Seems like there's a hole in my jeans

Journal Tomble's Journal: Seems like there's a hole in my jeans 4

Journal by Tomble on Saturday May 29, 2004 @08:26PM

(or so it seems)
Miscellany for all the family; batteries not included

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It happened again today, twice! WTF is it all about? Is this what GMHowell would call "a clusterfuck"? Pah. I'm supposing the URLs for the comments are going wrong after a few previews. Or perhaps it's due to having my IP change between clicking "reply" and clicking "preview" or "submit". Who knows. Obviously you buggers don't! :P

(Since writing that, it's just happened again. Don't think it's the IP address. And happened again, so I don't think it's getting the URLs screwed up. But other people are commenting in other JEs and the front page, so...)

What can I say. Leviramsey recently revived that idea of the JE circle migrating from /. to some new site of our own (perhaps one where we can shut out all the stupid ACs). The idea has more and more appeal every day, I think. Meanwhile, I have various comments and replies I can't post. How frustrating.

Creatine
(deferred for future JE)

I think you are a plant
Recently got around to repotting one of my tiny bristlecone pine seedlings. It had been in one of those little plastic film cases (with holes punched in the bottom, of course!) for about 3 years, but wasn't looking too well. It seems to be doing well now, which is nice. Often things I repot drop dead pretty quickly. I'll have to get around to doing the other one, and put those photos I took on my website. Speaking of which,

MMSS
My lame website management thingy (I've never been 100% sure WTF it actually is, my best guess is it's a "CMS"), MMSS has turned into a massive PITA. After I finished completing the changes I needed to make so it could take page layout info files in the form of configuration data (which could be written and edited by scripts) rather than m4 macros, I found that although it finally worked as I wanted it to in functional terms, it did so so slowly that my old ZX Spectrum could probably have done the job faster. My Linux box is old, but not that old!

So I came to the conclusion that doing the page generation in m4 rather than Perl was in fact a humungous mistake. The plan is now to get Perl to parse the config files, and use m4 purely to extract inline commands from the included blocks of text, which it should at least manage to do at a reasonable speed (it did OK whilst the tast was trivial, and I think this is trivial enough for it!)

Unfortunately, untill I finish that (and I've kind of lapsed in the past few weeks), I can only update my site using the older version of MMSS (which worked but wasn't so slow). Unfortunately, I've mostly forgotten how that worked...

Good thing I didn't suggest to Sol that she ran her new website with it! :D OK, I mentioned it, but in the context of not using it. That's OK, isn't it? Isn't it? Pah. Speaking of which, perhaps Sol could use her domain to hang a new email address off of. That's probably be handy for spam, but I don't think I know any more on the subject than she does unfortunately.

Something
Insert interesting content here

With friends like these...
Was discussing with JtS (well failing to, thanks to the stupid /. bugs) criteria for friending. FWIW, I tend to friend a lot of semi-random people who I spot on the front page who strike me as like-minded, and usually (not always!) I friend my fans*. Either way, I normally check up what sort of person they are, looking at any JEs they might have, and most of their still-visible comments, to see if they're who I think they are. I occasionally friend FOAFs, but there's so many of them, and my (mild) synaesthesia makes a lot of people's names look the same to me. EG: GMontag accuses CyranoVR and DaytonCIM (IIRC) of being the same person, but I confuse DaytonCIM with DubiousDave. I also used to confuse JtS with StB. There are others.

(*-Speaking of which, I have some new fans. Hello new fans!)

But most of all, I'm more than a little hesitant to friending FOAFs because frankly you lot, SOME OF YOUR MATES ARE BLOODY BARKING! OTOH, I can't complain too much. For instance, one person I friended (not telling who, ha!) has a link that resolves to tubgirl.com in their signature. AFAICT tubgirl.com is no longer available, so perhaps he made the link knowingly, just to tease people- "Haha, just imagine if that had worked" kind of thing. Speaking of which:

Terminology
The term "Troll" is used for people who say things they probably don't mean to trick people into making angry responses. It's also been used around here for such things as people who trick people into connecting to goatse.cx and other such horrors. I propose that such things don't really count as trolls as such, as the tricks are with obfuscated/unknown URLs etc rather than what a traditional troll uses.

