I rewrote my xchat log rotator. I only want logs rotated at most once a day, and only old logs deleted that are too small, not the most recent.
I've also restarted playing Alien Vendetta, one of the finest Doom megawads ever made. I'm playing the old (end of 2001) version on one computer and the new, optimised for compet-n version (end of 2002) on the other. I found I needed to code an always-run option for DIY, as I've become accustomed to not having to hold the run key down in PRBoom. It's not cheating because the original DOS "vanilla" Doom always had an autorun option if you knew how to turn it on (put joyb_speed 29 or 31 or something like that in the .cfg file)
It seems going on about how you're sulking because no-one ever invites you to whatever the hell it is they all do together, at least sometimes has the intended effect. I managed to get myself invited to a pub walk (not crawl, damnit) last night. It was... a pleasant change, yet somehow unsatisfying, perhaps because I couldn't afford to drink in every place we went to, perhaps because I often found myself seated too far from the middle of the group to feel properly involved.. Social dynamics are weird. Oh well, at least I got invited, heh.
Speaking of last night I'd like to quote from The Warwick Job, a site I should have linked to months ago but it's monitored by snafu so hopefully that makes up for it.
So: Don't steal, borrow or whatever verb you wish to substitute for "take" somebody else's stick and then use it to summon elder gods. And subsequently post a photograph. They get really upset about it.
Not at all sir, I was probably just shouting too loud like I always do, heh. I don't mind if you keep the damn thing, especially if it's being put to use in the name of dark magicks and, of course, comedy value.
Second update today, heh.
The perils of poor timing
It's Monday night, around ten to nine. There's a TV show on that you usually watch, but you've momentarily forgotten about it and gone on IRC. It turns out to be another dreadful coincidence. You find some people you know arranging an impromptu gathering, at which it is subsequently made clear you are not welcome.
You spend the rest of the evening sulking and unable to concentrate on or be pleased about anything, even when you finally managed to beat that pesky Doom map that has so far eluded you (because of that blasted megasphere which must be collected, despite that it requires being bounced by an archvile to get it) If you hadn't gone on IRC, you'd never have known! Thus, no problem!
I am reminded of many previous similar occurrences. A good example would be the house drama contest at school in 1997. Naturally, I wasn't in my house's production, but I knew the people who'd made a custom comedy version of Cinderella for another house. It seemed like it was all I'd been hearing about for the previous month, so I had decided to go.
Anyway afterwards they went for a post-competition drink in the pub up the road and again I felt it was made abundantly clear that I wasn't invited. I mean after the end of the event people were milling around and they'd all disappeared until one of them came up to me and it was like "if you see any of the of the others, tell them we're going for a drink" No "hey you should come as well" Then the next day they were like "why didn't you come with us" which just made it worse, yeah, pretend like I would have been welcome when it's all well over with.
So, yeah, I don't take rejection well. I've spent much time over the years trying to force my brain into not being bothered, and I have partially succeeded; both of these examples above are one or two day aggravations, after which time, becoming no more than other incidents of dark comedy value to sneer about later. But right now the wound is raw and spewing pus onto my keyboard, and my placebo is uploading it to here...
Program hides secret messages in executables (from The Register)
"...the application is still powerful enough to secretly stash the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in a single copy of Microsoft Word"
It's an obvious joke but I think that says more about the bloated size of Microsoft Word than it does about anything else, heh. Indeed I'm not sure of the size of the latest version of Word's executable file, so it might well be comparable to something large but laudable, like a Linux kernel, Mozilla, or whatever.
Way to drone on and kill a decent joke opportunity, Rob
Before I start, I'd like to announce the addition of Amy's Weblog to SNAFU. It seems she moved her site having moved house and thus having lost the ability to dial up to Freeserve to update the old one.
She didn't tell anyone about this relocation and took a certain amount of persuading before she allowed it to be monitored by SNAFU, so everyone tell her how good and interesting a site it is. I'm not being sarcastic. It is good and I look forward to further updates.
Want a credit card? Look no further!
We're all familiar with unsolicited mail. For example, credit card applications. My address has been cheerfully sold to no end of credit card companies, so every few days I get another letter inviting me to apply for another one.
