| Nik pointed me at this rather excellent Edward Gorey-esque Flash thing, and for some reason didn't blog it himself. So I did. [02:39] [0 comments]
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Wednesday 27 June 2001
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| You know you've been programming all night when you start mentally arguing with the strange ads that Eudora 5 is showing. "Click here to help sea turtles survive!", it says. But which sea turtles? I don't want to save the stupid or annoying sea turtles, and I bet the good ones don't need my help. They'd probably be offended if I offered. "What, you think there's something wrong with me?", they'd say, "I'm perfectly happy with my life. Bugger off." [11:19] [4 comments]
| Rate of work is looking promising for this recent deadline. Caffeine inspires drudge-work, and uninspires creativity [09:46] [0 comments]
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| Oh, another couple of fights, as well, from the same place... a game and a movie. [03:20] [0 comments]
| I just wrote some log-parsing scripts to see how people were getting to my site. Rather disturbing results, on the search terms. Second most popular was "stupid tests". I'll be keeping the most popular search term to myself. [02:21] [0 comments]
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Tuesday 26 June 2001
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| There should probably be some fighting as well. Mm, foolish Flash. [21:42] [0 comments]
| I just noticed there are no lobsters in my Blog. A disgrace that must be remedied at once. [21:40] [0 comments]
|  A new deadline for myself; all the coordinates will be relative by the end of Thursday. They will. Really. [20:33] [0 comments]
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| Hoorah! Due to being a curmudgeon today, I scored my first email pepper, in griping about someone asking for a hax0ring mentor on a mailing list I'm on. In other news, I'm trying to get the security of this server strengthened a bit, but I'm being blocked by my wife who thinks it's more important to cater to stupid people who are piggybacking on the server for free. Grumble grumble. [02:05] [0 comments]
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Sunday 24 June 2001
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| I just saw Swordfish. What an utterly fantastic movie. The acting was mediocre, the plot revolved around a dimly hidden twist, and the technical stuff was atrocious - worse, even, than in Hackers. Really, the jargon was fantastically entertaining, the computer-screen effects were very similar to those in Hackers - it all came together to make a very funny movie indeed. Perhaps the finest moment, however, was the first twenty seconds, in which John Travolta declares that Hollywood makes crap. Exquisite irony. All
the hilarious foolishness aside, it was actually a decently entertaining movie. If you're one to get annoyed by technical faux-pas then you might do well to avoid it. [10:24] [0 comments]
|  Today's Glyph may require referencing the 16th June Blog-entry to comprehend. [10:14] [0 comments]
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| Hooray, I have a new LinkSys network card for my laptop. Works well, installed easily. Now all I need is more than 2 frames per second in 3D stuff. [04:26] [0 comments]
| Eudora 5, by the by, is really aggravating. I want someone like Mr Putty to write a minimalist mail client. Support for attachments, and support for filters, and, dammit, support for the font Terminal 6. I was pleased when I found Eudora 5 supports Terminal font. I was horrified to find 'smallest' being about size 9 or 10. Must we all have the eyesight of voles? [04:18] [0 comments]
| Progressive - the car insurance company that, in their TV ads, imply that you can deal with them online. Perhaps you can, but then they ask you to fax them stuff, and then they send you a bill for not having faxed them stuff after you do, and then you fax it again, and they bill again, and then you fax again. It's all very exciting. Doubly so when you have to use a computer with a failing power-supply to send a fax. [03:39] [0 comments]
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Saturday 23 June 2001
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| An interesting way of propounding enlightened selfishness struck me in conversation last night, after the party. Give a decent man a fish, he'll eat for a day and give you something when you need it. Teach a decent man to fish, he'll eat for life, and teach you something when you need it. Give an average man a fish, he'll eat for a day and complain when you don't give him another tomorrow. Teach an average man to fish, and he'll whine if you don't teach him something else with more value and less effort involved. [23:40] [0 comments]
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 I went to a party last night, without even being dragged by my wife. What can I say? Kudos to the party-advertising skills of Tanya, I suppose. Also, as it transpires, nothing she had said the party would be was false; thence, kudos to her party-forming skills also. An interesting eclectic bunch of people; magicians, fencers and geeks, each with apparently their own odd side-skills. Me, I'm still wondering about the mechanisms behind the sleight-of-hand. [22:17] [0 comments]
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Friday 22 June 2001
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 Apparently I've angered the gods of technology with my unprovoked venom at a certain domain registration company. Lightning strikes, power goes out, ravenblack.net goes down and doesn't come back up. Marvellous. 12 hours later, it's brought back up manually, because that's when we could get access to the place with the server. But that's not all, oh no - my most-used computer has also had its PSU fried, such that the machine will work for a while, and then arbitrarily switch off whenever I'm doing something important. Marvellous. [23:34] [0 comments]
