31 Jan 2005 (Monday) 

We've now got a little 'favicon' for the website. It's only taken a few years, but until last night I had nothing decent that could create a '.ico' file that I liked. Now, having written something that's decent enough to create '.ico' files, I've created said logo for the site. I couldn't think of anything more useful, so I've used the 'G' from the 'Gerph' logo (simplified very slightly). This does mean it's a litle bit like the Google logo (in that they're both 'G'), but I don't think you'll get so confused.

Testing it in Opera, Firefox and IE shows that it works reasonably on light backgrounds. It doesn't work so well on a dark background, though. I might do something cunning to try to avoid that at some point. Like putting a white background outline on it. Ok, so that's not really cunning. It's just sensible.

Google have a program called 'Picasa 2' apparently that will locate all your pictures and sorts them into 'visual albums organized by date and folder names you will recognise'. So I'm giving it a go. I expect it to suck muchly, but we'll see.

First thing it asks is what you want to scan - all the discs or just the 'my <stuff>' folders. I've told it to scan all discs, and I'll just let it see what it can find. It's stumbling on the 35M TIFF files a little, taking quite a while to process them it seems. And oddly it only seems to have spotted the TIFF files, and ignored the PNGs. So that wasn't too impressive.

The entire operating system has scroll bars. This is Windows, you know what it's like. It's the same as every other WIMP-type GUI you've seen in recent years. Proportional scrollbar, which you can grab and drop where you want. Obviously this isn't in keeping with Google. They prefer to have a quite different control which is a block that you drag to indicate the direction you want to scroll through the bar.

I'm not going to rant on about how bloody stupid it is (yes, Apple and Real, I'm talking about you as well with your Quicktime and Real Player things... and nullsoft with their WinAmp and... etc) to go against the design used by the OS. The design that the user has selected as their interface. The design that ensures consistency of access and the principle of least surprise. Oh, that was a mini-rant. Anyhow, they shouldn't bloody well do it - it's not big and it's not clever.

Oh, and it uses this special type of scroll bar only for the main thumbnails view; the directories view is a conventional scrollbar. Well, conventional operation. It still looks completely different to the Windows standard.

Started 7:37am, and it's still going at 7:49.

The 'timeline' option is actually quite cute; it displays your images collected together as groups by the times they were taken. If it hadn't scanned the entire harddisc it might actually be useful. As it is, we've got half the timeline made up of images from HalfLife. But it's cute, I'll give it that.

Ah, I've found why it hasn't spotted the PNGs - it's configured to ignore them initially. PNG and GIF images are just ignored by default apparently. Even though it does say in the blurb that it will index them. Well it will, but you have to tell it to. Hmm.

There doesn't appear to be an option to show 'where it's currently up to in scanning all the discs'.

It's categorised some bits into 'Folders on disk' and others into 'Other stuff'. There doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between what goes where.

I think it must have finised now 'cos it's not popped anything up in a bit, and it's 5 past 8. Oh, I've just found the 'Manage folders' option which tells me that it hasn't actually scanned all the discs. It's ignored X:, Y: and Z: which are network mounted discs which actually contain the bulk of the files that I would be interested in. I've told it to scan Z: now, which is the MP3 archive and therefore contains every single album cover. It's not popped much up yet.

There's an option for 'Send to Hello' which appears to launch some website. Apparently 'Hello is a new program from Picasa that lets you instantly send dozens of pictures to your friends and talkabout them'. You know, I thought you could use 'email' for that. Doesn't seem at all useful to me when Email is just a click away otherwise.

The search of Z: appears to have only found two files - the video for Imagine which I've got in the JohnLennon folder. It looks like it's not actually marked the disc as being scanned recursively, so hasn't actually looked at most of the folders. And it appears that if I want to mark it as scanning everything on that disc you have to go and click on every folder and then click on the tick. That's pretty pathetic.

I've tried telling it to watch that folder for changes and it's not even bothered to look at what's there. It still only thinks that it has two files on the disc.

Yup, it appears to be utterly useless when it comes to network mounts. It's just not even bothering to check the folders as far as I can tell. And it isn't half hanging (like for 20 seconds) when I open the folder manager.

Oh. I found the 'Refresh thumbnails' option, which it appears you have to click on to tell it to actually do anything. So it's now scanning Z: and it could be there a while.

Apparently 'Other stuff' includes things that have 'non-standard aspect ratios'. And you can't delete this distinction, so far as I can tell. The sorting by name appears to be purely that - it just uses the name of the folder that the files were in. So I've got (at the moment) 4 marked as 'Greatest Hits' which is about as helpful as a chocolate teapot. The fact that they're already organised on the disc in sub-directories means that it's easier to use the filing system than this program. Which leads me to wonder who it's aimed at. Given the timeline thing and the fact that it does seem to like the idea of grouping by date, it would seem to me that it's intended for 'people who copy images off their digital camera and then never do anything more with them'.

Actually the timeline looks rather pretty for the album covers. If the albums were actually stamped with the period they came out it would actually be useful; as it is it's about as intuitive as randomly poking a directory to see what's in there - that's not my fault; the files are just created when I download them.

It's placed a number of things in the 'Other stuff' group which blatantly aren't 'non-standard aspect ratios'. Once in a Live Time, by Dream Theater album cover, 702x702 pixels. Now that I would have thought would be a pretty standard aspect ratio. If it's talking about the pixel aspect ratio then one would have thought that the properties would tell you that it was different. But no, it just tells you that the dimensions are 702x720. Which you could read in the status bar. The actual image itself is indeed square pixelled; 72dpi according to the ImgViewer application (and I wrote it so I'm pretty sure it's telling me the truth). 72dpi is the regular Windows resolution that you'll find. So obviously it's gone a little mad there.

I'm now up to 8 'Greatest Hits' folders now, and it's just in the middle of scanning Madonna.

The touch-up effects seem to be pretty neat, actually. More useful than some I've seen anyhow.

Hmm. The search does take into account parent folders, it appears. A search for Pendragon showed only those folders under Pendragon.

Well, all in all, quite interesting, but I'm not all that bothered byit really as I don't take photos much. Although maybe I would if I could organise them.

