Replying to Jennifer has taken a long time tonight, so no time for a long diary entry. Went to Cambridge. Looked at Estate Agents. Went for tea with Julia and Peter. Came home. Tired. Night.

Oh, bought two CDs - Carly Simon 'Coming around again' and Chris de Burgh 'Man on the Line' - which I've been meaning to get for ages and found whilst in Cambridge.

Amusing day today; looking for houses and such like. Um... Implemented 16bpp translucent horizontal line fill, and I've just finished a 8bpp version of it (though it looks awful). It also crashes every other time I run the module. Which is kind weird. I'll sort that out some other time. I've also optimised the 32bpp plotter so that it's a little more efficient. It's quite confusing now, but it does make some sense. Honest.

Big Hello to Jennifer in California who sent me a lovely email about the diary and I'll drop a line to tomorrow if I can. I'm going to bed early tonight, because it's 'hunt for house' time tomorrow and that's generally quite stressful .

Whenever you feel on top and happy, and generally content with life... Don't panic. Just read some usenet. [ Comment on oaktree; Zappo ]

Some people have their own dentist. Some people have their own psychologist. I've got my own (personal?) Love Guru's. If you don't know what a Love Guru is, then you probably need one. I've got two - I know, it's greedy, but there you go. Alice and Sherry... They're strange; they're Californian, and they're in their first year of University over there... I know, it's strange, but they seem to like the idea . As you might have guessed, I got an email from them today .

Do you feel you have an idea of what happens in my life from the diary ?
Yes    No    I'm a bot

One of the other strange things to crop up yesterday whilst talking to Vanessa and Dave was the topic of Andrew Clover. Strange, because Vanessa couldn't quite believe that I'd know the same Andrew Clover that she was talking about. Certainly I believe him to be the same person. Curious, though that someone who I know (if only by email) should be known to Vanessa in a completely different context. It just goes to prove the belief that there only a couple of hundred people in the world and you just meet them over and over again.

SVG shouldn't leave lots of copies of itself lying around when the browser goes bang now.

Someone has released a Napster MP3 client for RISC OS. I strongly disprove of it. Napster is basically organised crime against the music industry and is very different from keeping a personal music collection.

I've had a load of mails from Dave Upstairs about the problems with 'large' SVG files. I've hopefully fixed that now, but I'm still concerned by the size of the processed files involved when producing the files. At present it takes 13Mb to process the Moscow map, which is a little more than it ought. On the other hand, processing is only about four times slower than the Adobe plugin on my PC, which is reasonable, given the relative speeds of the machines and the fact that ConvertSVG is produced by one person and not by a large team . They do have a minor advantage that they support animation, filters, scripting and such like, though...

Right; in theory that's reduced the overheads on the drawfile generation by 36 bytes per element, which should reduce the size of objects produced. In theory they should be a little quicker to process too because large blocks aren't being copied around. On the other hand, there's another level of indirection which is a bad thing speed-wise. Certainly if the Moscow map takes 13Mb it's important to reduce the processing costs for the drawfile. Given that the static space required for that map is about 3.2Mb, it's reasonable that the space used be quite large. Hmm... I've just noticed that I retain the input buffer after parsing. That's not necessary; so that's 1.6Mb saved on processing the file. I could probably save more by querying the XML parser to see how much of the buffer was used and reallocing space dependant on that; that might reduce the space usage quite a bit.

With that change I've managed to reduce the application slot required by... absolutely nothing... That seems a little wrong to me... However, it could just be a limitation of the malloc function that I've not crossed a threshold to make that worthwhile. Hopefully, removing the input buffer should make some difference to the memory required, though. Yup. That's reduced it to 10Mb, which is quite a bit better...

SVG note for relative bezier curves; each element of the curve is relative to the last point, NOT to the previous point (ie the coords are:

• start (lx,ly)
• control 1 (lx+x0,lx+y0)
• control 2 (lx+x1,ly+y1)
• end (lx+x2,ly+y2)

and NOT :

• start (lx,ly)
• control 1 (lx+x0,lx+y0)
• control 2 (lx+x0+x1,ly+y0+y1)
• end (lx+x0+x1+x2,ly+y0+y1+y2)

which I thought might be causing me problems (but isn't because I got it right first time). Certainly the latter form is more sensible (but takes a few extra instructions to process ). Actually, re-reading the definition of the 'c' curveto command it is relatively clear that the former is the case. Certainly it seems a little bizarre, but I'm not going to worry.

Ah; the reason that some of the drawfiles are coming out as rubbish is... the polyline parser is complete cack. Well, maybe not 'complete' cack, but it doesn't actually parse valid points, partly because it was the first element to be processed (lion.svg uses it!) and partly because I've really not seen polyline used very much. It's a bug on the draw library I'm using really.

Apparently Paul F Johnson is reviewing SVG, so I can imagine it'll be slated a little. Oh well. At least I'm aware of its limitations (and to a greater or lesser extent, these are detailed in the files enclosed) and I am continuing development of it...

Oh, I did get up to watch TV on Saturday morning, by the way. Yeah; I was up from about 9:30 watching telly until 12:30 which is really quite draining. I don't like mornings at weekends. Needless to say, I didn't see Helen. But there you go. It's entirely possible that I missed something when I went to put washing on, or whilst getting breakfast, but that's my luck... Oh well...

