Monday 31st January 2005
Song: Brian McFadden - Walking Into Walls
Tonight was fun. First day back at uni. Mondays is still my day off, and is still the day I get to help out the first years' programming.
I wasn't sure what was happening as I knew they had a test today, and as I found out last year we're not allowed to invigilate. So I went along anyway. Turns out there were normal labs on from 4 - 6, and then at 6 - 8, there was the test. However, owing to the lack of staff, we were asked if we wanted to stay to help out. Still not sure actually if we were allowed, but it was quite good fun, actually.
Highlight of it was walking men to the toilet...
This aside though, it wasn't bad. So many questions. I'm sure we've all had that exam where we ask a question to an invigilator about something, and they say, "Sorry, I'm not allowed to say", and then you normally hate them for the duration. Well, I got to be that person, which was nice. I felt kind'a bad actually. This one guy who had a mistake which allowed his program to compile, but wasn't actually what the exam question asked. And he was so annoyed, and really couldn't see what the problem was. I really felt sorry for him after about 30 mins of him being stuck on it, heh.
My legs ached a lot, I'm so out of shape. Was quite a nice evening though. I've spent far too long sat here by myself.
Charlotte saw Fightstar's video today, and wants to come see them with me. I'm kind'a weary though that she'll hear another song and decide they're crap, heh. Still... would be cool if I did go with her. :)
Friday 28th January 2005
Song: Busted - Mrs Robinson
Ooo!
Just seen Fightstar on TV. Far too exciting. So very not Busted. :)
Thursday 27th January 2005
Song: Easyworld - All I Can Remember
Today I had my first time of "borrowing" someone else's internet connection. I went to visit my grandparents and took my iBook as there were a few things I wanted to do (including stuff in preparation for starting uni), and much to my excitement. Someone over the road appeared to have a wireless network set up. No password, encryption malarky, just one click and I was away.
I didn't push my luck with it, as I don't know enough about those things to know quite how safe I was, but I wasn't silly enough to try and poke around on anything internally.
Anyway, it was exciting for me.
Tuesday 25th January 2005
Song: The Corrs - Baby Be Brave
Crikey, the Mac OS X really is exactly how I think a computer should be. I know I keep talking about it, but it is *that* good!
I just took it downstairs to print. Plugged in our USB printer cable, and tadaa! It was set up and ready to print. There was no "Please insert disk labled Epson C62 Printer Drivers", there was no stupid bubble with a popping sound effect as it said "Your printer is now ready to use" that wont dissapear until I clicked on it. It just... worked.
I generally understand the system behind it all, as it's BSD running CUPS, but my linux setup took forever, and of course Windows needs drivers, followed by a slow progress bar, often followed by a reboot. (C'mon, you don't really enjoy those reboots, do you?)
After a minute or two, I'd calmed down, as all it was, was cups... so I calmed a bit, but then I clicked on this thing and it had the Epson utility that tells you how much ink is left and lets you do a nozel test etc. I was in awe!
I'll shut up now.
Monday 24th January 2005
Song: Hoobastank - Crawling In The Dark
A few weeks ago, I wrote quiet a long update. It was quite moany. I then lost it as I pressed backspace immediately after POSTing it, and then pressed something else which made me lose it. I can't remember what I did, but the end result was that it never made it into the database, and I then lost the one in this text box. In some ways, I'm glad I lost it.
It was about my skin... I'd developed yet another random patch of something on my skin. This time, it was a rash on my left hand. It looked like any other rash, but as it's me, it of course wasn't just any other rash. I'd not rubbed my hand on anything, or put anything on it, or done anything to induce this rash. It didn't itch at all, and came and went seemingly depending on the temperature (no, really). So after a few days, it hadn't gone away. So I showed my mum, and we went to the chemist hoping they'd know what it was, gimme some cream and we'd all be happy. But no, once again, I'd developed something that they knew nothing about. The fact that it didn't itch confused them all, including the proper doctory looking guy in a suit who was hiding round the corner, out the way of the public. I left with no cream, but told to wait and see if it goes away by itself, as it appeared to be purely superficial.
