25 Feb 2003 (Tuesday) 

Corrie tonight was Richard's confession to Gail that he'd killed... well, most of Manchester. Well, maybe not quite that many people, but the death count stopped short of including Gail because the baby woke up. Phew. Gail should have just called Ashley and Fred. Ok, so there'd be one more murder on the street, but it'd have been a closure for him.

Woo.

I've spent a little while looking at the components of IRClients. Some of the bits in it are just downright weird, but there's some powerful things in there. A Binary Tree class, implemented with callbacks such that the elements in it can be compared in an overloadable manner. You can inherit from a BTree and get its functions, plus extend it to provide additional facilities. The Handler class is built upon BTree and used it to locate and dispatch calls to named handler routines. The Window class uses the Handler class to dispatch click and other events to its clients. The Window class itself uses the core List class to track all its elements. And that's before we even think about he terror that is the 'unknown variable' handler that the 'Array' class uses to provide an associative array... There's even DrawFile processing and parts of the IRC client that actally were used included the CTCP, DCC, HTTP, Email and FTP handlers.

I remember demonstrating the HTTP and FTP handlers at one of the shows to someone. I forget who and I was really impressed with myself. Looking at it on the screen wasn't too impressive - it was only line based HTTP, and FTP is never that interesting anyhow, but when you see the manner in which the clients have been written you do appreciate a lot more how it works... oh my god, there's a External Edit client handler and a CD control script in here.

Yeah, IRClient was so far ahead of anything else. Never mind that it was just a 'reasonable' IRC client... it was a programming language that just got out of control. Matthew... well, he had exactly the right idea when he wrote the BASIC interpreter and did a really quite excellent overloadable class system. It's a pity that my scripts just couldn't take it anywhere useful .

I think I may have found a limitation in BasCompress's special control files tonight. Annoyingly you can't do... well, something that's quite complex and I'm not in the right frame of mind to explain; basically you can't pass a string that's a known function stem reference to a function that requires a function stem reference.

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24 Feb 2003 (Monday) 

Got a reply back from Energis today saying that they couldn't trace the threat email. That's not entirely surprising, so I'm not bothered. At least they tried.

Rain, sea, surf, sand, clouds and sky; Hush now baby don't you cry. There's a mockingbird, sing songs in the tree; There's a mockingbird, just for you and me. [ Mockingbird, from Barclay James Harvest, by Barclay James Harvest ]

Hmm; something of a light song sequence...

• One, by U2
• Tears in Heaven, by Eric Clapton
• Mockingbird, by Barclay James Harvest
• Moonchild, by Celtus
• Fatal Hesitation, by Chris de Burgh
• Boys Of Summer, by Don Henley
• Rome Is Burning, by John Wesley
• Heart and Shoulder, by Heather Nova
• Dancing In The Dark, by Bruce Springsteen
• The Power Of Love, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood
• Stay, by Lisa Loeb
• Constant Craving, by K D Lang
• Toy Soldiers, by Martika
• Jesse, by Joshua Kadison
• I want to know what love is, by Foreigner
• I'm not in love, by 10cc
• All out of love, by Air Supply

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23 Feb 2003 (Sunday) 

I had a listen to some of the bits from the Buffy Musical soundtrack last night. At the time I saw it on TV, two bits stood out - one was Tara's solo 'Under your spell', and Xander and Anya's duet 'I'll never tell' (Spike's 'Rest In Peace' was pretty cool too). 'I'll never tell' was the more funny and grabbed me more at the time but listening to them again, I think I 'Under your spell' is really great. You don't get quite how good Tara's voice is normal, and it really shows through on her solo.

'Cold Feet' was an hour and a half tonight, so I've missed the second episode of '24' now. Quite annoying. I'm watching series one in the background, too, so I'm slightly confused in places, but as I know how we get to series 5, it's not quite as confusing as (say) watching two series of Buffy.

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22 Feb 2003 (Saturday) 

After turning over from Lovejoy and notice that "Time Gentlemen Please" is on. Now I'm not amazingly keen on it, but Julia Sawalha's in it, so I thought'd be a fun way to waste a bit of time. So I was quite surprised to see Colin Matthew's on in it. Well, Paul Reynolds. It was just quite strange to see Linda and Colin together again. Well, the actors anyhow.

I'm a little Press Gang fan, even now .

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21 Feb 2003 (Friday) 

Finished Monkey Island 2 tonight. Good god, that's hard. 3 and 1 were very easy by comparison. The end of 2 seems to be a little bit... odd... It doesn't really fit with the start of 3, but then... oh well...