I was at Vanessa's last night. We ended up watching Photographing Fairies, which was ... strange and fun... Unfortunately, because Dave had rung at 4am that morning and she'd been slightly (!) stressed, she was quite tired and fell asleep - awww! And then Dave rang at about 2:30am, too so we got woken up then. And then talked for about an hour and a half about him and other things. It's quite strange; he can be such an insensitive prat at times, but he's very sweet with it. A little self absorbed, but full of energy... Anyhow, it's none of my business; it does feel a bit awkward at times with them two... Oh well.

Anyhow, we got back to home at about 5-ish and I promptly fell asleep until about 11pm when Julian rang. And, as you've seen, I've been doing SVG things until now (oh, except I watched Top Secret and rang Angela) and it's now 3am. I'm quite tired and it's freezing in here. I've decided that I've got to put the electric blanket on the bed. Unfortunately it means taking the undersheet off and sticking the blanket under there. And the fact that that's a lot of effort is why it's not been done until now. But I'm really cold, so I think I'd better.

They have exams at York tomorrow! What's that about ? I mean, come on! It's a bank holiday! Oh well, that's life I suppose... Angela has one, and Julian does too... It's the first of Angela's four final exams, so it's getting close to leaving...

Whilst at the uni today - we went to the uni to see David - it was quite strange; I kinda miss the uni life, and the people. There's something a little more dynamic there. Possibly it's the way that people are more absorbed in thinking that the Uni is the most important thing in the world. I've kinda lost that. There's nothing 'important' to me at the moment. Except to be warm. And to sleep. But I'm not really thinking about anything to the point of 'Oh, I've got to do that tomorrow'. At least, nothing that's of any note.

Oh, I nearly got the interrogated by Dave over what I'm doing at the moment for the company. Which was hard, because I can't tell him anything about what's happening at the moment. Strange thing is that Vanessa knows, because she's not involved and so it doesn't matter so much. I trust her. I dunno. I've only met her, like three times and I'm trusting her with things about the my work that I won't tell someone I've known for ages. It's not that I don't trust Dave, it's just... well, he's still 'in' that RISC OS community, and it's not wise to discuss things that have a direct line back there...

Still, it was quite amusing, and I was trying not to laugh at his comments. It was quite hard . Oh, got to see some of the graphics on the game thing he's working on with VOTI. Not sure I'm impressed. I mean, it's pretty. But when it comes down to it, it's just a lot of rotating cubes. Maybe I've been spoilt by playing Half Life/Homeworld, but even Doom looks more impressive to me. Ok, so I'm biased, but there you go.

On the Half Life front, I've been trying out a few of the other deathmatch levels to see what they are like. It's actually quite hard to choose maps when you don't know what they're going to be like (well, obviously!). But even still, it's still useful to try them and find out how they work and whether they are just going to be nasty, or whether you can actually work with them. The main things to look for are wide spaces if you like the rocket launcher, hidden holes that you can pop out of and use the machine gun on, not too many long winding passage ways (because being chased down those is just annoying), a couple of high points with possibly a few slightly lower that are quite well protected from being seen for sniping from, a number of quite accessible mines which aren't all in one place, and any fixed equipment that might be handy. The fixed equipment is important - things like the fixed machine guns aren't generally all that useful because they're just 'too' fixed, difficult to aim and exposed. Fixed rocket launchers are more fun, particularly if they're controlled from some other part of the map. Air raid attacks are sometimes useful, although they do tend to be a bit random. The rising water effect is useful to trap people, and the gas chambers are a variant of that - coupled with mines, they can be quite useful. The large air-raid where you have to reach a bunker once activated works quite well, too. I don't like crushing ceilings and the like. Similarly, I don't like multi-part puzzles for network games. Those bits where you have to open a door, press a button, walk a gang way or some such to trigger another event are just annoying because you're very exposed. Similarly, the bits where you have to have the power assisted jump thingy to get the heavy duty weapons can be annoying. Well, that said, there are a number of clever uses of that, so it's not that bad.

Anyhow, it's now 3:30am and I'm getting colder. Time for that blanket thingy.

Mail from Vanessa today; she's getting stressed at Dave again... Dave seems to me to be far to self absorbed to see what he's doing to her. I think it's quite sad, but I can't do anything... Actually I snapped at him on the phone a few nights ago because he rang at 1am. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I was tired and fed up...

Tomorrow, 9:30am... I've set the video in case I don't get up... If nothing else, I'll have it on tape . Yeah, I know I was quite 'I'm not going to be all that bothered by it' about the thing, but even still... Yeah, yeah, I know, it's all a bit sad, but there you go...

I seem to have this problem of running out stock lines when I'm too tired to think of a sentance ending. Oh dear.

Ok... It's 4am and I've got translucent horizontal line draw working in 32bpp modes. There's a few glitches, but it seems ok for the most part. It's not fast, though

Saturday, 9:30am or thereabouts, ITV (that's UK for anyone reading this in foreign parts)... Helen is apparently likely to be on Telly... Gawd only knows why, but watch it if you can... I'll try to be up at that time...

