We went to the hospital to visit some of Claire and Justin's friends, whose baby is still there. So, whilst they were visiting I got to look after Bethany on my own. Well it might not seem all that much, but it was nice to be able to do and to keep her amused and not being upset. She does love to walk around - holding on to fingers. I expect that by the time I'm back here next, she'll be running around the place .

We watched "Serenity (2005)Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, ThrillerIn the future, when a passenger with a deadly secret. Six rebels on the run. An assassin in pursuit. When the renegade crew of Serenity agrees to hide a fugitive on their ship, they find themselves in an awesome action-packed battle between the relentless military might of a totalitarian regime who will destroy anything - or anyone - to get the girl back and the bloodthirsty creatures who roam the uncharted areas of space. But, the greatest danger of all may be on their ship. From the mind of Joss Whedon, comes a new edge-of-your-seat adventure loaded with explosive battles, gripping special effects and fantastic new worlds.Serenity" tonight as well. I actually quite enjoyed it - quite a cool film, even without having watched Firefly (2002, FOX)Drama/Science-FictionIn the far-distant future, Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds is a renegade former brown-coat sergeant, now turned smuggler & rogue, who is the commander of a small spacecraft, with a loyal hand-picked crew made up of the first mate, Zoe Warren; the pilot Hoban "Wash" Washburn; the gung-ho grunt Jayne Cobb; the engineer Kaylee Frye; the fugitives Dr. Simon Tam and his psychic sister River. Together, they travel the far reaches of space in search of food, money, and anything to live on.Firefly.

I'm not sure if it really was her first word, but if not her first it is definitely her first that I've heard. She said 'please' to ask for a breadstick.

Two dreams last night; or three if you count the two part set that the first one comprised being two distinct dreams. In the first one there was an 'accident' at a resort house type thing in the middle of a forest somewhere where someone decided the close the shutters on the swimming pool whilst there were people in it and 7 people died under it. Then, in order to cover their tracks, they went and killed some of the staff and guests. Finally they wanted to commit suicide and tried to make it look like someone else had killed everyone so they poised one of the bodies with a gun and placed themselves so that they would get shot by it once the sun hit something or other. Only a woman turned up and found all the dead people and went mad and started chasing the guy who'd killed them all. So there followed a huge chase through the woods by both this woman and the police, and the woman killed anyone who got in her way in the chase. The police examined the pool and the bodies and the chase got bigger. After much chasing through forests, small play areas, backs of houses and a swamp like bit, he reached the sea and the port - which we'd actually seen at the beginning of the dream as where all the people were arriving at. The sand was all a pretty yellow, but the boat that had dropped everyone off had already gone. To cover the tracks, though, the guy ran out into the sea a few hundred yards (it's a very shallow bay where he came out - the harbour and small village was a mile out to the left and he was in a shallow, reedy area. Eventually he ran off towards a cave and the first part ended.

The second part started and we are in a hospital where the woman that had been chasing him had been restrained - her being somewhat nuts, and all the police and everyone thinking that she had killed everyone, rather than just the people that were in her way as she chased the guy. At this point, around about, we discover that she's actually the guy's mother and she is indeed bonkers. She escapes, stabs a few people in the hospital and sets off to hunt down her sun who she's still wanting to kill as well.

The only thing is that that's about when the dream ended, which is very frustrating as we don't know what happened.

The other dream involved going to a fair or something where Caroline was and saying something wrong to her and having to leave. And then wondering to myself why I did that, and going back and apologising, and trying to be... like... normal. She invited me back to somewhere that she and some friends were meeting up and I chatted with them more than I chatted with her. That was a little disturbing and stuff.

Patt and Steve came up today - it's lovely to see them again. I get to see them even more rarely than I see Justin and Claire. We went out for a little walk around Brotton and finished making cakes and things. Claire, Patt, Steve, and Stuart (their friend) went out for a nature walk and Justin and I stopped home with Bethany and watched "Alien Resurrection (1997)Action, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller200 years after the conclusion of Alien 3, the company is able to resurrect Ripley through the process of cloning and the scientists successfully take the Queen Alien out of her. But, Ripley's DNA gets mixed up with the Queen's and she begins to develop certain alien characteristics. The scientists begin breeding the aliens, but they later escape. Soon the Xeno-morphs are running amok on the ship, which is on course to earth. The Queen then gives birth to a deadly new breed of alien, which could spell disaster for the entire human race. It's up to Ripley and a band of space pirates to stop the ship before it reaches earth.Alien Resurrection" . Well, we watched it, and Bethany slept.

