Yes I am still here. Not that anyone asked:-)
The "I've got a brand new web browser" update
(it's not every day you want to surf the web, just to use the browser...)
A couple of days ago I made the necessary precautions and installed Galeon. This is a browser that sits on top of GNOME and uses Mozilla's engine to render pages, so you get the good bits of both, sort of thing.
So. Is it any good? Well, once it's set up and you've got it running, it's fantastic. Especially if like me you're treating it as an upgrade from Netscape 4. It really highlights the latter's dreadful CSS support and rendering capability in general.
That's if you can get it running. After installation it ran once, and I spent a while going through its preferences box (tabs! no popups! it will run mutt when you click on a mailto: link! WOOHOO!) But after this, I found that the first time I ran it, it segfaulted, and the second time it forgot half the setup.
But in this short time, I'd been so won over by its rendering that I knew I couldn't go back to NS4, so what to do? I did what I usually do, I put it off. (Hence the gap since the last update - I never even switched this computer on, I used the others instead...)
But here we are two days after the install. It's been run, quit, and run again today, and has worked flawlessly, no segfaults or configuration amnesia, nothing. Touch wood that nothing goes wrong again but... how can I put it best?... "this went very well...after some initial technical difficulties":-)
Planet of the Imps is back! (and other linkage)
Yeah, after a couple of weeks of downtime, the hilarious cartoon strip based on characters from Doom "Planet of the Imps" is back up. This news, from Doomworld, made me do a couple of laps of my room going "yeahyayyeah!", if you can imagine such a thing:-)
And some other random links:
- Struggle II - needs Flash, is quite long...
- Origami Boulder - it's all about the tone in which the site is written.
- Logo comparison: Data Connection and Imodium - this one'll probably only work if you know people who work there, but since Bex knows everyone that shouldn't be a problem.
Hilarious email
I have been watching your blog. No updates for a few days. Are you okay?
Am I okay?? Slightly bruised from where I FELL OFF MY CHAIR LAUGHING - you'd think people were hanging on my every word!!
Oh well, more hits I suppose, but you see it's not like I can be arsed to write millions of updates all the time.
Date format
Having thought about it for quite a while, I've decided to use proper date formats in the blog headers (although not anywhere else; the tracklist is still in my format and it probably always will be)
The following perl regexp, looped over all relevant files, did the job of updating all the previous material.
s|:(\d)/(\d)/(\d{4})|"/".($1+4*($2-1))."/".($3)|eg
In English that means, find everything that looks like a colon, then a single number, then a slash, then another single number, then a slash, and a final number four digits long. Replace with a slash, then a number that is calculated as the second number less one, then multiplied by four, then the first added on; followed by another slash, and the original final four digit number. Ish.
Of course the code was tweaked a little so that new updates use proper date formats as well. I tried doing some other stuff to it but it didn't work. Damnit why can't I program?! That regexp took like all afternoon to construct! Getting the /e modifier ("to evaluate the right hand side of s// as an expression") to do what I wanted was MURDER.
No wonder there's a teacher shortage!
The people who assess the paperwork Sarah has to do for her education course and teacher training and whatever it's called these days, are being really evil. It's like no matter how much work she does there's something wrong with her lesson plans and now it's got out of hand, this bigwig external guy's coming in and all sorts. So she was quite upset when I talked to her.
Hence the title. No wonder they're always on about there being a shortage - it's like the assessor people don't want the students to pass the course, and become teachers.
Quote "The quandry of 2002" unquote
Dunst versus Portman (link from fubar) Requires Java. See how much more obvious you can make Kirsten Dunst's nipple.
stressdamnitdoomdamnoldfriendsaarghwhattododamnit
I am angry and pissed off. It's this whole stupid "reunion" thing. That means, talk about what you've done with your lives since we were last all together. But I run that conversation through my head and big stress occurs. ("We've all got fantastic jobs because we're great! Why haven't you, Rob?") I even get offered a lift and what happens? I'm like, "watch me constantly run out of conversation during the car journey! Awkward silence! Stress!" SCREAMIN' HAIRY AB-DABS!
Also industrl.wad has been rereleased (see 6/5/2002) and I stupidly decided to play it again. It's too big, it's too stuffed with monsters, and there are bits that are IMPOSSIBLE. Six hellknights and six spectres in a dark cave not much bigger than my front room? Yeah, right! At least this time that's the only bit so far in which I've blatantly cheated.
