It's a new year. Golly. Hopefully it'll have less pissing about than the last one. Spent a little bit of time today (well 1st January 2005 really) tidying up the Diary so that I've got a new year ready to roll and don't have to put it off. I'll re-file this under 2004 in a little bit once I've got everything sorted out.

If I've missed saying it to anyone - and I've not said it to many, in particular because I couldn't be bothered to SMS anyone as it's just a waste of time waiting for a signal and successful send - Happy New Year.

Tonight was spent with Mum and Dad, which is amazing. Mum at home for New Year. An almost unheard of event .

In the dim and distant past there were things called 'Bookmarks'. Web browsers let you mark pages so that you could come back to them later. Wonderous things. And of course the typical thing to do was to put your bookmarks page on your website so that everyone could see it (nobody cared, but that wasn't the point) and more importantly, if you happened to be elsewhere, you could still use your bookmarks.

But in these more enlightened and technologically evolved days, I never use bookmarks. Why ? Because Opera makes it so much easier to leave those pages open. It'll reopen the pages when you reload it, and even retains them if the system crashes. The upside to this is that you have the page you were looking at exactly as it was. Which is great. But the down side is when you leave them open intending to do something with them and then finally never bother. They end up just hogging resources and your little tabs to select which page to look at become so extremely small that you can't even click on things reliably.

So this change in behaviour means not that you have to clear out your bookmarks every few months, but that you have to clear out the open web browser pages every few months. And this is what I'm doing now. Pages that I've left for later comment are now being recorded here. 'cos that's why I left them there.

God only knows when they were originally left there, so there's a bit of a hotch-potch of sites.

Documentation for the OpenType specification, links to TrueType specifications and Apple's developer documentation for Fonts.

You know those dance mats ? Cool big things. But if you want something more portable, how about a finger dance pad ? And if you wanted to plug it into your PC, why not use a USB interface. (yeah, there are others about, but that's just the one I have open)

On to maps, and we'll start with the US elections. The votes in the USA as a purple-scale, rather than the regular binary blue-red absolutes. Which is relatively interesting, but some people took this further (and rather neatly so). Instead of using the regular map of the USA, why not scale the physical size of the states by their relative weights in political terms. The result is known as an anamorphic map. This can be seen (along with a few other representations) on a Univeristy of Michigan site. And following on from the idea of anamorphic maps, there's a quite interesting use of them on an Norwegian site, showing the difference between GNP and water resources by using anamorphic maps.

Need to know the nitty-gritty of IEEE 802 standards (networking stuff) ? Well, why not go to the horses mouth. You'll probably have to engage your brain though .

Need to look cool and hear your MP3s ? Well, first you need to make sure you shave properly, but you can get your shades with MP3 player built in. But you might think twice when you see the price tag ($395 for 128M).

Want to know the gory details about Windows networking ? Well, you'll not find them all in the Windows Server 2003 TCP/IP implementation details, but it's certainly an interesting read.

That's not all the random pages gone, but at least I now have tab sizes that are usable in Opera .

I had a quite odd dream about having a broken leg and being in hospital last night. The doctor who was taking care of me turned out to actually be a patient from the mental ward near by. Very odd. And for some reason, broken seemed to mean 'cut off and reattached again'. Fortunately a few stitches seemed to hold it together and I was walking in a few days. And the doctor was quite cute. Even if she was a little insane.

The second half seemed to involve starting at a new school and having to queue up for buses and not knowing how the system worked here. Plus the ticket machines not taking any of the money that anyone had. 'cos I had just come out of hospital with my bit mended leg and so I didn't need to queue as much.

The My Family Christmas Episode was on today. Hmm. Dunno. It was funny in places, but it seemed a little directionless in places. Maybe I'm just being awkward though. I don't like the Wedding bits in these things. They only make me feel icky. Oh well.

Julian was watching Press Gang tonight. Bah, Lynda's cute.

I also noticed a joke that I'd completely missed all the many times I've watched it before. At the end of 'At last a dragon'. Lynda says that she thought Spike had a fiver - which is a reference back to Spike and Mr Sullivan making a bet that wouldn't have a chance with a lady. I missed it. Not much but still, after all this time you'd have thought I'd have seen it.

And I did, embarassingly, notice that some of the things that Spike says are things that I say now. Yeah, I just repeat the cool lines. Sadly without even realising where they're from. Doh.

Julian's here now; and Grandma's gone up to Scotland.