Apparently, according to Claire, my taste in women is far too limited. I can't think what she means .

The thing I remember most about today is shopping, only that's just the first thing we did today. We also went to visit one of Justin and Claire's friends, in hospital; she'd just had a baby. And this evening we've watched a film.

On the way back from shopping, though, a track came on the radio and I stopped in mid-sentence and just said "I love this track... but this isn't the version I know". The track is Iris, originally by The Goo Goo Dolls, and covered now by Ronan Keating. It's really nice.

And I don't want the world to see me 'Cause I don't think that they'd understand When everything's made to be broken I just want you to know who I am [ Iris, from Dizzy Up The Girl, by The Goo Goo Dolls ]

I hate trying to go to sleep, because it always takes hours. But more than that, I hate dreaming. This morning, I was dozing a little and the dream was a bit disjointed, but still hung together.

I was visiting Caroline (as I do so often) with Sue. There was something special happening at their place. I don't know what, but they had relatives around and there was a small building being constructed in the garden by a few people. Sue and Caroline were talking, and I was there at the time, and Sue was saying how there were things that were holding Caroline back and she should get rid of them, whilst all the while pointing to me - she was sitting behind me and pointing at me over my head.

I was getting ready to go and constantly finding things to put off leaving. Caroline was practicing singing something which she was going to sing at whatever was happening later. I don't know what it was, but it was pretty - something by a female singer, and which I liked, but which I now can't remember.

We were then sitting at a table, across from where the building was being constructed, eating yoghurts, and she was drawing a picture of the solar system in pencil. I don't know why either yoghurts or the solar system, because I don't like yoghurts, and I've no reason to bring the solar system in to things. She got up and went to tell the people constructing the building that they were doing it wrong. I wanted to go, so I picked up my empty yoghurt carton and went across the garden to where there was a small tent to look for a bin. There wasn't any in there, and whilst I was looking (there wasn't anything in there so looking more than once was somewhat superfluous, but I still did it).

Caroline's mum came over (I don't know if it was anything like her, because I don't remember her that well, but in my dream that's who it was) and said that I should go and stop her because - as I knew - she'd either get the people doing the building annoyed and they'd leave, or she'd become upset. I replied that I wasn't the person to do anything for her, and set off to see what I could do. Before I got there, she'd already left them, upset, and gone to sit with her mum and dad. I went and sat nearby and watched her. After a bit she got up and started dancing with some of the friends that arrived and she seemed happy.

If that seems just a little scary, then remember that it's only a dream and it's not a literal translation of any particular events. There's a whole load of obvious stuff in there - not all of which is related to her. So, that's all a little sad really.

You're the one I think about time after time You're the one that comes to me, visions in the night [ Make You Mine, from Siren, by Heather Nova ]

Ok, so ignore the title; that the lines just came to me...

From yesterday's Mobuzz I tried out the 'which programming language are you ?', and turned out to be Perl. How odd.

I need to go to bed now, only I don't want to. I might dream like that again .

The server's been having a very bad time over the last couple of days with the boot drive and another on that interface locking the system solid when accessed in certain (unpredictable) ways. So I've replaced them. The old 20G boot disc, and the 24G 'resources' disc are now gone, and at the same time I ditched the old 80G laptop backup (which now has more than that on it, but it, too, has gone). In their place we now have a nice 300G drive.

Yes, that's a silly big amount of space to replace the small drives with, but it's more sensible to have more space than less. I only wanted 200 originally, but the 300G wasn't much more expensive so it made sense to go for that. In any case, we've now got a 'WDC WD3000JB-00KFA0' disc (yes, that's there so that I know what it was in the future) to boot from. It's very quiet.

Couple that with the fact that there are 2 less drives in the server now and it's noticably quieter in here. And hopefully a little cooler - probably not by much but it'll help.