I've given in and written in the remaining answers on the lyrics guessing game thing.

Quick summary :

1 Further Away, from Ever, by IQ
2 The Crime Part 1 - Ballad Of Billy Grey, from The Crime, by Grey Lady Down
3 Honeymoon Suite, from In A Reverie, by Lacuna Coil
4 The Crime Part 3 - Paper chains, from The Crime, by Grey Lady Down
5 The Perfect Element, from The Perfect Element (Part I), by Pain Of Salvation
6 How Soon Is Now?, from Meat Is Murder, by The Smiths
8 In The End, from Hybrid Theory, by Linkin Park
9 Every Breath You Take, by The Police
10 One Of My Turns, from The Wall, by Pink Floyd
11 Empire Of A Thousand Days, from Pride, by Arena
12 I Don't Like Mondays, by Boomtown Rats
13 Grendel, from B'Sides themselves, by Marillion
14 Zombie, from No Need To Argue, by Cranberries
15 Going Under, from Fallen, by Evanescence
16 Last Act, from Quest, by Final Conflict
17 Your Town, from Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, by Deacon Blue
18 School, from Crime Of The Century, by Supertramp
19 A Collection, from No One Can single B-side, by Marillion
20 Permanent Vacation, from Heritage and Visions, by Galleon
21 What Do You Want from me ?, by Monaco
22 Inside, from The Mind's Eye, by Stiltskin
23 Into The Night, from Under The Red And White Sky, by John Wesley
24 Sorrow, from Momentary Lapse Of Reason, by Pink Floyd
25 Full Of Grace, from Surfacing, by Sarah McLachlan
26 Heart And Shoulder, from Siren, by Heather Nova
27 Scared Of The Dark, from Ring Of Roses, by Shadowland
28 Stay, by Shakespear's Sister
29 Mockingbird, from Once Again, by Barclay James Harvest
30 Somewhere Down That Crazy River, by Robbie Robertson
31 Bliss, from Origin Of Symmetry, by Muse
32 Toy Soldiers, from Toy Soldiers, by Martika
33 The Power Of Love, from Welcome To The Pleasuredome, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood
34 When Will I Be Famous ?, by Bros
35 Left Of Center, by Suzanne Vega
36 Well Known Sinner, from Take My Head, by Archive
37 How You Remind Me, from Silver Side Up, by Nickelback
39 All Alone, from Quest, by Final Conflict
40 The Last Man On Earth, from The Window Of Life, by Pendragon
41 Family Snapshot, by Peter Gabriel
42 The Land Of Make Believe, from The Best Of Bucks Fizz, by Bucks Fizz
43 Dear Jessie, by Madonna
44 Ocean Drive, by Lighthouse Family
45 Hazard, from Rush Street, by Richard Marx
48 Staring At The Sun, from Pop, by U2
47 Sweet Child O' Mine, from Appetite For Destruction, by Guns 'n' Roses
48 Prayer, from The World, by Pendragon
49 It's A Sin, from Actually, by Pet Shop Boys
50 Ecuador, by Sash!
51 Camouflage, by Stan Ridgway

And the results per-person are...

Nobody: 15
Simon: 19
Hannah: 3
Dad: 7
Chris Williams: 2
Chris Johns: 10
Andrew Hill: 4
Julian: 4

Note these are a little skewed because some people guessed things at the same time as others and I've included both those guesses up to the time that results were published, and people will have ignored those tracks that have already been guessed so they won't be present there.

So I declare that you all win because you got at least one track. Yay! Well done and I hope you enjoyed playing as much as I enjoyed doing it .

Someone's search the site for 'Hedgehog golf club' and 'Mongoose platters' just to make me curious. I rather like that.

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30 Jan 2005 (Sunday) 

Chris submitted a couple more guesses today for the lyrics and pointed out that I'd 'lost' 1988 diary entries. The link on the main page had accidentally been pointed at the 1998 diary. So I've just had to re-generate the entire diary to make it work. The annoyance with this is that it shows up how retaining static content can be annoying - if I change the template, the entire site (or in this case the entire diary part of the site, which is most of it really) has to be re-processed. So it's possible that I might use something more cunning to create those automated sections. What exactly, I'm not sure. I've got a choice between using SSI and PHP on the server, which is interesting but not to the extent that I want to go around changing all the page.

The diary management is... well I won't say archaic, but it was originally started back in '98 and I think at that time it ran HSC to process all the (well 'the only') pages in the diary. And aside from having more pages in it, and a few cleverer features - the summary sections, the automatically updated calendar, calendars for months and years, etc - it's still the same thing. And apart from the re-process time for the entire diary, the whole thing has kept working reasonably well.

I've just been skimming back through the very old diary, and 11 Jan 1999 made me laugh. Obviously at the time, setting fire to myself wasn't exactly humorous but I can at least laugh now.

I've added a tiny little feature to the diary so that the summary fields which previously only appeared in the RSS feed are now placed in a little block on the top right of the entry. It's not perfect, but it appears to work reasonably well for the browsers I've tested it with (Opera, IE, Firefox, Oregano 1, Phoenix, Fresco, Mozilla). I'm not entirely sure I'm keen on it so it might go in some future version but it looks ok-ish.

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29 Jan 2005 (Saturday) 

Lots of guesses by people over the past few days, making the list quite fun really . Obviously some of them would be difficult for people to have got as they'd never heard of the artists, but there's enough in there to have given most people a shot at one or two.

What's likely to be got next ? Well, 9 is bound to stick in someone's head some time soon. 15, too, should suddenly strike someone.

There's an amusing run from 22 through to 27 which nobody's got yet, and of them, 23 and 27 are unlikely to be got by anyone but family as the artist isn't likely to have been heard of outside them. 22 is more an odd one because the lyrics for the track are sort of strung together to sound good (or I just don't understand it!).

Clues ? 25 and 26 are female singers, the former of which is used on the end of a Buffy episode. 15 isn't sung as a single line, it's split after the word 'bottom'. 32 is a female singer too; as is 36 although it's on an earlier album by a group whose later stuff is predominently male. 43 is a female singer too and is intentionally placed beside 42.

