31 Jan 2007 (Wednesday) 

Well it's been a couple of days with the the new style music links in the diary, and I've no idea whether I like them or not. The diary generation time has increased massively 'cos it has to look up the artists in really nasty way. It might be useful to pre-cache some details there, I think.

Amusingly, I was just looking through the entries for November, December and January ('cos someone interesting was looking at them earlier today) to see what fun things there are in there, and there's a comment on 23 Jan 2001, asking for a search engine to return the official website for an artist, given their name - and the fact that I couldn't find one. So... it's 6 years later (almost exactly actually) and the best we have is MusicBrainz.

The other thing is that I used to swear a lot more back then, it seems. I hope that means that I've calmed down .

Today I've had a very busy day, it seems - lots of phone calls to organise what I'm doing next week. I don't know, nothing happens for ages, and then everything happens all at once. At least I feel good about it. Scared, but good. Absolutely nothing to do with Caroline, either.

Because of being scared, I've not rung her tonight either. It'd be nice to say it's not a big deal, but it is really, to me.

I've been trying out the streaming radio again today. It's neat that it sometimes shows me tracks that I wouldn't otherwise have heard - for example after quite a few tracks that I knew and had, I heard Who's Crying Now, by Journey which I've not heard in ages and wouldn't have known the name of if I'd had a gun to my head. Now I do. And Kashmir, by Led Zeppelin as well - the intro has been used for so many TV things that it's scary. I picked, at random, 'Radio Free Las Vegas' from the Live365 on SoftSqueeze, and it seemed to be quite a reasonable selection.

I'm quite tired now, though, so I think I need to go to bed. Sleep.

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30 Jan 2007 (Tuesday) 

Some numbers are magic. Like 42. Because obviously that's The Answer. Others just appear like magic. For the past couple of days a number has been in my head, just bobbing around. It's not a particularly special number really, but it would have been nice to know what it was.

I was hopeful that exploring what the number might be would give me some sort of clue as to its source. It'll annoy me until I either find it or forget .

[Edit (04 Feb 2007): I found out what the number was, and have removed its reference from the diary]

For some reason google docs makes me think that at some point someone at google said "I didn't say you couldn't write a spreadsheet using ajax, I said you shouldn't." [ Google Spreadsheets; Jogu ]

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29 Jan 2007 (Monday) 

I made a little effort (not much!) to make song, artist and album a little more centralised in the diary. In amongst which Simon rang and I chatted to him for a bit - which also meant that it was late and my plan to ring Caroline was out of the window. Oh well. But after that, I've finished doing the song reference things now. It's not all that impressive really. In theory, where I've remembered to do it, any artist reference can link off to the artist's official website. So if I mention in passing that I liked listening to Finally Woken, by Jem there should be a nice link generated automatically to Jem's website. It doesn't know what to do about the albums or the tracks, except to construct the right wording, but it's at least structured.

I've also tried out changing the background colour on the elements of the reference as well. I'm not sure that I like it. I'll see how it looks in a few days and whether I think it fits with the style or not. At the moment I'm leaning toward 'not'.

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28 Jan 2007 (Sunday) 

Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow Who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain There he goes moving across the water There he goes turning my whole world around [ Broken Arrow, from Robbie Robertson, by Robbie Robertson ]

I woke up with Broken Arrow going around my head this morning. Amusingly, I know Broken Arrow because of Rod Stewart's cover, but I prefer Robbie Robertson's version better. I tend to think that the cover that you hear first is more likely to be the one that you'll like, but I prefer Robertson's voice over Stewart's for some reason. There are tree images in the lyrics that are interesting, 'cos I'm not aware of their source (would 'etymology' be the right word to use there ? or can you only use that in reference to words ?), the most obvious of which is the 'broken arrow' which I don't know of any reason for, and can't seem to find any use of it in this sort of context (I'm ignoring the film, for obvious reasons ). The closest I can get is the city of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma suggests that the term is thought of as meaning an act of peace (incorrectly, it seems). That sort of works - it's always nice to find little bits of heritage that have seeped into language, even if it's the language of another nation.

The 'bottle of rain' is interesting too, and seems to be harder to find the meaning of. A FanFiction of Harry Potter suggests in its footnotes has a meaning for both 'Broken Arrow' and 'Bottle of rain' as Native American expressions, the latter being a wish for good fortune and happiness. Not sure about the story, but a couple of other references seem to back up this meaning, so I think I'll go with it. It also fits quite well because Robertson's mother was, it seems, a Native American, so that would be a nice tidy way for everything to add up.

