31 May 2006 (Wednesday) 

It's the end of the month. Whilst that's usually annoying, I'm not so bothered this month. Not sure why. There's still the usual things to do at the end of the month, like working out what I've done with my time and things like that but it's not seeming that daunting or anything. Feels almost calm again. Maybe because I'm distancing myself from the things that are annoying. Maybe... Oh... just "maybe..."

Not a lot else to say about the day though. A little more documentation sorted, a lot of time on the phone, and a little bit of a chance to fix some code that I broke a few years ago. It annoyed me intensely because I've been so careful not to. I doubt anyone really cares about the lengths you have to go to in order to be sure that the side effects of changes are minimal - or at least are what you expect them to be - and quite rightly so. It shouldn't matter to the developer or the user how much work went before. But it's still there.

I was pondering last night about 'learning stuff'. Like, when you were at school you got these 1 hour sessions to learn about 'something' (hopefully the subject that you were there for, but often quite a few other things too), and that's hardly enough time to do very much. Maybe I suck at doing things, but an hour can pass so quickly when you're going things. It is, after all, only 60 minutes, and that's only 12 lots of 5 minutes, and 5 minutes is nothing. That's utterly vague and weird but I'm not bothered.

I'm tired again. Must sleep. 3am. Bah.

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30 May 2006 (Tuesday) 

You know, I really hate writing documentation. Yes, I've said that. I think actually that I've said it many times before. There's just so much to write up, though. So many things to correct. So many things to correct the impementation of, because they're not matching the documentation. I mentioned to dad how I didn't expect anyone to read these things, and he said someting along the lines of "it must be annoying if nobody read them". Well, it is, but on the plus side at least you can say "well, it's documented".

On the down side, though, I'm very aware that what I think of as being 'enough' might not be seen by others as such. So I'm trying very hard to be complete. There's a lot of holes I've got listed as ToDos, but I'm slowly filling them in. You can sort of imagine a jigsaw that's (hmm; I was thinking about a jigsaw earlier, because of the '2 words' thing), being filled in - as you're doing one part you sometimes find sections of another part of the picture and so it grows in an odd way, with a major region 'growing', but with other smaller, or unrelated regions growing in little spurts. What a lovely analogy. Or is it a simile ? Not sure. I think it's both, actually.

Now that you're older Taking the time to look Back over your shoulder On the days confusion took [ The Space Between, from When It Falls, by Zero 7 ]

Other than that, not a lot to say today. I tried some 'barbecue ribs chinese style' crisp things that dad had brought home and the roof of my mouth hurts now. Odd thing.

Oh, and apparently it's half term now. Which I was completely oblivious of and had circumstances been different today I might have found out in a very scary (for me) way.

Another downside to writing these docs is that there are so many things which have not been finished but which need to be.

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29 May 2006 (Monday) 

It seems that I lent my radio headphones to Julian, not Simon. I was only one brother out. That's not too bad, I suppose.

I seem to have done not a lot of code writing today. Lots of little bug fixes as I've been working through documentation. It's not that there isn't any documentation (well, not for most things), but that quality is more akin to lecture notes than anything that's actually usable. If you're me you can understand what they mean. Otherwise you might as well be translating Russian, with only a long haired cat to help you. But as well as fixing the little bugs, I've managed to sort out about 80K of documents today - not writing that much, thankfully! Most of it was just sorting it to the right place and amending the bits that are now broader, narrower, or just plain wrong compared to when they were written. One or two documents needed writing from scratch, but that's all.

Just a couple of days left until 'Half Life 2: Episode One' is available. It's not like me to get too excited over things like that, but... well, it is a little bit exciting. Actually, I'm more than a little curious how well the process is going. There's been periodic updates of the game content which apparently will be unlocked at release. It all seems - so far - quite well managed and painless. Whether it will screw up at release because of the large demand, I'm not sure. But that is one of the main reasons why it's quite exciting.

I think I've just worked something out. Two words which Caroline said, which have been annoying me for the past 10 years or so. I'd just got off a train with Phil, having forgotten my t-shirt and having to stop the train just as it was pulling out... and I woke up. And had this very clear thought in my head what those words meant. I wish I'd known 10 years ago, though.

It's just a pity that those mistakes in the past just cannot be undone. Maybe it's just an excuse, in... maybe I'm just trying to make up reasons.

In my defence, and it's very little defence, I'll grant you, I've changed. Not that makes the blindest bit of difference. Oh well. If it takes me 10 years to work out something like that then really I don't deserve ... um... well, I don't know what... I deserve what I got ?

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27 May 2006 (Saturday) 

Today's top tip... disabling SpriteV may be foolish.

