Nice email today from Vanessa. 'Intriguing' was her word for the diary. I guess it is in some ways.

And an email from Alistair too... I will ring him tomorrow... Honest.

I'll work out a way to transfer emails to the Psion at some point, so that I can reply to them. As yet, I've no idea how.

I'll try out a form submission thingy, just to see what I think of it. I just thought it might be nice to get a little feedback.

I've not been writing much in the diary recently; mostly it's because I'm very tired and don't have much to talk about. Last week I failed to mention 'Techno Games'. Which, if you saw it, you'll agree was probably for the best. It could have been good, and bits of it were. But they were few and far between. I wasn't particularly impressed really by the program. I was impressed by Skeletron - a human shaped robot for climbing ropes. Whilst they were placed against a university team that had built a glorified pair or rollers and completed the climb in three seconds, they got the most impressive award from me, and took the games innovation award (or whatever it was). Theirs was really impressive.

And on Robot Wars, there was the Díotíor team, whose name I can't spell. They had their robot dismantled by Customs on the way over from Ireland and had to rebuild it on the day. Impressive ? Yes. And then the titles for the program gave the name in at least three forms, swapping the second i and o around, and moving the accent. Now I don't say that I've got the accent in the right place, but... they were great .

Anyhow; meeting in Cambridge tomorrow. Must sleep.

EasySocket debugging tonight; two bugs - both minor. 'true' is set to -1, when it is implied that the socket SWIs get passed 1. The difference is... well, nothing at all, because it's defined to be 0 for off, other values for on. But better to be consistent anyhow. And the other one was a sheer laziness problem; I was writing back to the module explicitly. That's now fixed, and we use the stack. Still doesn't explain why lots of listening sockets (or at least an FTP client) will generally cripple the machine after a number of connections (about a hundred or so, it seems). It's there. I just can't find the bugger . In the meantime I've reached version 1.14 and the release is only 1.08... which means I ought to release it sometime soon.

I get up in the evening; And I ain't got nothing to say. I come home in the morning; I go to the bed feeling the same way. I ain't nothing but tired; Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself. Hey now baby, I could just a little help. You can't start a fire; You can't start a fire without a spark. This gun's for hire; Even if we're just dancing in the dark. [ Dancing in the Dark, from Born In The USA, by Bruce Springsteen ]

Entry for yesterday night as well, because when I went to bed I was just a little too tired really. I thought I'd try playing Half Life; just to see how I could get on. That was at about half midnight. When it got to half six I noticed it was getting light. So I thought I'd go to bed. It's fun. At that point I was in the office complex, trying to get up a lift shaft that I had to run and jump at (it turns out).

Anyhow, I gave Robin a ring to ask how to do it and he said it was just a jump; it turns out that he's now finished it. I've got a little way to go then . After that I had a bit of a rest (it being about three-ish and being tired still... Then David arrived with Vanessa. I don't even know her last name . Anyhow, David (Gamble, from Colchester) is at Warwick uni and does fun sort of promoting stuff for the music he likes. I've got to admit that I can't get into it, but I have tried. It just doesn't seem to have much to it. But there you go. Anyhow, we went out for tea, and then came home and chatted for ages. The main things I remember are David's cunning 'spin some circles on the screen' program that he 'knocked up' with the remote keyboard (I was just showing him that it was possible to do things with it ), and Vanessa listening to tracks from just about every artist I have on the harddrive! Well, maybe not all, but certainly most of them. Ok, so I'm not a good conversationalist, but it's nice to have someone to talk to. That's my own fault for not going out.

Oh, I forgot to mention over the last few days (because I've been lax about making entries), but a bird got caught in the roof on Thursday morning, and was floundering about between the ceiling and the roof. I think a cat chased him in to one of the holes outside. Anyhow, it's been flapping about up there and we couldn't find any way of getting him out. On Friday morning he was so noisy that he woke me up at about 5am until I got up. Ok, so maybe I could have done more to try and get him out and I feel very guilty now that I didn't - I guess I just assumed he'd find the way out that he came in.

