31 Aug 2005 (Wednesday) 

Claire's had her little girl now! Yay.

My side hurts. I don't know why. But it hurts when I move. Oh well.

Spent a lot more time playing with AudioScrobbler than I ought to have today, most of which looks to have been pointless as historic submissions are not accepted. It takes a reasonably amount of time to submit a couple of thousand tracks, and it's a little frustrating that they're ignored.

There's a couple of emails I've got recently that I need to get back to and haven't yet. I don't feel like it now, though. Too tired and hot.

There was also a nice email from SocialMarks recently, which looks like a similarly interesting project.

Oh, and I've had a hair cut. Golly.

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30 Aug 2005 (Tuesday) 

I've abstracted out the Diary-To-RSS generation code from the page updating code now. Really this was just so that it might be possible in the future to use the Atom Feed History mechanism to provide the incremental archives on a monthly basis. It's not so 'useful' because everything is exactly as it was before.

Please remember that this is a daily diary. There's really not a lot of point in re-fetching the RSS file every 90 seconds when it's only updated every 24 hours at best.

I had meant to ring Claire today, but haven't got around to it. Oh well. Tomorrow, probably.

Whilst hunting for a CoverFetcher which might rival my own a little while back, I back across 'Amarok' which appears to be a quite nice MP3 front end for X - which also has a cover fetcher built in. It's not so bad really, but it did seem to like continually indexing my MP3s which I was less pleased with... But anyway, as part of its interface it said something about being able to communicate with AudioScrobbler, which is - it appears - a site that manages user-submitted details for things that people have listened to and provides suggestions. It does so by monitoring your MP3 player and has plugins for many different players.

Fair enough. So I wrote a library that does the same thing with AMPlayer - it's not all that hard really. So I've now got a very simple AudioScrobbler library which monitors AMPlayer's current instance and uploads details to the AudioScrobbler server at the appropriate time. Its error handling is less than perfect, but it is capable of managing large lists of MP3s whilst the client is offline for later uploadings - assuming, of course, that you do so before the application terminates. I need to tweak the client's recovery capabilities, because at the moment as soon as it hits a problem it just dies. But all in all, it's been reasonably interesting. Not practical, but nothing I do these days ever is. At the moment it's pointing at my test account at AudioScrobbler, but I'll move it over to a 'real' account once I'm happy that it's stable.

And I'm happily looking at some of the bits that Lacuna Coil offers and I see a little blocky advert saying "I liked you better before you sold out" - a Diesel Sweeties advert. It's just surprising to find it come up on a site elsewhere . Maybe it's just another extension of the 'few hundred people' hypothesis. If there are only a few hundred people in the world, they can only create a limited number of websites, so you're bound to hit upon the same ones again after a while.

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29 Aug 2005 (Monday) 

Still no word from Claire. Hope things are ok.

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28 Aug 2005 (Sunday) 

I've moved the mouse over to the PC and it still does its jumpy thing there, so it's something about the mouse that's wrong. I replaced the batteries recently so I'm pretty sure that's not it. It may, however, be some sort of interference that affects it. If so, then the mouse will work elsewhere but just not here. I'll just hope that that's the case. Pity, 'cos it's a lovely mouse otherwise.

It's also kind of strange having the mice swapped over because I've got used to knowing which machine I'm controlling by the feel of the mouse. Oh well.

I won't tell a soul I won't tell at all Do they have to know About my Goodnight Girl ? [ Good Night Girl, from High On The Happy Side, by Wet Wet Wet ]

I was sorting through some of the old compilations I've got lying around and moving things into the main Artists directory. It's surprising how many things you forget over time.

At the moment I feel like just beating the wall a lot. I can't seem to get things to work. Annoying as hell.

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27 Aug 2005 (Saturday) 

Hmm. I was just listening to the end of Evanescence's album 'Origin' and deciding what to listen to, and decided to put on Placebo's 'Running Up That Hill'. It's still one of those tracks that sends a little shiver down me. Weird.

Jessie paint your pictures 'bout how it's gonna be. By now I should know better, your dreams are never free. But tell me all about our little trailer by the sea; Jessie you can always sell any dream to me. Oh, Jessie, you can always sell any dream to me. [ Jessie, from Painted Desert Serenade, by Joshua Kadison ]

Coming back on the train last night the MP3 player ran out of power just as we were going over the crossing at Brandon, which was really quite neat. More usefully because I know the time I spent on the train and walking to the train station, it means that I can definitely say that the GMini 200 will do 9 hours playing time. It might be a little more than that, because I'm not certain how charged it was when I set off, but it's still good to know.