Doctor Who today (The Idiot's Lantern) seemed pretty poor to me. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood.

I was going to go in to Center Parcs, but I really couldn't sleep last night, so... well, I didn't.

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26 May 2006 (Friday) 

I had some radio headphones. I don't know where they've gone. I thought I had lent them to Simon, but he said that he hadn't got them. I've had a look through the cupboard of bits and I can't see them in there. The brief glance under the bed - which is where odd things get put - says that it's not under their either. So I'm a little stumped.

However, in looking, I flicked through the Big Box Of Printed Documentation, which has lots of documents that I've printed out. Amongst them are the odd specifications that I've written over the years, ranging from the Boot structure functional specification (which appears to just document the same things as are in PRM 5a) and the Options module, through discussion documents for general OS direction, to the RISC OS developer conference note.

One thing that's very clear is that I don't half write a lot of cack.

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25 May 2006 (Thursday) 

I've had another one of those scarey moments when things work as they should, but in an unexpected way. Only a couple of times in the past have I had a C-backtrace appear in a non-C application, but today was one of them. It's really odd because you don't expact it in the slightest. In this case it was because a free had been used on an invalid pointer, which results in a direct backtrace within the C enviroment. As this was a C-module that triggered the operation from within its SWI, we get a backtrace from whatever application called it - in this case, a BASIC program.

Better still, though, not only do we get the backtrace to the screen, but the diagnostic dump is generated safely so we can debug the problem separately if necessary.

Today's been mostly fun, writing an experimental module to make sure that the features I was documenting actually are the way they're meant to be. Found only a few anomalies from it - and, of course, the fun diagnostics from within the module.

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24 May 2006 (Wednesday) 

I needed a little bit of a change today. So instead of doing the normal stuff, I've written myself an 'email inbox to RSS feed server'. Which isn't at all impressive, but it looks cute - 'cos I can now see what email there is on the Squeezebox now. And it wasn't as much work as it might have been, because I just picked up my old email summary program, ported it to linux and then wrote a perl program to convert the output into an RSS feed - it's just hung off the HTTP server I wrote for the cover fetcher (come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure what part of the cover fetcher needs a HTTP server, but that's where it was).

In any case, the Squeezebox can now display the current emails in the inbox for mum and dad. I've not put mine in there because... well, I have lots of messages in my inbox. Maybe I should sort that out so that it's not silly. I've even added sorting to the lists so it only gives you the last 15 emails you've received. It may not be much, but it's been fun.

I found some cute little poems that I wrote ages ago, whilst I was trying to sort out my mailbox. I should probably sort them into the right place, but I'm not sure that they're finished enough really.

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22 May 2006 (Monday) 

M'lady: Salem, you're the only one who understands me. Salem: Yeah, but it doesn't mean I care. [ I don't care; Salem and M'lady; Sabrina The Teenage Witch ]

It seems, going by my conversations today and yesterday that I've become incapable of holding a conversation of longer than a few minutes. I don't know why that is. I'd like to change that .

Every time I think I have some words to write here, late at night, I find that when I come to write them they've evaporated like mist. I guess that's the thing about having a bad memory. Or possibly of not having a good concentration span. Maybe it's related to something about how I live. Maybe... I dunno... I tend to put off getting food when I'm hungry. I tend to put off going to bed when I'm tired. Like now, of course, so maybe that doesn't help.

It's only late at night, when I'm idling (bah, too much computing) that I actually think about things, though. Properly, that is, rather than the more generalised things throughout the day which I tend to distract myself from by doing work things.

I wonder, sometimes, if when I read this back in 20 years time whether I'll have any idea of what I was thinking about and how I felt. If I'm missing anything important or whether I'm not being verbose enough. But then the thought comes that I don't know if I'll be around in 20 years to care, so I try to stop worrying.

I could really do with some sort of plan. I've been hoping that I'd make some decision, and I've been trying to make my mind up as to what that plan should be, but it never seems to actually make it.

How many things go unsaid because you've no idea how to say them ? Claire bothered me a little while back by saying - quite tactfully - that I manage to say the wrong things to people. It bothers me a lot, because I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that my words are right. I don't know why that is. I can guess, but I hesitate to say it because of my memory playing tricks. I remember being very careful with my words around first year of university, because I remember chatting on IRC with people and using carefully chosen words. I can't remember much more before that, and I know many times I've done it after that.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I thought I'd get the chance to scream and shout, and to just be angry. But I never let myself do that, and I think that I'm never going to. I know that's just the 'you don't do that sort of thing' thing, but that's all that it is. Like the fact that you don't ask the questions whose answers change nothing.

