24 Sep 2000 (Sunday) 

Saw Scary Movie yesterday with Matthew, Dave and Joseph. Quite a cool film, taking the mick out of recent 'teen' horror films and a few other sources as well. Not sure I'd want to see it again, but it's not bad anyhow. Recommended to anyone who likes horror movies and doesn't mind them being the focus of a pisstake (well, obviously!)

Woo. Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is on Sundays at noon. That's cool. Makes it worth getting up on Sundays .

Apparently it's a bank holiday tomorrow. Nobody told us, so we're going in to work. Hmm...

Updates from Tim Hill (again!) for Forecast, which is quite cool. He suggests I think about renaming it; I'm not sure what I'd rename it to though. CamWatcher ? I kinda like that name... anyhow, it now supports default refresh times, and has the hotlist off the main menu.

Bought the Lethal Weapons, and The Long Kiss Goodnight yesterday too. I'll get around to watching them soon. Oh yes. Probably Long Kiss Goodnight tonight, I guess... Yup. There's a scene that's been cut. It's mentioned in The Making Of and in the Trailer, but it's not used in the film. The section where she jumps on the tanker from the sleigh. It's not even in the film. How very strange.

Minor update to TextScan tonight; Lenny pointed out that the key handler didn't work, and I really ought to just stick it on my website. It's been four years since it was last updated . Other things today included queries from Stefan Bellon about JFPatch, and some CMunge updates from Theo Markettos (XBit SWI bases weren't handled correctly and error-base's aren't wide enough for his use).

On the way home yesterday Matthew and I were talking about girls and suchlike. What it comes down to is that neither of us actually has much clue about girls. Where to meet, what to say, how to be interesting... the sort of general things you pick up by being around people. Certainly I've no idea. So. What with the fact that I seem to have very narrow criteria for anyone I'll be interested in, and the fact that I'm too scared to go and find such a person, it seems that I'm destined to be alone. Since there's nobody who will ever match up to Helen - whether that's fair or not is irrelevant; it's what I think I want - or more specifically, I'm always going to think of her, I'm resigned to the fact that I'm just not going to end up with anyone, and so I'm not going to have kids, or grow old with anyone. That's quite a depressing thought. It's reasonable, though, because I'm happy to say (hmm... happy ? Is that the word I want ? Dunno) that it's because it's the way my life has been lead. If I'd really wanted it any different I'd have done things differently, but I've not, so that's the way things are. I should be happy about it instead of moaning. Doesn't mean it's not annoying, though .

Also saw a very cool projector yesterday. Hmm. 5k. Too much for me to spend! By a long shot, really.

One of the things that Matthew and I came to the conclusion of, was that if we had girlfriends then we'd not have money to spend on toys as we do now. However, I'd quite gladly give that up and let Helen spend my money. Hmm. Ok, so I'm a sad person. I know I said I wasn't going to talk about, think about or have anything else to do with Helen, but... Maybe it's being with Matthew that does it. Maybe it's that that makes me think about her - by association, if you like. Maybe it's because I've got nothing else to take over my non-work moments; I have more time to think. Whatever the reason, it's not a good thing.

Lots more tidying of mailboxes tonight. Tired.

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23 Sep 2000 (Saturday) 

Ah-ha. I've discovered a track called 'Hold Me Now', which seems to be what I based 'Hold Me Now' on. It's by John Wetton, or rather it's on a live album by him. Lovely track.

A question about the diary arrived today :

Why would you downgrade your sound from 16-bit to 8-bit?

I have a HD that sits right above the riser board that you need for 16 bit sound. It makes nasty distortions when the drive is accessed, and without the 16bit upgrade it doesn't distort

Hmmm... Someone turned my old machine at Pace on today and left it to its own devices. I know this because the last thing I did before I left was leave an email to myself in the mail queue... Gosh, I'm sad...

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22 Sep 2000 (Friday) 

What's been happening this week ? Well, I've made Doom work on Solaris. Well. That's nothing special. RISC OS Doom+ will now compile and 'appears' to run on Solaris. There's the minor problem that it's just writing its output to a memory buffer and doing nothing useful with it, but that's a minor issue. Anyone know X enough to tell me how to stick a FE on it ? I'm not going to even try; I just wanted to be sure that it was reasonable code, sane and generally not going to do nasty things. Things like 'knowing' that you can access things off zero page safely are quite wrong, and whilst they work on RISC OS, they don't work elsewhere. Thank god .