Which reminds me, I should write something about the upcoming Doom III. Yes it looks fantastic, (esp. that guy lit by yellow - who does he remind me of?) but... does it play as well as the original? Is there going to be loads of new maps made by fans? How much hardware do you need to get it to run properly?... Damnit I don't want to think about it. For more go see Doomworld.
And finally There seems to be some misunderstanding about the encoding-of-MP3 update from a few days ago. The point is, the process works. I've no new tracks to release at the moment. (However there's no reason why I couldn't encode some of the old ones, other than my not wishing to have people tell me my music's crap, like they always do, I really don't need that, now or ever!)
Which programming language are you?
I'm VB. I'm stupid. I suck. (Take the test. One of the cooler ones, I reckon:-) )
Mehhhhhhh
Ever had a day when you felt like your body was full of lead, and all you could do - not wanted to do, but were able to do, despite your wishes - was sleep? I did, today. It's annoying because yesterday I got all sorts of stuff done.
Now there's people I get mail from. Bex. Josie. I'm talking to you. They say they'd love to just sleep all the time, like a cat. I don't agree. Quite frankly, I think you'd get bored.
However I did have the pleasure of a real proper lucid dream the other day. You know, where you realise you're dreaming and that you can do whatever the hell you like. Guess what I immediately thought? "Who can I have sex with?!"
Oh yeah. He did mention it in the mail the other day... Happy Birthday Mr Nelis!
I'm writing this in nano, instead of NEdit for a change, mainly because I haven't actually run X at all today, and those two are the only editors I have installed (Rob's typical "don't ever use more disk space than is absolutely necessary" policy at work again)
Let's see if we can get the formatting right...
Answering the mail
With respect to 16/5/2002's update, I received the following mail:
Hi, no time to write properly, sorry things have been hectic lately. Just read your website - NOT ignoring you, just not enough hours in day. Will get in touch and see you this weekend, love
Sarah
Yeah, it's all good. Honestly, though, I am so very paranoid sometimes.
Mind you there's enough people I'm avoiding seeing or emailing, not being able to face having to explain why I haven't got my life sorted out again. Oh well.
Answering a well-placed criticism
Iain pointed out to me the other day that the format of the update heading is not obvious: not just my crazy date format, but why there are two times and possibly two dates there as well. While this is explained somewhere in the archives it's a valid criticism that this information should be somewhere a little more appropriate and central.
It has therefore been added to the About page.
Other people's blogs
Felix has updated his page again and made it more of a pleasure to browse. He's written yet another huge blog entry.
Maybe I'm being really self-centred here but I can't help thinking he thinks I'm the only reader... GO AND READ HIS SITE, EVERYONE!
A *little* more on $PATH and $MANPATH
I looked at the source. It would seem that if you have a ~/bin/ then man itself finds manual pages for stuff in it, also from your home directory. To be honest though I'm still not convinced.
As for $PATH itself, addition of ~/bin/ isn't anything automatic, as far as I can tell it happens somewhere in one of bash's initialisation files. I'm a little confused because I'm sure I've seen it being added manually but when I removed my "if it's added once, don't add it again" construction from my .bashrc it stopped being added at all! Oh well. Never mind.
Track releasing: promising footnote
I am happy to report that using sox I successfully sampled a 7¼' track from my A3010 onto my Linux box. Furthermore, it was successfully encoded into an MP3 using lame 3.92. There were no segmentation faults, or files produced that when played back sounded like nothing but white noise, or anything. Fantastic.
Not only that, but it encoded in the ridiculously fast time of 1'20". (compare that with like four hours!)
So watch this space. Exciting developments may soon occur! I'm not looking forward to sending the resulting 6-12MB files through my modem, but you know. The point is, the process works8-)
I spent too long on #warwick again and now it's too late to do a proper update. But, here are some things from other people's sites that should be mentioned...
- Last week Felix updated his entire site. In particular he also wrote the longest blog entry I've ever seen:-) (I hope that link works...) Also, it links to here several times - thanks for that:-)
- Also Nelis has 'updated' his site (why the quotes, you sarky git?)
But that's it. I'm sleepy. Good night.
This update has quite a random subject. There's stuff I should have done, but haven't (pages to which I should link, a decent explanation on here about the format of the heading above, etc.) Oh well...
