29 May 2004 (Saturday) 

mp3.com appears to be back alive. It's probably not as much use as it's predecessor, but at least it's back.

Amusingly, the 'tech' page that starts off by using the phrase 'don't be glum, chum' also manages to use the word 'disparate'. Odd mix of terms, but hey, I'm not going to knock it. I couldn't even describe what 'disparate' meant with any accuracy, but there you go .

They have a rather odd compatibility chart on there for their players (only some wof which I recognise), listing the different filetypes the players support. Now you'd probably be thinking, like me, 'who cares?'. If you've gone to mp3.com, you don't really give a damn about Real format, or whatever. In the same way that if you go to NTLWorld you would be expecting to find out about services that NTLWorld provides, and not some crap about National Vegatarian Week (or, if you're looking at this in the future, just about anything at all that has nothing whatsoever to do with NTL).

Having now glanced at it briefly, it appears to be mostly an index of commercial artists and streaming of selected tracks. Which is all wonderful and that, but that's not what mp3.com used to be, and it's a bit pointless for me. And, you've got to just love this from it... the stream is Windows Media format. Well, you know what I think of WMA files, but that's just quite depressing.

Fortunately for those of us that actually like more open specifications, MP3's going to be around for a while. Even if MP3 licensing say it's not 'free', it's still a lot freer than WMA is ever going to be.

The presentation and information available on AMG appears to be much better than mp3.com too. Those people that used mp3.com because they liked the whole idea of unsigned artists getting promotion aren't going to care for the new site - they'll come and they'll go when they see that it offers them nothing. Those new to MP3 might go there, but this will only really be a transitory thing because once they've been introduced to MP3 they'll encode their own CDs rather than mess around with the streamed downloads. Commercial artists are great, and we love them, but when you're getting the same old tripe being churned at you over and over again with very little variation it gets tedious (say he, listening to a rather commercially successful album).

There's a lot of choice out there, but it doesn't come across on a site like that.

Oh, I've installed SpamAssassin recently because I was fed up with the amount of spam that turns up here these days. It's now down to a manageable 5 or 6 per day. However, in order to do this in a sane way, I've told spam assassin that any email that contains HTML is probably spam. I don't know anyone that uses HTML for emailing, and anyone that does should really change for the better of the world . I've only told it 'probably', though - HTML-content messages get a score of '4.0', so the mail still needs a reasonably high '1.0' to reach the threshold at which the mail will be binned. Actually it's not binned; it's just shoved in a separate folder that I scan every few days for anything important.

I've not seen anything important yet, but that doesn't mean I've not just deleted it because it's amongst a load of other things. Anyhow, if you're reading this and you're likely to send mail to me, do it without HTML rubbish.

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28 May 2004 (Friday) 

Mild spoiler coming up, so avert your eyes if you care about Friends and haven't seen the last episode.

No more Friends. What am I going to do now ?

Simple answer; buy the remaining two seasons. That's what.

But it's not the same.

I'm not sure, but I think I was expecting more from the final episode. Maybe it's just that I had this pre-conceived idea that Ross would be going to France with Rachel because he would understand how important her work was to her. I know Ross has a son with Carol and Susan, but he's not really part of Ben's life. At least, not in the things that we've seen - he's really only a part-time dad (oh how that phrase grates).

As for the Monica and Chandler thing; I wasn't really following that. It was kind of a sideline to the main Ross and Rachel thing. Ok so it was interesting, but we've ended something like 4 series with babies now (um, is that right ? "Ross, Carol and Susan's" (Ben), "Phoebe, Frank and his wife's" (Frank Junior Junior, Baby Girl Chandler and another one who's name I forget), "Rachel and Ross's" (Emma) and now "Erica, Monica and Chandler's" (Erica and Jack). Six people, six babies; and only one of those with which the biological parents are together. Very strange.

Anyhow, Ross and Rachel back together, Phoebe and Mike going to have kids - this is Mike the one who didn't ever want to get married -, Chandler and Monica with kids living out of the city, and Joey with Chick Junior and Duck Junior.

It's 3:19 am now and I'm thinking that 'buy the remaining two seasons' is an altogether too trite a comment. It's over. No more. Bah.

