31 Oct 2005 (Monday) 

I decided to take some of Claire's advice and try not drinking quite so much tea with silly sugars in. Maybe it'll help me sleep. Hmm. I do feel tired, but I'm not sure I wouldn't be anyhow.

On the plus side of things, I've been playing with cross-compiling things and can now cross compile the a large amount of stuff. Well, actually I can cross compile less things on a new platform, but it's still pretty snazzy. So I've now got a number of tools that build on three different platforms.

I think I'm hungry but I can't be bothered to go downstairs for something to eat. I think I just saw an ostrich. But it could have just been a short tree.

I had a rather concerned Chris on the phone earlier. I remember long ago thinking that the real world is much stranger than fiction. I still think that it is, but also that it can be scarier.

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30 Oct 2005 (Sunday) 

In a small diversion from the regular referer spam that the diary gets for online gambling and viagra sites, there's an advert for 'fernwood farm' in the Wisconsin (which I'm not linking to 'cos that's what they want). On the other hand it might be using the spam to good effect - you want to cause a company problems ? Pass out their address as spam to just about everywhere you possibly can and hope that they can't cope with the deluge of complaints and general enquiries that return. Of course, you'd also be providing free advertising, but still... it's a possibility.

Another plus side of that, though, is that the domains and addresses in question would quickly enter spam databases which might potentially cripple their ability to use the internet for proper purposes - if your emails to people are flagged as spam it becomes harder to contact your legitimate customers. Actually it's much more interesting than just that. Most referer spam comes from many different locations. This particular one came from only a single machine in China.

I was just checking on Last.fm because I was bored waiting for something to run, and noticed that nothing had been submitted to the server for about 2 hours. Seemed strange, so I had a quick glance at the diagnostics at the client. 13 tracks queued and many failures going back - lots of HTML-style responses from the proxy when it couldn't connect, then a load of '504 Gateway Time-out' response which finally caused it to go into its deferral mode - which means 29 minutes of delay (apparently). And just as I was typing this in, that time was up and it tried again with the following result :

Will update in 10 seconds
Will update in 0 seconds
Updating: One More Addiction
          Left Of The Middle
          Natalie Imbruglia
Queued track for submission (now 13 queued)
Candidate MP3 track change (0) : Big Mistake
Will update in 130 seconds
Will update in 120 seconds
Will update in 110 seconds
Connect to handshake server
ERROR: FAILED Database too busy - try later.
Catastrophic failure to connect; deferring by 29 minutes
Will update in 100 seconds
Will update in 90 seconds
Will update in 80 seconds

I included the surrounding sections, just 'cos it's even nicer. It's nice in the first place to see that the method actually is working properly. It's got to that point where it just cannot get anything to submit so rather than swamping the server, it's just going to keep the results cached until it can. Since I will probably go to bed before it manages to submit these, it'll just do it in the morning.

It's not much validation, but it's better than a kick in the teeth.

Notice: The servers seem to have stopped working with the ending of BST and the clocks needing to be set back by one hour. [ BST change-over; Last.fm ]

Which subtly reminds me that I need to change the clocks. It's not actually that funny really; but at least it explains the down time. And nobody should be cross because all their (correctly written) clients will just keep the data cached until the servers come back. I can say that smugly because mine does. Yeah, I don't care.

And, failing to sleep, we're now up to 42 queued ... and a wasp I've just swatted with a handy copy of the DCI4 specification. See, I knew it'd come in handy.

You know those bad days ? Those days when you know you've screwed up and you're worthless, and not actually able to do anything at all useful ? Those days when you find stupid little bugs that have been crippling things for ages - not just one but two of them hanging around like a bad smell. Those days when you just want to walk up to the nearest cliff and throw yourself off. You know those kinda of days ? I don't like them.

My feet are cold.

I flipped through the channels last night whilst waiting for my tea to boil and came across Bravo, or Sci-Fi or one of those channels, showing its light porn things that it does in those wee hours. Which doesn't interest me much, I'll point out, but what grabbed my attention was the little person in the bottom right corner of the screen doing a signed translations. It just surprised me.

Arse. That's the last day of the month.

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29 Oct 2005 (Saturday) 

Fuzzy eyes. Can't see.

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28 Oct 2005 (Friday) 

Have I eaten today ? I don't remember.

Plant in the bathroom needs moving to where there's more light.

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27 Oct 2005 (Thursday) 

Anyone wanting to find Simon Fletcher, previously of Peterborough, York, Newark, Doncaster, Weeting and now in Reading... he's got a livejournal account. You might have to excuse his colour scheme though.

So... I've got so many things to say and I have no idea where to start. I've got a spare few minutes whilst a build goes on, so I can probably write a few words on things.

The 'Popping Pills' quote earlier today was from Schizo, by Pendragon. The correct lyric is 'Climbing hills and popping the pills, has it got this far?'.

