25/07/2003 @19:01:46 ^22:00:14

FATHER TIME WAITS FOR NOBODY'S FOOL

It's always really hard to know where to start when you haven't updated for ages.

I was playing with perl and bash script one-liners again in order to discover that the longest time I've ever left this thing before making another update. The answer is apparently a shade over fifteen days. This gap, of roughly fourteen and three-quarters days, will be the fourth longest. It would have been the third if I had waited about three more hours. BoringStats++;

Anyway so a couple of days ago I received the following information

I've decided to stop updating my website (well actually I decided ages ago), so maybe you should take it off snafu.

but I decided to leave it there for a few days, so people would see the announcement so can I have your xdev account plz its not like you need all that bandwidth for a site that never updates kthxlololol

Actually I'm beginning to wonder if any of the sites currently languishing at the foot of snafu are actually going to update again. Yes, Frisky, I'm looking at you. I dislike how you randomly made a site, badgered me on IRC to get snafu to track it, then disappeared. At least your host does last-modified times so snafu doesn't have to download the whole page to discover you still haven't updated. Oh well.

So about a week and a half ago Simon reinstalled the server. This actually broke the site for a while, which I thought was funny, but it's all fixed now. One positive side effect was the creation of four and a half days worth of readable web server logs. The reason that I'm always going on about reading the logs is that I know snafu gets quite a lot of hits and I wanted to know exactly how many. This period gave me an estimate of 64 hits per day. This was around what I'd been expecting, so whatever.

For ages I've been using rsync with "-e ssh". Fair enough, but I discovered quite by accident yesterday that in Debian rsh is symlinked to ssh via the /etc/alternatives mechanism. I don't know why I've never noticed this before. This means of course that where I've been going "rsync -Pavze ssh" all I need is "rsync -Pavz". Might help somebody to read this, I guess

Also yesterday my mum came home from work having borrowed the fourth Harry Potter book. Like the previous three I swiped it to read. I couldn't help laughing at how, at 640 pages, it is fully twice the size of the third one. I also had to go back to the library. They wanted me to renew my ticket, which would have been all very well except for when I went to the desk to do it, there was this kid there who must have been like 7. He'd clearly only just learned to write, and took ages. I mean I know the little idiots have to learn sometime but can't they just practise at home?

In Doom, Classic 11 came out rather sooner than I was expecting it to. While it's a very good map I don't think it's up to the standard of the previous ones. Other than that I've mostly ran around large overcrowded difficult maps in god mode or with the super weapons patch. These are maps, like those from the Hell Revealed 2 beta, that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do. I also discovered that nuts3 does run with PRBoom, contrary to what I said before. You just have to do prboom nuts3.wad -warp 1 as it doesn't like non-320x200 TITLEPICs. nuts2 had the same incompatibility, I just forgot about it(!) Anyway, nuts3, with over 12000 monsters, still runs incredibly slowly on my system but it's worth a look because, as the author demonstrated several times in Equinox, he has a great flair for impressive architectural setpieces. There is a fantastic reference to Equinox in nuts3 as well, if you find it.

In fact, I've just had a intriguing thought: while nuts2 is nuts with a few extra bits added, nuts3 clearly has more in common with Equinox. Now I posted on Doomworld, when nuts2 came out, that since Equinox was released a couple of weeks after nuts, that now nuts2 had come out maybe we were about to see Equinox 2. Given the references it's just occurred to me that nuts3 is Equinox 2, since in the same thread the author registered and posted that he was unlikely to be making another Equinox because it would take too long. Could my and others' comments in that thread have inspired this? I would like to think so, but, yeah, who cares...