Anyway... this then brought back my other concerns. The patch on my right arm on the inside of my elbow (does that place have a name?) that has never grown or shrunk or changed shape, and occasionally gets very red, sometimes goes really dry, and never goes away. I've also got a random patch of dry skin on the back of my right hand. Except unlike most normal bits of dry skin this doesn't appear to have been caused by anything normal, and doesn't go away wiht moisterising hand cream stuff. Madness!
Anyway... Over the last week or so, things are looking up. The latest one, the rash, rarely shows itself now, in any temperature. The dry patch on my left hand is still there, but not so red and crappy looking. It feels a lot smoother than it used to too. And the biggest and most worrying of them all, the red patch on my right arm. it too is still there, but is fading. This one's fighting the most actually, it comes and it goes a bit. But on the whole, it's a lot more flesh coloured than it was 4 months ago.
I'm not too sure why this is, but I'm kind'a wondering if it's to do with my eating. I think I was quite so bad before, that my body was having issues. My eating has improved a bit so far this year. Not so much in quantity, but in quality (things like carrots!) and so I'm hopeful I'll get myself sorted out. I'm still not eating nearly as much as a 19 year old male should. But it's a lot harder to fix that one.
Pretty sure I'll end up being force fed by some tube by the time I'm 30. :\
In other news, I've found out that you can make Mac OS X applications in Java. Which is nice since Objective-C is ridiculous. Apparently they've basically just made Java wrappers around all the Objective-C classes. I assume the outcome is a proper machine code binary file, and not bytecode, though I'm not certain, as I believe that there's some Java thing entwined in the OS anyway. This aside though, it means I can start making programs for the Mac, which is nice. It's a *much* better API than Windows, from what I can tell. Perhaps more importantly than that though, is that it's really well documented. It also comes with a WYSIWYG interface builder, which I'm not usually fond of, but it seems to work really well. I think (though not tested) that it will also cope with windows being resized and stuff. Unlike GTK, it doesn't use tables and boxes to arrange everything, but it does have this thing where objects snap to offsets. This can be an offset of the window edge, another widget, or anything. So I think it should work.
Either way, I've had more luck with it in one day, than I have with programming for Windows in about 6 months or more.
Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!
Sunday 23rd January 2005
Song: Evanescence - Anywhere
I've been having more fun with my little iBook. It's such a cool little thing. I've just finally got around to installing the X server (which is provided by Apple, and fits in superbly with everything else). They've nicely made a window manager which lets all the windows be decorated as if they're running under Aqua, but sadly everything is a crappy looking grey colour.
Mac, I was discussing this with you earlier, and here it is if you wanna look. Clickety-click. To be fair, I think my use for this is fairly limited, though I can now install things like GIMP and OpenOffice.org locally. Maybe I could get some use out of this, I dunno yet. But I mainly did this for shits and giggles.
Having had enough time to really play around with Mac OS X, I really am very pleased with it. I would happily recommend it to *anyone* (and I've never recommneded linux to anyone). Whether you've got a PhD in Computer Science, or you think that Microsoft own the internet, it should satisfy you. They've just done it so well. Seperated the UI from the underlying system; made a very stable, easy to use interface; made it configurable; and haven't lied about or tried to cover up anything. They give you a terminal to play with if you're confident enough with UNIX shells, and if you're not, then I don't actually think you'll ever be at a disadvantage.
Best of all, no registry, no Active X, no blue screens of death, no browser integration into shell, no media player integration into shell, lots of use of unix things, actual innovation, no paperclip, help that's actually helpful, and ooh, I could go on for a while. It's nice.
Monday 17th January 2005
Song: Brian McFadden - Lose, Lose Situation
Thank you for your good wishes people. It went quite well, all things considered.
But more important than all this academia nonsense, is that I'm now £700 poorer. But I have an iBook to show for it. I'm a bit confused by a few design decisions of the Mac OS X, but on the whole, I'm happy. It has it's pros, and it's cons. I still prefer my linux though. I am at heart, a geeky control freak. I also prefer the command line over a GUI. I think it's a lot faster to get around, if nothing else.
So I thought I'd now compile a list of operating system's used. I'm such a proud loser.
- DOS 5
- DOS 6
- Windows 3.1
- Windows 3.11
- Windows 95
- Windows 98
- Windows Me
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP
- Solaris
- FreeBSD
- Linux (Suse, Redhat, Mandrake, and Debian)
- Mac OS X (Darwin)
I think that's all. :\ I want more!
