26 Oct 2009 (Monday) 

I'm up to episode 5 of Stargate Universe now, and it's slowly beginning to dawn on me that it's a bit crap really. I'd been giving it the benefit of the doubt because, after all, it's Stargate. But... it's not really improving that much. The interpersonal stuff, and the lack-of-any-interest storylines that I hated from Galactica are back, and they've brought a few friends. Plus the whole 'wave the camera around wildly and refocus like you're a moron' is back too.

At the end of last week's episode, the ship is out of power an seemingly failed in a deceleration manoeuvre and is heading straight into the sun. So, the obvious thing to think is 'either their gonna die, or it's a fuel-scoop exercise', tend towards the latter because... well it'd be a short series otherwise. The entire episode appears to have revolved around 'we've got no chance, lets send a few people to a planet in the one remaining shuttle'. That wastes about 35 minutes, and then - amazingly the cleverest scientist guy is amazed that it's a fuel scoop thing, and ... oh dear the shuttle's not going to catch them because the main ship is now accelerating out of the system. So... let's fly towards the planet and get a slingshot to speed up. Wow. There was a little bit of mystery added because it's possible the scientist guy might have known but it really wasn't all that much to care about.

They humour and the sci-fi-ness that made Stargate appears to be utterly absent. In its place we've got, what can only be described as... Battlestar Galactica in the Stargate universe. And only tentatively in that universe at that, because the links to anything else Stargate are very weak.

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21 Oct 2009 (Wednesday) 

LIRC using IRMan over USB Serial doesn't appear to work for me. Reason ? It's too slow and the IR_POLL_TIMEOUT needs to be higher than the default of '1 MSEC' that it's shipped with on Ubuntu. This has been fixed in the upstream, but it's taken me an hour or so of tracing through the code myself to find that that was in fact the reason why my remote wasn't working. Plus the 3 hours just to get to the stage of saying 'It's not working, maybe I've configured it wrong, and then deciding to pick out the source'.

Anyhow, solution - build from the upstream source rather than the ubuntu package.

There's also the issue that -ve values are being passed through interfaces that take unsigned numbers and hoping that that'll work fine, but let's not worry about that, as it appears to work.

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13 Oct 2009 (Tuesday) 

I'm very tired recently - well, for a long while - and can't seem to sleep. But when I do I dream a little. This morning was one of the less fun ones, partly because I didn't wake up until 11:20 . This morning's dream was about having to pack up and leave because someone I knew was very ill and I had to go and see them very soon.

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12 Oct 2009 (Monday) 

On the phone: "Mr Bubbles ? Aliens are attacking my house Oh good, my Dog found the chain saw." [ Aliens are attacking; Lilo; Lilo and Stitch ]

I watched Lilo and Stitch this evening; very cute and funny. I only cried a little at it.

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10 Oct 2009 (Saturday) 

I had a dream last night that I was finally buying a house. After all the looking around and trying to find one that I'd done previously I'd found the perfect one - not around here, but somewhere in a small town in America. Out of the way, and pretty large, and affordable and I could even spend get some bits customised. There were lovely trees around it, and a driveway up to it that wasn't really tarmac'd but made it feel a lot more homey for some reason. I was going to buy it with an old friend from school, because that's what we agreed to a few years ago. I just had to tell them that the place had been bought.

Then we moved in and there were so many rooms we got to choose which ones we wanted as our part of the house and we could move around as we liked. Lots of room! I picked a long thin room, and a small square room - the long thin room was my bedroom, and the square one was a living room, type room, with a telly and small table and seats. The three bathrooms were spread through the house, and the bedrooms had ensuite showers anyhow, so we'd never be in anyones way, even if we had visitors. They took a large rectangular room, and a small room as a bedroom.

It was all really nice, and I wasn't at all worried about it being in America because it was mine - well, ours - and it was so perfect.

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9 Oct 2009 (Friday) 

Apparently, we've been bought finally. So we are out of the administration process. Quite what this means for the future is still up in the air, but we're a little safer than we were, in a vague sense.

I know nothing stays the same, But if you're willing to play the game, It will be coming around again, So don't mind if I fall apart, There's more room in a broken heart. [ Coming Around Again, from Coming Around Again, by Carly Simon ]

Watched Ghost Town this evening. I don't, generally, like Ricky Gervais - I find him quite irritating - but I'm not letting prejudice put me off and decided to watch it. Really enjoyed it, and only cried a little.

Watched Bedtime Stories yesterday; and really enjoyed that as well - very fun!

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8 Oct 2009 (Thursday) 

Watched Micro Men this evening - the story of Sinclair and Acorn. Quite amusing, and fun. Particular gems were the comments about the Sinclair ram pack problems, and the Acorn board with their possible projects - ARM and the BBC Master. And the absolute gem of what looked like Sophie Wilson as the barmaid.

Ian: where did I leave that USB cable? gerph: the USB repossession fairy stole it because you were late with your royalty payments in rice to the ethernet demon, who is angry that the village of serial people have decided to cast spells of packet protection after the demon sent dragons of Perl to take away their children Ian: WTF? [ Where's that cable ?; drobe ]

That's not one of my stories. It's great though! Thanks Chris!