Anyhow, Matthew went home on Friday, so I was on my own. Hence why I was playing Half Life. But in any case, on Saturday morning (this morning) I woke up to the sound of one of the latches being locked (or unlocked - they do sound quite similar) which I thought strange as there was nobody in the house. So up I get and walk into the living room - to see a bird fly into the kitchen. So, the bird got out of the gap between the roof and the ceiling, and into the main house. There's no holes in the ceiling that I can see, and it can't have got in in my room, because my door was shut, so it couldn't have reached the living room. So now I'm looking for a magician bird, able to pass through walls. Bizarre.

Anyhow, David and Vanessa left about eleven, and I was able to play Half Life. Well, that doesn't mean that they stopped me; just that I did after they left. So I'm now up to 'Silo D' with three nice sound sensitive fingers tapping away in the test chamber. I've got the power on, and I've started the fan. However, the control panel for a test launch says that it needs oxygen and fuel. I couldn't see any other route to go down, so I decided to call it a night. Plus, I'm down to ten grenades now. No ammo. Just grenades. Which is less fun than an unfun thing on an unfun day.

Half Life is great; the sound effects are very cool, the graphics are cool. Although having said that, the Direct3D drivers gives 'dotty' effects every so often and is annoying, and the OpenGL drivers make straight lines jagged and sometimes flickers like mad when you start the game (you have to return to the menu and restart the game). But other than that, it's quite cool. I did find myself stuck at one point in a room with no way out, and ended up writing my name on the wall with a variety of weapons. Oh, and stepping on vermin. It's amazing the attention to detail on such little things. I don't mind some of the bigger problems (like the graphics, or the unrealistic friction effects with pushing and pulling) because of the little bugs that you can stand on. Well, I say 'can stand on'. I mean they scuttle about and die when you kill them, including standing on them.

It was nice seeing David again after such a long time. He's doing a lot of stuff, and seems to be much more overstretched than I ever was. But then that's up to him. And Vanessa. Well, she's a Biology student. She wants to spent time in education, doing a PhD after this degree. Sounds like fun, but it's expensive. I keep forgetting the lack of a grant nowadays. I do think that's a very big problem for most students. But the argument that most students merely get out an additional loan and then spend that on drink, whilst spending their grant on living, holds more water than you might think.

Anyhow, Vanessa has some quite diverse taste in music. And, like everyone else I've spoken to who has recommended music, she's recommended Matchbox 20. Which means I'm just going to have to listen to some. Hmm .

They seem to have a strange relationship. They're not seeing one another. But they are stopping together at the moment. For convenience, which I can understand. But there does seem to be something there, to my mind. Pah, maybe I'm seeing things that aren't, but they're nice together. She's also older, which is good for him. Not meant in a bad way, I assure you! In any case, it's none of my business.

Anyhow, I'll have to pop up and see them sometime. Really, I must!

Didn't get to see 'Randall and Hopkirk' today. Which is a pity, but then again you can't have everything. It'll be shown again anyhow. Oh, and the clocks went forward today too, it seems. Windows reminded me when I quit Half Life, which was rather fun. Admittedly I did check with Teletext first, before I believed it, but that's just common sense .

And that's about everything for today. I feel I'll be in Stewart's bad books, for various reasons, on Monday. But then again, I'm used to that . Bed time now. Sleep. Perchance to dream. Maybe.

Nice comment today from David (Henty, I think!) about problems with the links on my diary index pages. They should all be fixed now .

Ok, so I watched Techo Games today. Well, that's not very good. Maybe it's just not Robot Wars. Budget today; didn't pay much attention. Email from Amanda a little while ago, which I'm finally replying to. Started doing some more fun stuff with the sound system. Where did *SoundGain come from ? 'cos the source says it's new to RISC OS 4. I'm going to see how long it takes for people to find that little one, because we've had the OS for about a year and a half, and we've not noticed until today. Which kinda says something - it says we've not looked at the sound system since we started with the Ursula betas!

Developer site update at work today, and lots of funness. Ok, so that's a lie. But in any case, the developer site has moved now, and it looks quite neat, if I do say so. I've got to admit that websites that I design have a very similar look to them. Reason is simple - I like that look; it may not be the most technically impressive, but should work on every browser, even non-tables browsers. Actually non-tables might be a bit of a problem... No, I lie... the way that it's done means that it is actually quite a generic. Cool.