The last one is the 'witness tree' (context: 'I will meet you by the witness tree'), which I've not heard of before either. It seems that these are trees which were marked with important events and because of their long life would remain there for a long time, baring witness to those events. A few references imply that this was a very old tradition followed by many people, including Native Americans. I guess it's similar to cutting your name and date in the tree to show you were there.

It's a whole lot nicer when you know what a song means, and it means what you thought it did but in a far cooler way than you'd thought .

On the way to see Caroline, and part of the way back, I was listening to Jabberwocky, by Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman - it's very relaxing. I was thinking about it on the way there, because I remember it being one of the things we used as an example in some of our linguistics classes at uni, because of the way that the whole was nonsense but we could understand, or infer, meaning from it. It's not all that difficult for us (people) to do, and I remember vaguely us talking about how we understood the meaning and how we'd work out rules for working out the meaning.

I don't remember much about it now - which is a pity, because it's actually quite interesting. As an experiment, let's see what I can get out of the first verse - it's not going to be all that thrilling to read, but it'll keep me amused.

'twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. [ Jabberwocky; Lewis Carroll; Through The Looking Glass ]

Let's have a go then...

• 'brillig' is a state or period of time.
• 'slithy toves' are entities,
• 'gyre' and 'gimble' are things that 'slithy toves' may do.
• 'wabe' is a place or period of time (which is shorter than the 'brillig' period of time).
• 'borogoves' are entities.
• 'mimsy' is a state or action that 'borogoves' may have.
• 'mome raths' are entities.
• 'outgrabe' is something that 'mome raths' may do.

If I remembered enough, I'd break the sentences down to the parts of speech that they are and determine which patterns they matched. There's also the further conjuctions that you can make from those which actually only construct a meaning from the passage - like "'mome raths' may 'outgrabe' when it is 'brillig'".

Oh, there's a far nicer explanation I've found. Far clearer than I wrote it, and with proper names of words, too.

My head feels a bit fizzy tonight. I'm going to put it down to not sleeping well. And not to anything else.

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27 Jan 2007 (Saturday) 

I had a nice day with Caroline today. It's strange to think I'm going such a short distance but it takes me about an hour and a half to do it. Anyhow, I had quite a nice day. Unfortunately I didn't get to see the end of the film, so I'll just have to watch it some other time, or find a copy myself.

What's 'alphanumeric' mean to you ? To me - and, I thought, to everyone else - it means 'from the set of characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9'. That is, nothing but letters or numbers. Am I wrong ? I don't know. I'm sure I remember seeing specifications for many things use the term alphanumeric, and expecting that definition to be true. Only, now I come to wonder whether this is only in computing. Why ? Because I've just had problems with the National Lottery site, because my new password wasn't valid.

A notice telling me that 'Your password must be 6-12 alphanumeric characters' was given, which surprised me as I'd given a password 8 alphanumeric characters long. Talking to a support representative on the phone, they explained that they meant that the password must contain both numbers and letters. I tried to explain that they were using the term wrongly, but maybe I'm wrong - maybe only in computing does it mean what I think it means, and everyone else has a different meaning.

I didn't sleep well last night, again. Woke up at about 4:30, 5:30 and then at 7:30, and didn't get back to sleep again. Mum came in and reminded me at 8:10 what time it was as well.

On the way home I was wondering (again) about that knowledge thing that I whitter about occasionally. I don't know what reminded me, but there was this LP (vinyl record) we used to have, of nursery rhymes. To broke it. And the record player, I believe. But I no longer know why. The problem is that there's two conflicting memories. One - the one that I believe is right, is that I liked it and wanted to play it one morning, but I couldn't at that time (I was pretty young) work the record player, so I scratched it badly and destroyed the needle. That's the one that I think is what happened.

The other one is that I hated it and wanted to make sure I never heard it again, so I scratched it pretty badly. The thing is that I don't know whether I merely rationalised my breaking it by believing that I hated it - a 'sour grapes' reaction - or whether I really didn't like it, and my thinking that I liked it but didn't know how to play it was my way of hiding the fact that I did something naughty.

I've no idea any more which was real. I think I'm pretty right to be scared by that sort of thing.

Well, that's good. I've just asked Mum and Dad about it and they don't remember it at all. Mum suggested 'Are you sure it's not something you've invented in your little fantasy world ?' . No, my fantasy world is a whole lot more cruel - it'd point out in no uncertain terms that it was my fault and that I'd be to blame for ever and ever and ever for it.

It's getting late tonight and my head's a whole lot less swizzly over Caroline. Which is to say that I'm not playing out a few million scenarios in my head to see if any turn out well. And I'm not obsessing over the little things. I think it's got to be a good thing. Probably. Well, what I mean is that I'm not letting the silly little things get in the way of that fact that she's important to me.