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| The latest networksolutions idiocy - my fax doesn't count because it wasn't on headed paper! Not that they've ever had anything from me on headed paper, so it couldn't possibly prove anything... And not that I couldn't fake headed paper on a fax exactly the same way I faked my signature onto it, or anything. My, they are truly the champions of suck. [01:27] [0 comments]
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Thursday 21 June 2001
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| I've also been warned that the ravenblack.net server may be losing its line at some point in the near future. Hopefully that will coincide with the timing of getting it a new, better, line. [22:41] [0 comments]
| Hm, I'm vaguely collaborating on a song-and-Flash of DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL, possibly the new catch-phrase to replace All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Will we finish it? Probably not. [22:39] [3 comments]
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| So, Warlocks went a bit bonkers earlier due to someone messing with SMTP on the server. I fixed the damage, and changed it so it wouldn't happen again. Then I went and fixed a couple of things with Motepad, making it yet another 3K-or-so smaller in the process. All of this, of course, has prevented much work on Prelude from taking place. [05:13] [0 comments]
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Wednesday 20 June 2001
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| Grarh! networksolutions requiring me to fax them things, in this day and age, in order for me to be able to work around stuff. The fax is apparently to confirm that I'm me. Because obviously a faxed signature couldn't have been, say, copied from another document or anything. Even though that is, in fact, what I did, because I don't have a proper fax machine. [21:03] [0 comments]
|  Another movie-based Glyph, today. I'm programming. Stop whining. [08:47] [0 comments]
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Tuesday 19 June 2001
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| Something I should blog for my own future reference; how to do evil with the Windows kernel - do not click this without first disabling JavaScript. Note to self: you took a copy of this page, and named it kernel32.txt, in the documents. [21:30] [0 comments]
| Hoorah, the laptop returns from its sojourn. [19:09] [0 comments]
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| After a lot of heavy debugging, Prelude is now successfully rendering a load of mess into a window. Unfortunately, that's not quite the desired result, but it's a lot closer than I had earlier, so... good. [10:17] [0 comments]
|  Starting the day with a lovely movie-based Glyph. [08:14] [0 comments]
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| Ahh, surely there can be nothing more fun than trying to trace the mismatch in a binary file using nothing more than a hex editor, Calculator, and some coffee-fed eyes. Except for 90% of things. [07:40] [0 comments]
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Monday 18 June 2001
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| Well, not quite caught up on the deadline, but pretty close, and I think I can safely blame the dying laptop for the incompletion. Still, I suppose I'll have to program hard after I sleep. Sigh. [11:48] [0 comments]
|  The hours drift by, while I try to catch up on that missed deadline of mine... If I can get it done before I go to bed, I'm caught up, since I wasn't intending to program at the weekend. Here's today's glyph, anyway. This one has a double-implication, even, which is nice. [11:39] [0 comments]
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Sunday 17 June 2001
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| Well, that appeared to work rather fantastically. So much so that I've also written an archive-search script because it seemed easy. [11:05] [0 comments]
|  Testing the archiving code, which should be archiving anything more than 4 days old, I supply today's Glyph. [09:31] [0 comments]
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| For some reason my wife brought me a drink of coffee-vanilla-maple-sugar-lime. And half a pepper, but that wasn't in the drink. She is strange. The drink was strange. The pepper wasn't really strange. I don't recommend the drink, though sans-lime I think it would be admirable programmer-juice. [06:24] [0 comments]
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Saturday 16 June 2001
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| It's still Friday until I go to bed, I tell you! My deadline isn't up yet. This is quite a challenging deadline, all the same. [08:51] [0 comments]
| For a superior movie, try this Flash thing, the Star Wars Rap. Link provided by my politer half. [08:21] [0 comments]
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| Tomb Raider, the movie, was poor, as Nik predicted it would be. Not through fault of the writing, nor the acting, but rather the atrocious work of the director. Not more than a sixth of a second passes during an action scene without the shot being replaced by one of someone's eye, or gun, or kneecap, as an extreme closeup. So, Simon West - a director to avoid in future. [08:18] [0 comments]
|  It's after midnight; time for today's glyph. [08:05] [0 comments]
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| Anti-hax0r thought for the day; when hax0rs have firewalls, it can make doing mean things to them tricky. However, many hax0rs run unpatched Windows, behind their firewall. Since they are portscanning, their firewall will allow responses to come through. Therefore, what is required is a service that responds to commonly-scanned ports with a malformed and destructive packet. Doesn't seem as though it would be too tricky to do. Hm. [01:27] [0 comments]
