[2005-08-24]

We moved to a new office recently. That's one subject that I think I'll
avoid discussing [suffice to say that it could have gone better].

What's fun though is the new office has motion sensors to turn the lights
on around the office. This is kind of a stupid thing to derive joy from,
but the sensors are sensitive enough that if I print out a page to
one of the printers in the other room while the lights are off, they
automatically turn on.


[2005-07-12]

I reliase that I've written about nothing but Apple the last few updates,
but here's another; I love apple hardware designers.

Last night I poured a cup of water onto my keyboard... This is a laptop,
that's a bad thing. There's an explicitly designed little rampy thing,
for exactly this situation. I picked up the latop, tilted it towards
me, and all the water ran out. I continued using it, without noticing
any difference.


[2005-06-22]

Yay for software that forces you to agree to the GPL to install it,
thereby showing a total lack of understanding of what the GPL actually is.


In apparently unrelated news, NeoOffice/J is still crap and still better
than MS Office [for reference, when I was bitching about MS Office on
here a while ago, it was on OSX]


[2005-06-07]

Because everyone's not heard enough of Apple in the last couple days,
how's this for a fucking stellar piece of design:
If you plug in an iPod shuffle to the powerbook, it's too wide, and
covers up the other USB port, and one of either the video, or the
firewire, ports.


[2005-05-31]

Ten-day review of OSX.

Well, shit. There's not much I can really say, I gotta be honest. The
system, as a whole, rocks. I've been compiling a shitlist of features
that I want, or things that I genuinely don't like.

Features that I want are mostly all solved by installing a third party
app. Which is fair, because that same list of features are arguably 3rd
party in most linux distros.

The only two things on my real shitlist are:
1) That brushed metal thing; double clicking the title bar skooshes down;
but I don't know where the title bar is, because the brushed metal is
everywhere, seamlessly. iTunes, I'm looking at you.
2) Does dragging something in an app to the trashcan delete it? Who
knows? XCode sure doesn't. Most apps seem to do the same thing, though.

Basically, consistency. Exactly what Apple is meant to be good at. And
ten days later, I literally have those two [real] complaints, and
that's it. There are other minor gripes, but they're mostly penny-ante
shit that only matters in the context of my previous workflows.


In somewhat related news, only Apple would have the sheer balls to create
a product with no features, and then sell it as if it's a good thing.

I'm talking about the iPod shuffle.

"You can't actually choose what you listen to"
"Once you're listening to something, you can't tell what it is".

These are not stellar pieces of design philosophy when you're working
on an mp3 player. And yet, I love it.

See, having bought a mac, and having discovered that iTunes is really
nice, I ripped all my music. Woo. So now I needed an MP3 player. And
truly wonderful bugger that he is, Greg [aka treke] gave me a shuffle. I
didn't feel too bad, since it was given to him for free and he didn't
like it much. So that was pretty damn nice of him.

Anyways. Turns out that I have a *lot* of jazz. And a *lot* of soundtrack
material that's instrumental, boring, quiet, and long.


In conclusion, I have tasted the Apple Kool-Aid thoroughly, and it tastes
Goooooood. It has pleasing flavor, odor, and looks [even the carton it
comes in looks nice], and is only addictive in a "I choose to be addicted"
kinda way.


[2005-05-26]

I feel absolutely, unequivocally, completely and utterly, validated.

Tonight was the last episode of Lost. While I missed most of the series
due to reasons previously described, the end... Didn't. Big cliffhanger.

What a surprise. No-one found out shit, and everyone will have to wait
until the next series to find out anything. I'll lay down cash that the
same thing happens next time, and you *still* won't know the answers.


[2005-05-22]

I joined the dark side yesterday; I'm now the proud owner of an Apple
Powerbook. Woo.


[2005-05-06]

I remember when I was in 6th form [in the UK, that's two years until
you're eighteen and go to university]. I had a bunch of friends that I
hung out with *all* the time. I've not really kept in contact with them
as much as I should have, mostly because I'm an asshole. I strongly
doubt any of y'all read this, but if you do, hi!


Anyways. My point. Ever since I started using Linux, I've dumped pretty
much everything I had that was windows-related. I literally haven't got
much use for CDs of windows or dos programs, so I gave [or threw] them
all away.


Only one CD ever survived. That CD is Worms United. You remember, that
game from Team17, the one that was the original Worms, with the expansion
pack? Basically, Worms before it suffered the second-system effect and
turned to poo. I always had this dream that I'd play it again.

I played Worms United for HOURS and HOURS in 6th form with that crowd. I
remember wasting more hours doing that than pretty much anything else,
in the whole world. Well, the other day I dug that one CD out again.

Obviously it's not native to linux, but DOS emulation is pretty much a
solved problem as far as I'm concerned, so I'm prepared to choke down
dosbox. And damn, it works WELL.

Well, anyways. That was just a random happy memory that I suspect no-one
but me cares about.


[2005-04-05]

You just can't make this stuff up:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/msletter.jpeg

And because I just can't help myself:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/msletter2.jpeg

Also, if you look up the Meta Trend report, they're actually talking
about Linux migration, not Windows migration. *snigger*


Other stuff...

God of War fucking rocks. It's possible one of the most intense games
I've ever played, but damn it's fun. I beat it last weekend.

The whole PSP thing? I played Lumines for something like half an
hour. Really addictive game, but somehow causes my hands to get all
cramped and painful. I don't think I'll be getting a PSP anytime
soon. Just to put it in persepctive, I prefer the original XBox
controllers to the new ones.


[2005-03-24]

I've been porting JuggleMaster to TorqueScript recently. Useful, huh?

Last night I spent three minutes coming up with a small UI that shows
some of the internals of the siteswap validation process going on,
because I was trying to make a specific trick but couldn't work it out.

I'm hardly getting any awards for my UI deisgn, but:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/stuff/jmts/dontwanttoknow.png

It's the little things. I suddenly wish I had this exact item many many
moons ago, as it makes working out patterns MUCH simpler. Without that
tool, I just couldn't work out how to make the pattern you see there. With
it, it took less than a minute to find my mistake and fix it.


In obviously unrelated news, someone's doing some music for me, and I'm
trying to choreograph a juggling pattern for jugglemaster to do with it.

http://www.seguinsound.com/
The guy does amazing work.


[2005-03-07]

On the subject of Linux being "ready for the desktop", from what I gather,
having MS Office would make Linux "ready for the desktop".

Well, shit. I hope and pray that Linux never ever becomes "ready for
the desktop" because frankly, Word fucking sucks.

No, really. I'm currently trying to fix a 90-page word document. The
layout's all fucked up [even without intervention, it's pretty rare at the
moment to make Word load this same document the same way twice in a row]


Word's export to HTML function is just... Beyond compare. Sometimes,
I'm led to believe, it creates HTML that can render correctly in a web
browser. I've yet to see that particular feat.


I guess I'm pretty much just spoiled by the word processors that I
use. I mean, obviously vi or emacs is the plain-text editor of choice,
but for anything prettier, I've been using lyx. Both of which I fully
understand are generally considered to be ugly, but fuck that. Function
over form works pretty well for me. Clearly not everyone feels the same.


I'm sitting here, trying to convince Word to do some simple things. A
figure needs a caption, so it seems that the caption has been placed
physically near the figure in the blind hope that it might not fuck up.

How daft am I? I mean, who wants to be able to say "this is a figure
called XXX", and have the processor enumerate them for me? Or have a
reference in the text to XXX, and have the processor correctly convert
that to a reference to the enumeration?

I must be pretty fucking stupid to expect my word processor to correctly
enumerate sections for me. Or create non-retarded HTML. I mean, that's
what DreamWeaver's for, right? Duh. I'm clearly using the wrong tool
for the wrong job.


[2005-02-24]

Float like a butterfly, stings like a bitch.

I got myself a new toy; A Spyderco Spyderfly. It's a balisong, aka a
butterfly knife. Great toy, but could probably be construed as kinda
dangerous.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/spyderfly.jpeg

There is the argument that anything that has multiple hinges in addition
to a couple very sharp bits might be a bit of a silly thing to call a
"toy". That's just crazy talk.


[2005-02-14]

All these people who complain linux isn't ready for the desktop yet are,
IMHO, sadly mistaken.

It *must* be pretty easy and friendly to use because you get some pretty
fucking catastrophically stupid people using it. I mean, if they can
get it up and running enough to have problems with it, then it must have
been pretty fucking easy to set up.

QED


[2005-02-13]

I wash and I wash, but I can't get the stench of roleplaying off me.

I've genuinely been enjoying playing NeverWinter Nights and World of
Warcraft recently. How much longer each will last, who knows. but at
least for the time being, Both are thoroughly good fun.

I feel so dirty.


[2005-02-09]

The other day I was passing with some people and found myself completely
and utterly incapacitated.

Normally when I juggle, I'm listening to music, even if it's on in
the background. The other day, Pink Floyd's "Money" was on. For those of
you not paying attention, Money is in 7-time. This is very rare.
[For reference, Most of the stuff you hear is either 3 or 4, in general]

The pattern I was trying to learn was a 12-beat pattern. To anyone
that cares:
Person A is doing 3-count with person C
Person B is doing 4-count with person C
Every twelfth beat, person B passes to person A. And person C only passes
to person B. Everything else pretty much works itself out.

I was person C.

Basically, for as long as "Money" was on the radio, I couldn't do this
pattern. Just, simply, couldn't do it. The second that Money finished,
I had it rock solid. Maybe it's luck. Amused me anyways.


[2005-01-24]

Sensing a theme, I was driving to work just now, listening to an Infiniti
advert. It seems that if I buy an Infiniti, there's a fangled bit of
computer voodoo that will tell me if I'm going to leave the lane. The
example they used is that if you're driving along and staring out your
window instead of forward, then you'll be safe because as soon as you
start to leave the lane, it'll beep at you.

I'd tried to make it clear in my last post that I consider this
practice, in addition to Really Really Bad for all the obvious reasons,
is irresponsible and wrong. I don't think I made that quite as clear as
I ought.


Here's a brief bit of reader feedback, from Scotch Tom.

<snip>
Mornin Chunky
  Was reading your finger about Americans, SUVs and stupidity in
general, and thought you missed something crucial in what you were
saying.  Not only is the shit about not changing your driving style
encouraging bad driving, but it's down right wrong and irresponsible.
Does this car have magic tyres that go "oh, it's snowy, I'd better
magically develop extra grip from somewhere"... Somehow, I doubt this
scenario.  The fact is that in adverse weather conditions, you have
less grip, and you can't see anywhere near as clearly, so (a) your
reaction times are slower, and (b) your stopping distances are longer.

Now clearly, this is where they come along and go, "ah, but we have
super-mega-ABS-5000000", and quite frankly I give not a shit, because
if I'm trying to stop too quickly for the road conditions, there comes
a point at which I run out of grip, and the ABS kicks in, and then
there comes a point at which the ABS can't stop the wheels from
locking, and has to release the brakes just that bit too much, and my
stopping distance goes up dramatically.  All this does, is extend the
point at which I can safely stop, and make it so that at that point I
will very very very suddenly loose control in a BIG way, rather than
being in control of the car in the first place.  Don't get me wrong, as
you well know I was very glad of my car having ABS the other day, but
it is extraordinarily irresponsible of a car manufacturer to suggest
that that ABS is infallible, or that I should for some reason rely on
using it when the weather gets bad.

Bob
</snip>


[2005-01-21]

More on why Californian drivers are so catastrophically crap. Obviously,
the driving test sucks, and people aren't encouraged to engage their
brains while driving. Well, that's always been a given.

Among other things, today I decided that a lot of the blame can be laid
squarely on the shoulders of the car manufacturers.

One thing that's always bugged me in a lot of car advertising here is
the basic premise that "bigger is better". Truck A is 18 inches longer
than Truck B, goes the ad. Clearly that makes Truck A, in some nebulous
way, "better". Or that SUV X can hold an extra four people over SUV Y,
even though there needs to be a legal limit to stop people spurting out
more kids long before they hit SUV Y's limit. Evidently a lot of people
in California have very, very, small penises.


But today, I feel that Lincoln have successfully reached an all-time low
at encouraging bad driving. Apparently, if I buy a Lincoln Navigator or
Aviator, then when it rains, I don't have to change my driving style. Or
when it snows. Or whatever.

Apparently, because of various bits of fangled gadgetry in the Lincoln
SUVs, rain will make no difference to the stopping distance, nor will
any other road condition. I can go at the same speed as I always have,
and stop just as late as I always have, and it won't be a problem.

When I'm in charge, anyone who comes up with shit like that will be
fined. No, really. There should be a legal way to stop shit like that,
because it's genuinely counter-productive to the continued health of
potential customers.

I think there's something darwinian here, but if you factor in the
other people involved in the accident that's gauranteed to happen,
then suddenly it becomes a lot less OK.


[2005-01-12]

So I was going to say something about "State of Fear", the new book by
Michael Crichton, but then the tsunami hit and I thought I'd save it
for a while.


This book raises some interesting points that I never knew before. I
can understand why so many environmentalists are pissy about it, but
it's definitely interesting.

The basic premise of the book is that global warming may be
happening... Or, more importantly, it may not. There's simply not enough
information out there to demonstrate any sort of long-term trend, and what
little there is often tends to contradict the whole global warming thing.

Unfortunately for the environmentalists, Crichton has done his homework -
the bibliography contains hundreds of references, which back up him
up. He ends the book with an appendix showing his personal opinions
after doing all this research - and comes to a fascinating bunch of
conclusions.

This book is worth reading, if only to raise those points and read some
informed conclusions. It's a good story, too, as so much of his work is.


Secondly, there's an interesting comparison that I drew between this book,
and Farenheit 9/11. The whole name of the book, "State of Fear", is in
reference to a fictional paper written in the book that describes how,
by keeping people afraid, ruling powers can remain in power.

Remember how, in 9/11, the threat level keeps changing and we get
terrorist reports every other day? There's a common theme. Several
other parts of this book reminded me of Farenheit 9/11, but in a more
sideways fashion.


Finally, something of no genuine value, but an observation. One thing
that the bad guys in this book do as part of their larger plan is
deliberately create a tsunami, destined to strike California and cause
devastation. This book predates the tsunami around India by less than
three weeks.


[2005-01-04]

Chunky reviews the games that you are, aren't, or should be playing

There may be a theme to this, it's up to you to see if you can work out
what it is.


Observe that games from category 1 are generally around 50 bucks when new,
and may require further subscription fees.

Observe also that all games in category 2 cost less than half of any in
category 1.


1) First the ones that you and everyone else, are or aren't playing.

Categories are:
    YAFPS - Yet Another First Person Shooter
    YA3PS - Yet Another Third Person Shooter
    YARTS - Yet Another Real Time Strategy
    YARPG - Yet Another Role Playing Game
    YASG - Yet Another Sports Game

Halo
    YAFPS - More of the same, with campier bad guys
LOTR: Battle For Middle Earth
    YARTS - More of the same, with expensive names you'll recognise
NBA
    YASG - More of the same, no redeeming qualities
Metroid Prime
    YAFPS - More of the same, with kinda interesting puzzles
LOTR: 3rd Age
    YARPG - More of the same, with expensive names you'll recognise
That Blizzard One
    YARPG - More of the same, but this time less crap
NFL
    YASG - More of the same, no redeeming qualities
Metal Gear Solid
    YA3PS - More of the same, with trees
Doom
    YAFPS - More of the same, but darker
NHL
    YASG - More of the same, no redeeming qualities
Half-Life
    YAFPS - More of the same, with a gravity gun
City of Heroes
    YARPG - More of the same, without the interesting side-bits
UT
    YAFPS - More of the same, prettier graphics
GTA
    YA3PS - More of the same, with more ho-beating
Age of Whoevers
    YARTS - More of the same, without even changing the engine

There were a bunch more, but I took them out since you're probably all
starting to get the hint by now.

Of course, I'm not being entirely fair. At least one of the games there
isn't just a newly numbered version of an older game, or licensed from a
movie stolen from a book...


2) Secondly, I come to the games that you aren't but should be playing.

This also has something of a theme, not because I'm a whore, but because
I'm genuinely impressed.

Gish. http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=40
    You're an amorphous blob of tar with really cool physics. Kind of
    a platformer-puzzler, but not really.

Orbz 2. http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=5
    You can point, and you can click. That's where the UI for this game
    begins, and ends. It's great fun to play online, though, and you
    can genuinely pick it up, play two games, and put it down.

Zap! http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=39
    Honestly, this is appreciably a Torque Network Library demo, but that
    doesn't mean it's not cool fun. What I really like about it is the
    style of the game that's combined with the unexpected gametypes.

Marble Blast. http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=15
    I know, I know. It's a couple years old, now, but it's still great.

Finally, Jugglemaster. http://icculus.org/jugglemaster/
    Because I think I'm funny.


[2004-12-29]

Not to disappoint. Last July, I mentioned that dad and I have been buying
each other "mildly irresponsible" gifts recently.

For christmas, he got what the English call a "flickknife". Barely legal
in California [I carry one, since they're really nice...], it turns out
to be pretty catastrophically illegal in the UK, for a wide variety of
up-tight legal and down-right stupid reasons. Ho, hum, won't stop him
carrying it.

Apparently it makes his old pocketknife "feel girly". I have pretty
decent taste in pocket knives.


And in what I can only begin to imagine must have been an unwholesome
act, for my christmas present dad had walked into a gunshop and asked
for something "completely irresponsible and acceptably legal", apparently.

Here I sit, with a genuinely decent air pistol with a stack of gas
canisters, a big tin of pellets, and a little laserypointything.
See the little red dot? That's where the hole's about to appear.

Mmmmmmmmmm.


[2004-12-13]

People have funny views on appearance...

Today, someone at Dog Adoption asked me when the rock band I'm in is
next performing. Uh... Wha?

Next idea was "graphic designer". "Closer, but still not there"

"Computer Programmer".

I think there's some stereotyping going on, involving long hair and not
shaving for two weeks.


[2004-12-08]

"Self-improvement is masturbation"
  - Tyler Durden

You know, he raises a fascinating point, but my handwriting is so
catastrophically horrible it's pretty much embarassing.

Today I started working through a book that teaches improved
handwriting. We'll just have to see what happens.

This is how I add variety to my day.


[2004-12-06-later]

Godfuckingdamnit.

The merits of ebay are thus:
1) It's easy
2) It's cheap

The merits of paypal are thus:
1) It's easier than any of the alternatives

And that's where it stops. That's why I use both, and nothing more.


I'm just a fucking ray of sunshine today. I think today's theme boils
down to "money-grubbing fucks", with "retarded web designers" starring
prominently.


It used to be with paypal that to confirm an address, they'd make two
very small transactions on your bank account, which you'd confirm. Now,
they pull out two bucks and expect you to read other details on the
transaction.

Congratuations, fuckwits; you've gone from something I can do
quickly and easily online to something I have to wait for a statement
for. You've also gone from penny-ante transactional shit to essentially
stealing masses of cash because no individual gives a shit about that
dollar-ninety-five. It's like Office Space, but without any style, humor,
or grace. I strongly suspect there is a crackhead involved, though.


Today, I tried to buy something else. The rocket scientists at paypal
have managed to break something or other, so I can't actually click the
"submit" button. Now I had to root around in paypal's godawful interface,
going through way more steps, just to send someone money.

Modern web designers appear to have some sort of mutual goal: see who
can make it the hardest for people to give money away. This has always
amazed me that people would do it, but it's true. Can I give money to
someone please, using this online money-giving service? No? Retards.


In other news, the relative merits of the clusterfuck that is qmail
continue to completely elude me.


[2004-12-06]

You know, I came to a realisation the other day, which is yet another
nail in TV's coffin for me: There isn't an end.


I was watching Lost for a while [the first two or three weeks], and it's
really good watching. Soon, I realised that I'm only watching it for the
ending. That's all. It's fun, and there's more and more to it, but all
I want to really see is the end.

But no matter what it is, it can't possible be as good as I need it to
be, to warrant my urge to see it.


I was watching Alias a lot for a while, but then I realised, at the end
of the most recent series, that there is no end. While individual bits
of the show may each have a beginning, a middle, and an end, there's
pretty much no end to the bigger picture.

Compare, also, with the X files. The smaller stories/pictures/whatever,
are good of themselves, but the bigger picture... yeah, you're starting
to get the idea.


There are two reasons for this, as I see it:
1) People are money-grubbing fucks. The people running Alias will keep
it going for as long as it keeps making money, and would rather run it
into the ground than end it decently, and move on.
2) People are fucking retards. They'll keep on watching it. Be it the
new Alias, or the latest whos-gonna-fuck-who retarded reality show.

For that first point, compare with "24": The first series had a beginning,
a middle, and an end. And it stopped. I sat down, and watched it
all. Great.

The second series had a beginning, a middle, and an end... except it left
the end open for another series. And that will continue. The stories will
change or get worse as the creators run out of ideas, and eventually
series 10 of "24" will be utter shit, left open, and there won't be a
series 11 because everyone will have got bored of it.


Since I still have your attention [Can't believe anyone actually reads
my opinionated crap], here're the other reasons I don't watch TV:

1) Reality TV shows. They're shit. Recently they've gone from just garbage
to genuinely offensive. Wife swap offends my sensibilities. It's trying
to literally fuck up two family's lives for the entertainment of the
mouth-breathing masses. That is so offensive to me that it turns me off
other TV just because of it.
2) I used to watch TV for hours. Even when nothing was on. One day I
stood up and realised that I had just wasted an entire day watching shit
that I didn't even enjoy. That was the big turning point.
3) Adverts. I want to watch TV for watching the content, not the shit
between the content - which nowadays takes up more than a third of
the time. God, that pisses me off.
4) Unless I pay a subscription, the TV is crap [and has more adverts]. And
I'm studiously avoiding adding more subscription services my expenses,
since they suck away my money and I don't usually feel I get anything
from them.
5) Lack of originality. It's just another reality TV show. It's just
another CSI show. It's just another {drivel}. Come up with decent
original stuff, and I'll think about watching it. But back to my original
point, it's better have a beginning, a middle, and an end, otherwise
I'll consider it a pathetic money grubbing attempt on the part of the
producers, and I'll be turned off it forever.


And what sparked all this? Halo2. [Spoiler Warning]

Stupid fucking Bungie. Want a quick way to piss me off? Fail miserably
to end the story. As I started; Halo turned out to be a money spinner. So
they don't bother to end the second one, since it'll get people stoked
for the third. Horsefuckers.

No wonder I read so many books.


[2004-12-03]

There are many ways you can tell when your mail server sucks. Here are
just a few:

1) You're famous for pioneering the art of mail delivery as a denial of
     service attack.
2) You don't let anyone change any directory structure or filename
     nomenclature, and your chosen setup is pathologoically fucked,
     in a wide variety of interesting textbook ways.
3) Everywhere there are people that write about how fucking awful it is.
4) Everywhere there are people with fixes to problems with the server -
     and they all come in one of two forms, both of which are completely
     shit:
  a) A source-level patch
  b) A replacement binary or script for one of your binaries or scripts

No, I don't have anything specific in mind - what makes you ask?


[2004-11-18]

This is, quite possibly, the worst photo of me, ever.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/uniandclubscropped.jpeg


Taken at the office. I'm pretty sure that the boss has nightmares that
the office turns into a 3-ring circus when he's not in. Well, shit.

I guess he's right.


[2004-11-17]

I didn't mean to say that Halo2 isn't good... I mean, Halo is the XBox's
raisin d'etre, and the second one is definitely an improvement. I just
felt the urge to write a brief review that doesn't describe it as the
bestest thing in the whole of time.


In other news:
If you're fired, and your response is to trash all your work, you're a
fucking dick. Have some fucking pity on the poor person [me] who gets
to try and get all your shit back.

Also:
When you're writing anything that involves a filing system and dates in
the filenames, MAKE THE DATE AN ISO FORMAT.

I'm dealing with a backup system right now where the date, instead of
being something sensible [YYYY-mm-dd] is [dd-mmm-YYYY] where, to add
insult to injury, mmm is the three-letter textual representation.


[2004-11-15]

Halo2: More Of The Same, with sloppier controls.


Halo was always more of the same. I mean, it's an FPS. It's an FPS with
the first ever non-shit FPS interface on a joypad, but it's still an
FPS. It has aliens that you shoot. Surprised me in that, without a mouse,
I didn't find playing it an actively painful experience. I'd recommend it
to anyone who's not played it, but be aware that it's just high-quality,
more of the same.


I felt the story left a fair bit to be desired in Halo. Not dissimilar
in depth & quality to Quake3's story.

Spoiler warning: If you don't know this shit by now, you may as well
just read what I have to say.

Halo's story, slightly expanded:
There's a big round thing. You find it, it has aliens on it. Turns out
it was only actually made to hold some other aliens in check.

Pretty much everyone involved in this exercise hates or attacks everyone
else. You blow up the big round thing.

Watch for Bungie's standard plot tricks, including a computer with a
personality disorder.


Now that Halo2 is out, I'm playing this one through, co-op with the
girlfriend [again]. The story's non-trivial, which is great.

When you creep up on someone and *BAM, MOTHERFUCKER* the back of their
head, the skin textures look much better than before, although from a
distance I don't notice much. The aliens are campers, get used to it.


Thing is, the controls feel a lot sloppier.
In order to do the dual-wielding trick, you actually have to hold down
a button for a while.
To switch weapons, it's not just hit-the-button, it's
hold-the-button-for-an-instant.
That's prohibitive when 8 guys are jumping on you. This is obviously on
purpose, I just don't like it.

Anyways. While I'm very much enjoying Halo2, it's mostly More Of The Same.


*BAM, MOTHERFUCKER*. You liked that, didn't you, you camping fuck.


[2004-11-04]

Note that date.

Today, someone arrived at work with a Starbucks cup... With Christmas
branding on it.


This year's "christmas-comes-too-fucking-early, and-earlier-every-year"
entry comes to you three days sooner than last year's did.

Statistical anomaly? Let's find out next year.


[2004-10-27]

I'm beginning to quite like Blender. I've put in 3 days effort, and I'm
beginning to learn how some of it works.

Blender keeps reminding me of vi. The UI is basically "none" and "shit",
all at the same time. But once you start getting comfortable, it's about
as brutally efficient as anything gets, and remarkably consistent.

I finally got a unicycle model to export successfully into DTS format
for the first time today. Technically it's nothing more than the forks
and a monkey head, but I'm imagining that it's a unicycle, at least for
the beginnings of development.


[2004-10-22]

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.


What am I?

When I was invented, a tab at the start of a line in me was decided it
would be important. By the time everyone realised how stupid this was,
trying to debug me on a terminal when someone had used spaces instead
of tabs, it was too late to fix me for compatability reasons.

Correct! I am a Makefile.


But what am I?

I am langauge that failed miserably to learn from Makefile's
mistakes. Instead of taking a potentially neat idea [defining blocks
through indentation] and doing it in a neat way, I come with files in
my standard package that won't compile, because of indentation issues.

Correct! I'm fucking Python.


It started a couple years ago. I just wanted a little indentation.
But it could never be just one. Soon I couldn't afford spaces. Eight of
them cost as much as just one tab, and no fucker can tell the fucking
difference anyways.

I've been clean for a few years, now. I've not accepted the offer of
a single space. Especially not the ones that come with me. People are
amazed at how strong I am. There are plenty of spaces in my package,
but nowadays I know to just say no. I would say I'm stronger for it,
but basically I'm a fucking jackass.

Sometimes I hear people talking about me. They use the word "skullfuck"
a lot.


Everyone, let's fucking thank fucking python for that fucking great
admission.

*everyone claps*


[2004-10-15]

This season's haute couture, as I am obviously an expert on such things.

http://icculus.org/~chunky/tichoker/
Matching titanium choker and bracelet, with green and blue inlays.


[2004-09-28]

Things never change.

In my 2002-03-05 update, I mentioned why windows programs tend to
suck more than their *nix equivalents - that windows programmers are
encouraged to do stuff that "almost always works, and is much easier",
wheras *nix programmers are encouraged to always do stuff The Right Way
That Will Always Work.