Tonight I've made my SVG converter work with floating point input, rather than just using fixed point integers, which was the previous method. Actually, that only took about 40 minutes, so it's reasonably impressive.

Apparently it's David's birthday today. Happy birthday David!

Oh, oh, oh! Mum says that The Forbidden Planet and Arsenic and Old Lace have arrived at home. And since my stuff should be moving next weekend, in theory I should have my own machine and a more regular chance to do 'stuff' then...

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19 Sep 2000 (Tuesday) 

One of the emails on Saturday was from Helen. Admittedly it was just one of the survey things to find out things that you might not know about your friends. The thing about them is that you never quite know what people are going to say, even if you know them quite well. And the worst thing is that it's an email from Helen. In the meantime I can merely be thinking "I miss having someone around", but when I get emails from her it's like I'm thinking "I really want to spend more time with Helen". Yeah, it's sad, but I'm still crazy about her. Why, I don't know, but still...

All alone, Staring on, Watching her life go by, When her days are grey, And her nights are black; Different shades of mundane. And the one eyed furry toy, That lies upon the bed, Has often heard her cry, And heard her whisper out a name; Long forgiven, But not forgotten. [ Forgiven Not Forgotten, from Forgiven Not Forgotten, by The Corrs ]

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17 Sep 2000 (Sunday) 

Well, that was my birthday. I'm 24. It's quite simple; I'm going to end up old and alone. Ah well. That's life I guess.

Went out for a meal with Matthew and Joseph tonight at the Chinese, which was quite fun.

Picked up mail today, too. Lots and lots of email, most of it was just mailing lists, though, so there's not much to read. Well, there were some quite important things there, but there's nothing all that special, really... The Diary also got updated externally, too, so there's about a month's worth of diary entries that have just been uploaded. Only 2.8Mb of mail. Nothing much. Mostly it's mailing lists, though.

Matthew thinks I'm sad, 'cos I've got the times of TV programs in the Psion. Well, maybe it is, but at least I know when things are on.

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16 Sep 2000 (Saturday) 

Went into town today and bought some CDs from the £5.99 place in town. Well, I was in need of some more music. It's a desperate need sometimes . Anyhow, what did I end up getting ? Semisonic "Feeling Strangely Fine", U2 "The Unforgetable Fire", Don Henley "Building The Perfect Beast", Heart "Heart", and Queen "II". Finally, I've got a copy of Queen II. Phew.

Watched Matthew's Leon today; quite a cool film. It's for things like that that you'd like a little bit more on the DVD, but alas that's the way things are sometimes.

Added some stuff to JFTerm, multitasking resolves mostly. HTMLTidy now supports full File/URL fetches, although it's still using a really old version of the source (from the beginning of last year I believe ). RSS now supports saving links, and I'm in the process of adding a hotlist to it. Forecast is a little more modular internally; little is the operative word here. JFinger now supports you typing @ to move to the host field. Wow.

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12 Sep 2000 (Tuesday) 

A Brief Guide to downgrading your sound from 16bit to 8bit (on a RiscPC that has the board for it).

1. Take off the lid and burrow down to the lowest slice (remove any other slices and such like).

2. Remove the 16bit adapter board. This is located on the far right of the case as you look at it, and will have two connectors, one on a lead and one direct from the board. Remove both.

3. Find two jumper connectors. Place them over the far end four of the pins on the back right of the board. This will leave the nearest of the 5 bare. That's right.

4. Configure 8 bit sound with *Configure soundsystem 8bit.

5. Reinitialise the sound system with :

   *RMReinit SoundDMA
   *RMReinit SoundScheduler
   *RMReinit SoundChannels
   *RMReinit WaveSynth
   *RMReinit StringLib
   *RMReinit Percussion
        

Of course, step 5 isn't necessary if you want to reboot at that point. Probably doing this upgrade without turning the machine off is unwise. I'm unwise.