44 is a sad track. Well, it's not really so sad, but it makes me sad. 46 is a well known group, but possibly not a well known album - the earlier albums were better known (at least by me until I began listening to the later stuff, obviously).

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28 Jan 2005 (Friday) 

Quite a few guesses of lyrics from people today. Simon got loads, Hannah and Andrew Hill got a few.

Interesting ones that cropped up were number 8 ('I tried so hard and got so far') which both Simon and Hannah said they knew but couldn't guess, and 33 (The Power of Love), though. which they both didn't get.

I'm a little surprised that nobody's got 15 ('Just when I thought I'd reached the bottom I'm dying again') yet.

Unsurprisingly, nobody's managed to guess 50 or 51 just yet which were thrown in for being really hard to get, I thought. 49's not exactly easy either, now I think about it.

So, based on that utterly unscientific poll of just 3 people, the most well known track is 'Stay', closely followed by 'How Soon Is Now?', 'Grendel', and 'Sweet Child O' Mine'.

Which ones am I surprised that haven't been got yet ? Well, 8 should have been got I think. 12 really should have been, but maybe that's just me. Actually I've just noticed that 6 is piano-based which (other than the lyrical and melodic content) is a good indicator of why I like it I guess. Plus I grew up with it played a bit, so it sort of stuck in my head. It's not an obvious section from the track, though. 15 is surprising too, possibly more so than 8.

Other than 49-51 which others are unsurprisingly unguessed ? Probably 5, 22, 25, 26, 27, and 30. Ah, Chris Williams just got 50. And 8 as well.

Of course, Julian would fill in most of the gaps if he had a go because he's just got the memory for these things, even if his tastes differ from mine.

I'll fill in the final answers after a week or so.

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27 Jan 2005 (Thursday) 

Some random song quotes in the style of Hannah will follow, although I can't actually put the collection on random (it's complicated, but ControlAMPlayer - the 'front end' that I use for playing MP3s has no concept of random. That's because I wrote it and I have no interest in playing things randomly - I listen to albums upon albums upon albums and having it playing things out of place would annoy me. And, more technically, the MP3 collection isn't accessible through an auto-indexed database (ControlAMPlayer is written in Assembler quite a few years before I had a database component on the system) and therefore to access the collection would mean cataloguing at least 19,100 files (spread over 914 artists) over an NFS link on 10baseT. Not something you want to be doing as a background operation, never mind in assembler. Plus on a less technical level, there's a lot of cack in the collection and I hardly want to listen to it randomly. So all in all, I don't deal in random playing of tracks), so instead it'll be a few minor snippets which I'll just choose at random that I think might amuse, irritate or... well, I don't care anyhow. It's amusing to me.

If you drop me an email with the name in, I'll fill in the details. Oh, and in Hannah style, they'll only be single lines. I'd probably have used more than that, but they're only single lines as she used only single lines. Ok, maybe I'll do a couple of double lines.

And remember, it's cheating to use lyrics databases except to confirm that the line is the one you believe it to be.

Don't you cry precious tears for me. [ 1: Nobody, Further Away, from Ever, by IQ ]

And I have walked these city streets, with X-ray eyes devoid of grief. And I have heard your every breath, and I have watched your every step. [ 2: Simon, The Crime Part 1 - Ballad Of Billy Grey, from The Crime, by Grey Lady Down ]

Close your eyes. Don't you feel the rejection, baby ? Does it hurt ? [ 3: Chris Johns, Honeymoon Suite, from In A Reverie, by Lacuna Coil ]

You changed your name You changed your face You moved a thousand miles away [ 4: Simon, The Crime Part 3 - Paper chains, from The Crime, by Grey Lady Down ]

Behind those eyes a world explodes - no one there to save him. [ 5: Nobody, The Perfect Element, from The Perfect Element (Part I), by Pain Of Salvation ]

So you go, and you stand on your own And you leave on your own [ 6: Hannah, Simon, Chris Johns, How Soon Is Now?, from Meat Is Murder, by The Smiths ]

(7 appears to have been a duplicate, so I've just removed it)

I tried so hard and got so far. [ 8: Chris Williams, Chris Johns, In The End, from Hybrid Theory, by Linkin Park ]

Oh can't you see you belong to me. [ 9: Chris Johns, Julian, Every Breath You Take, from Every Breath You Take (The Singles), by The Police ]

Would you like to learn to fly ? Would you like to see me try ? [ 10: Dad, One Of My Turns, from The Wall, by Pink Floyd ]

Take no prisoners For they shall not receive any hope from me. [ 11: Simon, Empire Of A Thousand Days, from Pride, by Arena ]

Mother feels so shocked, Father's world is rocked, And their thoughts turn to their own little girl. [ 12: Dad, Chris Johns, I Don't Like Mondays, by Boomtown Rats ]

I've had enough of all your pretty, pretty speeches. [ 13: Simon, Andrew Hill, Grendel, from B'Sides themselves, by Marillion ]

In your head they are fighting. [ 14: Simon, Chris Johns, Zombie, from No Need To Argue, by Cranberries ]

Just when I thought I'd reached the bottom, I'm dying again [ 15: Chris Johns, Going Under, from Fallen, by Evanescence ]

Lying here I can see, sprawled in front of me, A man lying dead with a hole in his head. [ 16: Simon, Last Act, from Quest, by Final Conflict ]

I wouldn't want to be you. Mostly not even near you. [ 17: Simon, Your Town, from Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, by Deacon Blue ]

I can see you in the morning when you go to school. [ 18: Simon, Dad, School, from Crime Of The Century, by Supertramp ]

Though you don't know the girls, you'll recognise the view. [ 19: Simon, Andrew Hill, A Collection, from No One Can single B-side, by Marillion ]

Once I used to read, once I used to think. Now I solve my problems by ordering in another drink. [ 20: Nobody, Permanent Vacation, from Heritage and Visions, by Galleon ]

It's not how it used to be. You've taken my life away. [ 21: Simon, Chris Johns, What Do You Want From Me ?, by Monaco ]

Shadows move in pairs Ring out from a bruised postcard In the shooting yard Looking through the tears [ 22: Nobody, Inside, from The Mind's Eye, by Stiltskin ]

I don't care where you go or who you'll tell. [ 23: Julian, Into The Night, from Under The Red And White Sky, by John Wesley ]