The CD writer didn't seem to work, and so I have it space, ready to be tested, in addition to three extra discs that are no longer in the server.

Why is it that it's only after midnight that I have any inclination what it is that I want.

/dev/hdb3: Superblock has a bad ext3 journal (inode 8). CLEARED. *** ext3 journal has been deleted - filesystem is now ext2 only *** /dev/hdb3: Superblock doesn't have has_journal flag, but has ext3 journal inode. CLEARED. [ Badness; My server ]

Stargate SG-1 (1997, SciFi)Action and Adventure/Science-FictionThis sequel to the 1994 movie Stargate chronicles the further adventures of SGC (Stargate Command). It turned out that the Goa'uld Ra was only one of many alien System Lords who used the Stargates to conquer much of the universe. When Earth uncovers a working cartouche to decipher the coding system of their own Stargate, they find they can now travel anywhere. Earth's military sends out SG teams to explore new planets, find technology, and oppose the Goa'uld. Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson from the original movie are part of SG-1. They are joined by Sam Carter, a scientist, and Teal'c, a Jaffa who is convinced the Goa'uld are not gods.Stargate SG-1 episode "Stargate SG-110x06
"200"Martin Lloyd seeks out SG-1 for assistance when his failed TV show based on the real Stargate program becomes a feature film.200" was really fun, and had me laughing a lot. Stargate Atlantis (2004, SciFi)Action and Adventure/Science-FictionThe story of Stargate Atlantis follows the cliffhanger episode on Stargate SG-1's seventh season finale "Lost City", where SG-1 found an outpost made by the race known as the Ancients in Antarctica. After the events of Stargate SG-1 season eight premiere "New Order", the Stargate Command sends an international team to investigate the outpost. Soon, Dr. Daniel Jackson discovers the location of the greatest city created by the Ancients, Atlantis. The story unfolds when the members of the expedition encounter the Wraith, the race that defeated the Ancients ten thousand years ago.Stargate Atlantis, on the other hand was incredibly dull. Skip ahead for non-Stargate things.

Not that I don't like Elizabeth Weir, but the 'it's not real, you're in a mental institution' thing seems to have been done so many times that I just really couldn't care all that much - it wasn't anything new.

Let's have a see which of the bits in SG-1 had me laughing... Well, the whole Furlings section grabbed my attention and had me going "What ?! I can't have missed that episode! They've never met the Furlings!" until Sam said 'Well that never happened' .

Sam: Do you really think the best way to introduce the heroes of the story is to show them causing a massive catastrophe ? Cameron: That's realistic. [ The best way...; Sam Carter ]

Then there's the whole "Wizard of Oz (1939)Adventure, Family, Fantasy, MusicalIn this charming film based on the popular L.Frank Baum stories, Dorothy and her dog Toto are caught in a tornado's path and somehow end up in the land of Oz. Here she meets some memorable friends and foes in her journey to meet the Wizard of Oz who everyone says can help her return home and possibly grant her new friends their goals of a brain, heart and courage.Wizard of Oz" section which had me laughing a lot, but more so when Martin suggested that she come up with something more obscure and she suggests Farscape (1999, SciFi)Science-FictionFive years ago, astronaut John Crichton attempted to use the Earth's atmosphere to propel his ship, Farscape 1, at great speeds across the solar system. He went much further though and was sucked down a wormhole to a distant part of the galaxy and into the middle of a battle. He was rescued by a group of escaping prisoners and taken aboard their living ship. As the years went by, Crichton has made enemies, powerful and dangerous enemies. On his journey to find a way back home, he freed other captives who became part of the crew on Moya.Farscape - Martin's response 'Ok, you got me, I have no idea what that is'.

Never underestimate your audience, they're generally sensitive intelligent people who respond positively to quality entertainment. [ Never underestimate your audience; Cameron; Stargate SG-1 ]

Which I quote precisely because it sounds like it must have been a forum post somewhere about the show. Strangely it doesn't come up in any searches.

The section where they mess with Cameron's mind by suggesting that O'Neill is his dad, was fun too.