Is it important to ask those questions when the answer, whatever it is, can mean nothing ? Or that in asking those questions there are much worse consequences than purely the answer ?

It's like trying to take a measurement and the act of measuring affecting your answer, except that it's more general, I suppose. How would it be if you went to a shop and if you just paid for things you'd get one price, but if you asked for the price, you'd get a different one ? Is that even remotely relevant ?

If I was to look back at the number of times I've asked myself these same questions, what would I see ? Is this a product of a poor memory ? Or just some inability to recognise a failing in myself ? Well, to accept a failing, maybe.

Decisions made late at night when you cannot sleep are never to be acted upon. That's something I decided ages ago. Did I decide that because of Douglas Adams ? Or because I'd done something based on a decision at night that had turned out bad ? Or did I just reason myself out of those decisions at night so many times that it became a core part of who I am ?

I try so hard not to act on impulse, in talking to people, in what I do and in how I act. Why don't I trust myself in those things ? Why am I so self-doubting that I question and stop the immediate thoughts ? I doubt I can ever hope to answer that. At least not with any one thing. You cannot attribute any particular thing to any given action.

Woah, that's a whole lot of generalities. How strange that on moving from thinking in my head to trying to put words down I move from specifics to generalities. Maybe it's the knowledge that I'm writing things for them to be read. Which would be bad. It's also that the specifics are not just me, but my friends and family.

I still don't know the answer to this work thing. It bothers me in a way I haven't yet put my finger on. I think I've nearly had it a few times, but it's faded from my memory. You'd think I'd remember something I'd been looking for the answer to when I found it. It's not always the case.

I've always tried to understand the other person's view. I don't think I do very well sometimes. I try to put myself in their place, and to see things the way they do. I think that's been a bad thing a few times in my life. Maybe that's what Claire meant. Well, it's not - she meant it more literally, I think, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Why do I need to have the complicated things to do ? I know it's because I have to prove that I can do it. That's a form of arrogance, but I can live with that. But is there any point in doing things if there's nobody to prove it to ? Nobody to say "that's neat" ? Or if there are people to say that but that you play it down because you want to come across as modest when really what you want is some recognition ?

Some words like that. It's a wonder to me, sometimes, that there's all these words around and about in the world. Some recorded like this, some spoken, some only thought. How many of those words are important ? In the grand scheme of things ? Most are just about the day to day things - remembering to buy milk, talking about the weather or writing a note to a friend. But how many are actually important ? In that they change the way of things ? I don't know. I doubt it matters. But I'm conscious of the fact that I contribute daily to that general noise, even in the notes to myself.

That's not important though. Not in any way that matters anyhow. I bother myself in wondering how much is lost though. I hate to lose things. I remember sitting in the car when I was younger - I don't know about 10 or something ? - and trying to write a log of the things that I did. I don't think it was the '88 diary, because I'm pretty sure I lost it, but I remember (in that odd way that you do) saying that I wanted to write down that I'd broken my pencil. Either Mum or Grandma - I think it was Grandma but I'm not sure - saying something like "don't you want to remember only the good things ?". I knew I wanted to write things down because they happened, not just because I wanted to remember them that way. Maybe it's my memory playing up because I don't have a record of that time, but I do remember that. I remember it was the Inn On The Green and for some reason the colour green is important. Maybe the book was green. Or the car.

Why's this matter ? I guess I'm just writing it because I remember it and if I don't it'll be gone and lost. My poor memory really bothers me.

Which has led me miles away from the original train of thought that I came to here, and which I felt was important. But those thoughts fled and haven't been recovered.

I keep forgetting pine has a spell checker. Must remember to use it before submitting diary entries.

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21 May 2006 (Sunday) 

Just lying smiling in the dark Shooting stars around your heart Dreams come bouncing in your head Pure and simple everytime [ Pure, from Like You Do (The Best Of), by Lightning Seeds ]

It's quite a pretty little track, but I'm not sure so much about what it means. Whether it's meant to be sad or happy. I think it's happy, but it... just doesn't really have anything to tell me.

I was looking at fixing a little bug earlier and it led my to a section of code that I'd forgotten about how awful it was. With a little tweaking, I've fixed it to be better. With a lot more tweaking I managed to find out how I'd broken it and keep it much faster. Only, that's quite a number of hours gone and I was in a sort of odd mood when I rang a friend, and then it turned out all weird. Oh well.

But now I have to return to the original bug I was looking at and see if I can fix that, which is quite a bit more complex. Partly because I'm not in the frame of mind to fix it now .