I got fed up with the lyrics on the MP3 server having so many 'simple' mistakes in them and decided to automate a fixing of them. It's not so hard when you know what to look for - the simple ones like 'dont', 'wont', 'cant', 'youll', 'youd', etc, etc, can all be converted to the correct forms without too much hassle. There are some odd mistakes that occur repeatedly though which surprised me. I kept seeing a lot of 'atall' and 'atleast' which seemed to have no rational explanation. Getting 'its' wrong for the context isn't too bad by comparison. Even 'their', 'there', 'their' mistakes don't seem so important when you've got such blatant problems like not knowing that there are two words, not one. Oh, and then there's the files that the author hasn't bothered to capitalise anything which is frustrating. Or the ones where they're missing punctuation, which isn't too bad mostly, but some sentences just make no sense unless you remember to put commas or even a semicolon in them.

Good god what the hell happened to CVS ? I've updated to the 1.12.9 version and all hell broke loose with warnings appearing when I check things in. I go to fix those as recommended in the CVS guide and I still get warnings. So I finally decide to update the scripts to the latest required format otherwise I get these bloody annoying messages every time I sneeze, and then waste 45 minutes just trying to get the cvs log processor to work properly because it isn't in the slightest like it was before. It's almost as if the developers decided that it would be a laugh to make people change everything they've done in their repositories.

And of course, now that I've made this change I can't go back to the older version because the scripts are all incompatible. Thank god I only have two repositories to directly modify. When we were originally setting up CVS we had to make a decision as to whether components, or component groups would have their own repositories. It seemed vaguely sensible, but in the end I opted for the much simpler to understand 'one repository per source code base'. And thank god I did. There are... uh... hmm... that's a whole lot of bits... 700 modules (the CVS term for what I call a 'component' - 'module' has a much more specific meaning in RISC OS) recorded in the main repository. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to make those same changes to each repository if I'd separated them.

Well, I dreamt I saw you walking up a hillside in the snow Casting shadows on the winter sky as you stood there counting crows [ A Murder Of One, from August And Everything After, by Counting Crows ]

I'm part way through Scrubs season 3, which had what seemed to be most of A Murder Of One in one of the episodes. Which, I think makes the count 2 for Counting Crows, 2 for REM, and 2 for U2. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's what I remember of the counts. Of course, there are many other musical bits, but I'm not amazing on memory. Oh, and I'm avoiding saying 'Ben died', because it's sad - it shouldn't have been unexpected after the whole fantasy sequence they did with him in his first episode.

This mouse is really annoying me now; it's almost impossible to use. I'll just have to switch it out for another. At least then I'll know if it's the mouse or the machine.

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26 Aug 2005 (Friday) 

I'm outta here. Have fun dying alone. [ I'm outta here; Kevin; Diesel Sweeties ]

From Diesel Sweeties. Which makes me think that maybe I should have support for links in my quotes.

At some point I probably ought to include something to remind people not to fetch RSS files too often. Every 15 minutes is a little excessive as I only update daily. And every 60 seconds is a tad insane. Of course, there might be something in one of the RSS variants to limit the fetch time. I can't remember. And I should investigate same for Atom as I'm trying to keep up with that properly.

Interesting. I thought that the RSS format had something to suggest how often the feed was updated, but I can't see it in the 0.91, 0.92 or 2.0 specifications.

I'm watching the Feed History discussions on the Atom list with interest, because it should be quite possible to process the diary into a set of grouped feeds. Probably not every time I regenerate it, but certainly on a per-month basis.

Oh, and whilst I remember, Chris pointed out that the 1-and-1 webmail interface generates broken subject lines. It appears on brief investigation that it's because the subject line is not escaping a question mark properly. I could be wrong there, though. I didn't actually go back to the specification to check, but I'm pretty sure that's what I remember from when I implemented quoted-printable subject lines back in the dim and distant past (for gmail).

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25 Aug 2005 (Thursday) 

The harddisc on the laptop was having really bad problems a while back and rather than risking keeping going, I got a new one and copied off the stuff I had. It seems, though, that I missed one or two things when I copied them. Either that or I subsequently deleted them. So I've just spent a joyous hour re-fitting the old drive into the laptop, booting into Knoppix, and copying the files off. And why boot into Knoppix ? Because it's CD-based and won't touch the disc as part of the OS - so any screw ups that the disc might have won't be triggered by the OS just going about its business. Well, that's the theory anyhow. Certainly I feel a lot easier about just taking the data off like this than I would booting from that drive as well.

In any case, it's been a little more tedious than I really wanted. Oh well.

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24 Aug 2005 (Wednesday) 

Julian tells me that 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow' was written by Carole King, and most notably recorded by The Shirelles. I'd found the Carole King version yesterday, actually, whilst fixing up broken lyrics.

