30 Sep 2005 (Friday) 

Home now. Tired. Need sleep.

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29 Sep 2005 (Thursday) 

I'm not sure I'm so keen on Day Breaker, by Beth Orton. I had a listen to it more properly today. It seems to be a lot more down than the earlier two. 'Paris Train' and 'Concrete Sky' are easier to get in to, but the rest of the album just doesn't seem to find its place for me.

I'm away tomorrow, so I need to try to sleep. Bah. Since I have to be up in a few hours, I guess that means now. Anyone wants me, I'm on the mobile. Not that that's likely.

Eek, almost forgot to make sure that MP3 player had the right music on it.

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28 Sep 2005 (Wednesday) 

My friends have a tendency for describing me as nice. Or depressed. Or clever. Or an idiot. [ Julian's friends; Julian ]

Conversations that will never happen. Words never to be said. Actions never taken. Tears that are forever shed. [ A tired mind; Me ]

Mindless words, from a tired boy.

I want to do something. I'm not sure what. It being 4am, I'm pretty sure I should not.

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27 Sep 2005 (Tuesday) 

Lying in my bed, I hear The clock tick and think of you Caught up in circles Confusion is nothing new [ Time After Time, from Twelve Deadly Cyns And Then Some, by Cyndi Lauper ]

I was thinking... with the local lyrics database and the playback tracking that I do, it would be reasonably 'easy' to knock up something that selected a few random tracks, cut out a small section of the lyrics and posted it to the diary. All without intervention. Of course, the problem with that idea is that it wouldn't select the right bits of the lyrics to quote. Or maybe it would and I'd be completely redundant. Hmm.

My legs hurt. Bah. I've not done anything with them.

In completely unrelated news, JenniCam searches have been turning up at the diary over the past few weeks. I was curious why; it appears I'm managing to get into the google top lists for the word 'JenniCam'. Or rather, I'm in at around 277 - and yes, someone went that far down the list, it seems... It's just amusing; takes me back to a 'simpler time' .

There are probably a load of archives lying around, but this archive was 'close by' on the search page.

Oh gawd; found by Andrew Poole, have a look at some pictures of the 'Nara Dreamland' park. And then look at a picture diary from someone who went there. It's just weird, I tell you!

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26 Sep 2005 (Monday) 

The light is in fact day. I'm sure my spoken words are making less sense these days, and certainly these last hours. I'm not sure that my written words are all that much better.

Grey, Green, Pink, Black! Then Bang.

I think the bang is forgetting to copy the modified code before running a build. Bah.

Someone found the diary today by searching for 'Fragrance Taglines' (which, it appears gets to my diary in the top 20 Google hits, which is odd - for Mostly Autumn of all things). That amused me because it's an odd thing for someone to search for, but more so because the search came from within 'estee.com'. So, if the next perfume has the tagline "The Fragrance Of The Moment", then you know who to blame. Ok, it's not likely because that would indicate that it was transitory and stuff, but still, it would be amusing.

Someone else found the diary by searching for lyrics from 'So The Music Stops' by Shadowland. I don't think I've actually seen the lyrics online anywhere, so it's interesting that the main hit is for my diary.

Don't lie to me Now more than ever Don't live with this alone Were you ever gonna share with anyone [ So The Music Stops, from Through The Looking Glass, by Shadowland ]

Hey, and it's right next to an upside down SVG of a cheque I drew some years ago. And a reference to getting an email from Alistair.

I'm pretty sure that the diary has changed in focus over the years. It's less computery now. More whiney, I guess.

Music was my first love and it will be my last Music of the future and music of the past To live without my music would be impossible do In this world of troubles my music pulls me through. [ Music, from Rebel, by John Miles ]

Ooh, this is cool. I'd forgotten how nicely 'Pull The Damn Thing Down' segues into the 'Music (Reprise)'. Which is cool because it does, and cool because I got to use the word 'Segue' properly. The same's true of Lacuna Coil's "Trance Awake", going into "Senzafine". And many other things do too, but I was talking to someone about that join earlier, and it reminded me.

Well, I've still not seen any Giraffes or Elephants on the cam, and this is my third day. Maybe they get up late so they're there after I've gone to bed.

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25 Sep 2005 (Sunday) 

Why do people ask questions to which the answer can change nothing, and gain nothing ? Is it just curiousity ? Is it a hope that they can change things, or learn something that matters ?

I think it says something when of the top 100 tracks on last.fm, I've heard 6 of them. Not sure what it says, but there you go.

Stop, stop talking about who's to blame When all that counts is how to change [ Born Of Frustration, from The Best Of, by James ]

One thing to remember if you come across an ARM binary for a firmware is that if you find the marker 'ABEX' in it, it's a pretty good bet that it's an ARM SDK kernel it's based around. Why's this ? Well, as far as I understand it - and it's important to know that I don't have anything but examples of the output... and RISC OS - ABEX is the RISC OS SWI OS_Exit marker that means 'exit with a return code' and this was carried forward into some of the ARM things even to the more recent times. OS_Exit can be used with R0 pointing to error block, R1 = 'ABEX', and R2 = the return code to pass back to the calling application. It's hardly interesting, but it's still probably true.

I've just searched for ABEX on Google and it appears that it's not mentioned on the first couple of pages that that's the case. I hardly think that that is shocking news. Of course, I could ponder how 'important' my diary is with respect to whether I can get into the first few pages. Looking at the list of things that are there, I'd probably be able to get in around page 10 or so. That's where it seems to start being odd. I guess I'll just check back in a few days and see if this page even hits that. Ha!