Being bad at communication
Not the most inspiring thing with which to start. But you're reading it now, so why stop..?
So I finally managed to put into words why leaving IRC channels full of people you know is impossible:
- If you leave when someone else has just turned up, it looks like you're avoiding them
- If you leave just after someone else has just left it looks like you're only there because of the person who's just left and those remaining aren't good enough for you.
- And in the meantime everyone's talking and it's rude to just go in the middle of a conversation.
Yes I know it's rot but I am a wuss who can't have people thinking bad thoughts about him...
...which is why it's doubly upsetting when you get mails from people who have reacted badly to some remark you've made, but it was just what you were thinking at the time so you wrote it and sent it. See I'm crap at communication. I'm sorry. The only solution I can think of is that if you don't like it stop being friends with me, because this is how I am. Sometimes I say stuff that people don't like. It's either that or say nothing at all. Is that what you want?
Here, for example, is a remark that could upset. This is a story on The Register about text message flirting. Mildly amusing but otherwise unremarkable, except for a paragraph which mentions Reading. My thought was "if you know someone in Reading, read this paragraph and you will undoubtably be amused" - but I dare say that this will offend you if you live in Reading. But there you go.
Being good at having a suspicious mind
Let's suppose you are sharing a box of Christmas crackers with a friend. You know how many crackers there were in the box to begin with. Your friend says that, for one reason or another, they have not been shared with anyone else.
Now you have a good memory so you know how many crackers you've pulled, and thus you know how many should be left in the box. But counting the crackers left in the box, the totals don't add up! Further searching reveals the missing crackers... but not before you've gotten yourself all worked up because "someone's telling porkies and I don't know why"!
Before you say it, I haven't gone crackers. A version of this highly cryptic and contrived anecdote happened to me recently, and it only serves to highlight just how much I don't trust people, even ones who have no reason for being dishonest about their cracker-sharing habits. However on a more positive note, I think this sort of logical analysis is a skill:-)
Another entry in "Rob's boring weblog" (Hi, Matthew!:-) )
Things that make you go "Hmm..."
Firstly, what to do when one of your friends decides to ostracise himself because he thinks no-one gives a monkey's backside about him. I don't know, but I know it doesn't work. You can't ostracise yourself. Trust me, I've tried it more than one time before... But anyway he's cheered up a bit again so for the moment it's all good.
Secondly, what to do when you apparently lose all contact with the girl, um, how can I put this... that you're doing stuff with. (I can't think of a better term!... but anyway, I digress) Yeah I know, "expect to be ignored" (for valid reasons) but first there was the no-show at that party last weekend and then two of the "usual times you email me" that have gone past and you know what my brain's like it starts to yammer at me...
Yeah okay it's not like people always go to email at exactly the same times every week. So it's not much to go on. But you know. One possible explanation is that I'm being cold-shouldered for dissing that Nickelback record too much:-) Of course there are others...but they can stay confined to my real diary for the time being...
Damnit I might have to bite the bullet and use the damn phone again, oh horror of horrors. Speaking of which I might keep missing phone calls due to having the connection up so much. Oh it's all a mess:-)
PS If having read this, you now have a C+C Music Factory record in your head, then I'm sorry.
More on automatic addition of things to path variables
Okay it's not bash that's doing it, because none of the bash files, /etc/profile, /etc/bash.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc have commands that adjust the things. Well, not mine anyway, but then I've customised all of these files on my system:-)
How do I know this? Well today for a change I didn't log into X via xdm, but via a good, old-fashioned text login. And none of my scripts in ~/bin/ could be found, nor could the gorgeous manual page I wrote for rndsig be found in ~/man/.
Further investigation required. But isn't this fun??
Making Doom maps - in BBC BASIC!
A long long time ago I made a Doom level, it was just a big box with a monster spawner in it. You'd run around and monsters would spawn. They'd fight each other, and you, until the place got completely full and you had to start over. It didn't work very well and was deleted.
Fast forward to the end of last year, when the infamous NUTS.WAD (textfile), and a few weeks later, the unbelievably spooky and atmospheric Equinox, (textfile) came out. The first was simply two big boxes rammed with 10000 monsters (it is 10000, not 100000 like the text file says) and the latter contained, among a lot of incredible stuff, a few large areas infested with lots of different types of monster. These would inevitably fight each other.