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26 Jan 2007 (Friday) 

I really didn't sleep well last night, again. I'm not sure what it is, but last night and the night before I had left the blanket turned on, on its lowest setting, when I went to sleep. Maybe that's making it harder to sleep. Since it's a commonality I think I ought to leave it off tonight and see whether it helps. 'tis cold, though.

Huh, it looks like the diary's been broken since the 21st. I forgot that & was couldn't be included bare and needed to be &. Oops. But should be fixed now.

I was just thinking today about how to backtrace services work in SCL. I have a vague feeling that I missed an opportunity in not issuing a service per-stack frame. That would have allowed the core library to do the unwind work, and yet have the frame data displayed by an alternative client, without having to replace the entire unwind sequence. It'd be trivial to change, but I guess at that time I never thought it to be as important, because stack frame unwind is actually quite simple.

I'm going to see Caroline tomorrow. As I've been looking forward to this all week, there are some very important things to remember. The most important is that I have to not be over-excitable and to just relax and be me. Only not too much. It's just so great that she's talking to me at all.

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25 Jan 2007 (Thursday) 

Very restless night last night. No idea why, but I must have woken up ten times last night, so I didn't sleep very well at all.

Boo's now got a front end to its video, running on console 1, so that it gets input as well as output control. I'm actually quite surprised that it'll play smoothly. There's no video acceleration, and the processor's only 533MHz, and I'm playing off a remote share. It really is quite good. It's also set up so that the local SlimServer stream gets replaced by the video and then returns back when the video ends. I'm really quite chuffed.

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24 Jan 2007 (Wednesday) 

I've finally got around to playing with boo's video a little. I still can't get the composite TV out to work, but the VGA out works (obviously). It's not actually all that hard, but it did take a bit of fiddling to realise what I'd done wrong. Once I'd got the video mode set properly, and the correct LD path set up, it all works fine - basically the driver wasn't being located properly from /usr/local/lib because that wasn't in the LD path, and when it was in the path, it wasn't displaying right because the console was in 256 colours, not deep colour modes. When set properly, everything works.

Don't wanna talk about the weather Don't wanna talk about the news Just wanna get to the real you inside Like to get to know you well [ Like To Get To Know You Well, from Best Of, by Howard Jones ]

For some reason, the linke 'Like To Get To Know You Well' popped into my head whilst I was having lunch and I couldn't find what it was from - turned out it was Howard Jones, and not a track I know that well.

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23 Jan 2007 (Tuesday) 

Today has been exceptionally bitty. Lots of little things. Of those that I remember...

I updated AlienBBC on SlimServer to work with the new 7.0 standard for plugins. Not much of a change, but it means that I can now play BBC (and other RTSP) stations on the Squeezebox again.

I updated the Lyrics plugin to work with the new 7.0 standard, and added support for local lyric files. I've even returned the new version to the author.

I updated the My Picks and WikiRadio plugins to work with the new 7.0 standard as well.

I've rebuilt MPlayer for the main machine, because the BBC streams were dropping out after about 90 seconds and apparently that was fixed last year some time.

I've updated boo to have the latest version of SlimServer from the main machine. This means that it can now do all the nice things that my custom version does.

I made the USB port on the front of boo work. Ok, so this only means plugging the connectors into the right holes, but still it was a little bit hairy as I don't like plugging the wrong voltages into stuff when I get it wrong .

I realised that I could probably do local audio from boo, if I use a local stream player - like mplayer - to play to the audio port. That's kinda cunning 'cos it means that you don't actually need the SqueezeBox to play music. You do need a browser to control it, however.

I still can't seem to get the TV-out to work on boo, but I'm not too bothered about that, as the machine isn't up to decoding .avis anyhow.

I spoke to a nice guy called Simon (not my brother) about some interesting stuff.

And Julian, Dad and I tried out the 3-way conference call on Skype. It seeems that you can't do 3-way video conferencing in Skype, which is a little disappointing, but it does work with the audio, which is nice.

There was alos loads of other, more normal things, as well, but they're not particularly memorable.

It seems that the AlienBBC won't stream to the "http://server:9000/stream.mp3" stream because of a couple of checks in its source for a true player. Remove the checks and... it works. It's a bit odd that it explicitly avoids them, but works anyhow if it doesn't do that check. I've just commented it out and things work.

I'm tired tonight; I think that's because I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. Since I've just been tinkering for the past half hour or so, I think I'll go to bed now. There is no guilty in going to bed when tired. Write this out 20 times .