Mind blown and schizo is where we are, Climbing hills and popping pills, has it got this far. Standing in a crowd, voices shouting out aloud your name Oh you're not the only one who's stumbled a hard path Now you look at me and laugh [ Schizo, from The Masquerade Overture, by Pendragon ]

The Dream Theater concert was quite cool; they did the whole of 'Dark Side Of The Moon' in the second half which was utterly surprising (to me!). I think I just laughed at a lot of it because it was so cool. They really were quite exceptional.

Whilst going to the concert, the lyric on one track started me off thinking on a whole bad line of thought and I have no idea what the track was. All I know is that it had the word 'alone' at the end of a line. Unfortunately, my music collection has (apparently) 1776 tracks with that word in them. Which makes finding it more difficult. Even just trimming that list to things that I would have probably listened to on the way - Beth Orton, Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, Archive, Royksopp, Levellers, Soul Asylum, Stevie Nicks, and a few others - hasn't shown up anything that rings any big bells. I think I thought I'd remember - Ha! Obviously I wasn't actually listening to Dream Theater on the way up. That would make some sense.

Throw away my life in the fireplace With the old love letters And the Nottingham laces; Trying to forget the warm embraces Video suppers and the funny faces [ Solomon, from Songs From The Lions Cage, by Arena ]

I'm really amazed that I've not cited that lyric before. It was a tagline for ages, but that's hardly the same.

SongMeanings is back up again, so maybe I should post that 'Building A Mystery' comment. Not that it would contribute that much. There are a few unfinished thoughts lying around here now. I should try to finish them.

There was the recent 'exposed to culture' thought.

I think that was a thought that the exposure that we have to culture (and by culture, I mean the art, speech, actions, behaviour and attitude of others), both good and bad is massively increased these days. Whereas (let's say 20 years ago) it would have been hard (as a youngster that I was!) to know too much about what was going on in other parts of the world, or - more specifically - in places which aren't like here. Now it's not so hard because of the Internet and the profusion of various television things. So this means that we get exposed to a greater diversity of culture across because we see all the different types of things out there ? Kind of. Only really, we get to see the subset of the part that we like to think of as being comparable to us (notice that I didn't say 'the subset that is...' because the part we see is still only a minor part of the whole) because they have televisions or internet. And if that's the comparable part then what are the other parts like ? Does it increase the cultural value by bringing more to a region or does merely dillute the local cultural value ? Possibly both. Um, maybe I'm thinking in too generalised terms. I'm thinking about being 9 years old, say (because I said 20 years up there, more than any other reason) and what you encounter. Now as I remember, the exposure to people and things was mostly balanced by a degree of television, school, friends - although not that many of them - and books. Many of the books were old-ish. Television would have been split to probably 70% british, 30% american (guessed figures). Friends and school provided the additional social and group dynamic for culture. That's where things tended to be dismissed or brought forward as good - and invariably it was others opinions that tended to influence my own. But here's a thing. I never quite understood how it was that particular fads, rhymes, games and such like managed to cross the country if they were only interacting across schools. Anyhow, it was easy to see on some (rare) occassions that mob mentality shows itself within a school environment. Which brings me to the less good side of that cultural exposure - and which touches on the thing that I've probably rambled about a lot, although in the opposite way - which is that there's a validation if you see or hear of something happening elsewhere that happens around you, or similarly if you see or hear of something that happens elsewhere and you wonder whether it should happen here.

The typical example is television - do programmes that portray dysfunctional families breed more dysfunctional families, even if they're portrayed as such for their humourous value. Does a programme about the problems of inner cities mean that the problems of whole nations are left forgotten ? It's not just the television, of course, and the Internet provides much of the alternative input. Social interractions at school (and for older individuals, at work) promote the spread of issues, and it's mob mentality that overrides, it seems - the complete picture isn't seen, and little curbs the spread of 'interesting' issues. Conspiracy theories are a typical example of this sort of thing, but consider the other things you might have heard over the last few years which you later found to be utterly bogus - at what point did they have an air of authority and from where did that authority come from ? Given the input supplied by the greater exposure to things, can hysteria be generated intentionally, and can a completely false view be spread by mass distribution media ? Maybe there's an obvious answer there, and maybe Bush is the thing that comes to mind when you consider this, but how many times are we being manipulated by what we think to be right without considering the source ?

Which has deviated from my original intended point - and I did have one (yes, I just wanted to say that) - which was that if you have a child and you want to limit their exposure to 'bad' cultural input it doesn't seem that the local input offers such strong an indicator. Obviously you can't be there for everything, but ... I think I'm going to descend into "do you know what your child does ?" territory which is not a good area. So I'll stop there; I know what I mean but regardless of that, I have no experience so it's not really my place to say.