Anyway I love huge monster fights and I wanted a map in which to set them up. I felt the easiest way would be to code it. I made a program, in BBC BASIC and its built-in assembler, that built a level. At the time, it was just a big square box, hence its name Sandbox. The code populated the map with random monsters and you ran the game with it, turned a couple of cheats on, woke them up and sat back and watched.
Today, I rewrote the code. The map is now circular (ish, you know, you approximate a circle by a regular polygon with many sides) and uses a new algorithm for laying out the monsters that gets a lot more into the space. I've been messing with it all afternoon, it's great:-)
Not sure why you need to know this except for the fact that it's damn cool to run and its construction is nicely automated. Used a lot of coordinate geometry stuff I did at A-level, which cheered me up because I could remember it:-) Not to mention how you put a Doom map together in the first place - lines, sides, vertexes (sic), sectors etc. not to mention BSP trees. It's all good.
PS It might be that I just want an excuse to go on about Equinox, which is fantastic. I think that in another update I might go through it, level by level...
- Ran update-blog's archiving function again. It worked. Of course it worked. I wrote it.
- "99 bottles of beer on the wall" in many programming languages (283 at time of writing)
- It seems that if you create directories bin/ and man/ in your home directory, bash will notice them and add them to the relevant variables ($PATH and $MANPATH, respectively) There may be more of these.
- I am still putting off the installation of Galeon. Why? Because it will suck in Call me a wuss, but if it goes wrong I want to be able to restore my system, so certain precautions need to be taken.
- Some form of backup system would be nice.
- Even a decent disk partitioning scheme would be nice.
- I like nested lists today, have you noticed?
- Apologies to Peter and anyone else who spotted the link to a file named legorjy.jpg which in the end I decided not to post. Sadly it has been deleted. If you have a copy, could you send it Peter's way? Thanks:-)
Ooops. Look at the time. Nearly forgot to upload this update. Damn. Oh well.
Writing reports about parties
Yesterday, I went to another party. It was supposedly Graham's but, you know. It was at the same house as 23/2/2002 (see the archives) "Baby" Dave said he was expecting a report on my site (this morning, so it's late, but yeah, like I was awake...) so here you go.
Not too many people there but enough. And I think we nearly all have websites, so I should be able to do a big load of links: Graham, "Baby" Dave, Devin, Rutherford, Nelis, "Fresher" Dave, Matthew, Amy, and Vince, who doesn't have a site I can find, and a couple of guys who might have been called Steve and maybe Andrew or something, and whose site addresses I have no idea of, even if indeed they have them.
Yeah. You can see the flavour. Nearly all blokes and nearly all with websites. Hooray, a nerd party!!!:-) A surprising omission were the ModSciFi lot (is that the right address??) but we believe they all chose to spend the weekend at home, humping each other (Fair play to yer!!) but other than that it was the usual crowd:-)
Anyway, yeah, what happened at this party. Well what do you expect...
- We talked about stuff, e.g. the stream of dubious videos coming into the telly in the corner of the front room ("oh, great, Britney again(!)") and what can only be referred to as #warwick Topic 1, that is, computers.
- I went around shouting too much. Especially with the filthy remarks, as usual, few of which were any good (after I got home I remembered several bits I'd been saving up for ages, but I'd failed to use...Clearly the right moment wasn't there, you've got to use your A-list material with proper timing for maximum effect)
- "Fresher" Dave did his "let's try and get all the blokes in the room to snog me" thing. A vote was taken, and I was voted more evil than him, which was funny.
- Amy kept changing her mind on whether I should keep the goatee or not. Some other people said, "yeah, it looks okay". Most didn't care. Fair enough. But I still don't know what to do...
- There was a lot of comedy value to be had in reading body language. Well, there was. But, enough said, I mean I'll get into more trouble than I'm in already for my "let's shout about certain people spending a couple of months dissing some other people, then getting off with them, regretting it, dissing them even more, but now they've actually got together - I mean, ummgh, and what's the deal with relationships anyway" routine...
- Walked home with further gratuitously loud shouting, attempted climbing of lamp posts (I think I got about 6 inches off the ground) and having races and losing because my hat blew off and I had to go back and fetch it.
Random quizzes
Credit: I got all these from the bottom of the links page at Mouse's HQ.
Are you still reading this?
