1 May 2005 (Sunday) 

Well, I wrote some code today. And it worked. Startling, huh ? But I was quite chuffed that it worked and I felt quite good about it for a bit. I generally feel a little better today though. I think because I understand things better now and I've come to the sort of "this is the answer" point. Or at the least, the point at which I can say "there's nothing else I can put together without making assumptions". Of course, I don't actually have any answer. What I do have, though, is the problem which is much more important and allows you to determine the answer. And of course, knowing the problem only begs more questions, but at least they're questions that I can ask. Or might ask. Or would ask if given the opportunity. Or something like that. Not that I have any right to. More than likely it'll be years before I would, and it won't matter then, so nothing will come of them. So I'll just shut up.

Today has just been too hot really. Lovely storm last night. Or there probably was. I remember seeing flashes of it, and kind of hearing the rain, and being just about awake enough to see if the cats were out. But for a change my head was just racing and managed to drown out the outside. Odd that.

Sigh. And now I feel pathetic again. I still need something and I don't know what it is.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

2 May 2005 (Monday) 

Well, my good feeling from yesterday has, as expected, evaporated with the coming of a new day. In some ways it might be easier just to say what I think and 'get the hell out of Dodge' - and I even checked that that was a real phrase and hadn't just made it up. The only problem with saying what I think is that it's probably wrong, probably results in more harm than good, and probably isn't my place to say - even though I was explicitly asked.

Ah well.

On the plus side, today's Tips For Good Business Sense comes from Barclay's. I'll summarise because I can't be bothered to go in to details. When you ask for details from a customer on a website, try at the very least to validate them. Don't just blindly continue as if they entered everything perfectly when you know the details can't possibly be correct. If they stuck a space in a number without realising then try taking it out, or at least tell them that they made a mistake. There's a difference between preventing attacks by informing people of invalid combinations and informing customers that they're entering things that can't possibly be valid. For example, if I enter 'george' as a membership number, it would be advisable to tell them that it's not correct. What do you give away by doing that ? Absolutely nothing; anyone who was intent on attacking would never do it. In my case it was the membership number - read out as three groups of four digits, in a similar manner to the numbers on your bank cards. So that's how I entered it, with a space between each of the components. If someone enters '2010 1234 1234' then surely it would save a lot of time and energy to just strip the spaces ? Or at worst, return them to a page that says that it contains invalid characters and should consist only of numbers. Yeah, maybe I'm dim, but there's probably quite a lot of dim people out there. Do you really think it's a good use of people's time to be solving that sort of problem ?

When I first met you girl You had fire in your soul What happened to your face of melting snow? [ Acrobat, from Achtung Baby, by U2 ]

Listen to me now I need to let you know You don't have to go it alone And it's you when I look in the mirror And it's you when I don't pick up the phone Sometimes you can't make it on your own ... Sometimes you can't make it The best you can do is to fake it [ Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, by U2 ]

I started working on the rather naff 'generate a webpage listing every track played' program today too. It was another of those 'show that I'm not quite useless' things.

I think I may have an idea what the something is that I need. I spent a little while talking to mum and she said some things that were helpful. Maybe I am not quite as crazy as I thought I was. I think my first instincts were right. I just need to be able to focus and follow through. Mum wasn't really saying anything that I didn't already know, and it's not all that wonderful to hear your whole life being criticised, but she (and I) was right. So let's see if we can actually follow through on doing something about things.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

3 May 2005 (Tuesday) 

If I ran away, I'd never have the strength to go very far [ Live To Tell, from True Blue, by Madonna ]

I don't usually post links back to other logs, but David Chess is an exception in general because he manages to be insightful, honest and intelligent (as well as funny at times ). So, with respect to 'How to write a successful blog', he offers a very familiar viewpoint.

Which incidentally reminds me that I could do with 'permanent links' from the 'current' month as otherwise you have to update your links after the month passes.

In any case, I'll summarise by saying "everything's unimportant except 'clarity, proofreading, and RSS'". The first two are true of writing in general, and the latter is just how you publish these days. So whilst I've given more readership to that particular article, I hope it's reinforcing David (and my) view that it's because 'it's cack'.

Julian, Hannah, Simon, and Chris have done some test things, so I thought I'd compare.

Trek:
Justin: 57%
Julian: 44%
Simon: 52%

Brain:
Justin: 60% interpersonal, 80% visual, 80% verbal, 180% maths
Julian: 80% interpersonal, 20% visual, 120% verbal, 180% maths
Simon: 20% interpersonal, 100% visual, 100% verbal, 180% maths
Hannah: 80% interpersonal, 100% visual, 120% verbal, 100% maths

Capitals of the world:
Justin: 66%
Julian: 70%
Simon: 66%

History:
Justin: 40%

Commonly confused words:
Justin: 92% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, 66% Expert
Julian: 92% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, 93% Expert

Worst Case Scenarios:
Justin: 70% survival, 0% certain death
Julian: 67% survival, 0% certain death

Innocence:
Justin: -10 out of 56 (yeah, I had to include that for the cool result)
Julian: -25 out of 56
Hannah: -2 out of 56
Chris: -5 out of 56

I'll update them if the others do any more, but for now some quick comments...

I'm surprised I scored so highly on the History one - I was expecting around 20% after seeing the questions. I'm a little frustrated by the words one though - I should be getting 100% on the beginner really. On the plus side, I now understand the difference between some words I didn't really know before. I was also surprised by the high Countries score - either Julian should have got more than he did, or I should have got a lot less.

The Brain one was interesting; basically either we don't know ourselves very well or the 'interpersonal' group is just rubbish. Simon should score highest, Julian second and me last. The maths result is amusing, though - that we all hit exactly the same mark.

Helen was at Auschwitz today.