Must go now, another exam tomorrow.
Sunday 16th January 2005
I'm very seriously considering buying an iBook.
Just a few things I want to know:
- Is there a text editor? Preferably one better than notepad. I know vim's available, so this issue isn't huge
- How nice is it with RAM usage? Should I go for 512MB
- Is there a decent hex editor available?
- What's the worst thing about it?
- How easy is the insallation and removal of software (I think very easy, if I understand it right)
- How easy is it to get upgrades and patches to software, and how frequently are they available?
If you have one, or knows someone who has one or whatever, please leave comment here or contact me in some other way. :)
I plan on doing more reading and asking tomorrow. But for now, I need sleep. For tomorrow I shall be rising at 7am as I've got an exam on a topic I know nothing about.
Wish me luck!
Friday 14th January 2005
Song: Catatonia - No Stone Unturned
Well kids... it's happened.
http://www.busted.com/news/?month=1&id=281
Go run to your local music store on Feb 28th to pick up Fightstar's EP, amd/or go see Taking Back Sunday in Amsterdam or Ireland, where Fightstar are supporting. :D
Tuesday 11th January 2005
Song: Delta Goodrem - Extraordinary Day
Bought Kerrang today... my attention was first drawn to it after reading on Fightstar's forum that there's an interview with Charlie in there. I read the article there as it was all typed up, but then on Kerrang's website I saw that Korn and Blink 182 were also in here. So figured I'd get it.
There's a section on albums that're due out in 2005. It looks quite good... Finch apparently lost their drummer. This I did not know before. I've fallen out of the emo scene a bit. Should be good though... I like Finch.
More exciting than this though, is Limp Bizkit. Now as normal, Fred's talking the talk about how it's the best Limp Bizkit album ever (he has said that about every single album he's made (interestingly, they each seem worse than their predecessor)). However... It's being produced by Ross Robinson (!) and if that was not enough, Wes Borland is apparently back with them. So... I have very high hopes for this.
System Of A Down had a huge two page section. They're apparently releasing some sort of double album thing, but with the discs being released approximately 6 months apart. I expect it'll be good though. I have a soft spot for System Of A Down. Mainly because they're a bit insane.
There's also a section on new Garbage album. Akways quite liked Garbage, despite the fact their sound is a bit weird. Some days I just really get into it though. Apparently Dave Grohl appears on it, playing drums on one song. Also, Shirly has apparently recorded a duet with Marilyn Manson. That'll be interesting, to say the least.
New Alkaline Trio album, "Chruch And Destroy". Another amusing title, following "Good Mourning", and "From Here Too Infirmary". Heh, I'm gonna quote this, because it made me laugh: "The only other song title confirmed to date is 'Deathbed' - a title which suggests that the band haven't acquired a sunnier disposition since their relocation to San Fransisco a few years back." In other good news, they're still with Vagrant. I have high hopes for this one too.
Evanescence got a small section as well, though there's nothing new there either. Just yet another mentioning of Ben Moody's departure blah blah. It says here that Amy's done four rough demo's without vocals. I am looking forward to this one, more so than anything else mentioned. I'm mainly curious about Terry's song writing (I frankly found Cold to be quite a boring band), but I also hope that Evanescence get their spooky-ish goth like sound back. Origin was better than Fallen, IMO. Apparently though it was the departed writer Ben Moody that was into the commercialisation and stuff (he co-wrote Avril's "Nobody's Home") so I expect something weird sounding, at least. I'm also curious about how much input David Hodges had on their last two albums. Since he left before they were famous (unlike Ben) he never gets any media attention or stories about why he left. I just have a feeling though, that he played a big part in Origin sounding like it did. It was also better back then when he added male vocals to the thing. Kind'a encourages Lacuna Coil comparisons I guess. But I really liked how his voice worked with Amy's.
New Funeral For A Friend album is apparently not gonna be a load of whining over girls, and with less screaming. If it ain't broke...
Heh, and apparently Zack De La Rocha's album is going to be out this year. *ahem* I think I'll wait to see that before I believe it. It's apparently scheduled for Winter 2005. I believe it was first expected in 2001, so eh...