Whilst writing this, I received an email from Sue with a few jokes in - the first of which is the one that I've just seen a few hours earlier at bash.org. Which sort of backs up my point about cultural exposure. Is that funny ? Yes, it is. Is it funny enough to warrant mass exposure to the world ? Well, I'm not sure. Does it reinforce a cultural view that Bush is an idiot - of course. Is he ? I don't know, but I can certainly laugh at the idea that he is.

Anyhow, that's not exactly what I was thinking about back then, but it's close enough.

There's still a load of unfinished thoughts in the list, but I've not really got the energy to go at them now.

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25 Oct 2005 (Tuesday) 

Dream Theater concert at the Apollo tonight, so I'm setting off in a few minutes. And obviously means that I'm going to be quoting Beth Orton now... make sense of that.

And if you've taken me for someone who cares, Then there's a dream I know we both have shared, [ Live As You Dream, from Trailer Park, by Beth Orton ]

Half finished thought for the day... 'exposed to culture'. One day I'll finish some of those thoughts that are just meant to remind me to expand on them...

One thought that keeps coming to me is that AS9105 is 'big'.

I noticed that there was a machine 'garfunkel.ucd.ie', so - because I'm like that I checked the obvious one. Yes, there is a 'simon.ucd.ie' . On the other hand, whilst there is a 'fridge.afripatelecom.gh', there is no corresponding 'freezer.afripatelecom.gh'. Aww.

During the concert (more later, when it's not 2am), the lyric phrase 'popping pills and something' floated through my mind. Unfortunately the only thing that my lyrics search shows up is Andy Partridge's 'I Wonder Why The Wonderfalls', which isn't what I was thinking of. In fact I've no idea what I was thinking of - it might have been something completely different to that.

Somehow a search for 'Serious Arctic' on google throws up my diary at result 19, it seems. I'm hardly authoritive and don't think I should be that high for the two or three mentions I give it in the Diary. On the other hand, the top 3 hits are the BBC, BBC Newsround, and IMDB site articles about it, so it's not likely that people would go any further to find out about it. That there's an IMDB entry for it is cool, though.

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24 Oct 2005 (Monday) 

Not a lot to say today. Lots of cursing at things because I didn't understand how on earth things were failing when they were plainly right - which I did understand in the end, but it's all working only because of side-effects which I'm pretty sure the original designers were utterly oblivious of.

There were, when I looked yesterday, a few good comments left on SongMeanings for Sarah McLachlan's 'Building A Mystery'. I didn't think of it in any of the ways that the authors made their comments. Not too far different, but still not quite the same. In my view, it's about someone who's looking for their place - not necessarily a faith, but more generally than that, who they really are and what they will be. The 'mystery' in question, is that thing that makes them special and who they are. Someone mentioned the change in the tone at the end as indicating that they had found what they wanted, which I'm less convinced of; the whole body of the song is that that's what they're actively doing, and the end is - to me - saying isn't saying that they're complete but that it's just an ongoing thing. They keep looking. They won't find it. They'll keep looking, picking and choosing things, trying them out.

Another comment pointed to something I'd not considered - which I rather like - which is that it's about someone famous who's making their image so that they're noticed. In particular, the 'can you look out the window without your shadow getting in the way ?' line (which I particularly love because... well, I'll come to) because the fame means that both looking out of the window is a danger from being seen and also that their actions cast a shadow before them which they have to be careful of. Now that's actually quite a nice way of looking at it, but it seemed too deep for me. I had always thought (and this is why I liked it) that it was a continuation of the earlier remarks about coming out at night - if it's night when you look out of the window you'll always cast a shadow. And, better than that (in my opinion) is that it's connected to the earlier comment about 'the 'smile that won't wash away' it's something that they're trying to do - they're playfully trying to see out of the window without the shadow obscuring what they see, in much the same way that you might try to open the fridge door to see if the light's on when it's closed. And that's the main reason why I think it's a wonderful track, because it's an exploration of the world by someone who still sees it as being something special. They might not be balanced, but they're trying to see it in a different way for themselves. It's not so that they're fitting in with people. They're just doing it because they want to try things and see what it is that's their mystery.

Anyhow. I might not be coherent some times, but at least I've said my thoughts on it. Maybe I should post that lot to songmeanings. Only it's down at the moment. I really will do my Stolen Car meaning at some point, too.

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23 Oct 2005 (Sunday) 

I had some guy email to ask be about how to set up the sound on Doom with his PC. Hopefully I've managed to help him. It's odd they've managed to find me, and ask - it's not like it was for the RISC OS version which I know much better (although that's not all that true any more, because I've not touched it in ages).

