31 Jan 2001 (Wednesday) 

Bugger. My CD writer has died. It's a Creative CD RW. It was working quite well until today. And I've just spent quite a while trying to find out what's up with it. In any case, I've emailed their support people. I don't expect such things to die after only 6 months.

And of course, I try to contact support via their webpages. What do I get ? I bounce from their mail delivery system saying that it has rejected the recipient address. Their own mail system doesn't accept support emails. Impressed ? No. At this present moment, would I recommend Creative products ? No. What do I expect from them ? An apology would be nice for the massive inconvenience caused. And a replacement drive as a gesture of goodwill would put my mind at rest and retain a customer.

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27 Jan 2001 (Saturday) 

Number 5: Stephanie change colour. [ Bathroom; Short Circuit ]

Which won't make much sense unless you happen to have been at my school when it came out. Or maybe it will... I dunno, really...

Watched a film called Seconds today, about a guy who wants a new identity. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out, so he tries to get another identity. However, the company don't do that unless he can think of someone else who could benefit from the company's work. As he can't, they are forced to use him as one of the dead bodies for their new clients. Well, that was a quick summary .

- www.cdwow.com January 28, 101 [ What year is it ?; CD-Wow (http://www.cd-wow.com/) ]

Do you trust these people with your money, when a year after the event they still have Y2K problems.

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26 Jan 2001 (Friday) 

NTL CD arrived today. Spent a little while installing it. I had a problem, you see... The 'registering user' message popped up after I'd entered the details and then it just sat there like that for about five minutes. So I got fed up and hit cancel. Which obviously meant I couldn't re-register. Which is unfortunate. So I rang their technical support - well, that's what it's there for - and got through to a nice guy who gave me all the details I needed to make it work again. And if I'd read the on screen when I followed his instructions it'd have meant it'd have worked first time, not second time. Anyhow, I was impressed. Not that it didn't work, because I kinda expected that, but that there was anyone on the support line when I rang. It was 4am.

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24 Jan 2001 (Wednesday) 

[11] "My Last Theorem: A Prankster's Guide to Ageless Mathematical Jokes That are Funny Because They're True and People Can't Prove Them for Centuries." P. Fermat. Circa 1630. [ Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite, references; RFC 2795 ]

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23 Jan 2001 (Tuesday) 

Did you mean what you said ? What ? About bringing a child into the world being an act of cruelty ? Well, I meant it at the time. What do you mean meant it at the time, it was seven seconds ago. A lot's happened since then ! [ Having a baby; The Rock ]

I'm trying to find a search engine for musical artists. Basically I want to be able to say give it the artist name, and for it to tell me, or take me to the website for that artist. Is it really that hard ?

The answer, by the way, is 'yes, it's that hard'.

Watched Now and Again tonight. It was the second episode. Very strange series, in some respects. The major part of it concerns a specially built guy who's trying to see his family. He's dead, you see. Or his body is; his brain is in this new body. So his family don't know and they're trying to get by without his life insurance paying out, and without him. And the other, more scary part, is a psychotic chinese guy who likes putting nerve gas into eggs then leaving them in places where they'll be broken and leaving pretty sharpish. That's the scariest thing I've seen in a while on TV, actually I think. It almost compares to reading The Hot Zone in its gruesomeness, I think. In any case, I'll not be looking at eggs in quite the same way again. The strange parts are that the 'major' part of it takes up almost all of the time, and there's very little on the chinese guy. Which is all the more scary as you jump from his sometimes comical escapades to this violent psycho who is killing people in one of the nastiest ways imaginable (albeit pretty quick). And the other strange thing is that episode two ends again with 'to be continued'. It's more usual to have the first two episodes as setting the scene and a major encounter - which is what I expected - and then take off from there with episode three and more things happening in the same vein. It's keeping me interested so far anyhow. That and the fact that the name is interesting...

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22 Jan 2001 (Monday) 

Well, I feel bad tonight. Since about 8-ish, I've been watching Telly, it seems. You see, first there was Charmed (interspersed with Andromeda in the breaks), then Second Sight, then a film on Sci-Fi called 'Johnny 2.0' (with Skinner and Baddiel in the breaks), then Angel, followed by The Outer Limits, and then Skinner and Baddiel that I'd recorded. Feels like I've done nothing. Because I've not .

