21/05/2002-22/05/2002 @01:47:17 ^03:06:12

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-)