Spent most of today working on Bugz and the developer site. Fun. Oh, and played with the sound system a little at home for the laugh.

Watched the end of Farscape, amused myself by watching Cry Wolf too, which is silly and quite funny. I think. It's one of those things that I can't tell if I like or not. I think I do.

It seems to be that to make a 'weblog' most people just stick in links to sites that they've visited and comment on. I don't really want to be tarred with the same brush. I don't write this for links. Although I include them and I include other things too like feedback sections, but it's not for that. Indeed I detest that whole way of working because you become a portal in your own right - your own little links list. Whilst I once found it to be useful to have my own hotlist 'live' as I updated it, it's now something of a passé thing. Nobody wants to see other peoples lists of links, unless they are a definitive list. Portals are here to stay, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Ok, so I'm going to quickly cite a particular example of a peice that so makes me want to just leave that community... 'Chicago Tribune' "A weblog is a web site that maintains a constantly updated list of links to other sites". Ok, so I'm actually quoting weblogs, and in the process of citing that URL I'm doing a thing I dislike, but it's not about linking. It's about having your say. The wrong thing is being emphasised. The same thing happens with Portals. Look at daja news now. Oh. Sorry, you can't. Because it's deja, now. They lost the 'news' somewhere. Where, I don't know. Look at the top of the page if you wander over there some time. You'll find a little link to 'discussions'. If you're lucky, that is. The rest of the page is devoted to... what ? I don't know... it's just got that 'portal' look about it that immediately makes you go for what you want to know - information from the newsgroups. Further example ? Lycos ? There's this little section at the top. Then when you enter your search you get a little section in the middle of the page that is your results, squashed between a load of adverts and links. Take Yahoo - please! Another website (along with lycos) that doesn't seem to have webmasters that understand the concept of using colours correctly. Ok, we have a 'big' box on this one for our link. But then we have a further page of links. It's a mess. Really it is. But then you do a search! Joy of joy! They have some lovely full browser width sections. You can read it. Wow. Impressed ? I think I am. Almost as impressed as I am at google, which is a very nice search engine. As is AcornSearch. However, my search engine of choice is full of these links and portal-like things. Yes, AltaVista is that one. The thing is that AltaVista are the only ones who actually have a homepage that has the right colours (well, excluding Google, but then google have Clue). Annoyingly you do a search and the header of the page you get back has nothing useful on it. Otherwise, the content is fine. Amazon ? Well, it's got the right colours, but it's four pages (on my little browser window (768x480, or something similar ?)) of just links. Ok, so it's the homepage, but... still...

I'm doing what I hate by doing that lot aren't I ? I think I preferred it whilst agonising over Helen.

Just about the most scarey product I've seen in a while. I'd like it to be noted that I was following a news story link to find this. I'd also like to point out that it's probably offensive to some people. Hell, it's offensive to me! RealDoll. Hmm. Thinking about it, I'm promoting the site by citing that. But, that's life. If you're into the bizarre and weird, then at least look. And then revel in the fact that you're not quite as weird as you thought. Or if you are, then you're too weird. Go away.

Lots of work on Bugz this weekend, and added the final bits to the thermo goggles to Doom. They nearly work right, unfortunately snow and transluceny monsters appear wrong. Oh, and lost souls appear green for some reason.

Bugz is so cool. Need I say more ? Hopefully it'll go out to Developers this week, and then to the general public once it has had a little more time spent on it. I think this is probably the best use of my time this weekend (excepting the time spent on SpriteExtend which was... illuminating). And it's amazingly fun. Just because it's work doesn't mean it can't be fun.

Spent hours on the phone tonight to Julian and Chris (CejDav Chris, that is!). I must stop doing that! Consequently, I'm completely knackered and haven't got much interesting to say. I'm quite pleased I managed to talk to Julian for so long. Usually, we've not got much to say, but tonight was quite nice.

[ Entry from Psion ]

Tuesday done with. Not amazingly interesting, although I was in for 8:30 today because Dave (thanks Dave!) gave me a lift. Got to see half-life for the first time too... It's quite impressive. No, it's very impressive .