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17 Feb 2003 (Monday) 

I spent a ludicrous amount of time implementing an OCS parser in !RSS and the front end for it. It's nothing special, but it does allow you to import feeds from an OCS file into your local hotlist. It's depressingly slow. I would have hoped that my cut-down 37k file would have parsed in maybe a second, and probably faster than that. It seems to be taking around 20cs per site which is quite a significant amount of time. For this cut down file, it's taking around 5 seconds to parse everything. Working to the same scale, the 1M file from Moreover would take over a minute, just to parse. And during that time, because the parser is recursive and my code sucks at the moment, it doesn't multitask. Pretty poor.

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16 Feb 2003 (Sunday) 

Watched Stir Of Echos tonight, because I wanted to just do something simple. I missed the very beginning, but only about 20 minutes, I think. Anyhow, it's quite a fun film. Sixth Sense-y, and not too scary (well, I managed to watch it).

First episode of the second series of 24 this week, too. The thing to remember that Jack's down to only one person to worry about now so he's totally paranoid about her. Of course, with the general threat of terrorism at the moment, having a long running series about a nuclear threat in a major city becomes almost mundane. Well, maybe not mundane, but you know what I mean .

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14 Feb 2003 (Friday) 

As I'm sitting here, talking to Hedley about the bizarre ways of women, I'm drawn to think back to meeting Caroline again many months back. It's nothing special. Just that really strange thought of "I can't quite believe that I'm here with her". It maybe isn't that odd, but it's just that feeling of "everything you thought for the past x years is wrong... she doesn't hate you ... you can still talk to her", and whether or not we still talk or anything, that feeling that things aren't how you think is nice.

Dunno why I thought that. But there you go.

Friends tonight had a thing about Richard having taped over a film of Monica and him having sex. Julian dropped me an SMS asking whether I thought that this was a rip off of the 'Coupling' episode 'The cupboard of Patrick's love', which involves the guys watching a tape of Susan and Patrick and Susan finding out (ok, it's better when you watch it), but which Patrick has recorded over and the guys don't notice until Susan points it out. Sound familiar ? I never actually noticed that it was so similar really; I recognised the similarity, but it wasn't until Julian mentioned it that it really made me think about how similar they were.

Comment from one of my friends: "I hope the joke in question wasn't open source"

Comment from another: "but then Friends wouldn't call it a joke, they'd say it was a gag and thus separate from the main script".

Julian was probably unaware of the amusement over the weekend .

And whilst searching for release dates of episodes, I discover that the Friends official site is one of those 'we'll stick a bloody pointless flash site there 'cos that's good isn't it' things. So whilst it's still struggling to load the intro to the Friends site, I've already found what I need on the BBC's nice HTML site.

Anyhow, the answer is thus...

Friends series 9, 2002-2003.

Coupling series 1, 'The Cupboard Of Patrick's Love', 16/6/2000.

Which means that Coupling predates Friends. Astounding, huh ? Given that people compare Coupling to Friends, this probably isn't even vaguely interesting, but given that Coupling is hoped to replace Friends as a regular TV thing, it would seem... interesting. Amusing, anyhow. In a 'coo, look at that' way. Nothing else.

Received the EtherY sources from Castle today, too. I've asked Jack whether he wanted fixes and comments returning to him or not. Anyone wanting a copy can just ask, but it would be better if they were somewhere sensible. It would seem that SourceForge would be a good place for them, but it's really Castle's call as to what they want to do with them.

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12 Feb 2003 (Wednesday) 

So I'm sitting here waiting for builds to finish and I pick up the baby Rubik's cube that Julian got me. It's not far from one face done, but I've actually done that face and the squares that bound on to it now. I'm just amazed 'cos I'm actually able to do this much. I could never even see how to start before. Maybe I just needed to be tired.

I had a quick look at one of the stories about pictures of galaxies from the Hubble telescope. The pictures are really pretty cool .

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10 Feb 2003 (Monday) 

Oh my god. Can open. worms everywhere [ Licking the spoon?; Friends ]

Castle have issued a statement on the issue of the GPL. Basically, what they call the Kernel didn't contain the GPL components. It was the HAL that contains it. So you make of it what you will. Remember kids, don't be specific - don't say Kernel when you mean 'beginning part of RISC OS', because you'll be wrong.

Mrs Landingham! What's next ? [ '...with a sense of dread...'; The West Wing ]

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9 Feb 2003 (Sunday) 

I got my first hatemail today, which is reassuring.

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	Sun, 09 Feb 2003 11:27:44 GMT
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From: "Osama Binlarden" <osamabinlarden2222@hotmail.com>
To: justin.fletcher@ntlworld.com
Subject: Risc OS 5
Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2003 11:27:44 +0000
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
Message-ID: <F168PC5mNQz6QzpCEdh0001126d@hotmail.com>
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 09 Feb 2003 11:27:45.0020 (UTC) FILETIME=[4425DBC0:01C2D02E]
Status: RO

You had better shut your fucking mouth quick about there being linux code in 
Risc OS 5 or I will kill you

You have been warned

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus

So in my best vogon voice, 'Hello, where ever you are. I just want to make it perfectly clear that you're not at all welcome.'