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24 Sep 2005 (Saturday) 

At about midnight I was tired. By 2, I was knackered and wanted to sleep, but got distracted. I'm now awake. All I want to do is just sleep without thinking. And it's nearly 10.

Whilst watching the Sliders Pilot, I thought to myself "That's the Tollan guy from Stargate SG-1"... and it is indeed. And I have a feeling that the store manager was Walter from SG-1, too.

Mum's not here. I thought she was on a late today. My memory just sucks.

And doing things on the computer in this state of mind seems to be somewhat counter-productive. No, that's not what I meant. 'cos that would mean that I was actively breaking things. Which I've not. Yet. I just haven't made things work.

I want to see you clearly Come closer than this But all I remember Are the dreams in the mist These dreams go on when I close my eyes Every second of the night I live another life [ These Dreams, from Heart, by Heart ]

According to last.fm, my nearest neighbour in terms of musical taste from their users is 'gclienttest'. That's a little amusing - it's the account I set up to test things so it's effectively 'my taste'. Nice to know that it does work though.

The last 3 hours of coding seem to have been worthwhile. Aside from a single register being mistyped (non-fatally - the output was wrong but in the right shape), everything was just working nicely first test. Admittedly, there was a gap of half an hour of that 3 hours trying out Google Earth again (which I'll come to in a second), and another half hour writing a program to test the assembler in a nice generic way.

I've just returned with some tea and heard the birds singing. It being 5am, that's not entirely surprising, except I was sure my window was closed. Which it was. The birds in question are in Botswana, on a National Geographic webcam that I've been watching in odd moments between builds for the past couple of hours and just left in the background otherwise. I've said it before - about Jennicam that time - and I'll say it again... There's something very cool about watching the sun rise on another continent. In passing, I've seen some birds flying and walking around the pond, what appear to be fire-flies (it was dark - so I couldn't see much), and what looked like a couple of deer, but were probably something that aren't deer . Most of the time I've had Within Temptation, with 'Chirping Crickets' (or whatever they are that make that funny sound), and bird calls as backing. Now we've got more birds, this time as backing to Crowded House. "It's Crowded House, with the Botswanan Birds!" A special remix version I really never would have thought of.

In the last 10 minutes, whilst I've been writing this and doing other tests, the sun's come up enough to give us colour, and I've seen another deer-like thing wander over too.

Ah-ha. The deer-like things are 'Impala'. At one point the image panned across and I saw 3 of them, and then a few more, making 8. I thought that was quite cool. A few minutes ago, the camera moved across and zoomed in on a group of them. I managed to count 12 all in one shot. The squat little bird things are Helmetted Guinea Fowl, I think... and I've just seen about 20 animals all walk as a group to the pond, drink, and then set off again together. I'm not sure what they were, though. It's hard to tell - I'm just not good at identifying them.

If you want to find this particular thing, load up Google Earth - it's not the only way to do it, but it's easiest to describe - and make sure you have 616 or later. It will check when you load it, or you can click on the option to check for later versions. Once you've got that and loaded it (yeah, I know it's 11M; sorry, I've become complacent since getting ADSL), look at the layers and check that the 'National Geographic Magazine', 'Live WildCam' image is enabled. You might also want to turn on the Borders layer, too as it'll help. Go to Africa, and find the border of Botswana and Zimbabwe. There should be a little film image there. Click on it and you'll get offered details about it. You can then click on 'View the Live WildCam' option to see it at the bottom of the page. Before about 4:30am (UK time) it's dark and you'll get what I guess is a night-vision view in grey-scale. At around then, the sun's coming up and you can see a lot more. It's now 6am (UK time) and there's a lot of animals around the pond - birds, the Impala, and a few of the other animals I couldn't identify. You might not want to get up so early (or stay up, like I have, 'cos I'm doing pointless programming cack), but it's lovely to see the sun come up if nothing else, and you've got real 'live' birds to listen to, even if you're not actively watching the image. The site says that it gets busy around 7am (Botswana time, which looks like UK+1 hour) until noon, so it's not like you have to be up so early. And apparently 4-6pm is also busy.

I don't know if it's going to be valid in the future, but you could also try the direct address it gave me.

I'm just hoping to see an Elephant before I sleep. That would leave me in a good mood before I fall asleep, I think.

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23 Sep 2005 (Friday) 

I got beaten up by Status Quo. [ Quo; Les Battersby; Coronation Street ]

Who's gonna pick you up When you fall Who's gonna hang it up When you call [ Drive, from Greatest Hits, by The Cars ]

Nobody knows it but you've got a secret smile And you use it only for me [ Secret Smile, from Feeling Strangely Fine, by Semisonic ]

I think about you on a moonlit night And the stars all seem to weep. When there's so much to lose There's never any time for sleep. [ Stars All Seem To Weep, from Central Reservation, by Beth Orton ]

I had to write the tags for that out three times, the first two times I filled in the album field with 'Beth Orton'. You'd think having done it once I'd be able to get it right the same time.

My finger's not quite so sore today. At least it moves now. And it's now 2am. I have no idea how that happened, although I did lose an hour or so at about 11 to a headache and stuff.

