Finger info for chunky@icculus.org...



[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


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

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

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 York

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
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
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]

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.
Random things

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
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

Major kudos to Taylor Richards if it's actually working


[2002-01-12]

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]

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:
The whole course in a nutshell



[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:
My 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:
IIS is annoying me now

When this .plan was written: 2002-02-05 14:42:11
.plan archives for this user are here (RSS here).
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