The likelihood of finding out how it is is so very low and anyhow, it's just not worth worrying about. Like the other mails of abuse I get over the diary, it's just someone else who wants to say something but is too ashamed to say it outright as themselves. No big deal.

Of course, this could just as easily have come from someone at Castle as from any Joe-random user. Not bothered anyhow.

Anyhow, the Castle GPL issue is pretty much out of my hands now. Castle are making a statement tomorrow which will - they say - clear up the issue, so that will be an end to the matter. Unless it's not a good statement. We'll have to see.

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7 Feb 2003 (Friday) 

So, I'm sitting here, working hard trying to stop my code from crashing rather evily, and I decided to try RSS on SlashDot and see if there's anything interesting happening. Shocked, I am, (Yoda style) as I see that my story's the one at the top. Well, I say my story, it's Russell King who's at the front of this, but it's my evidence behind this. Which you can blame me for if you like.

My page of 'evidence' is really a little more waffly than it ought to be. Which is a pity, but I don't write all that well - reports end up more like commentaries. Anyhow... I'm going to bed now. I've spent about two hours writing up the second version of my comments so that there's information about the other two files, and dumps of the output files, and it's finally beginning to get to the point where I need to sleep. My code works now and it's getting lateish. Well, early. It's 3 am.

Oh, and the story's been covered by Drobe (well, obviously!), The Iconbar and riscos.org.

Anyhow, I'm going to post this and then sleep. Try to avoid the fall out tomorrow.

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4 Feb 2003 (Tuesday) 

It's quite depressing the number of reports questioning the use of the shuttle and manned space flight in general. Maybe I just want to see more people going to space because it's such a great step in the right direction. Nice to see that China are taking on board what's happened but are undeterred.

Meanwhile, Blair's failed to convince Chirac that there should be a war with Iraq. Can I move to France ?

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1 Feb 2003 (Saturday) 

For the past couple of weeks I've been keeping up with little bits of news with the quite lovely 'Feedreader'. It's nice because it gives you stories from various news organisations and other RSS or RDF feeds. Because of this, I've been getting fed up with the constant Blair/Bush cack and started moving on to more interesting things. The Science and Space news feeds from Moreover have been really quite useful in giving an idea about what's going on in what is a more interesting field. Every couple of hours (or quite likely more often), there'd be a story about the shuttle and what the astronauts were doing, and how they themselves were. It being the first Israeli on the shuttle, there were lots of things about him. Stories covered various things which had been happening, from the changes to the ventilation system because of a breakdown, to photographing electrical phenomena; from studying spiders making webs, to the observation of religion. It seemed quite interesting, and exciting to have been hearing about the things going on with the Shuttle crew and to keep up to date with its events. This afternoon, though, I popped on the the talker, and drobe pointed me at the BBC news site saying that the shuttle had broken up on reentry.

It's a terrible accident and an awful end to what has been a very successful mission - as far as I can tell anyhow. My sympathy to those who were involved in the project, and to their relatives.

It strikes me as odd that I should feel so badly for the family and the many thousands of people who put the shuttle into action and keep it running. There are so many things which happen in the world where so many more people die that it seems almost narrow-minded to feel that a group of 7 people on the shuttle should get more attention than the events elsewhere. I don't know why it feels like that. Thinking about it, I don't relate to wars or to the persecution that happens in other countries as well as I do to a scientific accident. Probably that's because I just turn off from such things because it is so depressing that such things happen. Possibly it's because there was no conflict here - it's just people doing science and doing it on the frontiers of our understanding. Possibly it's because I have been following their progress and so can relate a little more to the events. All of these factors are involved, I think, but it's difficult to say anything more than that.

The other thing that strikes me - and this is the more careful side thinking, 'cos the emotional side has again decided it's too depressing - is what this does to the US space programme. Some simple background as I understand it is that China are just beginning to embark on manned space flight; the European space programme has been set back by technical problems on its last comet chaser mission due to concerns over a previous Arieanne explosion; and the NASA were reexamining the use of nuclear powered space flight for extended missions. So far as I can tell, concern over nuclear powered flight stems partly from fears over the effects if an accident should happen during transition to or from space. Todays accident, with debris falling over Texas will give much more credence to these concerns. Shuttle flight will be set back significantly whilst an investigation is made, which might make things much harder for the development and crews of the International Space Station, I imagine. I would hope that this accident does not set back the space programmes of any countries in the manner that the Challenger explosion did, but I'm not all that hopeful.

Coupled with this, there's the issue of Iraq. How the Bush administration will deal with these issues together will be quite important in the process. It is unlikely that UK sympathies with regard to involvement in Iraq will change much in the light of this accident - I don't think that in general we're a nation that will blur the issue of sympathy over a space accident and military action against another country just because they originate from the same country.

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