We'll take our hearts outside Leave our lives behind I'll watch the stars go out [ Stars, from Halflife, by Lacuna Coil ]

Can't be bothered to write more.

Ok, maybe not.

The plays of Sophocles, however, are notable for their lack of anyone singing "We will wash it, we will scrub it..." [ Plays of Sophocles; An Analysis of Bagpuss ]

I came to this by searching for 'Yaffle', which appears to be a web-robot running out of the University of Newcastle. The origin of the search isn't important, but it makes amusing reading.

... and from there, distracted by 'Star Fleet' which was one of those things I saw when I was younger and had no idea what it was, except that I rather liked it. It's been lost to my memory until now. One of the reasons I remember it is that it actually had an ongoing story line - more so than most of the other things I remember from that time for kids. From the look of things, I've seen episode 2 through 8 - eek, yes I remember 8... all the little animals blocking up the ship. Oh, and 10, with the nasty trees that grab the ship. I do remember episode 16 where Lamia is captured, as well.

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22 Sep 2005 (Thursday) 

It struck me in the shower that it's possible that people think the way that I do. I know that's kinda of obvious, but my thinking that I'm anticipating things, or putting them off for good reason, or doing them in a particular manner as an excuse for another reason, isn't restricted to me. Of course, there's the similarly obvious statement that 'people aren't that complex'.

Ah well. I wish I could just say and do the things I want without worrying about any repercussions, appropriateness, history or expectations.

Too many impossible conversations are just running through my head when I'm not actively concentrating on things.

Dad had Neil Young's 'After The Gold Rush' on this evening, and I walked in on one track playing that I thought "I know that... but not that..." I'm not a huge fan of Neil Young; it's all a little bit depressing, Leonard-Cohen, music that just doesn't appeal, but I know the album a little. Anyhow, I did a quick search on the local lyrics search engine (yeah, it's working reliably enough now that I can do it for these things) for "But only love can break your heart" and up pops the result - Saint Etienne did a track not only with that line in, but which is the same track, and it's that version that I think I know better. It's just a little strange to go from the Neil Young to Saint Etienne versions.

I have a friend I've never seen He hides his head inside a dream Someone should call him and see if he can come out Try to lose the down that he's found [ Only Love Can Break Your Heart, from After The Gold Rush, by Neil Young ]

Apparently there is a war being waged in Drobe world against the invading DLL forces. All sounds like scary stuff.

I hit a wall earlier, and now I can't move one of my fingers without it absolutely killing me. Which makes it a little harder to type.

Rather interesting - if you can call it that - references found today. I have no idea what they mean, but they're interesting anyhow. To me. In the sense of 'what's that mean ?' interesting. And that has nothing to do with my hitting walls.

I did a search today for a couple of phrases which aren't relevant and would only mean something to one person, including the word 'Picsel' and was heartily amused to find that at the bottom of the top 10 results was a link to some .biz site - which am interested precisely not at all in, but which contains as its first heading a reference to 'Alliance & Leicester'. Why that's amusing won't be clear unless you happen to work at Picsel; and I'm not entirely sure it's amusing unless you happen to be me. Oh well.

I don't hold with coincidence usually. Things don't generally happen by random together. If they do, then it's really freaky, but if two things happen together you begin to think that there's something happening to bring them together. Obviously that's a paranoia that I have in general, but that's just the fun way that I tend to think of things.

When it comes to things that are important to me, I'm generally unwilling to say anything that ... oh, I don't think that sentence is really going anywhere useful.

Mind not working. Or rather, mind working, but not on code. Must sleep.

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21 Sep 2005 (Wednesday) 

I tried out 'Pandora' because someone on last.fm mentioned it. Giving it Lacuna Coil, it suggested Take Me Away, by Avril Lavigne. Now, I know that in my own listening Lacuna Coil comes top and Avril comes fourth, but I'm pretty sure that that's not a common thing. Certainly Avril isn't in Amazon's recommendations for Lacuna Coil. And last.fm listeners don't place them as being similar.

It's a little odd to think that my top tracks on last.fm are mostly Lacuna Coil. Winter, by Tori Amos is way down there beyond the top 100. I think it's just going to take a while for my music to settle down to be representative of what I like overall, rather than just in the last 6 months. Which, to be fair, has not been the most representative of me. Well maybe it is.

I've just noticed a somewhat disproportionate response I've just sent in my emails, almost without thinking. To one person I sent a rather bland email and to another I was much warmer. When they were both for (just about) the same thing, and should therefore have had the same kind of response. I kind of know why that is, but it bothers me very slightly.

There's a very energetic spider in here. He keeps running up and down a thread he's put between the top of the monitor and the keyboard (this is on Virginia, not my main machine, so it's not actually that much of a problem). Which is fine. Except after he'd done that I saw him climbing up another thread away from the monitor and up to the lights in the ceiling. And every so often as I'm moving around the room I'll feel a thread or two over me which he's clearly laid and I've not seen. I feel guilty about breaking them, 'cos they're so impressive and they spend such time. I expect to wake up and find a whole intricate web over the screen - actually I did a few days ago.

Of course, if drobe reads this he'll be running to hide behind the bed at the very thought of them. Or imagining waking up wrapped in ... hmm... I want to use the word 'gossamer' but I'm not sure I can use it properly... lots of spider web anyhow.