There's a world of misdirected energy in my life, it seems sometimes. It makes my think of Cybil's comment about Basil (Fawlty Towers) - "You never seem to get the balance right, do you ?". Or words to that effect. Only in my case it's not about pandering to people, it's about just trying to get the right focus. Oh, I can blame it on feeling guilty about things and all that, but it's only a re-directed guilty about other things really. Maybe there's some measure in there that you can do - guilty doesn't actually ever go away but only gets diverted to new places. So if you feel guilty about (say) forgetting your brother's birthday, you direct it to something else instead. Maybe. No, I'm just talking cack.

However, despite the cack, there's an interesting thing. I have a note about someone written down hereabouts somewhere which I could easily apply to myself, although I hadn't realised it until a couple of weeks ago. It's strange when you think of yourself like that, because you question whether it's something that could have always applied and you were just oblivious of it, or whether it's a 'recent' thing. Neither answer is particularly helpful in any way, but I guess that's not the point when you're trying to understand yourself.

I'm left to ponder, after someone's comment earlier today, why it is that they think that work is important to me... A few people have said things that make me think that that's how I come over. I'm passionate about what I do, clearly, but it's not important. It's something that I do, but it's not actually important. I'm not sure on the whole what is important. I think that's one reason why I feel confused at the moment.

A friend's comment on the talker was that "work isn't important but having something complicated to do is", which seems pretty accurate. It's nice to know that friends know me.

I'm hungry. It's 3am and I'm hungry. Mum's still not home. I really don't need to stay up for her; and I really am not all that bothered any more, but I do still tend to do it. I'm too annoyed at myself to go to bed, too. And I am hungry.

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20 May 2006 (Saturday) 

For the past 3 nights I've been trying to complete one FreeCell game on XP. Game #13582 is just being very annoying - I can't seem to complete it. I'm determined I will, but it's been the hardest I've tried so far, I think. Here goes another night, I suppose...

Yay. Done it. Just shows that perseverence pays off. Which I'd forgotten. 'cos in my experience preseverence usually just ends up in embarassment.

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19 May 2006 (Friday) 

Mum made a cake which was fortified with chocolate. Now, by that I don't mean the normal use of 'fortified' with food, but actually 'made a fort out of it'.

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18 May 2006 (Thursday) 

you can fold cheese slices more often than you can with paper its all to do with the size of CheezAtoms apparently [ CheezAtoms; Pedro; Talker ]

Website backups today; it seems that the source for my site is around 6M. Which is a lot of writing - not much of it useful, admittedly. But half of that is the diary content. Surprising.

I've just totted up the ToDos I've got through today. 5 deleted, 9 added. So that's a net loss on the day, obviously. Usually I don't think about it, but this time I've decided to check. It's not exactly reassuring. I tried a random 'skim through a load of components and documents and see what still needs doing'. I've now got two more pages of ToDos on top of those that I added from today's work. Probably these overlap the other things that have already been put on the list, but still it's a lot of stuff .

And in the dream last night I was getting beaten up by Lucy because I was with a girl who didn't want to go with some guy - which was who Lucy was working for. Fortunately, 'cos we're family Lucy didn't want to hurt me so only hit me a lot, rather than a very lot. And then she let me run away, slowly, and hide by moving to another town, so that she and the other hit men couldn't find me and this girl. For some reason, though, I kept coming back to the town to do things, even though I knew if they found me they'd probably just kill me. That's hardly sensible now, is it ?

Then again, imagining Lucy as a henchman out to get me isn't exactly normal, but I believe that that's playing on the fact that she seems so nice and friendly but I really wouldn't want to get on her bad side. She scares me.

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17 May 2006 (Wednesday) 

Really couldn't sleep last night. Must have been around 7am before I got to sleep. Which means that tonight I'm trying to get to bed a little earlier than usual. It's nearly 1am, so that's not quite worked out. Actually I've just realised that all I had for tea was half a beefburger. That's not good.

What have we done today ? Well, a few days ago I worked out how I could implement one of the features that someone else I work with will require. I'm not sure it's actually as easy as I thought, having now spent a day working on the code, but I'm getting there - the side effect is that some of the work I meant to do around 4 years ago and couldn't fit into the whole design back then has now been done. If it's right, it'll make some of the code in other components much neater and reduce the side effects of some operations. If it's wrong then I've not lost anything really.

On the plus side, I've re-written a few assembler functions in C because... well, because I can't face having to maintain the assembler to be perfectly honest. It's fine for some things, but for others I just don't have the time or energy to keep in mind all the registers, side effects, entry points and branches. Give me C any day. At least then you can see the design, rather than the implementation and replace things in a much more sensible way. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Actually, I was talking to someone a few days ago and they said that they used C mostly as a high level assembler. That's pretty much what I'm doing with this stuff.