And I'm feeling very jittery this morning. I don't know why, but I think some cereal and sleep might help. I wrote a prototype ASCII game this evening. It's not wonderful, but it's shown a proof of concept so I think the basics could work properly. Whether I want to take it any further though is another matter.

Oh, and I've given up on the idea of sending cards this year. I think I've missed the posting deadlines and whilst I thought I was quite ready for Christmas it appears that I'm not. Oh well.

I had a rather fun time seeing on a small scale why a nuclear stand-off is a much better solution than the alternative. I'm playing Civilisation III on a long running, very large map. Having won diplomatically quite a time back, I'm really just trying to obtain the rest of the map. It's tricky.

Time's moved on and whilst at one point I seriously led the rest of the world in technological terms, everyone else has caught up and it's now really a matter of who's cleverest with their resources. Having wiped out the French through conventional land war on my own continent, life became easier, at which point the stockpiling of ICBMs began. Interestingly I had already won by the time I wiped the French out - all the way to the diplomatic victory there had been no warfare on our part. I think something had happened between Germany and England but that was halfway across the world and we didn't know about it.

I'd been constantly plagued by the lack of particular resources within this continent. That was also partly because I never bothered to expand into the tiny islands which seem to hold those resources. Thus, I was left without any oil some years ago - a fact which held up the removal of the French for a while. The same thing happened later with a lack of Aluminium and even later a lack of Uranium. Both the latter pair were obtained through 'pressure of culture', forcing cities to defect effectively by looking good - that's a most definately Civilisation III feature and works reasonably well I think. Anyhow, after the French had gone - having obtained oil through a trade deal with the English that subsequently expired - I was left with a choice of targets.

The English hadn't got any nuclear arsenal. All the other countries had. I was beating them in terms of nukes (per country - between them they had more than me), but I wasn't willing to take on a nuclear power. I just doesn't come out so well for either of you. So it was the English. I think, modestly (!) that this was quite a coup really. Using the Modern Armoured vehicles (tanks) and Mechanised Infantry (Armoured Personal Carriers, I think) which were left over from the French war (the ones I built with the oil from the English ), and using little galleons ('cos I didn't have any oil to make Transports to carry them) I set about surrounding the island areas owned by the English. Together with a number of Battleships, these sat just outside their territory. Fortunately, throughout this set-up the English didn't make any pacts with nations so it was safe to attack the country.

With a 'right of passage' agreement, you can move into their territory without question, so having set everything up, all the Galleons, and the couple of Transports landed on the islands, each off-loading about 5 units next to a city. This is all fine 'cos they won't object as we have a right of passage. Next all the Battleships and a few AEGIS destroyers moved up to their nearest English ships and we attacked. The navy were then taken out first, thus if I failed to take the entire nation they would at least be unable to stop me bringing in reinforcements. Once the navy was removed it was just a case of each of the groups of units attacking their designated cities and occupying them. Because of a slight miscalculation, two cities on a separate island weren't taken in that single turn. It took until the next turn to wipe them out.

Quite impressive, that was. But anyhow, with lots of new cities, it's a push to develop them in to being productive parts of the nation. So I spent a hundred years or so just developing them so they were semi-sane. Having got there I was bored. You know how it goes when you're just running the nation and nothing's happening. So I decided to see whether I could take out Japan. Not wanting to lose where I was, I branched this off as a 'crazy' saved file, so I can go back. Japan didn't have any pacts with anyone so it wouldn't hurt to do a similar thing. Unfortunately, though, I didn't have enough land forces to take their entire nation quickly. So I decided to nuke the entire nation.

The idea, drawn from earlier games, is to ensure that you have sufficient ICBMs to destroy your enemy before they know what's hit them. It's usually worked in the past because you can take out the cities much more easily once they've been nuked. However, it does rely on Civilisation I knowledge that nuking a city halves its population and destroys all units based there, leaving it defenseless. That's where things break down.

That's fine, except it doesn't work on the huge maps where your enemys are separated and you don't actually have enough troops and weapons to take out the entire world in one go. Plus, although the population halves in Civilisation III, only some of the units are killed outright. In particular, nuclear weapons tend to stay hanging around. Which is a little annoying.