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22 Aug 2005 (Monday) 

I read alt.music.lyrics because... well, I like lyrics, and I've posted there once (not that anyone had any ideas on what I was posting). So today, somebody asked for an older track idea for a story - someone suggested Brenda Lee's 'I'm Sorry'. Once in a while I like to go find the tracks to see what they're like. So I look around and I see quite a few by Brenda Lee and download them - in particular I see a track called 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow', 'Baby Face' and 'Only You' and these ring bells with me. I have no idea if they're original or covers, or whether I know the covers rather than the originals but anyhow, it was amusing to listen to these and think "hey, I know this... it's from an advert". Those three tracks are used in a few things, but I am not quite sure what. Off the top of my head, 'will you still love me tomorrow' was used on the heating advert with the cat, dog and mouse sitting together in front of the fire - I'm doubting myself as I write it, but it feels right. I'm pretty sure that 'Baby Face' was used on a cream advert, but I think it was a slower version than the one I've got now. And I've got no idea what 'Only You' was on, but it definitely rings some sort of bell.

There's a thing on TV that Mum and Dad have had on during tea, about things related to the coast - yeah, it doesn't sound all that wonderful, but it's really quite interesting. Anyhow, I was amused to see as they got to Redcar that I actually recognised things - especially the coast at Saltburn that leads up to Claire and Justin's.

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20 Aug 2005 (Saturday) 

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18 Aug 2005 (Thursday) 

Marry him or marry me I'm the one that loves you baby can't you see? I ain't got no future or family tree But I know what a prince and lover ought to be I know what a prince and lover ought be [ Two Princes, from Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, by Spin Doctors ]

Two Princes is currently being used for some advert or other on TV. Can't remember what it was for, so it's clearly effective .

I hope them cigarettes are gonna make you cough Hope you hear this song and it pissed you off I take that back, I hope your doing fine And if I had a dollar I might give you ninety-nine [ Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, from Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, by Spin Doctors ]

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16 Aug 2005 (Tuesday) 

After a little bit of possibly pointless effort, I now have little '_CDDB.txt' entries in the MP3 collection alongside each album. And from them, I've tagged all the albums with the years, where present and where they don't conflict with those already in the collection. The main problem now is that we have a lot of CDDB files which have no DYEAR entry from which to use the information. Whilst that's fine in general, it does mean that we still have a lot of albums without tags. Maybe one day they'll all get tagged properly.

It's been a crap day today overall.

And the mouse is jumping all over the place again.

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15 Aug 2005 (Monday) 

I was sitting, looking at the random logs in my SysLogs directory and being mildly amused when I loaded the NetPlex log that it uses session logs. When was the last time you saw something using the session logs ? Actually, my thought was more 'when was the last time I thought about using them as being a good idea for something I've written'. The thing is that not much that I've written recently (in the last 4 years or so) lends itself to session logs. Which is a pity, because invariably the things that require multiple sessions are more interesting.

And as loaded up the other logs I found a few that were interesting - and a lot that were not - and the most amusing log was the Resolver log which had the entries :

14 Aug 23:36:32 192 Resolvers auto-detected as '192.168.0.100 auto'
15 Aug 00:36:32 192 Resolvers auto-detected as '192.168.0.100 192.168.0.55 auto'
15 Aug 17:52:23 192 Resolvers auto-detected as '192.168.0.55 192.168.0.100 auto'

(list truncated, 'cos it's not all that interesting to see long lists of numbers)

Which just shows that I'd forgotten that I had added the fully-automatic resolver address configuration to Resolver. And enabled it on my system. More interesting, maybe, is the 192.168.0.55 entry which means that Lynda is still running a DNS server. I honestly thought that that turned itself off once Internet Connection Sharing was disabled.

Looks like it is disabled when the connection sharing is disabled. The reason that it was still running was that the PPPoA interface for the USB modem still existed and had the sharing option enabled, even though I wasn't using it - and that meant that the machine was providing resolution services. Obviously that would have meant that Lynda would have been given a request which would then have been sent on to Buttercup to be resolved, and then on to the outside world. Probably not a noticeable speed delay really, but still, more bouncing around than is strictly necessary.

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14 Aug 2005 (Sunday) 

The word 'victim' floated by my head (well, in relation to something, but that's not important), and my mind immediately jumped to Counting Crows.

She is trapped inside a month of grey And they take a little every day She is a victim of her own responses Shackled to a heart that wants to settle And then runs away [ Mercury, from Recovering The Satellites, by Counting Crows ]

All the things we took for granted The words still live on in my head All the times I took for granted All the words I never said. [ Stars All Seem To Weep, from Central Reservation, by Beth Orton ]

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13 Aug 2005 (Saturday) 

I've always thought of you as my brick wall Built like an angel, six feet tall, six feet tall And when you go away, I start to weep You're too expensive girl to keep Isn't it sweet? I don't know where to begin, living in sin, How can we talk ? Look where we've been. [ Get The Message, from Electronic, by Electronic ]

I challenge you to listen to the musical introduction to 'Get The Message' and not think of Republica's 'Ready To Go'. Hmm. Maybe I'll play a few related tracks...