Meeting in Cambridge went 'ok' today, I guess... Got to go to 'The Wrestlers' for Lunch with Gary, Andrew, and Kevin which was quite fun... What else ? Oh nothing else, really...

Believe of me, What you will, There is a duty that I'm sworn to do; You know of nothing my life... [ Confrontation, from Les Miserable ]

I'm thinking of renaming the diary from 'Justin's Diary' (a dull name if there ever was one!) to 'Musical ramblings' or something similar... Certainly it would fit the flavour of things recently...

Then, a murmur of voices, like the distant rising of the sea, began to chant the name of one man. "Salutant! Salutant! Spartacus!" Next came Iynemus, victor of many fights, who was armed with sword and shield and known to be quick and dangerous, But the crowd, their voices rising and falling like the relentless crashing of surf chanted only the Thracian's name. "Salutant! Spartacus!" [ Animal & Man, from Jeff Wayne's musical rendition of Spartacus ]

Nothing else done today; replied to a little email, read some webpages, talked to some people (once we'd got home), and went out for a meal with Dave and Matthew. Fun .

Don't lie to me; Now, more than ever; Don't leave with this alone; Were you ever gonna share with anyone ? I stand alone, And I remember, That the last thing you said to the world, was So The Music Stops. And is there fear in that heart of yours; Do you believe the promises they made ? And are there doubts, Or second thoughts, As you march towards the light, With your eyes still open... [ So The Music Stops, from Through The Looking Glass, by Shadowland ]

A nice piano track from the end of Through The Looking Glass, which seems apt to me at the moment. I know, I'm a sucker for pianoy bits, but it's still a lovely track. It may not seem so lovely in the future, but taken as it stands, it's still nice.

Amusing thing to try on a Mico - in a Taskwindow, type :

*BASIC
SYS "OS_EnterOS"

and then try to turn the power off at the switch.

Drawfile to SVG converter started today. It seems to be far enough along that it can parse my 'Cheque' drawfile. Albeit, producing an upside down copy (as you might expect for the early versions). Because the SVG to Drawfile converter is much more complex, it doesn't - as yet - fully understand the files that the Drawfile to SVG converter generates.

The present output looks like this :

Of course, you'll have to have the SVG viewer for that to be rendered. Or at least a browser able to handle SVGs.

I believe that the current recommendation is to use image/svg-xml, but I'm not sure at present... I'll look into it later.

I'm in Cambridge tomorrow, anyhow, so that'll be fun...

Email from Alistair tonight, too... He sounds well - I should have rung him ages ago . Sorry, Alistair!

Nothing much today; chatted to Vanessa for ages on the phone. Replied to no email . Sent Robin fixed Plugin files...

SVG's can have embedded chunks of differently coloured text within a text line. Drawfile's can't do that. Well. Yet. But they can't nonetheless. Actually, I can't change the file format to take account of that because it isn't backwards compatible...

I've moved all the SVG elements into their own little files now. Mostly, this is because when they all live in convertsvg.c it becomes difficult to see who relies on who and what will need changing when you update bits of the code.

Lovely news posting in CSA.Programmer today, subject "Do Not Read ! 9459". Well. I didn't read it. I love this spam thing.

Well, that's the shows over. Some rather amusing things at the show. I think I told Keith that I'd have to kill him, but I was busy at the time, so couldn't. Anyhow, I had more on my mind than worrying about little things like that. Got to play with a ViewFinder too. I'm buggered if I can work out how to read the base of screen memory on it. I think it should be one of the GetInformation calls, but I'm not sure which and the values I get out don't seem to help. Or I can't write to them in User mode.

What else? Oh, went out with Robin on Saturday for another italian (we'd been to Pizza Hut on Friday [we got split up then, but on Saturday we were all together - all twenty of us ]). Paul, you see (this is Robin's Paul, by the way) likes Pizza. Actually we went to Pizza Hut tonight too, so I guess we're a bit pizza-fanatical too. Anyhow, we went Bowling after that which was fun; I don't think I've played since we were at Center Parcs Sherwood Forest, and that was... oh, god only knows how long ago that was, but it was a while ago... In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to win the first game with 141 points. Which was quite cool. And then the second game, I would like to say that I just had to lose, but actually I didn't. I lost, but it was because I was playing craply, rather than because of any deference to not show people up. See, I'm rubbish really. I put it down to beginners luck. Well, something like that anyhow.

As Robin had most of the ArmClub, WSS and Chris in the back of his van, we thought that it's possible that it could be a case of software engineer rustling. It's a serious problem. They lie in wait outside the places frequented by such people and pounce when the engineers are least expecting it, drag them off in a van to a dimly lit office and force them to work ridiculous hours. Prolonged exposure to this sort of treatment results in their inability to walk or to stand in bright sunlight. Robin, on the other hand, suggested that it was the software crisis rapid response team, that would rush to the scene of an emergency and leap into action. You take your pick. I'm going for option C - that they just wanted to go bowling and it was more efficient.