I attack Japan. That's easy enough. One nuke for every city they have. Their continent now looks like a mess. It'll take a century for workers to clean up the mess and god only knows what the global warming's going to be like. Obviously on the first attack the Japanese are pissed and declare war on you. Well that was expected. Only so do America and China 'cos you've used nukes - Japan didn't have any pacts but obviously the Americans and China were just pissed too. It's done now, so lets get rid of the remaining cities. After the 3rd, the Germans decide they want to declare war too. All Japan's nuked and I start moving some troops in. This is when I find there's still units defending the cities. Oops. I definately can't take the nation then. So I consolidate troops where they can defend me - hell there's going to be fire from the sky in a minute so it won't matter much - and end the turn. I didn't want to nuke any of the other countries because maybe they'd change their mind after a few turns if I hadn't attacked them.

And then it comes... the first nuke from Japan - yup, nukes survive being nuked; Damn. At which point the Aztecs join in. Because I have a Mutual Protection Pact with them, they now declare war on Japan. There's a lot of fire over my cities. Some of the Nukes are caught by the SDI defence (shot down from space) but many get through and I've got capital city and a lot of the main producers reduced to shells of their former glory. Oh well.

And then comes the second wave. America's turn. More nukes and now the Aztecs declare war on America - which probably isn't going to go well for them because they live right next door to one another. Again the SDI catches a few. Next it's China's turn and they do the same. For reasons that are unclear, they nuke one city absolutely and utterly to nothing. A city of size 24 nuked down to size 1 with repeated ICBM strikes. The SDI must have stopped about 8 of the nukes but it really was too much for the little city. I decided to abandon it. It really wasn't worth the effort. China took out a few other cities too. Then the Germans got in on the act and took out a couple of other cities.

So now we have Japan, America, China and Germany at war with me and the Aztecs. Japan's a nuclear wasteland. Or at least what passes for a wasteland when there's still cities and large numbers of units massing for a counter attack. Everyone else has pretty much finished off their piles of Nukes, but I've got about 15 left. My continent and a few of the islands I control aren't as bad as Japan but there's a patchwork of nuke strikes that doesn't look good, never mind the people and units destroyed - amusingly the Germans managed to nuke Hastings to nearly nothing, and then walked in with a few tanks, only to raze the city. Which was most annoying as most of the airforce were based there.

Now I'm in a huge war with just about everyone else and there's not much I can do to broker deals. People are understandably pissed, and from experience, the Civilisation III AI is much less forgiving, even when he's losing massively. The only nation that's 'friendly' is the Aztec nation and that's a bit strained. I exchanged world maps with them in order to see what the damage had been to America over their war, as they're next to one another. From that, it looks like there's two major nuke strikes on the Americans and one on the Aztecs. There's another strike on the Chinese which I presume came from the Aztecs as well. The Aztecs have taken two American cities, the Americans have taken one Aztec city. It's not quite the same kind of mess as in my continent but it's probably not a nice place to be. I've traded some uranium to the Aztecs purely because if they can make nukes then there's a possibility that they might come off better - or rather, they'll last longer occupying the Americans or Chinese whilst I can try to sort out my own continent and get rid of the Japanese and Germans.

This 'big' war has now lasted 5 turns (5 years) starting in 2190, and took about half an hour. It's not looking good for me; the Chinese will come out of this the best, I think, but it's going to be a close call. One of the cunning attacks took out one of the island sources of Aluminum by destroying all the roads to it, which leaves me with only Tanks (circa 1940s-style tanks, rather than the heavy duty tanks we have now), which means that reinforcing the other towns may be tricky. Plus the main producers have been crippled back to needing simple things like Aqueducts and Harbours. And whilst I had a large team of workers cleaning up pollution, quite a lot were killed in the cities that were hit and those that remain are working to clean up the continent. Global warming is rapidly destroying areas of fertile land because of the vast amounts of pollution about, and there aren't enough workers to either clear up the polution or deal with the land.

All of which was a rather diverting lesson in 'don't go nuking people because nobody comes off well'.

I may just go back and try the same attack, but without the nukes. A plain land war with Japan is something, with preparation, that I might win. Plus if he nukes me first then it might be that the Americans, Chinese and Germans will side with me, rather than against me. Which would be much less painful all around - Japan would have to spread his nukes over 4 countries instead of just 2, which might be better for me. But that'll happen another day when I have half an hour to kill.

I've added some very simple indices to the diary now. It's really only for internal use, but the first external change that's come from it is that the 'quotes' and 'songquotes' sections of the diary can be listed together on a single page. So, if you ever care to find whether I've quoted something in particular, you can check. I doubt it's of too much interest to people, but I like having information indexed.