How am I supposed to put together a show without any actors ? <fx: cue Thunderbirds (1965, ITV1)Animation/ChildrenThunderbirds are Go!! The year is 2065. A secret organization has been formed by multi-millionaire Jeff Tracy. The team consists of his 5 sons and his engineer, Brains. His Grandma, Kyrano, and Tin-Tin also live with the family. They live on Tracy Island somewhere in the South Pacific. They have many secret undercover agents for the organization. One in particular is Lady Penelope and Nosey Parker. The two live in a mansion in London. Scott Tracy pilots Thunderbird 1. This ship is like a scout ship. Thunderbird 2 is piloted by Virgil Tracy. This ship carries all the rescue equipment including Thunderbird 4. Thunderbird 3 is piloted by Alan, John, and sometimes Scott. The craft is used as a ferry between Thunderbird 5 and space rescues. Thunderbird 4 is piloted by Gordon Tracy. This craft is for water rescues. Thunderbird 5 is a space station in outer space. It is monitored by John and Alan on monthly shifts. The series is currently being played on G4techtThunderbirds style parody> [ Without any actors ?; Martin; Stargate SG-1 ]

Maybe we can have puppet O'Neill jump over a puppet shark on a one third scale motocycle. [ Jumped the shark; Martin; Stargate SG-1 ]

I was pondering earlier today the best way to make a huge terrorist impact without loss of life. Yeah, I know that probably seems like not a terrorist thing to do, but when you think about it, they want the attention and... well, to create terror, and whether that's through taking people's lives or just threatening to (!) it doesn't really matter. The VirusNG document I wrote a couple of years about doesn't seem to have appeared as a real thing yet. So maybe my new idea won't either. Ian says I'm "scary" for coming up with these things. I think of it as keeping myself thinking differently. If that means I have to come up with cunning new ways of destroying systems that people haven't thought of yet, then that's just the way it goes. I guess I have to remember that I also consider that things like 'random search' and even 'distillation' seem to be too unsure for me. I like certainty...

You know how you write something and you know that it's just so typical of you that you really shouldn't even be saying it ?

Last night there were no filament spiders to terrify me. Instead we had a confused vampire who had never actually been with any other vampires and was unsure exactly how it should act. Unfortunately he'd decided that the way he was going to act was to go kill one or two people per night, rip them to pieces and leave the bits all over the room or road. Eventually we met him and tried to convince him that this wasn't the way to be with some degree of success.

Julian pointed me at 'Things my girlfriend and I have argued about' and it's kept me very amused this evening. Which is handy as I needed a little cheering up.

And the cheering up was needed for a completely different thing than my dream last night which involved large numbers of spiders with 2 foot-long-filament thin legs which would attack people, enter their bodies and take them over. Which is always a joyful thing to wake up from. Now, under normal circumstances I'd quote an amusing section. But that would involve finding one which isn't butting against another section of equal amusingness. Which is tricky.

Julian told me the diary was bust for one of the entries, so hopefully that's fixed now. And that's about the only interesting thing that's happened today.

I've spent most of it chasing a bug report that turns out to be a fault in someone else's code. Makes a change from mine, but it was actually quite fun to find - using two diagnostic tools together in order to evaluate the problem and record details. "JSSL - Makes Debugging Fun!"

Oh, and I sliced my thumb trying to clean a pair of scissors. Chris and Ian suggested I should use Safety Scissors or get a Grown Up to help me. Bah.

I awoke from a 'big' dream this morning. Just one of those that seemed to be big in scale and duration. Of course, I don't know because I only remember bits about the dream. There were lots of things about it that I remember in vague terms, but the general idea what that I was going back to school - well, college or university - only I didn't want to. I didn't know what I wanted to do, only that I wanted to go back. I wondered why I'd chosen to go back to college rather than university - other dreams I've had have been mostly about going to university if they've involved the topic much at all. I kept going to a club where Caroline was working. I don't know if it was a club. There were lots of people and bright lights and drink, so a club seems reasonable. For all I know it could have been a fairground. Oh. That's a point, maybe it was a fairground. No, it didn't have a transitory feel to it. And I was really not wanting to go to college on the first day and so I didn't. Instead I went to the club, but she wasn't there, and although I was doing what I wanted to, I knew it was keeping me from the things I should be doing at the college... you know as I'm writing this, it's seeming somewhat... um... familiar in a more direct way than it did in the dream. What I mean is that in the dream I sort of knew what I was getting at and it seemed all oblique, but writing what happened it doesn't seem all that oblique.