Gary Stephenson came to the show too. Which I was amazingly surprised at. I was kinda showing off the SVG stuff to someone and they were just leaving when a voice behind me says "What's this then?", and I'm just about to start explaining as Gary sits down beside me... Shocked ? I nearly jumped out of my skin . Anyhow, we had a quick chat. Couldn't really talk for long because of the number of people around and the topics we really wanted to talk about weren't really for public ears. Oddly.

Um. What else ? Oh, Dave Walker was there too. Which was nice, along with a few other people - I mean people from Egham and IRC. Some of whom were just annoying, and some of whom were great to speak to. Certainly the Oregan posse were great fun. To be honest, I think they were quite pleased to see something that they had done out on public display (well, a non-NC display anyhow).

I took Helen and Lucy to the show too (my home harddiscs) because I wanted to have some music there to listen to, and I could play with the SVG stuff if it was completely broken. Robin said he thought they'd sold eight on the Saturday, which is rather neat. Unfortunately there's a few things that are broken about the viewer. One is that it doesn't delete its temporary files - which appears to be because I removed the code whilst testing Oregano - and the other is that the aspect ratio it tries to give things is inverted. Which was foolish . I've fixed the temporary file problem, but the aspect ratio thing could take me a little while whilst I recover from the show.

Right, that's that done.

What else happened over the weekend ? Nothing much. Well, nothing much I can talk about, anyhow.

I got a couple of interesting emails recently, including those from Gary, Alistair, Vanessa (whose name I'll spell correctly this time!) and... a 'blubbering idiot' and a 'yellow banana'. Which is really weird. Alice and Sherry - whoever you are - thanks for your email; I'll get back to you soon... at least once I've become less comatose from the show anyhow.

Really, I'll get back to you all, but it's 1am now and I need some sleep. At some point anyhow.

I'm just reading the news from over the weekend. Nothing special on usenet. At least not that I can see.

Oh, one other thing I've just remembered. 'Somewhere' reported that we'd have a number of printers to demonstrate at the show. I don't know where, but I got lots of people coming up to us asking for demos of printers and stuff. I know nothing about Printers and we had only one there. Where do these people (the people that reported that ROL was doing that) get their information ?

On re-reading parts of the CSS2 specification I see that I've got to change the API on StyleManager a bit. Unfortunately, the present implementation doesn't support user/author style sheets and is a purely CSS1-like cascade. That is, we don't support !important. Which we should for CSS1 compliance anyhow. Bother.

+++ N has disconnected! (oops. gone bust.) [ boo.com; N (Nick Clark); Egham Hills ]

Yay! Finished the SVG plugin and distribution. Hopefully it all works. I'll be continuing with the decoder anyhow, because it's really fun anyhow .

I have an automatic un-spam-trapper that removes all spamtrapped news postings and attempts to generate valid email addresses. It works about 90% of the time. However, some news postings from people generate amusing comments. Todays was :

[This post was apparently spam-trapped (wookey@godIhatespam.aleph1.co.uk); converted to :
   wookey@godIhate.aleph1.co.uk ]

Angela rang today and we chatted for over an hour. But I'm too tired to say anything else. SVG stuff does plugin things now. Wow. Oh, and it can save. And has a neat icon.

Went to see Gladiator today with Robin and Helen. It was rather good . Yes, I was actually very pleased with it - a film worth seeing - I expected it to be only mediocre, but it was quite fun, with a story and action too. I didn't like the camera skipping frames though - a kind of strobe-like effect during the action. That just gave me a headache and made me think of 70s films for some reason...

SVGs now have transforms applied by each element (which is not great - it'd be better to cascade them, like styles, but I don't want to be collating matrices - that's unfun). CLI interface is improved. Well, it has one. And I no longer have to flip objects and scale them up. I can do the scale from the CLI, and the flip is just a case of a final transformation. Oh, we've got error checking too. And debug is now optional, rather than being forced which it was previously. I don't expect that Debug is useful to anyone but me, but it's still quite handy. Next, write the plugin. Hmm.

Left my window open tonight, so it's freezing in here ! .

Simon didn't pass his driving test - bad luck Simon!

What's happened to SVG stuff today ? Well, I've got a lot further than before, even though every twenty minutes I come across something that makes me cringe and wonder if I'll every manage to do anything with it. The SVG specification is evil. Evil, I tell you!

However, I've got transforms that are starting to work now, along with paths.

Transforms still need re-working because they're very fixed on being for path-like elements only.

I've written up quite a bit in notes about the progress. There's a long way to go really! Oh, and SVG has moved - it no longer lives straddled between the xdoomtools sub-category of DIYDoom (it's based on code used in DoomPS) and the netscape JavaScript source, but actual gains its own directory in the C directory - wow .

Shall we go and see about the tiger ?

WebColours, my CSS2/HTML4 colour parsing module is now just about finished. CSS2 colour parsing is unfun. I began to wonder if it might not have been easier to just take the lex definition and just build something from that, but... well, I don't know lex that well and I've not got time to learn.