Julian's birthday today, too - I had forgotten until I noticed the date . For some reason his birthday wasn't on my settings for the reminders program. It is now, so hopefully I won't look like a fool in the future. Well, not for that anyhow.

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16 May 2006 (Tuesday) 

Heds: what are we talking about ? gerph: Um... quick summary since I got here... VC2005 has a bug with goto+debugger; you shouldn't touch things that danes write; C# generics make for poor sentences; and how you can't hi-5 a pig. Heds: all sounds sensible. [ What are we talking about ?; Heds and I; Talker ]

Which just goes to show that you shouldn't try to summarise the stuff we talk about.

I sent someone an archive of documentation a little while back for them to look at. I sent it using GMail (my GMail, that is, not the google thing), and because I forgot that I was including a directory, it archived the lot up for me. GMail uses the 'no compression' form of Zip archive for such things, because it's simple to do - GMail was meant to be a sub-32K email client. Only, the recipient reported that WinZip failed to decode it at all. It kinda surprised me because the 'no compression' (just storing the data) archive really is the simplest of forms. Unless, of course, my implementation was wrong - but after 10 years or so, I'm sure someone would have mentioned it, or at the least I'd have spotted it was broken. And original PKZip always decoded them, as did InfoZip. Oh well.

Today has been mostly about writing documentation. And checking documentation. And correcting documentation. And correcting implementation to match documentation. All in all it's been tedious and numbing. But I think it's been worthwhile. Easily got twice as many new 'ToDo's as I crossed off today, but still that's always the way of it.

I complain about the documentation a lot really. I do dislike doing it, but that's mainly because it's got to be right. Without correct, complete, documentation, changes might as well not have been made. Well, that's not really true for everything. But for anything that people might actually use it's important. And it's certainly important for anything that may cause problems. I pretty much accept that whatever changes people will complain that it has changed. It's unlikely in the extreme that anyone will be find everything sensible. Even I don't like some changes because they're half-jobs. So if anyone liked the half-job they'd not have the same goals as I have.

The half-jobs are mostly because things have to change in order for 'other stuff' to work sensibly, and because making the full changes in one go is just going to take a long time and cause problems, we have to aim for a half-way house to ensure that the transition is less painful. The problem with that kind of thing is that people will complain because things have changed and (maybe) grudgingly accept the change, but then the next time around they'll be more frustrated because they have to change again.

I don't want to get into any specifics, but there are quite a few low level areas that have changed significantly without much external change noticeable, and then there is what those things will need to do which is quite different again and will require much larger external change. The impact of the changes is just something you have to determine and see if it's worth it. Obviously there'd be no point if nothing was going to ever get done. Fortunately, I'm less bothered by how many other people use things... Hmm... well that's a lie... I get frustrated that no bugger uses the stuff I do add, but that's just the way it goes. It makes life easier for me, which is what matters and for 90% (guess - not real figure) of things there is a goal beyond the immediately visible changes.

Surprisingly few changes are ever made for themselves, actually. Things like 'that's poor code', or 'that'll break if the user did blah' excluded, the bulk of changes are 'if we change this then we will be able to do blah more easily'. I doubt that's obvious to some people. It's impossible to justify every little change - particularly as the justification would usually take longer than the documentation of the change and its implementation, as well as obviously giving away future plans in far more detail than I ever want to.

Some things are just hideously crippled because there just isn't time to complete them to function the way that they should be. That's a pity, but there's not a lot I can do about that.

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15 May 2006 (Monday) 

I've spent around 15 hours working with and testing ARM code today. Usually that wouldn't bother me so much, but it does seem to have hurt today. On the plus side, one function is now running around 8 times faster than it was yesterday. And that's 22 times faster than it did in the last release. The annoying thing is that I know it could be faster. Only I just can't see how it's managing to be slow in the first place.

I've got a little note on the laptop which says :

"I don't know what it means. I suppose I should take some comfort in the fact that I'm still trying to work it out, but that's not all that helpful really."

I must have written it a few nights ago, but I'm not really sure. Regardless of when it was written, it's a pretty little snippet of thought really.

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14 May 2006 (Sunday) 

I've spent a very relaxing day today butchering code. Well, strictly, I've been pruning code, because I've only been cutting away the dead bits and tidying it up, but there was enough of it that it felt like butchering. The results are, so far, quite pleasing. I've not yet seen anything cut which was actually used so it's not important - keeping behaviour as close to the previous behaviour is vitally important.