Hey, I know I'm pretty transparent. Which isn't to say that you can't see me. Although that would be kinda cool. Except for the not being able to do a lot of things because you can't be seen. I imagine that being invisible would make a dead cool spy, but a crap footballer. That talent which is great for sneaking behind enemy lines, is far less useful when translated into your colleagues knowing where to pass the ball too. It'd make the commentary a little more interesting though. Actually what they'd do is they'd have to install heat sensor overlays on the cameras viewing the pitch, so that the invisible player would still be visible to those watching at home. Wouldn't the other team be at a disadvantage too ? Maybe they could have heat sensitive goggles. Just because you're invisible shouldn't mean that you're penalised for playing sports.

Um. Yes. Right. Anyhow. I've got a sore arm tonight as well. It hurts when I lift it past about 45 degrees so I'm trying not to do that. Great plan, huh ?

We went to Liz and John's today to see Jacqui and Oliver's baby Giana. I even held her, after much goading from Oliver. She's so tiny and gorgeous. I've got some pictures, but Oliver said he'd send some from his camera - mine's playing up a little.

Whilst looking at the radio guide on Sky earlier, I noticed something which I thought didn't work. The 'Capital' station has the tagline 'Double the music, half the ads'. This struck me as impossible and I said so. Dad disagreed and said that that's not what it means. So I found some paper and a pencil and tried to work it out. Dad, meanwhile, tried doing it in his head - and was doing better than I before I'd even found the paper. We both came to the same conclusion.

For the statement to work, 'normal' stations must broadcast adverts for 2/3 of their air time, and music for 1/3 of their air time. Which means that Capital broadcasts adverts for 1/3 of their air time and music for 2/3 of their air time. This means that Capital are suggesting that other stations broadcast adverts for 40 minutes out of every hour, and adverts make up the remainder of the time. Whereas they have adverts for 20 minutes of the hour and make up the rest of the time with music. This presumes no other use of that hour (although obviously the proportions would still hold if they did use the hour for other things). This seems highly unlikely to me, and if it is true, isn't exactly the ringing endorsement that it is intended as.

Additional infrastructure can also mitigate the scheduling and queuing delays [...], but propogation delays will remain unless and until we find a way to transmit information faster than the speed of light. [ Faster than the speed of light; Interplanetary Internet: Architectural definition ]

The "Interplanetary Internet: Architectural definition" is really a very interesting read. Yes, I know drafts aren't archival documents, but it doesn't stop it being interesting. There's lots of little statements that could make for neat little quotes. Although there's a small degree of technical knowledge required to understand some of the concepts, you don't need to know the ins and outs of the IP system in order to get a picture of what they're saying - it's explained in very clear terms (in my opinion, obviously!).

I had a nice day out with Farren today. Makes a change to leave the house . We had a day around Ely and lunch at a pub and a nice chat about stuff. Hopefully we'll do it again sometime.

I found, whilst I was out that I still hadn't sorted out what I wanted on the MP3 player. What's the first track I wanted to listen to ? 'Building A Mystery' by Sarah McLachlan. Do I have any Sarah McLachlan on the player ? No. Doh.

I added support for playing by 'Moods' to the SlimServer today. This is basically a very simple change to the 'Genre' code in order to use the new tables 'moods' and 'mood_track' which I've created. The tables have been created by the fun process of 'fetch all the moods from AMG for every artist, and then for every track within the artist, populate the 'mood_track' table'. This is not exactly fun, but the code's pretty small because I've got the artists file structure parsing all organised, and the AMG site queries aren't too complex with the library I use.

The only problem is that there are a silly number of moods (180), and they're really not all that helpful, I think. It's almost random selections of the artists, I would say. I'm trying to listen to all the 'Delicate' tracks, on 'shuffle songs' (ie randomly within 'Delicate') and the list looks odd. The full artist list for 'Delicate' (within the collection here) is...