I'm writing this on Friday evening. I might write two, three or even four more updates before you get back in to work on Monday morning. Would you read all that is new? Or just the top one?
Congratulations to Jez and his band (I will link to your site if you say it's ready) They are apparently getting some of their tracks onto Radio 1's website. Good exposure. It's left for me to wonder how to do the same, maybe it'd help if I actually made some new tracks first, worked out how to MP3 stuff, you know...
Don't you just hate mouth ulcers? I do. I've got like 4 or 5 at the moment, one on the underside of my tongue and all the others evenly distributed around my mouth so I can't avoid painfully catching one or other of them on some part of the food I'm eating. I wish I could live on soup for a week until they clear up or something. Apparently you can bite them off but I really, really don't think that's possible, unless you've had so much painkiller that you can headbutt a wall repeatedly without feeling it.
I got a very funny letter this morning. A long time ago I'd written to apply to this company for a job they'd put in the paper. They never wrote back. Damn rude, I thought, especially since I sent them a stamped addressed envelope. Well today they wrote to me, saying that they have a new position available that my CV fits better. I don't know what to do. (I doubt I'll do anything. Why? Because it says "if you are interested, ring this number..." Bah...)
Some of my relatives stopped by the house this afternoon on their way back home. I tried to do the social thing and vaguely got away with it, probably because they didn't ask me what I am doing with my life at the moment, so I never really needed to get defensive and start shouting at people. I got to make lots and lots of cups of tea all at once again, which is always fun.
Freedoom; and more of Doom engine reprogramming
NERD STUFF ALERT! If you don't like this sort of thing DON'T READ THIS SECTION:-)
Went to Freedoom again and this time got hit number 11111 - even better than 11000? Probably!
While messing about with the golden gun cheat I've implemented in my Doom engine, I had it so that it was firing about 1000 plasma bullets in a big wall out in front of me. This was very funny but killed the frame rate for several seconds while the huge energy discharge dissipated. Yes all right I should have taken a screen shot. Sorry.
This was on top of the basic premise of a single bullet that kills anything. I've still got that implemented and it works really well after I fixed the "why do things fly towards me when I shoot them with a huge damage?" problem. I feel like explaining this. The convention in the source is that if you want to kill something outright you do a damage of 10000 points to it - this is what happens when you teleport on top of something, for example. But, when you shoot a monster, so there is a direction from which the damage has originated, the target gets a push in the opposite direction. To calculate the size of that push, we have (from p_inter.c, function P_DamageMobj)
thrust = damage * (FRACUNIT>>3) * 100 / target->info->mass;
FRACUNIT happens to be 2^16, so FRACUNIT>>3 i.e. FRACUNIT/8 is 2^13. The compiler does the multiplications before doing the final mass division and stores the intermediate result as a signed 32-bit integer (i.e. maximum 2^31) So to avoid an overflow:
2^31 > damage * (2^13) * 100 (threes and ones:-) )
i.e. damage must be less than 2621.44. Ordinarily, you wouldn't get a single damage this big (the maximum usually is 800, a possible value from a direct hit from a BFG) My original code read the amount of health of the monster you'd just shot and did a damage to it of that size, so when you shot a spiderdemon (health 3000) or cyberdemon (health 4000) you'd get this overflow and the corpse would fly towards you.
The solution was to "stagger" the damages. Loop, applying some large damage (say, 2000, which is still enormous, but less than 2621.44) to the target until it is dead. Plus, 2000 is big enough to impart such a large push to the smaller monsters that their mutilated corpses fly across the room at amazing speeds, which invariably results in hilarity.
PS P_DamageMobj is a fantastic function with all sorts of interesting stuff in it. One day I might write an update about the part of it that deals with how having armour affects damages done to the player: that is, the so-called "Damage Formula", and related results. Don't go away! It is really, really interesting!!!:-)
...Until dead imps dribble out of the monitor!