I tried playing HalfLife 2 Demo today, too. With a little fiddling it managed to work. It's very atmospheric. It really is in a different league to Half Life, I think. I haven't really followed First Person games to be honest, but the years have really been used effectively to make things much more impressive. I'm not convinced by the implementation of picking things up, though. The characters are impressive though. It was scary to see the Zombies throwing the boxes and tables that were lying around at me, though. I wasn't expecting that at all. Or the head crabs dropping off when you shot them. However, I really shouldn't play games. It doesn't help achieve my goal really. Much as the quizes don't either.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

4 May 2005 (Wednesday) 

I spent a few minutes today - well about half an hour really - making the archived diary entries (ie those that aren't the main page) include a 'title' element to describe them. Basically this just means that they (should) provide additional tooltip (or similar) help when floated over. Because of the way that the diary is constructed, you don't get these on the main page, but they do appear on all the earlier entries. Internet Explorer and Opera (7.5 and 8 at least) appear to display these as tooltips. It's not particularly impressive, but it's a thing on my tick list.

Ok, not an important thing on the tick list, but it's there anyhow.

Simon's answered some more quizes now. He's less Trek than me, and equally knowledgeable about countries.

The WebCam page is a little different now. In theory I've fixed the auto-refresh problems with Oregano, the centring problem with Opera and bumped the size up to 640x480. At night it does tend to be a bit grainy because of the lack of light, but during the day with the window open it's much better. And the camera itself is now sitting in front of Pudsey, looking out over the whole room, rather than just past me at a wall. Hopefully you get to see the door then which means that if anyone ever comes in you see them. Astounding, huh ?

Return to top | Comment on the diary

5 May 2005 (Thursday) 

Whee, I voted today. First time for me; after all this time I'd never voted - it's amazing but I'm finally doing it. Not like it's particularly painful anyhow.

I hide behind a smile as this perfect plan unfolds But, oh, god, I feel I've been lied to Lost all faith in the things I have achieved And I...I've woken now to find myself In the shadows of a lie I've created [ Away From Me, from Origin, by Evanescence ]

Sid Meier's 'Pirates' can waste a lot of time. I must not play.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

6 May 2005 (Friday) 

Sometimes you just wish you thought of things. Someone's done a "Last Dalek's secret diary".

I made a cheap iPod today, too.

I find it 'amusing' that the only hit on google for the phase that uses the worlds 'tableside' and 'torture' together (yes, I'm avoiding putting them together so that I don't change the results) is my Diary . Yeah, that was an odd dream. I do actually remember it.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

7 May 2005 (Saturday) 

Went to Center Parcs with Mum, Simon, Hannah and Julian.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

8 May 2005 (Sunday) 

William's naming ceremony today, which was really nice. Got to meet a few of our family that we never see often enough. Jessica, as usual, was gorgeous - and of course Lucy was too (yes, I have to say that to ensure that I don't offend her by not mentioning it after all). Martin wasn't wearing his brightly coloured tops, though, which was a little sad. Well, maybe not sad, but it's always 'him'. He just gives off 'happy' when he wears the bright tops . That said, he still had 'happy' today, so maybe it's not the tops that makes that happiness come out .

Whilst at the reception Hannah, Simon and I were saying about how people should have name badges on, or - better still - their name and their place in the family tree . Yeah, we suck at remembering these things. I have a reasonable(ish) memory for faces, so recognise people even if I can't name them. Whilst scanning the reception I saw loads of the family who I couldn't even have named given the chance, but one face stuck out as being wrong. It was a face I knew, but it wasn't in the right place. Later, I went inside and passed them and they said 'hello' and I said 'hello' back, thinking "I'm sure that's Paul". I thought "hey, I could ring them and see if they answer the phone... only my mobile's got no battery left". And finally thought "am I actually changing or just being myself as I've always been" and went up to talk to him for a change. Which was a really good move as I was right and it was indeed Paul Skirrow. And whilst I'm avoiding RISC OS things in general, it was still nice to see him as he was quite nice to me when I was at Pace. But so strange to find that he knew Lucy and Martin.

Someone said about the diary 'When you start quoting from "Sorrow" or "Wearing The Inside Out" then I'll begin to worry... Appreciate your diary.' today.

Which is odd, because I thought I had quoted 'Sorrow' recently. Checking back, it hasn't been quoted, which is curious as it's certainly a track which should be quoted in any case. I think maybe I didn't bother because it was already quoted back in 2002. And for a similar reason, oddly enough.

I can, however, tell you that 'Sorrow' has been played 6 times on the RiscPC since 22 March 2005. Which isn't all that interesting, but it's apparently true. Well, 7 now, 'cos I've just put it on. I try not to quote the same thing too often because... well, it's a bit dull, even for me .

There are quite a few tracks listed in the songquote blocks that don't have an album listed beside them. I should probably try to correct that. Most of them are now corrected to have the correct album associated with the quote where it's known.

I've updated the 'songquote' style to incorporate the album cover, where applicable. This is a quite experimental thing so I might change my mind in the future. It's probably not actually all that sensible an idea really but I'm just playing with it to see whether it seems useful or not.

See earlier entries for examples.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

9 May 2005 (Monday) 

My mind is playing its conspiracy theory game at the moment. It's really quite insane the things it cooks up with nearly no evidence. Oh well. I can put two and two together and get oranges.

Here we go; this is an odd one I found whilst wandering the Doctor Who sites. The BBC Doctor Who site currently has a set of multiple 'tv screen' images that cycle pictures and links. Image three-across, two-down changes to a Welcome To Geocomtex image that you can click on. From there, the 'Support' button lists a few technical questions. Some are silly; some I don't get. The first however, is

I've got a brand new RH-390 S12. The pins aren't properly set. Whoops! Our mistake. There was a transposition when the manual was printed. The correct sequence is: -... .- -.. .-- --- .-.. ..-. [ Geocomtex support ]

Which if we refer to a Morse Code Table spells out 'BAD WOLF'.

And the Who Is Doctor Who site now includes a letter from a young 'Adam Mitchell' who's won a 'geocomtex' competition with his letter about getting technology from aliens. And I think the 'wedding video' bits at the top of the page are previews of the next episode, 'Father'.

Looks like the site has actually been kept up to date, which is cute.

Oh, and the UNIT website exists and accepts passwords 'bison' (for information about events, including the discovery and auction of the Dalek) and 'buffalo' (the Doctor's password).