I'm trying out a new thing. Having the diary summaries and the main content truncated so that there's something a little more 'useful' in the content of the RSS file. It will make the file a bit bigger, but that's no huge deal.

I'm working on a very simple assumption - I write summary entries at the top of every diary entry, just so that I have a record of what the entry contains without much other looking at it, but also we now have the first paragraph of the entry, or at least some section of that within limits, in the decription. Previously the 'title' contained the date, and the 'description' contained the phrases I wanted the diary to have as a reference. Now, the title contains the date plus the phrases, and the description contained the number of paragraphs (approximately) and a section of the first paragraph. If that's the only paragraph (hey, I might write some very small entries!) then it won't be preceeded by an ellipsis. We truncate the paragraph if it's too long (only about 200 characters + whatever finishes that sentence), or at the first tag that isn't 'understood' by the generator.

Basically the whole thing is just mean to give a quick idea. I don't intend on sticking whole entries in the RSS. That's not what it's for. But it should be good enough for a small snippet.

I couldn't sleep last night so I decided to read the remainder of Pratchett's 'Going Postal'. Obviously I don't want to give anything away but it has something of the feel of the original Watch book (Guards! Guards! I believe), but certainly kept me reading it. I was nervous because I didn't know whether the it would still appeal - it's been some years since I read his stuff. But definately still a good author and a well worthwhile read. If I have any criticism, it's that the ending was a little less elegant than some of his books, but certainly good anyhow

An amusing misfiling in the music collection today was 'Letter From America', which (for reasons which probably relate to their relative closeness in the alphabet) had been filed under Pretenders, rather than Proclaimers.

Sundays are generally very relaxing, but for the past couple of weeks have been just like any other day. Why ? Because Stargate SG-1 was taken off C4. But it's back this week, albeit with two episodes back to back.

I'm not so impressed with the idea of showing double-episodes. It can work for some things, but for others it just makes a mess of your time. At the moment I can cope with SG-1/Atlantis on Sky because I can watch one on Tuesday and one on Saturday. But it just becomes a bit much to have two hours of television - well, when you have to share the telly it does anyhow.

I was looking through the logs on gerph.org - yeah, not the most thrilling of things, but as I have them I probably should exploit the fact that I can see them. First of all, I've got a load of references to '/<year>/index.html' in there. I can't find anywhere on the site any references to those addresses and I'm pretty sure that I made sure they shouldn't happen. So, if you find anywhere that references that sort of address, let me know, ta.

Looking further, I get referer details too. Not much, but it seems that a lot of people are coming from a Drobe article, quite a few from my vaguely still used NTL site, a lot from google (.com, .co.uk, .de, .be, .ca, .com.br, .nl, .pl, .fi, .fr, .ch, and .lt which I'd never heard of before). Interestingly, from this I discover that Paul Vigay has an online diary, which links back to here and - more interestingly, I think - cites David Chess as his 'favourite online blog'. Whilst I dislike the word, it's definately my favourite. And from there I find that Philip Ludlum also has a log too, which might be interesting to look at.

"Oh my god" (yes those words were just uttered). For the past week or so of watching Angel, since the new series started (that is, the series that started having Fred as part of the main cast), I've been going "Yay, Amy Acker" when the credits come up, because she's cute and fun. Yeah, I'm a sucker of girls who are a little strange. The "Oh my god", was seeing that the current entry by Philip (well it's for 2nd December, but still 'current' as I write) has 'Amy Acker' as a title. Of course, it's the character that's cute and you never really know what the real person is like, but since it's not likely that you'd meet either, that doesn't really matter.

Philip's layout is interesting, actually. It's a quite easy to read format and nicely structured. I, of course, don't really bother with partial updates through the day because it's a lot of hassle and I don't care to know that half way through the day I did 'blah' and then a few minutes later 'foo'. The diary usually appears after I get up anyhow for the previous day, so it's only a sporadic online record, even if it is automatically updated locally.

One day I'll make the whole lot even more automated with some snazzy XSLT or something. But to be honest, it works like it is so I'm not overly inclined to update it.

Actually, I rather like Philip's 'Topic' selector, and tried dumping my own name into the search - unsurprisingly nothing came up. Nice idea though - on my diary it's just freefind that does my work for me. And very nice I think it is.