You were there in the turnstiles with the wind at your heels You stretched for the stars and you know how it feels to reach too high too far, too soon You saw the whole of the moon [ The Whole Of The Moon, from This Is The Sea, by The Waterboys ]

It's important when setting up a machine to be woken by the magic ethernet packet to select the 'only allow management functions' option as well as the 'allow this device to bring the machine out of standby' - if it's offered, that is. Otherwise it seems to get woken up by just about any old packet sent its way. Which is less than useful.

I've got an important email that I need to think about still pending reply. I was going to deal with it earlier but then I hit my head on a shelf and decided that maybe I wasn't in the right mood.

I got an email from one of Alistair Galbraith's old friends today. Sadly I lost touch with him, and I don't really know how to get back in touch - I've tried a few things and got not so far. If I think of anything more cunning, I'll try that in the next few days. I should also get in touch with Matthew.

Who do you need? Who do you love? When you come undone. [ Come Undone, from Greatest, by Duran Duran ]

It appears, from David Chess, that Opera is now Ad-Free. Cool.

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20 Sep 2005 (Tuesday) 

For some reason I always thought of Pewter as a type of ceramic. Don't ask me why, 'cos I don't know, but it's only after seeing it many many times that I've realised that it was a metal (yay, three shots at spelling 'metal'). Well, actually I realised a couple of years back, but it's not a thing you see often and seeing it today reminded me.

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 ]

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19 Sep 2005 (Monday) 

I think I was a little tired last night when I was doing things. I found myself shouting and laughing at code rather a lot. That's something that's less practical if you work in an office I guess.

Woke up this afternoon with 'Lost Without You' in my head. The thing that seems to bring me back to Delta Goodrem... well, actually I don't know, to be honest. There's definately an attraction because there's a little piano bias there. Anyhow, it's nice.

If we ever say we'll never be together and we ended with goodbye Don't know what I'd do ... I'm lost without you [ Lost Without You, from Innocent Eyes, by Delta Goodrem ]

Last night I was watching Grosse Pointe Blank, which is a reasonably fun film that I've not seen in ages. Actually I was also watching Bedazzled last night (or possibly the night before, but it doesn't matter) - the more recent version. I had forgotten the little joke with the dogs at the beach (they're called Dudley and Peter), and I'm pretty sure I'd forgotten that it had Brendan Fraser in it. It wasn't as bad as I remember, either. I like both in any case, although I would prefer to have seen the initial 20 minutes 'cos I've missed that of both of them, I believe.

... Anyhow ... I was watching Grosse Pointe Blank and I noticed this time how many people just ignored the fact that he tells them he's a professional killer. Which is amusing. Anyhow, it was a fun film and wasted away a little time whilst I was failing to fall asleep.

Martin Blank: I had another dream about Debi Therapist: That girl you're obsessed with ? Martin Blank: Don't you think "obsessed" is a strong word ? Therapist: Uh, recurring dreams of loss and pain for ten years featuring the same person. Yeah, maybe that's a bit excessive. [ Obsessed is a strong word; Grosse Point Blank ]

The AudioScrobbler submission system appears to be failing to respond at the moment. Which is testing my client a little more - surprisingly it's actually working as desired. The initial handshake failed three times, and then it backed off half an hour. At that point it managed to handshake, but it's now failing to submit anything. I think now it should be falling back to the handshake, but it hasn't yet. That might be a bug, but I'm not sure. If the state machine wasn't so hacked about it would work a lot more nicely.

Ah, and the Diary's RSS feed ended up with an invalid entry yesterday because of a problem with using the wrong variable names in the 'update but not a new day' processor for the diary. '$_' is not the same as '$line', so don't use them interchangeably - a fault of moving a routine around and failing to rename my variables.

Apparently it's 'Talk Like A Pirate Day' - something I'm not trying by the way - but there's a whole load of pages about this sort of thing it seems. Strangest may be the comparison between Gangsta slang and Pirate lingo. But that's partly because it has the following line on it...

My roommate and I were discussing how much Hamm's you would need to drink before cutting off your leg below the knee and sticking a thick peg in the bloody stump suddenly changed from a good idea in the abstract into a fantastic idea right now (four)... [ How much before it's a good idea ? ]

I'm still not sure whether I like Aquarius, by Within Temptation. That's the main track off 'The Silent Force' that I can't decide about. Maybe at some point I'll come to a decision.

I was going to make some comment about hearts that try to reach orbital velocity, but I've got some vague memory of already having used that sort of phrase before. I hate repeating myself knowingly - partly because I know it's frustrating to hear people saying the same thing again. Actually, I think most people that talk to me probably get that feeling 'cos I do repeat myself a lot.

I was thinking a few days ago, partly because of hearing myself recorded though a microphone with something that wasn't quite working and things being echoed badly, about how I talk in the real world. I have this way of talking that means that I sometimes repeat the start of a sentence. I don't even know that I'm doing it most of the time, but I've heard myself sometimes and it's really annoying. Actually, it's more annoying because I can't stop doing it. I should ask dad. Only he's watching telly. Later.

There's been a little bit of news today about the plans NASA has to go to the moon. Now, I'm all for the whole space exploration, advancement of science and all that jazz, but it feels wrong. Why ? Well, whilst I'd love to zoom around the Earth, play around in zero gravity, or at the least watch as other people do, it just doesn't seem to be right. How many billions of dollars will be spent trying to get off this rock, whilst there are millions of people just trying day by day to live ? I know I don't do the news, and if you say that my avoidance of current affairs denies me the right to an opinion you may have a point, but I seem to remember that the Live 8 and associated events were a voice of the people showing where they wanted money to be spent - on trying to help those less fortunate. If you were to ask people - people at NASA even - whether they think it would be better to go to the moon or to give aid, help develop and otherwise better the lot of their fellow men in a direct way, I would have thought (ok, would hope) that they would plump for the latter.