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27 May 2004 (Thursday) 

Well, it turns out that meeting yesterday was in fact a huge waste of time. I'm not quite sure why I'm even bothering to be quite honest.

Chris was knocked off his bike yesterday, too. Got back from hospital today and seems to be in quite good spirits really - nothing broken but a few stitches and feeling rather sore.

Hope he's feeling better sometime soon !

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21 May 2004 (Friday) 

Dad's got me a copy of Terminator 3 because it was going surprisingly cheap at one of the places in the Mall. So I'm only missing 1 now .

I've been doing some rather silly things with icons today. I blame Ian. He keeps complaining that you can't do things and I prove him wrong. After many hours of cursing. But anyhow, I've got some pretty labels working now. On the other hand, there's been a lot of fixes necessary elsewhere to ensure that it's safe. It's surprising how many bugs you discover whilst you're implementing things. It's one of those odd times when you get the feeling that the code can't work correctly under all circumstances. You just cross your fingers. I don't like that, obviously, but that's one of the dangers when you allow other people to use interfaces to use your stuff. You can either be utterly paranoid about things or you can take it as read that they'll be sensible. And whilst I'd prefer to think that people will get things wrong, it's more sensible to find a middle ground between utter paranoia and being foolishly uncaring about other people making mistakes.

Penultimate Friends was tonight! It's an hour long episode next Friday which is going to be really sad. Not going to cry. No, I'm not. 'cos it's a TV series, and an 'unrealistic American show' (to paraphrase Justin Fletcher, 9 years ago). Definately not good to get yourself worked up with a TV show, but... well, it's hard when it's so fun and it's been there so long.

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19 May 2004 (Wednesday) 

Looks like I've got a meeting next week in Cambridge; well it'll be interesting if nothing else. I'm not confident that we'll actually get anywhere because there's just too much political crap going on around it to be honest, but at least it's a meeting. If I'm organised I might even be able to get in a film in the afternoon too, which would be a break.

I don't do meetings much. They involve people.

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17 May 2004 (Monday) 

Steve, we've been through this before. There is no grey area between a foetus and a Jelly Baby. [ A grey area; Susan; Coupling ]

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13 May 2004 (Thursday) 

Well, in the past couple of days I've moved Mum and Dad over to using Opera for their mail. Hopefully this will be more useful to them than the split Messenger Pro on RISC OS and Excel/Word/IE on the Windows environment which they had problems coming to terms with.

Plus, and this might be more practical, I've stuck a copy of FeedReader on the system, pointed at mine, Simon's and Hannah's diary's. If nothing else, it'll at the least mean that they can keep track of what Simon's up to.

I've meant to say this for a bit, but LivingTV's rebranded itself. It's now LIVINGtv. Dunno why.

LivingTV (well, whatever!) appears to have bagged another reasonable show. 'Wild Card' was something I'd not seen before. Imagine a less naff VIP (ok, you can't get much worse than VIP, even if it is silly), or a slightly less surreal Ally McBeal. Which doesn't paint it in a good way really. Plus, the fact that it has a voice-over on the beginning can either indicate something so bad you don't want to admit to watching it (eg Andromeda - yes, I admit it, 'cos it's fun), or something very cool (eg Quantum Leap). But it is quite interesting; definately not in the Charmed way, but still interesting. Certainly it's something I'd happily watch if I had a spare hour whilst I was having lunch.

Oh, thinking of voice-overs, Press Gang had voice overs on the end of it - something that I only remembered after I got the DVDs. One thing that struck me a few minutes ago was that I remembered that it had those end voice-overs only by seeing them, and thinking I couldn't remember anything else that did that. And the reason that it struck me was that I'd been stupid, because Drop The Dead Donkey used them as well.

Which relates not much to today, but it's just something I thought.

Today I cleaned the keyboard out. Impressed ? Oh you should be. I now have a bin covered in hair and crumbs from inside it. I reckon... oh... this is actually older than I thought... 6 years worth of 'stuff'... hmm. Probably cleaning it once a year might be a plan. Especially with cats around. My hair isn't going to clog it in a few years time, after all .

