Diary January 2002

Saturday 26
Drove home, which took as long as getting there because it was absolutly chucking it down all the way, and there were gale force winds. Watched TV. Generally recovered.
Friday 25
Left work at lunch time, drove to Harpenden. The M25 was actually moving. The M1 wasn't. Went to Keble London Dinner, which was actually quite good. Stayed in Harpenden.
Wednesday 23
Does anybody anywhere know how to send packets with any IP options set from a Solaris box? I've tried everything I can think of, asked everyone I know who might know, serveral I know and definately won't know, and quite a few I don't know at all. Nobody knows. ... 3 hours and some evil hacks later ... I now know! You really don't want to. Improved sendip's ability to generate random IP adresses. And, er, thats about it, really.
Tuesday 22
Converted the rest of the tests to the new API with the same cunning sed. Ha, that's code reuse, that is. Got an email asking about sendip on Solaris, which turned into a 7 hour hacking session starting at about 6pm when I got in from work. SendIP now compiles and looks like it probably works on Solaris 8, as long as you don't try and send any IPv6 packets. Fixed at least 3 bugs the effect all arches in the process. 2.1 will get released next week, probably.
Monday 21
Converted one of our 15 tests to use a different API (to achieve exactly the same thing). Much deeply cunning sed was involved. as they have removed a pointless level of indirection. That really was the highlight of the day.
Sunday 20
Played Civ. Finished upgrading heaven. Experimented with 2.5.2 and gcc 3.0.3 with very little success. gcc doesn't compile. 2.5.2 does with suitable patches. It might even boot, maybe...
Saturday 19
Played with the webcam some more. It now autorefreshes in some browsers on a good day. NTL's connectivity has been being randomly crap all day, which didn't help. Started upgrading heaven to redhat 7.2. Played some more Civ. Went to bed by 5am, just.
Friday 18
Did work. Played Civ. Watched TV.
Thursday 17
Did work. Went shopping (bought more deicer). Watched TV.
Wednesday 16
Ran out of deicer. Did work. Watched TV.
Tuesday 15
Made up most of the hours from the last week, especially yesterday. Left work around 20:30. This was largely because I completely failed to notice what time it was. As a result, didn't do a whole lot else.
Monday 14
Returned the hire car. Had an almost entirely unproductive day at work. Nothing seemed to want to work. Got phoned up just before lunch to say that my car is finally ready, but they can't deliver it until Friday. Bloody great. Spent the afternoon figuring out how to get to the middle of Portsmouth without a car. Ended up getting a lift to the station, getting a train that failed to stop even though it was meant to, getting another train back, and ending up with 10 minutes to get 500m. And they wonder why nobody uses trains. Still, got the car back, and it seems to work.
Saturday 12
Got the web cam working. This wasn't as easy as it might have been. The data coming out of the camera is in a *really* wierd format, and ImageMagick is horribly broken. It turns out that building an image in memory and converting that to a ppm mostly works, with occasional overruns. ImageMagick can then convert this to a jpeg. Whoever thought RGRGRGRGRG....../GBGBGBGB.... was a sensible data order should be shot. Spent ages figuring out how you are meant to do p