There's something ultimately depressing about fixing bug after bug after bug after bug and never getting to actually add the 'feature' that you initially intended to add. And when I say 'feature', what I really mean is 'fix the bug that is preventing the feature that you're planning on adding in the future from working'. I would say it was a comedy of errors, except that it's distinctly lacking in the funny. Maybe in the current climate of TV that does qualify it for comedy, though. Yeah, that was kind of for effect than being really true. I actually turned the telly on a couple of nights ago for the first time in ages. Well, other than flicking it on to watch Serious Arctic. Which, again, I missed the last episodes of. Damn. My memory just isn't good. I found myself trying to put the sugar back in the fridge again today, too. I get so upset at that.

You live in a church Where you sleep with voodoo dolls And you won't give up the search For the ghosts in the halls You wear sandals in the snow And a smile that won't wash away Can you look out the window Without your shadow getting in the way? [ Building A Mystery, from Surfacing, by Sarah McLachlan ]

Sarah McLachlan is still taking a long time to be got in to; I'm not sure why. I think I should like her more, but she seems harder to get in to. Than, say, Heather Nova, who I was introduced to at a similar time.

Oh, and Rubik has only one 'b'.

I think the Atom mailing list has now settled down to some conclusion on what the meaning of 'first', 'next', 'last' and 'previous' are. I've had nothing really to contribute because it's all been very confusing to even decide what I think. I think the outcome has been beneficial, but it's certainly be interesting to watch.

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22 Oct 2005 (Saturday) 

I logged in to the server a moment ago and a reminder popped up - as it does when I log in - and jumped a little bit too much. The problem is that it then took me a moment to calm down and recognise why it was that I jumped. Obviously my mind manages to recognise a pattern and inform the parts of me that panic faster than it can convey that information to the other parts of my mind that understand why I'm panicing.

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21 Oct 2005 (Friday) 

De-bug-ger... yeah, I've heard of them. Useful, are they ?

There's something wrong with being upset at spilling your cereal. It's not the spilt milk thing. It's just...

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20 Oct 2005 (Thursday) 

Strange dream last night. I was visiting a new school that I was going to be going to, or that someone I knew was going to be going to - I don't quite remember what it was. The place itself was large, based around two major parallel corridors with rooms on either side, the front facing rooms on the nearest corridor had mostly language rooms in it, the rear facing 'room' on the far corridor had a large sports area and swimming pool. The inner corridors were various other sorts of rooms, most of which were used as common rooms by people there. The far corridor, left end had squash courts for two rooms. Upstairs, there were more rooms (obviously, but also rest areas, where people could sleep if they were tired). It seemed all very nice, and the sliding steps to go up and down were fun to go down - it seemed like the place was designed to be enjoyable, not stressful. Walking into one of the rooms downstairs I say a little toddler playing on the floor, and her mother (who was, I understand, studying there) cooking something; her boyfriend was washing some pots. I met one of the other people in the room and they showed me around the upstairs, to the rest areas - where there were a couple of people sleeping, and a few just reading books, and around the back to the dining rooms. It all seemed very very nice. When it came to the end we were given the application form-type things, and it seemed a lot less nice. None of the things about the application seemed particularly 'important'; it was more about what you (whoever was going there) would be doing for the place - what it would get out of you. Which is fine, I suppose, but it's not... well, it just doesn't sit well with me. I, or anyone with me, wouldn't feel comfortable about a place that would expect to be getting more media attention because of who we were, or that would get given money for its latest basket ball team, or whether you were a great athlete so you'd raise the school's place in the competitions, or whatever. It's not that you might not be doing that anyhow, it's just that expecting it and it being part of the process seems... oh I dunno... maybe not wrong, but... where's the 'what do I get out of it'. I guess it's the difference between them advertising themselves to you and vice-versa. I'm not even sure what I think about it, but I got the distinct impression that it was a good place but the price to go there was too high. Not that I think that they wanted a soul or anything, but I get the feeling that was somewhere down the end of the list that I didn't read. I felt like I could be comfortable there. It felt nice, but I knew I couldn't go there. I think that that means something. I think I know what that means.

The soul and the spirit Each have got their own limit. And I can't waste another second, Living in hell like it's some kind of heaven. [ Feel To Believe, from Central Reservation, by Beth Orton ]

Well, that's good. Bash with my mods segmentation faults when I press ctrl-left arrow. I'm pretty sure I didn't break readline handling. So all I can assume is that bash-raw doesn't work properly like that. Which would explain the multitude of Debian patches. Well, maybe not explain, but maybe one of them is important.

It's now about two and a half hours after I wanted to be in bed and whilst I am now in bed, I'm still not asleep. Oh well.

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19 Oct 2005 (Wednesday) 

Lying in bed last night trying to sleep (as you do), the lyrics to a track went through my head.

She wore pink pyjamas, she made it perfectly clear that she was his for the night. [ Family Man, by Not Mike Oldfield ]

... which isn't quite in the spirit of the original.

Oh gawd; I've just seen an advert for a Michael Ball album with him doing 'Music'. I'm pretty sure it'd be hard to top John Miles' One True Version, and hearing a little of Michael Ball's I think I'm right.