AKA more Doom stuff
I should have posted this yesterday. But Freedoom has updated. Apparently they've done all the patches (i.e. wall textures) now. Earlier I visited the site and it had gone a bit wonky, I don't know why but I just took another look and it's working once more (I was hit number 11000! Cool, nice round number:-) - yeah, while I think about it, click on the counter, it's a really nice web stats page; Felix, you will love this, trust me:-) )
Freedoom is a project to clone the entire Doom and Doom II IWAD files and make them "Free", for inclusion on Linux CDs and the like, so you don't have to buy the game to play PWADs. I think it is a fantastic idea. The wall textures, and flats (floors/ceiling graphics) are all really good. However I'm not so sure about the sounds, and sprites (monsters, weapons etc.) replacements though. In particular NOTHING will ever be as good as the original DSGETPOW (sound you get when you pick up a large powerup, like a soulsphere) I've made whole tracks out of that, it's so beautiful. Still, never mind; I have the original IWADs, I can mix and match...
Moving on to today, for some reason I decided to create a user profile for the Doomworld forums. I might never use it but then again I might do. I like the way you can comment on news items. I think that sort of thing would be nice for this site but would require some dynamic content stuff that the server doesn't support and I don't know how to code. Oh well, just email me instead, it's not hard (although I do my level best to make it so, by using anti-spam measures and so forth)
Finally, in my version of the DIY source I have implemented a cheat called "the Golden Gun". It affects the pistol and is toggled on and off with a type-in cheat code. For those not familiar with N64 GoldenEye, your pistol will now kill anything in one shot. It's quite fun especially with very big monsters, and indeed useful if I want to do a quick run round an empty level but don't want to use the massacre function to kill every single living thing on the map.
There was some weirdness with getting the game to compile with GCC 2.95.4 (which was released for RISC OS at the end of last year) so for now I simply downgraded back to 2.95.2 because I couldn't be bothered to fix it:-)
I don't seem to have ever linked to DIY before. How odd. Oh well. I should really make a page for it or at the very least send my rather large list of changes upstream. And yeah, the fact that it's a port of the Doom engine to RISC OS, and works best with RISC OS (although does compile on various unix-type platforms) and contains lots of my personal customisations is one of the reasons I don't want to move my Doom stuff onto my new system just yet.
PS If you're wondering where you've heard that dead imps phrase before see the 2001 review. Also while I'm linking to stuff, go and read Planet of the Imps NOW. It's HILARIOUS. I think numbers 88 and 92 are especially funny.
To post to AAW or not to post to AAW
I was faced with an unusual question earlier today. I read a post on AAW and I thought, "I could follow up to this but is it worth it?"
This is remarkable. A year ago I'd've just pressed the followup key and got on with it. It just goes to show how your habits can change. There are a number of reasons, I'm not in the habit of posting so much these days, never mind all the times I've posted something over the past year and been flamed/ostracised for it, or the "gap" before I got the modem connection at home. But you know. Just struck me as weird, that's all.
Fox network special "when fingers get caught on furniture"
Why is it that recently I keep catching bits of myself on fixtures and fittings?
Only this evening I reached down to put a saucepan back under the cupboard under the sink and got my jumper caught on the gorgeous leopardskin print doorknob behind me.
Worse, I caught my finger on the shelf in one of the cupboards above the cooker as I reached in and took the skin off.
I'm not clumsy! Why do these things keep happening, damnit?
About time we updated this thing, really? What do you think? Oh okay. You twisted my arm.
Oh yes. As from now I have decided that an update doesn't necessarily need an <h2></h2> heading. Often as not I have real trouble thinking of one I haven't used before.
A couple of links
Doom and more Doom
So guess what Rob spent his weekend doing. Playing a few maps e.g. industrl.wad, an incredibly large map with tons of monsters (over 1300! It had a zeroed reject table so the only way I could make it playable was to get WARM to make one!) It was way too hard for me (damnit!) so I ended up cheating my way round it (oh well...) but you see I'm a sucker for huge levels like that, I need to see the whole of it.
Also, they've apparently officially announced Doom 3 now. I'm not too excited as I know I've no hardware powerful enough to run it anywhere near properly and I like the original quite enough thankyou very much. Maybe in a few years time after another system upgrade and there are lots of extra levels available, made as labours of love by talented individuals.
Brrrring! Brrrring!
Once again I found myself unable to use the telephone, putting off making certain calls this weekend, due to being a wuss. But I can't be bothered whinging about it, just to say I was very angry with myself on Saturday. Happily the problem was solved on Sunday, although in a quite subversive and wholly unsatisfactory manner. But the end result was as intended so like I say I'm not going to whinge too much, I don't feel like it.
Another deliciously cryptic piece from the people who brought you "technical difficulties":-)
Let's write a big update about Woody!
