25/01/2003 @15:26:14 ^20:33:41

Great big fucking test

Heh. Ladies, Gentlemen, Reprobates, IDIOTS who WON'T TAKE THE HINT and GO AWAY, RjY of anARCHy at The Realm of anARCHy is proud to present...

OMFG ROFL Site Of Shite Remix 2003! LOL KEKEKEKE ^__________^

11 January I had been dissatisfied with this site for some time. It was boring to post on it. I couldn't link to previous updates. Archiving was only semi-automatic and in lots of little files, the index for which looked hideous. I began to experiment with databases. Specifically, Berkeley databases. They

So I wrote some code to pull out all the previous 156 site updates from their files, and put them into a database which I imaginatively named omfg.db. Then I wrote a very simple PHP fragment that enumerated the keys, looked up their values and dumped them onto a page. It was proof of concept.

12 January I had been dissatisfied with the people I know for some time. Deliberate attempts to wind me up. Constant reminders of how crap in bed I am. Barely-concealed hatred. 8,000,000 mile lies. Hypocritical accusations of being "obsessively bonkers". Chronic, concentrated, whining smug pedanticism. Having every one of my humourous remarks taken badly and with offence, and being returned with gusto; or simple accusations of insanity from those who didn't get the joke.

I felt the amount of crap I was getting was growing and becoming intolerable. I was becoming dangerously angry. Then something in my head snapped. "I don't have to put up with this; I can, and I must, lose these morons entirely"

(Unfortunately this realisation occurred, as they do, at a highly inconvenient point. I'd somehow agreed to get involved in someone else's shitty idea and had only a few seconds before the chance to escape was gone. Drastic action had to be taken! I hadn't pulled a stunt like that in years and it showed because I didn't get away cleanly... but fortunately I can sprint and the suburb where I live is sufficiently mazelike to lose pursuers.)

I realised that any announcement of this intention would result in even more of the crap I was trying to avoid, like scorn, sneering, derision, ridicule, or worst of all, idiots going "oh what's wrong Rob" and pretending like they give a damn. So I decided to simply quit IRC/usenet/etc, silently.

Unfortunately though the phone's still there, and later, that's exactly what happened. Some people are too stubborn, or in my view, just plain dumb, to take a hint. Go away.

14 January I had spent a day and a half largely being incredibly frustrated by a lack of knowledge of various programming and markup languages, library interfaces, and so forth. For example I'd tried to write an X clock program using GTK. See, I've always wanted a Unix clone of RISC OS's !Alarm, but I couldn't work out how to do it... It was around 3pm, and I fell asleep. During the following two and a half hours I had a nightmare that was horrible even by my standards, and I decided I wasn't going to bed again for a long time...

I forced myself to continue experimenting with CSS. A lot of hours and thousands of reloads later I had a page that looked, well, identical to the previous design, but using CSS, instead of tables, and I had learned a lot... During the time I needed some text with which to fill a page so I could format it; having no lorem ipsum generator to hand I had to write it myself. Now, imagine the results of an angry, sleep-deprived brain's automatic writing. Not pleasant. In fact, unprintable...

15 January It's difficult to say where this day started and the previous finished, but at some point I felt there was no more CSS that could be done. However, a brain deprived of sleep tends to wander a little, and sitting there for a moment I suddenly saw in my mind a very clear image; an elevated view of the interior of a cave. In the middle, a glowing pool of water, and on the opposite side, a door, brightly lit.

And it was textured in ASHWALL3...

Yes, I had imagined a Doom map. The more I thought about it, the more ideas popped into my mind. A whole story built up quickly. I feverishly loaded Yadex, the map editor, and spent the rest of the day making a start on the map.

I loved how having quit IRC, I'd actually got some shit done for once, instead of spending hours being irritated by idiots, manipulated by morons, wound up by wankers, annoyed by... alliteration... "Dump your friends!" I thought. "If people can split up with their boy/girlfriends, they can do the same with the other people they know!" Unfortunately at least in my case most of those people know each other, so it's too hard to be selective; you have to nuke the lot. Oh well. Small price to pay for stability and lack of rage, I guess. At last, I felt good enough to sleep...

16 January

An invitation to a party turned up in the email. I am known for being the guy who turns up to parties, usually in stupid hats. But of course I don't want to go... What to do, what to do... Not only that, but another retarded phone call. "I'm in a good mood!" "so bloody what? go away!" "No! Come over and have dinner." "No now go away!" I hung up.