The principles of convertsvg are very simple. Really, quite simple. So simple. I'm stalling whilst I remember them. Yes. We have one program which is the constructor. That can is a simple CLI application which is called ConvertSVG. ConvertSVG is given a file to process. It gets the ParseXML module to read the SVG file and construct a broken down form of the data. This is then recursed through by ConvertSVG, with the help of ParseXML. Initially you start with a single, simple style which has no properties. Styles are managed by the StyleManager module. This maintains the styles' properties and values. Styles are defined as CSS2-like property definitions. For each entity of the SVG you copy the style, apply any modifications which are given for that entity and pass it on to its children. When a construction point is reached (eg a line) the style is examined and any relevant styles obeyed. One particular class of styles which must be obeyed are the colour class. These use WebColours module to convert the colour names given from CSS2 into palette entries. These are then applied to the constructed object. Once the recursion is finished we have a hierarchial drawfile structure in memory. We then serialise it and write it out to a file. Dead easy. Oh yes.

Previous versions of ConvertSVG did the job of StyleManager and WebColour themselves for some very specific cases. Plus, the style management was applied after the event on groups only, so it would fail on anything more complex. The new version, that I'm working up to (being the above plan) should remove this deficiency.

I hope.

Oh, the other good one to watch out for is the problem of flow anomalies (that's -fa in Norcroft C) which - if you're not careful - can lead you to believe that you've found a compiler bug .

Oooh! It actually works! I mean, it... um... works! It recurses down, passing the styles to each child as it goes, building up a fully cascaded set of styles. Pleased with myself, I am. Sleeping, I will now go.

One thing I've decided is that whilst the public is misguided 99% of the time, and lives on rumours, issuing public statements on what's actually going on it only prone to generating more rumours as people invent things that are between the lines, and when there aren't any lines to go between. And sometimes there are lines to read between and they completely miss them. People, they're stupid.

I've had a chance to listen to a little bit of music today in between watching telly and stuff... I've managed 6½ Marillion albums today, which is more than usual. And I watched most of The Net too.

Continuing the Scan saga... It turns out that the money that came out of the account and appeared to be for the computer again was actually for the DVD and other things. It just came to the same amount and was charged a month late. Quite why it's a month late, I've no idea... but there you go...

Vanessa and David over tonight; which was quite nice. She cooked some gorgeous Lasagne and did us a chocolate mouse too. It's like rather cool really. We ended up watching Toy Story 2 which Vanessa had brought along, and then A Bugs Life which David hadn't seen. Oh, and Vanessa corrected my spelling of her name, which I'd got wrong - sorry!

Intended to do the things with the colour manager for CSS, but didn't get around to it before they arrived. Oh well.

An email in my box today started "Look, we don't want to waste your time... or ours" and so I said thanks, and deleted it... Spam. It's great.

Ok, that's the style manager completed. It needs nasty things like an API around it, but it's done anyhow... It conforms 'nearly' to CSS2 style property parsing standard at present. There's a lot of messing about that goes on because of the escaping and the syntax that CSS2 imposes on the manager. Whilst the syntax is reasonably sane, it's still quite a git to parse. Don't use comments except at the end of associations because it doesn't know about them yet . Adding comment parsing isn't hard; it's basically anywhere that a space can occur a comment can occur, but it's still not nice. Malformed styles will silently abort. Part of the niceness about styles is that they are intended to gracefully degrade, which is useful in this instance. The other thing that I've done is a form of copy caching which should speed up the copy instance - I hope. I think I can speed that a little more too, but I'm not going to do that as it means restructuring parts of the add and change routines which are reasonably standardised.

... and, it's now 3am and the module works. Well, it does 90% of the things I need of it, anyhow. The next job is to integrate that into the SVG parsing code. That should be trivial, but I've got Vanessa and David coming tomorrow, so I might not get much code written... Depends really...

ViewFinder from John Kortink; it looks quite cool.

Oh, I'll do more piccies of developments when I've actually got something to show. Remember that the SVG converter as-was is only capable of decoding that particular subset of SVG.

You may remember some time back that I was saying how we got stuff from Scan and how I found that their webmaster was particularly unhelpful in updating the pages to have the colours correct and how later I bought a PC from them and Matthew bought a processor from them. If you don't remember, you know now.

Well, the processor didn't work when it arrived (remember, of course, that they had first got the address wrong and sent it to Stratford, London - they've managed to get it right in the past!) so Matthew got that replaced. Eventually. They hung on to it for five working days whilst they 'tested' it. And he got the carriage refunded at the same time because things hadn't arrived by the next day as they had promised.

I want to stress here that Matthew bought this lot on his card because... well, I have a fear of using electronic money . It turns out that Scan have, instead of refunding the carriage, charged him again for the total cost of the machine. Which is very, very, very slightly annoying. So, bare this in mind. Scan may do reasonably decent offers, but their support is awful and you run the risk of being charged multiple times for things if you have a problem.

No diary recently 'cos I'm on holiday and trying to rest and do other things rather than the normal stuff.

Helen rang this morning at about 10-ish (I was still asleep at the time) and was very upset about the Parents evening the prior night. If she's having problems then I think it would be nice if I could help. I can't, but it'd be nice. Ah well.

Spoke to Vanessa and Dave for a little while last night about various things not at all computer related (which is good!) and stuff. They should be coming down over the weekend some time and (shock of shocks) Vanessa wants to cook for us. Matthew should be back by then, which will be nice. I think.