I've seen all the gimmicks they use. Free gift offers, zero APR for 6 months, no annual fee, whatever. Pre-approval jazz, making it sound like you've more of a chance that you'd succeed in your application (why would they be checking on you, personally, to see if this were the case?) Dressing down the envelope so it looks like a letter from the taxman, so that you open it instead of just discarding it (I was very annoyed when I fell for that one, so the letter was torn into several dozen pieces more than usual)
However, this morning a new standard of lunacy was set, a whole order of magnitude in excess of the previous. I am hoping that by reproducing the contents of the letter here, somehow, it will seem a little more believable. Remember I'm not making this up.
[University of Warwick logo]
Mr Robert James Young
blah
blah
somewhere in the middle of England
blah
January 2003
We've still got a great deal to offer you
(and it's your chance to give something back)
Dear Mr Young
As an alumnus of Warwick University, we want you to feel proud of your achievements - and get as much from them as possible. With the Warwick University Platinum MasterCard, you can.
In terms of performance, the Warwick University Platinum MasterCard offers and excellent balance transfer rate of just 0% per annum¹ for your first five months. After this it will revert to the standard variable rate for purchases, which is a very competitive 14.9% APR.
So, if you've built up balances on existing credit or store cards or have a loan, you might find that transferring them to your Warwick University Platinum MasterCard could save you money. It would also make organising your finances simpler, as you'd have just one statement to check and one monthly payment to make. And it couldn't be easier to do - just fill in the balance transfer section on the application form overleaf.
Do your University proud for a second time
As well as offering you exceptional rates, taking out the card also benefits Warwick University. So, when the card is first taken out, Warwick University receives a payment from Beneficial. Subsequently, for every £100 spent, an additional payment is made to our funds - and at no extra cost to you.
What's more, as a Cardholder, you can expect a credit limit of up to £20,000², up to 56 days' interest-free credit³, no annual fee and free Purchase Protection Insurance*.
You'll find additional information in the enclosed brochure, or if you have any queries, please contact Beneficial Customer Services on 0870 240 0990. There's also an application form overleaf. All you have to do is fill it in and return it in the envelope provided - you don't even need a stamp.
Yours sincerely,
Tess Robinson
Alumni Officer
Development and Alumni Relations Office
Senate House
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
This letter must be read in conjunction with the accompanying leaflets.
1, 2, 3, *, please see enclosed leaflet for details.
For privacy reasons, your name, address and all other personal information contained in this letter has not been passed on to Beneficial.
No, it didn't work, it's still unbelievable. But why stop here? If you're going to licence credit cards for graduates, why not other stuff too?
- Warwick University Life Insurance: If you die in a horrible accident, the university gets a lump sum towards research into necrovivication.
- Warwick University Pizza Delivery: Buy a deep-pan cheese tomato pineapple and mushroom pizza and the university gets £1 towards feeding starving students! As a special bonus, if you order anchovies they are arranged into the shape of the university logo.
- Warwick University Make £500 p/w or more in your spare time! It turns out they need willing volunteers in their necrovivication experiments, and you get five hundred smackers for having various glowing chemicals stuck into you, or possibly lecturing the students.
But whatever they choose to do next, I'm sure it'll be in the best interests of their customers. That is, HFC Bank plc, trading as Beneficial.
IT WAS A LIE!!
Yes I made up that thing about six valentine cards as the best way to get at everyone posting whinges about not receiving any. Even if you did get one, what then? Sure, you feel elated now but later you'll split up having probably contracted VD. Was it worth those burning sensations when you go for a slash?
PX376 IS DEAD!
Writing Skills is no longer a compulsory course for third year maths/physics undergraduates at the university. I feel cheated.
Writing skills was a highly time-consuming course whose payoff was completely unrelated to the effort you put into it. That is to say the assignments
- took vast amounts of time to complete, to the detriment of all other courses that were on at the same time
- gave vast amounts of stress, because the work was the kind of thing I simply cannot do, and thought I'd left behind when I finished GCSE English. This was a personal thing, everyone else seemed to find it easy.
- took the same (large) amount of time and effort to do the assignments badly as it took to do them well, so you couldn't just knock it off and say "fuck it"
I hated that fucking course and feared the two hour classes, and now the snotty-nosed brats don't have to do it. I went through hell and it didn't do me any good, I'm still fucking jobless, yet the brats are all getting it easy, where's the justice? Education doesn't mean shit.