Robin gave me a lift back - I don't fancy walking back in the dark -at about 7, so I wasn't in too late ! Spent most of my time at home on the phone to Chris, pestering him unfairly. Sorry Chris! Nothing much else happening; spent the rest of the night hunting a bug through FontManager, SpriteExtend, Kernel and ColourTrans. I forget what the original query was !

Why not pop along to the smurfs-eye-view of the diary

Spent ages chatting to people on the phone today. To Dad about work and stuff, to Chris about, erm... work and stuff, and to Peter about... well, Hexen. I've fixed a minor bug in Hexen that leaves it almost devoid of any advantage in 24bpp over 256 colour modes. And I've played with Doom, optimising a few things and adding a few others.

I'm just eating some plain chocolate; I'd forgotten how amazingly sickly it gets if you eat it quickly!

I've got to walk in to work tomorrow, so I'll not be up till all hours tonight. 'cos that would be dim .

Anyone got a mapping for this ?

01101110 -> 10010101 n
01101111 -> 10010010 o
01110101 -> 00110000 u
01111001 -> 10101111 y

If you're interested, it's the character base sequence for a particular PFR file for the accented n, o, u and y characters. The mapping is self consistent, but doesn't seem to be anything I can spot. Yet. I'll publish my findings in a little while, if I can find a way of organising and documenting them.

As I was a surfing, one morning in spring, I spied a purple web site a-linked to from userland; For it was a log and it linked to .found., And I was amused by it and liked having it around; 'Oh, author, oh author, will you answer me ? For your page is purple and pretty, I see.' [ A short poem to the tune of 'The Bold Grenadier'; Justin ]

Go look at /usr/bin/girl if you're bored... it's... different.

[ Entry from Psion ]

Well, that's the weekend over. Nothing special; spent a large amount of time on the phone. And the rest was hunting out bugs in the new Doom stuff. I'm intending to do some work on the build system soon, but I've not really had the inclination, unfortunately.

[ Entry from Psion ]

It's strange to be making this particular entry. For one thing, I'm making it on the Psion for the first time, and for another I've got the house all to myself. Matthew's gone home for a little while.

I'm just sitting here watching Telly (well, I'm waiting for Buffy to start) and aching. I've still got a sore neck from this morning. I don't think that I slept very well, and can't move it past about 60 degrees.

'Video Nation' sections are generally pretty awful, and the one I've just seen is no exception. Ah, well... Buffy's just started, so I'll go watch it... Night!!

Very, very dull day today, where very little was achieved. On the up side, I got to speak to Peter and Julia again. He seems to be enjoying having this week off .

David Chess has one of these 'get to know things about your friends that you probably knew but it's fun anyhow' things. You get a number of them as chain mails. I thought "Oh, I'll fill it in, and then others can see my responses." But then I thought... If anyone wants to know, they can mail me, and that's only if I haven't already said... And I've said a lot of rubbish on here...

One thing that did crop up is the question about Snapple. Snapple is a TM, I think, for a particular brand of (expensive) soft drink. At least I have it in my head that it's expensive. It's probably not. But it's not something I know well... Correct me if I'm wrong .

Ooh... Cold shiver - the footsteps on the start of "The Spirit Of Autumn Past (Part 1)" just makes me feel cold . It's a slow piano section, so I'm obviously going to like it... it's got a bit of Floyd about it too...

Woo... Four games of Patience in a row. That's rather cool. That makes a total of 162 won to 72 lost. Given that that is about... erm... three and a bit months of Patience, that's not too bad...

Mostly Autum just finished (Well, end of "...Spirit..." and I can't seem to listen to "The Gap Is Too Wide"; the album should end there). Decided to pick a random track from the collection. Picked Lutricia McNeal "Stranded". It's a woman singer, which isn't a good track. I like it, but it's not something I want to listen to now... it's a little too 'plastic'. If you know what I mean. So, Kate Bush "Running up that Hill" is what we get instead...

I might put together a little app to log the tracks that are played per day. I'm not sure how interesting that would be, particularly as it would probably mean that you'd see the same tracks coming up again and again. Hmm... Interesting idea though...