Abba, Air Supply, Al Stewart, Beth Gibbons, Beth Orton, Bing Crosby, Bjork, Boy Meets Girl, Culture Club, Disturbed, Dolly Parton, Don McLean, Donovan, Elton John, Enigma, Enya, Evanescence, Explosions in the sky, Feist, Fleetwood Mac, Gerry Rafferty, Heather Nova, Herbie Mann, Indigo Girls, Julie London, Lisa Loeb, Mamas And The Papas, Maria McKee, Minnie Riperton, Natalie Imbruglia, Neil Finn, Nina Simone, Norah Jones, Paul Simon, Pendragon, Renaissance, Simon And Garfunkel, Space, T Rex, Tom Paxton, The Zombies.

So... Some of those are reasonable, but some are... not. I think the problem is categorising by artist, not by track. And since we don't have that per-track data available, it's a bit awkward. Is this any worse than the 'genre' problem ? Don't think so; it's just a little more distributed. I think it was worth trying, though.

It's possible that I should post my findings to one of the SlimServer forums just so that it's recorded somewhere useful that 'using AMG data for the moods ain't all that useful'.

I had to find some room on my MP3 player earlier today - 20G isn't really enough for all the things I might listen to.

Must remember to reply to Angela. I'll keep pestering myself until I do it.

Quick note for myself. 'I Will Fade' can be followed by 'What Else Is There?'. Sort of, anyhow.

I've finished the updates to the diagnostics system now, I think. It's been a reasonable amount of work to update each of the components to deal with the more complex logging we can now generate, but we've gained a few other features along the way. I would like to add symbol labelling and a few other niceties. They need a bit of an overhaul of the decoder system which, whilst incredibly useful, would probably take longer than the gain I would get. Not that the code's misdesigned. It's just beyond the design and so it would mean that a lot of the components would need to be extended in... interesting ways.

For now, I've fixed two libraries which had calls I wanted to replace by identifying them with the new diagnostics call and the ServiceList module. Which is handy - not vital, but handy - and means at least that some of the code we have is a bit more sane. It no longer thinks it is running on a BBC, which is always an advantage.

Jacqui had a baby last night. Congratulations !

I upgraded Apache2 earlier today, as apparently a security fix was available. Only then PHP stopped working. After a bit of fiddling, I've discovered that the following magic incantations restore the PHP to working order...

ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php4.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php4.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php4.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php4.load

And you never see me walking towards you If you did I would surely fade And you never feel me trying to hold you If you did I would surely fade away [ I Will Fade, from Lights, by Archive ]

Just as 'Noise' doesn't really match up to 'You All Look The Same To Me', 'Lights' doesn't quite match up to 'Noise'. However, there are always stand out tracks, as I think I may have mentioned previously. 'I Will Fade' returns to the feel that I loved about 'Rest My Head On You', but is more regretful than that track. 'Lights' itself is closer to 'Again', but doesn't quite have the same power. Which isn't to say that they're re-doing earlier things; it's just easier to compare.

It's quite amusing the number of registrations I've got in my 'Allocations' file now. There are a few in there that are for other people but most of them are mine. And there's a lot. It's amusing.

However not as amusing as the quote from a film I've just read about...

You know all those security scenarios we ran ? Well I'm smack in the middle of one we didn't think of. [ One we didn't think of; Snakes on a Plane ]

Seems like an absurd film.

My eye's watering tonight. I think it's just tired.

I asked Farren if she wanted to meet up again sometime and she came back with the strangest of replies. It turns out she'd got confused between a couple of messages. It amused me, albeit through my confusion :-)

More writing diagnostic code today. Nothing really special. Spent a long time on the phone to Chris, trying to sort out some of his MythTV problems. That was fun (!).

I also don't feel bad after yesterday.

I submitted my update to sort albums by year for SlimServer a few days ago. Yesterday someone pointed me at Bug 112 which is pretty much what I've done. So I've attached my changes there and you never know, it might even make it into the main tree. If it doesn't, I'm not worried because it works here.

I feel happy tonight, because I think I did the right thing about something Important.

And, speaking of Important, I got a nice email from Angela yesterday which I meant to reply to but never got around to. Hmm. I will tomorrow - it deserves some proper attention, not just a quick knocked off reply.

Oh, and I also got to use the phrase 'Hey, that's what my phone sounds like' today as well .