17 January Continued to tweak the site design (and my Doom map) neither with particularly noteworthy results. However, at one point I was rsyncing files when suddenly the server stopped responding. ping and traceroute still worked. Using netcat to scan ports known to blocked by the firewall produced an expected "Connection refused". However, the open and forwarded ones were reporting "No route to host". I hoped fervently that my hundreds of ssh/scp/rsyncs, page reloads, and generally hammering the server, hadn't taken it out...

18 January Sometime around 1pm I noticed the server had come back up. The evidence suggested it hadn't actually gone down last night; it had been rebooted but its uptime had carried on into the following day. It looked more like it had had its wire pulled out and lost its connection, but I really don't know. I don't think it was my fault though.

Inspired by part of a thread on Doomworld I rewrote Sandbox, my "shove a load of random monsters or whatever into a circle" map-generating script. The code actually looks pretty good now. The thread was about various esoteric bits of monster behaviour, and in particular, the effect (or lack of it) of barrel explosions on cyberdemons. People were talking about surrounding them with hundreds of barrels as an experiment. I used Sandbox to put a cyberdemon and nearly 8000 barrels into an area smaller than Doom2 map1's exit room. I knew full well it wouldn't have any effect; I knew exactly where Doom's source code blatantly says they won't have an effect. I simply thought that density of barrels was hilarious...

19 January While fiddling around with the CSS again I flipped the navigation bar thing (you know, the bit with "here's some stuff" at the top) from the left to the right. It makes the CSS simpler - I could combine it with the signature picture - and requiring less use of absolute positioning, which isn't so well supported by browsers.

20 January It's all very well having a nice new site engine, but if you can't update it, it's pretty useless. At last I made the script to add new entries into the database. There is still great room for improvement here but it works.

21 January Made a version of the tracklist to fit into the new site layout

22 January Converted other pages to fit in to the new layout

Yet another shitty phone conversation. "How are you doing" "shut up. take the hint. go away." Also I noticed "On a pretty much totally unrelated topic, has Rob a reason for dissappearing(sic) himself (and would he care to venture it?)?" on the mailing list. I wrote a reply, but I never sent it. However, rather than waste the material, I edited it into this update... heh.

23 January I noticed ntl's DHCP server failing to respond to dhclient's requests to have my system's lease renewed. About to lose my connection, I tried to fool dhclient into thinking the lease had another 24 hours, but it didn't work. I think I know what I did wrong though. So anyway, I switched this computer off... and turned on one of the others, and played a bunch of old Doom maps.

24 January It seems that last week's forced disturbances of my sleeping patterns (and, I'd like to believe, quitting #warwick) have actually fixed them. I slept from 12:30am to 6:30am. It's like a normal person! Christ!

I didn't really work on the site. Instead I made another attempt to learn how transmission control protocol (TCP) works, while running lots of tests with tcpdump, to try to find out why the hell so many of my downloads freeze and my connection seems so unreliable...

I happened to visit Pete's site, to find a new design. It gets worse, he writes later that he's redone his site in CSS, no tables. Oh fucking great. Now it looks like I've copied him or something and that everything I've typed up there is a lie. I mean, it's not like you can see any evidence that I wrote some shitty database thing.

Well, rest assured! You can think that if you want. I won't think any less of you than I already do, assbutt.

25 January ...

So we reach the present time. I think this new system is ready to put in. Yet more tweaks - I realised I could simplify my CSS a lot, remove half the <div>s on the page... but resulted in a layout that is weirdly similar to the host's main page, with the floated box in the corner like that. Oh well. I might yet still fuck about with it, there are things with which I'm not happy.

For example, the floated box repels text surrounding it. Good, it's supposed to. But why doesn't it do the same with background? I had the white date heading boxes going underneath the navigation bar, it looked horrible, they should have only gone up to its edge. Stupid. I had to fake it by putting "width: 0;" so the content (which now cannot contain whitespace, on pain of unwanted linewrapping) forces the box's width open only as far as necessary. This was not the effect I wanted, I want the white box to go as far over as possible, to the edge of the navigation bar or the edge of the page. Stupid.

I might have waited until the 14th of next month, when the site is a year old, but that's because I thought this thing would take longer to build. Oh well. Instead it's being published on the day that my stupid d:c/p/y date notation turned 10 years old, heh.

And that stupid party I mentioned is probably starting like now. I still haven't decided whether or not to go. I don't want to, I think it would be a disaster. However, I sort of said I might; and thinking about it, it might be good if it were a disaster. I mean, I can leave when they piss me off. Or, I could turn up and be really abusive - after all, they were damn fool enough to invite me... Heh.