I did notice a neat little trick I could pull, before realising that I'd be breaking behaviour that certain things actually rely on and was well documented. A pity but not an insurmountable one - I have a cunning idea about how I can get around it, but I'll need to spend more time looking at the implications of that change as well.

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13 May 2006 (Saturday) 

Ron: Have you ever conjectured as to whether the world as we perceive it is the be all and end all of physical existance ? Yvonne: Are we talking spiritually or scientifically ? Ron: I think I'm taking a position somewhere between those two alternatives. Yvonne: So we're dealing in metaphysics ? Ron: Could be - though I couldn't say for certain without getting hold of a dictionary. [ Metaphysics; Ron and Yvonne; Goodnight sweetheart ]

As well as liking the studio 'Out Of Myself' album by Riverside, I rather like their live versions which are on the 'Voices In My Head' album. Seems you can't actually get that album outside of foreign land, so I have to hold on to my money and just listen to the downloaded one. Which makes me feel bad. I'm still waiting for my physical 'Out Of Myself' CD to arrive. So much for 101CD's 'usually ships in 3-5 days'.

I had a cunning idea today. One of the things that SlimServer does is that it tends to thrash the disc and you can hear it rattling away upstairs when you select different options. Now that's annoying and putting in more memory has helped, but hasn't alleviated the problem entirely. Obviously the reason that it's still happening is that it has to get data from the disc. Since I don't have any swap on the server, it's not paging in the program. So, I returned to my thoughts about the database and checked its cache. The 'default_cache_size' parameter is, by default, 2000. That's fine, only I think that's why it ends up thrashing - the index pages and the data they refer to have to be reloaded a lot. Sometimes it doesn't thrash and that's probably when the pages are in disc cache in memory, rather than in the database cache. So, the solution, I thought, was to increase the size of the default cache size.

The database is held (here) as ~slimserver/.slimserversql.db, so we start up sqlite3 with that database and enter 'pragma default_cache_size=20000;'. That is, 10 times as much cache. A page is about 1.5K according to the SQLite documentation, so that's around 30M. However, the increase in size of the slimserver process is only around 9M. Previously it would have been using 3M (2000 pages), so that means that the indices that I'm using take around 12M in memory. Apparently for 27391 tracks, 2394 albums, 1176 artists. Since I've invariably got around 200M free in the server, using an extra 9M on data that's cached closer to where it's needed is a good thing. The disc doesn't seem to thrash as much (in small tests) and runs a little faster. Of course, the entire thing is now pretty much CPU-bound, blocking on the disc access much less.

I'll see how it goes and hopefully it'll be better off like this.

In particular, the lazy search for artists appears to be very fast now. The lazy songs search is not as fast as artists, but I haven't used it much before so don't have anything to compare to really.

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10 May 2006 (Wednesday) 

Much sunshine today.
Crazy people on the roads.
Didn't die; that's good.

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9 May 2006 (Tuesday) 

Mum was a little bemused this evening. I was staring intently at the screen and noticed that she was watching me, and told her that I was using my 'program to crash things'. It's just because I need to test failure cases aren't fatal, so I have a program that simulates all the possible failure cases so that I can see what the results are and make sure that they're actually what's meant to happen. But I can see how it's strange to have a program whose sole purpose is to break.

That said, it's not actually its sole purpose. It was originally my cross-platform ARM disassembler - from early work on the Pascal decompiler - and it's been subverted because I needed something 'real' to stick the code in so that I could see the failures in a more realistic program. So now it disassembles about 32 words, then waits for me to press a key - the key which determines how it's going to blow up.

Not all that interesting, but great fun. I actually enjoy some of these sorts of debugging sessions. It feels like you're actually getting somewhere, some of the time.

I've just noticed that if I pull the hairs in my eyebrow, they come out. So I probably shouldn't do that.

A somewhat disturbed website that Chris pointed me at had a few little gems on it - exploding pigeons, and the more amusing than silly duck translation. There's all sorts of disturbing and sad things on that site, but 'something broken' seems to sort of sum up the sadness that isn't about people dying.

I was thinking earlier on my previous thoughts about how 'people that just stick other people's stuff together aren't really developing software'. I'm sort of getting this feeling that I'm wrong. Not about them, but about me - maybe because I don't do that, I'm not developing software. At least not in that sense. That is, it's not them that are the different ones, but me.

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8 May 2006 (Monday) 

Plumes of smoke rise Merge into the leaden sky [ Sorrow, from A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, by Pink Floyd ]

Big fire in next door's garden today. I looked out of the kitchen window and there's this big black column of smoke coming from 'somewhere'. I rushed upstairs to check where it was, but it was only in the garden fortunately. But my first thought on seeing it was the above lyric.