Debian 3.0, codenamed Woody, was supposed to be released today. When I heard about this, back on Debian Weekly News's 10th April issue I thought "I'll believe that when I see it...", and, lo and behold, we have the 1st May issue which says it isn't being released just yet. But it is basically releasable. It's been basically stable for ages.
Why am I telling you this? Well, another case of my unerring sense of timing:-) I decided to do an apt-get dist-upgrade again. The download was last night, didn't take too long because I remove everything that I don't think is useful (e.g. emacs:-) ) This afternoon (unlike the last time I got this far) I actually let it install everything as well. So, I've (finally) upgraded my system to Woody.
You wouldn't notice too much of a difference. The odd difficulty.
- diald suddenly decided it wasn't disabled any more, and started creating big log files of failed connection attempts, so I had to disable it manually (exit 0 at the start of /etc/init.d/diald - yes, I still haven't tried to actually set it up properly...)
- The default configurations of mutt and slrn have changed their respective programs default colours slightly. I'll have to get used to them, or reconfigure them. Mutt in particular has made some very weird comment-outs and changes in /etc/Muttrc.
But everything else works. Some stuff slightly better.
- fetchmail "fits in" a lot better. I mean, it's got a boot-time startup script to run it as daemon, and proper ppp connection up/down scripts (well, an up script, the author doesn't think connection down scripts are necessary, but I do:-) ) What can I say? It simply feels like it is integrated into the packaging system much more neatly.
- The old problem with slrn_getdescs being run at the wrong time (i.e. just after bootup in an anacron job, and in particular when the connection wasn't up) has been fixed, again very neatly; /etc/default/slrn gets sourced from various places and it says whether or not you run getdescs via cron or via the ppp connection coming up.
- The problem with anacron and apm that I described on 4/4/2002 was fixed in much the same way I fixed it manually, although of course it fits into the packaging system much more nicely than a "local hack" (anacron puts a script into apm's directory of event handler scripts, /etc/apm/event.d/)
So, we conclude, it's all good. Have to say, HUGE MASSIVE BIGUP and stuff to everyone involved in the project. Debian rules. (he writes, for the benefit of the Sucks-Rules-O-Meter or more precisely the Linux distributions version - oh, what the hell, Linux rules as well, just for the benefit of the first one - they don't search for RISC OS, so there's no point in writing RISC OS rules as well, but it does:-) )
#warwick stuff, last week; lack of it, this week
I've been avoiding IRC recently because, like I wrote in the last update, it wastes so much time. You stare at the xchat window and type into it. Repeat until you realise what the time is, and you haven't updated your site or written your diary or are any way ready to go to sleep or anything.
However before the relevant log gets rotated away(*) I'd like to post these following quotes, from a friend who was pretending to be me at the time: (guess who!)
- "i let sarah **** me around cos i'm too crap with women to do anything else"
- "oh right so it's funny is it? why is it [everyone's] always laughing at me"
- "just because i can't go out and get a job"
- "some days everything goes really well and i fix my perl bug and i play my doom but some days i just worry and don't do anything about that worrying"
- "i'm no one everyone always talks to bex so go and talk to her or something that's probably because she's out having a life or something"
- "yeah i ****ing am [too wrapped up in my own little world to care about anyone else] now **** off stop talking about me i like to pretend to hate attention so that when i get some i don't have to convince myself i begged for it"
Good, eh? I'll probably get into loads of trouble for posting that but we were all only pretending. I think it's funny, but like I said, there's many a true word spoken in jest...
There's no reason for bleeping out certain words either, other than two and a half months without its use up to now; but thinking about it I realise the tracklist invalidates that claim... Oh well. Speaking of the tracklist why didn't anyone tell me one of the InfoTexts had a small t in the middle?!? It looked so ugly!! Aargh!! Fixed now though:-)
(*)Yes, I should probably say this out loud, I log my IRC sessions. It's so I can refer back to the conversation later, it helps me when I'm writing my real diary. I don't keep them for long, in fact I've gone so far as to write a little script to rotate them... xchat loads all perl scripts in its config directory on startup, so you have this thing that runs a program called savelog that you find on Debian systems. If you use Debian, and xchat, and/or would like to see it, tell me:-) If, on the other hand, you think it's really sinister, tell me that as well;-)