He's haunted by the memory of a lost paradise - in his youth or a dream, he can't be precise. [ 24: Julian, Sorrow, from A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, by Pink Floyd ]

The winter here is cold and bitter. It's chilled us to the bone. [ 25: Nobody, Full Of Grace, from Surfacing, by Sarah McLachlan ]

Wanna run for you. Would it do any good? If I flew for you, You would still be standing. [ 26: Nobody, Heart And Shoulder, from Siren, by Heather Nova ]

I can hear echoes of laughter in the attic Weeping in the hallway. [ 27: Nobody, Scared Of The Dark, from Ring Of Roses, by Shadowland ]

You'd better hope and pray that you'll wake one day in your own world. [ 28: Hannah, Simon, Andrew Hill, Stay, by Shakespear's Sister ]

Rain, sea, surf, sand, clouds and sky Hush now baby, don't you cry [ 29: Dad, Mockingbird, from Once Again, by Barclay James Harvest ]

Catch the blue train to places never been before [ 30: Julian, Somewhere Down That Crazy River, from Robbie Robertson, by Robbie Robertson ]

Everything about you is how I'd wanna be. [ 31: Simon, Bliss, from Origin Of Symmetry, by Muse ]

It's getting hard to wake up in the morning My head is spinning constantly [ 32: Nobody, Toy Soldiers, from Toy Soldiers, by Martika ]

I'll protect you from the hooded claw; Keep the vampires from your door. [ 33: Andrew Hill, Dad, The Power Of Love, from Welcome To The Pleasuredome, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood ]

You're a slave to fashion and your life is full of passion [ 34: Nobody, When Will I Be Famous ?, by Bros ]

When they ask me 'what are you looking at ?' I always answer 'nothing much'. [ 35: Nobody, Left Of Center, by Suzanne Vega ]

First you like to talk Then you like to come around [ 36: Nobody, Well Known Sinner, from Take My Head, by Archive ]

It must have been so bad 'cause living with me must have damn near killed you [ 37: Simon, How You Remind Me, from Silver Side Up, by Nickelback ]

(38 was a duplicate, so I've just removed it)

The dreams of wicked men, the sprites of spirit worlds, The hollow laughs of adults, the sniggers of little girls. The shadows from the bedroom when the lights went off, Demons that danced across the beams in cold deserted lofts. [ 39: Simon, All Alone, from Quest, by Final Conflict ]

With a stroke, one blinding stroke, the scythe sweeps the land The millions fall to their knees and finally set free [ 40: Simon, The Last Man On Earth, from The Window Of Life, by Pendragon ]

All you people in TV land I will wake up your empty shells Peak-time viewing blown in a flash As I burn into your memory cells [ 41: Nobody, Family Snapshot, from Shaking The Tree, by Peter Gabriel ]

Ghostly voices whisper 'Will you come and play?' [ 42: Dad, Land Of Make Believe, from The Best Of Bucks Fizz, by Bucks Fizz ]

Rub this magic lantern He will make your dreams come true for you [ 43: Nobody, Dear Jessie, from Like A Prayer, by Madonna ]

He left you black and blue Without a word of explanation [ 44: Nobody, Ocean Drive, from Ocean Drive, by Lighthouse Family ]

Here was I surrounded by a thousand fingers suddenly Pointed right at me [ 45: Simon, Hazard, from Rush Street, by Richard Marx ]

There's an insect in your ear If you scratch it won't disappear It's going to itch and burn and sting [ 46: Nobody, Staring At The Sun, from Pop, by U2 ]

I hate to look into those eyes And see an ounce of pain [ 47: Hannah, Simon, Sweet Child O' Mine, from Appetite For Destruction, by Guns 'n' Roses ]

All the hatred in the world Where did it all come from? [ 48: Simon, Dad, Prayer, from The World, by Pendragon ]

Twenty seconds and counting... ... t minus fifteen seconds [ 49: Chris Johns, It's A Sin, from Actually, by Pet Shop Boys ]

and can I just throw in ...

Dame tu mano y venga conmigo vámonos al viaje para buscar los sonidos mágicos de Ecuador. [ 50: Chris Williams, Chris Johns, Ecuador, by Sash! ]

and

When I said his name, the soldier gulped, and a medic took my arm and lead me to a green tent on the right. [ 51: Dad, Camouflage, by Stan Ridgway ]

Originally I themed the tracks, but it sort of drifted toward the end. It's not exactly styled in the way of 'stuff I listen to regularly' but jumps about quite bit. And obviously I've avoided any instrumental tracks.

And I kinda spent longer doing this than I probably ought to have done. So you've got over 50 to play with there. Get me at gerph@gerph.org will do. Or by the comment link below.

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23 Jan 2005 (Sunday) 

I've just found two entries for the 15th January which I'd not added to the diary. One day I'll sort out a simple 'if I email myself something for the diary, it'll be automatically added to it' thing. But not right now .

I'm having all the fun I can have with installing Windows XP on the family PC. I got so fed up with it being mind-numbingly slow that I just decided 'screw it, I'll upgrade things'. Why's it slow ? Because Windows 2000 installed over two partitions, the primary one of which is only 4G long and is utterly fragmented to hell. The cumulative weight of those patches and everything else that's been installed on there just takes its toll. Maybe there's an easier way to cut it all down but I've given up on it basically.

I finished watching Joey today, too. Well, up to episode 14, which is a lot of telly. And a lot of cringing. And a lot of laughing too. It's actually quite funny. And yes I got through 14 episodes without giving up. Beats Galactica, I think.

And that's episode 15. Hmm. Still funny; amusing way to while away those tedious "Windows is installing" repeated reboots etc, etc.

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21 Jan 2005 (Friday) 

It's possible that I may have been very quick to judge Joey. It's not Friends, but it's still quite funny. I'll not go so far as to think that it'll keep being so, or that the sections I saw were more than just small snippets of the whole and I was lucky. But it's not too bad.