I know it's not a question you can ask directly because you're comparing apples and oranges, but there seems to be something there that's not right. Maybe I'm just naive. I know you can't be totally focused on the needs of one group, but the difference in the gain seems to be huge. I know there's many businesses, and technology areas that benefit from space research and from that there are the jobs that are generated by that, but that can be said of most incentives. And I know that a country needs to have something to look forward to and be excited about, but their aim is for 2018 (and you can bet that that estimate will slip by 50%, so that'll be 2024) and it's hard to keep people excited by something that's that distant. Meanwhile, the US has been left struggling to cope with a hurricane in its own territory. Yeah, I know bringing that in is a little bit spurious and if I was reading it by anyone else I'd almost think it was a cynical ploy to get some easy sympathy for a viewpoint when it's not so related. But my point was that it's a place where a lot of energy can be used and have a definate immediate effect - and it's not even for African people, but for their own people. And yes, I know I've just minimised at problem there by implying that the US citizens are more important to the US than foreign citizens, but I have a reason - they are. Clearly you should expect that your own citizens should be foremost in your thoughts (well, maybe clearly... there's a whole other area there that I'm not even going to go down).

Anyhow, I've rambled away from what I was saying. It's not like I've got any strong wish to say "you must do this", but something just feels wrong. And with that uninformed and uneducated opinion, I'll shut up.

Long entry today, it seems. I think that's because I've been writing to fill the time between things building. Oh the tedium.

Hippy: What do they want ? Juliet: A collective consciousness. To make us all just like them. [ The Borg ?; Juliet; Dark Skies ]

"Juliet" is played by Jeri Ryan. Who is better known (well to me) as 'Seven Of Nine' from Voyager. I was literally just skimming through bits and caught that section and laughed a little.

I was trying to work out, yesterday, why the server discs seemed to be waking up every 30 minutes or so. I'd meant to set up the discs to be checked by the SMART monitoring tools every 3 hours, so they shouldn't have done that. Only I'd got the parameter wrong. Remember, 1800 seconds is 30 minutes, not 3 hours. Curiously (well maybe not, but still, it's odd) 3 hours is 10800 seconds. Maybe I missed a '0', or maybe I just can't do maths. Something else must still be up, because the WDC disc is always in its idle state; it never seems to go to standby. Well, not unless I explicitly tell it to.

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18 Sep 2005 (Sunday) 

I was standing in the kitchen this afternoon when I realised something. I slightly different way of looking at something I'd been thinking about for a while. It's not like it's an important thing, or that it's all that different, but it really just reminds me quite how dim I can be.

Bah. Words fail me. I can't quite get down what I want to say. Oh well.

Well... This is just... neat. [ Just neat; Spike; Buffy, The Vampire Slayer ]

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17 Sep 2005 (Saturday) 

I was awoken this morning by a phone call from Simon. I was in the middle of a rather cool dream which had actual plot lines and some sort of plan it seemed. Anyhow, I fell back asleep and continued where I left off - there was a woman hiding in a cellar, beneath a set of pipes, and stuff. And later Chris rang and woke me up just as we were gathering everyone into the room to show who the killer was.

All of which has very little to do with what I wanted to say, which I've now forgotten.

I ended up watching Dogma last night as well. Maybe that sort of influenced my odd dream.

And I've just found out that one of the 'benign' changes I made 4 hours ago has been the thing that's been preventing other sections of my code from working. Bah.

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16 Sep 2005 (Friday) 

You'd think with the space I've now got available I wouldn't have problems with running out of disc space. Only squid shut itself down this afternoon when the disc became full. I'd like to say I know where the space went from the root drive, but I've no idea. Or rather, I don't know what's changed to use the last few hundred MB. There's a load of things I should tidy up really. There's 2G of reference documents, but that doesn't change much. There's the 890M of RFCs and drafts, from which the StrongHelp manuals are built weekly. Hmm. Or should be; I don't remember whether that's still working or not - nope, they've not been regenerated since early August. At least I can set that going again.

Anytime you feel alone Just raise your hand, pick up the phone Tap in my number, there I'll be If one day your stars won't shine I will give you some of mine 'cause they could fall so easily [ Footprints In The Snow, from Black Moon, by Emerson, Lake And Palmer ]

It's frustrating when comments in code force you to look things up. It's amusing when it forces you to go and watch "Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure". Although obviously that's less amusing when it's at 4am.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. [ Strange things; Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure ]

The 'Circle K' is obviously some store in the US. 14 minutes into the film, if you're desperate to find the quote anyhow.

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15 Sep 2005 (Thursday) 

Well, I've caught up (for now) with the pending emails from the last couple of weeks but otherwise I've had a relatively unproductive day. I've fitted the new ATA controller to the server with the new disc, and the reorganised the existing discs to be slightly better laid out. Plus, I've also lost the floppy drive off the machine, which I thought was reasonable at the time, but now I remember that the Desktop system doesn't actually have a floppy drive either. The laptop and RiscPCs have though, so I can suffer with them for now. Well, should I actually need to use floppy discs. Which isn't likely.