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22 Jan 2007 (Monday) 

Dreams are odd things. I think they're just parts of your mind playing out fantasies and trying to understand things that have happend that day. That's why there's bits of my life in them and I'm sometimes the hero. More often than not, I'm usually getting embarassed, killed, or otherwise being unsuccessful - I guess I probably have some issues there .

So last night was a fun little dream. I had a few nice days out with Caroline, we'd been out to town a few times and been to the cinema and stuff, and things were getting more relaxed. It was quite nice, and we - her, me, and our parents (don't ask me why, but we were all together) had gone to somewhere - it seemed like a hotel, with show rooms, a theatre, and a casino. We had a nice wander, and something to eat, and everyone else went to do other things and we were left to look around the hotel as we could. It was all quite posh really. She went off to the toilet and I was left at - and this is kinda of strange - a roulette table made of lego. Someone came up and replaced one of the lego blocks with another, and left. The block had something black embedded in it - a chip of some kind - which you could see through a clear plastic top. Someone else walked over and picked it up. I went and followed them, but they passed the block to someone else and were lost in the crowd. I went off to talk to security and got sent over to speak to some official people - I don't know who they were, FBI, MI5... one of those groups with initials. I told them what'd happened and had to describe the people I'd seen. Then an announcement came over the speakers that people should leave the building. I ran around downstairs trying to find Caroline, but couldn't see her. After a few minutes, she found me, all paniced and not knowing what to do. Fortunately she calmed me down and we set off back upstairs to where the official people were. Unfortunately that it was then that the room exploded. The last thing I remember seeing was her getting away. And for some reason I remember that she was wearing a light blue top and something sparkly around her neck. But I was a bit groggy from having just had my head bashed into a wall, before I passed out, so I could have just been seeing things. Plus it was a dream, so that doesn't exactly help.

I'm not sure what bits of that are the ordering of things that have happened, and which bits are fantasy. I got to be a little bit of a central character in spotting these people. At least before I died, anyhow.

I tried the wireless PCMCIA card in the laptop today to see how well it worked. It seems fine. Caroline suggested that the adapter failing was less likely. And when I had the other PCI wireless card in the machine it, too, was a little ropey. So I'm thinking that there's something up with the PCI rather than the card itself. I don't know enough about the PCI implementation to know what that might mean, but it seems reasonable. The box is one of the VIA EPIA systems, so it has custom bits and pieces on it. Maybe one of those isn't playing right.

I've stuck one of the old USB cameras on Mum and Dad's machine. It's not great - it only gets about a frame per second, and it's not wonderful quality, but it does work. So at some point all three of us will have to try the conference call with video (Mum & Dad, Julian and me). Maybe we'll even get Simon to try it, too. That'd be funky.

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21 Jan 2007 (Sunday) 

I didn't get around to ringing Caroline back - I was going to do it after I'd finished watching House... But she rang me instead. Yay.

I'm not sure what else happened today, really. Everything sort of got lost after she rang.

Oh, I suggested a couple of solutions to problems that Chris Williams was having, which I hope helped. I finished updating 'boo' (my small server) to most recent linux packages, installed mplayer on it, and tested out the wireless card. The problem with the wireless card is... it doesn't work. Or rather, it's not reliable. I get around 50-60% packet loss going out of it. Coming in seems ok, but it's harder to measure. This is a Netgear MA301 PCI-PCMCIA bridge card, with a Netgear MA401 PCMCIA card fitted. It gets a very high TX error rate in its statistics. I should try it in the laptop and see if it's any more reliable, really. It's a little annoying, but not insurmountable. The wired ethernet's fine though. The combo themselves is actually the pair I removed from the machine downstairs because the wireless network seemed pretty unreliable. So I'm thinking there might just be something up with the card.

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20 Jan 2007 (Saturday) 

We watched Ice Age 2 tonight. Quite fun.

I never rang Caroline today.

For a number of reasons I'm feeling very annoyed at myself. For things that I shouldn't be. I blame feeling really good about myself yesterday. That'll be it.

Time to go to bed before I get too melancholic.

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19 Jan 2007 (Friday) 

I forgot to mention the cool message on the EDF Energy fault report phone line when I rang yesterday. I rang at about 9pm, after the power had been out from about 1pm-ish :

There is a fault in your area which began at 2:20pm, the power is expected to be restored at 5:30pm. This message was recorded at 2:15pm. [ There is a fault; EDF Energy ]

I've paraphrased the wording, 'cos I can't remember it exactly, but the times are accurate. I want EDF Energy's time machine.