DAVE MY HERO
Another revelation: Evil Dave is my hero. He's everything I try to be but better. He's rude and disgusting to everyone, like me, yet still people like him. I tried so hard to be that sort of laidback honest type but no they saw through me and now I'm seen as just another whingy kook, you know, the type you can't talk to honestly, you have to worry about what you say to them because they'll take it personally and scream at you.
Consider Sarah who I fell out with after she went off with him again having spent the previous five months telling me and everyone else that "she wasn't doing the casual thing any more". Dave of course proceeded to remind us all of this and his legendary sexual prowess as often as possible.
Now a few weeks ago she phoned up and I was saying "why don't you just leave me alone" She's like "I want our friendship back". Oh yeah? No. These days she treats me differently: she's decided I'm not the laidback honest guy I try to be and now talks to me now like she talks to all the other people she sees as emotional fuckups that she thinks she has to care about. She doesn't tell me shit any more. So we'll never have it back. I can't be friends with someone who treats me like she's a councillor and I'm her fucking patient.
Yet I quote "Sarah wants someone like Dave at the moment." Because Dave "the woolly mammoth of love" is like yeah, talk to me baby I'll take the piss and give you my honest opinion or whatever and she does because of... I don't know, something, I tried to be it before but I failed. I should say that since then to my knowledge they haven't been at it again... but it's half-term next week, just you wait for all the fireworks.
Also consider Matthew, who flames me every time I say anything disgusting that I think is funny. To be fair when Dave does the same thing and worse he gets the same reaction... but those two get on really well, whereas Matthew and I have a barely concealed mutual hatred, he flames me every time most every time I express an opinion, he tried to drive me off alt.alumni.warwick and the triv mailing lists... I don't get it.
So anyway in conclusion, what's happened is I tried to play with the big boys and now I'm payin' for it every day. I tried to be this way and yet there's someone else who's better at it, and it's him, I hate the guy he's really annoying but everyone still likes him and I hate it and I realised that it's because he's everything I want to be but he's better at it. No matter how good you are there's always someone better than you.
I got 6 valentines cards! Oh man! Six!! I think I know who two of them are from, but I've no clue about the others.
Also this site turns a year old today. I'd do a review but I can't be bothered. Go and read the archive. But out of us lot, mine was the first! You copied me, admit it.
Yesterday I bought another 4-way trailing socket so I could put my alarm clock back on the other side of the room. It cost two pounds, which I thought was pretty cheap. I got it from Argos, whose website fobs you off if you don't use IE, and indeed is listed on in this article on The Register about companies who don't like "alternative" browsers. The kid behind the collection desk, he was funny. He was probably about 14 and he said his lines, obviously straight out of the training manual, in a delightful monotone. He's fucking earning more than me though...
Looking at The Register just now, I saw this article. Some ISP bigwig is congratulating NTL on their infamous 1 gigabyte per day cap for "taking a stand". It's aggressive language but I can see his point about those who use tons and tons of bandwidth paying for it. The analogy between electricity and network bandwidth makes some kind of sense.
Mind you, this is probably because I rarely shift more than twenty or thirty megabytes in any given day, though, I'm sure I'd feel differently if I were into downloading tons of music and video and whatever, or hosting a bunch of friends' websites for free. The problem is that everyone's used to paying for metered electricity or telephone use, but these days, having entirely unmetered internet use. It's very difficult to change to a scheme that would potentially charge people for something that, previously, they got for free.
I'm not saying I think it's a good idea to return to a system where you pay for every second you spend connected. Charging for time online doesn't work, just because of the way people use computers; every second you spend connected is not spent sending or receiving data. But I think it's worth considering a scheme where you pay a flat rate, then some amount for whatever bandwidth you shift over some limit, like, say, a gigabyte. The flat rate could well then be priced more cheaply.
It'd never work though, because whatever happens, people are the same everywhere, trying to get as much as possible for as little as possible. The ISPs try to charge you as much as they can get away with and still have you subscribe to their service. The heavy downloaders want their extra gigabytes for free, especially since then they quite probably don't have to pay their TV licenses either. Our sites gets booted off the server because they're costing someone else money now. There is no easy solution.
But 6 cards baby!
So SNAFU seems to have been well-received by those who are on it... It does its checking a bit more often. I decided an hour is insufficiently frequent, despite the bandwidth. If I get any complaints I'll put it back, of course. I still think there aren't enough sites on it but... I suppose I could extend its scope... And yes, its icon is a joke.