I guess the comparison is to Galactica here - I looked forward to both, but not expecting too much. The initial episodes of Galactica were very much filled with the "I hope it doesn't continue like this", whereas (so far, and I guess this is limiting me as I've only seen the first episode plus a few snippets) Joey's filled with "Hmm... what's next". I guess the difference is also one of quite different expectations. And of course Galactica would have actually been worthwhile if they'd just fired the camera man or director who said "I know what'll look good, I'll make it look like it was filmed by an amateur".

Yes, I'm using Joey as a platform to take another dig at Galactica. I don't care really; it had the potential but blew it by having crap presentation. Well, that and I did mention the other things.

But I'm not talking about that, am I ? Hmm. Anyhow, yes, Joey... it's quite fun, and I'm not expecting anything more than for it to make me laugh a little. And it does, and not whilst I'm cringing. Which is good because it's so hard to do.

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20 Jan 2005 (Thursday) 

Well, I'm just sitting here going "It works" quite a lot. The module still spews debug like a mad thing, but it's actually doing what it's been told to. Even when I told it to do complicated (well, reasonably) things.

Greebo and Grendel are both being kitten-soft at the moment. They're so cute and strokable . I think actually it's 'cos of the time of year and they're eating better. Grendel's not been as sick as he has been in the past and he's generally seeming happier. He still yells at me, but that's just his way. Like it's Greebo's way to do everything at such a leisurely pace that you might actually fall asleep before he reaches you.

I think I might just sit here and cackle some more.

I got a nice email from the BBFC IT people this morning. I reported, early on in the day that a film had a broken RSS element - because it was a rejected film and (I believed that) they'd not had any rejected films since the RSS feed was set up. The element itself wasn't actually broken, but the text was just incorrect because fields had not been filled in. And today I got a nice email back thanking me for it.

The film in question, titled 'Terrorists, Killers and Other Wackos' was rejected for very good reasons it appears - be aware that the text of the reason for rejection might actually be disturbing even in its description and that I'm saying this purely so that I'm not blamed for people blindly following the link. I suggest an 15 rating for the description . It was an enlightening read, though, because it shows the Board's treatment of an extreme video. I didn't realise that they would actually reject a video - I hadn't really considered this type of content at all, to be perfectly honest - and had kind of assumed that extreme material would end up with an 18 certificate.

It's also interesting because I had thought that categorising films would actually be quite a rewarding and interesting task - deciding what level of the certificate is appropriate to a film within the guidelines in order that they not be shown inappropriately. But, I think that having to sit through and categorise such a film would probably leave you feeling quite drained and quite sickened. On the other hand, that's me; people have different tollerances for these sorts of things. Maybe they have different people to do different types of films - that would make sense as someone who's an expert on the distinction between (say) PG and 12A wouldn't necessarily be as useful grading a film that was on the 15 and 18 cusp. Or maybe they would; I don't know. But in any case I have this image in my head of the film being seen to be difficult to categorise and a few more people being called in to ensure that it's not just one person's opinion before they all got together to detail the reason explicitly so that there's no question what the reasons for rejection were. And then everyone going off for a few pints .

On the NBC site it gives a quote from USA Today about the 'Joey' series, a spin off from 'Friends' ...

... hands-down the best sitcom of the new season. [ Joey; USA Today ]

Ok, so I've only seen the pilot, but it's a little cringe-worthy. I have this vague feeling that I'd be thinking "good god this season must suck" if I'd seen much more. But I haven't so I can't think that yet. Of course, one episode isn't anything to go on anyhow, so I really shouldn't even write that. Forget I did. Ok ?

I think the problem is that Joey isn't the strongest of characters from Friends - no offense to Matt le Blanc who plays him well. He was always the 'dumb backdrop', just as Phoebe was the 'quirky one' (yeah, I know I shouldn't dump them into categories, but they just ended up being that way at the end I think). That said, to do a spin off of either of the other couples wouldn't have worked so there wasn't all that much choice if they were going to do one. I don't reckon it'd last more than a series really. Maybe two if it's pushed, mainly because it's living off the Friends reputation. Could be I'll be completely wrong and it'll be wonderful. I'll see I guess.

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19 Jan 2005 (Wednesday) 

Lots of porting work today. Trying to create a new module from some external source. It's going reasonably well, but one or two assumptions are holding me up. But on the plus side, it's gone from being a 50k module that prints 'u[1]' a lot to a 100k module that actually does something more than that. Admittedly that involves printing a lot of debug, but it's at least getting there. And admittedly I can stiff the machine still, but that's just because I set up loops by accident. So tomorrow's going to involve some rather fun faking of things that aren't available to the module so that the code will actually work in the way it expects from its original environment. Oh joy.

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15 Jan 2005 (Saturday) 

Sometimes I wonder if I'll care about my dreams in the future, but then I remember that reading the earlier ones is amusing, so I think it's worth it after all. Anyhow, last night was odd. I was out with Chris and we were going down some stairs to a car somewhere and we were taken hostage. I got away, but Chris was left there. So there's Chris at the bottom of some stairs (that seem to go nowhere - dunno why we were going that way) and me up with the police hostage-squad type people in a warehouse type building above it. One of the guys suggested we could just blow out the supports to the building and crush the hostage-takers, but someone else pointed out that that would crush Chris too, which was fortunate .

Our only communication with them was through my mobile phone (for reasons I don't understand) so the police kept in touch that way and I had no mobile phone. After a few hours not a lot was happening so some of the guys went out for tea. Then something happened and I had to go get them. I found them out at a little table outside a cafe, eating pastries. So they rang back to the warehouse (I'm not sure why they didn't call them there, but anyhow) to find out what was going on and after some discussion, and exchanges of mobile phones (there were a few extra) they went back. I asked to borrow one of the phones because I hadn't got one now and I then had to go off to the reception for Suzanne's wedding. Suzanne had got married the other day, and they were having a reception at Lucy and Martin's house today - which might have been where Chris and I were going. In any case, Suzanne and her husband had split up and she was planning on moving away so this was also a 'goodbye' get together, too.