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10 Sep 2000 (Sunday) 

News: The space shuttle Atlantis has successfully docked with the international space station. NASA said that although a guidance system had failed, it had been a textbook docking... Justin: ... the textbook in question was the Emergency "What to do if your guidance system fails" handbook. Matthew: ... and not "The Ladybird Book Of Docking Spaceships" as is more commonly used. [ Sky TV news ]

Quotes finally have little quote blobs around them. Which means that I now have both song and normal quotes highlighted nicely. I'm hoping that the quote blobs appear sensibly in most browsers. Browse seems to do things oddly sometimes. Fresco, well, it seems to completely get the blockquote width wrong; not sure what's going on there or how to fix it. Maybe ask Jogu. Oregano does a reasonable job, but appears to leave a gap at the top of the table and doesn't italic (or highlight in any other way) the quote, which is annoying. WebsterXL is evil anyhow, but does a reasonable job; it's just a pity that you can't resize windows sensible with it to see the effect. Bookworm and Webite give approximately the same results - they're non-tables browsers, so that's understandable - but it's quite interesting that they do look reasonable, though. ArcWeb has a decent stab at it too, and doesn't display too badly. Webster (non-XL version) doesn't seem to understand the valign's on the tables, but other than that, it seems the same as WebsterXL.

Midsomer Murders was on tonight - new episodes, too. Nasty one, too... Daughter of a bishop killed her family for just wanting her for money. Um, that doesn't make sense. Oh well.

Working on 'File/Memory streams' today (colloquially 'fstream'). It seems to work well for files, and appears correct for memory streams. The main missing thing is closing memory streams. They just don't terminate at present. And I need to check that skipping data works as you'd expect.

I've installed 'Reminder' now as a 'thing to run on startup'. I'm getting annoyed at modifying applications and not remembering when I update the website which ones are ready for release. The idea is that I dump their names into the Reminder application and then I can see which ones are either pending work, or pending release (maybe I should have a way of storing additional notes beside each one ? Hmm... sounds like it's a little too specific then).

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9 Sep 2000 (Saturday) 

Forecast now has all the London 'JamCams' - Tim Hill sent me a load of them and I've only just got around to integrating them because of things happening recently. I also noticed a little bug with Forecast which meant that it would put the names of the first entry in a submenu as that menus title. Minor fix.

JFTerm updates. URLs preceeded by non-text will now work (I hope!), and you can now drop things on to the window and have them entered with the current input as a 'prefix' to that. Useful on IRC if you want to /me something, or whatever. Joseph suggested that, as that's what Talker does .

Went to town today; looked at books, CDs and DVDs. Nice CD shop - with a little door on to Buchanan Street. Most CDs £5.99; which is annoying as I bought a lot of them for more . Well, I know better now. Bought Natalie Imbruglia's "Left of the Middle", and Chris de Burgh's "Into the Light". Mostly I bought "Into the Light" for "Say Goodbye To It All", 'cos it's quite cool - it runs straight on from "Borderline", which would be cool with it as an MP3.

AMPlayer now supports ID3v1.1 tags. Wow. It's not much extra work, so it might as well understand them.

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8 Sep 2000 (Friday) 

Updated the diary with entries from the Psion. Many new entries .

First version of MP3 info complete. It's not quite ready yet. It needs a few tweaks. Like being multi-window and plugin-based. But other than that, it's just fine.

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7 Sep 2000 (Thursday) 

Buffy today was "The Prom" which is quite a cute episode, even if only for the last scene. Tried out a multi-session CD on the MpTrip today; it doesn't recognise anything but the first session, it seems.

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6 Sep 2000 (Wednesday) 

There's only a small collection of music on the drive at work. I must rectify that at some point, but I'm not exactly sure how easy that'll be. Probably I'll stick Apollo in and copy stuff to the tiny drive that's on it at the moment, although it'd be more sensible to actually get a decent sized drive.

I found out why Trick Of The Tail and Mama are ignored. They're MP2 format. I was sure I'd re-encoded them, to be honest, but it's possible I missed them. At some point I'll get decent copies. So that means I've got 3 albums to reencode, because they're not able to be played on 'something'. Overall, though, I'm quite pleased. If I get Dad to send up the Marillion disc, too, that'll be good. Although, hopefully it'll be next week that things can get sent up. In theory. All being well. I hope.