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21 Jan 2001 (Sunday) 

I've been spending a few days trying to organise my source code into some sort of sane order. The problem is that a lot of the things I've written rely on libraries that I've written before. Consequently, they require a bit of thinking about to ensure that you've always got the latest version of a library. The solution, obviously, is to maintain all your source centrally, rather than spread out across multiple harddiscs as it is. So, it's all slowly being checked into CVS. And at the same time, I'm updating to use a couple of 'maintainance' systems.

The first of these, I've described before. The 'VersionNum'/'Commit' system is based around the principle that you have multiple files as part of a component, and those files as a group have a version number. This version number is the component version number and it should be incremented with every non-trivial change (ie any change which isn't purely documentational should update the version). The 'commit' script does this job. It's not brilliant, but it's certainly doing a nice job of ensuring that versions are updating when they ought to be . This sort of management means that version numbers race quite a bit, but that's not a problem as it merely means that the granularity of change is much smaller and therefore bugs are more trackable.

Another thing that the commit system makes possible, is automatic ChangeLog generation. These are basically copies of the CVS lots made into a single file. This information could be obtained by doing a 'cvs log' on the VersionNum file, but you're not always in a situation where you can do that and therefore this helps that process greatly.

The second of these is the 'build' system. Because, as I've said, I need a number of external resource to be pulled in at release-time, it is useful to combine this process with the build itself. Whilst this can be achieved with makefiles, it tends to be quite clumbersome (to my mind). You have a lot of flexibility with makefiles, but you also have a great potential for mistakes by the same token. Instead, I've written a small (well, it was small when it was designed!) program to do this. We know what components we have, because they're in the CVS modules file (which is updated whenever commit adds a new component, so it's always up to date). We can use this to find the components we need to pull in.

So, let's take an example makefile (this is actually the most complex one I have, but it's also the one I'm trying things out with!) :

# Project:   SVGPlugin

# Import:
#  Source.Plugin         <- BASICLib-Plugin:Plugin
#  Source.TaskWindow     <- BASICLib-TaskWindow:TaskWindow
#  Source.Special-TaskWindow <- BASICLib-TaskWindow:Special
#  Source.VersionBas     <- @:VersionBas

# Release:
#  !SVG.                 <- @:Source.
#    !Boot
#    !Run                <- @:Source.!RunC
#    !Sprites
#    About.About         | VTranslate
#    About.0001270094
#    Messages
#    Sprites
#    Sprites22
#    Templates
#    Modules.ParseXML    <- ParseXML:ParseXML
#    Modules.StyleMan    <- StyleMan:StyleMan
#    Modules.WebColours  <- WebColours:WebColours
#    Docs.Browsers       <- @:Docs.Browsers
#  @:!SVG.Bin            <- ConvertSVG:
#  @:Examples            <- @:Resources.Examples

RELEASES = $(RELEASE).!SVG.!Help \
           $(RELEASE).!SVG.!RunImage \
           $(RELEASE).!SVG.Docs.ChangeLog

BasCompressFlags = -CVar -WEndRtn -Reduce "" -XRef 0 -MultiDEF -special Source.Special,Source.Special-TaskWindow { > null: }

# Final targets:
export: 
        @echo [No exported components]
release: $(RELEASES)
clean:
        remove Temp!Help
        remove Source.!RunImage

# User-editable dependencies:
$(RELEASE).!SVG.!RunImage: Source.!RunImageU \
                           Source.VersionBas \
                           Source.Special \
                           Source.PlugIn \
                           Source.TaskWindow \
                           Source.SVG
        RMEnsure ZLib 0.14 RMLoad System:Modules.ZLib
        Set SVGPlugin$Dir Source
        BasCompress -In Source.!RunImageU -Out $(RELEASE).!SVG.!RunImage ${THROWBACK} ${BasCompressFlags}
        
$(RELEASE).!SVG.!Help: Docs.!Help
        VTranslate VersionNum Docs.!Help Temp!Help
        Cat Temp!Help VersionLog > $(RELEASE).!SVG.!Help
        Remove Temp!Help
        
$(RELEASE).!SVG.Docs.ChangeLog: Docs.ChangeLogHeader \
                                VersionLog \
                                Docs.ChangeLog
        Cat Docs.ChangeLogHeader VersionLog Docs.ChangeLog > $(RELEASE).!SVG.Docs.ChangeLog

The important section of comments at the top is the main bit. This declares that we need four files from various components to be brought into the source (BASICLib-Plugin, my plugin library, and BASICLib-Taskwindow, a simple controller for taskwindows; the @ component, is the 'current' component). It then declares the files we need to release, some of them coming from this component, and some from other components. About.About is actually being passed through 'VTranslate' to create a file that contains the same data but with a few tokens replaced.