So I head off, through Norwich to the house, (which magically turns out to be in the countryside, across from a farm and beside a field with some goats in it) and I get there and it's all odd because Suzanne's (I have this feeling that there was an earlier part of the dream about the wedding and their splitting up, but it's faded into haziness now - I do remember that her husband was a little bit distressed but she was not so bothered) acting all bouncey as if it's just another get together and not 'the day after the wedding and you've now split up'. Anyhow, I'm chatting to a couple of people but generally staying on my own 'cos I don't chat to people well, and I decided to go for a walk and see how the hostage negotiation's going on. I leave the house and I'm walking down by the farm whilst I'm trying to talk to them about Chris. Not much has happened and they'll call me when there's any development. So then I decide to SMS people that I know with the temporary phone number because it's probably not a good idea for anyone to ring me and get the police expecting a hostage demand. This is even though most of the poeople I know are at the party. So I send everyone a message and then head back. At which point I think I must have woken up.

Sorry Chris, I don't usually leave my friends to go to party's whilst they're being held hostage. Sorry Suzanne, I know you didn't leave your husband the day after the wedding. Sorry Lucy for relocating your house to being next to a farm.

Very strange.

The diary had the entry for 12th January 2005 entered wrongly. For reasons that are unclear it was coming out as 4th February 2073. Fixed now, but looked very odd.

I was just trying out the shoutcast servers again to see what Internet Radio was like. It's pretty variable in my experience, but I'm not too worried - I've got my local server with more music than I can shake a stick at. But I thought I'd see anyhow... so I try Virgin radio first; not too bad in general but frustrating in having adverts in I always thought. So I flipped over to Shoutcast, which has a reasonable selection and chose the first one that seemed to interest me. I was surprised to hear a track I not only knew, but didn't really expect to hear outside the local collection - Understand, by Jadis. That was on 'Progressive Rock Universe' so I may have to try that again.

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14 Jan 2005 (Friday) 

We went to Center Parcs this evening for a meal, which was rather nice.

Simon's home tomorrow. And Hannah too.

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13 Jan 2005 (Thursday) 

Just a quick note to say that I finished Imogen a couple of days ago. Quite funky it was too. I was only a little way off finishing it when I played it on the Beeb, too .

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12 Jan 2005 (Wednesday) 

Well, lots of new things to play with today, and I've managed to make them all work quite quickly and without to much external help. Follow the instructions and generally do what I'm told and everything works. Both on Windows and on Linux. So I'm quite happy. I have had to write a new lump of perl for dealing with NNTP which I've not done in a bit, but that was rather fun anyhow. Plus, I've now read quite a bit more about the later SMTP features. When I last read up on them the EHLO extensions were quite new and I ignored them. I don't think AUTH was even about and I certainly never even considered looking at the SASL stuff. But now I have, so I feel a lot better about my understanding of them.

What else ? Well all this was whilst I was meant to be tidying up - a job that would have probably only taken half an hour or so if I'd not been so distracted. Oh well.

I'm also trying to tidy up some of the DVD covers that Chris gave me last year (or was it the year before ?). Which is tedious as they're 36M TIFFs. Not the most fun of things to be manipulating.

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11 Jan 2005 (Tuesday) 

Well, wow, Claire's going to have a baby. It's really strange . But great news, so congratulations to her and Justin !

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10 Jan 2005 (Monday) 

Quite a lazy day today. Just trying to update some code with a few new features. I don't often get to use the things I write. Well, I use in the sense that they're there and they do what I want, but not use in the sense of looking at them from the point of view of someone else seeing them. Having the memory of a goldfish is handy in that respect. In any case, it's not so much that I didn't remember anything about how things worked, but just that I'd not quite envisaged using things in the way that I'm doing so, and therefore it was a little different to normal.

Anyhow, that was quite pleasant to do, and not the usual thing. Plus, rather than just writing tools that 'will be useful in the future', I'm actually using them in that way that means that this is the future that was thought about for them. It's kinda like the way that the entire ImageFile stack comes together with Filer Thumbnails - that's the whole reason that the stack exists. But the actual doing that final bit and seeing that things had paid off so well was really nice. That there are so many side effects off that is just a bonus - alpha-channel sprites, CMYK sprites, massively overhauled JPEG rendering system, PNG, PNM, XBM, GIF (ish), ICO, BMP, PCX, and Sun raster image rendering, as well as the native Sprite, JPEG, Artworks and Clear, and the more underlying improvements to allow the Wimp to use deep sprites. And there's the slight side effects that came about from the alpha-channel sprites - translucent rendering (which is used in the DragASprite code), more generalised blend operations, and font-blending at any screen depth (previously it was only at 8 BPP or deeper). And the side effects of the ImageFileRender system - a new Window gadget for easy display of images, single call rendering of images, and the more general use of colourmapping in sprites, drawfiles and JPEGs. All these little things, just so that we can get a little thumbnail of an image in the Filer window.

Yeah, you can argue that some weren't necessary, but it's not just the goal that's important in this sort of thing. It's the making the journey to that goal structured in such a way that the goal isn't just the end, but a step toward things you hadn't considered. If I remembered the proper engineering terms I'd use them, but my mind's gone blank now. It's really just a simple thing about designing things right so that your system is reusable. And not just 'reusable after you've messed about with it some more', but reusable as it stands.

But anyhow, this is all randomness on ancient history. So much of the work ends up being framework and the goal seems so very distant that it's sometimes difficult to remember that that's where your going except for the steps that lead to it. On the other hand, it's usually very clear the way that you don't want to go, so the overall goal is merely the Right Route anyhow.

And I'm rambling around the fact that a non-goal was achieved today. In that it was never really a core intended feature, but it was a logical progression that it would have been foolish to have not pursued. And I guess that's where things get to be worthwhile sometimes.

On the down-side, today, I've discovered that one of the components I had branched some time ago has subsequently been restructured quite a bit and all my changes apply to files that no longer exist. Which means that merging them into the contemporary version of the component is going to be an arse. And what I thought might be a half hour job once I've re-familiarised myself with where the development was will probably take a few hours. All of which is a lesson in not branching before a re-structure,. I was aware of the need for the restructure and just didn't worry about the branched version at the time. "I'll come back and fix it up later", I think I probably thought. Not a huge deal; just a little more to do. It's not finished anyhow and I'm not at all sure that it's 'right' anyhow.