FreeFind tells me that someone went mad searching for Caroline 9 times on Wednesday last week. Well, there are one or two entries about her in the diary.. And there was a search once later for 'highschool'; so that could have been Phil or someone else I knew from school, I guess. Not that it matters. For all I know it could have been anyone else wanting to know about her. Which, in itself might be quite wrong. Hmm.

I've been relatively circumspect about saying things that would otherwise give away private details but I think I've kept all the personal details hidden. She'd have said if I'd not. Well, she probably would have. That is, if she even looked at it. On the other hand, you never know, if could be Andrew, or their families checking up on the psycho that still writes about her. Hmm. That, too, isn't exactly an appealing notion. And you might argue 'don't write about her if you don't want to be thought of like that'. Which is a fair and reasonable point.

What a wicked game to play To make me feel this way What a wicked thing to do To let me dream of you [ Wicked Game, from Wicked Game, by Chris Isaak ]

In last night's dream, Andrew was suggesting I not wear yellow socks. I never wear yellow socks. I don't know why he was suggesting that, but it's pretty good advice I think. I may, however, have been wearing yellow socks in the dream. I don't remember.

A few people (well 3) have said they like the little album cover graphics so far. Which is a little interesting. Oh, and whilst I remember, the italic text for the song quote is an idea that I stole from Julian's diary 'cos it seemed to look nice.

And I apologised to Andrew Rawnsley today for being an arse. Well, a lot of things might have been handled better back then. I really ought to apologise to Matthew too. I've lost touch with him, though. And maybe Alistair for not keeping in touch with him, too.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

10 May 2005 (Tuesday) 

So, what's been achieved today. Well, I fixed Julian's CD player. I only said I'd look at it about 3 years ago, so that's quite quick for me. But it's hardware. And it's using a soldering iron - the right way around this time. Ok, so it's only making sure that the connections are all made properly, but still I feel it's useful. Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, but nonetheless it makes me feel like I'm not so useless.

The sky isn't always blue The sun doesn't always shine It's alright to fall apart sometimes. [ One And One, from Dreamland, by Robert Miles ]

Simon said that he didn't like the track because it's mathematically wrong. After a little pondering (yeah, I was slow) I said that it is correct. 1 AND 1 = 1. Yeah, I think I'm a bit sad.

Do you remember when you were 15? And the kids at school called you a fool 'cos you took the chance to dream In the time that's past and the one thing that lasts Is that same old song that we played along and made my daddy cry I miss those days and I miss those ways When I got lost in fantasies In a cartoon land of mysteries In a place you won't grow old, in a place you won't feel cold and I'll sing Da da da da da da da da da da da da [ Innocent Eyes, from Innocent Eyes, by Delta Goodrem ]

I love Innocent Eyes, by Delta Goodrem because it's so... pianoy. And Delta Goodrem has a gorgeous voice. And it's a cute track too. Really I should try to follow the things that I like. Long ago it was the case that I thought I didn't like most female artists, and then I realised that most of what I listen to these days is female singers. Not all, probably actually only 60% female maybe, but still it's a lot more than 'don't like' . And when it comes to tracks that are just cute it's usually the 'tinkly' or 'pianoy' bits that are tend to grab me. Off the top of my head, pianoy things like Winter, by Tori Amos, Solomon, by Arena, and The Burgundy Rose, by Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman spring to mind.

I'll protect you from the Hooded Claw Keep the vampires from your door [ The Power Of Love, from Welcome To The Pleasuredome, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood ]

I've just realised that 'Hooded Claw' should be capitalised, because it's a noun. Huh. It's amusing to have a reference to Penelope Pitstop in a love song like that .

There are parts of me he'll never know, My wild horses and my river beds, And in my throat voices he'll never hear. [ Island, from Oyster, by Heather Nova ]

Every now and then I know you'll never be the boy you always wanted to be [ Total Eclipse Of The Heart, from Super Hits, by Bonnie Tyler ]

Yeah, I want to change those words around a little, but that's the lyric. That's the problem with lyrics sung by one gender directed at another.

So baby, you don't have the time Too busy, you can't see the crime In keeping yourself to yourself [ Throught My Fingers, from Are You Sitting Comfortably?, by IQ ]

Yes, I've got kinda carried away doing little lyrics because I know it'll put pictures with them. That's a little bit cheating. But still they're things I was listening to so it's not like it's cheating that much.

I've now seen the first episode of 'Dead Like Me'. It's... well, it's a black humour thing and I think I would enjoy it. Only... it's just that I find it very sad at the moment. Maybe I'll watch it some other time and I'll feel better about it.

I actually admire Ian for managing to be so dedicated to what he does. Even when he's so frustrated. It's frustrating at times, but it's a good trait.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

11 May 2005 (Wednesday) 

Being such a mess that your friends don't even ask for your help ? That's the bottom of the barrel. [ A Mess; Scrubs ]

Angela rang today; it was lovely to talk to her again after so long. She's very settled, it seems, which is lovely to hear. I at least apologised to her for any past... um... nasties. She doesn't remember anything, but in any case I've done it.

One of the commonly known truths was explored today. Pouring water over the electrical connection, rather than into a kettle will kill the power in the house. The UPS kept the computers running, but the cordless phone stopped (obviously) as did everything, and this little voice called upstairs to me "Um, that may have been me". So remember this... don't pour water over the connections to your kettle. A pretty obvious and self-explanatory piece of advice.

And I managed to pop a button off my shirt whilst I was gesturing and talking on the Talker so I had to sew it back on. Golly thrilling, huh ?

Oh yes and I got a nice card from Essex uni asking me to donate money and a card from the nice man - Paul Sullivan - who I spoke to on the phone. Not quite at the moment, I think, but it was nice to chat to him. He was even in Eddington flat 9 in first year. Strange world.

Practically, though, today seems to have been a bit of a loss. Oh well.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

12 May 2005 (Thursday) 

You can't run away forever But there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start You want to shut out the night You want to shut down the sun You want to shut away the pieces of a broken heart Think of how we'd lay down together We'd be listening to the radio so loud and so strong Every golden nugget coming like a gift of the gods Someone must have blessed us when he gave us those songs [ Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through, from Bad For Good, by Jim Steinman ]

Yeah, I chose the Jim Steinman version rather than the Meat Loaf version even though it's the Meat Loaf version that's got the stronger memories. Hmm. I just tried listening to that version just then; it's apparently a little raw again now. I think there's only a couple of people that know why it important to me anyhow. Apart from the blindingly obvious, which actually I hadn't really noticed until right now.