In this month's .NET journal:
"How to Write High-Performance C# Code"
Subtitle: Optimize early and often.
http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=46342

In the first paragraph, there's a nod towards the quote that "Premature
optimization is the root of all evil" - But then he tries to knock that
down by saying that sometimes, speed is vital part of any of the code
in your process, using the example of vehicular real-time control systems.

.NET? Vehicular Real-Time Control?

Then he talks about a wide variety of topics, including elemenal 101
stuff. Except if you're writing the sort of app where it matters, but
you don't know to keep critical sections small, then you shouldn't be
writing the app in the first place.


I dunno. Just seems to me that nothing ever changes. Microsoft produce a
pretty decent spec, overall, and then technical article writers recommend
ways for you to fuck it up.

I had written a long list of things arguing with what he said, but then I
realised that if you're one of the people that even read any of the .plans
on icculus.org, you've already graduated beyond the intended audience.


[2004-09-22]

Recently, I've been playing with aalib again. aalib Rocks.
http://icculus.org/aahelper
http://icculus.org/jugglemaster/mpeg/aa5mills.mpeg

I think that these could mostly be considered Bad Things(TM).


[2004-09-14]

It's arrived.

I like it.


[2004-09-08]

Woooo! My new Nimbus is on it's way to me [No, really]

http://www.unicycle.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=741

*hops up & down*
I can't wait.


[2004-08-27]

People never cease to amaze me.

First, of yesterday's problems:
The color separation. All I had to do was clamp to the limits instead
of scaling down, and suddenly the juggling dude is now not pink. So
that's good.

The GNU Autotools still blow. Instructions are still "edit the makefile",
but at least it's easy to do, now.


Last night, I go into #wxwidgets, and ask for a little help. Today,
someone I don't know [except briefly on IRC] sends me a huge patch
and Visual Studio buildfiles. People like that rock. And he didn't even
want credit beyond a mention of his handle, which I've duly placed in
a couple places.


[2004-08-26]

Woohoo! http://icculus.org/jugglemaster/mpeg

I've now got mpeg dumping working. Which is nice. As the webpage says,
"Better Than The PostScript Ones(TM)"

Color separation is slightly off, and the whole of jugglemaster now
BADLY needs to be autoconfiscated [current build instructions use terms
like "edit the Makefile"], but it's coming along pretty well.

Of course, if anyone wants to offer a bit of help fixing either of the
above, I'd be eternally grateful...


[2004-08-09]

I wonder if it's in bad taste that as my two-page random-test-document
for printing out at work, I've been using my CV.

Using the office printers, I've probably printed out maybe a couple
hundred copies of it recently.


[2004-08-03]

I was given one of those MS ergonomic keyboards [the ones split into
two halves], and I've been using it pretty much exclusively ever since.

I rather like it. The only real issue with my typing that it's shown up
is that I always hit "y" with my left index finger. I'm quickly learning
to fix that, since "Gart (-;" is appearing on the screen way too often.

I seem to tend to keep my hands one key further out that the home positions,
and use my index fingers more than entirely necessary. That one's a lot
harder to fix. Even conciously I find it very physically hard to use my
little fingers on the bottom row.


[2004-07-27]

I think I'm just gonna have a perioidic torrid love-hate affair with
Plan9, until I get the hang of it at which point I'll jack in Linux
altogether.

I start playing with it, am amazed at all the wondrous things it does
that simply leaves Linux and friends behind, then go back to Linux
because learning a new OS is hard and effort and stuff.

Sometimes I have sympathy for the people I've forced to use Linux.

Sometimes I sit here and wonder how in hell I EVER managed to learn Linux,
without a permanant internet connection sitting on a machine nearby. Then
I consider that if I can learn Linux having only used Windows and dos,
I can sure as hell use Plan9 having become familiar with a wide variety
of other OSs, and having the internet sitting near me, with people who
actually know answers to stupid questions.


[2004-07-19]

"We have a fairly new policy where we collect a small fee to guarantee a
seat in the emergency exit row. As you know, this area of the aircraft
is very popular and affords more legroom. A passenger can request to
be seated in this row but, only by paying the fee, can we absolutely
guarantee that this row will be assigned."


You are a worthless bunch of money-grubbing turds. I always used to be
able to "guaranee a seat in the exit row" the same way I could guarantee a
seat anyplace else on your stupid flying metal box - by turning up, asking
for a seat that's not yet assigned, and getting it printed on my ticket.

Evidently, an exit row seat was in fact a free-for-all before, and it's
only now, through a one-time-fee, that I can guarantee that even though
I've been assigned the seat, I'll actually get it?


Please. Maybe they should put a 20 dollar premium on window seats, to
"guarantee" that someone who's turned up and asked to see out the window
will actually get the opportunity.


You know what I find most offensive?

That they can /possibly/ try to fob off a normal rational human being
with a reason like that. I think my fingers would physically rebel
against me if I actually tried to type that statement.

I was a paying customer, not just a dumb animal, and I normally appreciate
it when I'm treated like one.


[2004-07-13]

I think Orkut is a perfect example of why you should never, ever, even
consider running a website on IIS, ASPX, and friends.

I mean, let's face it - A group of the undisputedly best web engineers
in the world can't make it work properly, and with one of probably the
biggest clusters in the world, they can't make it run at a decent speed,
either.


[2004-07-10-later]

Dad liked his birthday presents. I think there's a theme going on with
me and him.

At Christmas, I gave him a set of lockpicks. He gave me marine flares.
For his birthday, I gave him one set of average throwing knives, and
one really really nice throwing knife.

Definitely. I have 5 months until next Christmas to work out some more
completely irresponsible gifts to give him.


[2004-07-10]

Forgot to say yesterday - there really is a platform 9 3/4 at London
King's Cross. Part of my trip home involves going through it ["it"
being King's Cross, not the Hogwarts platform :-)], and I happened to
see it.

It's just a sign on a random brick wall, and it's not between platforms
9 and 10 [there is no "between" platforms 9 and 10], but it's close.


[2004-07-09]

Virgin Atlantic demonstrate flagrant capitalism at it's most offensive:

I arrive 4 hours early, as per usual, so I can scab an exit row seat by
dint of being first in the queue, and asking nicely. It's what I usually
do, and it usually works.

"Can I have an exit row seat, please?"
"Lemme check for you... Yep, we have two left."
"One for me, please"
"That'll be seventy five bucks"

Uhm. Fuck that.

What the fuck... I mean, I turn up with a valid ticket for this seat
[exit row is still cattle class, remember?], and they won't let me have it
without paying more?

Yes, I had a really shitty flight. The seats fit people comfortably[ish]
if they're skinny and 4'5 tall. I think we can safely say that I'm
neither particularly skinny, nor, at 6'3, am I at or below the requisite
height. I failed miserably to get any sleep at all, and the movies were
all ones I'd seen before [excepting Shaun of the Dead, which I can VERY
highly recommend]. Bleh.


Nowadays, I kinda find it offensive. You know that, at the cost of
inconveniencing a couple passengers, you'll still be able to make 75
bucks for each and every seat, because there are enough people that /are/
prepared to pay for it.
So you do it.

It'll piss off lots of customers, but it doesn't matter because they've
already paid for the flight. And in a way, they can't /really/ complain,
since it's just as if there were no seats left when they got there.

Ugh. All people that make decisions like this should be forced to sit
in seats for people a foot or two shorter than them for 12 hours. Starting
a couple hours before bedtime, so they'll be really, really, tired,
but still unable to sleep.


[2004-07-06]

I finally beat Zelda Wind Waker. Really, Really, Great Game. Pretty much
warrants the purchase of a gamecube on it's own merits, so that's nice.

I bought Grand Theft Spiderman, so that'll probably keep me busy for
a while.


[2004-06-26]

I think we can safely say that Farenheit 9/11 isn't likely to improve
Bush's campaign.

And I'm lit up like a Christmas tree.


[2004-06-25]

Finally!
http://icculus.org/~chunky/coif

Last night, I finally got that together.
I think I need to shoot the photographer, though.


Now I'm working on a stainless steel bikini set, in a looser weave,
and it's infinitely easier.

I think I can safely say that making a substantial bit of 6-in-1 titanium
maille is really quite a lot more effort than a bit of 4-in-1 stainless
steel.


[2004-06-23]

Mario Kart Double Dash still very much rocks. Great fun, and am still
working on it in co-op with the rather lovely girlfriend, who rather
conveniently actually enjoys computer games.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-12-14
I think I've passed "the test" with flying colors.

Currently, we have Gold in all but three of the cups.

Couple minor-ish points, though:
1) Fucking game fucking cheats. It's deliberately engineered to let you
get away with some stuff sometimes, and not at others. But to the point
where it's annoying.

For example, sometimes it just decides that no way are we going to win
a specific race, and goes out of it's way to descend weapons onto us
until a couple computer karts have gone past, just at the finish line.
Kinda annoying when we're about to win a new cup, or something.

2) Mirror mode is possibly one of the filthiest hacks I think I've /ever/
seen in a computer game.

They literally gaffered the 3d part of the engine in backwards, reversed
the left and right controls to make up for it, set the computer on
cheat-as-much-as-you-want mode, and hoped no-one would notice... Uck.


Of course, it's still GREAT fun, and I'd really recommend that if you
have a GC you pick it up. Doesn't really come into it's own until you
play with other people, but very, very, cool, anyways.


[2004-06-21-later]

I took the car in this morning. Just got a phone call that they've had
it apart. Net total, something on the order of 2400 USD.

Ow.


[2004-06-21]

I think I'm honored. For what's possiblty the first time ever, it
turns out my name was dropped to get someone a discount at a juggling
thing. Eep!


[2004-06-19]

I think Monty Python has had a pretty permanant effect on me and movies.

I'm watching the previews for Arthur, and every time I see a sword or hear
someone mention Excalibur, I hear, in my head "You can't expect to wield
supreme executive power just 'cos some watery tart threw a sword at you!"

While I was watching Timeline, every time someone shouted "trebuchet!",
I hear "Fetchez la vache!". Come to think of it, now, I hear that /every/
time I hear the wrod "trebuchet", not just in Timeline.

Watching Americans eat, I can't ever help but think of the scene from
The Meaning Of Life where the large fella is finally eating a minty treat.

It just goes on and on...


[2004-06-17]

I've booked my car in to be fixed on Monday. Finally.

A new engine will cost two to three grand, or getting it rebuilt may cost
2 to 2 and a half, depending. Of course, if the block's properly blown,
it won't be worth rebuilding...


[2004-06-15-later]

I still fail to understand, in this day and age, why companies insist
on not supporting Mozilla.

The development tools for mozilla/firefox/whatever nowadays manage to
make web development infinitely easier [Web Developer Toolbar, EditCSS,
and liveHTTPheaders to name but three] than I ever remember it being
while trying to debug some stupid table layouts in IE.

Frankly, even if that's all there was to it, "Outline Block Elements",
"Display Form Details", and "Outline Table Cells" would on their own
qualify as a killer app. And they're only the beginning [if you want
a liveHTTPheaders equivalent for IE, it's 50 dollars of shareware,
and shitty with it!]


And then, forget the whole development incentive - what about the
business one?

It just boggles my mind. I'm a customer, and I have money. I decide to
give it to comany XXX, and then company XXX makes it fucking hard to
give it to them.

Nowadays, I'm sorry, but whatever it is that you sell, I can get
elseplaces on the internet, too. There have been several cases where
certain companies out there had me shopping, and a whole bunch
of things in the shopping basket, only to fail at the last
javascript-validated-button hurdle.

Technically all it cost me was 20 minutes of my time. All they had to do
was use some server-side perl to do the same thing [Error! your phone
number contains stupid characters], and at the cost of a couple k of
bandwidth, they could have made a couple thousand dollars off me [one
extreme casse, that really happened to me].

It would even be easier, since, from experience, I know that it's a whole
shitload easier to use a genuine submit button and some perl than it is
to use a "normal" button with some onClick javascript.


I know, I've said this many many times, and am probably boring as
hell. But it really infuriates me, from both my technical background [I
wrote an entire web-based licensing system that even works in Netscape3
and Lynx], and the obvious business sense [I'm /trying/ to give you
money, and you're not letting me!].

Bleh. This is from the category of "everyone who already knows this
is a step ahead of me", and "anyone who doesn't know, or doesn't care,
by this point in time, is already a lost cause".


Wait. Lemme give you a recent, concrete, example [that triggered this
update]:


From: Chunky Kibbles [mailto:chunky@icculus.org]
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 9:27 PM
To: support@auctionworks.com
Subject: Site broken...

Heya,
I just tried to pay for an item I won on ebay using auctionworks, and
everything worked up until the moment I tried to click the "continue"
button on the page that I can enter my addresses on - and nothing
happened.

I'm using FireFox 0.8 [User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686;
en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8]

Just thought you might like to know,
Gary (-;


Note the you-must-be-at-least-this-smart-to-use-this-ride bit - do they
notice that I'm on a Linux box?


From: Auctionworks Support <support@auctionworks.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 12:57:27 -0400
To: 'Chunky Kibbles' <chunky@icculus.org>
Subject: RE: Site broken...

Gary,

Thanks for the information. Do you have Internet Explorer on your computer?
Try using that to see if that works for you.

Please let me know if you have any other questions, comments, or concerns!

--Michael


As Greg just put it, "fucking brain surgeons"


[2004-06-15]

I'm in two minds about Nintendo.

I've been playing Zelda Wind Waker [still], and yesterday I got round
to opening the Nintendo Gallery. There's a particularly stellar rimshot
the first time you enter:
"We've been losing members due to our lack of "gimmicky attractions"...
but don't worry, True [sic] fans know we're the coolest"

Something immensely funny about that, to me... Right up until they piss
me off, and the relative merits of that comment wane a little...


Nintendo have recently been demonstrating themselves to be hardware
whores, in the worst possible sense of the word.

I was very much looking forward to co-op Zelda. Just seemed like a
Really Cool Idea(tm) to me, and had so much potential to be amazing. I
have trouble imagining anything much sexier than a bit of split-screen
cell-shaded action. Mmmmmmm *rocks back and forth*


As the obvious aside here, I'd like to point out that Wind Waker's
graphics were a true work of art, and it's just a pity that the marketing
division caved to the stupid kiddiots out there for the next version -
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2003-03-21 for a quick run-down
that I completely agree with.


The tingle tuner in Wind Waker I can pass off as a pretty neat bit of
extra content for anyone who already had a gameboy. Really, I'll let
them get away with that one.

Entry level to Four Swords co-op, if all you have is a gamecube [ie,
me], is the cost of the game [50 bucks], two gameboys [100 bucks each],
and a link cable [10 bucks]. In a fit of generosity, they'll save you
ten bucks by giving you one link cable with the game.

For the mathematically challenged: For me to play co-op Zelda with my
girlfriend, it'll cost me two hundred and sixty dollars.

Fuck. That.


In the end, it's a huge disappointment. I'd been looking forward to it,
but now Nintendo have lost 50 bucks instead of making a couple hundred. I
doubt I'm the only one that thinks this way.

It's not even worth buying the game for single player, IMHO, since the
basic premise of single player is that you just do the work of four
people sequentially.

Ho, hum. Wind Waker still rocks, but unless they quit it with this shit,
I won't bother buying Nintendo hardware next time.


Here's a hint to Nintendo: the Gameboy is offensively over-priced. I'd
pay for it if it were at the 50-dollar price point, and came with a game
and a mains adapter. At a hundred bucks, I'd damn well better be getting
more than just the device - for a start, I'd want a whole fistful of
games.

And I can put a lot of whole bunch of games in my fist.


[2004-06-07]

Seems that it's been a while since I updated, so I thought I'd write
down a few things going on in my life [Liz, Bob, Timmay, this means I
get a week or two while you needn't bug me :-)].


First, something that amuses me every time I see it - On one of the
sports channels here, every time I see it, there's some guy shaving his
head in a wee, pathetic, effort to look "cool" [I can only guess]. Under
the foam, when it comes off, is a logo of the relevant channel. Or
team. Or whatever. It's not like I'm the target audience for the ad,
or even care.

What amuses me, though, is that he's shaving with a straight razor,
and using it completely wrong. He's dragging the blade across his head
in the doesn't-cut direction. Not what you'd consider a whole lotta
effective.


Zelda Wind Waker still completely rocks. I've been playing through many
many side quests, etc, so I've not beaten it yet. This is possibly one
of the best games I've ever played. Many people, I'm sure, will find it
too easy, but depressingly it's pitched at about my level. Fun :-)


I can easily beat an average 18.2 mph cycling to work, I have discovered,
if I take the bike path that doesn't go alongside a road and involve
lots of stopping for traffic lights. It goes through some dodgy areas,
though, so it's only good for the morning commute. *sulk*


The last couple weekends have been absolutely fantastic. For the first
time in a really long time, I've had a ladyfriend who doesn't sit there
twitching and convulsing if we're just sitting there doing not much. Just
chatting, or she works while I make maille, or whatever. It's great.

On Sundays, we've been going to a Dog Adoption thummybob. It's really
good fun, but I want to take some of the puppies home *sniff*. You gotta
wonder why people abuse & leave out dogs like that. But it's certainly
fun to meet lots of dogs. I like dogs. Dogs are great.

I'm not normally much of a beach person [think "hasn't been to the beach
for the sake of going to the beach since move to CA"], but on our first
date, she actually took me to a beach in Malibu. That was rather nice.
We even finished off Memorial day weekend by walking down there again at
night [bare feet this time. Makes me slightly itchy since I'm mildly
neurotic about creepy-crawlies, but beaches are definitely better with
bare feet]

She's also a wicked Mario Kart player. Have her riding shotgun, and
beware any bugger driving nearby. She likes the little Koopa guy because
of the evil snigger he has every time he smacks someone [hey - if
you gotta pick a character it may as well be because he sounds evil,
right?]. Great fun, and with her help we've got gold on many levels I've
not even been awarded a cup in when driving solo.

The other weekend we went to the Getty museum [which I've been wanting
to go to for many, many, moons. Never quite got round to it]. I can VERY
highly recommend a jaunt for anyone at all who's anyplace even remotely
near. The gardens are positively beautiful, and the artwork is a joy to
see, too.


Recently, I've ramped up my work on a maille shirt. I've not yet decided
what I'll be turning it into, exactly, but I know it'll be something I
wear on the top half of my body. I've done about 1/3 of the front, and
am currently working on a basic coif that'll end up being incorporated
into it.

It's hardly what you'd call "period", given I'm making it from titanium
and using a way denser weave than is usual, but it sure as shit looks
cool.


[2004-05-12]

It may not be much to most people, but it's something to me.

When I started cycling to work [the middle of January], my average speed
was about 10 or 11 mph. Not much, but then it had been about a year and
a half since I did any serious cycling, and I wasn't trying too hard,
either.

After a few weeks, when I put in a modicum of effort, my average was
closer to 13.

This morning, I averaged over 18 mph into work. Pretty healthy increase.

It took me slightly over 14 mins. I can officially cycle to work faster
than I can drive, if there's any traffic on the road.


I'm completely hooked on Zelda Wind Waker. So far, the only thing that's
been annoying me is the woefully small money pouch you start with,
meaning that a couple times I've missed out on 200 rupees because I've
collected it, not knowing what it was until after it's failed to add to
my full 200-rupee-only pouch.


[2004-05-07]

When you're at a juggling thing [be it a club, a convention, or just a
street performer], if you see something really cool you can walk up to
them and ask them how it's done. And they'll show you.

The great thing about juggling is that it's a skill that takes many many
moons of practice, but most people doing it are always delighted to show
you how it's done. There's no problem with anyone else knowing how to do
something - it's all out there in the open already.


Magicians, on the other hand, tend to be really grumpy. If you ask them
how something's done, it's "magic". While it takes a long time to get
the hang of magic, most of the value in it is the fact that other people
don't know how it's done. The very act of spreading knowlege of how to
do magic devalues it, in their eyes.

If you go to a magic shop, and ask the guy there to show you something
really cool, he'll show you - but then won't tell you how it's done
until you agree to pay for it. And often, it turns out you've paid 50
or 60 bucks for something that's actually a really crappy item.

Go to a juggling shop, and everything there is out in the open for show,
tell, and play.


By way of example, try looking about on the internet for how to do magic
tricks. Then try looking about for how to do some juggling tricks. There's
pretty copious amounts of stuff about juggling, but almost everything
about magic is where you can buy an illusion that does XXXXX.


I like going to juggling clubs and finding people there who know magic
stuff. They're always happy to teach you what they know, if they do
magic. One of my friends works at the Magic Castle [anyone who doesn't
know, it's an exclusive magic club in LA]. I met him at juggling, where
he taught me some basic coin magic.


Funnily enough, once you know what you're looking at, a great many
illusions that you see professionals do are actually pretty obvious how
you do it. At the magic castle, I was watching on guy playing about with
a deck of cards, and although he wasn't deliberately showing me anything,
it was obvious to me what he did a lot of the time, and as such I learnt
a few new things :-)


Interesting aside - I actually got my first ever paying job [using...
*hangs head in shame*... FrontPage], appreciably because of my juggling,
I think. It was about a two hour interview, of which I spent about an
hour and a half teaching one of the guys interviewing me how to do 4
ball mill's [a very, very, cool juggling trick].

Bring on the carnie abuse. I'm used to it.


[2004-05-05]

You know, relationships here are /weird/. At least, most of the ones
that I've seen that in some way originated here are. But since I've
finally been given an incentive to believe that relationships in LA
aren't all fucked-by-design, I decided put some written thought to it.

Note that a lot of this may well be the social circles I travel in. Back
home, I spent time around very, very different people to the punters I
socialise with here.


Back home, I think I have probably a net total of 3 friends that behave
in a manner that one could even remotely conceivably describe as
"slutty". Two of whom are in the same "open relationship" - another
concept that I hadn't really even heard of until I moved here. I've been
cheated on in the past, but that was for a variety of reasons, none of
which would incite me to describe her as a slut.


I moved here, and a few months later I found a new ladyfriend. It hadn't
even occurred to me that I'd need to ask, or that we'd have to have
"the talk", in order for her to /not/ be sleeping with other people.

So, since I never asked, she continued. Only when I asked directly
[sideways queries, it seems, are avoidable] did I find out that she'd
not been with me exclusively. That kinda stung.

I don't mean to imply that there's anything *wrong* with this, /per se/,
just that it's far outside my own realm of experience, and something
that in the past I've considered reprehensible behaviour.


All of this just seems weird. If I'm at the stage where I'm going
to sleep with someone, it simply would never even cross my mind to
sleep with anyone else at the same time. Possibly [demonstrably], I'm
faithful-to-where-its-to-my-decrement. In the circles I've previously
travelled, anything beyond a peck-on-the-cheek with anyone other than
my partner has pretty much qualified as cheating, in my book.


I broke up with this lass I've been chatting about here for a plethora of
reasons, only one of which was my whole trust problem thing [you know -
where I expect someone to be with me exclusively?].

To lend some proverbial hope to this whole situation as I see it, I met
a new lady shortly after.

This new lady simply can't understand, like me, the urge to be with more
than one person at a time. It's rather a refreshing change, especially
given that one of my current women-from-whom-all-advice-falls is your
true raging slut, in every manner possible, and is more than happy to
admit this and offer advice to other budding hopefuls.


Of course, now I must gloat about the new lady, since most of
the people that read this .plan are thoroughly geeky [in the most
positive possible sense of the word], and I just can't resist.

She's a geek. Thoroughly. It's great. She has an XBox and a PS2, her PC
is made by Alienware, and she's pretty much always addicted to some game
or another. Between us, we recently beat Halo Co-Op, and it turns out
we make a pretty formidable team on Mario Kart Double Dash.



Ah. Yes. On completely another topic, I bought myself a GameCube.
Obviously, the normally main reason for choosing a console is the
games. I wanted a system whose games I can /actually/ pick up and put
down [MGS VR Missions with your "Bah, this one doesn't take more than
a few seconds to complete each level then I can put it down", Damn
you]. That's targetted at my playing capabilities [I simply lack the
computer-game-related skills to match most modern games requirements]. And
the GameCube is pretty much it. Big, bright colors. Games where your
sole weapons are a very unthreatening modded super-soaker and your
ability to land on someone's head.

So, as the observant among you have already guessed, I now have a pretty
healthy addiction to Super Mario Sunshine. And every single time I get
a new shine, this comic springs to mind:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-08-28
It's like Mario-crack or something. Horrible.

The new lady's response?
"At least I'm addicted to a game for adults"

I also abolutely DIG Mario Kart Double Dash.
And Zelda arrived today.


[2004-03-29]

Completely not my normal fare, but I really feel the urge to say
something.

Until I came to this hole in the world, I'd never even seen these things,
and knew less-than-nothing about them. [ie, like 4/5 of the world,
I was convinced they were halfway between the bad kind of witchy-woo,
and complete tosh]

I have several friends here that are avid tarot users. They have a
healthy conviction that there's more to it than random chance, and
apparent evidence to back it up.


So anyways. I'm vaguely cynical about this stuff [obviously enough],
but something weird kept happening - every time any of my friends would
get their deck out and start playing with it [especially if they were
doing my reading], I'd end up crying.

Not because the reading was close or accurate or anything [a different
topic I'll get onto shortly], nor that the pictures scared me. I can't
really explain it, it was just something that seemed to happen - I always
felt something really strongly, and I'd no idea what the hell it was,
except that the only response I had to it was to cry.


So, in an effort to stop this sort of thing from happening, I decided to
learn about it in the hopes that actually knowing what was going on would
stop me wigging out - and because suddenly it seemed like an interesting
topic, and I tend to gravitate towards things that I find interesting.


A few things I've learned, from the perspective of someone who's
mainly unconvinced, but reasonably open-minded:

1) The tarot tends not, in my experience and from what I've read, to be
magical kinds of mystical things. They don't cause bad things to happen.

Terribly sorry, for example - the morbid-sounding "death card" is usually
a good thing. It's kind of a gentle flavor of "Something's gonna come
to an end, but that's a good thing, and whatever begins after is much
better".

2) They tend to be more of a way of focusing what you already do when
thinking about stuff. They have images that are there to aid your
imagination and thinking [the word we're looking for is "meditation"].

As a general rule, we all know what it is that we /should/ do whenever
we have a question about something. You'll know what the right answer is,
whether you want to hear it or not. If you're having to ask whether or
not leaving your job is a good thing, the very fact you had to ask means
you already know the answer.

When you try to do a tarot reading about a topic such as this, all
that'll happen is the cards will give you the kind of yes that you need
to hear [think "Oracle from the Matrix"]. The imagery may also tend to
get your attention onto other things you may have missed - As a really
basic example, an adult male figure may become pertinent in the reading
that hadn't occurred to you as needing your attention before.

3) Bad cards aren't necessarily "bad" cards

By way of example;
If you see a Tower in the recent past, then all you have to do is think
back on the topic the reading's about, and there'll be some kind of
catastrophic change of events. In this case, it's a statement of fact,
not a prediction of dire events to come.

If you see the Tower in the near future, it's a warning. It's letting
you know that something heavy may be coming your way. But this means
that you can see it coming, and possibly lessen the negative effects,
redirect them to become a more positive thing, something like that.

The observant may ask about fate-vs-free-will at this point. I don't
have an answer for you, but you can glean that it's possible to get a
negative card in a reading about love, yet still meet your One True Love
the next day.



Something that occurred to me the other day, and the real reason I'm
writing this.


I've probably done 10 or 15 readings for other people at this
point. Clearly, I'm thoroughly inexperienced, but something I've been
noticing about my readings - I'm doing exactly what I slated John Edwards
and friends for the a couple weeks ago.

I read the cards as I see them. Literally, I read what they have to say,
looking up specific card meanings wherever I don't remember what it
is. And I find myself saying things that I could have rehearsed without
either the cards or someone to read them for.

I'd be reading cards about me, say, and the cards would tell me that
I'm intelligent but lazy. That I need to manage my finances better,
and that there's a bunch of things going on in my life that suck. Well,
shock-and-amazement abounds. Who'd'a thought?