So, in the same way as we have words Virus, Trojan, Worm, for concepts that are fairly similar but somewhat different, I propose that for people who give links to Goatse, Tubgirl, etc, we use the name "Grue". As in the creatures that you get eaten by in certain games if you wander around in the dark. How about it?

What am I doing?
Hmm, I knew I had stuff to talk about, but my brain's a bit futzed ATM. Did I mention I slept for 14 hours? I did. I must have been quite tired (see previous JE! Yes, I'm such a muppet sometimes).

Things I have been up to, apart from recently trying to break Insanecarbonbasedlif's cypher (groan) and emailing Interrobang:

Hoping to either install a Jabber client, or write my own. Unfortunately, most existing Jabber clients are either not runnable due to their requirements, or strike me as yik. And most GUI toolkits clash with my sensibilities or requirements. I'm considering XForms (the recently GPLd GUI toolkit, not the stupidly misnamed XML forms thing) at the moment. Still, I don't know much about the Jabber protocol- it's documented, but that spec's HUGE.
Making Interrobang a Mix CD. Apparently arrived today! Or yesterday. Hooray!
Thinking about changing my Atoms clone (SDL-Toms) to be a client-server game, rather than hotseat (you play, then they play, etc). This could have allowed for chatting, etc, which would have been a nice feature. Unfortunately I got a headache trying to figure out some of the details, and got sidelined designed a neat new authentification system. I might go back to that later
Taking photos- did I mention I got a neat little cheap camera for my birthday? I did. One of them 10-quid keyring cameras. The plan had been to try to write a Linux driver for it, and if I couldn't it'd be so cheap it wouldn't matter. As it happened, there's already drivers for them. Numerous cameras (as I suspected) have exactly the same cheap chipset as this, which Gphoto supports as an "Argus DC-1510", and there's a kernel driver to get the webcam functionality! Sadly doesn't seem to last long on the battery, and I couldn't get new AAA ni-cads (everything seems to be NiMH nowadays).
Trying to create a replacement bookmarks server for the Dillo browser. Got some done, and got positive feedback from the alternative Dillo mailing list, but had some points I was uncertain about, and I don't know how to make Perl modules (I don't have anything more advanced than the Llama book, and I'm a bit short of funds to buy more). I might get something from the library.
Still trying to cut back on my Slashdot usage. Managed for a couple of weeks after I switched off the JE notification (which is still off ATM, the barrage of messages had been driving me mental). But then it started creeping back, more and more... I had a few days a week or so back when I didn't really post anything. But soon, I'll be cutting back big time! More on this later!
Trying to upgrade stuff. Debian/Stoneage has XFree4.1, which seems to be very BUGGY. I eventually got around to upgrading the Xserver to the 4.3 version from Debian/Testing ("Sarge"), and I've not had it crash since (that got to be a MASSIVE PITA, I'd usually lose something important in the process). But I still have to upgrade the X libraries too, and there's lots of old programs that still needs "xlib6g", which is from years back. I've got most of them uninstalled or upgraded now. Some of the remaining packages include various crappy versions of crappy Java. Perhaps somebody can enlighten me a moment: If I install either Mozilla or Firehamster (whatever that spinoff is called this week), to cut out having to use Konqueror (which I had originally thought was stable, HAH!!), will it come with its own Java implementation, or will I have to have one of my own installed? Hmm, actually, now I think of it, I don't have Java switched on now anyways. But sometimes I'd like to. Anybody?
Thinking of writing a TODO list manager. I could really do with something like that.
Probably something I've forgotten. Isn't there always.

Interesting news 'bout me
(now also deferred for future JE, where it belongs! You'll keep...)

Passing shots

If gay marriage is outlawed, only gay outlaws will marry.
Um...
There were many more, but the dog ate them.
Bugger.

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