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18 Oct 2005 (Tuesday) 

After saying that there's usually not anyone angry in my dreams, there was a large mob guy who was trying to get me to put staples through my hand last night. So, maybe I'll rephrase that to 'I'm not usually angry in my dreams'.

I was going to write more today, but I've not I'm afraid. There was definately something I had in mind. But it's gone now.

Dad has, however, found where the wasp's nest is.

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17 Oct 2005 (Monday) 

I had a nice long day with a friend today. Only it was all a dream and none of it happened. It strikes me as odd that in my dreams there's never any shouting. There's never any real anger, or anything like that. The 'bad' is always something that's an undertone - something that has a historic meaning rather than an obvious one. Maybe there's something important there, but I don't know it.

I went to bed with a headache, finally fell asleep with a headache and woke up with the same headache. Maybe it wasn't the same headache. Maybe that went away and a new, but very similar one returned just as I woke up. Now, if I could tag them like birds, that would make their identification easier. Maybe there's a whole genus (or whatever the classification grouping is called) of headaches out there.

Anyhow, two tracks floating around my head as I awoke...

And you may ask yourself How do I work this? And you may ask yourself Where is that large automobile? And you may tell yourself This is not my beautiful house! And you may tell yourself This is not my beautiful wife! [ Once In A Lifetime, from Remain In Light, by Talking Heads ]

This is not me I never said it was I didn't like it because I lost my way This is not me You know that it's true And I'd be lying to you just to convince myself This is not me [ This Is Not Me, from Innocent Eyes, by Delta Goodrem ]

Oh, and a top tip... *Unset Alias$* is unwise. I meant *Show Alias$*.

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15 Oct 2005 (Saturday) 

I wanted to describe someone as pragmatic earlier. As a comparison to myself - I'm not particularly. I can't remember how the rest of my description went but it wasn't particularly interesting except that I'd used the word for the first time in ages.

One of the things I said I'd do was to stay in touch with Caroline. I've not. I feel quite guilty about that. But since it's subsumed into uber-guilt in that general area, it's not like it matters all that much. I should at least try. And I should speak to Carol Hill again, too. If only because she's been nice.

"If only because she's been nice ?" - what sort of reasoning is that ? I know what I meant, even if my phrasing is less than ideal.

Oh, and I opened my box of Chocolate Orange Segments that I got for my birthday, yesterday. It's only a month after the event, but I don't eat chocolate all that quickly. Easter eggs tend to last months.

I announced the Amiga MOD, MIDI and ABC playback plugins that I did for the SlimServer a few days ago. So far there's been no response to them, although I did see a couple of people download them. I spent a couple of minutes (yeah, only that) reformatting the announcement to make a little homepage for them so that they are at least there's some record of what I did and somewhere to point people at if they ever want them.

I really need to sort out the local server to store them within the general music collection, but that's not going to be simple I expect. Needs thought.

Helen dropped me an email today. That's really sweet. I should just do something about mailing people rather than complaining to myself that I haven't. Or being too scared to.

Actually, I've also updated the local SlimServer - which I've shown Dad how to work from the machine downstairs, which is kinda cute - to support 'Browse By Year', which isn't in 6.1.1. It is, I've now found, present in 6.2. Only it's not quite right in 6.2, because the album names under the year aren't given the name of the artist, so it's harder to tell when it says "The Best Of (1)" what that actually means. Anyhow, I've added that to the local copy too; it's not perfect but it'll do me. I'll upgrade to 6.2 when it comes out of Beta and hopefully they'll have taken my suggestion, or at the least I'll have something to dump in there to make it work 'my way'.

Mum's invited us to Pancake House at Center Parcs tomorrow. They have a few days when they just invite staff, families, contractors and maybe some special guests before they open. That way they find out how it's all going before being unleashed on the real public. Of the places they used to have at Center Parcs, Pancake house was always one that I could never quite place. It just didn't seem to fit into the normal set of restaurants. We'll see whether I can reconcile that off position tomorrow.

I wonder if Greebo's ok. He's come and sat on my lap this evening and actually laid himself down over my arm. He's not done that for years. Maybe he just wants some attention ?

A few days ago Chris and I were lamenting the "Bloody Annoying Seemingly Gratuitous Changes" that seem to go on in Software. I'm sure I've made many of the same, and some are - I'm sure - bugs. I think we were cursing MPlayer's changing in command line format, but the other things that have seemingly pointlessly changed came up - such as imapd now requiring users to use secure imap by default. Today's annoyance ? cvs. At some point in the past god knows how long, it's changed from using a date format on 'cvs log' of 'yyyy/mm/dd' to 'yyyy-mm-dd' which has broken all my scripts that export CVS log information into a readable format.

Yeah, I know it's a better format, but still it's an annoyance. I shouldn't really be that bothered, because it's now conformant to ISO 8601 which is a Good Thing. But still, it's a bother.