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7 May 2006 (Sunday) 

Watching Doctor Who Confidential today, I noticed on one of the sheets 'Helen Rayner' and I was about to spin back to check but then her name popped up on the screen properly - as 'Helen Raynor'.

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6 May 2006 (Saturday) 

More dreams today. Maybe it's the heat that does it. Last night was a strange dream about having spilt red paint on a cream carpet and being unable to get the stain out. And as if that wasn't strange enough, I went to visit Simon Merton to see what he was up to these days, and ended up hanging out in a back shed just off the high street where it was lovely and quiet and we could just settle down comfortably and have a drink. It wasn't a shed, but it had that sort of feel to it, whilst being a small bar at the same time. Some of the things I remember vividly are that the door was a quite strong green, and had a latch-handle on it (like a shed), that there was a telly sitting up in the corner of the room, the bar was small and very compact for a small place - you could only get maybe 15 people in there at a push, and there were quite a few sofa chairs and 'sitting tables' (a sitting table is just somewhere you're meant to sit, rather than to actually put things on - don't ask me where I get that idea from, 'cos I really don't think that any table is really designed to be sat on, even though they do). And as we were chatting, Caroline and some of her friends came in and sat on the other side of the room. Which, given its small size, meant that they were only really a couple of metres away. That's about all I remember.

I've spent the entire day tracking down a bug which turned out to be a 'STMDA' which should have said 'STMDB'. I really dislike that kind of thing. After you've spent ages tweaking all the things you think can be wrong, the true cause of all your pain turns out to not be in your code, not anywhere near your code and not your fault in the slightest. Oh well.

Doctor Who tonight. I missed the post-opening titles, 'cos I was making myself a cup of tea, so I didn't know what the episode was called, or who it was written by. But I really enjoyed it; thought it was nicely placed and lots of little fun things - in particular the Doctor's comments and the appearance of a horse in the spaceship (oddly, I was thinking when I saw it "nah, Douglas Adams can't have written this", and when Dad saw it he said "Douglas Adams is dead, isn't he?"). It's only when I watched it a second time (with Dad, 'cos we had tea - he didn't get in until after it finished) that I saw that it was by Steven Moffat. It seems that I just like his stuff, even when I don't know its him.

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5 May 2006 (Friday) 

Last night was so very very hot. Took ages to get to sleep. But when I did, I had a strange dream about being in a park where there was some kind of fair going on. I was staying in a large tent. It was white and red. Part of the fair had a huge crane thing and a number of fair-type things around its base. Those are the kind of strange things that I remember. I was in a hurry, I was going to meet Caroline and see how she was. She was working in some cave, with machines all around the walls and lots of little people that kept breaking. Whilst I was visiting her, though, I kept having to rush off to see another Caroline who was somewhere else, in a white room with lots of odd things dotted around the place. When I came back to the first Caroline one time, she was in a meeting with 4 suits who she worked for, who were telling her they'd have to let her go. And I remember feeling quite helpless.

I was pacing the shower this morning, as I do, and I actually realised what the dream was. It makes a bit of a change, because usually I'm not all that hot on spotting the meanings - which, to be fair, I don't think there are in many of my dreams, or I'd be looking to hijack a submarine by now.

Anyhow, that amused me this morning. In a 'oh dear' kind of way.

I feel (quite justifiably, I think) quite pleased with myself today. I needed to sort a table of entries that was being assembled with ObjAsm, despite the fact that the entries are being given in a random order. So I managed to write a few macros that take all the values and write them out in a table sorted correctly. I'm quite pleased that it worked.

She's got a wedding ring that's Cartier, as far as you can tell She threw it down the local wishing well [ Somebody Special, from Suits (Remaster), by Fish ]

Glancing at the lyrics tonight I noticed that the words aren't what I thought. I had thought that it was '... that's cotton, as far as you can tell', cotton being a second wedding anniversary. It fits better with the track being Cartier, though.

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4 May 2006 (Thursday) 

A few nights ago I had a very strange dream about stealing a submarine. One of the fun things about it was that if you're sitting in a boat, raft or other small craft, right beside it, you can't see it. I realise that that is kind of the point, but it was still fun. I was drifting away and not realising. For some reason at the end of the dream we ended up at a secret naval base with the submarine - I think we were hoping to sneak in and get supplies. Only there were a whole lot of soldier people waiting there with big guns. In a half-hearted attempt to escape, some of us ran to one of the experimental weapons - complete with 'experimental' signs, flashing lights and other high tech things around it. We threatened to use it and the General who was there told us to go ahead. It turned out it was a special kind of drinks despenser. So we didn't really do so well. There was also a section in the middle about going to an island to see some friends and running aground, but I don't remember that so well. That's two quite vivid dreams about submarines in the space of a year. I'm pretty sure I'm not all that bothered about them, but... well, it's strange.