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12 May 2004 (Wednesday) 

In watching the news sites as I do with the RSS reader, I find it amusing that the same story comes up many times. Ok, actually really annoying. But it's made worse when the sites don't allow you to access their content unless you're registered. One example I came across today is the Los Angeles Times - may other online news sites do the same thing, but this one was rather neat.

It was an Associated Press article published on the Los Angeles Times site, which I couldn't access because I'm not registered. AP articles turn up everywhere. Usually with exactly the same headline and content. Really it makes me wonder why anyone would bother with them, to be honest. The point though is that the same article appears to have been published by loads of sites. So I skip down a few news items and there it is again at another site - 'Seatle Post-Intelligencer' apparently with the full article on it.

What LA Times thinks it's doing by requiring registration when the same content is free elsewhere is curious. Maybe they have abetter quality of adverts on their site ? Or maybe they actually have other in-house writers that are worth it ? Maybe. I wouldn't know, but if they're sourcing off AP then they're no different really than Moreover, except that Moreover's free, in that they're just syndicating news. And of course that's what RSS is for.

I wonder if at some point in the future we could have news stories in just one place; or maybe multiple stories in different places that have different perspectives. Rather than the current situation where not only is the same story reported poorly in a number of places, but the same actual content is used as well.

If the story was only reported by those who actually knew what they were talking about in a single place (or with different, but knowledgeable, perspectives in a different places), then maybe we'd actually get a better quality of news. Seeing the same thing, said the same way, time and again gets a little tedious and really doesn't contribute much.

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9 May 2004 (Sunday) 

So I'm in a submarine which is just leaving the docks where it was built; I've joined up with friends because... well because were going around this amusement park and it had the shortest lines, and the water slides were closed. I'm in my bunk, and we're leaving - but I can see outside. And this dock has been built, for reasons that defy physics on the side of a sloping hill or something. So you've got something like this...

+           | x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
 deliveries |x x x Machines  x x x x Cranes  x
  <-        | x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
            |x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
            | x+------------------------------
+   large   |x |     ____________________________________
|           | x|    /     me        _____                \
|   drop-   |x |   |               /     \                |
|           | x|   |               \_____/                |
|    off    |x |    \____________________________________/
|           | x|
+           |x +-------------------------------
            | x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
 <- forklift|x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
            | x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
+----+======+x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
  x x|stairs  x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
   x +======+x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
  x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x +-----------
   x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x| 
  x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x | medical centre          
   x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x| 
  x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x +-----------

Note: Not to scale.

The docks are yellow, for those of you watching in black and white.

And so we're pulling out of the thin channel where we're docked and out into open water and we're attacked. Damage on the front of the sub and we're running around like mad, klaxons sounding and all that stuff you expect whether it happens or not. For reasons best described as obscure (this is a dream) we back up, away from whatever's attacking us.

Now, apparently a sub that's backing up and has barely moved a 100 metres can knock down 3 foot of conrcete wall. Yup that's right the entire sub bashes against the edges of the channel and finally straight through the back wall and down a 40 metre drop to the deliveries area below. Needless to say, this isn't the most ideal position for a sub to be in. Nor for those of us inside the sub, even if we do have excellent birds-eye views of it for the purposes of understanding whilst we're in the dream. So I'm racing around the sub (which must have been designed by someone from Star Trek, because even though we're at, like 20 degrees from vertical, still manages to have perfectly horizontal floors and no problems with going 'up' or 'down') trying to get out, which for some reason means I have to go all the way to the front (top, at its current attitude) and round toward the back (bottom at it's current attitude) where there's an emergency exit at the bottom of the sub near the engines. Don't ask me under what circumstances an exit hatch on the bottom-back of the sub would be useful - the only time I can think of is when it's inclined at 20 degrees having smashed through a wall coming out of the docks. And I guess that doesn't happen much.

So I get out and hobble over to a fork lift to help some others out and to get to the stairs and the medical centre. There's no water gushing out around us, so... oh, I dunno, my dream didn't even question that.

So anyhow. That was my dream a few nights ago which I remembered for some reason about 15 minutes ago. If nothing else you gotta love the art. Pity I can't do 3D representations of it.