Actually, thinking about it more, I can't actually complain because I would prefer that it was standard rather than something random. On the other hand I may be more concerned that I remember that the standard number is 8601 without checking. Yeah, I can remember that but I can't remember that sugar fills the sugar bowl and not the cup.

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14 Oct 2005 (Friday) 

Oh, I updated the diary's generation process yesterday because of things in Google being unhelpful. Well that's my reason. It's probably more useful. Previously all page titles were just related to this site, which doesn't help Google which displays the page title as the hit - just seeing 'Diary - March 1999' isn't particularly helpful. Same goes if you bookmark the page. So I've updated the entire site to use 'Gerph - <Title>' now. I know it's not much but it should at least mean that the results that come out (and other things that use the title element) will be displayed more sensibly. Obviously this will take a few days to propogate through search engines.

Today seems to have been very bitty. Lots of little tiny fixes and probing things. Plus there was a somewhat annoying examination of someone else's code which I thought was right, but now I'm almost certain they've lost the plot on.

Oh, and whilst I remember, the BBC are showing Serious Arctic again, at around 7:30am on weekdays. Not exactly the most practical of times to show it, but still, it's good.

A quick look at google implies that the title change has taken effect with them already. At least for the part of the site that I checked.

I'm thinking that this run of diary entries without lyric quotes can't last. 11 days without a lyric quote - and that's the only one so far this month. Dear me.

And I meant to ring Helen and I still haven't. Bah. I suck.

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13 Oct 2005 (Thursday) 

I noticed that I missed something, when I finally got to use the computer this evening, with the bash changes. If you suspend and then resume a process you don't get the title updating for the new process. So... the subsequent patch is to 'jobs.c' and should be immediately after the call to 'set_job_running'...

  /* JRF: Added special stuff for printing
          messages to change my terminal */
  if (foreground)
  {
    char *ps5, *ps6;
    ps5 = get_string_value ("PS5");
    ps6 = get_string_value ("PS6");
    if (ps5 && *ps5!='\0' &&
        ps6 && *ps6!='\0')
    {
      char *cmd = p->command;
      int cmdlen;
      ps5 = decode_prompt_string (ps5);
      ps6 = decode_prompt_string (ps6);
      if (cmd==NULL) cmdlen = 0;
      else
      {
        char *end = strchr(cmd, ' ');
        if (end) cmdlen = end-cmd;
        else cmdlen = strlen(cmd);
      }
      fprintf(stderr, "%s%.*s%s",
              ps5, cmdlen, p->command, ps6);
      fflush(stderr);
      if (ps5)
        free(ps5);
      if (ps6)
        free(ps6);
    }
  }

Also, I've updated the PS1 slightly now to have the tail of the PWD in it, so it now says "PS1='\[\e]0;[\W] - \u @ \h\a\]\u@\h:\w\$ '" which makes it a lot easier to read.

Mum and dad will be back tomorrow, all being well.

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12 Oct 2005 (Wednesday) 

This is something I've wanted to do for a while but never really got around to doing properly. XTerms (and Nettle/NettleSSH) support setting of their titles. This cool, but I want it to be 'clever'. In the past I've not really used this to good effect, but the prompt can be used to reset the title line to something sensible. In my case, I use "PS1='\[\e]0;\u @ \h\a\]\u@\h:\w\$ '", which gives me 'user@host:$ ' as my prompt, and 'user @ host' as the window title. That's nice.

What I wanted next was to be able to change the title based on the command that I had executed. That's less easy. There's the DEBUG trap, but that only supports a command execution - you can't get at the current command line it seems. There's the PS4 tracing prompt, but that too only allows you to set the output, not to put the command line in.

So my solution was a little bit more brute force. Change the source. bash2.05b (the source debian uses here) has 'execute_simple_command' as a function, which can be modified to add the special output. I've actually made it a little more generic - but not astoundingly so. Immediately before the 'if (dofork)' line, add...

  /* JRF: Added special stuff for printing
          messages to change my terminal */
  {
    char *ps5, *ps6;
    ps5 = get_string_value ("PS5");
    ps6 = get_string_value ("PS6");
    if (ps5 && *ps5!='\0' &&
        ps6 && *ps6!='\0')
    {
      ps5 = decode_prompt_string (ps5);
      ps6 = decode_prompt_string (ps6);
      fprintf(stderr, "%s%s%s",
              ps5, simple_command->words->word->word, ps6);
      fflush(stderr);
      if (ps5) free(ps5);
      if (ps6) free(ps6);
    }
  }

And then in your .bash_profile, add in :

PS5='\e]0;'
PS6=' - \u @ \h \a'

When any command is executed, the 'PS5' prompt will be output, followed by the first word of the command, and finally the 'PS6' prompt. If either are missing nothing will be output - that just makes it easier to set up the prompt when you're using a title setting command.