I tried ringing Caroline this evening, only it was so late I woke her up. I feel so very guilty now. Oh well ; I'll just pop off and shoot myself... don't worry, I'll be very humane.

And dad says that I've been a lot happier in the past 3 weeks. Although, he did say that '3 weeks' was picking a period out of the air. I think that's a good thing.

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18 Jan 2007 (Thursday) 

I'm in the middle of a power-cut at the moment. The storms today seem to have knocked out the power in the village - Brandon and Methwold both seem fine, but it's all darkness here. It's almost 11pm at the moment, and the power's been out since 1pm. I'm hopeful that the power will be back before the morning. Actually, at about 10:30pm the power did come on briefly - for a second or so - before cutting out again. I did check outside and it's still affecting everyone; it's not just our local fuse that's been tripped.

I'm writing this by candle-light. Amusing, really, to be using a computer with the aid of a candle. Oh, I think that I might even be able to use the term 'ironic' there.

Once in a while you buy something and then think shortly afterward "What on earth was I thinking?" ? I had one of those moments yesterday. In truth, the answer was 'I was thinking "this'll be really cool"', only it turns out it's just a bit stupid, irrational and ... um... I'll go with 'stupid' again.

It's a bit of a pity its so cloudy tonight; with all the lights in the village off it'd be great to look at the stars. Well, if it wasn't so cold out - at least the wind's calmed down, though.

So, without power, I've hardly used the computer today. I've got the 3hours-ish of battery that the laptop has, and maybe a second battery if I need it tomorrow. I would hope that the power will be back tomorrow, though - I'd be surprised if it wasn't back. But it does mean no email today.

Surprisingly, I'm actually quite tired this evening. It's early and I'm tired.

I was actually intending on ringing Caroline tonight, but we were went out for food - without electricity, cooking is problematic - so it was a little late by the time we got back. Oh well. I guess that just puts it off to another day - I know I shouldn't put such things off, but sometimes there's not a lot you can do about it.

Last Saturday, Caroline said that she was surprised that I didn't hate her. I didn't have much of an answer for that, but I'm equally surprised that she doesn't hate me. Or at least that she still wants to talk to me. I have this vague suspicion that Claire would have something to say about that. I'm not sure what, but I get this feeling that I can hear her starting to say something when I think about it.

Write out 1000 times - I must not put words into people's mouths.

Power's back; it's about 11pm. Yay.

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17 Jan 2007 (Wednesday) 

Bizarre things we found today - first from last year, there's a story of a woman passing her baby through an X-Ray machine at an airport. Maybe that's not all that bizarre, but it seems odd anyhow. The second is a quote from the comments in 'petemaild', part of the system that runs the 'petitions.pm.gov.uk' site.

The 1980s called, they want their 3Com back! [ The 1980s called; petemaild ]

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16 Jan 2007 (Tuesday) 

Keep those clouds dispersing Never leave my side [ Fold, from Lights, by Archive ]

The PSU fan on my main machine decided that it was going to stop running today. The CPU fan ended up running quite fast before I noticed. I turned the machine off and let it cool, but I'm sure there's Something Wrong. The PSU fan's working ok now, but... I'm not too happy with it. On the plus side, having the main machine down for a little bit gave me an opportunity to see how well the laptop+wireless+Skype worked. The answer? Pretty well, actually. I knew it should, because Chris had been using his laptop with wireless for Skype, but it's nice to see for myself.

Had a reasonably long chat with Julian this evening, which was quite nice.

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15 Jan 2007 (Monday) 

I've had an odd day today. I felt a little bit bad this morning 'cos I didn't pass my driving test, but then Caroline rang and I was all happy again. Yay. I didn't even need to go eat chocolate.

Mum's first day at her new job today, and it all seemed to go well.

Slowly, some thoughts are beginning to appear about Caroline. Not big things; just the little sprouting ideas. I'm not sure that sounds right, but it'll do for now. It's been suggested that I not spend as much energy on thinking about her. That's a very hard thing to do, really, as the slightest thing can go to her. It's probably a good suggestion, though.

I tend to think in glacial-time. [ Time; Justin ]

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14 Jan 2007 (Sunday) 

Mum and Dad and I went out to visit places today. We went to Imperial War Museum at Duxford, Wimpole Abbey (where mum's starting work), St Neots (where mum and dad used to work, years ago) and Anglesey Abbey (where mum's finishing work). Quite a fun little day anyhow.

And after 24 hours to think on yesterday, I don't feel too bad. Not that I should, but it was a likely thing 'cos I still find it hard for a whole load of reasons. I really did have a great day, and it's nice to have enjoyed it without being upset too much after it.