So maybe I shouldn't have called Was it too soon to tell? Oh what the hell It doesn't really matter How do you redefine something that never really had a name? Has your opinion changed? [ I Don't Know You Anymore, from Affirmation, by Savage Garden ]

Dad and I watched 'National Treasure' tonight. It was actually very fun. I was expecting something interesting, but it was very 'Indiana Jones'-like.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

13 May 2005 (Friday) 

Hopefully some of the RSS entries that ended up being 'empty' should now come out correctly. The problem was that the elements which were 'special' (in the most usual cases 'private' or 'songquote' entries) were just being truncated as soon as they were reached. Oh, and I misspelt 'truncated' in a variable name. I should really use perl with warnings on to catch such things.

Come to my house tonight We can be together in the nuclear sky And we will dance in the poison rain And we can stay a while in heaven today [ Stay Together, by Suede ]

Return to top | Comment on the diary

14 May 2005 (Saturday) 

Twice now I've had the Linux box just die with out of memory errors. The first time, a few days ago, I thought nothing of it really because there wasn't much I could do about it. This second time I was more annoyed - what if I'd been doing something useful, or the system had become seriously broken because of it. Anyhow, I took a look around whilst it's still in the middle of complaining about a lack of memory and there's no swap space and no real memory available for pretty much anything. And there are a lot of 'proxy-nntp' processes running.

The 'proxy-nntp' actually doesn't proxy NNTP, strictly. That was just why I created it originally; the more common use of it is to provide certain friends with a means of accessing my local HTTP server without my opening it up to the whole world. The proxy provides a simple encryption algorithm which uses a simple agreed key on connection (which should prevent replay attacks, not that it's significant for this particular method). A couple of people suggested I should just use SSH tunnelling, rather than this more obscure thing, but... Well, it's not that I don't trust SSH, but that it's out there, it's known and people will try to exploit any possible hole that may be found - the gains on exploiting an SSH hole are potentially huge - whereas only a few people know the (laughably simple, but still not obvious) algorithm that my encrypted system uses - the gains on it would be minimal by comparison. Yeah, it's a paranoia over such things, and it's security through obscurity - it'll never be able to stop a serious attempt to crack it - but it's not blindly open, and it's not a well-known protocol so your average hacker will just go 'huh?' and move on to their next target.

In any case... the tool's written in perl, and it's forking whenever it gets a connection because it just makes life easier - if I was doing it in C, I'd be more clever about it, but it's not like it's an 'important' piece of code (or so I thought). The problem, though, is that it never drops the connection unless one of the ends that it's proxying for does, so the process remains open forever whilst the connection remains present. And more importantly, the memory remains in use for the newly forked process. So, someone connecting to the right port and then just leaving the connection open wasted (from looking at the statistics) about 1.6M (which is a silly big amount for such a simple proxy, but that's what you get when you use perl). And many of these connections eventually killed the machine.

All I've done is add a short timeout to the connection and transfer system so that should anyone try to do that they will have to get all their connections within a short space of time to cause a memory failure. That's not the most ideal of things, but it will suffice for now. It should stop random probing from leaking processes indefinitely by at least having some limits on the processing.

Saturday today, which means that Doctor Who's on again. Yay, a bright light at the end of the day.

I'm trying, idly, to work out what the spoken section at 1:35 in 'The Perfect Element' actually is. It's a group of voices - mirroring the voices from the song teller's mind - but I just can't make out what they are. A few lines and words I can just make out, but it's not the easiest of things.

And sometimes you want to speak to her and then You do not want to speak, Then the opportunity has passed. Your dreams flare up, they suddenly vanish. [ Sometimes it happens; Brian Patten ]

It's annoying when, years later, you can appreciate things properly, when they've been lost for so long.

I had a dream last night about ( ok, I've just realised why this is odd) a track that was like Gabrielle's 'Dreams' but not that track actually. It seemed odd and I don't listen to that track because... well, it's all a little bit 'not me', but I tried listening to it and skimmed the biography that was noted with it. A section caught my eye...

The big break came when she recorded a demo called 'Dreams' based around Tracy Chapman's 'Fast Car' which subsequently fell into the hands of an A&R man at Go! Beat. [ Dreams; Biography of Gabrielle ]

So, I think... Let's have a listen to 'Fast Car' and see what it's like. And suddenly it's like "wow, I know this track". I'm not sure it was the one I was thinking of in the dream but it's still memorable. The two tracks are quite opposite in their feeling - 'Fast Car' is a story of disappointment, whereas 'Dreams' is about hope - but clearly there's something similar in them.

I'd always hoped for better Thought maybe together you and me would find it I got no plans I ain't going nowhere So take your fast car and keep on driving [ Fast Car, from Tracy Chapman, by Tracy Chapman ]

You could say it's not all that great to be going back to old albums ( Tracy Chapman is 1988) but it's exploring things that I wouldn't have otherwise listened to. Just because it's not recent doesn't mean it's not 'new' to me so I think it's great to find this music that I've not heard before. After all, there's a world of music that's gone before, so can it would be foolish to just ignore all that history.

Hmm. I think I've lost my CD for Tubular Bells III, by Mike Oldfield. I believe I found that out a couple of years ago when I wanted to re-encode the MP3s at a higher rate, but I still haven't got a new copy. One day, I guess.

I rebuilt pico and pilot using the latest sources today. Wow. Not entirely useful, or practical really but what the hell, it's done. One day I'll work out a list of the cack that I've done and never bothered to release. There's just so many bits that are nearly finished and never will be.

It's 4am. I've just watched the last two episodes of Joey. It's hardly wonderful, but it has its amusing bits - I've put my time in to watch it, so I'm going to see it through to the end. Anyhow that's done and I'm absolutely fed up and I have no idea what to do now. I don't want to go to bed because I'll just feel awful and I don't really feel like much else.