In any case, new disc fitted, and old ones moved around. It's a little bit nicer to get 50M/sec out of the discs instead of the 14M/sec I was getting from the on-board interface. So I've now got more space than I know what to do with. Not only is there the new drive, but there's also the 20-odd G that I've got back on the 160G disc now that it's able to use its full size. Previously it was formatted to 'smaller' because that's all I was offered when I formatted it. It's all down to the LBA addressing (or something like that, IIRC - I can't remember the exact details because it was ages ago that I was following it properly) which means that the disc couldn't be bigger than a certain size. Around 128G. So anyhow, with the general messing around that's gone on I copied everything off the old disc to the new old, then wanted to repartition it to use the full size of the disc. It was only after copying everything off (about an hour and a bit for the full disc, which was nice) that I discovered that 'parted' can change the partition size with the ext2 filing system on it. So I could have just resized it without the copy. But in any case, it's done now. There's just short of 1/2 TB in the server now, and nearly half of that is still free. Eventually I'll get back to that position I originally wanted where the home drive is just for my stuff, and the shared reference material and other bits are completely on different drives. Not quite yet, but at least with the space it can get there.

I have a dull headache that doesn't seem to have lifted for the past couple of days, however I think that's partly due to being forced to close the window at night due to the number of wasps that seem to like floating in here. Possibly they're drawn to the light at night. Ah well.

Nice relaxing music day today though. Röyksopp and Enigma.

You were the one I was dreaming of all my life When it is dark, you are my light [ The Child In Us, from Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi, by Enigma ]

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14 Sep 2005 (Wednesday) 

My code doesn't work. I've got this sort of hybrid monster of a pair of components which doesn't quite know which one it wants to be. It's painful trying to wean it away from one shape and into another.

I looked in the Carly Simon folder earlier; still can't go there. It's just this toxic waste ground that's really not a good place to go.

How do you feel? What is there to feel? [ Afraid Of Sunlight, from Afraid Of Sunlight, by Marillion ]

If I am the storm, if I am the wonder will I have flashlights, nightmares and sudden explosion ? There's no room where I can go and you've got secrets too I don't know what more to ask for I was given just one wish [ What Else Is There?, from The Understanding, by Royksopp ]

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13 Sep 2005 (Tuesday) 

Maybe if you know that someone else blames themselves for a thing, that exonerates you from any guilt. Maybe that passive acceptance of another party's guilt makes your own fade away. Of course, without any original feeling of guilt, there is no necessity to accept the guilt of another as an assignment of blame.

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12 Sep 2005 (Monday) 

Help, I can't see!

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11 Sep 2005 (Sunday) 

I had a nice email from Russ from Last.fm, thanking me for the re-write of the Protocol docs. It's nice to know it was useful . Good to be of use for something, I suppose.

There's about 8 mails that have deserved some proper attention and I haven't had the energy to put in that they needed over the last week. So I'm determined to get around to replying to them. They're important and I shouldn't put them off, but every time I've thought about replying I've thought "No, that needs more time than I have right now". Which, now I think about some of the trivial things I've done, may not be entirely true. But still, that's what I thought. So that's tomorrow's job. Well, one of them.

There's also a few mails I really ought to send people, but haven't yet.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've had 2 or 3 searches turn up for Matthew Bullock. Which is odd. I should really have kept in touch . And in the last couple of days, 3 searches for 'How to write a diary entry' (or words to that effect), which is an odd thing to search for and odder 'cos I don't think that I've really written much about how to write things. I think Matthew Godbolt said it best recently - and it was quite touching in a nice way - that it was like hearing me speak when he read the diary. That, I think, is probably quite important. I know it's a little informal, but hell, it's what I write. Hmm. I think too many rambles on the diary tend to drift in to talking about why I write the diary. That seems very blog-like. Must Not Blog.

Of course, the incessant song-quotes do detract from the whole-some goodness that is my real life. Except, of course, that I don't have one.

The passport of a deceased person should be submitted for cancellation to the nearest [...] passport authority; it will be returned on request. [ Passport caution; UK Passport, page 2 ]

Why would you want it returned ? I can kind-of see the purpose as a reminder of the person, but that's not the first thought that comes to mind. The first thought is "Oops, sorry, we thought they were dead, but it turns out they were just really sleepy."

The hologram over the face is a little scarey, though. If you see it from the right angle it looks like my face has a goatee, that I've got a large nose, horns and strange protrusion from my forehead. Imagine a strange devil Gerph and you've probably got something of the idea. I'd show you a picture, except that scanning holograms just doesn't work, and of course it'd be pretty dim to scan my passport .

I heard from Simon today that Mr Horne died a few weeks ago of a heart attack. I'm not sure what to say, really. At least, not more than Simon already has. I only knew him for a few months, but he was a teacher I remembered very fondly and liked.

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10 Sep 2005 (Saturday) 

AudioScrobbler appears to be down today for maintenance. So this should test my client's recovery capabilities in the face of hard errors. So far it's not fairing well - it seems to be in the '30 seconds delay' mode, which is wrong. It should have noticed and backed off to 30 minutes, but didn't. I had tested it locally but obviously not well enough - the problems were occurring when the handshake server was responding with errors through a proxy.