XSLT is kinda cool in the number of transforms it can apply to data. Well, I think it's rather nice anyhow.

Thought Buffy was on tonight, but it's on Thursdays now - I don't think it's been on Wednesdays for ages, but still I think it is. Oh well. Anyhow, there was Simpsons, and then Stargate SG-1 which is a new series. Apparently Buffy Season 1 DVD release is unofficially confirmed as being released at the end of November. That'd be cool. And X Files DVD series 1 is now 'out'. At least that's what Fox's site says. Hopefully it'll be 'physically' out soon.

I was quite surprised that Matthew says he's not seen The Forbidden Planet. It's still 'on hold' at Amazon; I might buy it, or I might just tell Matthew to get his brother to buy it and post it over if he's getting some other DVDs. I would imagine it's not so easy to find. Although, I could order from Amazon and ship to a States address and get him to post it over. That's probably just as awkward, though.

I keep thinking of cool things for RISC OS. Ah well. A Really Amusing (worthy of capitals) PFJ posting today. Why ? Because it was a fake. And nobody noticed. Except him, obviously. The silly thing was that it wasn't a mickey take, it wasn't rude or defamatory. It was a reasonable post with all the PFJ-like traits you can expect. The only things that gave it away if you looked were the headers which were quite amusing. The Message-Id matched with the exception of one letter a prior message - the user part of the Id was missing the 'f'. Quite why anyone would fake something that was completely mundane, I'm not sure. On the other hand, faking something by me is reasonably easy, too.

On a related note, I tried signing on to Smartgroups - somewhere that does maillist management, basically - and the reply that comes back to welcome you has a malformed Message-Id; it's not using a world unique identifier in the recommended form. The domain part is a local domain, not fully qualified. Well, what do you expect ? I mean it's not like these people have to distribute email to many thousands of people, is it ? Oh. Oh dear.

Reorganised the organisation of parts of the Psion tonight, which makes it a little easier to find 'stuff' now, as well as getting rid of some useless stuff.

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5 Sep 2000 (Tuesday) 

The Genesis CD (2) has on it :

1. The Lamb Lies Down (1)
2. The Lamb Lies Down (2)
3. Trick Of The Tail (ignored for some reason)
4. Wind and Wuthering
5. And Then There Were Three
6. Duke (256kbit - doesn't play on MpTrip)
7. Abacab
8. Genesis
9. Mama (ignored for some reason)
10. We Can't Dance
11. Calling All Stations

I'm not yet sure why Mama and Trick don't play. When I find out I can avoid them. When moving through the directory structure this disc is confused by having a top level 'Genesis' directory. This means that it is possible to step up to a empty directory.

Matthew's quick stab at a Corrs CD has a bizarre collection of tracks on it. Basically, it's written 8.3 DOS names, in a semi-random order on the disc, rather in the order that they appear in the directory structure. For example, we have Runaway as track 1, track 2 is Forgiven Not Forgotten, track 3 is Heaven Knows, track 4 is Along With The Girls, track 5 is Someday, track 6 is The Right Time. Basically that seems to be Forgiven Not Forgotten, but with a different first track. However, you switch to directory mode and you can play them in the right order.

The conclusion we can draw here is that the track number displayed as the first two digits on the player is the physical track number. When tracks change, the track within the directory flashes momentarily in then seconds field.

When in All mode, the tracks are played in the explicit order they were put on the disc (minimising the head move distance). This implies that there is a disc track number for every track, which may not be in an increasing order compared to the directory structure of tracks in the directory.

There are a number of operations that the Preview and Next buttons can trigger. These relate to how they are used. The normal operation is by press and release. Generally this is track change. Then there is press and hold which tends to operate a repeating fast forward, generally within the track. And there is press, release for a moment, and then press and hold, which is a repeating version of the main operation. Generally used for 'skip many tracks'.

Dir/File displays a name but has no effect in All, Intro, One and Random modes. In Dir or Dir Prog modes, the directory navigation is reasonably simple, even if it does destroy your brain. In Dir selection, you move up and down through the directories, but the moment there are no more directories at the level you have selected, you are switched to File selection mode and can then select a file within that directory. It's actually more confusing than it sounds here if you're not sure why it's doing what it's doing, but it does make sense once you get the hang of it.