I'm bored. So I'm going online to see if there's any more interesting things happening mail-wise. I doubt it, but I'm putting off doing some work that I had told myself I'd do tonight.

I don't have any Bonnie Tyler! I've just realised as I looked for ... erm... a track I've now forgotten the name of! Total Eclipse of the Heart ? Let's see what AudioFind has to say for itself... As I've usually found, it says "Nope".

I've got a little example program in BASIC now to handle a number of Taskwindows and display the output in a window. It's rather nice actually. No documentation, but if anyone wants a copy...

Apparently it was pancake day yesterday. Oh well.

Hmm... If you submitted a reply to the question about the challenge at 8am GMT and you on the 7th March, then it didn't get through - I didn't get a yes, or a no, just the details that you'd submitted something...

More nomic stuff on Dave Chess' pages... It's good fun this, although however hard I try I can't seem to get a higher score... I'm pushing to reduce the scores rather than to increase my own, thus reducing the gap. I'm not sure it's going to work, but I have reduced Bovine's lead by about 70, I think in one move... That was sort of planned... but the problem is adding a rule that is unscoring...

Oh, I had so much fun with the nomic today. It's so great.

I see that Helen has been back on IRC recently, which is reassuring. I thought she'd left for good, but after an absence of about a month, she came back on... erm... Sunday, if I've done the maths right...

Anyone had any luck with the Stream yet ? I'm guessing not, because it's not all that easy really - through poor design rather than being too hard.

Anyhow, I'd better get to bed.

Oh, we've had an idea for the Foundation. Hopefully, this will be useful to us at ROL. It'll go out in the next newsletter if we get permission for it anyhow. Sorry, I said I'd not talk shop...

Went and bought some CDs today and found some cool music. I finally bought 'Mama' (Genesis) which I've not got. I think it's the only one I'm missing apart from the early stuff, so now I have to work my way backwards. I've got a copy of Radiation (Marillion) now too, which I think gets me all the albums excepting marillion.com. From what I've heard, it's going to take a little while to get into. Radiation, on the other hand, has some lovely catchy bits on it such as "These Chains", and "Under the sun". I also got myself a copy of 'From Time To Time' (Paul Young) which I listened to on the way to the concert with Dad last week and had forgotten how much I enjoyed it.

I also managed, over the last few days, to find copies of "The Boys Of Summer" (Don Henley) which I've not heard in ages and is really cool, "Run to you" and "Summer of 69" (Bryan Adams) which I think are about my favourite tracks of his (although "When you're gone" is kinda growing on me).

I'm just looking at Mama now. It's a Japanese import, which I've seen before but I've never really had the nerve to see how different they would be. Obviously the music is the same, but they're in a card sleave, which is odd in itself. As well as a virgin inlay advertising other groups (in Japanese, of course), there are a miniture lyric sheet, just like the vinyl version (parents don't have the CD, I don't think... or if they have, I've not borrowed it yet!). Plus, there's a folded paper inlay with the lyrics in English and Japanese as well as... and I was surprised by this... the family tree for the group Well, it pleases me because they're just so interesting to see who exactly begat whom. It's up to date too, with Ray Wilson (formerly of Stiltskin) in the final (current) line up.

Lots of fiddling with Zap today to make it into the 'current' 1.44 (test 2) version. In theory it's about there, there's a lot of messing with my version because my menu structure is very, very, much in flux. It's... well... The main menu has 5 entries on it. That says something for it. Good design or bad design, I'm not sure, but I'm getting happier with it.

Ooh! ArmTCP has moved. It's now on the left of Apps. Which is the correct place for it in the new-world-order. Neat, huh ?

Cool. 'Someone' has taken up the challenge of deciphering that stream of binary digits I put on my website. I don't know who it is, but good luck to them. It's not too hard to spot a number of patterns. The first one should come about five minutes into looking at it, maximum. After that... well, that depends...