There's another branch, in another component, that I created recently which I think might suffer the same fate soon if I'm not careful. On the plus side, though, that was hacked together in a few hours in the first place and isn't at all well done. Its memory requirements are... well, shall we say 'obscene'. Nearly 4M whilst quiescent. That's just insane. But it's really only there as a placeholder, so it'll need some significant work later.

I have this nagging feeling that all this waffle is pointless, but worse than that, that I had something I wanted to put in the diary today. I do remember that I was very tired when I woke up earlier, so I should probably go sleepy-byes soon. Nope. Can't remember what I wanted to write. Oh well. Like the thing I was meant to add to the shopping list that will no-doubt come to me after it's needed, I've forgotten.

I've got to the 16th in my advent calendar now - it has little Crunchie bar things in it. I don't eat chocolate too much. That said I had two fingers of Twix biscuits and a Mars bar earlier. Which I think completely says "You're lying, Justin".

Hmm. Must ring Angela soon, too. Amazing the things you forget to do. Well, not really amazing. Bit naff of me really.

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8 Jan 2005 (Saturday) 

In a whim, I decided to try Half Life again. So that's 4 hours I'll not see again. And I'm only at the nasty thing that shoots fire from his arms, too. I got through the bangy thing with only a few mistakes though, so that's not too bad.

To get to sleep - I don't sleep well generally; I blame stupid times - I watch Friends. It's simple and it's easy to watch to sleep. But because I know it so well now, I'm now watching it with French subtitles. Which makes it muchly fun (although less useful as a way to get to sleep). One thing that came up, though, was a rather odd phrase. "elle m'a pose un lapin". Now I may have misremembered the exact spelling, but that was about it. And it struck me as being odd, because Joey had said absolutely nothing about a rabbit - rabbit, I definately remember is 'lapin' in French. What Joey said in English was "She stood me up". It turns out that it's just a French idiom. Obviously I barely remember any of the idioms that I learnt at school, but I think that's rather cute. I have no idea of the derivation - just as I have no idea of the derivation of the English "She stood me up". On the other hand, I can at least see a possibility of a derivation in the English version. The only way I can make any sort of connection with a rabbit is maybe if you're in a 'Fatal Attraction' frame of mind.

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7 Jan 2005 (Friday) 

Well, this is odd. It's 4:30 in the morning (Friday 7th, that is) and I just turned the telly on to find that BBC 1 is showing a test card. They never show the test card these days. It's over to News 24 at night. In any case, it's nice to see that it's card 'J' which I've seen referenced before but never actually seen in real use. I'll wander downstairs and see whether it's just this region or what... might be the winds around here have done something... or maybe it's just odd. Well, it's back now.

It seems from todays tea that I'm not a big fan of Lamb Mince either. I don't like Lamb in general, but I thought "Well, it's mince it might be ok". Uh-uh. No, it seems that just being mince doesn't take away the fact that it tastes like lamb.

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5 Jan 2005 (Wednesday) 

Finger nails are lacking today. I think I must need to eat more.

Not a lot else that's worthy of writing, to be honest. I've spent to previous two days trying to think about a problem and read up on it and got precisely nowhere. And today I had an idea, which I've now implemented and seems to work. It's got some odd little quirks so I'm pretty sure it won't work in some cases. But these things will get worked out of the design, I'm sure. Part of my hesitance about it is that I've ignored a pretty major part of the problem. Well, not strictly, but other people have dealt with it, but for the requirements I have it's not been necessary. I just have this very nasty suspicion that it's going to come back and bite me soon. And it'll mean a re-work of about a third of the code to add another degree of freedom. The problem with that is that it says "You've not designed this right". Which I know I haven't because I started out in my design with "This doesn't seem important, so we'll ignore it". Implementation's correct for the design, but the design sucks.

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2 Jan 2005 (Sunday) 

When fetching the lyrics from various places on the 'net, the fetcher sometimes gets duplicates because people have used similar names that it can't differentiate. The canonicalisation routines try to remove these but once in a while they crop up - particularly when a single site has multiple entries for an artist (in this case 'Connells' and 'The Connells'; sometimes they might have 'Connells, The' but we understand those). In any case, they sometimes pop up and I have to weed through the ones that couldn't be sorted into the main library because the files already exist.

I decided to try that today and found '74-'75, by The Connells in there; which I really didn't know I had and I rather like. It's like finding little presents.

Other suggestions for the cover versions are...

Where The Streets Have No Name ( U2 / Pet Shop Boys) which both work amazingly well. I don't know why because it's a dancey update, but it works. Maybe again I'm baised because I can place them both in a time that I liked.

With A Little Help From My Friends ( The Beatles / Joe Cocker) brings a little heavier sound to the Beatles track, and uses female vocals for the second parts, rather than a chorus which is a little more distinct. It's also helpful that it was use on The Wonder Years which again places it in time for me .

As I suggested yesterday, I've actually sorted out the links on the 'quotes' page so that it now has the entries in the correct order.

It's enough to make you wonder sometimes if you're on the right planet. [ Two Tribes, from Welcome To The Pleasuredome, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood ]

I managed to lose a tooth last night in my dream and so I was quote surprised this afternoon when I suddenly rememebered this and my tooth was still there. As I'm writing that I'm wondering what on earth purpose that comment might possibly serve if I read this diary back. It's all quite self serving anyhow, so I'm not going to dwell on that too much.

Too much of this evening was involved with trying to track does who is corrupting emails between myself and certain people. Now given that there's only so many possibilities we've narrowed it down to just a few. Emails are leaving my machine properly - at least as they leave here over PPP they're ok. The destination doesn't seem to matter - a few people with different hosts were seeing corrupt emails. The emails that leave here are correctly formed. When arriving they are, generally, appearing with their headers mangled; usually attachments have their headers corrupted or transposed with those of the email header itself but we've also had a '.' in a MIME separator go missing on one email. After much debugging, not all of which is conclusive, I'm reasonably confident that it's NTL that's to blame. One of, or some combination of, their servers is corrupting messages when particular criteria for their headers are matched - usually it happens with reasonable sized Zip (test zip was a couple of hundred K long) by getting the data stream corrupt, transposing sections. Usually within the first 3k of the message (my estimates place it around 2200 bytes from the point at which the 'Received' header occurs for the '.' removal; the others are too complex to decide on a fault case).