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7 Oct 2009 (Wednesday) 

I've got a replacement laptop, since mine's unwell - the hinges on the screen have broken, so I've got another one. The idea is either to just use this one, or to migrate bits from it to the old one - transplant screen and hinges. I'm not feeling particularly confident about that but I'll see how I feel when I get to look at it. As it is, the replacement is kinda-ok. It works so long as... you don't need F1, you don't knock the power lead, and you don't disconnect the power lead - I think the battery connector is dead, as my old battery doesn't work with it either.

However, it means I have a working laptop, which is nicer. It's amazing how bad the Lenovo is at wireless. My laptop - Acer travelmate 220 + SMC PCMCIA wireless card - works really nicely on the network. The Lenovo, with its built in network is awful. It drops out regularly and it's very bursty.

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4 Oct 2009 (Sunday) 

I had a lot of fun working with TVDB::API recently. My TV series are now augmented with info from it, which is quite handy. Together with creating .nfo files for XBMC to use, it could all be quite neat - I'm close to getting there with that. However, I did find a few bugs in the module, so I've posted up a report and fixes on CPAN so that hopefully they can get integrated into the main version.

It seems to be nearly Halloween. Well, not really, but by the shops you might think so, and I came across someone with way more time on their hands to do halloween things. And quite cool with it .

It's, like, 3am in the morning. At about 2:20 I was giggling uncontrollably and feeling really quite good. So, I decided - in that way that you do - that I should try out this Google Wave thing that Matt's invited me to... and now I'm not giggling and I'm sort of not-at-all blown away by it and not at all bothered really. The problems are many and not that complex, really. You see, the thing about email - the basic, fundamental thing is that you don't need anything. Well, ok, you need a mail server, but only in the loosest sense. You can write a mail server. It's not all that hard. You can get a mail server from other people. You need a mail client - there's loads of them about, even some - god forbid - that are web based. If you don't like one client you change to another. If you don't like your server, you change it.

The thing about IM conversations is that they're on a multitude of different networks. There's so many it's almost impossible to count - I restrict myself to just 3 major IMs these days (talker, skype, work-IM), because that's all I can handle. Maybe that's just me. 3 IM systems, work mail, home mail, and about 15 million terminals tend to keep me occupied. Why do we need another system ?

There is the obvious counter that there are so many of these systems that having one that can do more jobs must be better. That's not really true, and never has been. Small, modular systems that do their jobs well are invariably more resilient and able to be managed and maintained. Interactions maintained at a controlled level make for a better system. Not that joined up modules (as many of Google's services are) isn't in that mould; it's just that the system as a whole is so restrictive.

The question that immediately springs to mind is not 'what can I do with Google wave ?', but 'if this is meant to be better than email, then how can I get this for myself ?'. Email is ubiquitous; the systems exist in many forms and in many manners. You're beholden to nobody with email, because it's controlled by anyone. You put your email where you like with who you like. Google wave is just another application-level system, whereby you're locked in to a particular vendor and you relinquish the control of what you're doing.

You can use the argument that the Google APIs will allow you to pull the information out of the system, should you wish that. But where's the point if you cannot use them anywhere else ? If you're not by an Internet connection, where's your wave then ? I presume you can prepare content for upload to the system and put it on the side, but your entire interface is 'dead' because it's all hosted elsewhere. What happens to the content when Google goes away ?

I have a good degree of skepticism over proprietary applications - and let's not confuse this application with email. Having been bitten enough times by the fact of data being locked into formats and systems which are obsolete, I'm wary of any others. More wary when the content you have entrusted to the format doesn't reside under your control.

As for the wave itself, I can see there's a good deal of stuff that might be useful to be done for transitory things like organising parts of project work, etc. But I can only see it being useful for transitory things. In the same way that IM is (mostly) throwaway and you wouldn't usually care to keep for 10 years.

Email and email-like communications that I had 10 years ago are still available to me. ICQ and other communications are gone and lost, and probably that's for the best, but it's still a little sad. Skype communications are available for extraction relatively easily, but mostly I'm not that bothered by them either - if I were then I would at least be able to. Google wave's API reference doesn't really indicate anything about how you export information. There's a few things about how to set up robots - which appear to be additional instances of accounts, some stuff about setting up gadgets, and some other extension things.

And I'm not even going to start on the whole 'it doesn't work with all the web browsers' thing that forced me to install another browser on my system. Because the same argument that I used above for email applies - you choose the system you like and things work.

Maybe I'm being too harsh, and I can't say that I've used it much as the only person I've contacted with it is Matt, and - it being the early hours of the morning - he's not around. So there's a limited amount you can do when you're just playing with the UI.

Apparently Googlewave thinks that I'm offline, and despite clicking on the 'Connect now' button, it's resolutely refusing to actually do so. The UI design could really do some work. I have no idea what 'Archive' and 'Mute' are actually meant to do. They appear to hide, move or toggle something but I don't know what the concepts are that they are trying to get across. Similarly, to reply to a particular message it appears you can also click on the bottom border of a message.

I also watched Stargate Universe this evening. It's ok; I'll see how it goes - as yet there's been a lot of people and not a lot of sci-finess. "Yes, it's a ship - it's a place thats in imminent danger of falling apart after the ancients left it lying around and we've now got a very short span of time where we've got to find a way to survive"... hmm... that seems familiar.

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3 Oct 2009 (Saturday) 

Bernard: I have to be very careful, don't I ? Genie: Yes. Say the words 'I wish' with the caution you would usually reserve for 'Please castrate me'. [ I wish...; Bernard and the Genie ]

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