Oh, and Julian quoted a track that I wanted to quote last week - and amusingly was on telly only last week. I actually wanted to quote it before I noticed it was on, but saying that doesn't mean too much.

I hope she fries, I'm free if that bitch dies - I'd better help her out ... First he'll kill her, then I'll save her - No, I'll save her, then I'll kill her! [ Walk Through The Fire, from Once More With Feeling, by Buffy The Vampire Slayer ]

I never saw you look like this without a reason Another promise fallen through, another season passes by you [ In A Big Country, by Big Country ]

However, since I can't go to sleep I might as well do something useful with my time and tick off something from my list. Well that's a sort of tentative tick on the list. I'm not able to concentrate. My mind's just wandering too much at the moment. Listening to 'Brave' probably doesn't help. Sleep.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

15 May 2005 (Sunday) 

Just when I thought I'd seen the last of you You come here scratchin' at my door Your pain and anger's in the howling dark Of every corridor I walk [ The Great Escape, from Brave, by Marillion ]

I'm not sure I'm keen on Sundays. They seem to be filled with... nothing.

I nearly feel angry. I would if I had the energy anyhow. Only, I've tried so hard for so long not to feel angry that my heart isn't in it anyhow.

I'm working through a rather silly and possibly pointless project at the moment. It's really just an experiment to see if I can do this; I don't know whether it'll work but I'm going to try it. Probably I'll abandon it like most other things, but we'll see anyhow.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

16 May 2005 (Monday) 

Last week's searches have, apparently, all been 'C' words - CMunge, Caroline and Choices. Phil emailed to say that it wasn't him searching for 'Highschool', too.

Also, early this morning someone was searching for 'DrawGrade' which is really amusing because it's been years since I wrote that. In fact, I don't even know whether I have a copy left on my machine. Well, I probably do but I have no idea where.

I was reading someone's online diary earlier as I was bored and there was a typo - 'going in to shops and trying on cloths', as I recall - and it brought a whole memory flooding back. I had this image of them walking in and putting whole rolls of cloth against themselves to see how it looked... and then realised that Caroline had done something similar. It was... strange. I really hadn't remembered about that until now - not even slightly. It's amazing the things that are buried down there.

I'm really quite jumpy now. Or maybe panicy. Not sure which it is. Could be because someone was looking for Caroline in the diary. Or because of that memory jumping back at me as if to taunt me about a past that I possibly don't know.

Went to the bank today to pay in some cheques which was kinda normal. Except it was raining and on the way back after being so very careful almost all the way home I managed to stand on a snail. I hate that. I know it's only a snail, but there he (or she) is, sliding along, having a nice time in the rain, and then suddenly he's not. Without him even realising, a huge foot has just snuffed him out. It's so unfair and thoughtless. And I feel guilty for it. I always feel guilty, admittedly, but it's just one more thing to add to the pile.

Uninteresting fact; I have around 180 tracks with the word 'guilt' in. Which was mainly brought about because I wanted something else to quote other than Crucify, from Little Earthquakes, by Tori Amos ("Got enough guilt to start my own religion") because I probably quote it a lot. It's another 'me' track, though. Ah the wonderous features of having all your music so organised. Some might just say I was a little... um... obsessive about it. Obsessive ? Me ?

I was going to write to William to say thank you for inviting us to his naming ceremony, but I never have, and I feel a little guilty for that. Mainly because I thought it would be cute; he and Jessica wrote to us after the new year, so I thought it would be nice to write back. And speaking of cute things, I realised a few days ago that a present I wanted to give someone which should have been exceptionally cute and thoughtful is utterly inappropriate. Whilst trying to be cute I kinda forgot the sanity; there's being surprising and there's... well... just doing things wrong.

So walk, in time to life's refrain Relax, don't do it to yourself again Decaying yourself with all the love you won't give Killing yourself about the way you don't live now 'Cause you're not gonna live forever [ Sunlight, from White Lilies Island, by Natalie Imbruglia ]

Return to top | Comment on the diary

17 May 2005 (Tuesday) 

I wrote a couple of hours of code, and then ran a nice little program that deleted the lot. That was really pleasing. Oh yes, I didn't half feel silly for that. Anyhow, it only took another hour to re-write the program so it wasn't too bad.

Well, I will go down with this ship And I won't put my hands up and surrender There will be no white flag above my door [ White Flag, from Life For Rent, by Dido ]

I'm sure there are some really poor lyrics out there, but Roxette's 'June Afternoon' can compete with the rest of them I feel...

We can pretend that you're a star 'cos life's so very simple Just like la-la-la [ June Afternoon, from Don't Bore Us - Get To The Chorus!!, by Roxette ]

I mean, come on, people...

Oh, I don't expect anyone to agree with my musical taste .

And now I'm all annoyed because I can't find any music that I actually do want to listen to. I got as far as track 11, with a few skips and then decided I needed something else. So I'm back on 'In A Reverie'. I'm not exactly exploring my music at the moment really.

I'm also annoyed because I couldn't (although have now) work out how to make a JavaScript reflection of an arbitrary group of C structures. It just took a little time and reading to get something that seems to be working.

On the plus side, I've just added 7.5 to 2.5 and got 10.0 so I must be doing something right!

Return to top | Comment on the diary

18 May 2005 (Wednesday) 

Aside from being relatively depressing, and dark, I really enjoy the Lacuna Coil that I've got. Well, possible because of that, actually. So, I'm thinking... what's my favourite track ? Maybe I should do this for a few artists, 'cos it'd be fun. Over the next few days maybe.

1. To Myself I Turned
2. Falling Again
3. Heaven's A Lie
4. Cold Heritage
5. Honeymoon Suite

Maybe I should do a quotes ordered by artist page as well as a quotes ordered by date.