Taken in the context of point #2 above, this would make sense. I already
know I'm a lazy bastard, and I tend to end up convincing myself that
there are other reasons for not having done something - when it's just
that I've been lazy. Oddly, I'm re-affirming faith in the cards.


So there you have a bunch of stuff that may or may not mean that tarot
cards may or may not be anything of practical interest.


And now the slightly more witchy-woo side to this.

1) I find the cards are right more often than would be entirely reasonable
if it came down to chance.

There's a game that we play sometimes, where you basically deal the
cards into a few stacks, ask a simple yes-no or two-choice question,
and turn over the top card on each stack. How many cards face the relevant
direction is your answer, with varying degrees of potency.

The tendency also is that if you ask stupid questions designed to test
the power of what's going on - "Does two plus two equal four?", then you
may or may not get the right answer. On the other hand [and a favorite
among the girls I know who do this] "Does XXX fantasize about YYY?" tends
to be right pretty often [take that one on good faith]

Yes, there's a H2G2 reference here -
God: "I refuse to prove that I exist for proof denies faith and without
faith I am nothing"
Take from that whatever you will.

2) I find that the same cards are coming up, more often than would be
reasonable by pure chance.

Pretty much every single reading I do about work, the seven of cups
appears. To me, in readings about work, it represents my boss. But what's
disturbing is that it turns up every time. Out of 78 cards, I deal ten,
and he appears in one of the four or five salient positions every
single time.

When I first got my deck, I found that the Heirophant would keep turning
up. And not just in readings. I'd be shuffing and he'd fall out. I'd
pull the cards out of the box, and he'd be the only one left. I'd be
shuffling and he'd fall out again. I sat down and had a hefty think
about the whole thing, and he no longer continuously pops up requesting
my attention.

One of my closest friends has at least one of the same group of cards
turn up every time they want to know about relationships, and the cards
pretty much all represent the most recent ex, in a malevolent context.

3) And the obvious - Every time someone else is playing with them, I'm
feeling something. Not just mildly, either. Something offensively strong
and supernatural that I don't have an answer for or an explanation of.


Read into all of that whatever you want. I just felt that I had to put
all this down. The cynics out there can find explanations for all of
these things. I know I could, if pushed. The people that believe
everything, blindly, probably think I'm being narrow-minded and that
there's more to it than I've described.
Honestly, buy a deck and make your mind up yourself.


[2004-03-20]

I got my new titanium links the other day. Only about 1600 of them
[a pound], but it's enough to give me an idea of what it's like to work.

I want to make a full shirt, basically, out of titanium maille. Have done,
ever since I started playing with maille.

And it's HARD work. Several hours work down, and I've only got a sheet
about 5"  square or so [admittedly, I'm using a slightly denser weave
than your average, but still...]. But I do know that I want to finish a
complete shirt :-) If it puts it into perspective, several strong people
have now tried to destroy the sheet, and failed miserably to even bend
any of the links a little. I dig this stuff.

I also ordered a sampler of anodised colors, and I'm gonna put green &
purple trim on it. Yay! Look forward to photos of this in a couple years
when I've finished it. I need to write an application to help me design
this. Hmmm.

And after working it for a few hours, Sherri hands me one of her watches
that she broke a while ago, "Can you fix it?"
Of course, I try, and find that after working some... "Slightly" harder
stuff, it's incredibly easy, and actually find myself wondering how this
jewellery stays put at all. Silver is pretty much the same. I've made
some gorgeous pendants [hearts, stars...], and every time I'm amazed at
how weak it actually is.


[2004-03-01]

So, I've discovered that my new housemate is as easily entertained as
I am. I can leave her sitting in front of xscreensaver-demo, and she'll
be entertained for a seriously long time.

The current amusement session has [thusly far] lasted about 45 mins,
so I'm using her laptop to go on teh intarnet and write this. We're only
on the second screensaver so far [coral lasted only about 20 mins just
now, cubenetic's been going for the other 25 mins]


[2004-02-23]

Some free advertising

For my contact juggling, I have some metal, and some acrylic, balls. And
keeping them polished and scratch-free turns out to be a fair bit
of effort.

"Lido-Lustre polish wax" is for the metal ones. It's some sort of
silicone-based thing, with ammonia [or something close] as the solvent.
When you're done with it, it actually leaves a thin layer of silicone
on the surface [by "thin", I mean microscopically]. And it's really
really clean & pretty when you're done.

The other stuff I've been using, for my crystals, is "Novus Polish". Novus
appear to have only 3 products in their line - fine, medium, and coarse
plastic polish. The coarse stuff will actually take out huge dents. No
idea how, but it impresses the hell outta me.


I finally finished ESR's book.
Conclusions?

Pretty much what I expected all along. The technical content, on it's
technical merits, is remarkably good. The book's definitely worth reading
for that.

Anything non-technical, anything where you're capable of expressing an
opinion, anything that provides opportunities for self-envagelisation,
ESR takes the opportunity and runs with it. The history of open-source
orientates itself around the moment that he single-handedly got Netscape
to realse their code. Most open licenses out there are good, with the
notable exception of the GPL, which he only gratiates with so much book
time because it's so popular.
On the plus side, he doesn't gratiate the editors holy war with much
time. He makes mention of both, and uses emacs lisp as an example language
quite a lot, but I never felt that he expressed an actual opinion on it.

Overall, I'd recommend the book, but to take a lot of it [and these bits
do tend to be clearly marked] with a pinch of salt.


wxWindows [now wxWidgets, apparently] completely rocks. I wrote an app
this weekend [including some networking stuff] on Linux, and this morning
I tried building it on bloodshed's DevC++. No warnings, no errors. And
I didn't have to even touch the code.

It's even happy to let me compile stuff on Linux using
-Wall -Werror -ansi -pedantic
Which probably actually went a long way toward the win32 portability
thing, but I'm seriously impressed. It was /easy/.


[2004-02-20]

Some random thoughts, since I've not updated in a while
First, ESR.
Shit, I still can't leave this man alone.

The chapter about code re-use turns into a philosophical exercise
in open-source stuff. This very much makes sense, in the manner of
progression that he does it. Except the bit on source availablility
is somewhat overshadowed by the massive ranty bit about
Open-source-versus-Free-as-in-Freedom and about how the OSD definition is
more betterer than the GPL. Most notably, there's a thoroughly incendiary
section titled "What Qualifies as Open Source".

Words used in the section after that one include "infectious", with all
the negative connotations that go with that. And he wsa doing so well,
too.


Other stuff - it was my birthday last weekend [Yay!] and among other
things, I got a 4" stainless steel mirrored ball. Very Seriously Cool
for contact juggling. Shows up much better at night than my crystals
do. It's niiiiice. I also have a new amber necklace. My old grain-of-rice
thing gave up the ghost one too many times, so I got given something
new. But more than 5 years isn't bad for something that's normally only
meant to last a few weeks at best, I guess, so it's retired at home.

Also spend from Friday until Monday in the Arizona desert. Arizona is
right up there with my intial view of California - "Wasteland". I drove
all of 360 miles there, and the same back. It would probably have been
a bit better if the rental car's wheels were even slightly
balanced. Ick. Or, for that matter, if didn't take more than 11 hours
to get there [do the math on that one - it bites]. Sucky


I was there for an SCA event - basically lots of people prancing about
hitting each other with bumper-sized-sticks, covered in foam and duct tape.
Among other things, everyone there also would dress up in old-fashioned
garb, and play at random stuff - including petty childish politics.
Luckily, that's one thing I don't take part in.

Some interesting differences in approach between the UK and here spring
up again, at this point.

In the UK, the focus appears to be on realism. If it's the correct way
of doing it, then the "fighters" will dress up in chainmaille armor
with nothing but a linen shirt on underneath, and prance about with
bumper-sized-swords, axes, and other genuinely scary items.
To clarify - if you're wearing nothing but a chainmaille shirt with
only a linen shirt on underneath, and you get bashed, it will quickly
become abundantly clear to you what's just happened. In practice, they
tend to favor the scarier weapons in the UK, and intend to do no damage
with them - it ends up being slower, but much better looking in close-up
and photos.


In the SCA, the focus for the fighters appears to be loosing off
some of their aggression. They wear stuff that normally qualifies as
modern-but-old-looking armor, have "swords" wrapped in foam & duct tape,
and bash each other as hard as they can possibly muster. It's just a
different approach.


Interesting side-line, and a wee bit disconcerting; the history part of
"The Art of Unix Programming" actually mentions some of the activites
that the original geeks of the internet had in common - and one of the
notable picks is playing in the SCA. A brief google-based search of
ESR's site shows that this is something of a theme.

Anyways. I had a really good weekend.


I've moved in with a friend, cutting my rent by about 600 bucks a month,
which is nice. Turns out to have some bad points, but I'm hoping it's
nothing that can't be got over. Bleh.

I'm also working on http://icculus.org/~chunky/aaprimitives . Haven't
done much in a few days, since I've been pretty busy. I've been pondering
adding widgets to that, too. I need to fix polygons, but other than that
it's not doing too badly.


[2004-02-03-bit-later]

For reference, yeah, I enjoyed the book. I'd recommend it, if you find
that kind of thing even remotely good food-for-reading.


[2004-02-03]

Just finished reading "The Story of O", by Pauline Reage for a second
time.

I really enjoyed that, but... well, the edition I have just kinda
stops. There's a postfix paragraph describing "the last chapter, which
has been supressed, ...", which just took a lot out of it - I was really
hoping for an ending, you know? It's just one of the things I look
forward to in a book.


More pertinently, arty people suck. Not just a little bit, either.

I read the two introductory chapters before actually reading the
book. Them being at the start of the book, that seemed kinda like a good
idea. But no, it turned out that both of the introductory chapters, by
what are distinctly arty people, both describe what happens at the
end. Bonus points, there, kids.


But the bit that really bugged me, and the reason that arty people suck
[as opposed to stupid critics that feel the urge to describe the ending
of a book at the start of it], is their judgement of the book.

Their vague reviews of the book that they were giving were based on a
"Who the hell is Pauline Reage?" kinda thing. "Pauline Reage" is actually
a pseudonym, and no-one knows who she really is.

If she's a famous, arty, author, then the book is a fantastic piece of
art, about the gradual debasement of a top Parisian fashion photographer.

On the other hand, if she's some random baseline erotica author, then
the book is judged to be just another bit of low-quality fetish porn.


See, I don't do a good line in judging books based on their author. I
have no aversion to saying that "Dead Air" mostly sucked, even though
I think Iain Banks is fantastic.

Can we not judge stuff based on whether or not it's any good, as
opposed to whether or not it's written by one of a self-congratulatory
mutually back-patting bunch of people who've qualified themselves as
"arty"?


Just as my .02, the first time I read it I was kinda shocked, and it
mostly came across as just scary stuff. The second time I read it, I'd
become a wee bit inured to the graphic sexual content, and found it to
have a more artsy flavor... But hey. Anything goes.


[2004-01-26]

The CD I got the other day is the first CD I've ever had that was wearing
a gimp mask. That's probably some kind of honor.

http://www.preachingtotheperv.com/
The soundtrack is currently a special edition that comes with a vinyl
mask on it. Kinda different, I guess.

I think I'll be forever indebted to Ara for introducing me to this
movie.

Remember kids - it's a comedy first, and a fetish porn second.


[2004-01-15]

Just gave notice on my appartment. Looks like my rent will be dropping
by 500 bucks a month or so. So that's good.

And I cycled to work this morning. Yay!


[2004-01-13]

Finished "Invisible Monsters" last night while watching Withnail &
I again.

Another truly quality book. I recommend this more than Survivor. There's
a whole lot more surprises in store. Great case of an unreliable author,
who eventually gets round to surprising even herself.

Only thing that seems weird is that the book doesn't feel like it's
written by a girl [it's written in the first person]. I can't put my
finger on it, but I didn't realise for a long time into the book [a few
pages, at least] that this is written from the perspective of a female.
And even then, it never quite felt like a female author. Not sure if
that's just me, but that's somehow the way it seemed.


As an aside, here, the more of ESR's book I read, the better it gets. As a
technical guy and author, he's great. His problem is just a narrow-minded
thing. He does a case study on why unix RPC is bad, but then says that
Windows RPC is the epitome of bad. Bleh.


[2004-01-12-shortly-after]

In response already:
1) I don't imagine I'm hurting ESR's book sales any more than the fact
   that he's already made them freely available online.
2) I don't not believe in ghosts. I'm just sitting on the fence until
   someone [or thing] convinces me either way. Or I die, at which point
   I expect it'll become reasonably obvious.


[2004-01-12]

It's just not been my week. So far, my sinks have flooded and my whole
appartment stank of next-door's shit for a few days, and now my car's
thrown a rod. Gnuh. And I'm forcing myself to read The Art of UNIX
Programming.


I can't help myself. I just can't stay away from this man.

Don't pick on windows ini files, while saying that record-jars are
wonderful.

[General]
Foo=Bar
This=That

Passes for EXACTLY the same thing as

%
Section: General
Foo: Bar
This: That
%

If you're parsing. Except that the windows ini file is in some ways
easier, as you can garauntee the ordering of at least the section name,
when you're going from start to finish in the config file.

A topic closely related to this is that not once, in the whole section on
parsing config files, does he use the term "state machine". Something I
consider important and useful when talking about config files that are
anything more complex than a single line. Guh.

Especially since the windows ini file fits into a state machine way more
tidily than a record-jar.


OK. Gotta say something positive. It's only polite. So:
The purely technical stuff about the relative merits of textual protocols
and data formats, that you can't possibly have an opinion on, is good.

I find that he's saying a lot of things that I already know, but it hasn't
ever occurred to me that a lot of this implicit knowlege I seem to have
can be formalised and justified within a reasonable technical text.

For example, it's simply never occurred to me to justify the fact that
textual formats are better for stuff like most configuration. They just
are, everyone knows this, it seems self-evident to me.

Remarkably, I enjoyed the whole chapter on protocols, as it simply didn't
leave much room for him to bitch about NT - most of the protocols
out there are either unix-friendly originally, and most of the NT-based
protocols require so much binary-data-like-work that it just doesn't
leave much room for debate.


Other books, I finished "Survivor" by Palahniuk. Good fun. Not up to either
of "Choke" or "Fight Club", but still good reading.

See, my way of buying books often boils down to walking around the store,
looking at authors I like, and buying anything I've not read. My steady
influx of fresh authors comes from people lending me books they enjoyed,
or mum buying me books whenever she's around. Works out well.

All of which means I'm now reading another book by Palahniuk, "Invisible
Monsters". So far it's been great. I thought the picture on the front
cover was just weird until I found out what it meant, and now it makes
me kinda feel sick to look at. Sometimes that's just the way it goes.


Finally some thoughts on dead people. Not my usual fare, but it just
put my back up last night.

See, I'm reserving judgment on whether or not there are dead people
around us all the time, present and accounted for.

I, personally, have never seen a ghost [to the best of my knowlege],
but then again, there are people that say they have [personal friends
of mine included]. I don't want to be narrow-minded, so I'm not closing
off the possibility.

But there's something that really riles me. And that's people that talk
to dead people, in a manner that's no more or less convincing than I,
personally, can talk to dead people. John Edwards and Shaun Valentine,
you know who I'm talking about.

There's a whole load of people out there that dearly want, possibly even
need, to be able to give their last farewells to someone, to know that
whoever-it-is is doing OK. And this is not a problem to me. Feel free,
be my guest.

But so far I've watched and listened to these two specific examples
of people talk with dead people, with a patter that comes out of a
textbook. Whether or not they actually talk to dead people, I'm not
sure. Not my place to say. But I truly believe that they're con-men.

Last night I was listening [I can't be bothered to re-tune the radio by
my bed], and the ONE thing that came out of Valentine's mouth that
had any kind of concrete value to it [that some baby was a boy] was
actually wrong. Good recovery, but no better a blag than I could have
managed.

I turned the radio off after that. [This was about the second or third
angel that I'd listened to that was apparently "in waiting" in the Kost
103.5 studio last night.]


As I said. There may be dead people around us [quite possible], and
John Edwards may talk to them [somewhat less likely]. But there are
people out there who are giving money to these people, with a patter
that comes from a book, because they believe it. All of which just seems
like a really easy con to pull.

It's just not a problem because in a way people are paying relatively
little money for a complete exercise in peace of mind. I guess that in
terms of bang for your buck, they're providing much better services than
your average head shrink. [Because I've not yet been incendiary enough]


[2004-01-08]

As promised, some thoughts on the History section of the Art of UNIX
Programming...


First, off the obvious - there's just way too much RMS-bitching and
self-evangelisation. While I may think that RMS is obsessive and does
some things that work out negatively, he clearly has brought an awful
lot of unixy stuff to where it is today - without him there wouldn't
be a GNU/Linux, in my opinion. The kernel's not a whole world of use
without the crap around it.

Now I may be mistaken, but I thought that RMS started his crusade over
a print driver. No mention is made of this in the book. Hmmm. I'm
probably mistaken.

He takes massive opportunities to promote himself, for eg pointing
out that he wrote the CATB, and so far he's the only person in the whole
wide world to come up with a coherent argument for the fact that I,
Chunky Kibbles, like open source software. He also slips in other
references that, if someone makes the effort to look stuff up, will also
lead back to him - the whole open-sourcing-of-mozilla thing immediately
springs to mind. In CATB, he explicitly points out that was his
doing. Here, it's more of a hint that you need to look up... to find
out it was his doing.


He comes up with a list of things that you could do to create an
anti-unix. This, in and of itself, isn't too bad. But I don't like the
single-minded approach that an anti-unix is a Bad Thing.

You know... a lot of people just don't want a unix. For a variety of
reasons, they don't like unices. I have several friends who, having had
sufficient experience with both unices and NT, have chosen NT. Not my
choice, but whatever.

The implication just seems to be that if it's not unix, it
sucks. Personally, it's my humble opinion that he's mostly right. But
that's based on my own experience and requirements.

With the exceptions of Apple [notably, the Interface guidelines and
another point I'm going to come to] and Be [as an academic interest
and a toy, not a real OS], he simply never claims that any other OS
has any merits, Which just seems narrow-minded.

The book is not presenting a fair and unbiased opinion on this topic.


Throughout the whole history, it seems that Linux takes up half of
it. That Linux was the first truly uniting force to create a proper unix
[after the first, which he implies was never popular enough to become
a force in and of itself, and lost all interest when it became commercial].

It seems that, according to him, unix was badly fragmenting for the whole
period of time between the original AT&T/MIT commercialisation up until
the advent of a working Linux kernel, 92-93.

Well, goddammit. Make your mind up. Is unix a thing that you can rely
on between vendors, systems, platforms, etc, etc, that everything is a
variant on a single theme, and that unix is a Good Thing?
Or is it a stupid, fragmented, non-portable system that Sun, DEC, HP, and
IBM all conspired apart to try and destroy in the interests of creating
a commercial, different, OS? If it is, then 25 years of unix's 35-year
history gathers together to make something that's not unix. Something
just doesn't gel, in my head.


He also seems to contradict himself. Metadata on files and elseplaces
in the OS is a good thing or a bad thing, take your pick. But please,
pick one.

According to my reading of this book, Metadata is cool when it's extended
attributes in Linux 2.5, or your filesystem is a database when you're on
Be. Metadata in the form of a registry [or anything else NT uses] blows,
and we're all pretty ambivalent about Mac's Resource Forks. I understand
these are all different things, but in the book they're all linked under
the nebulous idea of metadata.

Make your damn mind up.


Of course, if you're reading this particular book, I'm guessing that
you either side with his rantings, don't care about them, or are against
them. Any of these ways, it's a bit like me sounding off about whatever
I usually sound off about in #i.o - no-one's actually basing their
judgement on it alone, and if they are, they shouldn't be.


Finally, a quote from someone's slashdot .sig:

For those concerned about the "virality" of the GPL, a suggestion:
    Write Your Own Damn Code.

Just made me laugh.


[2004-01-05]

Forgot to mention two books:
Sidney Sheldon's "The Sky is Falling". Thorough mindless trash. I read it
in about two hours on the airplane, as time-fodder. The story was good
all the way through, as I've come to expect from him, but the ending
simply cleaned up one loose end. Just one.
And there were many many ends that weren't cleaned up. The book kinda
just stopped. c.f. Eaters of the Dead.


The other book, actually the first one I read this holday, was
incredible. One of the best books I've read in a long time.
"The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold. It's written from the perspective
of a girl who's killed, rather unpleasantly, while she's still really
young. I'm happy to confess that I'm a complete wuss and that violence
doesn't really do it for me. I nearly put the book down at the end of the
first chapter, but since it was apparent the rest of the book wouldn't
be like that, I carried on.

The whole book is written from her perspective, sitting up in Heaven. As
it goes, once you die and go there. From there, she can do pretty much
whatever she pleases, except go back. Including reading people's minds
and instantly knowing what's going on wherever she wants. Normally my
mind rebels and simply refuses to accept stuff like that, but this was
written in a way that just never seemed a problem to me. And I REALLY
enjoyed this book. It's about how a bunch of people deal with a little
girl's death. And for anyone who reads it, Ruthie can be my new hero.


Currently, I'm reading "Survivor" by Chuck Palahniuk,
Something-not-yet-published by Gwyneth Jones [but I need to read it's
predecessor first - I simply don't understand a lot of it, clearly
because it's a continuation], and the Art of UNIX Programming.

Look forward to a bitchy review of the History section of ESR's book
when I remember to bring my notes with me. I've not yet started the
technical bits, but so far there's been an awful lot of RMS-bashing and
self-masturbation, pretty much everything you'd expect from ESR.


[2003-12-28]

I just read "The Reader" today, by Bernard Schlink, or however-you-spell-it.

Fantastic book.

I really enjoyed the whole affair parts of it. The romantic interest,
all that. But the whole thing where it's a book about the holocaust is
a problem for me.

See, I always hated history. And if I hate something, you can be assured
I will go out of my way not to learn it, even if it's an interesting thing
[I mostly hated it because I was forced to do it, IIRC]. So I'm reading
this book, and I didn't:
1) know much about this before I started
2) grow up in Germany

It's really hard for me to grasp a lot of the finer
Germany-and-or-Holocaust parts of the book, because he spends a lot of
time alluding to, floating generally around, and pretty much avoiding
the exact topic he's talking about. If you know stuff about it, then
I'm sure that he's putting an incredible spin on the whole thing,
and extracting new-and-unexperienced emotions from the astute reader.

I, being the backward an uneducated sod that I am, simply didn't grasp
the finer points of the Germany-related stuff, or of what I'm sure were
parallels between the long-running affair and the Holocaust.

Even after all that, it was a fantastic book. I really recommend that
anyone who gets much in the way of reading done reads this.

His other book I've read, "Flights of Love", is also fantastic.


Other books I've read this holiday include "Prey" by Michael Crichton,
and "Dead Air" by Iain Banks.

You know, I never realise quite what a depth there is to Michael
Crichton's books until I see the movie and am so offensively
disappointed. All of his books I've ever read, with the exception of the
Great Train Robbery, I've been able to blast through in a couple of hours
[three at the outside] the first time, and about an hour and a half the
second and subsequent times. Doesn't ever seem like long enough to really
get some good content in. I always really enjoy the book, but after I've
read it I've never felt I read what might qualify as a truly great piece
of writing or a literary classic. Great read, good fun, fabulous stories.

The Great Train Robbery was written in a different style, for good reason
[just read it]

Just by the way: Congo, Jurassic Park [/et al/], Sphere, TimeLine, Great
Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead [the movie "The Thirteenth Warrior"],
Andromeda Strain, and probably others - all really good reading, and
completely disappointing movies. Notably, the Eaters of the Dead, which
missed out the WHOLE point of the book, IMHO. But also the rest for just
losing out all depth.

"Prey" was a really good read. I recommend that one. Hope they don't
turn it into a movie, because whoever does it will undoubtedly overdo
the special effects and give completely the wrong impression of the
intelligence of the swarm. But that's just my humble opinion, having
read every other one of his books, and watched all the movies where
they're availble.


And now for the disappointment. I hate to say it, but I didn't get a
whole lot out of "Dead Air". Usually Iain Bank's books [and most of his
SF stuff, under Iain M Banks], is really good all the way through. In
fact, his book "The Bridge" is possibly one of my favorite books ever,
with pretty much all of his others high up in my list.

Dead Air has a really good ending. It's gripping for about the last 3 or
4 chapters, had me completely sitting on the edge of my proverbial seat,
for the 15 mins it took me to read them.
Unfortunately, the build up was easy reading but generally dull. Some
guy, who spends a lot of time talking on the radio, having various
bits of illicit sex, and doing drugs. Oh - and does it with a Scottish
accent. Woohoo.

Worth reading for the ending, I guess, but since his
ending-to-end-all-endings in the "Wasp Factory" [incredibly
good book. Seemed humdrum until you got to the end the first time,
and suddenly everything changes], I've been vaguely disappointed with
the endings of many other books.


[2003-12-07]

And then *HE* comes up with the idea of adding IPC to the aajm version
so it can be used as some kind of progress bar during system startup.


[2003-12-06]

(20:53:29) Greg: you are seriously taking this juggle master thing way
               too far
(20:53:47) Greg: wxgtk was one thing
(20:53:54) Greg: aalib was almost tolerable
(20:54:05) Greg: but jhtml and the print function are just wrong
(20:54:14) Greg: deeply horribly fundamentally wrong.
(20:54:20) Chunky AIM: Thank-you.
(20:54:33) Greg: white-skinned michael jackson wrong


[2003-12-03]

Saw "Love Actually" last night. Fantastic movie.
It helps that I really dig chick flicks, but I loved it all the same.
And that thing with being English in America? That ain't made up.

* American points at thing
<American> What's that made of?
<Me> Aluminium
* Horde of American Girls giggle


[2003-12-01]

It amazes me. "Do you celebrate thanksgiving in England?"

I'd like to say that it's one isolated incident.

I'm at a polit-ish thanksgiving dinner, so I can't really say the obvious
of "Yes - every year in England, we celebrate that when we left England
we could find food".

And it's not restricted to thanksgiving, either. I've really, honestly,
not-making-this-up, been asked before if we celebrate independence day
in the UK. "Yes - every year in England we celebrate the time we beat
off the English".


I'll run with the "they're making polite conversation" thing, since I
have a little thing deep inside me that just really wants to believe
people aren't actually that spectacularly stupid.


[2003-11-25]

Last night [Monday] I rang up UPS to find out what was going on with
it. Apparently they'd failed, once again, to pick up my new toy from
it's misdelivery. Fantastic.

I got a little stroppy on the phone [again] to some poor girl that really
didn't deserve it [she sounded like she was about 17, just manning a phone
to make some cash]. Apparently the driver went back to the misaddress
shortly after I rang, and the place was closed. So they promised they'd
go get it this morning.

Well, they did. They must have picked it up this morning, and it arrived
at about 10:15 am. No mean feat, actually.

So now I have a cool new toy. Anyone curious, it's a Kershaw BlackOut,
serrated.


OK. In retrospect, I was a little harsh on the company I ordered this
from in the first place. I'm 99% certain that Mozilla would have entered
my address on the form, so I wouldn't have paid too close attention
to it. According to the receipt I was e-mailed, the address was wrong
there.
Lesson to you, kids: check the addresses on receipts you're e-mailed.

Anyways. Other than a petty game of who-gets-the-blame-for-two-transposed
digits [I'm willing to accept blame on it - I didn't check the receipt,
and I might well have typed it in in the first place], I'm impressed.

The guy at the company I've been conversing with has actually been
incredibly nice & helpful with me while I've been pissy. The knife was
bloody cheap in the first place. To be honest, I'd highly recommend this
place and am likely to buy from them again.
http://store.yahoo.com/emergencyoptions/
[technically it's www.emergencyoptions.com, but that takes you to a
flash splash page which is IMHO criminally offensive nowadays, but what
do I know about web stuff anyways?]