He's at home at the moment, doing more of this holiday thing.

Spent nearly two hours on the phone to Vanessa tonight, chatting about Dave and life in general. She's really nice and it's sad that she and Dave split up.

In one of these dreams, you'll forgive me. [ I wish I was a girl, from This Desert Life, by Counting Crows ]

Amusingly, the Washington Post wrote in an article that Microsoft technologists had invented XML. Later, they printed a correction for the error. It's amusing that such things are quite expected nowadays though.

Did an interesting thing last night whilst Matthew and David were playing Half Life. Well, it took about an hour. I added the colour handling this morning in about twenty minutes. Damn, I'm good.

If you don't know what's so nice about the lion, pop over to the Mozilla site.

comma (,) isn't a valid character in an XML attribute name. Not interesting, but it's true.

Coincidence ? Or something more sinister ? [ Coincidence ? ]

What a fun day today was at the AGM. I seemed to end up taking notes. Which was very fun, given that I ended up with the most massive of headaches you can imagine .

What's today been like ? Well, we got up late for various reasons, one of which was that the power went off... Unfortunate, but there you go. Need more sleep anyhow; I'll try to do more of the sleep thing over the weekend. AGM tomorrow. Which should be fun. Oh yes.

I got the UPS to talk to my machine at work today, which was kinda neat. Admittedly, it wasn't that impressive to unplug the power and watch the machine shut down, but it's better than a kick in the teeth.

Last month, whilst bored, I knocked up a little chunk of pseudo-code for a laugh. It's been done many times before, but this one is mine. Mine. All mine. Mu-ha-ha. It's not in any particular language, and has no particular mapping of functions so don't try to parse it, please !

/* World initialisation - refer to functional specification for
   project Genesis 1:1-2:2 for details of the features */

God::main(void)
{
  entity world = new entity;
  entity sky;
#define heaven sky /* renamed for ease */
  entity land;
  entity sea;
  entity plants;
  entity fruit;
  entity herbs;
  entity fish;
  entity birds;
#define fowl birds /* more renaming */
  entity man;
  entity man_male;
  entity man_female;

  /* Initialise the states */
  earth->state = void;
  earth->light = false;
  earth->age = 1;

  /* Begin setup */
  earth->light = true; /* Good */

  earth->map_lightlevel(Day, true); /* Should divide them */
  earth->map_lightlevel(Night, false);

  /* Debug to indicate how far we are through initialisation */
  earth->age++;

  /* Create a 'Heaven' part of the earth */
  heaven = earth->split(Heaven);

  /* More debug */
  earth->age++;

  /* Create some land */
  land = earth->split(Land);
  sea = earth->split(Sea); /* Good */

  /* Populate - land */
  plants = land->add(Plants);
  herbs = plants->split(Herbs);
  fruit = plants->split(Fruit);
  plants->setCycle(herb,seed);
  plants->setCycle(seed,herb);
  plants->setCycle(fruit,seed);
  plants->setCycle(seed,fruit); /* Good */

  /* Check that that was ok */
  earth->age++;

  /* Time needs organising */
  earth->divideTime(Days,365);
  earth->divideTime(Seasons,4);
  earth->divideTime(Hours,24);

  /* Give us some source for that light so that it's not just magic */
  earth->split(Stars);
  earth->split(Sun);
  earth->split(Moon); /* Good */

  /* Check the time */
  earth->age++;

  /* Populate - seas */
  fish = sea->add(Fish);
  fowl = heaven->add(Fowl);

  /* Do some classification here */
  fish->classify(Whales); /* Good */
  /* FIXME: Add more classifications of fish and fowl */

  /* Ensure that these are parts of our class */
  bless(fish);
  bless(fowl);

  /* Make them start regenerating */
  fish->do_fork();
  fowl->do_fork(); /* spawn child processes */

  /* Mark our position */
  earth->age++;

  /* Populate - animals */
  beasts = earth->add(Beasts);

  /* More classification here */
  beasts->classify(Cattle); /* Good */
  /* FIXME: And remember to classify these */

  /* Create our main AI process */
  man = new typeof(this); /* Create like ourself */
  man->rule(fish);
  man->rule(fowl);
  man->rule(beasts);

  /* Divide into two competing types */
  man_male=man->split(Male);
  man_female=man->split(Female);

  /* This could be optimised before the split, but it's clearer like this */
  bless(man_male);
  bless(man_female);

  /* Make them start regenerating */
  man->do_fork(); /* run processes */

  /* Set up the consumption dependencies */
  man->consumes(herbs);
  man->consumes(fruit);
  beasts->consumes(herbs);
  fowl->consumes(herbs);
  /* FIXME: Add fish */

  /* Looking good so far, I think */
  earth->age++;

  /* Think we're done now, all is left is to sleep... */
  sleep();
}

Buffy today; it was so cute to have Willow trying to keep Oz calm at the beginning by reading to him. However, Buffy's gone just a little psycho by taking to chaining up people that she once loved... Ok, so that's an exaggeration, but still...