I would like to emphasise that it is not a competition. The most recently updated sites go at the top. That just makes it easier for readers to use. More pivotally, it is how it works on the site from which I stole the idea.
In fact it can't be a competition because it's simply not accurate enough. Too many false changes are detected. They annoy me. To be honest I might take the damn thing down, unless anyone actually relies on it.
It seems the host has MySQL now. Nelis is experimenting, I shall have to as well... but to tell you the truth after a month or so of site programming and database crap I want to do something different.
The obvious choice is making patches for PRBoom. I've been looking through various Doom sources a fair amount but it's been ages since I made any changes to any of them. But since the last time I mentioned it the realisation struck me that any changes I make should be to the CVS version rather than the last released version, which is now about six months old. From what I've seen CVS has a lot of new stuff in it that looks... interesting...
I guess I'd better work out how to use CVS.
SNAFU!
This site was put up nearly a year ago. Since then, a number of other people I know have put up similar things. A number of them were only updated two or three times, but some of them endure... so I stole the idea from newsdot to make:
Site News of Acquaintances From University (SNAFU)
It was described last night as "clever" and "quite useful" but it's not yet without its problems.
- not every site server gives you a Last-Modified header with its pages. In this case you have to fetch the entire file and check for updates.
- worse, Pete's web host's advertising policy puts a load of javascript into his pages that keeps changing, so it looks like his site's always updating when it isn't.
- It currently updates forty two minutes past every hour, I don't think that's often enough but any more and its bandwidth use becomes somewhat unsociable. There are some things you can do with HTTP request headers, like specifying an "if modified since" time to make the request conditional. I'll have to look into that further.
- I don't think it's got enough people's pages on it, but like I say a lot of people started weblogs but failed to keep them up. I'm open to requests but bear in mind if your site never updates you'll be embarrassed...
Peter said to me "how can a CGI script have a last modified time?". I think there are many ways in which a dynamically created page can return the time it was last updated.
- A weblog has the time it was last added to...see below
- More generally, any page that is an interface to some sort of database has the time the database was last modified. Even something as frequently updated as a share price index.
- A possible exception would be a form processor, you know, something that takes user input and does something with it. p3find, for example. You could possibly return the time the page source was last modified, but that might screw up caching.
Here's some PHP to fix the first case. For this to work you need a file whose last modified time changes when, and only when, your site updates. For example, I have my Berkeley database of updates. Then you write the following code, or similar:
header(sprintf("Last-Modified: %s GMT",
gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", filemtime(/PATH/TO/FILE))));
This goes at the top of your index.php (or something else - I can have it check a url different from the one that is linked) but it must be before any actual content is sent. See header() in the PHP manual for more details.
$ sandbox 3003=1 66=3
Yes finally. Sandbox, my Doom monster fight simulation arena generator, has a command line interface. That means, you don't have to fuck with the start of the code to alter the monster ratio (shown as barons 1 to revenants 3) or the many other variables, e.g. radius, height, wall texture, to name a few.
I know it needs work. Even I can't remember all the so-called DoomEdNum thing numbers; I know 3003 is a baron and 66 is a revenant, because I just tried that combination. Similarly, it's easy to remember that a spiderdemon is 7 and a cyberdemon is 16, but is a hellknight 67 or 68? And what the hell is the number for a cacodemon? I know an archvile is 64, and I think a pain elemental is 71 but I'd have to check. See the problem?
So, it needs some name to number hash. A web interface would be interesting too, wouldn't it..? Well, maybe, but I think it's more important that I patch my DIY modifications, like the Overdetailed Map, into PRBoom first.
DIY's page has gone missing. I find this very upsetting. I used that port for years. I still do. Not as often, because PRBoom is on a machine that's both faster and is connected to the internet. Thus it's more convenient to get the WADs onto it, especially with cable. Also DIY might have a number of features that I wish were in PRBoom, but I can patch them in. I wrote most of these features into DIY in the first place...
Here's a bunch of pictures of all the monsters if you can't remember or are just interested.
I redid the archive back to a monthly index of links. It required slightly more complex code (like this thing could be called "complex" at all anyway...) but it works better with Google, which follows links but doesn't do forms.
Also, Felix sent me some screenshots from his Mac, remember? So there was my nice greyscale site. Except the selector. Which was in aqua...