[2003-11-21-later]

Several months ago, I wrote this:
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=chunky&date=2003-01-19
You'll notice there's a <snippage> there. Well, last time I spoke to the
rather gorgeous lass in question, she'd quit the telemarketing thing,
and I completely lost interest around the time she started scaring me,
and I got a new ladyfriend anyways.

Well, I was wading through my stuff, and given that I no longer have a
vested interest in a specific person not reading it, here it is:

<snip>
In other news, I've spent the day at a conference of sorts. I won't
name the company doing it, but it's essentially telemarketing training,
with bonus legal pyramid scheme. Not something I'd really been expecting,
but since there was female interest involved, I didn't start throwing
things. [Or ripping anyone a new asshole. I had to do that to one guy
who rang me at 7am the other day.]

Oh. And it's not telemarketing, it's "referrals" [only inflicting
telemarketing on friends & family], and it's not a pyramid scheme, the
money just flows upwards, into ever-decreasing numbers of people, and
the people putting it into the system never get any out. It's only the
people who're in the system that get to keep any of it. Think "novel
business strategy for providing phone & electricity".

I think the real clincher was when the guy says "Most people, when they
say this, the first thing they ask is whether it's legal". Following
it up with "now - when you go away, don't tell your friends or family
about this; they'll think you're crazy". In a kind of "no - really -
don't tell anyone about this, it's crazy" kinda way.

And you're looking at one of these things where all these people,
who're essentially telemarketing their family & friends, are being
whipped into a religious fervor by some dude who's telling them how
much money they can all be making.

Literally, there were 700 people in that room, all of whom had disengaged
their brain and were being fed thoughts through their ears, essentially
doing so because of the threat of massive quantities of money.


I kid you not, I had imaginings of low-budget horror movies where there's
one guy in the middle of the room, capable of rational thought, and
wondering how everyone around him is being quite so hypnotised and
wound up. His eyes are like some far side cartoon - the only set of eyes
visible in the room, and widely twitching continuously around him.
Suddenly, without warning, everyone in the room picks up rocks & starts
throwing them at him. The ones with knives start flicking them. Cutting
the backs of their hands marking themselves and getting prepared.


Of course, it's not all bad - I've learned now & improved techniques
for convincing even the most reticent of family members to give money
to this. Mostly stuff involving "If you really respect me for who I am,
you'll do this for me", and "could you do me a personal favor?". Pretty
much stuff related to guilt-tripping people out, which is a technique
I've been learning from the American side of my family for years. It's
just never been this distilled and used as a teaching mechanism instead
of a way of convincing me to do stuff.


Seems the next conference on that scale [international, would you
believe?] is going on over valentine's day weekend, "so you can bring
along your spouse/ other half/ whatever, and have a romantic weekend
at the same time".

*shudder*

And, for anyone who gets the reference, the only company name that
popped up for a "we're in allegience with" mention was EarthLink.
</snip>



[2003-11-21]

Not only did UPS fail miserably on the computer thing [you know,
where they ship it to me instead of throwing it around like it's one
of my juggling toys], they've now managed to take incompetency to whole
new levels.

On Monday, an item is shipped via UPS to me. Second day shipping.

I look up in their tracking database on Wednesday that it's been
delivered. Except not to here, which is interesting, since I was pretty
sure that here is to where it's been shipped. Noticing on the tracking
info that there were various weird address confirmations, I attempt
ringing them up.

It seems the address on the label had two digits transposed. Fine,
sometimes that's just the way it goes. I can choke down a dumb
typographical error.

Seems that they noticed the address with the transposed digits didn't
exist, looked up Gary Briggs in their database and found some random
Gary Briggs that lives out in the great blue yonder or something. So
they deliver it there. I can't imagine how they didn't find this me, also,
with an address that's alarmingly similar to the one they already have,
except two digits are transposed and it actually exists, but hey. What
do I know.

They assure me that it'll be picked up on Thursday morning [was delivered
to Gary on Wednesday morning], and arrive on my doorstep "either Thursday
evening or Friday morning". For bonus points they take my phone number
in case there are going to be any problems.

Friday evening rolls round, I try phoning them again. Apparently the last
entry in their database they have regarding this was me ringing them up &
pickup getting re-scheduled for Thursday.

Not having contacted me in two days to tell me that it didn't happen,
I'm IMHO understandably stroppy. "We'll find out what happened and ring
you back in under an hour". An hour and a half later I try ringing
again just in case, since I don't have too great a record of shipping
companies bothering to actually contact me. Apparently they've no idea
what's going on, but will "ring [me] back in less than an hour", for a
second time.

This time it only takes half an hour to get back to me, and it seems that
they've no idea what's going on, but will find out from the driver when
he gets back, and have re-scheduled a shiny new pickup for Monday morning.

At least they've generously re-imbursed me. Or, apparently, will do. Or,
I'm guessing, will re-imburse the company that shipped it. Who have, in
all fairness, responded to one of my e-mails... Albeit only to apologise
for the errors that caused me to send the e-mail in the first place. And
successfully sent me something that probably qualifies as a weapon to
completely the wrong address to start this all.



[2003-11-17]

PostScript scares me. I'd always thought it was just-another-image-format,
but oh, no. Oh, hell, no. It's a fully fledged programming language, "most
closely resembling FORTH". Basically, it's a big ol' stack-based language.

I was reading the "PostScript Language Reference, 3rd Ed" at the weekend
[or, to give it its recognised name, "The Red Book"]. It's the language
reference as published by Adobe. There's another book, "The Blue Book",
or "PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook" as Adobe like to call it.


I basically learned it for the sole purpose of this:
http://icculus.org/jugglemaster/ps/
My application now has a print button. And not just for static images,
either :-)


What scares me about PostScript, though, is the startjob function.
When you send a postscript job to a printer, it stores it's entire
internal state. Then lets you do whatever you want. As soon as the job
finishes executing, the state of the machine is restored in preparation
for the next job. Which is a pretty sensible way of doing stuff.

Running with the usual well-let's-not-restrict-what-a-person-can-do
kind of thing, it's possible to actually leave your own [protected]
space and start messing about in the machine's space.

For example, you can arrange to have a clipping box put on every job
printed henceforth.
In other words, by merely "printing" about 4 or 5 lines, you could ensure
that this top-of-the-range printer will only ever print the bottom half
of each page until it's firmware is reflashed [or another PostScript
expert recognises what's happened and codes up something that replaces
that clipping box]

It scares me that this is possible.


Two things I don't like: There is no alpha blending. You get to draw
stuff using essentially a painter's algorithm, and you don't get to see
stuff you've overlaid.

Secondly, PostScript is primarily a PDL [page description language]
[duh]. But this means that you don't get certain features like
"delay". Display PostScript [a dialect designed for visual displays]
supports a stop-execution and resume-execution-based-on-an-external-thing,
but normal PostScript doesn't. So my juggling proggie dumps postscript
that busily prints stuff out a bunch of times before moving onto the
next frame. It's not pretty, but it works.


[2003-11-10-later]

http://icculus.org/jugglemaster/

W00t. Finally got permission to release it all, joy & happiness abounds.

And I think I'm truly honored:
http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=1763
"This might be the strangest project we host to date"


[2003-11-10]

Meet Bobo.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/bobo.jpeg

Poor baby. His mummy fell down at the weekend. No-one in the appt
complex knew her, but she's currently in hospital and we're hoping she
wakes up. In the meantime, I have an extra friend living with me for a
while. He's nice. Old, and looks like he's starting to get cataracts,
but a lovely animal anyway.


I finally made myself a decent bag for my picks, so now they're worlds
easier to get to and play with. How exciting.


[2003-10-27]

I'm so proud! And geeky with it!

Last night I was watching one of the Family Guy episodes [in season 2,
the one where the guy in a wheelchair enters the wheelchair olympics]. I
know it's not much, but there's a bunch of blind guys walking around
with a big sign in braille that says "GO BLIND".

And I read that without having to look it up. Yay! I had a lot of trouble
because they do their capitalisation all funky. To capitalise a single
letter [eg at the start of a proper noun], you prepend a cell with just
the bottom-right dot in place. To capitalise an entire word, you prepend
two of those cells. In the show, they just capitalise each & every letter.


In the meantime, one of the reasons that I wanted to learn braille was
so that I can use a braille terminal. Remember Sneakers, anyone? Yes,
those really do exist. And if anyone out there knows where I can get
a braille terminal for an affordable price [or has one in a garage
gathering dust that they'd like to donate :-)], I'd love it.

See, I simply can't afford the couple grand these puppies seem to cost.


And other than that, jmdlx [http://icculus.org/~chunky/jmdlx] compiles and
runs just fine on windows, without modification, using Boodshed's DevC++.
http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/devcpp.html

Nice compiler, nice UI, free as in beer... I like this software.


[2003-10-13]

Yay! Just got my new book from Amazon, that I only ordered in the furst
week of July. Ugh.

"Handbook for learning to read braille by sight", but Lelan Schubert.

Coooool.

In other news, you know you suck when "[the timer's] precision is
platform-dependent, but in general will not be better than 1ms nor worse
than 1s."


[2003-10-09]

Hmmm. You know you use perl too much when the C++ toolkit you're
using provides hash tables and lists, and you use them as an
obvious-way-to-store-data. Mmmm. Dig those hashes-of-lists-of-classes.

For anyone curious, the project is http://icculus.org/~chunky/jmdlx

I've written the pattern loader, but haven't integrated it yet [I'm
storing the patterns using the above data structure]. I'm considering
myself seven kinds of lucky that my parser actually worked first time,
since debugging it wouldn't have been too entirely joyous.

Working on getting permission to open-source it, but the other two
authors are kinda hard to reach.

wxWindows still rocks, but it's timers are hideously inaccurate. I guess
I've been spoilt by spending months working on RTLinux :-)

Major pity that their website is really good-looking & easy to
use right up until the moment my desktop explodes, leaving me
without-a-functioning-graphical-web browser, and I need to download
something using lynx.

And aside from it being ugly as sin, wxWindows' documentation is
just as good as Qt's, IMHO, with the exception that wx has more
examples-just-when-you-needed-it. Which is nice.



[2003-10-01]

I'm finally working on a random port that I got the source for many many
months ago, but never got round to actually porting [sorry, kids, it'll be
closed source, at least for a while... and of no interest at all to most
people out there - not really a game, I'm afriad :-)].

Since this doesn't run on Windows or Mac either, and is a generic C++
program, I've taken a stab at wxWindows... and I have to say that I'm
seriously impressed with wxWindows.


[2003-09-10]

Not that it's depressing that this is my attitude, but I shaved this
morning and it's the first time I've /not/ cut myself since I got my
new razor. Yay!

See, I finally have a decent straight razor. It's niiiiiiice. In
all honesty, it's faster, easier, and does a better job than my old
Mach3. And I'm finally getting used to it, which means I avoided
lacerating myself in the process of using it this morning. Oh. And the
soap smells so much nicer than any foam I've ever used.

These are the highlights of my day.


And because I can't possibly write a .plan update without being
incendiary, I discovered yet another reason that the UK is so much better
than America - our flag looks MUCH better when it's used as a bandana.

Or any other time, now I come to think about it.


[2003-09-04]

Equal Opportunities...
So, if "The university of York is committed to a comprehensive policy
of equal opportunities in employment", why in Hell do I have to fill in
a form that qualifies me as white, English, and not disabled, as part
of the application process?

Surely, in a sensible world of "equal opportunities", these facts would
be completely irrelevant, and actually actively avoided until /after/
one would begin employment there?

The sensible thing to do in my mind would be to hire people on the merits
of an anonymous interview where you can see neither their color nor how
many legs they've got, and based solely on their technical capabilities.


Oh, wait. I remember. Employers nowadays are forced to hire the token
black wheelchair-ridden woman, even if she's a fucking moron, just to
prove that they'll hire black wheelchair-ridden women.

Not, you understand, that I've had first hand experience of people
not qualified to do a job being hired just because they're a minority,
and then me having to clean up the broken remenants of their work...


[2003-09-01]

Exercises in usability, Number {many}

I just opened a recent version of Media Player. Funky UI. Looks
cool. Marks for consistency. It's like it almost resembles anything
else I know how to use. Nowadays, changing UIs radically just to make
them prettier at the expense of usability, comes under my favorite
User-Interface 101 topic of "Moving Shit About". Yay for pretty shit.

Challenge: Given the URL of a stream, it took me a noticable amount of
time to work out how to open it. I first tried clicking the biggest most
obvious button there, and it took me to a windows media-realted website.

I mean, everyone knows I'm not really a pointy-clikky genius, but as
someone who's never touched this system before, I shouldn't have had
trouble opening a URL.

Of course, that's probably my bad for having the URL on a clipboard
instead of e-mailed to me, since I'm sure Outlook would LOVE the
opportunity to helpfully open it for me. [Yay for e-mail inboxes full
of .pif files.]


[2003-08-26]

"The most interesting thing about King Charles I is that he was 5'6"
at the start of this reign, but only 4'8" tall at the end of it"

Amuses me every time I hear it.


[2003-08-16]

Obviously, I have a different opinion on a lot of movies to most people.

I just finished watching American Beauty. Again. Not quite as many times
as Fight Club, but hey...

For those who already know, a great many things in my day haven't been
working out too well recently.

But this movie just...

You know, it has one of the happiest endings of any movie I've ever
seen. I watch it, and it just makes me smile & feel good about a great
many things. It's soooo not a picker-upper kinda movie, but the ending
always makes me feel better, generally, about the whole world.


[2003-08-11]

Today is financially an unexpectedly OK day. I went to the AAA to see
if I could make my car insurance cheaper, and the nice man told me that
I was already saving 800 bucks this year [no accidents and no tickets;
other people's insurance and driving school are two wonderful things]


[2003-08-02]

Joy! I'm going to Linuxworld. Leaving at some godawful hour on Sunday
morning, then helping with setup in the Canon booth. I'll be there
all week.


[2003-07-30]

Netscape3:
1) Has an option for the number of concurrent connections to a
server. Defaults to 4. That's really cool.

2) It obeys the width attribute on td elements. And I mean, "OBEYS". My
normal hack for saving bothering working out image widths is:
<td width="3"><img src="blah"></td>
All modern browsers simply expand the td to fit the image. NS3? Nope. It
obeys it. Now will you people please stop whining that Mozilla never
obeys width tags, wheras IE does? NEITHER do.

Meh. Now, if only I could find libc5 compatability libraries for
Slackware 8 or 9, I could actually test seriously in NS3, as opposed to
forwarding an X session from a slowish Solaris box.

In other news, it seems that my anal HTML coding habits have produced HTML
that worked perfectly in NS3 and 4, Lynx, and everything newer. And in
sizes down to about 603 pixels wide [NS3], 618 pixels wide [Firebird],
and 617 pixels wide [NS4].
Which, being well below 640, is more than enough to satisfy me.

It should be said at this point that a lot of my HTML is copied from
DreamWeaver HTML. Notably the <table> elements, including all thir
guff. There's a bunch of them and they're nested. I'm VERY impressed
with DreamWeaver.


My DVD of Withnail & I just arrived. Happiness abounds. I fouled up a
few other things. Happiness desists abounding.


[2003-06-23]

I win.
Apple just announced Mail 2.0, including funky stuff like using the
Safari Core [gratiate it with it's real name, kids; KHTML], and being
muchly improved. It's not based on Ximian, but who cares. I was right.


[2003-06-02]

Charlie Croker NEEDS to have an English accent. That's what makes him what
he is. I actually didn't associate the names with the original people
[any of them] - until someone actually said "Charlie Croker", I hadn't
realised who that "Charlie" was. The accents are just too far removed.
"Mr Bridger" is "Mr Bridger", not whatever-his-first-name-is [Donald
Sutherland]. I didn't associate them until long after he died, and they
started talking to his daughter. [not much of a spoiler, given I saw
him die in the trailer]

Other than that, I really enjoyed it in the same way I enjoyed Ocean's
11 - it's not MEANT to be a new version of the original. It's an almost
completely different story, and should be looked upon as such.

Edward Norton's one of the best actors to have appeared recently, IMHO.

I really enjoyed this film, but it's not the original. Read into that
whatever you will.


On completely another topic, a two foot high wall kept the Scots out of
England for several hundred years. Here's a direct quote I just received
from one of my Scottish friends:

(10:19:44) ***bob successfully knocked himself out this morning
(10:20:18) bob: woke up at 8:45, saw the time, went shit, I'm late,
jumped out of bed and banged my head off the wall... fell unconsious
back onto bed


[2003-05-23]

Interesting advocate for pirating music; I was watching TV the other day,
and saw the Nissan Frontier advert. The CD being pushed into the CD
player is only visible from the underside... and blue.

In other news, I lied. I got heavy on a LinkSys access point the other
day and was so impressed that I bought one. It has lots of security
measures in place, so long as you actually turn them on. It also has
the ability to act as a client to other access points, which would be
the real reason I bought it.


[2003-05-17]

Quick prediction:
Now they've effectively ousted IE from their desktops, by simply creating
a massively superior product, Apple will go on to create a rocking
mail client.

I'm guessing it'll be based on Evolution, that they'll license Ximian's
Connector, and it will blow Entourage way the hell outta the water.


[2003-05-14]

OK. I know everyone's bored of this topic by now, but:
I've just finished reading Fight Club, on Ryan's recommendation. It's
a good book.

Lots of things in it are very different to the film. Like, say, Marla
Singer's presence through the whole thing, and, oh, I dunno... the ending.

I definitely recommend reading this.


[2003-05-05]

It's funny. I spend so much time whining about how pathetic the drivers
here are. Which they really are.

But suddenly, when I'm on a bike, everything changes. I get LOADS of
leeway from passing traffic. They're noticably more wary around me,
and careful of my presence. It's really really nice. People hang well
back if they can't get around me, and when they do move to overtake me,
they make sure they're way the hell away from me when they do it.

At this point, I could turn this into a rant about libellous societies
again, but you know? I think I'll just quietly appreciate the fact that
I feel safer on the road on my bike than I did in the UK. Which is
completely the opposite of what I was expecting.

I also have a nice bike path that goes about halfway to work from where
I live, which is basically going alongside the road next to some grass
and flowers & stuff.

There's another bike route, but apparently it goes through some crappy
neighborhoods going workwards [although going marinawards it's quite
nice. Little detour along a river thing, ending up going around the
Marina. It's purty.]

These are the exciting things in my day.


[2003-04-21]

To clarify, once-and-for-all:
If you've ever been to a Farscape convention, you are so much more dorky
than I could EVER be.


[2003-04-04]

Way to go, Linksys. Man, I ain't NEVER buying a Linksys piece of hardware.

I've just upgraded someone's wireless access point for them. Using
crossover office [good] and a program called "tftp.exe" [bad]. From work
while they're at home [bad].

To clarify, tftp SHOULD have a ttl of 1, and it's unauthenticated.

I've also done a couple other administrative tasks through the web
interface. My bad, that's going through...
<quickly checks>
more than 20 hops from here.

I hate to be harsh, but completely consistently, every time I'm messing
with a wireless router, if it's made by Linksys, it simply horrifies me
how insecure it is.

Yes, I'm fully aware that the "remote administration" thing is a setting
that you have to turn on. But IMHO, it simply shouldn't exist.


[2003-04-01]

OK. So I like lots of random skill type things. Magic, Juggling, Making
Chainmaille, Solving Rubik's Cubes, pretty much whatever takes my fancy.

I've also recently been taught to do do cross-stitch. Yay!

I finished my first piece the other day. Something small and fairly
inconsequential, but I think it's pretty cool all the same. My week now
includes an embroidery group every Wednesday. That's kinda depressing
when I think about it.


[2003-03-25]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/my-first-chainmaille.jpeg

Remember how I said the other day that tin snips are a little piece of
chainmaille-related heaven? Well, it's still true.

That picture right there would be the whole reason I learnt to make
chainmaille. I saw online various people wrapping juggling balls in it,
and thought "sounds cool, plus it's a new random skill to learn".

Take one normal cheap juggling ball, and wrap in chain.

Completely changes the whole feel of the ball, makes is somewhat larger,
more resilient to hurt, heavier... lots of things. And muchly personalised.

Very cool.



[2003-03-20]

Hmmm. I was just looking at my CV, and two horrific things came to
my attention:

1) Every time I've worked with Macs in a really-I-mean-it kinda way,
    I've been in a small windowless room housing 4 computers and either
    two or three people. Usually at least one of my roomies smokes.

2) All of the paid jobs I've had so far have involved me, in some way,
    relegated to webmonkey. Be it search engine developer or more
    general-purpose monkey. And my personal webpages are still ugly
    as sin. Perhaps I oughta do something about that.

Sensing a theme, I've also just realised I've ended up as a DBA to go
with the webmonkey stuff, oftentimes.

*shudder*


[2003-03-17]

Note to self: When people online talk about using Aviation Snips to
create the rings for ChainMaille, over a pair of normal wire croppers,
and how they're a little bit better...

They mean it.

This weekend I was wandering by Sears at some point, and thought
"Perhaps..."

So I bought some Aviation Snips [for Brits, "Tin Snips"]. And suddenly
I'm finding I can make a small mountain of rings in remarkably little
time. With remarkably little effort. And when I take a pair of pliers to
them, the rings actually meet cleanly at the end. And don't come apart
when two rings are meeting at their respective joins.

Anyone else considering learning to make ChainMaille [not as hard as it
looks, by the way], spending 15 bucks on a set of Aviation Snips over
8 bucks for a normal pair of croppers, it's COMPLETELY worth it. By
several orders of magnitude. Think "Difference between night & day"


[2003-03-13]

Yet another browser sounding-off session.

There's a reason that HTTP headers exist. That MIME types exist. And
the reasons IS NOT that the browser knows better than the server.

By way of example:
Content-type: text/plain

If you're Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, pretty much anything except IE, then
it's rendered as plain text. Even if it's HTML. That's a Good Thing,
there's a reason for things like that. [eg, serving up source code to
HTML in-line scripting langauges]

And that's where my usual ranting finishes. IE sucks, Mozilla rocks.

But no.

Mozilla, in it's infinite wisdom sees the following, and renders it,
if it's been served up as text/plain:
Content-disposition: attatchment; filename=something.clf

Having flicked through RFC2183, the above should be interpreted as
"ask the user what to do with it", which IE actually manages successfully.

Of course, not to let IE off the hook, it does helpfully append a ".txt"
extension.

Grrr.

You see, I'd really hoped to avoid that whole application/octet-stream
thing for a simple text file. But no.

<mozilla> When I grow up, I want to be IE



[2003-03-03]

Oh, my bad.

Seems that the username isn't necessarily blank; it's just ignored in
the whole auth process. It's almost as if that's better.

Other than that, Ryan's right:
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&date=2003-03-01&time=04-00-14
The comment on MarbleBlast? I bought that, too.


[2003-02-27]

Not that I'm really complaining as such, but a quick note:

If you're designing an all-in-one-router-wireless-dsl-thingy... or
any other device like that, really, then you really should take into
consideration something specific:

People are STUPID.


OK. Kudos for refusing connections on the web interface if more than one
hop is involved [ie, from any machine not directly physically connected
to the switch - say, someone's hijacked your wireless connection and is
routing TCP onwards.]

Considerably less kudos if you, as part of the authentication thingy,
put your Brand name & Model number in the response.
<Netscape> Password required for LinkSys whatevermodel

All I have to do is visit the website, grab the userguide, check out
the default admin uname & passwd, and trash someone's router. Most people
plug their computery stuff in, and if "it works", they won't touch
it. For example, if they plug in a wireless router and their laptops
magically go on the internet.

Most people don't enable encryption. Most people wouldn't enable mac
address filtering, even if they knew what it was.

The username & password would have taken a hellish long time to guess
[blank username], but instead linksys hand it out on a plate. Way to
go, guys. You're not enhancing the already pathetic reputation that
802.11b has.


[2003-02-18]

You know it's pathetic when you're watching chick flicks on your own &
really enjoying them.

In other, completely independant news, I've heard Bed of Roses [Christian
Slater & Mary Stuart Masterson, 1996] is quite a good movie...


[2003-02-16]

Mmmmm. Was my birthday yesterday, and spent many hours drinking and
playing pool and drinking. Mmmmm.

Oh, and did I mention drinking?

Wireless networking is cool. Stupidly insecure, but cool all the same.


[2003-01-26]

You're never entirely certain what sort of party you're going to.

I think I first realised something was amiss when I noticed there was
some kind of weird volcano thing [about a foot high, mebbe 3 feet
across]. At the focal point of the living room.

Come midnight or so, the volcano was filled with baking soda, vinegar,
and red dye. Yes, we've all been there. But I bet you've never brutally
sacrificed a virgin [it's a barbie doll; use your imagination] using
said volcano. Well, not that brutally, but unwholesome all the same.

And In other news, I appreciate all the help I had from one ladyfriend
many many moons ago who taught me to undo bra straps damn quickly with
just the one hand.

If you're reading this, that'll teach you to tickle me.


[2003-01-19]

Note to self; it's not 100% reasonable to "not keep my appartment tidy;
random visits from good looking chicks are pretty non-existant".

It's just scary when you hear a knock on the door, and there's a really
nice-looking lass outside. Who you've never met, but cooks you dinner
anyways.

<snippage>

And you know what made it all alright? I'm such a wuss, but we were all
wearing those papery wristband things, and at one point she reached over,
grabbed my hand, and drew a big smiley face on it.

Probably about the same time as I would have been twitching & convulsing
for lack of coffee.


[2003-01-14-later]

Two updates to the previous:
1) I think the word you are looking for is litigious, meaning more
willing to resort to lawyers. Libellous means they say untrue things
about people deliberately. [Hi, Tom]
2) Apparently, it's more likely the kids are already being serviced by
the priest in the church, so the odds of me making the situation worse
are close to nil [Hi, Greg]


[2003-01-14]

I had my first juggling gig in this country not long ago. It was some
random charitable thing in East LA involving about 50 or so kids, 3
jugglers, and some others at random. [We'd been expecting more kids to
be there, actually]

In the UK, I used to do something called "PlayScheme" fairly regularly.
Parents in the area would leave their kids there, and then the kids would
be entertained by painting, balloons, games, whatever_usually_amuses_kids.

Every time I went there, I had to sign a piece of paper, something to
the effect of "I promise I'm not a paedophile, and so far I've never
been caught". Or something to that effect. It actually seems like a
pretty good idea; the parents can be pretty comfortable that nothing
scary's gonna happen to their kids. And, from what I gather, the relevant
checks really were done after the event.

Come a charity gig entertaining kids in LA. I'm expecting to be given
a piece of paper that I must sign, this being even more of a libellous
society [is that the right word?] than England. And, lo & behold, I am.

Reading through, it's simply a Name & Address thing so they can contact
me if they ever feel the urge to ask me to do some work again. Seems
reasonable enough, and the lasses there were pretty good looking... The
fine upstanding christian thing was a bit off-putting, but since it is
a charity gig in a church, I suppose I oughtn't be surprised.

And another bit at the bottom to sign. Saying that they're allowed to
use my photo. For promotional purposes.

Seems being a paedophile & working with kids in East LA would be no
problem, but being afraid of my own image in print is perfectly ok.


[2003-01-06]

This is really quite cool.

I just got some new juggling balls, and a new acrylic.

At Xmas, I'd been playing with someone's silicone juggling balls, and
while I was in London talking to dad about it, I'd whined that they were
too expensive for sensible people to be able to afford.

Dad, not having thought of anything to give me for Christmas at that
point, gave me enough cash to get some.

So I now have 6 green silicones [Mmmmmmmm], and a green Acrylic
[Mmmmmmmmmmm. It's purty].

It's really weird. When they come in the box, they're all shiny; I never
realised there's actually a break-in period before they turn the normal
silicone-texture...

Of course, until you've used them, most people simply wouldn't understand
what's so great about the better part of two hundred quid's worth of
juggling balls. [Ow. Ouch. Owie. Ow. Ow. Ow.]


[2002-12-23]

Not-really-in-the-kitchen-with-Chunky

Jalapenos make an EXCELLENT addition to any pizza, one of my personal
favorites being Ham & Pinapple.