I was going to go to bed early tonight; but it's now 3am. Bother.

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3 May 2006 (Wednesday) 

Sometimes you get a nagging feeling that you should understand something and even though you've put the thought in, you've got nowhere. That's how I felt this evening listening to Semisonic 'Gone To The Movies'. I don't know why, but it sort of nags at me. Oh well.

I had emmense fun today trying to work out why a simple section of code was telling me that 19963 was after 2000000. The reason, I discovered eventually, was that I'd forgotten that I was counting down, not up. I felt a little silly. Oh well.

Someone mentioned today that in the early hours of the morning it will be "01:02:03 04/05/06". Whilst I've not got any clocks that actually display the time in that format, it's still quite cute. I don't think I will be staying up for it, though, 'cos I'm trying quite hard to get to be normal with my sleep patterns. After being kept up until 2am last night with someone on the phone, and then doing another couple of hours of stuff because "I might as well, 'cos it's so late", it would be a good idea to try to get to be more normal again.

Feel so light This is all I wanna feel tonight Feel so light Tonight and the rest of my life [ Tonight And The Rest Of My Life, by Nina Gordon ]

Always get a nice feeling off that track. It's really quite nice.

I got a nice little email from Dan Sully at Slim Devices to tell me that he'd put through my changes for the ID3v2.4 updates to MP3::Info.pm in their subversion server, so it'd have been in the last night's builds. Oooh. Scary. If there's problems with it I will bet that I'll see them on the forums . I think my code's fine with the exception of known and documented limitations.

It's been so hot in here today. I really don't like that. Makes it hard to concentrate. The water thermometer thing says it's something hotter than 24 degrees, which for this room is pretty bad.

I got a postcard from Farren today, too - which was quite a surprise. I saw the card and thought "oh, mum and dad sent one whilst they were in Turkey and it's only just got here", but no, it was from Farren. She'd only said that she was going away - not where she was going . So it was lovely to get a card off her .

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2 May 2006 (Tuesday) 

Listening to friends complaining about the way that their corporate wiki was being abused, I came up with the cunning idea to have a wiki that allowed you to write code. It's really not all that novel, but it is kinda cute in its own little sad way. You type your code into the edit box and save it. When you view the code, anything that's in a comment (all this is for C code) is formatted wiki style, everything else is regular text formatting. The '#include' lines are interpreted and the referenced files will be linked to. Instead of just an Edit button at the bottom, we've got a 'Compile' button, and - if the compile phase has already been performed - a 'Download' button. When you compile the code you get a list of all the warnings that the compiler output. I thought about doing the Compile phase implicitly after an edit, but it's a bit wasteful if you're just editing one or two things.

It's not very advanced really, and there are loads of ways that it could be updated. Some of the simple ones that would be useful to add would be...

• allow users to split up projects so that you didn't have to work in the same file namespace all the time.
• allow each project to have a set of associated source files - a makefile if you will - so that multi-file sets can be build.
• automatically process with ctags and produce highlighting and/or searching capabilities from it.
• add anchors for each line in the text and allow the compiler output to link to the source.
• support other filetypes, so assembler and CMHG files can be built as well
• support different build options (to go with CMHG and the makefile idea) so that different APCS options, or defines can be specified.
• add in some history so that if you delete your masterpiece you can get it back .
• integrate with CVS (which would do the history thing, I suppose) so that all changes can be recorded when users are happy with them.
• split into multiple frames, so that the user can have their compiler/throwback window separate from their editor/viewer.

... and so on and so forth. It's a pretty simple idea really. Hardly takes any sort of work to get right - took me about an hour and a bit to get the initial implementation working. It's just a neat little odd thing. Haven't done one of them in ages.

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1 May 2006 (Monday) 

The thought occurred to me today... Do plants have antibodies ? What I mean is that we - people that is - have antibodies that fight off disease, and they're made by cells in our blood which are carried to where they're needed. That's fine, but plants are different to us, and for a start they don't have blood or a circulatory system like we do to distribute such cells to the source of an attack - unless you count the sap that the tree uses to nourish its higher levels; does that provide the same purpose ? If a fungus attacks a tree, what stops it from consuming the tree as a whole ? Is there something that the tree produces that performs the same job as we do to fight off an infection like that ?

It might seem a little bit of a dim question, but I don't know the answer.

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