The actual processing that the makefile does is quite small. Almost all of the release work is handled by Build. This particular component doesn't actually need to make anything other than the !RunImage, so it's not really that good an example, but it is quite useful, really.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with the way that it works. It's not just for BASIC components, but C, libraries and anything else I chuck in there. Even the library of absolute files that the whole build system needs is maintained by commit (but not by build yet - there's a minor problem that you can't build something if you don't have the tools, so that's just a plain makefile!).

Quite a technical diary entry today.

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20 Jan 2001 (Saturday) 

Pretty tracks, that sit together :

• All Out Of Love, by Air Supply
• Mockingbird, by BJH
• Heroes Never Die, by Mostly Autumn
• Winter, by Tori Amos
• Through The Barricades, by Spandau Ballet
• Forever Autumn, by Justin Hayward
• In My World, by The Moody Blues
• Stay, by Lisa Loeb
• Rome Is Burning, by John Wesley
• Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), by Green Day
• Beyond The Dark, by Celtus
• Drive, by The Cars
• The Roof Is Leaking, by Phil Collins
• Right Here Waiting, by Richard Marx
• Russians, by Sting
• The Drugs Don't Work, by The Verve

Maybe. They seem to as I jump through the tracks briefly anyhow. I like putting together little theme-groups like that. It's quite nice, particularly as a number of the tracks are quite nicely outside of most people's experience. In any case, they're not in any particular order. If you have any of these in your collection, listen to them again. They're pretty.

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19 Jan 2001 (Friday) 

Xander: Surprised that Buffy couldn't make it tonight. Willow: She's probably out with Riley. You know how it is, with a spanking new boyfriend. Anya: Yes, we enjoyed spanking. [ You know how it is...; Willow, Xander, and Anya; Buffy, the Vampire Slayer ]

Joan: Elaine is in... some trouble. She has a little domestic problem. Publisher: Domestic problem ? Her last domestic problem was finding her husband cut in to little bits. [ Off to Columbia; Romancing The Stone ]

Slow the rain falls, The memories blowing through; I stand with arms outstretched, To catch the warmth of you; Eyes to the Heavens, Screaming at the Skies; Trying to send you messages But choking on Goodbyes And I wonder why... ... Close my eyes now, and focus on the light, You are more beautiful, and never out of sight; And tears that fall are blood from the heart, From the moment that we part, May I offer those tears, For the love of the years; For the love. The ways, the ins and outs of heaven, Still elude us to the end; The tears, the sun, the rain, I feel them on the face, against my skin. We loved you then, we love you still; And don't you know, don't you know, Heroes never die, they live forever. [ Heroes Never Die, from For All We Shared, by Mostly Autumn ]

A difficult group of lyrics to type with tears in your eyes, it seems .

I've found myself using @ for the 'this' element in various parsers I've written recently. At first I wasn't quite sure why I was doing it, but when I thought about it, it became reasonably obvious. @ in IRClient is the 'this' element of a class, and also the parent during overloaded routine dispatch. That stems from Matthew Godbolt using it, so it's necessary to look a little further back. And then it's blatantly obvious. @ is the CSD (Currently Selected Directory) under RISC OS, aka 'this' directory . Easy.

Greebo's come and sat with me for the past two nights whilst I've been doing stuff. He's really cute when he falls asleep, but a pain when he's awake. Aww...

I had a strange dream a couple of nights back; I had stolen a balloon with a friend (as in 'hot air balloon') and was floating over the country, popping down to see places whenever we could, before the balloon was wafted up and away from us again. It was quite fun, but I do remember that a couple of people died in one place, because... well, they just threw themselves off the roof I think.

Last night, I was part of some army type unit who for some reason were in a valley tracking something, and some of them had managed to get away (how, I don't know, and what from, I don't know) but we were stuck there, and were making out way up the rocky edges, climbing as best we could. Then there was a dam-burst, and we had to climb faster to get higher up before it came and washed us all off. I reached the top just before it arrived, only to find that the top was actually only a few feet wide, if that. It sort of came to a point, and fell away steeply on the other side too. Imagine a glacial valley, and you'll get the idea. Except that it had a 'squared off' top, as if someone had a plank of wood capping the top. Don't ask me, that's all I remember for now.

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16 Jan 2001 (Tuesday) 

I think if I hear Erin Shore one more time I might scream. Argh! It's my 'example' track I'm using for testing MP3s with. So, I've heard it a couple of hundred times in the past hour, it seems. Plus the couple of hundred the last time I tried this. Argh!