[2002-12-22 - Later]

I've just watched Fight Club again. Man, that movie's good.

And while I was watching it, a couple thoughts that I'd forgotten about
occurred:
The conclusion of the movie is that some tall buildings get blown up.

A few weeks [months?] ago, I was talking to someone about this film. "I
think it's a f***ing great film", I claimed. "Well, I used to think
it was OK, but now I think it's pretty tasteless and should be removed
from shelves" came the response.

Sorry, that's just not right. First, the obvious [to everyone]:
When the film came out, it was good. After some events, the film is now
considered bad. Fuck that. History doesn't change because of current
events. Any film I've enjoyed in the past, I still recognise that I liked
it and may still do - whether or not current events have any relevance
to it.

I would have said something at the time of this discussion, but the
person making the above comment is an, uhm, "imposing" character, and
arguing things like this kinda leaves one slightly afraid. So I let it be.

The other point, somewhat obvious to some, not at all obvious to
Americans, and apparently pretty politically incorrect, is that two
buildings is f**k all.

I spent most of my life [20 yrs] being ousted from various buildings,
tubes, trains, busses, and random streets. Why? Because terrorists were
about to blow said items up. I've been within hearing range of more than
one [ok, only two, but still...] bomb blast, from terrorists.

I don't like to sound callous, but it's really hard to be sympathetic
to some people who think their world's coming to The End just because
a comparatively minor infraction has been suffered against some
people, several thousand miles away, who just happen to be of the same
nationality.

And I've not even started comparing attacks on the Japanese subway yet.

I have huge amounts of sympathy for all directly involved, and the events
of September the 11th were a truly terrible thing. It's just that to some
people, they're considerably less than "an attack on the fundamentals
of humanity", and really need to be treated as such.

And don't forget who was supplying the IRA with their weapons pretty
much the whole time.

"But that's different..."


[2002-12-22]

You know, it never used to amaze me that people used IE - to be honest,
it was considerably technically superior to any of the other
offerings. Faster, simpler, and it didn't crash as often. Moz early
adopters, you know what I'm talking about.

I'm sitting in front of my mother's computer right now, using IE, and
seriously wondering why anyone ever uses it at all anymore, doubly so
for the technically inclined people.

If you're technically inclined, I no longer believe there's any excuse at
all to use IE - with the scary security problems that crop up weekly,
and it's shitty support for normal HTML development [a view source
shortcut? Anyone? Please?], I don't understand what would make someone
actually use it as their primary browser of choice anymore.

And for the non-technically inclined, I probably oughta point out here
that I've seen no end of pop-ups, pop-unders, flash banner ads, etc,
etc, and two things:
1) I have even less sympathy than I used to for all the people who don't
install ad-blocking software.
2) The least the advertising companies could do is WRITE SOME WORKING
CODE. I've seen a whole bunch of piecemeal 404s, broken javascript,
crashing the browser, and sundry other things. Of all the browsers where
it may or may not work, my mother's 6-month-old off-the-shelf machine
running windows and IE /really/ oughta be getting it right.

For bonus points, this machine is a LOT slower than my machine at
home, although the sheer number of CPU cycles available to one browser
instance/load time is considerably higher here. Phoenix loads faster on
my machine at work than IE does here, and I don't even have working
{Normal_IDE_Feature_XXX}.


What I'm looking forward to is the day that some little bastard breaks
into either the BBC or CNN's site, and puts some malicious code on the
front page that formats everyone's hard drives. I firmly believe this
is gonna happen sooner or later, and I'm glad I won't be using IE when
it happens. It would be even neater if they broke into the MSN search
page [the one where you end up every time you mist-type something into
the address bar], or google, but I think that's setting my hopes a
little high.


[2002-12-02]

If you're reading this, you should know that I have trouble replying to
e-mails with a From field of the form "Mumble Mumble <>"

In other news, 89 in a 70 zone. Fuckers.


[2002-11-14]

Went out last night with a guy I know from juggling caled
"Catastrophe". He's in the video business, and is interested in
open-source, geekdom, and linux.

We go out for sushi. Seems a noble goal, really. It's pretty disarming
when you get there, and he's talking to the Japanese people, in Japanese,
and everyone's smiling and laughing except me who doesn't understand a
single word of what's being said. Which is nice. But it was good, and seems
that's in danger of becoming a regular thing. Which would suit me pretty
much just fine.

Over dinner, we ended up discussing mostly the merits of open-source, and
what the various licenses are.

He's currently reading "Free As In Freedom" to give himself first lessons
in Open-Source. Which I would say is a lot like reading Mein Kampf to
learn about keeping unemployment low.

So all that was good.


We then went to a "British Pub" in Santa Monica, "The King's Head".

The door man was wearing a shell suit, which took a whole lot out of
the experience, really. Mostly it was pretty good, and they had pint
glasses. I got whupped at darts, but then I never was any good.

I'd give it a 9 out of ten for effort, and roughly 4 and a half for
implementation. I have a feeling I'll be going there again, as I did
enjoy it, after all.

It was nice, too, to hear a liverpublian lass sounding off about
Alex Ferguson.


[2002-11-12]

OK. Since I've had one or two responses about yesterday's comment:

Firstly, my machine did not get 0wned; Nor did any forums that I run.


Basically, I had an argument online with someone, semi-publically.
[Dagnammit. It was a 5-letter correction sent in a patch to a mailing
list]

He then wrote an article with what I took to be a backhanded attack on
me in it [relating to our argument]...

I posted a reply on the forum, and it was changed to be completely
contrary to what I'd written, while keeping it in my style of
writing. Which just really pissed me off, since it could genuinely have
been mistaken for me saying something I very much didn't.

In all fairness, the forum is anonymous/unauthenticated in the first
place, and people have written stuff as me on more than one occasion.

Someone else pretending to be me doesn't annoy me, so long as they're
either clearly not serious, or at least not writing something that I
care about or have an opinion on.


I've also sent an apology to the guy for me making an ass of myself,
although I still stand by my points.


[2002-11-11]

On the acceptable use of technology.


It's not, in my humble and considered opinion, acceptable to
electronically permanantly change statements made by someone, because
you disagree with what they've said.

Doubly so when it is changed to something that still seems to be from the
original author, and is completely contrary to what was written before.

Hell; I don't change my OWN statements from the past, even though some
of them are flagrantly wrong/shortsighted/whatever.

The idea of someone else changing them for me just seems a little...

Wrong.


[2002-11-07]

Look at the date on the top of this update. Really. Look. See how it
implies christmas is still most of two months away?

The whole thing with selling stuff in the shops, I've pretty much
got over.

It's when the street decorations are going up that I start to wonder.


[2002-11-01-bit-late]

Forgot to mention.

When walking around the noxious chemical section in a hardware store,
people think you're weird if you're opening each one, sniffing it,
and putting it down again.

I was just checking that "kerosene" really is "paraffin", but whatever...


[2002-11-01]

Some complimentary things:
1) Yay for American telcos
2) Yay for American ATMs
3) Yay for American customer service

In order:

This morning, I rang up Verizon with some questions about my bill. The
lady on the phone answered all the questions with any problems at all.

And it seems I'm not the only computer geek in the world who avoids high
tech stuff at home as much as possible; the woman understood exactly what
I meant when I said that "I don't want caller ID because I've deliberately
bought a phone with as few features as possible, which means it doesn't
have a display on it". "You sound like a computer person" she said. "Yes",
say I. "Lots of computer people are like that", came the response.


I just went to get money out of the hole in the wall while holding
[surprisingly enough] a coffee. There's a little shelf jutting out from
the wall, that's about cup-sized. Every other ATM I've ever used had
sloping edges everywhere to deliberately stop you from standing stuff
on it.


Finally, I guess it's kind of a bad sign, but it's pretty neat when you're
listening to someone in the coffee shop giving the new guy instructions
and is telling him how you like your coffee, ensuring that he'll
remember it.


[2002-10-31]

Hmmm. A couple pieces of news:

The whole McDonalds coffee thing. [Thanks, M Vance]
http://lawandhelp.com/q298-2.htm

It seems that the facts of the situation include McDonalds serving coffee
dangerously hot and the woman getting a little more than a "scalding".

I'm trying to refrain from judging this situation, but I'm still pretty
convinced that spilling coffee on yourself isn't cause for a lawsuit. I
make my coffee at home dangerously hot. Although I can understand
some danger in serving coffee too hot, I think that McDonalds knowing
about this an deliberately doing nothing could be considered them doing
something that is something that punters want. If more than half your
customer base want something, what're you gonna do?

All of which is vaguely moot since I like neither McDonalds coffee
nor food, and haven't actually set foot in a McDonalds in years.


TechTV [thescreensavers, to be exact] have just e-mailed me about
http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/aaut
"I am very interested in talking with Greg Alexander about Text-mode
Quake, or you about Text-Mode Unreal Tournament, and a potential
appearance on our show...."

Which is nice.


[2002-10-22]

OK. So the guy has actually shaved a fair bit off the price [about 100
bucks] and replaced more of the hardware than he was planning to. So
that's good.

That doesn't mean I like the Jetta.


[2002-10-21]

Yes, I'm in a bad mood.

It's lost on me; you're busily raping customers for work you're doing
on their VERY old car [350 USD for just the labour!]. Two things:

1) Imagine this car is, very likely, going to be coming in for many more
services in the coming future. Is it not a good idea to levy at least a
little of the grand-or-so it's gonna cost them in total, on the grounds
that in the long run you stand to make a SHITLOAD of cash?

I mean, think about it. How is it good business driving away [pardon
the pun] customers that are, in effect, cash cows?

2) Adding insult to injury, said customer hires a car from you.
Their car is OLD. On it's way out. They'll likely be buying a new car
sooner or later.

So why do you, as a dealership, give them one of your really shit cars?

Not that I have anything against the VW Jetta specifically, but it's a
NASTY car. It doesn't vroom [I'm 22. I'm likely to be wanting a vroomy
car sooner or later]. It drives, quite frankly, worse than my classic
Beetle. Now, to be honest, my Beetle is actually a /fun/ car to drive,
but I see no sense in advertising with that thing. [Apologies if
you're a Jetta driver, but you could have done /so/ much better]


Surely good business at this point would be to give them a cheap deal
on the repairs, get them on your good side. In the long run, they'll
keep going to you lots, often, with their crappy beat-up current car.
When the time comes, the likelyhood is that they'll buy the car from a
dealer they trust. When they're hiring a car from you while you're doing
the repairs, it's a MAJOR advertising opportunity. Don't blow it with
a Jetta.

Perhaps it's just me, but all Pacific Volkswagen have to do is save me
a couple hundred bucks now, and, in doing so, pretty much garauntee many
many thousands of dollars of business in the future?

And for reference, if you see someone driving around in a car that says
"Pacific Volkswagen Courtesy Car" on the rear window, it should be noted
that it's not a courtesy car. I'm even getting done for the hiring of
that puppy. Admittedly, I'm paying less that I would at Budget, but not
a lot.


Gnargh. One of these days I'll write a whole stack of complimentary
stuff in this .plan. I promise I didn't actually come to this country
with the sole intent of hating it here. It's just that I moved to what
has now been described as "the scrotum of the states".

And in other news, the lass at the coffee shop has a nice bum.
Mmmmmmmmmmm.


[2002-10-16]

Amusing conversational nuances for the modern man:
"It's Wednesday today - hump day!"

You see, apparently that's a perfectly wholesome statement to use to
your customers at {too early} in the morning while all they want is a
cup of coffee. She's a random lass that works in my local coffee
shop. It's just still a bit disarming when she's looking unusually
relaxed and says that to you first thing in the morning.

Apparently, it's that wednesday is the "hump" in the week, so if you
can get over it, the rest of the week gets better or something. Which
I realised after the initial mental images had been & gone...


[2002-10-07]

It's not a good sign when your two new hard drives arrive in a box
branded as "Australian Gold Tanning Products".


[2002-10-05]

And in retrospect, I suddenly find my earlier comments about people not
knowing how to drive are justified; in England, there are 4 major things:
1) Emergency stop
2) 3-point turn
3) Reverse round a corner
4) Parallel park

In England, you have to do #1 and two of the others [chosen by the
examiner]. Here, I had to do none of the above. Which, now I think about
it, goes partway toward explaining the fact I've seen people rearend
other people multiple times on the road since I got here.

The hardest thing I had to do here is reverse in a reasonably straight
line. Which I did badly [looking in the mirror not turning around],
and I still passed.


In other news, I've upgraded to slackware-current, have installed ALSA,
lots of other new-age things that I've been meaning to do for ages,
and I'm impressed. It's nice.

Note: You know your audio library is "too big" When the CVS, bzip2ed,
is nearly 9M. Even after I stripped out the win,mac,Be,and test stuff,
it still came in at a 2.5M download. I've no idea at which point an audio
API becomes "too big", but I'm pretty certain 9M is the wrong side of it.


[2002-10-04]

Ways to get the attention of a driving test examiner really really
   really quickly, #34:

When he walks up to you and asks who was sitting next to you while you
drove there on your driving permit, tell him you drove here on your own.


I made 9, count them, 9 mistakes on your driving test. Two were for
speeding [both backwards and forwards], and the other 7 are all in some
way related to the fact my neck hurts like hell to turn it. So I'm not
feeling too bad about it...

Just to clarify, that means "yes, I now have a full driving license
for CA"


[2002-10-01]

I hate that.
I walked in on Friday evening, turned on the computer. Fair enough.

The 40G games drive had bitten the dust. Fine, except 15G of
non-trivially-replaceable data also went with it [downloads, builds,
documents, etc]

Pffft. So I walk over to the freezer to put a couple ice trays into
it. Holding them, a book falls off the top of the freezer when I open
it. Spreading water all over the floor, and messing up a book.

Within one minute of walking into the appartment, I realise it's just
not gonna go well...

Other news?
I have some furniture in my appartment, finally. A love seat, a semi-comfy
chair, a table, a lamp and some other stuff. All generously donated by
one of my aunt's friends who's moving to a smaller place.

I hired a cargo van from Budget to get the furniture back. The single
most un-vroomy thing I've ever driven. Thoughts:
1) Why is it necessary to initial pieces of paper saying "this makes
wider turns that you're used to in your sedan"? If someone needs to
be told that, then they shouldn't be allowed on the road in anything,
let alone a behemouth van.
2) Why is it covered in dents when I get it? I mean, one or two dents
is fine. But these puppies are /covered/ in dents...

People in this country are shit drivers. I mean, /really/ shit.
Before I left England, I only ever saw one accident. Interestingly,
it was the one where I was involved.

I've seen more accidents first hand since I've moved here than I'd seen
during my entire life in England.

I know that people say "there are more roads here with more people on
them", but, as a percentage, there are several thousand percent /more/
cars on the road here that're all dented up than there are in England.

I suppose I oughta say something good so, "Carpool lanes are a good
idea". Seriously. And that's about all that I've found here that's good.

Even the police here are dangerous drivers. They're far too agressive,
to the point where I query whether or not they're a major source of
accidents. Like, from what I've seen, they're more agressive than almost
everyone else on the road.


[2002-09-24-about-45-mins-later]

Hmmm.
Having read over all of that, I appear to be a prime candidate for a
terrorist for "attacking the American way". Well, here's the deal: I
have nothing to hide. I don't encrypt my e-mail, anything like that. I
really do pity the poor bugger that has to read through all of my e-mail
[if, for some reason, I'm flagged and they're reading it all].

"How's things over there?"
"Nothing changes"
"Chunky misses you kids"
"Us kids miss Chunky"
And so on, and so forth.

And some poor bugger has to read it all. Hahahahaha.

And while we're at it, I hope some policeman comes knocking at my
door. It won't happen, from what I gather, but I'd love to spend half
a day watching someone get paid to sift through my dirty laundry. That
would just amuse the hell out of me.


[2002-09-24]

Apparently, I'm currently in the right place to be at the forefront of
technological developments, various. LA is "the place to be"

But man, there's some stuff here that's just... backwards. Socially,
especially.

Has it occurred to you people that it's a bad thing that your policemen
carry guns? Surely in any civilised society, this crap isn't needed?

"We're all allowed to carry guns to protect ourselves". Bollocks. Get
the hell rid of them. You do not have a fundamental human right to carry
guns. Really. I promise. In England I had to jump through many many
hoops to get a license for a shotgun. Anything that holds more than 3
rounds? Not a chance. And have I /ever/ heard of anyone "protecting"
their home with one? Of course not. You catch a burglar, they tend to
run off. In this country, you catch a burglar, they shoot you. /now/
tell me guns are a good idea for everyone.

There's something very badly wrong when you go into a fast food
restaurant, and there's inch-thick perspex between you & the servers.
I mean, /badly/ wrong.


It is my considered opinion that there should be some manner of
sanity-checking in this country. Any lawsuit that could conceivably
be "frivolous" should be voted on by 150 random people in any
street. Anywhere. If you think it's fair that 12 people can vote on
something, why not 150?

Surely, in any even semi-sensible society, you'd take the guy, who thought
it would be safe to put his winnebago on cruise control and walk into
the back, out the back and laugh at him. Point at him, even. People like
that are the subject of ridicule in England. There's a certain level
of stupidity that's simply beyond rational explanation and so should
therefore be laughed at. And yet, you people waste valuable time on
it. You take 12 productive people, and waste a few days of their time.

And that woman who bought a coffee and spilled it on herself, then
sued McDonalds for serving coffee too hot because it scalded. Well, hot
diggety-damn; now anybody dumb enough to drink McDonalds coffee gets it
cold. That's nice.


Two thoughts on this: 
1) She thought she'd make a quick buck
2) She really is that dumb
I think it's a happy medium, but things like that need to be thrown out
of court and the sue-er should pay for wasting everybody's time.

Of course, there's more, but I'm bored of writing now.


In conclusion, this is a completely backward country, and I want the
fuck out of it. Until you stupid fuckers grow up, I'd rather be in quaint
old England where people tend not to shoot each other, say hello, and
I can walk from one place to the next.


[2002-09-15]

New & Interesting ways to rape customers, #145:
    Fun with power supplies

This one comes from CompUSA; sell 600W power supplies with what is
clearly not enough hard drive plugs, hence forcing customers to buy at
least two splitters.


[2002-09-09]

In the spirit of my continuing obsession with stupidly hard
Rubiks-cube-alike puzzles, I've bought one of each of:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/puzzles/bandaged-cube-t-l.jpg
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/puzzles/master-cube-n-l.jpg
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/puzzles/profcube-yellow-l.jpg
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/puzzles/skewb-ultimate1-l.jpg
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/puzzles/square1-l.jpg

The professor's cube and the master cube aren't really a problem. I can
solve both of those already, I "just want one".

The bandage cube and the ultimate skewb. They're a little harder. The
Square-1 hasn't arrived yet.

I also still have my one of these:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/random/puzzles/impossib-l.jpg
which Cordy bought me a while ago [Yay!]. It, too, is non-trivial but
I can now solve it without too much hassle.

Damn, these puppies are hard. Mmmmmm. By the way: Peter's black hole;
bonus points come from being able to do the third solution [not mentioned
anyplace on the website] where instead of having all silver stars,
or all black hole, you have each face as all stars of the same color
[there's a bunch of colors there other than silver & black]


[2002-08-29]

http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/pilot/patien252.txt
Has a version of patience in it called "Tabby Cat" I used to know it as
"Idiot's Delight". It is a stupid game. And I spent several hours playing
it last night. "I gotta beat it JUST BLOODY ONCE before I go to bed..."

Actually, this one is a little easier than the version I used to know [the
one I used to have didn't have a free cell in it], but it's essentially
the same. Stupid.

http://www.petersblackhole.com/
This thing's pretty cool. Ignore the text on the website - imagine "15"
[the gnome tool bar applet/that sliding puzzle you had when you were a
kid/etc], but in 3d. Where all the tiles have faces that look the
same. Kinda. Luckily, every piece is sufficiently unique to make it
clear what goes where.

And after a bit of prompting, I now have USB Palm things working, so I
can use it without permantly wearing down the batteries. W00t.


[2002-08-28]

So, you find a Palm Vx in the back of a taxi with no marks of ownership
and nothing in the memory. What're you gonna do?

http://icculus.org/~chunky/writing/palmconnectivity

In other news, lots of exciting things going on. I stole a light from
the office, so I have light in my bedroom.

Greg [treke] kindly donated a dumb terminal, so with that and the Palm,
I can now actually get information out of my computer.

Lots of stuff going on in the office.
People who code C++ and inherit stuff with copy'n'paste scare me.

Heya, Sara, Cordy.

While we were in SF, we walked into a bar.
"Newcy Brown" say I.
"Hnuh?" the bartender responds
"Newcy Brown"
"Oh. Newcastle?"
"Yes."
"We only have 22 Oz bottles"
"It'll have to do."
"..."
"Until I came here, I'd never drunk it out of anything /except/ this
 size of bottle.
 Stupid Americans"

Clarifier: 22 Oz appears to equal one normal pint.


[2002-08-20]

"Contains MTBE
The state of California has determined that the use of this chemical
presents a significant risk to the environment"

Written on a petrol pump in a shell station.

Last night I discovered that my bedroom has no lights in it at
all. That was at the same time as I decided to start putting my new bed
togther. Yes, I finally have a bed, desk, and fridge.

Nothing to sit on, mind, but it's a start.


[2002-08-16]

In a slightly less mature, but much more seriously considered manner:

There are more freaks and weirdos in San Fransisco than there are in
the whole of England, Ireland, and Wales.

Notice I left out Scotland; a 2-foot high wall was sufficient to keep
them out of England for several hundred years...


[2002-08-15]

OK. So in an attempt to not be childish, I went and spent a happy hour
or so chatting so some guys at the MS booth, seeing what they're offering;
http://icculus.org/~chunky/writing/ms-at-linuxworld

In the meantime, there are some other guys here with some seriously tidy
embedded devices. On the order of half a watt power requirements at full
speed, or they'll sleep for 3 weeks on a single AA battery. I want.

And a quick bit of pimping; before I came to this convention, I'd never
seen CodeHost's current big product, BrightQ; and /I'm/ impressed. It
genuinely does what it says on the box.

FlightGear have a booth, but they're not burning CDs of the scenery
dataset *sniff*.

And I'll have one of everything in the Sun booth.


[2002-08-12]

You know you're having a shit day when you're ringing up the towing
service to see if it's cheaper & easier to leave the truck to get towed,
rather than spend any more hours looking for someplace to park the
f**king behemouth.

I'll be camping out Booth 1081.

Somone, somewhere, has a sick sense of humor; the MS booth is right
between the Linux Rookery & CodeWeavers.


[2002-08-07]

Yes, I can spell USA perfectly well, thanks.
And no, I'm not gonna talk like the rest of you. I'm different, goddammit.
Some quotes:

"One of these kids is not like the others"
"My mummy says I'm special"
"Stupid colonials"

I was in Culver yesterday, so I wandered into my
about-to-be-place-of-employment

Looks like I'm going to LinuxWorld. W00t.


[2002-08-06-later]

Just a note: out of 36 questions, I got 34 right. Technically, your test
is easier than the UK one.

I hate driving in LA. At least in England, I don't tend to have to put
my 10-foot-long car into a 9-foot hole between cars on the motorway.

M-O-T-O-R-W-A-Y. Get it right.


[2002-08-06]

So:
Once I get a driving permit, I'll be allowed to drive in CA so long as
I have someone sitting next to me. I'll also be allowed [once I get it]
to get car insurance, a car registration, and all that other great stuff.

All of which would make sense, if I hadn't been driving my aunt's car
perfectly legally since I arrived. It would be legal for me to drive my
car, if they would just let me have insurance.

Do you guys have to show your driving licenses to go for a piss? I seem
to need one for virtually everything else...


[2002-08-04]

OK. So I shipped my computer via UPS, with my hard drives in my carry-on
luggage.

Interestingly, the people at the airport had nothing at all to say;
didn't even bother asking me to open my luggage.

During the course of transit, sufficient hurt was put on it to dislodge
the speaker & then decimate said item, and to dislodge one of the case
fans [with the 4 clips holding it in] and wiggle that all over the
case, too.

During this process, my grahpics card fan also bit the dust.

I've now put it all back together with some superglue, and on a wing and
a prayer, the thing actually still works. Haven't tested the CD burner
yet, but all diagnostics run just fine, with all 8 drives playing nice
together still.

I'm now in the market for:
1) The usual power-lead trappings
2) A computer speaker
3) A couple dumb terminals
4) A monitor
5) Some decent speakers

In other news, I forgot to mention; Mountain Dew can be my new best
friend [second still to coffee, but mmmmmm]

Still looking for an apartment. I hate apartment shopping, especially
when I know I'm gonna have to get a studio or 1-bedroom, and fork out
double the rent than if I were sharing.

Oh, yeah; something from before I left the UK;

Anything HP can do, I can do better.
Their scanners play Ode to Joy.
My mouse plays Ode to Joy.

I bought an iFeel mouse for the comedy value, and
after a brief bit of research and CVS downloading here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tactile, I got it playing random musical
tunes. Ode to Joy being the one that HP do, so I thought I'd start with
that one.


[2002-08-03]

I'll call it my Driving Baptism of Fire.

It's the first time I've driven an automatic.
It's the first time I've driven anything bigger than a small car.
It's the first time I've driven with a trailer.
It's the first time I've driven on the right hand side of the road.
It's the first time I've driven on a freeway.

Two days ago, we flew up to Reno, picked up a U-Haul truck & car trailer
[flat loader? Hell, no], and dad drove us to Tahoe.

The next day [yesterday], we throw my new car [mmmmmm] onto the back of
the trailer, and begin driving to LA. About 60-odd miles into the journey,
we stop for Petrol [it's spelt P-E-T-R-O-L, goddammit], and dad says
"Wanna have a go?"
"What the hell, my driving test is on Monday, after all"

So I get to drive this many-ton truck, a stupid autmoatic, about 350
miles. Eeesh. For reference, I've now done about 10 miles in the car I'm
taking my test in the day after tomorrow, and I still loathe automatics.

Other notes: It's spelt B-O-N-N-E-T. The last letter is a hard T. And
it's what you muppets call a "Hood".


[2002-07-29-shortly-later]

*** Topic for #icculus.org: Chunky Kibbles, United States Pimp Corp:
    Enjoy Yosselves
*** #icculus.org joshua 1027991609 (from vinge.openprojects.net)


[2002-07-29]

Lock up your daughters.


[2002-07-28]

It's tomorrow. Scary. I'm also taking "The World of Pooh" because Pooh
rocks. More memories, also. Hiya, Cordy. You wanted a mention...
Also, I've got this seriously cool cross-stitched piglet, who's really
cute. Awwwwwww.

Since people don't seem to get it, I like Pooh bear for two reasons:
1) He's a bear of very little brain, a lot like me, and
2) He's always happy. Doesn't really know what he's gonna do in the
next ten minutes, but always enjoys doing it. Yes, that's a precis of
the Tao of Pooh, and yes, I happen to like it.

Just been out shopping for pint glasses, to clarify [mostly for Hendersa &
MikeyP] what decent people drink out of, pip, pip.


[2002-07-27]

OK. Two days, and It seems to be time to turn a little weird about
switching continents.

I've been clearing out my room at home ["home" /a la/ 22 years, not
"home" /a la/ anything else].

Shit, there's a lot of random memories there that I'd just forgotten
clean about. "Dredging" applies to what I've been doing.

I've binned about 6 or 8 black bags of random stuff. Mostly empty boxes
and 15-year-old trash, but some stuff that I just can't justify keeping,
even though I'd never throw it away in a million years if it was possible
to keep it.

I fucking /hate/ getting rid of books. But on the grounds I can't ever
justify taking novels to the states with me [I'm told you have them out
there], and I'd rather mine were read than sitting about on shelves,
I've given away roughly several hundred novels in the last few months.
Only to people who I know will read them, but still...