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Friday 15 June 2001
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 The first piece of semi-abstract art is now produced. Perhaps I shall do one a day; a regular blog feature. Until people beg me not to. The mouseover text is very much a part of the piece. [23:36] [0 comments]
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| Hoorah, it compiles! Of course, it doesn't link yet. That would be far too clever. But still, only 31 link errors, which are mostly unwritten functions. Soon be done. *cough* [18:30] [0 comments]
| On the upside, going to bed annoyed and recently-caffienated has caused me to awaken earlier than time normally begins, already up for programming. Not only that, but it apparently caused me to have dreams inspiring me to interesting modern art involving simple shapes. [14:41] [0 comments]
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| Garrh. Having failed to be inspired to program all day, I finally got a cup of coffee and set about beginning, only to find all the libraries are configured inappropriately on this computer for this project. Damn you, laptop! Damn your paltry battery to hell! The artificial deadline works very well, but the breaking equipment negates that. [09:11] [0 comments]
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| Anti-hax0r thought for the day; I would like to make a fake NetBIOS service, that apparently shares one file which would essentially be a passive trojan. The hax0r would download the file, and run it, upon which it would appear to do the expected thing - extract some files. It would also modify their autoexec.bat to fux0r their system when it's rebooted. Surely this wouldn't be illegal - owning such a program isn't illegal, and I certainly wouldn't be distributing it. Only having it 'stolen'. [07:15] [0 comments]
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| How annoying - apparently ICQ have started recycling their numbers. I discovered this by seeing an old friend appear; one who I thought must have died, as they suddenly stopped emailing a couple of years ago. It turns out that friend's ICQ number is now used by a Russian gentleman who speaks in broken English, and who was no doubt mightily confused by my greeting him like an old friend and telling him I thought he was dead. [06:57] [0 comments]
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| Ah, superheated water, I'm told. What fun. I'm glad it explodes, rather than waiting 'til I drink it, in that case. [05:52] [0 comments]
| The mystery of the exploding coffee. What happened here; a cup of water, possibly already warm, was microwaved for 1:40. It was removed from the microwave with no untoward effects. A teaspoon of coffee granules was added, and the mix suddenly went insane and started leaping out of the cup, rather like a shaken carbonated beverage. But with more scalding and staining properties. Can anyone explain why this would happen? [05:39] [2 comments]
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| It turns out the reason I couldn't remember whether I like the "peppered" or "original" Tofurky Jurky was because I liked them equally. They still seem awfully expensive for the quantity of food present, though. If anyone happens to know how to make fake turkey out of tofu, gluten and beans, do let me know. [04:33] [0 comments]
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| Pleasingly, IBM's warranty is a good one. They pay to ship it to them, they pay to ship it back, and a three-day turnaround, allegedly. [01:12] [0 comments]
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Thursday 14 June 2001
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| Oh joy. My laptop has decided that more errors on bootup is a great idea. 173, 192 and 163. Thirty Helens agree, it's unlikely this is something I can fix myself. [20:02] [0 comments]
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| An entertaining hax0r was trying to get through my firewall tonight. An oblivious one, who didn't notice my poking his firewall in a mirror image of how he was poking mine. 216.51.91.226 is the person, and 216.51.91.225 is their preconfigured firewall. Wimp. [09:31] [0 comments]
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| And now is the minute of discovering it works perfectly. I am king. [08:52] [0 comments]
| Midnight has turned; now is the hours of testing the script's ability to start a new day. [08:50] [0 comments]
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| By the way, don't get Clairol's blue-black hair dye, unless you actually don't want any blue involved. The actual colour produced is better described as old-man black. [03:51] [2 comments]
| I got the fantastic Playstation game Evil Zone today, enabling me to extract images of the suit I want. I must get a sound-capable Bleem for maximum enjoyment of the poorness that is Evil Zone. [03:43] [0 comments]
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| This is rather pretty. Thanks for that, Eperdu. [03:33] [1 comment]
| How ironic - I've started a blog in an attempt to encourage myself to do some work by imposing arbitrary deadlines that I announce I'll have stuff done by, and I've just wasted the entire morning writing blog-construction code. That's the way to not procrastinate, eh lads? [00:40] [0 comments]
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Wednesday 13 June 2001
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| Somewhat amusingly (in a sick sort of way) Nik broke his script while creating a link to RavenBlog. It's like karma, man! As a price for forcing me to waste my morning blogging, all your works shall be in vain. [22:20] [0 comments]
| Okay, here goes with the anti-procrastination measures. If I don't have Prelude back working at approximately its previous state by Friday, I'll... um... do something nasty. [22:02] [0 comments]
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Ah, the 
Today's Glyph really is 