Oh, the ILOVEYOU virus seems to have made its mark today. One source claimed that it 'brought London companies to a standstill'. Whilst I'm not sure that's the case, it certainly stopped everyone working at all the companies where people on the Talker I use were - mostly because they spent time discussing it . It's obviously not going to affect RISC OS in its present form. However - and this one made me laugh - apparently Essex Uni was out of action all of today because of it. No comments.

Ok, I can't work out the file format for Psion 5 'Jotter' files, so I'm just going to copy the data out as it is and hope it's readable...

• March 10th
  
• March 11th
  
• March 15th
  
• April 26th
  
• May 2nd
  

Note from Chocky about spelling in the diary today; Oh, Julia's back in the states at the moment... at least, until Wakefield anyhow .

Findings for Psion Jotter files :

• They're &10000050 type files, so they follow the standard structure for those.
• Bulk data is immediately followed by a section index, for jumping to each of the blocks.
• Sections are short values for the length + &4000 (why &4000 ? I don't know!)
• The next 'could' be a section type identifier. I get some that are regular, and some that vary from file to file.
• 'spare' blocks appear to be identified as having type identifier 0. I'm assuming a heap-like fragmenting format for these.
• Types around &6d appear to be text.
• Type &EA is the application name Jotter.app and some other data.
• Type &69 is the table/column descriptors. I don't know why these are used.
• Type &14 consists of a number of small blocks of data, I think.

But - and this is the big but - multiple entries appear to be stored in some of the section blocks. The section index isn't long enough for all the entries in one of the files I have.

Anyhow, code is available if anyone wants to know more about what I've found. At least generating the files is easy .

The dream last night ended in me waking up (in the dream) and finding my face all beat up, with a nasty black bruise under my right eye, over my cheek, another over the left of my top lip and on the bottom lip about the same place. Obviously someone took offence at the previous dream .

However, I've got a sore mouth at the moment; I think one of my transplanted teeth it twisting as the other teeth move around it and it's now pushing against my lip (the left of my top lip, oddly enough). I must go to a dentist at some point. Really, I must.

I was surprised today; someone I had given a specification to complained about it being in HTML format, and said they would much prefer it to be in Impression, Techwriter, ASCII or PDF instead of HTML. I like HTML. I'd prefer to write in XML, to be honest - because it's far more structured (especially now that I've seen the XML2RFC stuff) - but I don't think that the RISC OS world can quite cope with that yet (Hell, I'm working on it, ok?!). HTML has the amazing advantage of being portable, scalable, and non-proprietary. Impression and Techwriter are proprietary (and not portable), I can't author PDFs on my machine and therefore isn't useful to us - and it doesn't have a structured meta-description within it (to my knowledge). ASCII is good, because everyone can read it, but it's not able to provide structured meta representation of information. One that wasn't mentioned was PostScript, and I don't know much about that. As I understand it, I could write the code decoder in such a way that it decoded a structured meta description, but... I'm not thinking about it, ok ?

So, I choose HTML because people can view that, edit it, and export it in some other format if they want. I don't think it's wise to assume that people have particular packages on their machine, but a web browser is now universal and in any case, you can still read it in a text editor and get a reasonable understanding of it, even if it's auto-generated.

Nothing much to tell today; had a very strange dream this morning, but I'll try to put it in the Psion rather than write it up here, because I want to go do bed and don't feel like sitting up all night writing about a strange dream on the big computer. One day I'll transfer the stuff from the Psion to here and you'll see how weird it was...

Oh, tomorrow is Take Computer In To Work Day. Which basically means 'synchronise MP3s'.

Oh yeah, updates to the diary last night, because it's May now. My, how time flies.

Many thanks today to Simon St Laurent for pointing me in the direction of xml2rfc, and to M.T.Rose for writing xml2rfc and (also) to him for the RFC related to XML RFCs. So cool an idea. I so like XML .

[ Entry from Psion ]

I've just woken up from a dream about Helen. For some bizarre reason she had invited me back to her hotel room (via the air vents - too much Half-Life) and then fell asleep on her bed. Such a wonderful way to start the day; if you need a way to make you feel annoyed and crappy, then that scores really highly.

[ later that day ]

Let's elaborate a little on the dream this morning, shall we. For posterity, that is. Bare in mind that it's now night (well, early morning) and I've been thinking about this all day. It's kinda like the time I had a daughter, and kept wishing that it was real, even after I realised it wasn't.

I was walking through town in the rain. i don't know which town it was - the streets were wide and the buildings were quite tall. Sort of Colchester, near the centre, but with more space, newer buildings and less people. Nobody, in fact. The place was deserted. There was a party going on at the hotel out to the left, which is where Helen came from. She was dancing through the street in that carefree way that people do on telly, or in dreams. She seemed to be bouncey and jolly, and a little wet from the rain. She wore, for some reason, a white flowery top. I don't think I've ever seen her wear such a thing - I'm not sure she would. The flowers were red and maroon. I don't know what else she wore; a black skirt, maybe - I wasn't paying much attention as I was watching her face and, for some reason, her hair. I have a very vivid memory of her wet hair.

She - I knew, though she didn't say - was with the party at the hotel with a group. I have a feeling that it was some musical group though I don't know why. She'd slipped away quietly so that she could dance for a bit on her own. This, I knew. She seemed quite merry, as if she'd had a little to drink. Enough to be playful, but not to be drunk or foolish. She invited me to her hotel room, and I let myself be led there.