My posessions have now distilled down to:
1) One cupboard full of stuff. I couldn't bring myself to throw the BBC
Master, and there are probably 10 boxes of "stuff" in them, mostly in
the form of books & other random memories.
2) A pile of stuff that wouldn't fit in my cupboard but I can't bring
myself to throw out either. Not a very big pile, mind...
3) One suitcase of stuff. Things that're coming to America with me,
mostly clothes, about 6 or 8 textbooks, and a few things like Rubik's
Puzzles and teddy bears. Yes, Sara, both of the Poohs are coming with.
4) My juggling toys. Probably about 30 balls, 6 clubs, and 7 rings. I sold
all the rest while I was in York. I miss my unicycle. And my diablo. And
all the clubs I sold, and, and, and... The 6 remaining clubs are in
transit in the same box as my computer. I mean, I /really/ miss the
unicycle.
5) My computer, which is partly in transit, and partly coming in my
carry-on [expect a story here about convincing customs that my hard
drives aren't bombs, and my steel toes really are just steel]

All in all, I've actually started getting depressed and thinking about
all the things I'm gonna miss. Which is soooooo not a good way of moving
forward, but... that's just how it seems to be.

I guess all this shit happens to every bugger at some point in their
lives, but fuck, I've never been a big fan of change, and this has just
really put the shits up me.


[2002-07-23]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/gallery/
Also reachable by clicking the cow.
That is all.


[2002-07-22]

Because so many people have now asked me about journaling filing systems,
I wrote a short piece about them:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/writing/journaling


[2002-07-19-later]

As hendersa just pointed out, "only 10 more days until the british
invasion".

In the meantime, my computer is 62x43x20 cm, and weighs 21 kgs [46 lb
for people who like it that way]

To ship it with BA World Cargo [who, by the way, have so bad a website
I couldn't find out how to ship it or how much it would cost], it costs
5.83 GBP per kilo. I have to bring it to the airport a day or so before
I fly, and pick it up when I get there. 122.43 GBP, total.

To ship it with UPS costs 104.83 GBP, and they come & get it, then
deliver it about 4 days after.

And we all know about FedEx, so I haven't even bothered looking into it.


[2002-07-19]

Today on "In the Kitchen With Chunky", two recipes. The first from SRE,
the second from mum:

1) "Audible slapping as the arteries slam shut"
Serves about 4 or 5. Or one MikeyP

Preheat oven to 180C
Chop and fry six rashers of bacon.
Take six raw burgers, place in baps.
Chop into quarters.
Put in a pie dish.
Add bacon pieces.
Cover in about 1.5cm of grated cheese.
Mix 8 eggs with 1/2 pint of milk, and whisk till combined.
Pour egg mix over burgers and cheese.
Place in middle of oven for about 25-30 minutes.


2) [Somewhat nicer, easier, and better for you] Random thing
Prepare about 1 and a half per person. Two if they're hungry.

Cook some asparagus shoots.
Take one soft taco, put some cooked asparagus shoots on it.
Cover liberally in Pont l'Eveque cheese.
Put another taco on top.
Fry in butter until it's done, turning once.
Serve with salsa [I like the hot stuff].

Note: If you can't find Pont l'Eveque, brie is ok, but don't fry for
very long at all. Only strong/interesting flavored cheeses are worth
the effort, here; otherwise this recipe is singularly dull.
Corn tacos are an order of magnitude nicer than flour ones


[2002-07-11]

Hmmm. Well, once you've got the top times in all of the sneaking VR
Missions, you get to take photos of Mei Ling. With all her clothes
on. Bugger.

And the models are all inside a barrier thingy, out of kicking range;
it's not actually possible to beat Naomi shitless for giving you a
life-destroying virus that could kill you at any moment. Bugger.


[2002-07-07]

W00t! Now I've beaten MGS VR Missions. They're bastard hard, but seriously
good fun all the same. And now I can get rid of the whole damn PlayStation
[on Monday it gets returned to its rightful owners, along with a courtesy
stack of PAL games]


[2002-07-05]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/flight.gif
W00t!


[2002-07-01-later]

Brief addendum to the ending of MGS:
"I chose not to choose life. I chose something different"
I couldn't help but keep thinking of Ewan in TrainSpotting for the whole
of that ending.


[2002-07-01]

MGS VR Missions. 94%. Stuck on 3 missions:
1) Variety #7: Millions of flying saucers come at you. You have one
weapon to kill them with, but it's a homing missile and you don't have
time to let it lock on. Once I've beaten this one, I can move onto the
other 7 misions in this section.
2) Puzzle #10: Last puzzle mission. I've worked out how to beat it,
it's just that I keep messing up [running too fast so the guard loses my
footprints]. It's easy to beat in theory, but in practice I keep messing
up just near the end. Last of the puzzle missions.
3) "VR Mission": Which sorta counts for 10 missions... basically, I can
get to about level7, but if you mess up you have to start from the first
one again. Not too hard to beat, but requires more of my time.

And then I'll be able to walk all the way up to the nasty pixellated
models to take photos. Hmmm. You can kinda tell the age group this game
is aimed at...


And to clarify: You may now refer to me as "Chunky Kibbles, BEng". W00t. A
letter for each of the years I've been doing my degree. It almost seems
as if it's worth it.


[2002-06-30]

OK: Several things are now cleared up:

FedEx: The guy turned up and then left. The next day, he turned up, and
left. The people back at his base phoned to ask where I was;

"In the Goodricke Porter's Lodge, a lot like I said I would be. Where
is your courier?"
"He turned up but you weren't there"
"If he turned up at all, he certainly didn't look for anyone waiting
for him
 I'm wearing a black baseball cap, blue jeans. Make him come back and
do his bloody job"

And so now the contract has been sent. At great expense, it will now
get there 3 days late. Most of the crap Americans do is really bad, but
at least you've got customer service right. "Chunky's giving us money,
let's be nice to Chunky".


My Degree: Well, I got an honors degree. It's a piss-poor honors degree,
but if I call it an "honors degree", that officially puts me in the same
group as people who got a First.


Metal Gear Solid: Whupped. OK, I beat it on easy, but at least I got the
"good" ending. It's so *sniff* I'm so torn up *sniff*.
I'm apparently rated as a "puma". According to a brief bit of googling,
I'm rated 8 out of 12 for playing it on total cripple. Ho, hum. I suck.

Several notes on Metal Gear Solid:
1) The weapons lady is there for a good reason. If I'd thought to equip
chaff grenades and ring her up, I'd have found out what they're for. And
I then wouldn't have spent about 4/5 of the game running from security
cameras with guns, instead of shutting the stupid things off.
2) It's a bit odd that I get to snog the woman who's genetically
engineereed to be frigid.
3) This game f***ing rocks.
4) The whole story was actually really good, IMHO. Lots of plot twists &
the like. In a kind of actually-I-didn't-see-that-one-coming kinda
way. Which makes a change.
5) When you're playing MechWarrior, you and the guy stand there facing
each other blasting away. You'll probably win.
   When you're playing Heavy Gear, you and the guy stand there facing
each other blasting away. You'll probably win.
   When you're playing MGS, the bad guy stands there in an almost
invincible mech, and you stand there in a T-shirt, facing each other
blasting away. Playing it like that, you're onto a loser.


[2002-06-27]

FedEx. Grrrr.

Yesterday, I recieved my contract for CH. Yes, the update on that one
is coming soon.

I had a shufty through the contract, and signed it. Put it in an
envelope... and started looking for a way to ship it to the US fairly
sharpish.

Seems the choices I have, if I want it to get there quickly, are FedEx
or... some other company whose phone number I couldn't find. So that's
that.

Ring 'em up.
"Need to send about 10 sheets of paper to CA. What can you do?"
"We can pick it up sometime between now [2.20 pm] and 4.00
  - It'll get there Friday before 10 am"
"That's cool."
"25 pounds 80p, please"
[note: that's about 40 bucks for you yanks - ow]
"Mmmmmkay"
<boring snippage>
"Can we have your phone number please?"
"xxxxxxxxx"


Roll on 4.20, by which time I've been sitting around for in excess of
2 hrs.

"Uh... you said you'd be here by 4.00. It's 4.20. Surprisingly enough,
my pick-up address may be York University, but I do have elseplaces to be"
"I'll do <stuff>. I'll ring you back within half an hr"
<hang up>

<15 mins later>
"I've found you ordered something. I'll find the courier for you now"
<hang up>

<Wait 20 mins>
"He came to the pick-up at ten to 3. You weren't there, so he left"
"I've been here since 2.20. Why did you take my phone number if it wasn't
for the courier to contact me?"
"<mumble, totally unrelated>"
"And this is now going to arrive 3 days later, right?"
"Yes, sir, there's nothing we can do about that"
"I've been sitting here for better than 2 and a half hours waiting for
you. As soon as this arrives in the states, I get a rather-seriously-needed
infusion of money. And now it's going to take an extra 3 days to get
to me. Is there anything you can do about it?"
"Sorry, sir, I'll get the courier to come to you tomorrow. 12 to 2 pm ok?"
"Can you pick it up in the morning?"
"Nope. Afternoon pickups only."
"Do I have any other option?"
"Not really"

So. Looks like in future I shan't be using FedEx. I was possibly standing
in the car park at 2.50, but there's no earthly reason for the guy not
to ring me if I'm not there. That's why I give them the bloody number. If
a pizza guy can ring me when I'm only paying a fiver, I'm fairly certain
FedEx can ring me when I'm giving them 40 bucks.

And I'm fucked because I needed to speak to the university with regards
to a, uh, "non-trivial", debt. I was going to go there at 4, but was
waiting for someone who wasn't going to come and gave no message that
he'd been and gone [if that's actually what he did]. Generally, this
has really fucking put me out.

If anyone can recommend a decent cross-continental shipping service for
future reference, I'd be greatly olbliged...


[2002-06-12]

<Next day, 4pm having sobered up and popped enough pills to make the
hurting stop>

Well, that went mind-bogglingly badly. To be fair, I did sit there for
the full 3 hours, but I'm not sure I actually did anything that Bill's
gonna deem worth his time marking.

What this means, too, is that I may be able to finally get some work
done for Big Daddy MikeyP, as I now have about 2 1/2 weeks with nothing
to actually do, except drink. [I think someone's arranging a LAN party...]

We're imagining something along the liones of "The birth of Binky",
here. If you don't know what that is, consider yourself lucky.


[2002-06-11]

In approximately half an hour, my last exam begins. It's a 3 hour exam
on Cryptography & Communication Theory.

I anticipate being in the pub in approximately an hour and a quater/an
hour and a half. If anyone's looking for me, I'll be in the bottom of
a bottle of gin.


[2002-06-10]

http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~jgh105/yluginstday.html
I'm the one in the grey-blue shirt toting an O'Reilly shirt and looking
as gormless as I can. My machine is the one playing UnrealI on the data
projector [mmmmmmm], and yes, the penguin is mine.

In other news, I also have an exam in an hour or so...


[2002-06-08-later-again]

Well, here's the deal.
I failed one exam last Monday [Real-Time Systems], although I think I
did pretty well on the bits that someone wants to pay me for; just I
did crap on the ada bit.

Since I knew that was gonna happen, it didn't end up being as much of
a crisis as it probably should have been, but what the hell.

On Monday, I have Networks & Distributed Systems. Well, either I'm
going to:
a) do really well, since I spent all last year doing that kind of
thing, or
b) do miserably badly, because he's gonna expect me to remember what a
TCP packet looks like, and what the 7-or-5 network layers are.

Then, on Tuesday, I have Cryptography and Communication Theory. Which
is so mind-bogglingly bastard hard, I'm unlikely to even scrape a pass.

In the meantime, I'm successfully avoiding doing any revision by finding
things like:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2002/20020525l.gif

This appears to be pretty much the opinion you buggers have of me.

Tomorrow is our LUG's install day. My machine is going to be demoing
"this is how cool linux can look if you really try", and "this is why
gaming under Linux is so cool". Apparently, some guy's bringing a
projector along, so I'll be able to see all my games in big.

There's a queue of people who want to see Descent3 going, for a
start. Bugger. Should probably sort out my joystick then.

And just in case I haven't said it before, www.tuxgames.com, specifically
msimms [& tina; I haven't forgotten about you, sweetheart, I promise] is
cool.


[2002-06-08-later]

Remember, kids; it's not big, and it's not clever:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/aaut/


[2002-06-08]

Just for the benefit of Icculus, here's my current list of novels I'm 
part-way-though-and-still-reading, in order of
how-quickly-I'm-reading-them. I'm hoping that there's at least one or
two that you haven't read.

Note that 3 of them were given to me by ex-girlfriends, two of which
were from the Smithie. See if you can work out which two [it shouldn't
be too hard]:

Winnie the Pooh - A A Milne
The Collected Stories - A C Clarke
Feersum Endjinn - Iain M Banks
Delta of Venus - Anais Nin
The FountainHead - Ayn Rand
The Zen of Juggling - Dave Finnigan


[2002-06-05]

Everyone in my LUG, pretty much, uses Debian. Here's a rant I've just
posted to the mailing list:

It's because of the debian users that I don't use debian.

I don't mean that in a bad way at all; I think debian users are great. But
you guys *keep pimping the wrong thing*

A while ago, when I decided to dump RedHat [when 7.0 came out], I started
looking for a new distribution. After trying several, the options were
pretty clear; Debian, Slack, or LFS [given my requirements at the time].

Slack seemed the nice, clean choice [and everyone I know online uses
it], and debian... well, the debian people kept telling me how great
debian is "because it's free /a la/ free, as well as free /a la/
speech".

I don't care.

I don't use linux because I believe all software should be free. I
use linux because I think it's cool, and it does what I want.

I clearly don't seriously care about free-as-in-free given I posess
most of the commercial games out there, I have a graphics card for which
there will probably never be free-as-in-free drivers, and I use opera.

If you guys had merely pimped the package management system, and the
security stuff [until the last LUG meeting, I didn't even know that
debian had a security update thing at all], I would most probably be
using it by now.

You also did't tell me about dist-upgrade, which would [for me] probably
have been the single, big, selling point. [this is before I really cared
about security]

Noticing also, as Ewan said, that if you install a redhat box but
leave out Netscape 4, or if you install Slack the same, or any number
of other distributions, then your box is essentially
debian-free-as-in-free. Which a lot of you guys seem to miss.

I /now/ know all of the "this is why you should use debian stuff", and
if anyone had told me about it ages ago, I'd be using it.

Most noticably, Roger, the other week while we were wandering
someplace, you were telling me how great debian is because of the
free thing. You're a package maintainer. You, as much as anyone,
should be telling us how great /that/ is.


At this point, you're probably saying "but some people really do care
about free-as-in-debian-free". That's fine.

All of those people already use debian, because it's the only one that
claims to be free-as-in-free. I'm sure there are some new people
coming along periodically who really do care, but I can't imagine it
being half as often as RMS and friends would like it to be.


[2002-06-02]

Fight Club - the gift that keeps on giving.

OK. It's just weird. I've watched this film more times than I can shake
a really big stick at. And it keeps getting /better/.

Every time I see it [now in the mid-to-late teens], I see stuff that I
haven't seen before. I totally missed the whole "and for some reason,
this reminded me of my first fight w Tyler" thing until tonight [while
he's in his boss' office, trying to get severance-pay-we-all-dream-about].

If you haven't yet seen this film, go out and buy it. Watch it.

Watch it again a couple nights later.

Rinse

Repeat.

I've never known a film I can watch so many times, and yet still be
gleaning stuff from it.

For anyone else, I'll be doing an update on CH as soon as all the facts
are in.


[2002-05-29]

"Hiya,
Could you possibly bend over so we can show you a little trick BT
taught us?
 - <obfuscated>"


Also, I've just been rebuilding a friend's machine with a stack of new
hardware he bought. Here's a hint:
If you're going to put the word "Professional" in your operating system's
title, you're implying that a professional might feel the urge to use it.

That means you should say to the user things like "do you want to install
all these games? Do you want to install this ton-and-a-half of shit?"

Someone's who's professional may feel the urge to miss out the garbage
they don't want.

For god's sake. It's bad enough that your "server" can't run
headless. What the hell is your flagship server OS doing running tons
of games and having colored cursors [CPU intensive activity] and having
f***ing swooshy rounded buttons on the task bar? There is no earthly
reason to swoosh the f**ing buttons about.

Grr. I hate XP.

Also, note several User-interface-design principles:
1) Do Not, Ever, Move Shit About.
     If I look for somethign and find it, the correct response is not
     to move it;
 Chunky: "Where's Freecell? Oh, here it is"
 * Windows helpfully moves the freecell icon chunky eventually found
 Windows: "Psych!"

2) Progress bars imply progress. It's considered cheating to move the
f***ing bar back to the start when it hits the end, because you can't
work out how long it's going to take you to {install, boot, whatever}.

My god, people.


[2002-05-26]

Shit, I still hate hospitals.

We were playing pool last night, the girlfriend tripped and fell over
backwards, so we took a little trip there. She's fine now [except for
a fair-to-middling headache], by the way.

Damn, I /loathe/ those places. Even when I'm not the one with the
problems...

Although I have to say; the doctor was clearly good at what he was doing,
as opposed the the muppet-like student who attacked the back of my throat
with sharp metal spikes when I last went there.


[2002-05-24]

More mental notes for drivers [another excerpt from a posting to one of
the local newsgroups in York Uni]

1) When you're overtaking someone who's doing 60, you pull out
slightly to check of there's someone coming, right? Well, "someone" in
fact includes cyclists.

According to my speedo, I do on average about 20mph. To overtake
someone doing 60, you probably want to do 80 or so.
A simple bit of maths says that our relative approaching velocities is
~100mph.

For reference, that's f**ing scary when you only manage to pull back
in when you're 20 yards away, and I'm staring down the grill of your
radiator.

2) When there's a speedlimit sign that says 20, and it's by a school,
and there are kids swarming about, it's /not/ considered correct to do
40.

I come to the figure 40 because I do [as I said] about 20 on average.
You go past me at roughly double my speed. That comes to about 40.

Which is wrong. And dangerous.


[2002-05-20]

Plenty of UnrealI stuff for anyone who's into that sort of things:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/

Note that I still don't like this game. I play with it because it's
tinkerable-with, but as a game it sucks.


[2002-05-19]

E-mail from someone I've never met. I'm sure it's nothing on what Hendersa
gets half the time, but things like this still scare me:

-------
From: "Han" <obfuscated@student.cs.york.ac.uk>
To: "Chunky Kibbles" <gjb105@cs.york.ac.uk>
Subject: I really want to know you
Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 21:29:57 +0100
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000

Read thoght lots of posters in News Group.

I'd like to know you, man... are you left handed, btw.

Cheers
-------

Hmmmm.


[2002-05-17]

Several boring things for today:
Yes, it was the line DOS=SINGLE in config.sys. Yet another useless piece
of "how to protect windows from itself" trivia to commit to memory. At
least the ladyfriend didn't cut my knackers off.


My girlfriend bought me a new toy:
http://mefferts.com/images/puzzles/puzzleballs/impossib-l.jpg

The bottom layer is pretty hard.


UnrealI/UT Stuff: http://icculus.org/~chunky/unreali-install.run
If you have an UnrealI CD and UT installed under Linux, try it.


I gave up on 7th Guest, since it wouldn't install and it really annoyed
me. So I installed the 11th Hour instead.

It's really really good. I'd forgotten. Especially since last time I
played the game, I paid no attention to the video clips because they
weren't "part of the game", and various other things. This time, though,
I took time to appreciate the full more-than-an-hour-of-FMV and the
actual puzzles.

A few of the puzzles are /really/ hard. There's one that's essentially
a Connect4 you play against the computer, and it's coded perfectly
[afaict]. Unless you go first, I don't think you have a chance in hell.

There're some problems relevant to using SB16 Emulation on the Live,
that mean that after {random period of time}, it starts to sound all
scratchy and buggered, but the midi still works fine and you can just
save quit & restart without too much effort.

The thing where you have to choose which ending you want has always
annoyed me; if you pick the wrong one, then you have to jump through
some seriously hard loops to beat it again and get the right one. In
this case, I actually beat the game 3 times from a save near the end,
but note that the second two times, the last puzzle is infinitely harder
because the computer gets to go first.

In this particular game, it was actually fairly clear which was the one
not to go for, but between the other two it was a pretty hard choice
[The woman you came to save, or the woman who's been helping you save
her. The third choice is the woman who's the "bad guy" throughout the
whole story, but has nice jubblies]. I ended up beating it 3 times just
to see all the endings, anyways.

I have to say; if you've never played this, go down to your local Frys
or wherever, and pick up a copy. You can usually find both the 7th Guest
and the 11th Hour in the same box for five bucks or so. If you can make
the 7th Guest work, it's worth it, but if not, the 11th Hour is good in
and of itself.

Perhaps there are some lessons to be learnt from it, though, for more
modern game producers;

1) Having bonus stuff on the CD is cool. Doom{1,2} and Hexen WAD files
 of the mansion are seriously cool. You have 4 CDs of space, you may as
 well shove in a couple hundred k of bonus stuff. In this day and age,
 you have [given the whole DVD thing going on] several /gig/ of free
 space kicking about. It's not much effort, and it keeps the punters
 more than happy. I don't mean Easter Eggs, here, I mean stuff like WAD
 files and "the making of..." video clips.

2) Documentation. A dead-tree manual. Containing useful stuff.
 Useful README.txt files; ones that tell you useful stuff.
 The distinction here is subtle; I think dead trees are good for "how
 to play the game" type things. If it's another FPS, what the hey; we
 all know what the warehouse level is going to look like and how the
 controls work. So put in some weapon & bad guy specs instead. But if
 it's something else, perhaps some ideas about gameplay and the like?
 README.txts are the sort of thing that will be of interest to the people
 who find them. Think about it. If you just leave a README.txt in the
 game directory, most punters will never find it. The ones that read it
 are the sort who want to know "this setting does this if you edit the
 config file". And other technical details that may actually be relevant
 to the tinkerers among us.

3) It working first time. I beat this game, from scratch, without ever
 needing a patch. I understand the need for patches and the like [eg,
 changing gameplay, stopping cheats, etc], but sometimes it just shouldn't
 be necessary [eg, Black&White as it came out of the box. While it
 wasn't so crap in terms of gameplay, it was certainly more buggy than a
 very buggy thing, and until the patch came out, I never managed to make
 it work on my housemate's computer]

4) Windows-specific whine:
 Your game goes into one directory. With DOS, this always happened. To
 remove 11th Hour after I'd finished it, I went to the directory in
 windows explorer, and I wiped it. And it was all gone. All of it. Not
 just a little bit. All of it. All of Loki's games, if I rm-rf the
 directory, the game is gone. My user prefs are still there, but that's
 in a good way. Leaving user prefs hanging about in the registry is
 the reason that windows boxes slow down and die. It's not hard. All
 you have to do is not use the registry; that's what config files are
 /for/, people. It's why they were invented, for god's sake.

OK. Ranting over. I'm off to watch Ocean's 11 again.


[2002-05-13]

So. Imagine the situation. You're sitting in front of a windows98 machine
[I said /image/ the situation], and want to install The 7th Guest on it
because it's been so long, you just found your CD again, and you happen
[accidentally] to be near a windows box again.

Windows: "Windows thinks it'd be helpful for you to run this in DOS
          mode. Yes? No?"
Chunky: "Uh... OK."
 * Windows reboots into DOS Mode
 * Windows refuses to install the damn game anyways.
W: "You are currently running in MS-DOS Mode. Do you want to return to
    Normal mode to run Windows Applications again [Enter=Y,Esc=N]?"
C: "y"
 * Computer reboots.
W: "Psych!"
W: "You are currently running in MS-DOS Mode. Do you want to return to 
    Normal mode to run Windows Applications again [Enter=Y,Esc=N]?"

Bugger.

So, at this point, my lovely girlfriend [the one from the shower scene
below] threatens to cut my knackers off if I don't fix it. What with the
fact that it's her machine.

Bugger.

A brief search on everyone's favorite search engine returns
http://www3.sympatico.ca/rhwatson/dos7/x-dos.html

Which mentions config.sys and the line DOS=SINGLE. I think I'll go home
and try it.

But I mean, /come on/. You can start in safe mode, but anyone who's
not had a previous life using windows extensively wouldn't ever think
to push F8, and certainly wouldn't think to use "edit". Why do people
use this stupid piece of software? It breaks itself with no recourse to
fixing it, and it generally doesn't actually Work. It offers to fix
itself, but it doesn't.

Don't kid yourself. We've all seen windows go blue. The fact that I
can say "go blue" and you instantly know what I mean should really
explain a whole lot.

Yes, this has put me in a bad mood.

In other news, I went home today to sort out some stuff for MikeyP, and
do some washing, and the stupid washing machine is very very broken. It
neglected, among other things, to unlock the door or to run the Spin
cycle. No, it's not that I was impatient; it had already run past that
bit on the dial, and had simply not done what it said it was going to.

Grrr.

I also finally have a couple of pics back from my last fire exercise.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/juggling/images/breathe/firebreathing1.jpg
is one of them, others are on the way.
Unfortunately, most of them didn't work out too well, and came out looking
like http://icculus.org/~chunky/juggling/images/breathe/firebreathing2.jpg
But as I said, more on the way.


[2002-05-07]

http://www.mefferts.com/images/puzzles/new/megaminx-l.jpg

Notes on this cube:
1) It's not a "cube", I just think of it as one.
2) It's not as complicated as it looks. It's actually exactly the same
as a normal Rubik's Cube, except for one [just one!] difference:
Instead of having 4 sides on each face, this has 5. As a natural
progression to end with a platonic solid, you complete the exercise with
a dodecahedron.
As a result, almost all of the normal cube-like moves actually work
here, also. You just have to imagine that the 3 faces you mess with
are perpendicular instead of vaguely perpendicular, and everything just
slots into place.


Hmmm. Anyone who can solve a vanilla Rubik's Cube [3x3x3], you can
[probably] solve this already, depending on how you solve a normal one. If
you do it a slice at a time, this is almost completely the same. You can
solve the whole cube except the bottom slice using just your intuition
and the move that takes a piece from the bottom to the side, without
munging the rest of the center slice, or the stuff above it.

Except one thing that was bugging the living f**k out of me.

What that picture doesn't show you is that the colors on opposite sides
are exactly the same. Hence, the edge-middle pieces have /two/ of each
color pair, and the corner pieces have two of each color group [eg, RGB]
but are handed, hence, unique. For example, going clockwise around the
piece, there's one Corner that goes Green, Red, Blue, and there's another
that goes Green, Blue, Red.

Since the centers never move:
1) The centers are effectively different colors WRT each other
2) The corners are all unique
3) There are two of each side piece.

Which means that
4) Sometimes, you'll get to what looks like an insoluble cube. It is. You
need to start again.

Which was my mental block. But it's also a pretty daft design, vaguely;
you /can't/ garauntee that you're solving the thing correctly; as opposed
to other normal cubes, where you're garaunteed to have the correct piece
if you just look at the colors. Or it doesn't matter if you have the
wrong pieces, so long as they're the right color [like the 5x5x5 cube,
which has groups of 4 indistinguishable pieces, but they can be in any
order when you place them].

Anyways. I'm now off to try to make pretty patterns on it; solving
Rubik's cubes is generally "simple", wheras making pretty patterns all
over them is
1) harder
2) more interesting
3) more time-consuming


[2002-05-04]

Something I posted to one of our campus newsgroups yesterday:

<snip>
Notes for drivers:

1) Overtaking on Blind corners is stupid
2) Even if it's a cyclist
3) Even if you're doing it because there's a big f-off puddle and it's
     your only forseeable opporunity to soak the stupid person on his
     bike.


4) I was a white van driver for a year and a half. I /know/ you can
f***ing see me, I also know that it's easy to pretend you can't. I
know where the f***ing blind spots are, and I'd have to be
mind-bogglingly f***ing stupid to cycle along in them.

Cutting me up as I'm coming up beside you, even though you're waiting
in traffic and can't f***ing go anywhere, is just f***ing annoying. If
you're one of the ones who complains at people going up on the kerb on
their bike, then you should be f***ing courteous and stop trying to be
deliberately f***ing annoying. If you're not in my way, deliberately
moving over is stupid.

