wonderful website that's been getting lots of awards. The site directly mentioned, if you care to visit it is CyberBritain. Be unimpressed. I was. I judge webmasters ability to understand the principles of the web by not their skill on implementing JavaScript, snazzy graphics or any other things, but on whether I can read it. If they provide the valid colours so that it 'works' on my white on black style then it's got past the first hurdle. This site didn't. Next is the 'have you got any alt tags on the images so that I can use a slow modem' category. It fails on that. Then comes the 'have you got a site that requires frames where they're not really needed ?' category. The many that pass the previous two tests (The Register doesn't pass the first, by the way) pass this because they know how irritating it is. CyberBritain fails there too. It's one big frame page with lots of tables in it.
"What's the content like ?" I hear you ask. Well, usually I ignore content on sites such as this, because I've not been able to read anything. But I'll make an exception, because it's meant to be so great. So, with my black and white clour scheme in place (I can't read it otherwise) I go wandering off... To find Weeting. No. No weeting. But that's not surprising. Methwold has a link; it is a link though. But because we've got frames it looks like it's part of the site. Of course, also because of this you can't navigate properly and pressing back takes you to the previous page that linked you to that frame - ie The Register article, and not the frame. To say that's irritating is to understate things. Of course, you just have to remember to use the frame navigation buttons instead. Irritating ? Yes. So basically the actual page provides very little content. Purely links. Yeah, links are fine. Let's see if we can find out how to contact the webmaster...
Oh dear. This is very cool. I can't find a link to a contact address - which is impressive in itself. But I in looking, I find that the 'Pr' of Promotion is linked. I think "Ok, let's see what it is". It takes me to 'SexySearch.co.uk'. Which appear to be a porn search engine and organised list of links. I've had a quick scan (well, you do, don't you?) to see what I think, and yes, you can find an amount of material you wouldn't probably want your kids finding at school. Why do I say that ? Because it was just before finding that link that I was thinking that it would be a reasonably useful resource for a kid at school to use as a research for projects on the local area. They always seem to do them.
Of course, as I read through the remainder of the article on The Register, I see that this is mentioned there...
In any case, I'm not all that impressed. Which seems to be The Register's impression. Anyhow, as I'm on this little thing, I'll pop to 'LastMinute.com' which is apparently the top 'British Internet Icon' and see what I think. Let's hope there's no porn here. I'm not intending to make a habit of giving quick reviews of sites, but just once or twice. Ok, it's taking ages to download, but I think that's just because NDirect are being slow.
Ok, we've got some white links on light blue. That's good. Oh, and black text on a black background. That's a "I forgot to define the background colour". A more rare failing, but still a 'duh!' award. Let's wander over to the 'valentines' part of the site. Remember it's not that far away. Get your cards in the post otherwise they won't arrive on time. Ok, this section has to have both backgrounds and foregrounds turned off. And I can't read the graphics in this way - it needs to be fully filled if people are going to anti-alias and not just made purely transparent. Let's try 'gifts'. Got to be interesting. I really don't like this three column view. The 'things' are in the far column and just go on for ages squashed up'. I'm going to try 'roses' because I'm like that - I like roses, I think they're romantic. Ah. Clicking on 'Next step' gives me an error :
A database error occured. ROUTINE: GetBusinessConnection ERROR NUMBER: -2147467259 ERROR: [Informix][Odbc Informix Driver]General error. Insufficient Connection information was supplied Response object error 'ASP 0156 : 80004005' Header Error /lmn/i_standard_expansions.asp, line 74 The HTTP headers are already written to the client browser. Any HTTP header modifications must be made before writing page content.
Probably that means that "Your browser didn't provide all the information we need; even though it conforms to the standards we really could do with something that is an Apache-ism" or "Your browser doesn't conform to the standard, but we don't know how to cope with that, so we'll give the user an impossible to decipher error message on the grounds that they'll complain and tell us about the problem."
Of course, this means I've got to find out who to tell. Let's go hunting the contact address. Ooh! A 'Contact us' page linked from the main page. I have to go back to the root though, because it's using frames and I want to keep the error on the screen - so much easier to provide the name of the webmaster with the error page, don't you think ?
I think I come under the category of 'A customer' I guess... And that animated GIF in the corner is beginning to annoy me. Ok, that's them mailed.
I've been having something of a day for complaining to webmasters. I'd tell you about the TescoDirect fiasco, but it'd take too long. There's so many problems I had with their site, trying to even use parts of it was impossible because of the way it was set up. In any case, I mailed them to ask about the problems I was having and to see if they know how to fix them.