I really need an MP3 CD with some interspersed tracks and directories, so that I can confirm the above hypothesis. Certainly that makes sense. I should be able to construct some instructions properly soon.

Anyhow, it's time for bed now. Really, I need my sleep.

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4 Sep 2000 (Monday) 

Had a strange dream about Helen last night. For some reason, I was trying to get permission from a group of people for a piece of software, and was having problems. They didn't seem to like the terms, and they seemed to want to run away a lot - usually up stairs or into other rooms. In the end I left Helen to it, whilst they were sitting on the roof of the building, and she came back with a zero fee, zero royalty licence for it. I'm not even sure what it was. Strange, but more normal than usual!

Don McLean's 'Vincent' (or Stary, Stary Night as I think it's better known), always seemed a great piece of music and poetry to me. However, I've always thought of it as being about Jesus. It just sits quite nicely with that as the object of the song. However, as I understand it, it's intended to be about Vincent Van Gogh. Whilst I can see that it works, looking at it that way, I do think that my personal interpretation works much better. Everyone's entitled to their opinion - mine is in this case factually wrong, but I prefer to live in my world; at least in that instance anyhow.

There's a lovely thread on CSA.Misc. Well, I say lovely. It's amusing. Someone actually wants to buy RO2 PRMs. Not quite sure why. But there you go. People are strange. Similarly, there's people asking whether a Mico or RiscStation is the best machine to buy. It's curious; I'd not recommend either. Or the A7000(+). Just seems like a waste of time, to me. Might as well get a machine that will actually be useful. A PC would be a good bet. If you're really desperate, a RiscPC, but not the lower spec machines. At least, it's the lower spec machines that really do restrict the software developments over the past god knows how many years. Would you believe there are still people going on about RO3.1 and asking why it's not being supported ? Now, I'm all for keeping thing backwards compatible, but not to the exclusion of future developments. I know I was one of those in the 3.1 camp about 3 years ago, but that was 3 years ago - things have changed and I'm seeing a whole different side to things - there isn't really much you can say but that.

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3 Sep 2000 (Sunday) 

Lesbian Elections ?! They have to be elected, now ? [ Misreading 'Lebanese Elections' on the morning TV news ]

Just remembered a DVD I wanted - Somewhere In Time.

I just love the junction of Sauchiehall Street and... well, I don't know the road name, but it's a big intersection that has a motorway under it. Anyhow, why do I like it ? Because it works. The pedestrian crossing appears to be on the right timing so that you can cross all of it, and the roads are spread such that you're not waiting for other traffic - it doesn't seem to queue much. It seems like a really nice piece of design to me.

Helped Dave move in today.

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2 Sep 2000 (Saturday) 

Whilst walking around there is one thing I began to wonder. I don't tend to think about the future much, but it does happen sometimes. The thing is that it's Matthew's Birthday tomorrow. He'll be 24. Which means that I'll be 24 too in a couple of weeks. "So ?" I hear you cry. Well, I'm single. And I have been for the past... well, too many years. Why ? I'm not too social, and I don't tend to go out. That's part of it, but more it's down to being obsessive for most of that time. So, why think about this ? Well, I was thinking vaguely about birthdays and kids and it came to me that if, hypothetically, I met someone and we were to have kids, then I'd be in my 30s when they were starting school. Is that scary ? Kinda. More scary is the idea of having kids, so I'm not thinking about that.

Hmm... Sandwiches from the place called "Taste! the sandwich with more" don't live up to their name. Sorry. I've been wandering around the shops (big and small) here to get an idea of where things are and who does what. More specifically, to see what's cool. Generally, most places are reasonably interesting. I really enjoyed walking around John Lewis', but that's mostly 'cos it's quite big and has a lot of choice .

Excuse me whilst I collapse in shock - Virgin has five IQ albums on sale! That's quite amazing, really.

Me: Hiya Chris... <listens> Are you in a train station ? Chris: No, I'm in Amsterdam. Me: Oh. Um. <pause> What are you doing in Amsterdam ? Chris: At the moment, playing pool. [ Talking to Chris on the mobile ]

Well, I was speechless.

