Diary October 2001

Wednesday 31

Failed to leave work until 7:30, which was kindof careless. As a result got almost nothing useful done at all in the evening. Started upgrading fileutils, but make check fails so I'm not sure this is a terribly good idea... Also downloaded the latest xine for experimentation.

Tuesday 30

Upgraded glibc on oakley. This was rather harder than it should've been due to the fact that 'make install' can only ever work if you have a statically linked /bin/ln. This fact is not documented anywhere as far as I can tell. The reason is, it installs everything (including /lib/ld-linux.so.2) then rm's the symlinks in /lib and recreates them. Which fails because it just rmed the library ln is linked against... DUH.

Monday 29

Bizarre day. My brother randomly sent me an SMS saying he was engaged. Spent most of the afternoon in a conference call that achieved absolutely nothing/ apart from deciding that the people who needed to be spoken to were on holiday, which everybody knew before the start of the call anyway.

Saturday 27

Cleared mail backlog, did some sendip stuff. Pending unexpected happenings, 2.0 should be out within a week, maybe.

Friday 26

Day off work due to having no sleep last night and still feeling broken. Didn't get a muge amount done though as I didn't get up until 3pm and then didn't have the energy to do anything productive anyway. Discovered whow out of practice at playing bass trombone I am.

Thursday 25

Let work earlyish due to feeling wierd. This turned out to be food poisoning. Bleugh.

Sunday 21

Reinstalled bounce (my windows box). This really did take all day.

Saturday 20

Got up at about 5pm. Went to see The Fast and the Furious. Which took until 2am for various reasons. Firstly, we were aiming for the 7.15 showing, which existed on the internet but not at the cinema. So we ended up sitting in a pub for 2 hours (after driving round Southampton for half an hour and failing to find anything to do) and going to the 9:45 showing. Then I went the wrong way on the way home due to being on autopilot and forgetting to go via Winchester. Then it was patchy thick fog.
The film wasn't really worth it. Too American - it lacked any decent cars. Whatever you do to a Honda Civic, it is still not a good car. And racing in straight lines is boring. Oh, and a truck driver, when having his windscreen removed by a grabby thing would probably emergency stop, not just sit there and take it. But apart from that...

Friday 19

Totally unproductive day. Spent most of it catching up on mail I haven't read in the last 3 days. It rained. Lots.

16-18

CICS testing is so far rather good fun. There are rather a lot of bugs, though.

Monday 15

Spent a day trying to work out how to detect when somebody changes slides when all you have is a unstable grab of their monitor input. Managed to get reasonably accurate at it, but there's still sone changes I can't detect. Which is very annoying.

Sunday 14

Sectionals at 11:30am followed by lunch with parents. By this time it was raining again so we went to Beaulieu motor museum, which was extremely interesting. Didn't leave there until 5pm. Didn't get home until gone 7 due to the M27 not moving. Spent the evening in front of the TV, recovering.

Saturday 13

Warm and sunny. Missed most of it due to still being in bed though. Parents turned up around 5ish. Played at Romsey URC, remarkably well. Then stayed in the pub until closing and got pretty pissed.

Tuesday 9

Did som extremely evil (but not remotely useful) things with netscape plugins. Had an almost entirely unproductive day. Got told about a very very strange bug in sendip which causes it to segfault somewhere deep in the depths of glibc, but haven't had time to investigate it.

Monday 8

Got volunteered to do CICS Usability Testing next week, which will either be incredibly boring or incredibly good fun. Spent most of the afternoon chasing around after various video cables, monitor splitters, and long lengths of BNC. The wiring in my office is now officially confusing. At least, I'm confused... It does work though.

Saturday 6

Spent most of the day asleep or in front of the TV. Played in Soton docks, for a ship that was delayed by an hour, and came back thoroughly cold and hungry. Went to see Driven. It was rather lacking in the reality department, but otherwise okish.

Friday 5

Still no news on the bug. Fixed sendip so it now handles data properly, and fixed the Wake On Lan script.

Thursday 4

Wrote the beginings of a netscape plugin to do some very sick things with ActiveX components. This was not fun. Not at all. The guy who claimed to have found the bug yesterday didn't get back to us.

Wednesday 3

Warm and sunny. Wrote a program to grab a JPEG and a TIFF from the scan convertor and in doing so found at least 4 separate bugs in the (binary only) DLLs that came with it. Bloody marvellous. Our customer reported a bug at 4:30. By 5:30 we had concluded that the 5 lines of code they were reporting a bug in could not possibly produce the results they claimed to be getting in any circumstances ever, and we couldn't persuade them to either. So we sent them an email say basically "You're wrong" and went home. Twisted an ankle playing tennis after work. Oh well.

Tuesday 2

Spent the morning moving a computer, monitor, CCTV cam, scan convertor and other crap around, and the afternoon playing with it. This was suprisingly quite fun. Did a little opium hacking.

Monday 1

Housemate's friend of the female variety turned up. She's actually rather nice. Which is good, 'cos she's staying for a fortnight, aparently. Could be interesting. Spent most of the day at work playing with numbers to work out just how much of the work we've already done for our customer isn't going to be paid for. Played with a scan converter a bit.