Las cartas que escribí Nunca las envié No querrás saber de mi No puedo entender Lo tonta que fuí [ Estoy Aqui, from Pies Descalzos, by Shakira ]

It's such a fun little song; although that's not really the section that's the most fun - the section which is 'entre fotos y cuandernos, entre cosas y recuerdos, eue no puedo comprender' in the chorus is just so pretty. I can't help just laughing because it just runs so gorgeously together.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

19 May 2005 (Thursday) 

Wah! Someone said they didn't like the album images on my site. That's, like, terrible. Oh well, you can't please everyone I guess. However, it's possible to try. I think the person who said they didn't like them was using NetSurf so I can't really help them, but for those of us that use JavaScript capable browsers you should now have a little 'Hide albums' link which appears beside the 'Hide sidebar' link. This setting will be remembered by a cookie so you should get the same settings each time. Because of the way in which the page is processed, the images will appear momentarily before being hidden away once the page has loaded. But that's no huge deal really. Possibly not the best use of 45 minutes but it's amused me a little.

But what scares me and what tears me, is what you really want; And what you really want... is nothing. [ What You Really Want, from Under The Red And White Sky, by John Wesley ]

Return to top | Comment on the diary

20 May 2005 (Friday) 

Some days - and it's only rare days now, sadly - it's useful to be able to remember how to talk HTTP direct to servers from telnet. Yeah, it really isn't all that often.

I sometimes envy Caroline in being so 'together' with her life.

We had another mouse in today; after a little fun yesterday chasing a mouse around the hall after Greebo brought him in, we've got another one tonight. Again, Greebo bringing him in. He's evil, clearly. Even if he's just being a cat. As I write this, he's sitting in a box in my room, just looking at the 'walls' around him and breathing hard. When he starts getting fidgity I'll let him outside but for now he can stay here where it's not raining, there's no cats and there's nothing for him to worry about. Except the huge, bespectacled, human that keeps looking at him once in a while. There's nowhere in here to stick the cam on him, so I didn't bother.

It's 1:30am and I'm thinking "what am I doing" to myself. I'm thinking I should go to bed really, only... I'm not actually doing the going. It's like the getting up in the morning. Which isn't fair, because I know the whole point; it's just difficult to break a habit and to actually do what you say and know you should. Some things are easy habits to break.

Oh, and I watched Star Trek First Contact again this afternoon, because I didn't remember it. It's not too bad. I think I prefer Insurrection though. I haven't seen the one that follows that whose name eludes me right now.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

21 May 2005 (Saturday) 

I had something I was going to say a moment ago, and it's gone. It'll come back to me if it was important, but like so many things that you think and go "oh, I'll write that down because it seems important", it never is important and you forget it.

A few sentences recently - to myself, obviously - have been started with "What if ...". Not the big "What if"s, like "What if there's a god and he's laughing at us ?" or the slightly lesser ones like "What if we'd never developed speech ?". And not the smaller ones like "What if it rains on monday ?" (which would be scary and I'm really hoping it doesn't), or "What if I run out of music to listen to ?" (which is just unlikely, really). But the more medium ones like "What if blah hadn't happened ?" or "What if I'm wrong about bingle ?" or the mildly frustrating "What if my memory fails me and what I remember about ping is not right", or even - and this is the most annoying one - "What if when I think flurble, I'm actually right ?".

None of which can be answered, and I'm not even bothering to think any further than a single line beyond the question these days, thank god. But the questions are there. Of course a lot of those questions relate to issues in the past as they generally must with 'What if' questions, but there's also the future tense version, like "What if flibble happens; what will I do then ?". And there's even the extended disco version which can just leave you trying to work out what the question even means once you've phrased it - "What if buzz happens, and I said I'd bingle but I can't because of the wobble I can't do that even though I promised ?"

Oh, it's not like I'm thinking about how the world might be if things were different really; but more trying to reason what happened in the past.

Thinking about it, there's probably an equal number of "Why ?" questions that I float around and are equally unanswered.

It's easier sometimes to just put all these questions in a big box and leave them alone. Putting things in a box like that just means you have to come back and open it at some point. Boxes never stay closed forever, it seems.

I've heard these before, I've been here before [ Solomon, from Songs From The Lions Cage, by Arena ]

I was going to get up early today. My alarm went off and I was thinking I ought to get up and then I didn't. And then it was 8am and it was a little too late so I just went to sleep. Not the most thrilling of stories, I realise, but I'm not exactly known for originality. Well, except on very rare occassions.

One of the nice things about AMPlayer is being able to play tracks concurrently. That is, I've got 3 tracks playing in the player at the moment. Well, strictly not playing - 2 are paused and the 3rd is playing - 'cos obviously that'd just be noise. But it's kinda nice because it means that whilst listening to one thing you can just pause that and start something else playing immediately and when it finishes (or at any other time) go back to exactly where you were in the earlier track. Or, as I've done now, the machine came on playing 'The Police' and I fancied listening to another track (because a line was going around my head earlier) by 'Rod Stewart', and then whilst listening to that I wanted to quote the 'Arena' track above and so put Solomon on as well. So, once Solomon finishes, I'll restart 'Rod Stewart' (or not; maybe I won't feel like it then) and then go back to to 'The Police'. Hey, it may not be the most obvious of things, but when you've got a mildly non-linear thought process (which is a nicer way of saying that my mind tends to jump a lot between unrelated things ) it's a real help.

Oh, and I tried to email Matthew Godbolt a few days ago and got back a bounce, sadly. Anyone know where he is these days ? You know, I could just ring the last number I have for him and see if he's still there.

Oh, and it appears I do have a copy of I don't want to talk about it, by Everything But The Girl - it's on one of the compilation albums. Julian mentioned it a few days ago on his diary. Hmm. I'm not sure which one I prefer.

Hmm. And LyricsFreak have changed their page format so my parser didn't get anywhere with it.

Ok, The Police isn't quite the mood I need to be in right now.

I had a little bit of a scary dream last night, too. Which I'm not going to relate in public because its content was disturbing and personal anyhow.

I was just thinking; I could probably do that quite easily. I know quite a few people use the RSS feed, but it wouldn't be hard to make the 'RSS feed to email' conversion tool which could tell you when the page had updated. Obviously I wouldn't be using the email addresses for anything other than this RSS feed process, 'cos I'm not like that, but also it would mean you saying to me "I want to know about your life" which isn't exactly everyone's cup of tea, I imagine.