If you're one of the ones who beeps their horn at me for cycling along
no hands, perhaps you should put the f***ing mobile down and use at
least one hand on the steering wheel [honking the horn doesn't count
as "on the steering wheel"]. Perhaps you should also avoid driving
past me so closly at such speed that it's only through sheer fluke,
and my ability to grab the handlebars, that I don't fall off.

5) F**K YOU is not a suitable response to a cyclist who looks behind
him, sees you're about 60 or 70 yards away, signals his intention to
turn right, then does so.
</snip>


[2002-05-03]

Added some KDE3 screenshots at
http://icculus.org/~chunky/kde/scrshots.html
Yes, that's edie running Wide&Short. W00t. Not sure why I though that
was worth a screenshot...

Some UT ones are also up.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/scrshots.html
Is the HTML page, but understand; this page is going to put a whole
world of hurt on your bandwidth if you're on 56k. I haven't split the
page up, so there's 1.7M of thumbnails on that page. Hmmm.

Note that the shots are faily dark. Blame nvidia. I won't alter the
screenshots, as that's considered really bad.

The really slow ones are on DM-Gothic are with full anti-aliasing on. The
crappy antialiasing is FUGLY, so I've not bothered putting up any shots
with it on. Note that this game is pretty good-looking without FSAA.

I'm seeing some problems with the big screenshots, but I'm not sure
why. If you're having problems, I'll do reconversions of some of them
as I hope I still have the .bmps someplace.


[2002-04-29]

Ignore the KDE thing I've done previously
http://icculus.org/~chunky/kde
Is an extended, updated, and generally improved version.


[2002-04-28]

Things that Chunky does with his time that could be considered technically
"stupid", number 546: Fire Breathing

I just got to do this the other day, and it's fun.

Since safety is, actually, of concern here, I was slightly loathe to do
it until I had someone who knew what he was doing standing near me. More
by luck than judgement, I end up chatting with someone who knows how
to do it. Interestingly enough, he's the same punter who stars in the
update below this one.

Notes about breathing fire:

1) Try it with water first. You don't want to spread paraffin [kerosene,
to you yanks] all over yourself the first time you try to spit it out.

2) Paraffin is one of the most disgusting things you can possibly imagine
putting in your mouth, because
 a) It tastes f***ing awful
 b) It's got this horribly slimy oily textures to it

3) Paraffin /will/ drip down your chin and onto your shirt

4) Listerine is also one of the most disgusting things you can possibly
imagine, but it's one hell of a big improvement on paraffin. Surprisingly,
it can actually cut through the nasty oily thing you have going on in
your mouth. Which is nice.

And, possibly the most important to those of you with a sense of
self-preservation:

5) Paraffin is apparently carcinogenic. At each fire-breating sitting,
I apparently do myself a similar amount of damage as I would do to myself
by smoking several hundred cigs.

In the meantime, I'll be doing it again tonight and am hoping someone
brings a digital camera so's I can put pics up.

It's good fun when more that one of you aim fireballs in the same general
direction, but slightly crossing, so you end up with a /huge/ fireball
thing going on. Very much good fun.


[2002-04-24]

Let me tell you something that really really pissed me off last night.

One of my friends had come into a bet; if he can get a lass in the shower
before the end of the night, he makes 50 quid. Fair enough. Seems like
a really good deal.

I'm sitting there chatting to some random people [who I've never met
before]. Quite out of the blue, I ask one of the girls there [who is
seriously fucking drop-dead gorgeous, IMHO. Looks a lot like one of my
Exs, but with longer hair] if she'll get in the shower with this guy,
not expecting anything to happen. What with the fact that her boyfriend
was sitting there next to her.

Now, technically, she was also offered part of the profits on this,
but we feel that's hardly the salient point of the story.

I comment that I'd better get at least a fiver out of the deal, given
my part in it. "OK", he agrees.

She then she goes and [both of them have their clothes on] gets into the
shower cubicle/room with this guy. They're each just gonna wet their hair,
and make some cash for doing it. It's like a small room with a shower
in the corner; you can turn on the water without actually getting wet,
but that's about all the space there is.

They're both in there with what I can only assume is all their clothes
on. And someone comments "no, you've gotta pass at least /her/ clothes
out through the door". And she only fucking did.

Now. That's fine. But look at it from my point of view:
1) I've convinced a fucking gorgeous lass to get into the shower with
someone.
2) She gets her clothes off once she's in this shower.
3) I make just five pounds on the deal, rather than getting to take part.

So... I've convinced a girl to get into the shower with someone, and
she turns out to be willing to get her kit off. And I did all that for
a fiver? Shit. Perhaps next time I'll convince someone who's really
good-looking to get into the damn shower with /me/.


[2002-04-23]

Apparently:

1. The woman at the front desk probably was indeed amazed by your
British accent.  I'm telling you, that's one of your primary reasons
for moving to the states: easily impressed women.

[ed's note: Apparently, toting english banknotes is also a viable tactic
in getting women's attention, when you're in the states]

2. "Claim Jumper" was the restaurant we went to where they serve the "Ore   
Cart".  Anyone who comes to the US must eat there.  It's generally one of 
the conditions of your travel visa (if you happen to have one).

3. The front bumper of my car isn't shredded.  It does have a few spots
where the paint has been scraped off down to the metal, but in general
it's not too bad.  I could feasibly get away with some touch-up paint, but
I opted for the racing bra on the front instead.  Damn truck drivers
with their big trucks that like to back into innocent sports cars...

I guess that clears that one up, then.


[2002-04-22]

Fine, I'll update my .plan.

For anyone who's not paying attention, I was in the states for a job
interview. It was with a random company who do cool stuff with cool
toys. A purely Linux house.

So, anyways. I arrive in the US and a couple days later the boss of
this company [there're only 10 people in it] picks me up in his Jag,
that would be very nice if it had
1) A gear stick
2) 3 pedals
3) E-type written on it instead of XK8
But it was pretty nice, all the same. Guess you can't have everything.

In this oh-so-lovely car, we then go for a little potter from Rolling
Hills [near Palos Verdes] up to Beverly Hills, where this company
currently is, for me to have an interview. Except I end up camping there
the whole day, and they're only actually expecting to interview me for
an hour or so.

Which gave me ample opportunity to sit there, pointing and laughing at
all the people who were actually doing work. Mwahahaha.

At one point, I heard the comment "you'd better get a picture, it's the
last time you're ever gonna see him wearing a tie". Hmmm. Bonus points
for observation, there...


Going back slightly, the first thing that happened as I arrived in this
office was the usual round of introductions. First greeting I get:

"Oh, I love your accent".

And she sounded like she really meant it. You people scare me. Women
in this country can't even take American accents seriously, let alone
point out they love them.

After several more greetings, I get a comment "oh, so /you're/ the
embedded guy". Hmmm. Well, at least I knew what to be expecting when they
come to interview me...

Now, obviously it's hardly a "normal" day as such, but one of the first
things I get to watch in this place is the only lass there present
the only french guy there with a blow-up Monica, who comes with bonus
cigar. Mmmmmmm.

Which is topped only by the Clinton dildo that's under one of the other
guy's desks.


When it came for them to actually interview me, I guess it didn't go as
great as I might ideally have imagined...

"Can you do this: {mumble} ?"
"Uh... In theory, yes. In practice, I've never been able to afford one
of those toys, so I've never been able to try & install Linux on it."

[rinse. repeat. This being the focus of this particular intervew,
after all...]

"What old code and stuff can you show us that you've got?"
"Well, most of the stuff I did at Lehman is not exactly for public
consumption, and there's very little in the way of major coding projects
I've done outside of that. I'm helping on MSPhil's Secret Project X,
but I'm hardly going to be banding the source for that about..."

[although it should be noted that I've not exactly done much on project
X so far, and when they interviewed me I'd only just signed the NDA &
contract...]


Right. Anyways. I hope I get the job. If they offer it to me, I'm going
there. Simple.


Later on, myself, the french guy, and another punter all wander [ok,
drive] up the street a bit to the Troubadour. It's this really nice
club, where the Flower Kings were on stage that night. I had a seriously
cool time.

The Flower Kings rock. They're sort of Pink Floyd wannabes, but with
more bass, and a slightly different following. That place was absolutely
decked out with the proverbial ageing rockers. Bunch of guys older than
me all toting black leather jackets and going about on Harleys. You know
the sort. Very seriously cool.

First off, getting in was a bit of an exercise. I hand the man on the door
my drivers license, so I can have a wristband and can then have a
drink. [That's a bloody good idea, if you ask me. You get id'd once,
and then the lady behind the bar just has to ask if she can see your
wristbands. Seems crap at first thought, but then's actually a really
good idea when you think about it.]

"You're shitting me"
"Uh... no, that really is my driving license"
"When were you 21?"
"Last year"
"When were you 22?"
"Uh... this year?"
"When this year?"
"Dagnammit. It's written on the damn card."

Eventually, I get in and have a drink. Mmmm. Bottles this time. Saves
all that pint hassle you people seem to have so much trouble with.

Following that, I end up crashing on {weird french guy's} sofa. I
didn't wake up with chloroform on my breath and a sore ass, so I guess
that's good.

Next day, hendersa comes to pick me up. Everybody listen up. His car's
bra on the front... It's not because he races it or anything decent
like that. It's because the bumper's shredded underneath it, and a bra
is cheaper than a bumper.

In the evening, we went out to this steak-kinda place. Met Mike Phillips &
his missus, "Lady Firedancer". They didn't scare me at all.

Can't remember what it's called, but they have on the menu, among other
things, the "Ore Cart". Which is just a trolley covered in dead stuff. Big
trolley. Lots of dead stuff. Yummy. I didn't have one, actually, as I
think it's just a little out of my league...

Anyways. That's all fun. Other notes about driving around in the US:
1) Just because someone's address says "Rolling Hills Estates", doesn't
mean you don't go in the gate that says "The Terraces". Bugger.
We only ended up driving round the hill 2 or 3 times because of that...
2) Instructions on the web are, at times, not perfect. We got within a
couple miles of home, before taking the "scenic route", which finished
at approximately the totally wrong place.

Hmmmm.

Anyways. I think I've probably bored the living f**k out of all of you by
now, so I'm gonna quit. Am going fire juggling in an hour or so anyways...


[2002-04-21]

KDE3 is big. It took me all day yesterday to compile it, and that was
just how long it took to build. Not me messing about, that's just
compiling it.

Some notes:

It's all of KDE3 except kde-bindings, which wouldn't compile, and i18n,
which I don't want.

I built this against qt3, so if you have that on your system already,
great. If you don't, there's one in the kde directory; I leave it there,
as I have a qt2 install someplace, also, and didn't want to mess with it.

In the kde dir is also up-to-date versions of libxml, libxslt,
libaudiofile, and pcre [advanced javascript regular expressions]. It's
all self-contained, so you should be able to just run this.

Just untar it into /opt; it's in it's own dir, "kde3". Which you should
symlink to /opt/kde.

A suitable environment for running it could be:

KDEDIR=/opt/kde
QTDIR=$KDEDIR/qt
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$KDEDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PATH=$KDEDIR/bin:$PATH


http://icculus.org/~chunky/kde3.tar.bz2

[gamehenge:~/web/]$ du -sk ./kde3.tar.bz2 
96512   ./kde3.tar.bz2
[gamehenge:~/web/]$ md5sum kde3.tar.bz2
e59f8e23da09302885907549d1d0f352  kde3.tar.bz2
[gamehenge:~/web/]$ bzip2 -cd ./kde3.tar.bz2 | tar -tf - | wc -l
  21037

Eesh. And you thought windows was bloated.


And a brief review? Well, it's a major improvement on the previous one,
although not as noticable as version two was on the original. It looks &
feels really professional [except the SIGFPE the first time kdesplash
runs. After than, it never happens again. Hmmm.]. I would seriously
consider putting this on "mum&dad's machine". It really is nice. I'm
not going to be using it, though, as it's not my "cup of tea", as it were.

It's a whole bunch lower on the resource usage than it used to be [like,
most of it doesn't even appear in top(1) anymore], and a whole bunch
smoother & prettier with it.

All in all, if it's your sorta thing, it's great. If it's not [ie,
you're a twm/blackbox user], then so be it.


[2002-04-18-later-again]

Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal

I've just watched this film. I had no idea films could be so... Eeeesh.

Imagine: A Marilyn Manson wannabe is doing his last concert for 40 fans on
a Boeing 747. Someone pretending to be him locks him up on this airplane,
and hijacks said plane. They're going to drive it into a small church
in a small village in east Kentucky because that's where the antichrist
is gonna appear for a Very Bad Second Coming (TM).

Throw in a l33t hax0r and a good-looking lass [who is also a l33t hax0r]
for good measure, and you have an exciting sub-plot. Sorta.

Well, I haven't technically ruined the storyline...

But you know? I really actually enjoyed that film. Total and utter crap,
requires an attention span of, uh, nil, but is just a good fun watch
with the odd bit of actually quite listen-to-able music.


Tonight I also saw Lake Placid. A film of even less merit, actually. For
anyone who hasn't seen it, let me ruin it for you: It's a giant
crocodile. They're going to kill it when it gets into a helicopter
[a fair sized one at that], but is so big that it ends up getting jammed
in the door. Yes, this crocodile is big enough that it gets stuck in
a helicopter because it's too big. Possibly worth watching for the bit
where they're using a helicopter to dip a cow in the lake. But if I were
you, I'd turn over and watch some static instead. It's more interesting.

Conclusion: If you're going to watch Lake Placid, don't. Go and watch
Turbulence 3 instead. It's actually better.

Other things, I've only come across it now I've been to the states
and sat in hendersa's living room/workroom. It's called "Thumb Wars"
and is truly a sight to behold. Yes, it's a rip off of various bits of
Star Wars, where the actors are thumbs with really bad voice acting and
pieces of a normal person's face superimposed on the thumbs. This also
will be rated forever in my "Higher than Lake Placid" list.

Past my bedtime. G'night.


[2002-04-18-later]

<Mongoose:#icculus.org> islamic radicals think tall buildings are bad umkay?
You scare me


[2002-04-18]

Right. Stop asking, I'm putting up a .plan update about my trip to America
once I get back on a fast internet connection. The connection from here
is showing up characters at about 2 per second. When I'm lucky. And it's
annoying me.

More importantly, the reason for this update. Today I bought a mag "PC
Plus". I buy it because it's one of the two mags I can find that don't
treat me like an idiot [so long as I'm not reading anything except the
"expert" sections]. The other one being "Linux Journal" which no shops
stock because nobody buys because it doesn't have a CD on the cover.

In it was a couple-hundred-page booklet from Linux Format of "your linux
questions answered". You'd'a thought it'd be a good thing, wouldn't
you? Well, that's what pissed me off. I'm sitting here reading through
it [I can usually find at least a few gems in these things that I don't
know about], and it's appreciably wrong on some major things. I mean,
come on. It's /not/ a good idea to untarball a new kernel OVER your
existing one. Ever. And so on, and so forth.

This is why people think linux is difficult. Nowdays, it's not. In fact,
in my recent experience, it's actually working better and easier than
windows. Especially Me or XP when they don't like a device. Anyways. So
someone buys this magazine on "installing linux and making it work
when you're stupid", and then the stupid person tries it [stupid isn't
derogatory, here. It's just a term for the less enlightened], and then
it doesn't work. And then they think it's hard or for the l33t among us.

Grrrr.


[2002-04-05-later]

OK, so I'm sitting here in an office with nothing but an internet
connection, waiting for people to pay attention to me. Bwahahahaha.

Looking around, I found this, that I did a couple weeks ago:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/joybuttons-patch.gz

If anyone wants to try it, it's a patch against the current kernel,
2.4.18 [although it does also work against 2.4.4]. It changes the
behaviour of the joystick coolie hat, so it behaves like 4 buttons
instead of two axes. Which may or may not be an improvement, depending
on what you want. Just a random hack I did. To mention, it patches
joydev.c, so if you're using some other method, it won't work. But why
aren't you using joydev, then?

Hendersa, I hope you're happy. This is of no interest to you at all,
but I'm updating my .plan as requested anyways.


[2002-04-05]

Waiter: "Would you like a drink with your meal?"
Chunky: "What beers do you have on tap?"
W: "Just the one: {mumble}. It's quite nice"
C: "I'll have one of those, please"
W: "What size?"
C: "A pint"
W: "Huh?"
C: "Well, it's about a pint in size"
W: "We have [something] ounces, or [something else] ounces"
C: "Which one's nearest a pint?"
W: "Uh......"

Argh. Can't you people drink sensible measures?

Beer comes in two sizes: A pint, or a half-pint. I always thought that
was pretty simple...

In fact, I remember now. Several years ago, I had an American girlfriend
[a Smithie, would you believe?], and she took pint glasses over to the
states as novelty gift-items. You people really scare me.

In other news, the topic in #icculus.org when I logged in this morning:

*** Topic for #icculus.org: Chunky_Ks loose in the US.  Lock up your
       daughters.  Film at 11.


[2002-04-03]

From the /other/ side of the Atlantic, this .plan update comes.

I'll do a more convincing update tomorrow [probably], but in the meantime,
I've spoken to just one of the ugly people who read this plan [Hi,
Hendersa (=], and will be meeting at least two of you in a few days.

Being tall is great. It means British Airways upgrade me when I cry
some. I'm only 6'2", but dad's closer to 5'20". The two of us go and check
in early, then cry a little, and we get put into BA's "Traveller Plus"
class, or something, And the seats are big enough that I can actually
fit in them. Woo!

Makes a significant difference over a 11hr flight. [Which, for
anyone curious, is long enough to watch Ocean's 11, Harry Potter &
The Philosopher's stone, Bandits, and the first half of Ocean's 11
again. And read whole bunches of Rubini&Corbet. And stare out the window
a whole lot.]

Other exciting things? I was frisked twice at Heathrow, but unfortunately
both times the good-looking lass just stood by watching while a bloke
gave me a good groping. Bugger.

Steel toe caps are not your current air-travelling friends. After being
leapt on the first time I set the alarm off for metal things, I had
them off and shoved them through the x-ray. Fine, not a problem. But I
dread what you americans are gonna do on my way back. You seem to be a,
uh, "little" more paranoid than the British about this sort of thing at
the moment..

Oh, yeah; For anyone in the US, you should learn to appreciate your
Mexican restaurants. I just went to the Red Onion [don't know if there
are many of them out there, but this one's damn nice.] Yummy. It's
worrying. The last time I was in the states, it was illegal for me to
drink. And it's been bloody ages since I've had any margheritas. And
yours over here are a /damn/ site nicer than any you'll be able to get
in the UK. Mmmmmmm. [nobody in the UK blends theirs, for a start. And
actual lumpy salt round the rim? HA!]

Past my bedime, I think. Not sure when my bedtime was, but I'm pretty
sure I'm feeling like it's long past.

Note: I probably won't write a more extended version of this one tomorrow,
as you've already had all the salient points from my day. Any more would
just be mind-bogglingly dull.


[2002-04-02]

http://pics.sluggy.com/comics/990106a.gif

You see, I would find that intensly funny, except...


[2002-03-27]

Man, I hate it when that happens. You're cycling along, and pile into
a width restriction in the road at high speed and do yosself a not
insubstantial amount of damage.

Now, technically, it's probably your fault for being too drunk to really
get on a bike, and it's only through too much practice that you can even
balance on it, but that's not really the point.

So. Today I'm confortable that my jaw's not broken [I wasn't too sure
yesterday; couldn't open my mouth without mumbling in pain...], but I
can't shave because I have this largeish patch of blood & scraped skin
on my chin where I don't really fancy taking a razor. And I imagine I'd
look a little silly if I shaved /around/ it...

I landed on my shoulder, somehow, so now carrying a backpack is quite
an unpleasant experience [so is rolling over in bed, actually]. And I
landed on my wallet & keys, too, and since they're always in the same
place, I have a large bruise in exactly the same place I always get a
large bruise. Ho, hum.

All of which is technically my fault, but I'm not half having a crappy
time at the moment.

In other news, summer's coming; I've been able to cycle to campus in
just a shirt a few times, now, and people are cutting grass again,
the smell of which I happen to like.

And a week today I fly to the states. Yay!


[2002-03-25-not-much-later]

http://www.glassdog.com/smarttags/
I'll be adding that to all my pages as soon as I can be bothered. Thing
is, let's face it; my webpages aren't exactly "popular" to start with,
and I'm pretty certain that they're of less-than-no-interest to your
average IE user. Ho, hum.


[2002-03-25]

There's something really amusing about drew.currupt.net
Anyways. On his site there's this:
http://drew.corrupt.net/domo.html

Which references
http://members.aol.com/johnk0/godkills.jpg
[which we've all seen], but then also references
http://drew.corrupt.net/think-of-the-domokun.jpg

Which I hadn't.


[2002-03-22-later]

Her name is Lena. Ta, Missus E-B


[2002-03-22]

The word I was looking for was marinate. Thanks, Icculus. Not only are
you some manner of uber-geek, you know cool cooking words, too (=

http://www.btsuckcock.btinternet.co.uk/

Yes, it really exists.


[2002-03-21-a-bit-later]

Forgot to mention: serve with
1) Boiled potatoes are quite good
2) Green veg. I like green beans, but most things go.


[2002-03-21]

Well, since everyone is abusing my recipes and stuff, here's a genuinely
nice one. So, for today's episode of "in the kitchen with Chunky" [no,
hendersa, /not/ "stomach pumping with the Kibbles"]... Chicken with
Mango & Mustard. Personally, I thought it sounded pretty indifferent
when someone first put it in front of me [I have no particular liking
of either mustard of mango], but it's absolutely delicious.

Right. This is so easy it's scary. You'll need:

1) Some chicken breasts. Ones with skin are nice, but ones without work
too. Pieces of chicken with bone in are good, also, but since this is a
nice thing and I don't like using my fingers when there's huge amounts
of sauce, it's not as ideal.

2) A pot of mango chutney. Personal taste prevails. "sweet" is nice IMHO,
but when eating, "too much" seems to appear really quickly. I also quite
like stuff with cinnamon in it if you can find it.

3) Some mustard. I /really/ like the stuff that's farly mild but has
grains in it. You know the stuff I mean. Without the grains, this is
/nothing/ like as good. Trust me.

4) Olive Oil. For not much of a good reason, but improves the texture
of the chicken no end. You gotta have some manner of oil, and I assure
you that olive oil is definitely worth it over any other.

Right. Mix together [technical terms coming up] "some" of each of the
last three.

About four or five tablespoons of mango to about three of mustard to about
two of olive oil usually seem about right. Mix it all up in a mixing thing

Trivia for students: If you are cooking in a pan suitable for mixing, then
this will need but the one piece of washing up. If you're using a separate
mixing thing, it'll need two pieces of washing up at the end of the day.

Anyways. Put the chicken in it, and leave in the fridge to {you know what
I mean; I can't remember the word}. Personally, I don't usually remember,
and it's no truly great loss. But when you do leave it overnight, it is
much better.

Cook for as long as you'd usually cook the relevant chicken things on
gas mark 5 or so. I find that about 40-45 minutes is usually about right
for about 4 or 5 chicken breasts. The mango goes brown, and that's good.

Many thanks actually go to Si's mum [whose name I, embarrasingly enough,
can't remember] who originally came up with this recipe while I was
round their house one day.


In other exciting news, I'm sorry. You know who you are that I'm
apologising to, and I really mean it. Sincerely. Lots.


[2002-03-19]

MGS VR Missions sooooooo needs more missions as the ninja.


[2002-03-18]

Since my recipes are obviously so popular, here's an extension to the
last one: simply add jalapenos. Yummy. They add texture and flavor,
without impacting the heat much that was put there by the stupidly
hot sauce.

Notice that if you happen to like you jalapenos crunchy [I know I do],
but they're all soft and annoying when they come out of the liquid
they're stored in, simply remove them from that liquid and leave them
in the air for ~1/2 hr. The go all crunchy and get noticeably hotter, too.

For anyone who's not paying proper attention, by the way: this gets a
fair-to-middling on the "things you really don't wanna put in your mouth
unless you know what you're doing" category. If you don't like hot food,
don't do it.


[2002-03-15]

Note: My old stuff has moved to http://icculus.org/~chunky/oldplan,
although the resourceful among you will be able to find it in
IcculusFinger's archive system.



Hmmm

Well, firstly, an apology. For the last {mumble} weeks, I've been doing
immense amounts of work on my project, avoiding sleep to achieve this,
and other things severally. And while I've been doing that, I've been
a total arse.

Specifically, I'd actually like to apologise to all the people whose
lives I've made unpleasant during that time. Explicit cases include
Sara and a guy on loki.games.ut who I let loose on even though he was
actually giving me a compliment. Ho, hum. Everyone else, you know who
you are, and I am sincerely sorry.


So, that out of the way, things, otherly:
My project. Is sucks. I've failed it miserably, and I'm now considering
it to be the final nail in my degree's coffin. I'll probably still get
a degree, but it ain't gonna even slightly resemble a first. While it's
been feeling like I've done huge amounts of work, in the end, I look at
my project, and it just looks crap. Oh, well, what can you do, right?

More cheeful things, now.

While I've been doing my project, my main foodstuff has been the
following:

Take two pieces of bread
Put cheddar cheese on one [mild is good, but mature has a more interesting
flavor, if you happen to like that. Took me a sandwich or three, but
now I prefer it]
Pour oregano liberally-ish over that.
Take the other piece of cheese, and thinly smear some of either
1) Dave's Insanity Sauce
2) Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce
over it. Notice the word "thinly". Notice that the word Habanero comes
/before/ the word tomato in the ingredients on the Ultimate Insanity
one. This recipe, by the way, can cause substantial amounts of pain if
you get this step wrong and read "more than a drop or two" into the word
"thinly".
Put the two together, and put into a sandwich toaster until cooked
[how much you like them cooked is up to you]
Eat gently

If you live in the UK, you can get the above at http://www.pepperama.co.uk

Yum, yum. And since I imagine many of you missed my last recipe, have a
shufty at http://icculus.org/~chunky/bucket_of_sick.html . Chip butties
are delicious. Bonus points go to anyone who can tell me why I gave that
web page that name. I'll give you a hint: someone else chose it for me.


Now that major project is out of the way, I can teach myself how to
write a device driver in earnest. Specifically, I have a copy of Rubini
& Corbet, and I shall be producing a rot13 device driver. Why? Because
I need a trivial device to start with, and rot13 is about the only
interesting but trivial thing I could think of that still contains a lot
of the important bits of your average driver but without lots of boring
stuff in the middle.

Hmmm. I lead such an exciting life.


Well, you gotta give some guys credit for obstinacy. The other day,
a guy called xwins appeard in #icculus.org [and #loki, I believe, but
#loki is no longer my standard trolling grounds].

Ten minutes or so after his arrival, I started /msg'ing people the message
"ten bucks says this is Hopkins". For anyone who doesn't know who Hopkins
is, he's someone who's more annoying than me, and, among other things,
slapped a lawsuit on one of #icculus.org's other patrons for comments
said patron made on /.. Now, people who do that actually /scare/ me.
http://treke.net/downloads/hopkins_log.html
[warning: it's long]

Anyways. In the end, it turned out the he was Hopkins, and lots of
people owe me money... although I commented that they may as well give
it to Icculus. That was sincere, by the way. Major kudos goes to at
least one guy I know who /did/ paypal Icc the money.


Now that my project is done, I have gone and got my playstation
back. Cool. And MGS. And MGS VR Missions. Anyways. Unfortunately, you
won't be seeing the PlayStationCam updating much as I'm no longer on
a permanant internet connection [I never got a response from BT, by
the way], but I'm now back on it. I've beaten ~57% of the VR missions
[according to the stats there], and I've almost not started MGS at all,
given that I found it easier to pick up & put down the VR missions. So
I'll be playing them for a while.