Admittedly it's a bit of an evil hack, but I can now see what the terminals are running much more easily, and I won't waste those precious seconds stepping through them all to find which one I want. Well, maybe. Of course I've got to see if it's actually useful, but it seemed like a sensible idea so I'll just hope that I was right, I guess.

Ok, so now I've seen the video for Stand My Ground, by Within Temptation - which is the first thing that Dad heard of them... Yeah, it's kinda cool. It actually reminds me of video for In The End, by Linkin Park, but that's mostly because they're on a building in the rain - Stand My Ground outshines it by far.

And the video for Angels, by Within Temptation... is much scarier than I thought of it as. Not that I didn't think it was a scary track, but it's got some more structure behind it in the video. Memories, by Within Temptation is again different, but it's still quite neat.

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10 Oct 2005 (Monday) 

I was meaning to get something useful done this morning, but one of grandma's friends rang and woken me up, so I didn't get so much sleep, then after I lay down 'for a few minutes' I ended up dreaming. Caroline was looking at me through a window, and when I noticed and yelled out her name she came inside and talked to me about herself and stuff. I woke up from that and found that I was actually soaked from sweating so much, so I took off my top and dozed for a few minutes... which turned into a dream about flying somewhere.

I was travelling super-economy class - which means sitting on the wing, apparently. So when the wing started to burn, I was a little desperate to try to put it out, and ended up trying to use my coat and then whatever people could hand me - including, oddly enough, some ice spray aerosol which shouldn't have been on the plane anyhow. In any case, the fire finally spread from the outer housing and the main body began to burn. So I told the person beside me that we were going to dive and just then the pilot did that - and the fire went out as we dived. I'm not sure if that's right - I'd have thought that diving would supply more air to the system, rather than less. Although it is reliant on the burning material remaining close by to heat and ignite other fuel, so maybe it's the fact that the speed removes the burning material more rapidly than it can ignite the engine's fuel. After that we landed - an hour earlier, and I was thinking it was rather a neat way of jumping the landing queue, although I'm not sure that flying on just one engine would be my idea of a jolly time. In the airport we were all just happy to be alive, and left quite quickly - didn't seem that there was much investigation, or anything like that. We went to a shop somewhere - I'm not sure who with - and there was a guy holding the place up. So, all bolstered by surviving a plane's engine fire right beside me, I wasn't paying all that much attention and eventually ended up running away from the guy down some small alleys.

All in all, it's not been 'fun'. Oh, and not 'the best' at all; that summary just seemed rather appropriate.

When it comes to making folks feel uncomfortable, nobody holds a candle to a brain in a pickle jar. [ Brain in a jar; Diesel Sweeties ]

It might not be insightful, but I rather liked the line for its strangeness.

Last night I spent a couple of hours getting AlienBBC working on the SlimServer (with SoftSqueeze - I don't have the hardware... Chris does). Whilst that was 'fun', it was interspersed with real work, so it's not like it was solid nasty. Today, though, I've spent a few hours working through making the SlimServer play SoundTrackers. It's been quite a fun thing to get up and running, although quite how sensible it is to play such things through expensive hardware systems, I'm not entirely certain. What the hell, it works anyhow, and that's my 'weekend' I suppose. Hopefully Chris'll have a chance to try it out and - all being well - it'll work on his system too. Always a bonus.

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9 Oct 2005 (Sunday) 

Helen's birthday today; I sent her a little SMS to wish her well. But I'd forgotten that her phone seems to send me stuff that my phone can't understand. So the SMS replies from her just appear as '<data>'. Oh well.

Well, I actually saw two Ostrich on the Botswana Wildcam today. I was actually quite pleased and then confused. "Hey, Ostriches! Or are they Emus. Hmm. What's the difference between an Ostrich and an Emu ?" It turns out they're part of the same family, and they look a little similar, but Ostriches are the things you can see around the pond.

Elephants! Not recorded but actual real elephants, it seems. Two adults and two younger ones. The little ones are cute. Actually it's one medium one and a very small one. That's about 25 minutes I've seen them for. And that's a warthog. It's been quite a day animal-wise. Well, morning.

I was sitting watching telly this evening, feeling crappy and taking the occasional swig from a bottle and it occurred to me that this would be a terribly depressing thing. Only, the bottle contained Bacon Bits. So it's as bad as you might think .

Some days I just think I shouldn't be allowed to write code. Evilness abounds.