I managed to make a fool of myself a moment ago by ringing the wrong number and getting a friend's Parents. Really easy to do when you don't make a note of which number is which. But still, I feel foolish when it happens.

I also rang Adrian Lees to say congratulations on getting Aemulor working on the A9. Which probably isn't all that special, but I thought it was quite a nice thing to do. It impressed me that he got it working so quick anyhow.

You know, the way the album covers are done I could be really clever and link direct to a local copy of the lyrics. Well, maybe that's not 'really' clever, but it'd be quite cute anyhow. You'd never have to search for them elsewhere 'cos I'd have them already stored here. Or something. Maybe.

Anyhow, I finally got through and spoke to Helen, and it was lovely to chat again (hopefully not too depressing anyhow). It's strange; she said her mum still asks after me. I really wouldn't have thought they'd remember me to be perfectly honest. But nice, really. I'd not heard from her since she got back from Poland, so I was just concerned that she was well. And I apologised to her for being scary stalker-type person for a while. I wasn't really all that bad I don't think, but I wasn't exactly... um... sensible. Which I think covers most of the people I should apologise to - certainly all of the girls I believe that I've wronged over time, I believe. In any case, I feel a little better about myself for at least doing that. Maybe I should make a list of the people I know I should have apologised to and tick them off. That'd be... um... a little organised about saying sorry.

If you're saying sorry in an organised way, does that mean that you don't mean it as much ? Hmm. I think it still means the same as it did if you're saying sorry because you have wronged them, rather than just to make the list seem worthwhile. And of course, if you do really mean it.

And in continuing exciting news of the silly project I'm working on, the string "Hello" appears to have a value of around 1E1000. Which probably means that the code to recognise strings doesn't work.

Nope; it means that I'm not recognising 'NaN' ('Not a Number') properly. Which is frustrating; I'll work that out properly tomorrow because simple 'is this NaN ?' isn't working, I'm not sure why and it's late and I don't want to think about it.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

22 May 2005 (Sunday) 

Dad's watching 'Kramer V Kramer' downstairs. I remember it vaguely from when I was little. They liked it. I remember it being disturbing. I would have been only little, I guess - the film came out in '79 so I'd have had to see it a few years later on telly I suppose. I remember a lot of frustration, and shouting, and unhappiness. So whilst I think it's probably a good film, it's not one that I would want to watch myself.

I've done a simple converter from my RSS to Atom on the site now, which should be correct. However, it's pretty much useless at the moment because I'm using draft 8 of the specification which apparently only came out a little while back. In any case, it'll make changing it for new drafts a little easier. It does seem a little strange to be using a format that is useless to people, but it will, in time, be useful, I'm sure. The Atom feed is linked just below the RSS feed.

I had this little circular email from Sue earlier which was amusing and scary. I'm not going to relate the details but they were... well scary. The basic summary is that my favourite number is 17, Hannah is my Lucky star, 'Moonchild' is the song for Helen, and the song that tells me most about my mind is 'Crawling'.

I'm reading the 'Atom syntax' mailing list now, so that I can get some idea of where they're heading and how the process of standarisation works. I've watched some bits of these things before with the SVG drafts, the SysLog drafts, Link Local address allocation and a few others, but it's useful to see how things work and to (maybe, if I actually understand enough!) contribute.

I found my NaN problem too. It's obvious. NaN != NaN. The non-C99 compiler works correctly according to the specification in that there is no real understanding of NaN with respect to optimisations, but that's not a problem for my code. It just means that I have to implement a simple 'isnan' function to check my returns. No huge deal but a little bit frustrating because such things (FP operations, that is) aren't exactly an area I have much expertise in.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

23 May 2005 (Monday) 

I really didn't sleep well last night. I kept waking up every few hours. I think it's just a more obvious form of my being restless. Oh well.

It's been a long time since I woke up to a screenful of new email. It seems that the Atom list is very active at the moment so that's why I'm seeing loads of things. It's strange to see so many people talking about these things when they're ranging from the nit-picking to the intention-changing, especially when they're trying to finalise the specification.

However, I've noticed from the discussion that my atom:id values have a semantic I'd missed. Well I had missed it; it just turns out to not be important to me. Fragment components on atom:id are still used as part of the comparison for identifiers.

I've just added the relevant auto-discovery tags to the website and whilst they'll actually direct you to the diary rather than anything else, that's really all this site is useful for these days, so I'm not so bothered. Both the RSS and Atom feeds are listed as alternates. The Atom feed reference follows the draft-ietf-atompub-autodiscovery-01.txt document, and the RSS feed reference follows the note given in the 2002 'Dive In To Mark' weblog entry as that seems to be the only decent description of it - I can't find anything more authoritive.

I had a (brief) play with Opera 8's RSS handling. I'm not actually quite as impressed as I was on initially looking at it. The integration of the auto-discovery is great, but I'm not sure I like the way that it just treats the articles as mail. What is it that makes it different from Feed Reader for me then ?

Well, it doesn't appear to sort sensibly for a start. New articles appear at the bottom of the list. Yes, you can toggle the date order that it sorts with but that doesn't appear to be remembered between feeds, or between restarts so you have to keep resetting it.

The dates on the articles aren't identified properly either. Dublin Core date elements are seemingly ignored, which is I suppose fine in general but FeedReader supports them. RSS 2.0 pubDate elements are supported, it appears, but oddly it appears. The BBFC site uses RSS 2.0 and pubDate but all its entries appear with the same date; by contrast, Drobe uses the same things and appears to not work. What's the difference between the two ? The BBFC site isn't, seemingly, valid. It's valid enough to be parsed but not enough to be understood as valid RSS 2.0. Email sent to BBFC describing the fault so it's possible they'll fix it - their people seem very helpful and competent on the couple of occassions I've emailed them anyhow. I'd bearly managed to write this paragraph before I got a reply from them thanking me and saying that they'd fixed it now.

It can't import OPML (or OCS which seems to have generally been left alone by the world - typical as that's what I implemented in my reader!) so I had to re-enter all the feeds by hand.