Had a very strange dream last night. I was at a meeting, I think, in a hotel in a town. But the meeting had been called off, and I was left to my own devices with some other people. We met some friends of mine and... well, I think we ended up camped on a number of benches in the hotel in brightly colour sleeping bags. It was day, too. Anyhow, on getting up, we decided to see the town. I think I had only a little while there and then had to get a train home. Or somewhere. Anyhow, Helen and I (didn't I mention one of the friends was Helen ? Ok, one of the friends was Helen) went for a walk around the town. She was dressed up like it was going to snow heavily. You could hardly even see her face. And she didn't say hardly anything but mono-syllables (hmm... now that sounds very familiar...) but... well... dreams are like that and you know what someone means. Anyhow, we walked around town and then decided to go to the fair at the bottom of town. It was on a slope you see... Then I woke up.

Matthew's off home for a week next week, so I've got to work out how to get into work without his car. Which is going to be interesting. He suggested I could get a bike. Which is a good idea, but it really is years since I rode and for all they say, I'm not sure I'd actually be much good, and the roads around stratford scare the hell out of me at the best of times. So I'm not keen on that. I'd rather walk than ride, I think. My next choice is to get a taxi in, but that's quite expensive. So, I'll have to think of something. At this rate I'll just be walking.

Didn't get any chance to look at the PFRs tonight.

One thing I forgot about yesterday was that in the 'Behind the Planet of the Apes' documentary (talking about the making of the films) they described the making of the Statue Of Liberty scene at the end of the first film. I had always assumed that they had built the top of the statue, in a sort of melted form. Either that, or a model which looked like it because of the distance. But no, infact they overlaid a picture the Statue onto the rocks that were already there in post-production. Strange!

Designed some nice help pages for Doom, but the total size of the draw files and GIFs is about 3Mb, so I'm not going to upload them. Plus the fact that at the moment I don't have anywhere to upload them to... They don't quite fit into the Doom section of my site.

I had a look at pfr's yesterday, as David Chess has been talking about them lots. It seems that they consisted of a form of tagged file. I'm not really looking at them too hard, as I would assume that they would be quite hard to decode, but still... it's a challenge. I like the idea of working with a source that you don't know - an encrypted or encoded source data - and trying to end up with something intelligible. One of the things that sort of stems from earlier musings on a 'way' of talking to an intelligent species with whom there are no comonalities; which was later spurred into further thought after reading Contact, yet more by David Chess (yeah, I know... I should get out more!) buying a copy of the Codex Seraph-what-ever-it-is and then links from things related to that to the VMS - a 'real' manuscript with no known interpretation, or way of knowing if it is interpretable. Which kinda brings me back to the Doom stuff I did today - the descriptions are encoded such that they can be read. If you have the key.

Soon after reading Contact, I attempted to write a short example script based on the principles given in the book... Actually, I may as well release that out into the wild. Imagine that you're receiving a binary sequence from somewhere. That file is the sequence. Spot the patterns, and decipher the content. No clues given.

It was a cold night in December, The snow lay on the ground, She was coming home from school one night, On the other side of town. It was getting late, There was something wrong; Then I heard the news. A TV flash, By nine o'clock, They'd found her socks and shoes. [ Daddy, from In The Hot Seat, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer ]

I wouldn't say this was one of my favourite tracks. Because of its content, it's a quite disturbing track really. But maybe it is that that makes it so appealing. It's a story about something you try not to think about, but it happens.

Oooh... Wrote a little banner program today, which was kinda fun. Spent ages trying to find what turned out to be a minor issue with SpriteExtend. The banner looks kinda cool. Well, I like it anyhow, even if it does take up far too much memory .

Watched 'Planet of the Apes' today. Again. I'd forgotten a lot of things about it, to be honest.

We only stay in orbit, For a moment of time, And then you're everybody's satellite, I wish that you were mine. [ Recovering the Satellites, from Recovering The Satellites, by Counting Crows ]

I'm too tired to write up diary entries at the moment, but I'll give a quick summary of today. Watched Star Trek, watched Buffy (nasty swim team turn into fish men), laughed at Matthew trying to install Windows for the umpteenth time, and generally giggled to myself.

There, that about covers the day. Oh, and Dad popped into work to pick up the CDs. He's finished his course now, so he's gone back home.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Counting Crows pictures ! You can't see me, or the rest of us as this is too high up, but from the third picture we were about a centimetre and a bit below the bottom right corner, in front of the speaker you can't see .