I am vaguely technical. I know whereof I speak, generally about things HTML or HTTP based, so I know that things aren't always as easy as I might make out. But colours being wrong ? What does that say for the other things, especially if you discount that and still can't get to the actual content. I'm not saying that my website is perfect, but it doesn't have any major bugs and I do fix them relatively quickly when people point them out (and usually reply to them if they supply and email address).
But then, I'm not an Internet business. And if you're an Internet business you just have to say so to people, they give you money and then you produce something that doesn't work. Well, the latter isn't always true, but it does seem that there are no 'big' Internet businesses that actually making money. Unless I've just been getting the wrong impression from the news stories I've read.
Anyhow, that's enough of an entry for tonight I think.
I'm back after watching a Friends, a DS9 and a Stargate. I shouldn't really watch Friends because it tends to leave me thinking... well, you know...
New version of Slige (485) today. All of about ten minutes to apply the changes I've made, but a further hour and a half to make it into a single non-library requiring file so that Dave Chess can have it back.
Music tonight was brought to you by Richard Marx (Hazard) and Phil Collins (the Face Value album).
Baring in mind what I've said above about webmasters talking about colours, I've had three emails tonight about one of the sites that had problems as the webmaster fixed it. I've not had a chance to mail back, but I will tomorrow when I'm more awake. Before I go to bed tonight I'm going to see if I can dig out Lemmings from the Games Zip disc.
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Listening to some new music today from home. I've got Duke (Genesis) now, so I can finally say that I've got all the Genesis I ever need (well, actually I'm missing the early stuff, but that's not on CD at home either. And Dad sent up the Mostly Autum album which he likes. I took a random selection and picked 'Shindig' (track 7). It's really amazing. Well, I think it's great - it's an instrumental, running straight into the next track and it just builds up really well and sounds great. He also sent up Tristan Park who I didn't think much to in concert, but Dad says he's got into. Well, the little listen I had to it said it was all very samey, and I wasn't too impressed. I may just have to listen to it again when I'm less tired.
Oh, I hate module tasks with stacks in RMA. I do. Oh, yes I do. Don't even ask me about them. Ok ? I've been beating my head against a brick wall with this one and come to the conclusion that "It's impossible". Trust me on this.
Confession time. I sent Helen an SMS last night. I was tired. I'd had a
couple of glasses of wine. So there you go.
Matthew's fixed my 'Serial hardware has gone walkies' bug, by the way.
Depressingly little email today. That is, none.
Rob Kendrick gets todays "Twat of the day" award for irritating me. I pop on to IRC to see if there's anyone worth talking to. There isn't. So I leave. Next I get a barrage of people trying to talk to me, because Rob tells them that it'd be fun. Yes. It's obviously fun to annoy someone that doesn't want to talk to you. People who do something to annoy me, generally annoy me. Odd that. There's nothing worse than someone who is trying to irritate you. He earns a further "twat of the day" award a denial of service attack on my machine whilst I'm trying to use it. Since that's against the AUP of most reputable providers, I'm slightly miffed.
Wahey. To further the general irritance today, I've got a little email from a webmaster (Warren Young at cyberport.com) who believes that users that change the default settings on their web browsers "deserve what they get".
Probably I get worked up too much over these sorts of things. How about I do something else ?
My Frankie Goes To Hollywood CD appears to skip on Black Night White Light. Which is slightly annoying. I think it probably needs a bit of a clean.
Lots of work on CMunge tonight. If I see any more of it I'm going to scream. I enjoy the work, but the stuff I've just done is very hacky. CMunge needs a little tidy up now, I think. It's to the point where I can't really keep up with what nastiness I've hacked into it. I need to reorganise the sections relating to the special casing of the handler routines specific to callers. Also additional error identifiers would be nice, so that we don't have to provide them ourselves each time (an add_error_identifier routine?). I don't know when the next version of CMunge will come out. I'm really not happy with the bits I've done today. It's very... icky...
... and I've not done any more discs today, so they're still spread all over
the room. Matthew's parents were here today. I've not idea what they thought
to my place being a tip .
I know, I know. I'm easily irritable at the moment, and I've got double standards about some things. But hell, I don't care.
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Apparently Julian and Simon are playing with Sky Digital at the moment. It seems like it's quite fun. I do wonder if it's useful though. Lots of things that are fun generally aren't.
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The police inspector gets out of his car to investigate the murder in the museum.[ "Arriving at the murder", Midsomer Murders ] |
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Looking through old discs today, I came across the following email I sent to someone. It's got not relevant to anything but I found it amusing...
