Diary September 2001

Sunday 30

Complete waste of a day.

Saturday 29

I'm sure today must have happened at some point, but I seem to have missed it.

Friday 28

Bah. Humbug. Our customer didn't sign the contract. This means I might not have anythiing useful to do on Monday. Bah. Got rid of the cold though. And fixed a rather silly bug caused by Adobe changing the PDF spec between acrobat 4 and 5 without telling anyone.

Wednesday 26

Almost entirely uneventful day. Almost got rid of the cold.

Tuesday 25

Spent most of the day decoding JPEGs by hand in an attempt to work out how to embed them in PDFs. The spec is kindof vague. Managed it in the end. Still got a cold.

Monday 24

Fixed a customer's bug within 2 minutes of arriving at work. Spent most of the rest of the day making sure it was really fixed. Oh, and chasing obscure bugs caused by the fact that x>>32 is not defined when x is a 32 bit integer (in practice, it appears to be ==x on 32bit platforms and ==0 on 64bit platforms, which makes sense). Oh, and one caused by a bug in M$ Visual C++ where doing ul = UL leaves UL and ul having different values. (ul is an unsigned char *, UL is an unsigned char [800]), the effect is what you would expect ul = (unsigned char *)*(long *)UL to do. Still got a bastard of a cold.

Sunday 23

Housemate's bird turned up. Went down with a bastard of a cold. Between them these prevented anything even vaguely productive from happening.

Saturday 22

Spent most of the day tidying and cleaning the house because one of my housemate's birds is visiting tommorrow. No fun at all. Grumpph.

Friday 21

Took the Fiat to a scrapyard. It shall be no more. Attempted to find a map shop in Southampton, and completely failed. However, I did discover that the maps I was attempting to get didn't exist anyway.

Thursday 20

Somebody came and 'fixed' the oven today. Haven't tested it yet, butthey left a very long and complicated set of instructions how to light it. The Fiat failed its MOT due to a rusty front subframe, which would cost about 200 quid to fix. Bugger.

Wednesday 19

Waited for somebody to come and fix the dishwasher all morning, which they eventaully did. So worked a bit late. Nothing very exciting happened. Actually managed an evening in for the first time in *ages*.

Tuesday 18

Fixed the Fiat's breaks. This took all evening, an we're not exactly sure how we did it, but they now work.

Monday 17

Did some more tot he Fiat. Well, spent an hour figuring out how to get the wheelnuts off, then ran out of time and went to band smelling of WD40 and antifreeze. Fantastic.

Sunday 16

Watched the GP in a pub. It wasn't that exciting. Band in Mottisfont Abbey grounds for some religious thing at 6pm, which was bloody freezing. Other than that spent most of the day attempting to recover from last night. Got a the sort of mail I *like*. It read:

Subject: Thanks (Sendip and Packprint)

Sir -

What terrific utilities! Many thanks!

Nice.

Saturday 15

NTL actually turned up and gave up cable TV and cable phone. But not cable modem. Aparently they need to drill a whole in the wall to do that, so we need to ask the landlord. And they didn't have the modem with them anyway - aparently it is in the post. Tested the Fiat. Amazingly it seems to work. The brakes are still broken, but the exhaust appears to have held up, which is good. Went out on the piss with people from work in Winchester.

Friday 14

Found the bug. Within 2 minutes of getting to work. fprintf was buffer overflowing (don't ask). Might even have fixed it by the end of the day, but mostly spent the day fixing other bugs and adding random possibly useful feachurs. Not that I actually did much productive work anyway. Clear some sendip mail backlog. Reports on 2.2-pre2 are all good, so 2.0 could well appear shortly. NTL are meant to be giving us a loverly cable modem tommorrow. Yerright.

Thursday 13

Was a bit late to work. Put the caar through the carwash so I could see the damage from yesterday better. It is not good. Attempted to fix the fiat's exhaust. It needs a new stud (2 are ok, but one the bolt tightens infinately) and a new gasket, but we kludged round it, and it might just work. Unfortunately it got dark, wet and windy on us so I didn't test it. Went for a very nice but rather expensive Chinese in Winchester. Spent the entire day at work chasing a memory corruption bug round and round in circles and ended up getting almost exactly nowhere. GRR.

Wednesday 12

OK, it seems that the terrorists were simultaneously incredibly clever and rather stupid. It seems somewhat unlikely that somebody who had the degree of organization to crash 4 planes at roughly the same time, and the right kind of mind to actually think of doing it, would not leave a car with translated airplane manuals sitting around for the FBI to find. Ho hum. The reaction is, frankly incredible. The problem is not security on internal US flights - at least, not the way people are claiming it is. If somebody is determined to smuggle weapons onto a plane you can't stop them. However, if the door between the pilot and the passengers wasn't there... Anyway. Acquired a dent in my car (not the Fiat) due to a rather large branch landing on the bonnet in the car park at work. Not impressed. Left work bloody late too trying to get the AIX laptop I fixed yesterday to be useful enough for a customer meeting tommorrow. Life sucks sometimes. Booked the Fiat in for an MOT next thursday - so I've got a week to get it roadworth basically. Could be interesting.

Tuesday 11

Some terrorists flew some planes into the World Trade Centre, the pentagon, and god knows what other bits of the US. Nice stunt. This caused the internet to grind to a halt. Fixed an AIX laptop with some WD40 and a bit of good luck. Picked up the Fiat, and towed it back to Hursley.

Monday 10

Went to look at a free car somebody at work is giving away. Its a Fiat Uno 45, 1.0 litre. Pile of crap. But no rust, and it works. And its free. So I'll take it, fix it and flog it for a couple of hundred quid. If anyone wants it, you know my email address. Sorry about the missing diary entries of late. I've been a bit of a stressed bunny.