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13 Jan 2007 (Saturday) 

I had a nice day out with Caroline. I managed to say a few things that have been on my mind for the past 12 years or so. It doesn't make a lot of difference, as I knew the answers, except that I've got an answer from her. Maybe I am a little insane. Who still holds a torch for their ex from school ? Isn't that just a little bit nuts ? Or a lot nuts ?

I wonder where the phrase 'holds a torch' comes from. I can't, in a quick search, find out. Oh well.

I don't know the answers, but I keep asking the questions of myself. I keep hoping that the answers will present themselves. That's what I meant by the 'waiting' last year. I keep expecting to find some sort of revelation, and for things to make sense and to know what to do. There's never been any. And I'm still worrying about her.

There are a few things that I wanted to say that I didn't, mainly because they never came up, and because I'm still not completely happy with saying these things. That doesn't actually bother me. I don't need to say everything to her at once.

It's only a lifetime Where heroes need heroic deeds It's only a lifetime Where children dream of breaking free [ Sirens, from Pride, by Arena ]

One of the most important things I decided recently is that no amount of information can help you sometimes. Thinking that you'll understand something if only you can know everything about the subject doesn't work. I'm not sure how I phrased it today, but it sounded right the way I said it then. Hopefully it didn't sound too trite. Even trying to find the right questions to ask sometimes doesn't help.

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12 Jan 2007 (Friday) 

I'm really nervous about seeing Caroline tomorrow. I don't know, maybe it's just because... well because of the many reasons that would make me worry about her. It's not like the world will end, so I don't need to worry so much. Well, except when I'm dreaming about the world ending .

I guess I just have to be me. Try to be calm and... well, normal. Ok, not normal for me. I'm going to be so ill-at-ease that I'm going to say something more stupid than normal, I'm sure. To her, this is just a day visiting a friend and picking something up. To me... what's the difference ? Oh, who knows... I'm not even sure I can put together a sentence there.

I tend to think quite often that 'I'll wait and see'. At least, in most things that aren't computer related. It's not a policy that seems to work. The idea that you can have enough information to make a completely informed decision on something just doesn't seem to be sensible. I was sort of thinking about this as I was walking home today.

I'm not sure what conclusion I came to, though. Is there a limit at which you can make decisions given not-enough-information ? Do you just play the odds and hope that the information that you don't have doesn't contradict the actions that you take ? How's that apply to foreign policy ? We'll do x, because we believe that y will do z. And then if y anticipates x, how's that affect what we do ? Yeah, that's just the 'what if he knows that I know that he knows that I know ?' problem.

One of the trailers when we went to see Casino Royale was for Hot Fuzz, which looks like it could be quite cool.

I thought I'd watch something light to calm a bit. I thought 'Romancing the stone' would be reasonably fun and unthreatening. Only it seems to be region 1 and won't play on the DVD player. So, instead I'm watching Friends episode 1, 'cos it's completely non-threatening and fun.

Oh, plus I've got Greebo with me tonight it seems. All curled up and cute.

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11 Jan 2007 (Thursday) 

Rain, sea, surf, sand, clouds and sky Hush now baby, don't you cry There's a mocking bird Singing songs in the trees [ Mocking Bird, from Once Again, by Barclay James Harvest ]

It's been incredibly windy and rainy today. Not very nice out there.

I had a dream last night about Greebo and Grendel playing in the garden. It was a little bit sad.

I'm meant to be seeing Caroline on Saturday. I'm a little apprehensive at the moment.

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10 Jan 2007 (Wednesday) 

Wilson: You've got to find less debilitating outlets to humiliate people. I hear bowling is more fun than stalking. House: But I'm good at this. [ Humiliating people; House and Wilson; House ]

We went to the Cinema today - we saw Casino Royale. Not so bad. I think it sort of trailed off at the end, but otherwise it wasn't so bad.

A hundred nights of fun and games A thousand empty glasses I feel it change And stay the same As each day passes [ 100 Nights, from Holidays In Eden, by Marillion ]

I've not listened to Holidays In Eden in ages. It's really strange to come back to. Although, it seems to me that if it's 100 nights, and 1000 glasses, that's 5 glasses each night. Is that a lot ?

It's been so long since I thought about this, but I think I missed something when I did. The whole end section of 100 Nights is angry. It's the person having the affair (the Singer) that's angry, but the one being cheated on. That whole section from 'You didn't notice me...' has far more anger than the earlier section. I'm going to think that it's because they're angry that they've let 'This Town' make them like everyone else. I hadn't really thought of it like that before, I don't think. I always thought of it as more a boastful, or confessional, but it strikes me that it fits better the new way.