All in all, I've really given up with NTL. They're really quite pathetic when it comes to technical support now; I have to mess around with 2 hour cut-offs, their 'transparent proxy'. I've lost the 'justin.fletcher' email address because NTL are apparently unable to fix it, their homepage is a joke for trying to find anything out or change any settings. Actually, if you want a great example of how not to provide a homepage for a product, the NTLWorld homepage is just perfect. For posterity, the primary problem with it is that it's a webpage for people using NTLWorld. So why do they give a toss about the news, interviews, competitions or anything else. If they want that, direct them somewhere else. What do people that go to that site actually want to know ? How to subscribe, how to change their options, information about the product and the network in general. Where's that information found on the site ? Well, it's hidden away in a little corner. If you can find it at all, that is. It scales terribly on systems that have JavaScript disabled, and isn't even valid HTML in places. Generally it's an arse to use, whatever you want to do. And why do they keep it this way ? Because some pillock at the company decided that a good homepage for default installations would be 'http://www.ntlworld.com/', and if they change it to actually be appropriate to its purpose then everyone that uses that as their starting page will get confused. Bloody stupid reason, really. And of course, since they've relocated their call centres abroad you have a bloody hard time trying to make yourself understood, never mind trying to get anything done. When you are understood, in general the people on the end of the line have the technical ability of a haddock. But anyhow. NTL suck and it's really not worth the hassle any more.

We have some party packs of Smarties downstairs. They're almost all gone now, but the packs are still fun because they have letters on. People change them if they're bored so that they read different things. It's not so easy because you only get the letters from 'Smarties'. We've had some fun ones, but I think today's is the longest and silliest - 'SAMS A REET MISER'.

Having finally had a chance to check out the lyrics for some Deacon Blue tracks, I now realise there's a lot more bitterness there than I had thought. Which only makes me like it a little more - it's not quite what I thought so it's more fun.

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1 Jan 2005 (Saturday) 

I woke up this morning from an odd dream. The russian mafia had kidnapped me (which was quite scary) and threatened my family and friends unless I worked for them. Boss-man suggested that the previous person who had been uncooperative had lost their head. Anyhow I didn't really have a lot of choice so ended up working for them, going on rather fun operations to infiltrate buildings and extract information and money from people. Quite a fun life. Albeit under threat of death and generally not doing good things - quite unlike my every day life. There's not much threat of death here. Unless you count being mauled to death by a hungry cat. Which might happen, y'know.

There's some bizarre discussion about writing programs to use recursively reentrant code in order to provide multitasking dialogue boxes - you know, the way that RISC_OSLib does and the way that generally is considered to be about as useless as... well, I dunno... something not very useful. Or rather, I had assumed it was considered as a stupid program design, but quite a few people have jumped to say that it sounds like a good idea. I really thought we'd gone beyond such insanity - after all, it's been quite a number of years after RISC_OSLib and people learnt their lesson from that. Well, I thought they had.

I flipped on the telly earlier whilst trying to eat my supper and 'Tank Girl' was on. It's kinda... weird. No. It is weird. It's sort of like a cross between Mad Max, Batman and ... something else. Oh and with human-kangaroos. I'm not going to say it's a bad film... it's just quite different .

I found a rather cool cover version of 'Running Up That Hill' a few days ago. The original version by Kate Bush is quite cool. I'm not sure I prefer this particular version, but it's got a different sound to it that I rather like. It's like changing the whole effect of the track that you wouldn't think about otherwise.

If I were to throw it into a quick bad of female singer-tracks, I'd probably come up with a list like this... oh, I just did :

• Running Up That Hill, by Kate Bush
• Time After Time, by Cyndi Lauper
• Love Is A Battlefield, by Pat Benitar
• Toy Soldiers, by Martika
• Promise Me, by Beverly Craven
• Total Eclipse Of The Heart, by Bonnie Tyler
• Heart And Soul, by T'Pau
• These Dreams, by Heart

There are a few tracks which have been covered and sound significantly different and make the track into something other than it was originally. There's a real difference between just re-singing a track and making it into something that's equally good but in a very different way. Let's have a quick think. I'm not sure I can come up with many, to be honest, but we'll see. Three immediately spring to mind though .

I think I'd probably put that Placebo cover in there; it's not amazingly different but it's nicely understated to give a different sound to the track.

Always On My Mind ( Elvis Presley / Pet Shop Boys) is (as I'm about to say in another entry) a dance-updated track, but it updates the track in a way that makes it not so depressing and really gives it a whole new life.

Eleanor Rigby ( The Beatles / Godhead) has such a different sound to the original that I think of it as the same track, but updated for a more modern audience without pandering to 'make it dancey' which seems to be about the limit of some covers (bah!). Of course, I love the original as well because it's so well orchestrated and produced.

Mad World ( Tears For Fears / Gary Jules) provides a similarly stark contrast between the versions. Tears For Fears play on the idea that it's a strange and dreamy feeling, whilst Gary Jules captures the isolation and depression of being lost without understanding the world. Two totally different outlooks on the same words and so they both work amazingly well.

I'm sure I could come up with more if I tried but that'll do for now.

Oh, and whilst I remember, I found what may go into the sin-bin of worst covers ever, too. Comfortably Numb, by Scissor Sisters may actually be the worst thing ever. If you haven't heard it, imagine Bee Gees meets Pink Floyd. And then take away what ever you thought was good about either of those groups. It's not a re-interpretation of the track, it's just singing it differently to a different backing. How's that different to the other tracks I've cited ? Maybe because it's a track I like and it hasn't captured the feeling or any reasonable interpretation of the original. Maybe I'm just too biased to see any redeeming feature of the track. Poor beyond belief.

Oh, and I've moved the 31st December entry back to 2004, so we're back to a consistent diary again.

There's also a quote from over christmas that I wanted to write in the diary but I think it might not go down so well with some people so I'll not bother.

Grr. I've just noticed that in the 'quotes' section I've got the dates coming out the wrong way. I'm not quite sure what's going on there, as the months are right, but the days within them appear reversed. I know why that is. It's because that's the order in which the entries appear in the files. I'll have to sort the entries before I write them to the index file. Tomorrow.

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