I was thinking a few days ago about extending the RSS file to include the first section of the diary entry; maybe a paragraph or just the first two sentences or something. Dunno. Maybe. Can't be bothered at the moment anyhow.

One of the fun things that did get shown in the referers was that '192.168.0.100/~justin/' and 'buttercup/~justin/' were quite high up the list. Not quite sure why - those pages are the local homepage so from there I went to look at the diary. Probably from whilst I've been testing the 'show the calendar' thing.

Amusingly, about ¹/₆ of the hits on my site are from Google's robot. Opera (my browser of choice) gets a depressingly low number of views, but I guess that's to be expected really - IE, Netscape and 'Mozilla 5' come top. Even Wget popped in there, and - amazingly - 'Internet Explorer 3.0'. Yeah, I know it's not interesting hearing all these statistics, but it makes for something interesting about the site that I never really knew much about before.

From the 'popular pages', obviously the diary comes pretty high - given that that's the only 'useful' content on the site, that kinda makes sense. It's the RSS file that gets the most hits there, though. The stories get a reasonable number of hits, which is nice to see, but more interesting is that the requests appear to be almost exclusively for 'gerph.org'. I give that as the main address for people to use because it's shorter.

I wrote a module yesterday which was interesting. I had decided to write a functional, purposeful module in a day. Actually it's not quite finished; it needs a few syslog calls in it and maybe a way to stop it working the moment it starts up. But it was in a day, and it was purposeful - not like the one hour 'here's a replacement button style' modules which aren't really all that much effort (obviously, as they only take an hour). At some point I should do a quick count up of the number of (significant - no border modules and no patches!) modules I've written. For the laugh.

Oh, the other thing that was interesting from the logs was the large number of requests for 'favicon.ico'. I still haven't written the ConvertICO code to do the sprite to .ico conversion, but maybe I should. After all, I've done the ConvertBMP sprite to .bmp converter, and .ico is only limited in its size, as I recall. Although it would be more difficult because I'd have to content with converting multiple images, not just the single image that .bmp uses. But still, maybe it's something to look at.

I was meaning to have an early night tonight. Actually, I was meaning to also write a very quick entry and then go to bed but I seem to have gratuitously linked and rambled a lot.

Would you believe it's December already. Well, obviously it is. It just seems to have gone fast.

Windows XP's LPR printing (printing from XP to an LPR network printer) is somewhat strange. Firstly, the 'ports' pane in the prints configuration window doesn't handle being updated very well. If you add an LPR device, parts of the text in the pane aren't displayed properly. If you select the port to delete it you will (sometimes) select the tick box for using that device, and thus it will refuse to delete it. Other times it still ticks the box but lets you delete the port anyhow - leaving you with nothing ticked in the ports box at all.

Secondly, when you actually try to use it, it provides the queue name with a space tacked on to the end. This screws with my LPR server because it expects that when you give it a queue name that's the name of the queue you mean - case sensitively. The RFC is pretty clear - you have a command number, followed by a queue name, followed by a LF. It does say that 'if there are other operands to the command they are separated from the printer queue name by whitespace'. There are no operands, so there should be no space.

Anyhow, that was a fun few minutes debugging that. But at the end of it, I've spooled a 15M postscript version of the ARM ARM to the RiscPC. Which isn't all that impressive, but the base software was written back in '98.

In finishing the Lyric Fetcher, I've also fixed up a few of the incorrect lyrics that have been fetched. Not too many, but they are are frustrating. In particular, none of the sites had a 'decent' copy of the lyrics to Heart and Soul, by T'Pau.

Why's that bother me ? Because it's impossible to sing. Well, with only one person it is anyhow. Not only are the parts layered over one another, but the 'fore' vocal changes from one singer to the other and back. It's all pretty cute. So I updated the lyric that was closest and reformatted it to be correct and we have a stonkingly correct version. And I'm just sitting here and laughing whilst I write this entry because it's just so cute. The track, that is, not my formatted version of the lyrics which are kinda unspecial given they wrote the words.

Anyhow, it's great having all the lyrics and covers available, even if it's only on the server and not on the portable player too. That said, I don't think I'd want to allocate that much space on the player just to images.

Summary:

JPEG Files: 4320   Size: 529972 K
Text Files: 12073  Size: 48408 K
MP3 Files:  18592  Size: 96699704 K

But that only includes the 'Artists' section - I don't put covers and lyrics in the Compilations, Musicals, TV, Classical, and Spoken sections.