Or is it just sung and played that way because it makes a big climax for the track and sounds good ? I don't mind either way, but maybe it's an interesting thought exercise. At least a simple issue of meaning in a song has far more constrained parameters than any real world problem.

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9 Jan 2007 (Tuesday) 

I'm a little amused that whilst watching the 'Hunting' episode of House, it turns out that House lives at 221B. It just amused me, that's all.

The rain tonight made me even more agitated.

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8 Jan 2007 (Monday) 

SongMeanings go bang. It looks like the database back end has vanished. It's claiming no entries at all in its 'statistics' box, and the forums are empty. That'd be bad, then ? Oh, but it's back now. How odd.

Greebo's been really upset today, I think. He's wanted a lot of attention and cuddles and he's cried when he hasn't got it.

Windy again tonight.

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7 Jan 2007 (Sunday) 

I'm in a really good mood tonight because I actually managed to ring Caroline and talk to her. Like a normal person. That's quite a big thing for me. Ok, so it's about 5 days since I wanted to call her, but that's an improvement for me. Letting the thoughts that I shouldn't beat out the thoughts that I want to usually lasts far longer than that.

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6 Jan 2007 (Saturday) 

I was a little amused to watch the first episode of House and immediately recognise the woman as Laurie from The West Wing. I may not be Julian, but at least I'm trying.

Caught up in circles Confusion is nothing new [ Time After Time, from Twelve Deadly Cyns And Then Some, by Cyndi Lauper ]

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5 Jan 2007 (Friday) 

Sometimes you like tracks because they just sound good. It's sometimes a little embarassing if, later, you find that the lyrical content isn't what you thought. Obviously places like Kiss This Guy have many of them, but even when you don't mis-hear them but later find out that what they are it's sometimes strange. I like the use that foreigners make of English. They make mistakes in the use because it's different to their language. If you can understand it, there's no problem. For songs, though, it's a far more fun ball-game. They can pick and choose words that have the right sound, and it makes things a whole lot more fun. I'm thinking of the Lacuna Coil lyrics here, which are sometimes not quite right english, but the sound is good and the meaning is obvious - an English singer might hunt around for other things that actually end up worse but make more grammatical sense. That said, I tend to cringe at the end of Aquarius, by Within Temptation because a line just doesn't work so well with bad grammar.

But anyhow, that's not what I was really thinking of when I started writing this. I wanted to know what the lyric was for Before, by Riverside, because it sounded strange. The lyric turned out to be stranger than I'd thought it was.

And the remnants of your tears and smiles Shift deleted from my mind [ Before, from Second Life Syndrome, by Riverside ]

An allusion to computing ? Or just a nice sounding phrase ? I don't mind either way around, but it's interesting.

I meant to go to bed an hour and a half ago, but I've been investigating and reporting a remote exploit on a website. I found it by examining their logs, which they publish online. Hopefully they'll actually take some action and fix the problem as it's never nice having people run programs as you.

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3 Jan 2007 (Wednesday) 

Top tip of the day: Don't feed your printer cable ties.

Dad complained to me that the printer wasn't feeding paper somehow. After about 10 minutes of fiddling with it and having already declared it 'broken' (yeah, I'm astute), I noticed a tiny piece of plastic showing out of the bottom of the feed mechanism. With a pair of tweezers I pulled it out and it turned out to be a cable tie. It may not be the most astounding piece of detective work in the universe, but it's useful to remember, I think.

Somehow I seem to find it difficult to put some things into words. I tried last month ( which, looking at now, I realise you have to claw your way through dreams, cats, lyrics, coincidences, and even some ramblings about my fun web services, before you get to anything useful) to write down some of the things that I'd done but it didn't turn out so well.

Hark, the herald angels sting Please repair my broken wing Why won't you look at me? I live and breathe [ Get The Message, from Electronic, by Electronic ]

(which is appropriate, 'cos the title is 'Get The Message', and I'm complaining about not being able to get a message across... ok, it's tenuous)

I tried updating the sourceforce id3lib to support ID3v2.4 yesterday. I've been too busy with other things today to continue it, but I'm not convinced it's a good idea. I like some of the design of id3lib, but something feels wrong with the design. I can't put my finger on what it is, though. I think I need to work with it a bit more before I can make any judgement, really. Lots of programs use it, and their authors argue that the reason for not supporting ID3v2.4 is that the base implementation doesn't support it.