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15 Jan 2001 (Monday) 

Yay. And so it ends. Yes, RedHotAnt have finally decided to call it a day. Fucking useless gits. Sorry for the harsh language, but I'm slightly irritated . And with a whole day's notice period. Wow.

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14 Jan 2001 (Sunday) 

Went to Snetterton market with Dad today. There really wasn't much there, but we did get to see the amusing guys selling toys with their speil. I enjoy watching them doing that sort of thing. It's just quite fun to see .

Found a minor bug in Browse's URI handling today. It seems to treat the data attribute of an object element as being the type to use, even if a type is specified. Which means that my test I wanted to use didn't work. Slightly irritating, but not major. Certainly not something to panic over.

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13 Jan 2001 (Saturday) 

Set up Simon's A5000 today. That was quite amazing, actually. I'd forgotten some of the 'silly' things I'd done on it. FilerPlusPatch really was quite nice. I do miss it in some ways, now . But I can't live without some of the new filer features, so it's not too bad. Anyhow, I hope it's all working for him now.

Reorganised my MP3s. Well, some of those that were marked as 'unsorted' into the relevant directories. Removed dupes and put other bits right. I'm still not sure of the best thing for some artists. I mean, take The Ballad of Tom Jones. By Space and Catatonia, so one of the ID3 tags says. But actually, it's Space and one member of Catatonia, I'm told. So, where should it go ? Under Space, Catatonia, the artist (whose name I've forgotten) or a new category specially for that track ? Or even under all of them ? The latter begs the question of whether Money For Nothing would be in both Dire Straits and Sting or not ? Nothing in this world is ideal .

ControlAMPlayer now supports an option to queue an album. Ctrl-Shift-Double-Click (I know it's a mouthful, but it's quite logical, really) will mark a file as 'to be played when the current directory is complete'. This does mean it's now added to the ever increasing list of "Things To Release When You Have Time".

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12 Jan 2001 (Friday) 

So, I want to see whether there's NTL service around home. I doubt there's going to be, but I think 'I won't know if I don't look'. So, what do I do ? I try http://www.ntlworld.co.uk/, thinking as I do so how strange that looks. So, it's not valid. UK company, without a uk domain ? Silly of me really to think that . So, I try http://www.ntlworld.com/ instead. What do I get ? Fucking Ananova news ! Do I want that ? Did I frigging well type in http://www.ananova.com/ ? No, I don't think so. So why the hell is it here ?! For fucks sake, get a grip! If you go into Dixons, you don't damned well expect them to try to sell you a sofa.

Calm. Ok, so I was foolish in my thinking ahead, there... I should have gone to http://www.ntl.co.uk/ instead. But, still, it has a link at the bottom for its internet access at the bottom of the page to ntlworld.

Finally, I find the answer, and... TV internet, and NTLWorld.

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11 Jan 2001 (Thursday) 

I did a quick spate of 'download the Psion games and see what they are like' last night. Not something I do often - well, I've done it once before. But, I was quite surprised on installing Mr Matt to find that it was written by a Reuben Thomas. Reuben and I used to exchange emails quite regularly a while back - he's a really nice guy. And it is indeed he. I'm quite surprised and relieved to know that he's still doing fun stuff . Try The FreEpoc site for more stuff like that.

Went to Simon's Presentation Evening at Methwold tonight. He was getting the prize for highest number of points in the school ('Outstanding Work At A Level'), which is very neat. In his suit. With short hair. I'm generally proud of the people up there - whether I know them or not, but for him it's like "That's Simon! He's my Brother". It's rather nice to know that Simon, Julian and myself all went through there and took some of the prizes each time. Yeah, maybe I'm being smug, but I can't help that. He's done well.

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10 Jan 2001 (Wednesday) 

Can we, can we, can we go out clubbing on holiday ? Can we ? [ Talking to Dad about their holiday in Lanzarote; Mum ]

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9 Jan 2001 (Tuesday) 

Had my hair cut today. Golly, exciting, huh ? Yes, it's the big news of the century. I lead a thrilling life. And I finally got the linux box up and running, and... talking to RedHotAnt. Now if only they weren't closing down, that'd seem more impressive.

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1 Jan 2001 (Monday) 

Dangermouse: The French coast! Penfold: Oh, are we going to Paris! Fifi ? Dangermouse: Ssssh, Penfold. I told you not to mention her whilst we were on air. Penfold (to camera): I'll tell you about her later. [ Statues; Dangermouse and Penfold ]

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