And finally, for this plan update, my exciting holiday plans:
Wooo! Am flying out to the states come the 3rd of April, and am flying
back on the 9th. Will be meeting, for the first time, some of you scary
people who actually read this .plan. Mwahahahaha. I'll be arriving in
LAX at 5.20 in the afternoon after an 11hr 05m flight. Mmmmmm.


[2002-03-05]

ARM told me to f**k off. Hmmmm.

Saw "Battle Royale" last night.
Deep thoughts.
Hollywood violence is funny. Let's face it. Arnie wandering about
with a RailGun, Brad Pitt as a vampire, or violence /a la/ "Cube"
is fundamentally unreasonable, hence amusing. ["Cube", by the way,
is very highly recommened by yours truly]

Battle Royale sooo had the potential to come in that category. Bunch of
kids get dumped on a island in the middle of nowheres, some are given
guns, some are given dustbin lids, and the last man standing gets to
leave the island. Which soooo had the potential to be really good.

Instead I found it genuinely disgusting. There is overly-large amounts of
detail to the amount of blood that sprays from someone's head. Dissenter
in the classroom? Throw a knife into her forehead. Which would have been
amusing if it hadn't been done in a deadly serious "this is genuinely
likely to happen" kinda way. I like to think I have a semi-substantial
constitution, but this really put me off.

I'm hesitant to say it, but I found this film nearly as unpleasant as
"Crash". For anyone who's not seen Crash, either, here's a hint: At
least they only get down to the open-wound-fucking thing the once. I'd
/really/ urge you to skip that one.

I forgot to mention. I hate to sound racist/prejudiced/whatever, but
we've all seen what Japanese game shows are like? People /really/ stand
there stabbing themselves and others, stuff like that? Well, this is
a Japanese movie, in Japanese, with English subtitles. I think there's
a chance that in my mind it was a case of "based on what I've seen of
Japanese stuff before, this is genuinely possible". Which is really
disarming.

Didn't like it at all. Truth to tell, I nearly walked out about 5 mins
after it started.


On another note, here's some deep thoughts on why Windows sucks.
Actually, not Windows. Windows programs.
When you're reading a book about programming under
{Linux,Solaris,whatever} [say, for the sake of argument, it's "Linux
Device Drivers, 2nd Ed" by Rubini & Corbet], they make a really big thing
of "let's do this the right way". They say things like "remember endian
stuff. This is how to deal with it". And "The correct way of registering
a device is like /this/, at time of writing". Making a big thing about
getting it right first time, doing things the "Right Way".

Now pick up your favorite VB book for today. It says things like "this
isn't the tidiest way of doing stuff, but it's shorter and pretty much
always works". It seems that windows developers are taught to hack their
way through stuff from the very outset, wheras linux developers are very
much taught to "do the right thing". Witness that you can hang out in
#loki for a while, and you get people asking questions like "what's the
correct way of doing XXXX?", and throwing themselves at the mercy of
the gathered. And then they write some code. and it works well.

And you know it's gonna be a bad day. MCSE test question:
You NT server explodes. Your Boss wants his spreadsheet back NOW. Do you:
a) Use an NTFS reader by booting to DOS from a floppy
b) Tell him to deal with it.
[couple answers snipped]

The correct answer to the above is, actually, (b). Why? Because MS didn't
write [hence, officially sanction] the NTFS reader.


"I have a dog with no legs. I call him cigarette. Every night, I take
him out for a drag"


[2002-03-03]

Because I've never been bothered to do it before,

GCS d- s+: a-- C++(---) ULS+++ P+++ L+++ E--- 
W++ N++ !o K- w-- !O M(+) V-- !PS !PE Y-- PGP- 
t 5- X !R tv-- b+++ DI++ D+ G e h+ r+ y+
ma->+ k+ f+>++4 X+>++

Deliberately no URLs or identifying marks included, in order to obfuscate
this to anyone who thinks I should have been working instead of working
that puppy out.

Yes, the extension is the same as most everyone else's on icculus.org.
By now, this should be telling us something about icculus.org and it's
patrons.


[2002-02-28-very-early]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/juggling/fire.html
And then I met the Leprechaun, and he told me to burn things


[2002-02-27-later]

Exercise for today:
Is there anything we can do to convince people to read {old posts,
READMEs, brief searches on google, etc}?

People don't. Don't try to kid {me, you} that they do. All
you have to do is look at one of my posts this morning on
news://news.lokigames.com/loki.games.ut to see what I'm talking about.

Someone said that if I reply to one more post with the URL of the lgfaq,
he's gonna pull his hair out. If people read READMEs, or old posts,
or whatever, then I wouldn't have to post that URL. So what do we do?

It seems that all I do by posting that URL is piss people off. Perhaps
they believe that the right thing for me to do is copy the text out of
that page [a fair bit of which I wrote in the first place] and post it
on the newsgroup?

[for reference, http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/utrant.txt was the original
post & my reply]


[2002-02-27]

Two things:
This one's for MSPhil [or, more technically, Katie]
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/kriloshot.png
No doctoring. Suck it down.

This one's for anyone having trouble with Myth2. I wanna know if this
fixes it:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/myth2/

Grrr. Waaaay too much project work to do with waaaaaay not enough time
to do it in.


[2002-02-25-later]

Because I'm in a bad mood with BT [or just generally], I thought I'd
respond to their last letter.

It's a deliberate troll, given that I know I'll never be using their
services again, and doing my damndest to put other people off them,
too [I find them sufficiently offensive, I'm gonna do my part in taking
them down].

Anyways. http://icculus.org/~chunky/rants/btresponse.txt

I'm also genuinely curious as to why they're driving away really quite
good customers such as myself. I mean. Come on. Think about it. Someone
who leaves their internet on permanantly. That means that I use the
internet lots, whether it's with BT or another provider. And if it's
BT, then they get money off me. If it's not, then they don't. Give it
a whole moments thought, you morons.


[2002-02-25]

So. The general conclusion I've been able to come to is that the
nv drivers are toasted. I've been told this by several reliable-ish
sources. So I've tried downgrading to older drivers that supposedly work,
but am unable to make the bastard things actually at all. Just some
scary-looking red lines vertically on the screen, and nada else.

So there are several things I'm doing right now:

1) Choosing to ignore the damn thing, as I didn't pay for the card,
haven't yet paid for the monitor, and I need to fix the damn monitor
before it'll even turn on anyways, so dualhead would currently be useless
as I've only one working monitor. That sentence made no sense, but I'm
in a bad mood so I can't be bothered to fix it.

2) Time for project work is drawing to a close at an altogether shit-scary
rate, so I'm gonna ignore it on that count, too.

3) I have this nasty feeling I'm about to end up coding on just my dumb
terminals again, soon, as my GFII fan is making that nasty noise again,
that it made last time I ended up having to take it out and get heavy
on it's ass.

Side-Note: Postal2 May well be coming to Linux. Which is cool. Postal
Rocks.

To install myth2 on a recent distro you need to download either a more
up-to-date installer, or, if you're like me on a slow internet connection,
use a bind mount as a quick'n'dirty hack. Details will be forthcoming
on the lgfaq.

It's pissing with rain. Lots. Often. Am soaked.

As a direct result, I'll probably update this later while camping out
the computer labs again to avoid going home. And I don't have uplink
installed in the labs.

Sod it. I have a lecture to go to. More later. Perhaps.


[2002-02-19-a-bit-later]

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/nv/
I'm annoyed at NV, now. Can anyone help me?


[2002-02-19]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/rants/btshutdown.txt
I'm now officially internet-connection-less

I guess it's my fault for using my "Anytime" account at "Anytime". I'll
make a mental note not to do it again.


[2002-02-17]

I've just bought a new book. [It was going very cheaply indeed]

Pay attention to the title of the book, and the picture on the cover:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/ntnetworking.png
[700k or so]

Note: I have in /no way/ edited this cover at all. I just scanned it in
and put it up.


[2002-02-16-just-after-reading-Yoda's-plan]

Ryan: If you change the vi on icculus.org, I will fly over to the states
and cut your bollocks off.

It behaves like genuine vi. None of this noncy new stuff. none of this
multiple-undo stuff [multiple undos is for wimps]. It behaves /exactly/
like the original vi. Which is what I like.


[2002-02-16]

Today is the day after my birthday. Anyway.

Yesterday, I got some seriously cool stuff.
I got a big plasma-ball-type thing. Which is cool.
Being the simple guy that I am, I got a spinning top, which has also
been hours and hours of amusement thusly far.
Some other random stuff.
And what Sara gave me.

Sara is nice.
Sara gave me whole stacks of Pooh stuff [Pooh rocks. Pooh is my friend],
some stupidly strong coffee [mmmmmmm. 'tis nice], and a really nice hip
flask with my initials engraved on it,

And a new shiny rock. This one says "Love" on it. Aaaahhhh

Am seriously bored of work, now. I really would like to be on the Candy
Cruncher beta, but there's no way on earth I can justify installing
another hideously addictive game with so much work to do.

Elsethings. Am confuzzled. After lots of hassle with Scan, I've finally
had my new TNT2 and 4 rounded ATA100 cables, 90cm long. Yes, they are
theoretically gimmicky [and damn expensive, for 10p worth of plastic
and metal], except they're really nice to actually use. Especially with
a big, fugly, mass of cables that exists inside my machine.

Hmmm. Well, for a start, they were delivered to the wrong address. But
luckily, since dad came up to visit me, I got them pretty sharpish.

The next thing that confused me is that the invoice comes to zero
pounds and zero pennies. And has lots of works on it like "free" and
"zero cost". Am majorly confuzzled.

So. Now I have two graphics cards in my machine. Funky. Except:
The GFII GTS [AGP] on it's own works fine.
The TNT2 [PCI] on it's own works fine.
The line
Screen "Screen PCI" Leftof "Screen AGP"
is enough to cause the X server to bomb. The cards are correctly detected
and working fine. There are two things in /proc/nv. Everything's
cool. Except that trying to put two screens in ServerLayout causes a
bomb. Bastard f***ing X bastard f***ing nVidia bastard f***ing Linux. I'm
sure it's actually me just being a cripple, but in the meantime, my
internet connection at home has died an altogether horrible death. So I
can't be online at home, trying to fix my machine, and I can't fix it
from campus. Bastard f***ing BT.

I have a feeling, also, that this may be a prime example of something
X 4.2 would fix, so I'll download it and try it later. I've done my
"compiling X" penance at version 4.1.0, so I shan't be compiling
this one myself. Deep thought: Compiling X is a whore. I do it once
every few versions, as my penance to all the Linux things I've done
wrong. Ever. That's how bad things like that are.

More mental notes: Everyone has been a llama in their past:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8bgqev%24jh0%241%40news.3dfx.com&output=gplain
I was a llama once, too
There are two specific embarrasing things about that:
1) I was writing that from Outlook Express.
2) I was asking how to make gnome start instead of twm, because I didn't
    like twm.

Just think. Anyone at all [even people who don't know how to change
a window manager, like gnome, and use Outlook] can end up as a
semi-competent person such as my good self.


[2002-02-13]

Hmmm. Well, I'm doing lots of work-type things again. You know, I
_really_ hate one thing in particular about final year projects: It's
100% on the write-up. If my code never works, then it's just the way
it goes. I can still get full marks. I want to code and get marks for
/that/, goddammit. Ho, hum.

Anyways. I'm currently camping out pc172s in the computer science
department on campus, solely because I can't get home. Indeed. The river
going past my house has flooded. I may or may not actually have a home
to go back to by this time tomorrow. Hmmm. That's bad, right?

Actually, to be fair, I'll have a home, but it may be a bit fetid/smelly,
and wet. This morning I got my feet soaked above my ankles while cycling
to campus. Bugger. But there's something rewarding about a car going
past at speed, soaking me, then stalling. And not starting again. So I
quite happily cycle past, stop at the edge of the puddle and admire the
quite substantial distance that the bloke in his car is going to have
to trapse through on foot, while I got past on my bike With merrely damp
ankles. Mwahahahahaha.


"Cease to resist giving my good-byes. Drive my car into the ocean. You
think I'm dead, but I sail away..."

Bonus marks for guessing what the only CD I actually bought with me
is. Gonna be a long night. One CD, and a bloody hot computer room.


[2002-02-06]

And I think I've worked out the last problem, too; in order to make
krilo2.prog run without bombing upon entering a password, you need to edit
the script that runs it to "cd /usr/lib/krilo" before executing anything.


[2002-02-05-yet-later-still]

Level 56 is insoluble with krilo.prog; you need to switch to krilo2.prog
to be able to play it.
Level 57 is /hard/


[2002-02-05-later-still]

I have the password for Level 55. Level 56 is a bit weird. Causing
me problems.  Time for me to go and do some work, I think.

Wave of Mutilation is my favorite song on PutV. Followed by Everybody
knows. [Although I prefer the one in the film with the gravelly voice
version thingy]

Hmmm.
This is far and away the best penny-arcade comic.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/guns.jpeg
[in a go-and-do-some-work-you-bloody-student kinda way (=]


[2002-02-05-later]

Still depressed about shitty exam results. But have bought the
soundtrack to "Pump up the Volume", to make me feel better. Not quite
sure how that's gonna work, but hey; you gotta have a laugh, right? I
think this can join Placebo, Radiohead, and the Crow soundtrack in the
"Chunky Cheerful Collection"

IHBT. IHL. HAND


Hmmm. In other news, someone the other day showed me a Rubik's cube, so I
dug out a couple of mine, and am playing with them again. For reference
for anyone who doesn't know how to solve them, it is, actually, really
piss-easy. You just learn a couple of moves by rote [which are mostly
highly symmetric, making it so easy that even punters like me can grasp
it], and you can solve the whole thing.  The only interesting bit is
when you start trying to make pretty patterns.

Which is much more interesting with my professor's cube [5x5x5 instead
of 3x3x3 - you can buy them at www.mefferts-puzzles.com], but
unfortunately, that's on loan, and I'm getting it back ASAP.
Professor's cube
http://www.mefferts-puzzles.com/puzzles/profcube.html

And here's a hint: the solution that comes with it is a damn site harder
than the solution described here:
How to solve a 5x5x5 Rubik's Cube
http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Jake/5x5x5.html
Yes, that's my name on the page, as I found a really simple move to do
one particular exercise.

Elsewises, two pieces of news WRT my mum [who won't ever read this,
but I love you, mum, anyways. You're the best].

She's now got the house that she [and me, and my sister] wanted. It's a
really really nice house, just outside Aberystwyth. Now she can settle
down, get an Aga for the dog to lie against [and me, whenever I'm there
(=], and generally start actually living the rest of her life in earnest.

Plus, she's just texted me to ask for help with FrontPage. I don't know
if any of you people have ever actually used it, or if you've merely
heard lots about it. It is, actually, as bad as everyone says it is. I
used it for a couple months once [I was paid to. I feel so cheap, but
it's the way it goes, right?], and loathed it. But since it's what she's
been told to use, it's what she's using. So I'm gonna have to help her
with it. Ho, hum.


[2002-02-05]

Hairy goat balls. Just got my exam results, and they suck. Royally.

Sara cooked me dinner again last night. Spag Bol. And delicious, with it.

And now this terminal's fucked, so I'm typing blind.

Fuck this. I'm going to find a small {corner,stone} to crawl {into,under},
and sulk.



[2002-02-04]

finger msphil@icculus.org

Addition:
And if you're not using an RPM-based distro [/a la/ slack], you need to
overwrite /usr/lib/krilo/levels.pak using /usr/lib/krilo/levels2.pak. It's
something that the RPM does, but rpm2targz gives no recurse to.

Other conclusion: Katie is a figment of MSPhil's imagination.

PS I now have the password for level 45, and got to level 49 earlier.


[2002-02-03]

Damn you, MSPhil. I get over my Krilo addiction by nature of the fact
it doesn't work under Linux, and I'm no longer near my father's windows
machine... And then you tell me that it does, actually, work. And a bit
of research shows that yes, it /is/ possible to play.

So I'm no longer over my Krilo addiction. Bugger.

PS I can get a damn site further in it than you can, though, so all is
not lost. I have the password for level 40. You?

PPS My money says it's MSPhil with the Krilo addiction, and not his Katie;
she's just an excuse.


[2002-02-02]

Right.
Why I call myself Chunky Kibbles
http://icculus.org/~chunky/kibbles.html
What that means is that people can stop asking, now (=

Plus, I've gone back over this .plan, and changed all the ones saying
2001 to 2002, since I'm clearly a bit slow on this. [Thanks, Trisk]


[2002-01-31]

Loki officially cease, today. And that's pretty shit. I'm really sorry
about it, actually, as I think they were doing some seriously good things.

Anyways. Life goes on. There's a good chance that the only real answer
right now is that "that's what you get for having a sucky business
model". By "sucky business model", I mean that you're asking linux people
to give you money. Which Linux people are generally, it would seem,
loathe to do.

Anyways. There are lots of other companies out there, #loki still exists,
www.tuxgames.com still exists, and so on, and so forth. Life goes on,
and I wish Scott, wife, and friends, all the best in whatever they choose
to do.

On other topics, if you're a student in the computer science department,
I wrote a quick howto on SSH'ing about in the department without using
passwords. Mostly this is only necessary because the linux boxen have
silly-bugger ssh setups. But hey; I guess that's just the way it goes.
SSH in Comp. Sci at Yor
http://icculus.org/~chunky/writing/compscissh

And elsethings? Not much, really. Have been to bed for the last 3 night
running, so I guess it's time I quit sleeping again. I wrote another
page this morning that lynx users will be able to find, but I'm afriad
it's mostly a visual image-type thing, so... Hmmmm...

Did some shopping. Can't find [it would seem] a PCI graphics card at
all, except one shop was trying to sell me a TNT1 for 45 quid. Ha. F**K
right off.


[2002-01-30]

Today, I had my interview at ARM. I got ripped to shreds on the hardware
stuff and actual chip-implementation type things, as I was expecting
[to be honest; hardware isn't really, as it were, /my thing/. Add to that,
I was taught computer architectures by a mathematician, not a computer
hardware guy...].

On more cheerful notes, my C knowlege was sufficient to answer most of the
questions, but one or two required a little prompting [eg, "Write a macro
in C that returns 1 if you're on a big-endian machine, and 0 of you're
on a little-endian on". Or the other way round. It's not like which one
returns which is the point of the question, you know? Anyway. That one
required a fair bit of prompting. The rest were OK.]

Hmmm. I'd still like to work for them, but there's still a company or
two higher on my list than them [not by much, understand, but a little].

Anyways. Sara's really cool. She got me a shiny rock with "luck"
stamped on it. OK, it's a hunk of metal, but "shiny rock" sounds
cooler. Anyways. She drove me the 175 miles each way [from York to
Cambridge and back], and has really good taste in music, so the trip
was really good. I'm /really/ sorry that my interview took two and a
half hours instead of the half an hour I {was expecting, am used to},
for the duration of which she sat in her car outside doing her work on
"Death and Dying", phoning loads of people whining about how long I was
being, and other similar stuff.

I also saw someone who I haven't seen in ages, and wants me to do some
random work on the Quake2 engine. Some pretty cool stuff, actually
[ripping entities from a database instead of hard-coding them into
maps, and other similar things]. And other as-yet-unannounced things,
severally. If it comes to anything, you'll all know about it in a
few years.

Anyways. Sod this. I'm going to bed.


[2002-01-28]

Some things that annoy me
http://icculus.org/~chunky/rants
Nothing really specific; just things that annoy me when I'm cycling about,
a letter I've sent to a company that is now starting to really piss
me off, and I've moved my bt page there, too. I'm sure this page will
grow. And grow, and grow, and grow. But hey... what can you do, you know?


[2002-01-27]

The Chocfest
http://www.chocfest.york.ac.uk
Chocfest was yesterday, now. It was _seriously_ good fun. Random juggling
convention that we hold in York every year [yesterday was the seventh]. If
you've never been to a juggling convention, it's pretty much an excuse
for many many jugglers to get together, have a natter, and juggle lots
in the meantime.

At the end of the day, there's a show with some professionals on stage &
stuff. Half-way through a raffle was drawn, and I won a box of useless
tat. Cool day, though.


Something I should have done a long time ago

A fair while ago, now, I crashed my car. Was going up the motorway,
and a tyre blew out [100% no bugger's fault]. Bounced off the barrier
times, severally, and the car was absolutely totalled. By "fair while",
I mean it happened nearing the end of last August.

I was fine except for a case of whiplash, but the nice doctor gave me
happy drugs so it wasn't too much of a problem.

Anyways. Rather than an attempt at self-pity, this is more of a thanks.

Several people actually stopped. I'm some random guy with a destroyed
car standing by the side of the motorway, and three [IIRC] totally
independant people driving along stopped to make sure I was ok. At the
time, I didn't have a mobile, so one guy offered to let me use his. It's
the small things, you know? But a whole bunch of people basically stopped,
got out of their cars, wandered over to make sure I was ok, stood around
chatting with me for a bit [I'm guessing I was acting a little oddly],
and then when the police & ambulance arrived, they wandered off.

I'm afraid I only got the name of the guy who lent me his mobile; Steven
Marsh. Man, you're great.

Anyways. The point of all this? There are a few people I'd like to
really really thank, but I'm unlikely to ever be able to. Really can't
imagine they're reading this, but if they are, you know who you are. [by
Peterborough going north on the A1, beige Fiesta]. So this is also just
to say that there /are/ good people around. Several people really went
out of their way to make sure someone who they'd never met before and
will never meet again was OK, for a bare minimum of thanks. And that's
really amazing.

Thanks.


[2002-01-26]

Later today is the chocfest. The juggling convention in York every
year. It is cool.

I've been really geeky and put some "easter eggs" on my homepage [sorta]
that you'll be able to see if you're either a lynx user, or prepared
to trawl html source. Pointless, but it gives me another use for fugly
pie menus.

Quake2 is pretty funky. Relnev, you's good.


[2002-01-24]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/
Have a shufty at my homepage.
I kick Dan's ass

Yes. I've put a pie menu back on. looking at it another way, I'm writing
HTML to save myself from have to do any work today. Now /that's/ bad.


[2002-01-23]

Hmmm. Well, the schedulers don't work as planned, we're getting there,
but it's taking some time.

I've started keeping a log of issues, which I really should have done
before.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/project/notes.html

Coffee is still my bestest friend.

Just bought a PCI graphics card only to discover it's AGP. F**K. Now I
need to find someone who
1) Has a PCI TNT2 and an AGP MoBo
2) Wants a free upgrade
3) Is near to me right now so I can have this puppy working in the next
    couple days.

ChunkyLand has been modified so that the green terminal is now on top of
the orange one, as all it's currently used for is the entry in syslog.conf
that says:
kern.* /dev/console

Damn useful. In the meantime, I've basically been using my main machine
for IRC and web browsing, and doing all my work on the orange terminal, as
it's actually a damn nice toy to use. If you need to know what ChunkyLand
is, have a shufty at my homepage.

I need to find myself a job. I'm bored of job-hunting, and would like
to just go on with getting degree-type things done. I have an interview
with ARM on Wednesday, that Sara's driving me to [she's lovely, she
is]. A couple other random punters have contacted me, too, and I'm
specifically hoping the one in LA pans out. But let's see how things
turn out, shall we?

I see Dan's put a pie menu on his webpage. On general principle, I'm
going to have to re-write mine just so's I can feel superior again. [And
because he was nasty to me on one of Loki's newsgroups when I tried to
start a troll-fest]


[2002-01-21-ten-pm]

Depressing .plan update. Ignore if you're not interested in reading
depressing things in my day.

Just watched Amelie. It's a french film with english subtitles. It's
about a french lass, called, strangely enough, Amelie. One day, her life
changes radically. This film is actually _really_ _really_ good. It's
funny lots, often, and is generally really enjoyable.

Once again, I've been to the movies and cried over random couply
couples. I'm not currently part of any couple, and that really sucks. I'm
not planning on reducing myself to Prometheus' level, but I really hate
being single.

Hmmm. Here's how life seems to be for me: find a really nice girl,
with whom I get on really well, and decide I really like. Time spent in
relationship with her is indirectly proportional to how nice they are. I
can think of someone I went out with recently for just a few weeks,
and she really made a difference.

OTOH, if I can find someone who's a generally nasty lass who'll treat
me like shit, it'll last at least a couple of years.

No, scarily enough, I'm not bitter at all. Just sad that she's bitter
at me.


Hmmm. Haven't slept since I got up on Friday morning, except a couple
hours in one stint, and various "power outages" during some of my
lectures. You know what I mean if you've been there.

I think I shall go home and sleep.


[2002-01-21-just-after-midnight]

This .plan update dedicated to Sara, who cooked me a really nice dinner
last night. She won't understand a word of this as she's a non-tech,
but hey; it's better than never getting a mention at all, right?

Well. I've now done really rather a lot of work in the last few days,
at the expense of sleep, food. But not, it would seem, without the truly
premature emptiness of multiple jars of coffee. Ho, hum.

My project
http://icculus.org/~chunky/project/
That's what I've been working on. I've basically written the hooks
into the normal RTLinux scheduler, and implemented one policy that is
defined in my project [a deferred server], and one policy that's not
[a never server]. And it's actually pretty good fun.

You know, in a geeky sorta way.


[2002-01-18]

Bugger it.

Sara's now got my PlayStation, and it's staying there until I do some
bloody work. Grrr.


[2002-01-17]

Built a mySQL database on my machine at home this morning, Builds really
cleanly now. Nice.

Sara whupped me at BomberMan. Bugger.

Hmmmmm. Am being offered muchos cash to write a Quake2 mod. Hmmmmm.

If you're currently running FAKK2 on Linux and are seeing
total blowouts early in the game, have a shufty at my unofficial patch:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/fakk2/

Major kudos to Taylor Richards if it's actually working


[2002-01-12]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/playstationcam/
The PlayStationCam
That is all


[2002-01-09-after-exam]

Hmmm. Well, the exam's over. Lemme see. The exam started at 9; here's
the first entry in my timeline for today:
9.35am: Phone call from department wakes me from my sleep.

Ho, hum. What can you do, right?

Anyways. I think I failed it. Not by much, but a bit. Apparently, I may
or may not get penalised.

Got two e-mails from companys I've applied to for jobs recently. ARM
want to see me for a second interview [which is very very cool indeed],
and CodeMasters wondered if I'd consider testing for them, and if not,
could I please verify I'm l33t with C and C++...

Note for people on icculus.org: I've updated one to mutt that doesn't
have the recently-found remotely-exploitable security hole.


[2002-01-08]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/bt/
Why I hate my ISP
I'm just really annoyed at BT, now, and I'm hoping this puts them into
perspective for anyone who is considering purchasing their service.


[2002-01-07]

And I'm still not getting any work done. I re-built UnrealTournament to
include a splash screen again instead of doing any reading, today.

You have no idea how mind-bogglingly boring this course is. You may
think you do, but you don't.
Witness: http://icculus.org/~chunky/mis/mis-course.pdf


[2002-01-07-just-past-midnight]

Just for reference, I've given the playstation away until after the
exam. In the the hopes that in the 48 hrs I've got left before it,
I'll do some reading for it. I'm going to bed.


[2002-01-05]

Note to self: you have an exam on Wednesday, for which you must have read
on the order of 40M of text. Of which you've currently done, literally,
zero. So why, exactly, are you playing Metal Gear Solid?

Just thought I'd mention: if you're a user of icculus.org, I've actually
built tin and mutt in my home area. They're in ~chunky/bin. Mutt is the
latest stable [1.3.24i], and tin is the latest unstable [1.5.10]

Note: mutt doesn't have imap support; you don't need it. Get qmail to
deliver to a mailbox in your home, and then you won't be able to hammer
the imap server. Look at my .qmail to see how to do this with procmail.

For reference, I have the following in my .bash_profile:
export NNTPSERVER=news.lokigames.com
alias tin="tin -r"

You may also find this of use:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/configs


[2002-01-04]

Am working on a PlayStationCam. If other people are allowed webcams, I
should be allowed a PlayStationCam [since that's the only thing currently
plugged into my TV card (=]

Just for Mr Hendersa-man, you should know that yesterday I did this:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/iis
IIS is annoying me now