Gawd, Gap adverts are awful.

Watched The Living Daylights tonight; I'm just too tired to do anything, so I'm spending a lazy day in the Hotel. I'll probably do same tomorrow, too. There's not much else to do, really.

So what did I end up buying today ? Well, I think I spent a little more than I probably should be spending at the moment, but it was fun. To make things easy, I'm giving Simon my radio headphones, and I've bought myself some more. That should make things easier, and solves the problem of what to get him. I bought a carry case for the Walkman, and a belt strap too, so I can actually use it as a Walkman. And the more important thing that's needed to use it as a Walkman - some batteries. I've got some rechargeable batteries, because I'm lazy. These will charge in the player, which is rather cool.

I also briefly popped in to Virgin to see if there was anything cool there. The 2 CDs for 22 quid caught my eye, but there wasn't much there that was worth paying that much for. However, hidden behind that was a 3 for £12 offer. At first, it didn't seem that I could find anything, but after a little searching, I found a few 'Best of's - Sad Cafe, Alice Cooper, and Bonnie Tyler. For 4 pounds each, I'm not too bothered. Wandering around in the full price section, I managed to find two albums that I wouldn't mind, and weren't at a silly price - T'Pau's Bridge of Spies, and Genesis' From Genesis to Revelation. That should complete the Genesis collection of major albums, and only leaves me with Seconds Out and Turn It On to get from the rest, as I understand it. Since Turn It On is just a 'hits' album, I'm not sure I really care that much.

Pah. Batteries are nearly dead in the Psion now, so I'd better sign off. Maybe I should have used it on the mains power whilst I'm here in the Hotel. Ah well.

The instructions on the Walkman are really quite bad. So much so that I'm almost tempted to re-write them. This time in English. There don't seem to be any instructions for using the CD player in Prog mode. It's actually quite simple to do. First pause the playing of the track you're on, unless you want to listen to it whilst programming. Now, hold down Play/Mode until it highlights Prog on the LCD panel. The numbers displayed then show <sequence> - <track>. <track> is displayed as 2 digits. Using the Next and Preview buttons will change <track>, and pressing Repeat/Enter will store the current track in the sequence. Pressing Play/Pause will then start the programmed sequence playing. Repeat, when in Prog mode will repeatedly play the sequence. If Repeat is off, you can still use Next and Preview to move through the sequence in a cycle; it is only when through the normal playing of the last track that the player will stop.

In Intro mode, only the first ten seconds of a track will be played. You can use Next and Preview to move through the tracks, but using Next or Preview to step through the track itself will revert the mode to All. If Repeat is selected, the Intro play will return to track 1 when the last track has been played.

In One mode, play will stop when the track ends. If Repeat is selected, the track will be repeated.

Random mode actually means Shuffle - tracks are played in a random order without repetition. When that order completes, the player stops. If Repeat is selected then a new order will be selected and playing continues. In Random mode Preview means the same as Next - it advances to the next track.

In CD mode, there are two Bass Sound settings. Sound 1 is normal. Sound 2 is 'extra bass'.

Whilst charging, the player will display the battery light on the LCD panel, flashing every second or so to indicate activity. If the player is not active whilst charging, then 'CHG' will be displayed.

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1 Sep 2000 (Friday) 

Ok. It's bizarre. I wasn't looking for it. It just turned up in a search for something work related. I don't even want to think why it came up in those searches. The Underpants Archive. It's an X-Files thing.

David and Joseph should have been moving in today. However, although the paperwork appears in order, they don't have a boiler. Which means no heating and no hot water. Which is a bit of a pain. So, I've checked back in to the hotel until Monday. It's all a lot of hassle. Spoke to Matthew briefly today - he's been on Holiday this week.

Went out with some of the guys from work. It's quite strange; being in a different office to the people doing other work in the company. If I didn't know better I'd think people wanted to make life hard. When I went to Pace I ended up on the other side of the office to the people I was working with, and here I've ended up... on the other side of the building in another office. It's Ok once you're used to the place, but it does seem a bit stupid if you want people to settle in easily.

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