Of course, with no selector, there was no easy way to get a link to any given update, only the final one in each month. So I changed the heading, from this,
<h1><span class="entry">DATE</span></h1>
to this,
<h1><a class="eh" href="?t=TIME">DATE</a></h1>
Basically I have a link duplicating what the old span did, and at the very same time, being a link as well! Neat, huh? Well it will be if it works correctly in all browsers. Which it won't because they're dumb. Remember, whatever you do, don't use IE!
I Told You, Don't View This Site With IE!
Its PNG support turns out to be, predictably enough, extremely retarded!
libpng.org's PNG support in browsers page
Despite Appearances, This Is Not A Rant!
Following the recent Field of Integers debacle, I have been accused of being a "blogger" suffering an "eternal struggle for actual content".
Yes, I'm fully aware it's a joke, but it again made me think about why I do this site at all. Like everything else I do, it's entirely selfish. (I write code, but never release it unless I have to in order for it to be useful. I make records, but I'll be damned if I ever try to give them to people again. Too many idiots complaining about sound quality or simply telling me "that's crap, Rob")
I do this site so that whenever I have something I want to go on about, I can. I can't talk to people I know about things I would like to talk about, we don't have those things in common. Rave records? "We don't want to know" Doom? "Don't make us laugh, it's shit" Computers? Most are like "shut up"; I know some who aren't, but they know so much more than me it's embarrassing...
It's for me. It's entirely selfish. I'm not going around whoring for hits by posting images of half naked celebrities or doing link exchanges with lots of other sites. I'm not running a community site. I don't have comments pages. (If I did, it would be because I built them myself as a coding experiment) I might well appear to be struggling for content, to anyone else who happens to read this. But I'm not posting for them to read, I'm posting when and only when there are things I want to say - good or bad - and I think I have noone to whom to say it.
So don't call me a "blogger"! I think I'm disqualified, thank gods. I hate that term.
To that end, I have something I want to be uncharacteristically pleased about, yet I wouldn't really be able to tell anyone because I couldn't see them understanding why this is fantastic (and rightly so)...
Doomworld's Custom Titles Contest
Yesterday evening, there was the Doomworld custom titles superfest contest. The idea was, twenty(ish) screenshots from from either Doom or Doom 2 were posted, one at a time (in many cases having been tampered with in evil ways!) Contestants had to give the game and the map number, and the first person to get it would win.
And I won! Twice!!
I can't believe I won, to be honest, I never win anything. But I guess this competition was made for me... I have (a) a fast internet connection (b) an excellent visual and symbolic memory and (c) a chronic malignant obsession with a nine year old computer game, heh.
I risked pissing off the forum moderators, and people running the contest, to win twice. Why? There's a few reasons.
- I missed out on the first screenshot posted by a few seconds. I won the third one. I realised I was pretty good at it, so I carried on. Ego trip? I guess so...
- A cheap way to increase my postcount; a good few of my posts are carefully-researched and formatted posts, often as not with citations from the source code. Not only do they take ages to type, there is little opportunity to post them. Hence my postcount before the contest was only 27, after some eight and a half months. This was annoying. The ease with which people seemed to post, and subsequently become friends. My general unwillingness to venture an opinion for fear of looking like a dumbass...
- The first one I won was originally mistakenly awarded to someone else. Instead of taking offence and leaving in a huff I uncharacteristically thought "I could make sure of this by winning another one"
- The person to whom my win was awarded was crowing about it on #zdoom, only to be hugely disappointed. Now I know that kind of disappointment, it's horrible, and I wasn't about to be the cause of it in someone else if I could possibly avoid it. I thought maybe I could win another one and donate it. It turned out I was right, and I was thanked for my efforts. How to win friends and influence people, yeah? I wish that thread had been posted sooner, like before I'd gone to bed last night... I had a few ideas...
Oh, the prize. Winners got the custom title of their choice. See under my name where it says "anARCHy"... When you get to 250 posts, you get to set your avatar (the little picture) to one of your own choice, as opposed to one of the default ones (and I stopped caring about avatars when I switched them off, along with images and sigs, to make the pages load faster) but titles are harder to get because they are only given by the forum admins as a reward (or a punishment for being a retard, heh) I know it doesn't seem like much, especially now one way or another there are so many people with custom titles, but, you know, it means something to me.
PS It's a huge coincidence: I was going to post here about the guy who beat me to the first screenshot anyway. I'd rather rashly decided to write a post about drum and bass, but... well, just read it and the ones after, yeah?...