I've spent most of the day updating the diagnostic tools because I had an idea that a small change would make it possible to do some far more clever things. The 'small change' has actually involved a lot more code than I had expected, but has found a few limitations of the original implementation that I have easily overcome. If nothing else, that's got to be a bonus. I now have some even more impressive diagnostics being generated for special cases.

Unlike the previous automated diagnostics, these are intended to be explicitly deployed in known failure cases in order that more information can be reported. Exactly how useful it is really depends on how it's used, and I'm not certain that it will be useful to the majority of users. However, the ability to generate diagnostics should never be avoided. I've got a few plans for how to finish the code tomorrow, but mainly I need to tidy up the internals and finish the external API so that it's possible to control what's being done without having to recompile code.

I was chatting to Chris earlier this evening, mainly about his experiments with MythTV, which seems to be pretty neat, but got to talking about the diagnostics tools. I've got so many things that are nearly finished for debugging things. The recent BTS and related tools aren't finished, but they're a long way down the line. But other than that there's quite a few little things that have never really seen the outside world. There's the amazing (in my opinion - hey, I can afford to be immodest at times, it's one of the few things that ought to scare the hell out of people who know what it's doing) ServiceList module which I've mentioned before on usenet, but nobody was particularly interested in. Obviously there's commonly known things like addr, but also there's the simple and sweet SWIc, and its friends which I know many people have written, but they're nice too.

I've always intended to put together a 'debugging toolkit' with all these little things in, but I've never had the time. It's mostly finding and finishing (or documenting) them to a useful state that I don't have the time for. Other people must have the same sort of things lying around. Adrian Lees mentioned - ages ago, and I don't know if anything came of it - of his 'interrupt the OS' debugging he had written. No small feat, but invaluable for a particular need.

Anyhow, it's just one more thing that I enjoy doing. I think maybe I enjoy a lot of things but don't show it sometimes. Even those annoying bugs that Ian comes up with that just seem to be completely impossible until you realise that people are relying on things that don't belong to them... Grr...

And, of course, to return to the original topic of the day (ish), it might not be Important, but it keeps me amused whilst the Important things aren't so front and centre.

I'm just not going to be able to sleep tonight, I know, but at least I won't be worrying. Not too much anyhow.

Tomorrow, the 5th, is Karina Stenquist's Birthday, according to the not so subtle hints in today's programme. So, Happy Birthday!

I had a strange dream last night which I can't really remember any more. But I woke up this morning with 'Carrie Doesn't Live Here Any More' by Cliff Richard stuck in my head. It's Dad's fault for buying a collection of his hits. Oh, and I do like that track, and have ever since... oh... Peterborough '82 or something like that...

There's a very simple rule that you have to follow in any program. You don't mess with things that don't belong to you. Obviously it's one of many simple rules, but it's pretty generic. Just as you expect nobody else to mess with you behind your back, you shouldn't do the same to others.

With explicit patches you expect this kind of thing and you know that you take your life into your hands when you run such things. That's fine and acceptable - if you know the risks and you are aware of things then there's nothing too wrong with it. Obviously if you're unaware of the risks then it becomes a bigger issue. And you apply a higher standard to things that have been produced by companies than just free patches. So when you find commercial things that shouldn't need to be poking around doing so, it's slightly frustrating.

I know there are times when it can't be helped and if that's the case then obviously there's nothing you can do about it. But at other times... well, it's just plain wrong.

I know it's an undirected rant, but it's frustrated me and so it's worth it. And I feel a little better, despite the fact that I know no bugger'll take the blindest bit of notice even if I ranted at them whilst beating them repeatedly with a baseball bat. Although, thinking about it, if you're being hit by a bat then after a few hits you're probably not going to remember much. So maybe that's not a good example.

Oh, and the other Fun and Exciting thing I discovered today was a magic key to hold down whilst a component was initialising to make it do something differently. One that's not documented anywhere to the best of my knowledge, and which effectively makes the component useless. Good job it's never been triggered accidentally then.

I'm too tired to care about the diary tonight. I think I'll just go to bed. I don't think I've achieved much today, but that's mostly because I've been doing the 'compare what works and what doesn't' thing.