I was childish, and unfair; To you, my only friend. I regret, but now it's the end. [ Why!, from Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi, by Enigma ]

For reasons which are... not interesting... we were trying to decide on what would be the most pointless SWI. 'OS_ReturnR1' (R1 on exit is R1 on entry) was discounted because you might use it for string conversions in BASIC. 'OS_MashRegisters' (returns corrupt versions of R0-R9) was similarly not granted the award, because it could be used for a random number generator. The winner, though, was much more fun... 'OS_RandomSWI' which calls a random OS SWI. I can't actually think of any constructive use for that - it's just about as pointless as you can get, I think. Thanks to drobe and cmj for their suggestions .

And Xargle terrified me with his story of being mugged tonight. My sympathy to him . I'd be too terrified to even think if someone threatened me with a knife.

Interesting musical list...

• Born Of Frustration, by James
• Sit Down, by James
• Altogether Now, by The Farm
• Let Me Entertain You, by Robbie Williams
• What Do You Want From Me, by Monaco
• Joyride, by Roxette
• Twist And Shout, by Deacon Blue
• Tubthumping, by Chumbawumba
• Stay, by Lisa Loeb
• Alive And Kicking, by Simple Minds
• Secret Smile, by Semisonic

I was watching The West Wing tonight and the phone rang. So I rush upstairs to grab the phone, only for it to go off just before I reach it. So I hit 14713 to call back whoever had called. And I'm a little surprised that it's Caroline. Weird. But we end up chatting for about 45 minutes about stuff and it's nice. It's like being friends again. I like that.

I hope that things are going to be like that in the future and that this isn't just some little thing from just getting to know one another again.

Went to see Caroline in town on Monday. It's now Wednesday, but I've not written anything because I'm both lazy and because I didn't want to say anything that might be reactionary.

Well, we're both alive. Nobody yelled. I only got a little angry. I think I was a little too bouncey, really. It was somewhat strange and I couldn't really believe that she actually wasn't angry at me. After so long, it seems that I may have blown her attitude out of proportion. Regardless, we wandered around town and chatted.

She didn't remember her last phone call, which means it probably wasn't too important. She's still lovely. Different, but lovely. And she still has those mannerisms that were both frustrating and utterly endearing - on anyone else, those mannerims would be hated, but on her they're just special, and appealing. Well, they are.

After walking to the station repeating "She can't touch me", it seems that I was wrong. She can. I don't handle women overly well, and Caroline... well, Caroline has always been something special. It's hard to see her married, and with a daughter (not that I met them!) but I'm happy (I am) that she is. I'm jealous, of course. I do, it seems, still care for her a lot, and it hurts like hell to know that she has had such a bad time and that I couldn't help. But it's no longer - and hasn't been for many years - something I can do anything about.

Her daughter looks lovely. Well, she's a baby, so there's not a lot you can say really; a baby is a baby, unless its your own, and babies are cute.

Andrew, I only saw photos of briefly, looks like a nice guy. Again, there's not a lot else you can say there - what else are you going to say about a guy who married your ex and makes her happy ?

And so, we reach the final question... am I going to keep in touch, or just leave things in limbo ? Whilst there are many things I'd still like to know and I'd like to keep up with her, I think it probably isn't a good idea overall. She has her life. I have mine (whatever that is!). It took many years to recover from her first time around and having those same thoughts, and sleepless nights again isn't really something I want to go through.

That said, I never was one to avoid something that was bad .

After much messing about, I've now got the IPTables kernel and scripts working (what appears to be) correctly. Which means that nothing comes in that wasn't initiated by us, and nothing goes out which we aren't expecting. There's the usual forward on port 87 for my JFTerm chat client, so that if you wanted to get me and I was online you only had to connect to that port and type to talk to me. You really need some form of talker client for that, but it works with a normal telnet client nonetheless . So, gerph.dyndns.org port 87 to chat. Astounding, huh ?

Why, though, was I messing around with iptables when I had a perfectly working ipchains setup ? Well, it's pretty simple. Because the kernel had been upgraded to 2.4.18, ipchains were being made obsolete - although they worked - and consequently would not be able to use the old ftp masquerading module. This isn't a problem for most sites as they reject the initial address that I give them (a private allocated address) and my FTP client switches to PASV mode - having got that code working, I'm quite pleased with myself . But, freenetnames - who provide movspclr.co.uk - have got their firewalling (or FTP server) failing to masquerade their private network correctly and reply with a 172.16.x.x IP which is also in a private address range. Consequently, they can't connect to me because my firewall means I provide an invalid local address, and I can't connect to them because their firewall means that they provide an invalid local address.

So, the upgrade to iptables means that my end - at least - can provide a correctly masqueraded FTP connection and the upload works correctly. It's really their problem that they've not got PASV working properly, but we can't have everything, can we ?

As you can see, because of this, the Diary's back now after about a month or so of absence.

6:05am, and I get a connection on ttylink port with 'muhahaha' from tarantula.tpgi.com.au. Weird. To paraphrase Mr Jelts, "Hello, whoever you are!". This is half an hour after I upload the diary saying that you can connect there... amusing.

Scanning quickly back through the diary for Caroline entries, I find an entry for 8th October '99 which has a dream about meeting her - there's a small section in July '99 about meeting her, which is odd, too. The dream, though, is very strange. I do actually remember it. I remember her being scared and cowering. Whilst I doubt it has any relation to reality, it seems a little... disturbing now. It must have been a little affecting back then because I wrote about it.

Any thoughts about this Caroline thing ?

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

I was amazed by going to the lycos site to be told that "Netscape 4.7 is a very old browser and does not support the latest industry standards for HTML". Particularly as I wasn't using Netscape 4.7 - I use Oregano that fakes Netscape because it gets in to most sites. I was more astounded when I went into the site and found that it didn't display hardly anything correctly.

So, I'm curious... what features does my browser lack that lycos relies on. I look at the HTML. Amazement is lost and replaced by astonishment. HTML... well, they might have heard of it, but their main page isn't.

How many faults can we spot with a quick glance ?

Well, firstly, the entire document isn't wrapped in <html> as it ought to be and they roll straight in with a head. They've given a doctype. It's wrong because already they've violated that, so they're down two points on the second line of the file.

So we wander through and find a slew of empty div elements which we can only assume are replaced by real bodies by src'd javascript later in the document. That's pretty nasty in itself.

The stylesheet content is unhidden - it should be contained within HTML comments as recommended in the specification. Scripts are similarly unescaped. The body of the page contains top bit set characters and yet no charset declaration is provided for the document. The body declaration is only part specified, lacking colour specifications although a background is given. The &copy; entity hasn't been heard of by the authors, apparently. The document has raw & characters within the document.

The document itself is a mixture of DOS and unix line endings which indicates a lack of any regard for the actual content - they can hardly be maintaining it when the file can't even keep to the same line ending style - even if it is auto-generated.

As you can imagine, I'll not be going to the lycos pages when I've got Google.

Lycos is a very bad website; it no longer supports the industry standards for HTML, nor the spirit of backwards compatibility upon which the Internet is structured.

Please visit a search engine site that is.

Google, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves support such standards.


You may go back and browse the site, but your experience will be bad, so don't click here.