I think I've improved the code to be able to cope now. Really the whole thing should be a single state machine. At the moment it's a bit of a mess because I didn't think initially that a state machine was the way to go for the purpose. But even though it's running in a taskwindow, I'm still using it as a polled library so that I can interleave it with the AMPlayer monitoring and the two function independantly of one another.

I re-wrote the AudioScrobbler protocol document to say all the things I thought it should say. Took me quite a while, but it was a distraction whilst I was waiting for builds and stuff. Dunno if the administrators will be at all interested, but it's done. I did take a few liberties by changing things in it, though, so maybe they won't be too happy about that. No matter.

But the fire in your belly That gave you the songs Is suddenly gone And you feel like a fake [ King, from Afraid Of Sunlight, by Marillion ]

Chris was a little surprised that I like Anastacia. Is there something odd about that ?

I have a headache again; it doesn't seem to have gone since I took some tablets, so I think I'll try going to bed instead. I also have no nails so I might have some cereal too. Oh the thrills.

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9 Sep 2005 (Friday) 

Today sees a self-referential Bunny - which amused me for a few minutes. Well, enough to write about. Anyhow, it's amusing for more than the obvious reason. When Simon was showing me them and I was stepping through the old ones (admittedly randomly at first) I saw the earlier one. It amused me because the title is "chasing nuns out in the yard" and the caption "The Bunny was being followed by a happy little phantom" - which is a reference to 'Happy Phantom' by Tori Amos, who I happen to like. It was just one of those things that said to me "hey, this person is on my wavelength". So it amused me.

And if I die today I'll be the happy phantom And I'll go chasin' the nuns out in the yard And I'll run naked through the streets without my mask on And I will never need umbrellas in the rain [ Happy Phantom, from Little Earthquakes, by Tori Amos ]

And today's, with the title of "chasing nuns out there on mars", and caption "This one was definately not a happy little phantom..." with a flaming skull coming after the Bunny references Bunny, Happy Phantom, and Doom - the latter of which I know a little bit about.

It appears that the music disc that 'Artists' is on is, again, full. And that's having moved away all the stuff that was mislabelled or generally cack. Aside from about 80M of unsorted Cover tracks and things, it's full. I blame Simon for giving me things. The disc's got 6M free, which can't be good. If I kill the CoverFetcher cache, that'll free up around 680M, but I really don't want to do that just yet. It'd make a mess of things.

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8 Sep 2005 (Thursday) 

A brief glance at ImageNFS has told me why the artist ordering has become 'broken' recently. Since I passed 1024 unique artists, the HeapSort is no longer being applied to the results. Which is pretty much what I expected, but seeing it in ARM makes it a bit more real than "that's what it feels like".

It's not like it's important; it's just that ControlAMPlayer is lazy and doesn't do the sorting itself - it just hopes that the FS will. It's never been guarenteed, but still I'm lazy.

And 20 minutes later, I've fixed it to now support 4096 files in a directory before it won't bother to sort. Something's up here - I think somthing I've written is corrupting RMA because shutting the machine down appears to kill ImageNFS with aborts.

Bah; I can't seem to find the words I want to write. Oh well. I'll just stick down some random words that are the meaning, and I'll just have to work out in the future what I was meaning. Yelling. Make cry. No. Expecting? Hate. Grr. Tea.

I have a passport now. It's all exciting. Can you just feel the sarcasm ?

Oh, and today's Bunny was a reference to Brainiac (ok, it's pretty obvious from the title), which amused me. I must admit that Bunny is sometimes hit and miss, but when it hits it is quite funny. That makes three comic stips I read daily. Scarey, really. I thought "Oh, I'll drop the show a line; it might amuse them if they haven't already had 20 other people email them the details". Only I can't find an address for them, and their 'forum' appears to be a register-to-post thing, and you have to give over loads of info to Sky for them to use as they wish... and somehow I'm not particularly keen on doing that just so that I can give them the address of a comic.

Having got nothing more than a few bits and pieces done in the last couple of hours, I think I'm going to go to bed.

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7 Sep 2005 (Wednesday) 

You took my heart, deceived me right from the start. You showed me dreams, I wished they would turn into real. You broke the promise and made me realise, It was all just a lie. [ Angels, from The Silent Force, by Within Temptation ]

I was talking to dad earlier and the the telly was on - I have difficulty concentrating when there are two things happening - and I was distracted by the music on it that I recognised. I don't know what the programme was (dad did say but I've forgotten now), but I recognised Strange and Beautiful, by Aqualung playing in the background. I was all surprised and pleased that I recognised something, and then another track came on and I was very surprised - "... and that's Lacuna Coil!". And not something I'd have expected; it was 'Stars' from Halflife. At least, I'm pretty certain that was it - now I come to relate it it seems vague, but still it was amusing to hear.

Bah; the AudioScrobbler client got all confused at one point today when I had multiple instances running. Part of the code was ignoring errors and ended up iterating forever and I didn't notice. Bother. You can tell when it screws up because the machine goes really slow as a single task hogs all the processor time .

Today doesn't seem to have achieved much. It seems to have consisted of staring at a screen a lot and trying to understand something that I don't really want to understand but need to.