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8 Oct 2005 (Saturday) 

I was in the shower a moment ago being all annoyed that I hadn't had a chance to do the inplace string reversal. It was a test question thing, and I hadn't actually done it - I didn't want to at the time, but now it's bothering me. It was something like 'write a function to reverse a string in place without using any external storage', and with the proviso that any assumptions I made could just be stated. So I came up with the following in the shower...

void reverse_in_place(unsigned char *buffer)
{
  int string = 0;
  unsigned char *cur;
  
  for (cur = buffer; *cur != '\0'; cur++)
    string = (string << 8) | *cur;
    
  for (cur = buffer; string != 0; cur++, string>>=8)
    *cur = string & 0xFF;
}

Where the assumptions are that chars are 8 bits long, and ints are infinitely long. Yeah, it's not realistic, ints can be any length according to the spec as I recall. Actually they're meant to be the most easily handlable number for the system, I believe, so it's a little unrealistic. And it is really just using the int as an external storage when you're really expected to perform the reversal using a pair of pointers to swap the characters. It really should be something more like this...

void reverse_in_place(unsigned char *buffer)
{
  unsigned char *tail;
  
  for (tail = buffer; *tail != '\0'; tail++)
    ;
    
  for (tail--; buffer<tail; buffer++, tail--)
  {
    unsigned char first = *buffer;
    *buffer = *tail;
    *tail = first;
  }
}

I was just watching an episode of Angel (Room with a View) whilst I eat my tea and there's a lovely section where Cordelia is just talking and Angel is left standing, wet after coming out of the shower and being very confused. At the end, Cordelia goes to have a shower and Angel has this look of "what just happened?". It's actually a look that Steve on Coronation Street seems to pull off quite well. But the thought that went through my head was "Yeah, I've come out of 'conversations' like that". Only, when I think back, the conversations are usually with me. Which makes it a little weird to be confused about what happened.

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7 Oct 2005 (Friday) 

I was going to write something useful last night. I didn't. Actually this morning I found myself writing a whole bunch of code which I was writing for a very simple C test only last week, which was quite surprising.

And now I'm too tired to write anything useful. I know I wanted to say something and I thought "I'll say that later" but it's now later and I should have known when I said it that I wouldn't remember, 'cos I know what my memory's like.

So I've got many thoughts going around my head at the moment because my mind won't settle on any one thing at the moment.

• Therapist questions do you think...
• ObjAsm Keep directive.
• Can just pick up the phone.
• Lost luggage.
• Diary summary lines on archive pages.

Didn't get time to write anything about any of those, 'cos I've been busy thinking about other things today. Maybe I'll do them tomorrow. All of which sort of duplicates yesterday's 'oops, forgot to write what I was thinking'.

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4 Oct 2005 (Tuesday) 

I've been watching your world from afar, I've been trying to be where you are, And I've been secretly falling apart, I see, To me you're strange and you're beautiful. You'd be so perfect with me, but you just can't see, you turn every head, but you don't see me. [ Strange And Beautiful, from Aqualung, by Aqualung ]

Some mornings you wake up and regret the things you did the previous night. Since I don't drink this isn't so common, but this morning it was an email I sent that... was silly. This is why I've got a whole queue of unsent messages - they just get postponed instead of being sent. One, however, got through last night 'cos I thought to myself "Oh, what the hell, it doesn't really matter".

What's that sound ? Like bubbling... Oh, I left the wildcam on... let's see, which window... ELEPHANTS! ELEPHANTS! [ Elephants!; Me ]

Ok, so only the 'ELEPHANTS! ELEPHANTS!' was actually out loud. Unfortunately, it's not live; it's just the 'best of' stream 'cos the Live cam is offline apparently. So I still haven't seen any Elephants. Well, not live. Not that the ones I'm seeing weren't living. But they're not... well, you know what I mean.

All in all, it's been a pretty naff day.

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2 Oct 2005 (Sunday) 

The paragraph counter appears to have been broken on the RSS generator. Result ? Yesterday's entry came out as being '3 paragraphs' instead of '1 paragraph'. So I've fixed that. Just trim off the leading and trailing paragraph breaks.

Kate: We appreciate all the trouble you've gone to [...] Willie: [...] very good pate too, what's in it ? Uh, let me guess... There's lobster, there's sour cream... but there's something else ? ALF: Play-doh. Willie: That's it. ALF: The flourescent kind. I wanted it to be special. [ Lobster Pate; The Tanners and ALF; ALF ]

I'm a little surprised that SongMeanings.net doesn't have a decent meaning submitted for Stolen Car. I should probably add one. It'll only be my opinion, but that's all these things ever are. That said, it's possible that she's already said what it all means.

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1 Oct 2005 (Saturday) 

It appears that the somewhat ancient version of the Perl port that I'm using (5.001) leaks memory when you perform search and replace regular expressions which use numbered referenced groups. The numbered references seem to be the things that are leaked, going by the size of the leaks. The nice script I have that indexes the quotes was falling afoul of this and running out of memory when September rolled over into October (it only update the quotes on a monthly basis). I've managed to reduce the size and number of references that it performs in searches now, so that the leaks no longer cause a fatal problem, but it's only delaying things. I can't really stop using regular expressions in that code. It's kind of the reason I'm using Perl.

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