Oh, and Rachel's going away . I know I said that yesterday, but it's still true .

I finally finished by little 'findgaps' program tonight. Basically this is a little tool which, given a .wav file will locate the break points in the file (using silence of a user-defined size, amplitude and minimum distance) and spit out the resulting chunks. Well, that was its stage a few months ago when I split up the 'Full Circle' tapes for Mum. The main reason I had not done anything since then was because it operated on .wav files. And since invariably you want to split up already compressed MP3 files - the decompression and recompression of which would be tedious and very lossy - I wasn't going to do that.

What I've done is added support for MP3 frame processing for the source file. We don't decode the MP3 - you still have to give it a .wav file - but if you give it the MP3 as well, it'll apply the splitting process to the original MP3 file, using the .wav file to decide on the break points. Admittedly this means a little bit more hassle as you have to decode the MP3 to a .wav first, but it's cheaper to do that and play with the parameters for a particular file than to decode it every time. Not all files have the same limits for 'quiet'.

Anyhow, it appears to be working, which is a really handy thing if you want to put the MP3s on a device that can't easily skip in to a particular point - say a CD player, small MP3 player. Or if you've got an 8 hour MP3 story as a file.

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7 May 2004 (Friday) 

I don't often laugh out loud at the online cartoons I read; it's usually just a little smile. But today's Phoenix Feathers just made me laugh. The back story, for those who haven't followed it is that whenever 'Sha'am' (the name of a demon who turned up close to the start of the cartoon) is named in the hearing of one of the characters, something bad happens - they're investigating the effects.

And I'm laughing more at the authors entry under the page. Usually they're interesting in an odd sort of way - I don't know the author and I have no idea of their life really, except that it's quite fun. But, the amusing part was following the 'this page' link for examples of the 'Consequences' game - which took me to a 'pilgrim.demon.co.uk' URL.

Which possibly shouldn't surprise me as I found out about Phoenix Feathers from Angela Rayner, whose family use the 'pilgrim.demon.co.uk' domain. But still, it's amusing to find things being so circular.

Wah! It's getting close to the end of Friends now, and Rachel's going to be going away . Ah well.

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6 May 2004 (Thursday) 

I thought I had something to say when I opened the diary this evening, but it's obviously gone. Events of the part couple of days have been utterly unnoteworthy. Well. That's not true. They just don't seem to have featured as being worth writing down because although they are interesting-ish I didn't have much to say.

Angela rang to say that there was a Lunar Eclipse the day before last which was quite cool and red. And I had the cats wandering back and forth after me as I paced back and forth on the road whilst looking at it and chatting to her on the phone. Hmm. Cordless phones.

Julian rang today and told me I'd made a mistake about the number of tracks that the MP3 player will understand - it's about 5000, not 1500 like I'd thought. Oops.

And I watched a film a few nights ago called 'A Boy and his Dog' which was about a boy and his psychic dog in 2024. Very strange and really not worth it. Possibly more interesting in the novella form. I'm not sure what I think of the authors work - it's not bland; it's just... well I don't know what to think of it.

Anyhow, it's coming up to getting light so I'm just going to finish some things off for an hour or so and then I've got to sleep. I need to talk to people tomorrow so I really ought to be up at a sensible hour .

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4 May 2004 (Tuesday) 

I'm just watching Stargate - Carter's happy that she's seeing someone outside of work (who we hope won't die this time) and she's humming to herself in the lift. Not particularly amusing, but the tune that she's humming is the theme from Stargate SG-1 .

And Sky One are currently using the introduction 25 seconds from Evenescence's "Everybody's Fool" for in the adverts for "Tru calling" which is quite amusing. Not actually seen any of Tru Calling myself, though.

One of the most fun spam I've seen turned up today, purely because it came from "Alyssa Milano".

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2 May 2004 (Sunday) 

Flipped on the telly tonight in a vague attempt to alleviate the boredom of watching the screen saver on the build machine. There was this odd film on called 'Heaven'. Very flashbacky and compelling in a bizarre way. Quite violent which I wasn't amazingly keen on, but that's the thing about screen savers - you can always watch them instead.

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