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> I hope you are well and I look forward to hearing all the gossip.[ Old email, found lying around ] |
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Hmm... I'm wondering - basically I've this pile of floppy discs lying on the floor at the moment. Would anyone be interested in taking them off my hands ? It's just a thought, but there might be someone who is... erm... sad enough to be interested in some of the stuff I've done in the dim and distant past. None of it is amazingly interesting. Well, not unless you like reading the emails I sent from uni and seeing some of the strange things I have archived. Ok, it was a silly idea.
Coo... Some weird stuff on these discs - I've just found my A Level Computer Science mock exam and project work, as well as the Pascal work we did at the time. It's not particularly great, because most of it is assignments. Unfortunately, when I was bored I stopped doing assignments and started writing a 6502 Assembler and Interpreter. Some might say I could have done with a life. I had a girlfriend at that time too. Gawd, I was just as sad though.
Guttorm's StrongHelp manuals dated 8th June 1995. Wow. Before I got my mits on them and updated them to contain all sorts of stuff.
Julian's just rung up. It's 25 to midnight and Julian's just rung. Well, he's at uni. So he's allowed. Actually he rang to tell me Ally McBeal's on. Which is quite cool, so I'll leave an Alarm on.
Anyone else want to remind me it's valentines day ? It seems I can't quite get away from the fact that it's soon. Remember that it was Grandads birthday on that day too. Which is something that's generally hard to forget. Anyhow, all cards to Brickall Cottage, Weston Upon Avon, Warwickshire.
I love the ads for American Beauty. It's great. It's been nominated for all these awards and stuff. Apparently. But I haven't got a clue what it's about. And because they don't even make the effort to tell me, I really don't care to see it. The hype of films generally means that they have to say what every one else said about it because they don't have any story to tell of. Well, that's all I can think. Because that's all the impression they leave me with.
Budweiser update: The frogs got away !
I've probably not been watching telly much, but today is the first time I've seen the next Budweiser advert after the sign falls.
Well, I've copied 80Mb of Floppy discs so far. Logically that's around 75 discs, I guess... To look at the number lying around you'd think it was much more.
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Yay. A new month. Cool, huh. Happens every so often. Well, I had Amanda and Mum here yesterday and the day before. Which was fun. Amanda's nice. Amanda seemed to take a strange interest in the fact that the diary is available to everyone on the internet. She's kinda like I expected and kinda not. Which is not unsurprising, as people generally are when you meet them.
They also brought up loads of my old stuff from home, so I'm sitting here
with a large box of floppy discs to sort through at some point. I've sorted
all the paper out now, I think. It needs looking at more, but it's not too
much trouble. Only one and a half black bags of rubbish to go out. Since this
is me, it was quite hard to do that, but it's quite reasonable really when I
think about it. Almost everything I threw out was so mind-numbingly trivial,
or could be obtained again. For example, I had to throw out The Time Machine,
War Of The Worlds, A Christmas Carol and The Island Of Dr Moreau. I used to
print out books to read whilst at uni, 'cos the printer was free and then
take them home to read. Stingy ? Moi ? Nah... But I've got most of
them on discs somewhere now, or I can download them, so I'm not so worried
now.
There's all my old Uni stuff, my GCSE Computer Science project, my A Level Computer Science project and my final year Uni project. It's a lot of paper, but it's definately worth it because I can look at them and say "I did that. That was damned good." Most of it still is. Most people did dull things as their projects though.
I also found a load of letters to Helen that never got sent. They're all sitting in a folder on the side waiting to be typed up so that they're never lost. It's that thing about not destroying things, you see... I can then throw away the physical letters and they'll never be lost. That's the idea anyhow.
And today, I've got a headache. Why ? Because we've been meeting a deadline
and it's been quite tiring. Plus we didn't get to bed until late last night
'cos we were chatting.
Oh, and Angela and a few others pointed out a couple of problems with the diary. Hopefully I've fixed them now! Thanks!
Lots of email today. 43 messages. I think most of it is likely to be DynDNS mailing list, but the rest... well... I'll just have to wait and see.
I've updated the statistics page a little. It now includes links to the days in question, so where the question isn't obvious it may help. I may include a 'reference' field at some point because "Do you think I'm doing the right thing" isn't exactly descriptive.
Thanks to the person that mailed me to say "It says January, not February". I've fixed that. Basically at the start of each month there's a few files that need changing and I tend to have forgotten what needs doing. I'll make it much better one day.
Interesting thing on the Buffy site. Go to a postcard I sent myself and then change the URL's number to show different peoples messages to one another. It seems that not all of the messages are there, but... well, it's strange to have it so open. You never know. You might find out something you weren't meant to. They delete them regularly, so if you're visiting this in a while you may find that you have to bump the number by quite a bit. Some of the messages look like plants though. To me, anyhow.
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