01/02/2004 @17:09:16 ^22:10:22
snow more like NO!
in after it taking an hour and three quarters to get home and we were lucky! People only like snow because they remember it fondly from their childhood and the pictures on Christmas cards.
IN BEFORE BAN
Stop the presses. I am issuing the following statement about events surrounding the mass kick from the QuakeNet #warwick this evening. YES FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS IT'S TIME FOR IRC DRAMA!
- I was arguing my case for banning FDave from, well, everywhere, in #warwick on Astrolink.
- From things I said it was inferred that I should "kick all of the other #warwick [the QuakeNet one] then"
- The guy who "owns" the Astrolink #warwick suggested that his brother, hereto referred as "DangerDude" would be able to do this more efficiently, as he knows one of the QuakeNet IRC operators, a guy called Ferg.
- For "shits and giggles" DangerDude asked his friend if he would do it, but Ferg initially refused.
- I changed the topic in QuakeNet #warwick to "HI FERG! GO ON! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!". This extra persuasion caused Ferg to change his mind and kick everyone. DangerDude and I laughed heartily.
Everyone else failed to see the funny side, which is why I decided to write this. Let's be fair, there were probably no more than three people (out of a couple of dozen) who knew anything about this until they were unceremoniously removed. But still, once again the humourless morons take the shit way too seriously and get all annoyed.
Coding by idiots for idiots
First of all I had a program that connected to port 19336 on primrose (if I had remembered to run nc -lp 19336 initially), sent the string "FAG" to it and then segfaulted. Now I have a program that connects to port 19336 on primrose and sends "FAG" to it four times and doesn't segfault.
This is what they call progress, I guess. GNet proved useful. It's all very well doing everything yourself but really I know nothing about this crap and I think it would probably be better to start off more high-level.
As an indirect result of this recent spate of coding for cretins, there has been progress in my seemingly never-ending quest for a unix text editor anywhere near as good as Zap on RISC OS was. I installed the following potential wastes of disc space:
- Zile: I never got on with Emacs. Not only was it impossible to learn, every keypress doing something unfathomable, but it was bloated as all hell. Zile appears to be Emacs with a lot of the crap removed. It's okay but it only has syntax colouring for C/C++ and shell scripts and I'd like it to be able to do perl as well (though shell script mode sort of works for this)
- Vim: If Emacs is bad vi is probably worse. Like many, my only experience of it has been trying to remember how to quit when for some reason I have been unceremoniously dropped into it. However for some reason I have found Vim to be usable. Its syntax colouring is very good. Its C mode is frankly superb; it does all the indenting just as I want it to. Like Emacs it has myriads of commands and keypresses that I don't understand, and in particular the constant swapping between insert and command mode is really annoying. While not as heavy on disc space as Emacs it's still fucking huge. But in spite of this I have yet to uninstall it; in fact this update has been written using it.
I should also mention the current and past stalwarts; Nano, which is good for text files and emails but rubbish for source code; NEdit which would rate highly if didn't require X (recall I discarded XChat for Irssi almost entirely due to the latter being a terminal program) and, Jove, the only excuse for which was that it was way back in the day while I was still a student and I didn't know any better.
THREE HUNDRED DAMN LINES
Session 16, Voucher 2000. The UW11 credits voucher. Man that took all week to put on. In fact on Monday it felt like I had a day's worth of work off five or six different people. It pretty much worked out that way as well.
Hopefully this week I will be able to say something along the following lines:
- No, I haven't done it and I don't intend to either
- Numbers, yes; typing stuff in, yes; crap with horrible Microsoft products; okay; even filing, yes; dealing with people? No, and not just no I haven't done this before so I might get stuck, I mean no I'm not doing this.
- I thought, yeah, but what's the worst thing you'll do? Fire me? Oh well! Bye!
There's shit you say you can't do because you've never tried before and you can't therefore say "yes I can do this" in case you let people down, and then there's shit you know you're incapable of. And I don't think they'll fire me because if they were going to they'd have done it already.
Fuck it. If I do get fired, quite frankly, it'll be a relief. I've been getting more and more sick of the place for two or three weeks now.
Moon2000
It's about time I mentioned Doom again. Moon2000 is a single map for Doom 2 running on MAP06. It is a fine example of oversized architecture. That is, it's really, really huge. There's not so much detail but you don't notice that due to the size of everything. High ceilings, massive rooms, wide-open outdoor spaces with mile-long lines of sight, everything is about four times the size of similar objects in more normal-sized maps. As such, it takes a while to traverse and suddenly it no longer seems like the player can run around at ninety miles an hour.
It's epic. The sky texture is blue and beautiful. The gameplay is rather uneven, sometimes you're running and fighting for your life and others you've been running full pelt for ages and have hardly seen a single monster. The secrets also vary, ranging from id-quality setups to "push at the correct place on this unmarked wall" crap.
In summary it has that sense of space, largeness and atmosphere that I really like in a map, and although it's not perfect in some departments I would highly recommend it.