For reasons which are clearer if I say I've been playing Half-Life lots recently, we took the air vents up to her room. Ok, that's the sad computery bit over. For some reason she wanted to be discreet and not let anyone know that she was there. As we went there, she teased me about things I've done.

We got to the room and she opened it with the key. The door was on the left of the corridor as I was looking down it. We walked in and I looked around. For some reason, there were quite a lot of 'things' in the room. But it didn't look untidy. The bed was unmade, and had cream and brown quilts on it. The bed lay to the left of the room, a large balcony window in front, with curtains drawn (it was night outside anyhow, but the lights in the room meant you couldn't see out), on the wall on the right sat a number of drawers and a telly, with a connecting door to somewhere just beyond.

Whilst I was taking this in, Helen had lay on the floor and gone to sleep. So I carried her to the bed and put her inside it. She seemed dry by then. And then I lay down beside her, on top of the covers. She is on the far side of the bed as you enter the room; I the near side. She turns to me, as if she'd not been sleeping - maybe she was just pretending ? - and says "you're not going to sleep - didn't you come here for something ?" and I have to think of a reply. So I'm left with the thought "yes, I came here because I want to love you, and hold you." And then I wake up without saying anything.

I realise that as I write this, some might think that I've omitted juicy bits, but that's near enough how my dream happened.

So. What can we make of this ? Well, that I've played too much Half-Life for one thing. That I've got this amazing crush on Helen. That I believe, subconciously that I've no chance unless she's had something to drink. That, within the context of the situation, I'm still shy, even in the dream. That for her to make fun out of me within my own dream means that I'm very self concious and insecure about myself. And that I really should avoid being anywhere near her, or ringing her.

The latter of these is one resolution made at the start of the year that I broke, and am now regreting.

And what of the Helen of my dream ? Is she the Helen of real life ? Of course not, but she's a stylised version of her. A sort of 'feeling of Helen'. Mum chides me regularly for anything to do with her, so I don't talk to mum about her. Ok, so it's a common thing to ignore something you can't deal with, but...

I feel very sad that I am not the person for her. Possibly because I don't feel that there is anyone else I would like as much as her. That, some say, is a passing feeling. It's taking a long time to pass. The last section of the dream, I read two ways - firstly, I'm untrusting of anything that women do (she's asleep and yet she's really only pretending; although I believe that it's just a paranoia), and secondly that I'm so shy around her. In this case it's not shy of her, but shy of the situation.

I'm unsure of my reasonings, though. Matthew said that I've got two moods - the bouncy cheerful mood that means that I've just spoken to Helen, or the supidically depressed mood which means that I've just spoken to Helen. There is the other average 'tired' mood, where I yell at anyone around and tell them they are doing things wrong. That's the one I'm in most of the time really.

Anyhow, that's the dream I had - see, it's not x-rated or anything; I don't dream about her like that - why, I don't know. Maybe I don't want to be with her like that, and I'd really prefer to be just friends. But I know that isn't true. I think that's more down to the shyness and not wanting to think of her that way. What anyone makes of the dream is up to them; I've included the detail I remember.

Night - hope I don't dream like that again.

"Horses are like cats, only bigger." [ If I get on with cats I should be able to cope with horses; Mum ]

Aww... She means well . That sounds a little cruel. I'm only saying it 'cos it's funny and... well, it is funny. Especially out of context.

Went to town today for lunch. Vaguely amusing. Had Pizza with David and Matthew; it's quite nice to see him back after two weeks holiday. Actually, this long weekend thing has been quite fun. Going back to work is such a pain.

A little more work on XML stuff today; MathML is XML. SVG is XML. RSS is XML. It's curious, but there's lots of uses for it. Odd that.

Spoke to Helen today and tried to sound like I had something interesting to say. I think I failed abysmally. As usual, Keith was being smug.

Who of all you now, Will ride the lows and highs ? Whose hands are these that come to pray ? When you turn away the distance in your eyes, Speaks the words that you won't say; Far away - we say goodbye; Too many un-remembered arms that won't let go. [ Came Down, from Ever, by IQ ]

New MP3s today include 'Don't pay the ferryman' and 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart'. Coo.

What can I look forward to this week ? Not a lot. Three day week, though.

I've just had this incredible wave of guilt from having just looked at AMPlayer - which currently says "All the way from Memphis - Brian May". Which word set it off, I'm not sure; I think it's the Brian May bit. I have this feeling that I've been incredibly rude to someone and didn't apologise. I'm reasonably positive it was whilst at Sixth Form and I'm reasonably positive it was to a girl; I'm relatively sure that it wasn't to Caroline, because it's a different kind of guilt. Hmm...

If I was rude to you at Downham, and it was related to something to do with Brian May, and I never apologised - however bad a mood I was in - I'm sorry. It's going to annoy me now, but to whoever that was, I'm really, really sorry.

Oh; link from ages ago...

Take a look at "Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps - by Kees Boeke"; yes, it's a steal from David Chess' pages, but it's sill quite fun.