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6 Sep 2005 (Tuesday) 

So it's better this way, I said Having seen this place before Where everything we said and did Hurts us all the more It's just that we stayed, too long In the same old sickly skin [ Full Of Grace, from Surfacing, by Sarah McLachlan ]

It's strange to see that people find the diary by searching for tracks that I've cited. Maybe they're - like me - thinking they're pretty or apt, or maybe they're just wondering "what's that track ?". However they get here, it's nice to see. Recently there's been all sorts of searches, but the one that stands out is Metisse's 'Boom Boom Ba' that quite a lot of hits over the last couple of weeks.

(cackle) Yesterday's RSS summary looked stupid - it came out something like this :

[18 paragraphs] (Songquote 'Constant Craving') (Songquote 'Linger') (Songquote 'Sense') (Songquote 'Sleeping Satellite') (Songquote 'Runaway Train') (Songquote 'Dry County') (Songquote 'Always The Last To Know') (Songquote 'Everybody Hurts') (Songquote 'Two Princes') With apologies for any of the above that aren't actually 1992 'cos I've got them mistagged here. ...

... which is just silly. So I've spent about 10 minutes fixing up the processor to understand about consecutive songquotes now...

[18 paragraphs] (Songquote 'Constant Craving', 'Linger', 'Sense', 'Sleeping Satellite', 'Runaway Train', 'Dry County', 'Always The Last To Know', 'Everybody Hurts' and 'Two Princes') With apologies for any of the above that aren't actually 1992 'cos I've got them mistagged here. ...

Which may not be particularly interesting, but it makes me feel a little better anyhow.

I'm sure I keep hearing something going 'be-beep'. So I've paused my music and I'm hoping that it'll happen again. Yup. It was the cordless phone that I'd thrown on to the bed so that I'd remember to charge it that was beeping. It was beeping because it wanted to be charged.

Within Temptation are interesting. Probably worth a listen to anyhow; I've listened to 'The Silent Force' twice now, and it's definately interesting. I'm not sure whether it's samey, or whether I just need to get used to them. It's definately got something of an interest. Might be a bit much for me but I'll see.

I've listened to The Magic Numbers now; the album doesn't grab me. It's a bit... well, it's not me. Oh well.

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5 Sep 2005 (Monday) 

Maybe a great magnet pulls All souls towards truth Or maybe it is life itself That feeds wisdom To its youth [ Constant Craving, from Ingenue, by K D Lang ]

Oh, I thought the world of you. I thought nothing could go wrong, But I was wrong. I was wrong. [ Linger, from Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can't We, by Cranberries ]

I'm flying high on something beautiful and aimless, it's got a name but I prefer to call it nameless. [ Sense, from Sense, by Lightning Seeds ]

Have we got what it takes to advance? Did we peak too soon? If the world is so green Then why does it scream under a blue moon? [ Sleeping Satellite, from Great Expectations, by Tasmin Archer ]

So tired that I couldn't even sleep So many secrets I couldn't keep Promised myself I wouldn't weep One more promise I couldn't keep [ Runaway Train, from Grave Dancers Union, by Soul Asylum ]

All my dreams went up in ashes And my future blew away Now the oil's gone and the money's gone And the jobs are gone Still we're hangin' on [ Dry County, from Keep The Faith, by Bon Jovi ]

Always the last to know - how you're feeling The last to know - where you are The last to know - if you're happy now [ Always The Last To Know, from Change Everything, by Del Amitri ]

If you're on your own in this life, the days and nights are long, when you think you've had too much of this life to hang on. [ Everybody Hurts, from Automatic For The People, by REM ]

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

With apologies for any of the above that aren't actually 1992 'cos I've got them mistagged here.

I always think that Dry County, by Bon Jovi is similar to Telegraph Road, by Dire Straits). Ooh, and I'd forgotten about the very cool guitar section in the middle.

At some point I'd like to find a complete archive of the singles charts so that I can incorporate that into the server. However, it seems to be tricky to get historical chart information. It might be easier to just go for the 'highest position reached' thing.

Dad's suggested the group ' Within Temptation' earlier today; I'll have to try listening to them. Of course there's all the stuff that Simon suggested over the weekend that I've got to go through...

Oh, and my AudioScrobbler client doesn't do 8859-1 to UTF-8 yet, so I've just been lucky with the things that I've listened to that they're in simple ASCII. On the other hand, I do lean toward that because of the problems in getting characters to appear (and work) on different platforms. Oh, and there's also the fun of '?' between platforms, but I reckon that a question mark is much more useful than the hash so Windows-Sucks and RISC OS-wins on that. Fortunately it doesn't occur that often - although Are You Sitting Comfortably?, by IQ and Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, by Cranberries do get hit by that.

I've got a few emails lying around in my inbox that I need to think about at some point. I've not really felt like thinking for the past few days though.

I also want to sort out some way of saying 'This is how the MP3 collection has changed since you last saw it'. Which is less easy than it might sound - it'll probably involve a brute force 'find' and 'diff' at the end of the day, 'cos it's just simple.

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4 Sep 2005 (Sunday) 

Good god my musical taste is more skewed than I had expected. I was expecting something of a lean toward two or three artists, but it looks scarily like I'm continually drawn to the same group - Lacuna Coil. It's a little amusing that Avril Lavigne comes in 4th. Since the charts will change in the future, and this covers the last 6 months of listening, pretty much, here's the top 20 - not that anyone will care (I know how much I just ignore lists done by other people, but hey, it's my diary and I like to know about my music).

1. Lacuna Coil
2. Archive
3. Heather Nova
4. Avril Lavigne
5. U2
6. Tori Amos
7.