I've been walking in the rain just to get wet on purpose I've been forcing myself not to forget just to feel worse I've been getting away with it all my life [ Getting Away With It, from Electronic, by Electronic ]

There is one thing. That I would die for. It's when you say. My life is in your hands. When you're near me. Your love is all I need. Now I can't imagine... [ What Do You Want From Me ?, by Monaco ]

(also known as "that song that goes 'sha-la-la-la-la-la-la'")

I used to think that the day would never come I'd see delight in the shade of the morning sun My morning sun is the drug that brings me near To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear I used to think that the day would never come That my life would depend on the morning sun... [ True Faith (The Morning Sun), from (The Best Of) New Order, by New Order ]

(also known as "people in funny suits knocking one another over", and "that chorus that I just can't sing")

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12 Aug 2005 (Friday) 

For sending mail through demon (and 1-and-1, too, but I don't do that), Postfix needs to use the secure SMTP. This is a pain and so that I don't have to remember how to do this in future...

For postfix authentication to function as an smtp client, you require postfix, postfix-tls, libsasl2-modules, add the line ...

host        user:password

to /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd. Use ...

postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

to create the database it uses, then finally add the lines to main.cf ...

smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options =

so that we use the authentication. Then it's just a matter of restarting the server. And you're done.

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11 Aug 2005 (Thursday) 

Woke up today with 'Your Wildest Dreams' floating around my head, which was somewhat annoying.

Quite a few searches on the diary turning up the 'Boom-boom-ba' track quote.

It's not quite on Roxette's 'La-la-la' level, but U2's 'Wake Up Dead Man' has some pretty poor lyrics...

Jesus ... Your Father He made the world in seven He's in charge of heaven [ Wake Up Dead Man, from Pop, by U2 ]

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10 Aug 2005 (Wednesday) 

Will you ever understand what it is I do? Is music in your soul ? or did it leave you long ago ? [ Dune, from Fallen Dreams And Angels, by Pendragon ]

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7 Aug 2005 (Sunday) 

I don't want my heart Don't want my head Don't want my friends Don't want my bed [ Beyond You, from Afraid Of Sunlight, by Marillion ]

Last night's dream was simple enough. There was a gun siege in a shop - kind of a castle type shop, with big stone walls, and lots of open spaces and I was outside. I went inside to offer myself as a hostage instead of Caroline, explaining that I didn't want her to be a part of any story because it might then make news and it would be visible to people that she didn't want to know her. Fortunately, the gunman let her go and took me as hostage instead. Unfortunately it did mean that I ended up getting shot in the head, but hey, that's life I guess.

The thought popped into my head whilst I was sitting here today. Well, not thought; a name. 'Sarah Kiffin'. I'm not even sure that's the right spelling. Or who she is. Whether I knew them, I have heard their name on some program, or they were someone historical. But their name is doing that floating-around-my-head thing that will now annoy me a lot.

Hmm. A quick search for 'Sarah Kiffin' comes up with almost nothing on Google. A search for 'Sarah Kyffin' on the other hand, pops up quite a few answers. None of the ones immediately present ring any bells with me though. It's odd. But then I only looked at the first 10 entries. Once in a while I see people coming to the diary from Google's later pages and wonder how interested people must be to get that far - it's one thing to look through the first page of results, but to be looking for something and follow it through to the fourth page is... well, it's a little bit more dedicated.

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5 Aug 2005 (Friday) 

Istanbul was Constantinople Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople [ Istanbul, by They Might Be Giants ]

I was playing Civilisation and one of the computer cities was Constantinople. Which is fine, except that every time I see the name I immediately get an image of three rats dancing around singing the above track. Well, either that or various scenes from Condorman (which is such a cool film). So, why should I have an image of dancing rats ? Well, I did a search and sort-of expectedly it turns out that there was a Muppets Tonight episode with Pierce Brosnan in which mentioned Istanbul a lot - and every time that they did, a few rats came dancing into shot singing a bit more of the track.

Oh what crap there is floating around my head.

Atom feeds should now validate again - the validator's improved and my feed was still broken. It also has a correct year in its 'updated' field now - it hadn't been Y2K compliant. And the RSS feed now has the astounding Dublin Core date elements - I didn't want to go so far as jumping to RSS 1.0 or 2.0 or whatever it is that has the elements directly because I'm not sure that I'm ideologically happy with them - plus I don't know them all that well.

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