I just don't like this argument. I can't think of a specific example, but when I was working on the libxml2 ports a few years ago, one of the things I remember seeing regularly (and I'm possibly misremembering, but I'm sure you can apply this to other places - I've seen it on the Mozilla JS newsgroups once or twice, I'm sure) is posts which say something along the lines of 'can you change this because we need it for our platform'. Now that's fine, and it's great to have these extra things as part of a base distribution, but I remember that I was always quite reticent about forcing RISC OS-specific changes on people. It doesn't seem right that others should be lumbered with those problems - as a minority system.

But, that's not why I jumped to thinking about this from ID3v2.4. It's the (few) posts that I saw which said a stronger version - 'we're only taking the release version and we must have these changes put through' (yet again paraphrasing). Now that seemed insane to me. Effectively it was saying that it was company policy to only accept the word of external developers over their internal developers as to the correctness of their product. That their own developers were at the whim of those who weren't even being paid by the company. Doesn't that sound strange ? To me it seems very odd. I know there's a lot of places where it's true, particularly now, but with an open source component there's no absolute requirement to have the release version and a local copy as the same thing. It doesn't guarentee correctness any more than any other mechanism. I think it's possible I just don't understand the policy of those companies or individuals.

But what made me think of this was the number of people that use id3lib and haven't actually updated it to provide ID3v2.4 support. I think, however, I should end this line of thought because, whilst I can clearly see that ID3v2.4 is superior in every way to ID3v2.3, take up has been incredibly slow, and tag tool authors have been exceptionally resistant to taking it up.

I've even had people argue that Vorbis comments are superior because they're not as restrictive as the ID3v2 frames. This just strikes me as ridiculous because the ID3v2 standards are actually defined and give good specifications for what they contain (and how to extend them), whereas Vorbis has a few of the common values defined and everything else is (pretty much) a free-for-all. And I've yet to find anyone who can actually explain to me what the 'ALBUMARTIST' tag is meant to be used for in a useful manner - actually this comes from the SlimServer forums where they discuss it a bit because of their perceived issue with 'various artists' albums. I have less of a conceptual problem with why that is an issue, but it's still difficult to understand. I think it's down to a difference of views in how to manage music collections. Maybe.

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2 Jan 2007 (Tuesday) 

But we're never gonna survive unless... We get a little crazy. [ Crazy, from Seal, by Seal ]

I'm sitting here with Greebo curled up on my lap. He's being nice and settled.

There was a good reason for thinking of 'Crazy' there, but I've forgotten it. I keep hoping that it'll come to me.

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1 Jan 2007 (Monday) 

A new year always means a bit of messing around with the diary, but it went nice and smoothly this year, so I'm happy. I'm sitting here with Greebo on my lap because he's a little lost today I think. I'm not sure why but he was crying downstairs and when I called to him he came running up and jumped up on to my lap.

It does mean, though, that the top level diary book image now has the wrong date on it. I come across this every year and find it frustrating. So, this year I've decided to take some action to prevent that being a frustration. I've changed the '1988-2006' to say '1988-...' instead. See what I did there? How cunning was that ? Ok, not all that cunning, but it won't be any sort of annoyance for me any longer.

Two Doctor Who spin-offs today. There was a Sarah Jane story; which is a pre-cursor to a CBBC series. Not sure how well that'll work, but it's for kids so it probably won't be as heavy as Doctor Who. And there were the last two episodes of Torchwood. So. Having seen them, I'm not sure that I know what to think of it. Certain episodes, like 'Countrycide' were not interesting to me, and the plane load of people from the past was a completely wasted opportunity. Others, like 'They Keep Killing Suzie' were quite clever. 'Random Shoes' felt like it was a Doctor Who episode - nothing to really justify it being a 'heavier' type of story line. The 'Greeks Baring Gifts' (or whatever it was called) was a reasonable story line, but was a little bit spoilt.

I don't think it really knows where to put itself. It doesn't want to go for The Outer Limits type of SciFi, and it doesn't want to run with the tamer, Doctor Who style of stories. And yet they want to do the heavier story lines. It seems to me that that means they introduce sex and swearing and that makes it a more adult type of show. I'm really not sure that that's the case.

Ok, here's what I think... It seems that you can have a light sci-fi which involves not much explanation (Doctor Who), or you can have a very slightly more complex sci-fi and stick in lots of sex and swearing (Torchwood), or you can have a very light sci-fi which removes other scary factors (Sarah Jane). Maybe I'm just missing the point and Doctor Who (and its universe) should just be treated as entertainment and not as a way to flex those mental and imaginative muscles.

I guess what I mean is that Torchwood doesn't go anywhere that hasn't been trodden already by others, often better. I might just be looking for the wrong thing. Not everything has to cover new ground.

It's rainy and horrid outside again tonight. Still feeling bad about that.

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