Any articles that you've not clicked on (or held the keyboard cursor over for a moment) are bold, and go normal after you've clicked on them (or held the cursor over them). However, there's also a 'mark as read' option which makes the text even less bold. And if you 'delete' articles, they're gone for good. I'm not sure I'm keen on that.

It occurs to me that the 'Friends' page should actually say something about Caroline. And some of the other entries should be updated these to be correct. And some people I actually know now should be in there. They have been real friends and I should at least acknowledge them. Actually the 'About me' page probably ought to be updated, too.

And the weekly search results this week had lots of things, but the top entries were for GradeDraw, HighSchool, Caroline and RISC (in ascending order). Thrilled ? I can see it in your face how enthralled you are at that.

I added two new classes to my project today, which are nearly identical and share a whole bunch of code anyhow. Like most of the things I've done so far, it's read-only. However, I hope to be able to do writable properties soon. I know how, it's just that I've not got around to doing the 'set' methods.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

24 May 2005 (Tuesday) 

Nothing much to say today, except I updated the 'Friends' page with some new people and amended the entries that were already present. Which isn't all that impressive really. On the plus side, I've given Caroline an entry at long last!

I'm also quite chuffed that I got a simple module up and running today. It's nothing special; it just prints out a message when certain packets are received. But it was a litle bit of pain to get working nonetheless, and this is just one of those 'first stage' things.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

25 May 2005 (Wednesday) 

I've just realised that the lyrics on Imaginary, by Evanescence are different on the Origin and the Fallen album versions. The structure of the track has changed a little, but it's still the same thing. I prefer some of the way the Origin version goes, particularly I like the additional verse that isn't in the Fallen version. The Fallen version follows a more common verse-chorus pattern (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus) and even has the same lines bracketing the entire track, whereas the Origin version runs slightly differently (verse, chorus, verse, verse, instrumental, chorus).

I've copied the Estoy Aqui lyrics to the server now, too, because they're quite cool. It's alongside the Heart And Soul lyric which also raises a smile. Every once in a while I try singing along to them - I'm on my own so I can do that. It's not easy, but I like the challenge; not only in trying to remember the words but to get them right when they run so fast. The other one that's always a challenge is New Order's 'True Faith' because I can never seem to get a breath in the right place. Which is all why I admire people that are actually musical!

When scratching ones face during the cooking of tea, ensure that sharp knives have been removed from hands. I managed to avoid stabbing myself in the eye early through the wonder that are 'glasses'. I think it's that whole not caring so much which is leaving me being careless.

And another RSS bug fixed today; 'linkto' elements now work properly when used in the first paragraph of an entry.

How come Counting Crows seem more depressing than Archive at the moment ?

I've taken a day or so to try to do a rather complicated mini-thing in order to prove to myself that I'm not shit. So far it's going 'slowly' but that's partly because I've had to read a load of docs to see how to make things work before I can actually make them work.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

26 May 2005 (Thursday) 

It actually bothers me that by reading a lot of the diary, Caroline came to the conclusion that I hate her. I know that's, like, two months ago, but it bothers me. But having aside the other things that bother me, we come down to that one which is minor and not really something I'm going to be secretive about. I never was good at getting across things in words, so maybe it's just that.

But still, it bothers me.

I'd thought it out, thought I had the answers After all is said and done The only thing I really know is your name [ Shadowplay, from Internal Exile, by Fish ]

Interestingly, in that way that probably isn't all that interesting to most people, the lyrics on The Company website for 'Out Of My Life' differ from those that are sung. The emphasis is slightly different.

And a big three-cheers for RFC3927 which has finally made it into out of draft ! In case you're not aware of every single RFC that goes through (!), that's link-local addressing for IPv4, aka ZeroConf address configuration (as provided by the ZeroConf module under RISC OS). The RISC OS module is reasonably accurate to the specification, although it does use a earlier draft for its implementation details. Somewhere lying around here I've got a list of the things that different in the implementation to the RFC. I believe the RFC was withdrawn for a little while whilst some of the text was modified.

I didn't notice this before but the UNIT press briefing about a 'Computer virus file sharing alert' (about a file called 'ruffcut' ) is dated 10/03/05. The leaked first episode appeared before that, but the BBC started investigating it (so they claim on their own news site) on 08/03/05. It just amused me anyhow.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

27 May 2005 (Friday) 

Julian quoted Out of my life, by Fish in his diary today, so I rang him up to say that he screwed up by quoting the Fish site... and he tells me that I screwed up, 'cos I've got the import cover for Internal Exile, by Fish on my site. Damn .

To be honest, I was sure that I had fixed that in the library. Hmm. It is fixed, but it hasn't been propogated through to the diary site it seems. I wonder why. Oh well, fixed now.

It reminds me, though, that I really need to sort out a permanent link to my diary, because it's not particularly useful to have people referring to entries in the 'index.html' when that's only valid for a month. David Chess has a cute little box beside each week which when you click on it takes you to that week's permanent page. I might do something similar. I also rather like his way of styling linked images in brown, because that's the site's primary style (yes, I know he's done other things, but it's nice to have the entire site styled. Since my site is styled black and white, I could do that as a style and only produce greyscale album covers. I'm not sure I'm keen on that.

I had a quick search for David Chess on Google and amongst the many places he appeared was BlogShares which seems kind of strange and interesting and... well, you have to sort of be a bit sad to want to do those things, but I'm kinda sad so that'll do.

Julian also commented that the lyrics seemed to relate to things in my life, or lack thereof. Well, this months do, directly. Except for the Roxette one.

Oh, and we had grand total of 3 'no' and 1 'yes' vote for people getting emails when the diary's changed. So it's probably not worth my spending time on.

Hot. Too hot today.

I noticed that the the NTLWorld account really is dead now; I tried the URL and it's gone. The email addresses, I noticed, went a little time ago, so if anyone has any references to it, change them. And of course, if you have any 'movspclr' references lying around, they're long gone.

And by the time you see this, Julian's diary lyrics will have been corrected anyhow. Not important.

Return to top | Comment on the diary

28 May 2005 (Saturday) 

I've just corrected a load of spelling mistakes in the August 2000 month because... well, it really was quite astoundingly poor when I glanced at it.