To be fair, that albums in 2005 section was quite good... sadly though the bit about Korn was nothing more than a 15 question "interview" (phone, e-mail, I'm not sure) with Jonathan Davis. Each answer being about one sentence. And as for Blink 182, it was nothing more than a stupid joke on the letters page. Oh well.
At least this was a nice music update, with loads of my opinions which no one cares about, and no mention of the big evil computer company.
Monday 10th January 2005
Hurrah! That N/A grade has now been revealed to be 27/30, which equates to 90%. So I'm a bit happier now...
Oh, and for those who care. I was right. I can shutdown Windows remotely. As expected they'd just removed the button from the start menu, and hadn't bothered to deal with the shutdown code.
Thanks Bill
This also led me to write my first ever Visual Basic Script... very exciting!
Monday 10th January 2005
Song: Evanescence - Field Of Innocence
Blah... I'm so pissed off.
Most recent grades from uni says 9 out of 100. Fantastic. I'm like 99% sure that there's an error and it's actually meant to be out of 15. The only consolation though is that the class average was 5.99. But even if that is a simple mistake (or shortcoming of the blackboard system), it has resurfaced all thoughts about how fucking awful my coursework grade was. 52%. It's sadly quite big headed to say... but I really don't expect grades like that. One friend that I helped got >70%, and I also got 92% on the first test. So blah...
Aaaand there's a huge thread on the discussion board with (some quite rude and offensove) people all moaning about how they've got an uncharacteristically low grade. I can only think that there were two people marking the work, and one was looking at the marking criteria in Welsh or something.
Ugh. Everyone's also got "N/A", written in the grade column for another module. Although I don't mind as everyone has it, not just me, the suspense is killing me. I found it quite easy... but I also the afore mentioned one easy too.
Blah.
Monday 10th January 2005
Well well well, what a fun few hours I've had...
Basically, I was looking on Google for some information regarding the XP licence. Found my way to a slashdot article about it. The comments following it, were basically poking fun at it. The general gist was that using a VNC server on Windows XP violates the licence agreement. Anyway... though I'm not *that* bothered about the legality of my Windows machine, but it did lead me to ponder... is there a remote desktop client for linux. If so, I can ditch VNC anyway, since the other one will probably work better.
So I then found this rdesktop program, which does just that. I was soon dissapointed to see that my nice Windows theme wasn't appearing in this window... so I set out to find out why. Like any good package from Debian, it was terribly outdated. The software did indeed support themes, but the version I had didn't... I then found a patch, on sourceforge. Much excitement, except I couldn't figure out how to apply it, since I have very little experience with patches. I try and guess a bit, screw it up a few times. After too long, I gave up one one of the files (rdesktop.c, incidently... kind'a important, it had main() in it) and ended up bodging the patch in by hand, with nothing more than vim. And much to my suprise, it actually worked! So I was very happy indeed.
I am still a bit undecided, but I think I will ditch VNC in favour of it. It's just a lot more uh, proper. It's likeable to using VNC on a UNIX machine, instead of loading a local X server and loading remote clients, I guess.
Only problem with it is that remote people apparently can't shut down. The option's been taken off the start menu. I do however have a lot of faith in MS and trust that they've done that poorly. I'm expecting that all they did was remove the button, and didn't actually alter the shutdown code to prevent remote users from performing it. Therefore... all I need, is an alternative route to the shutdown bit. run32.dll or something comes to mind... it's very Windows 95-ish, but I'm sure there's an equivelent in XP.
Anyway, for those with big screens, look at the outcome here, and admire my 100% legal little setup.
I also today decided to uninstall Microsoft's anti spyware program. It's tray icon couldn't decide if it was coming or going. It also sometimes sprung a twin which dissapeared on mouseover.
Hopefully seeing Charlotte tomorrow, and having a panic + revision session with Matt. Gonna be an interesting day.
I've now got 11 of those bloody xwrits windows on my screen, so I'd best go. For what it's worth, my arm really aches.
Thursday 6th January 2005
Song: Within Temptation - The Promise
"The statistics on sanity are, that one out of every four Americans, are suffering from some form of mental illness. So think of your Three best friends. If they're okay, then its you"
I bought this Within Temptation album today... I think I'm a proper goff kid now... it's only a matter of time before the bats start flying out the bathroom window.
Next on the agenda is Lacuna Coil. I may go to Woking tomorrow, and look in HMV for Comalies. We'll see.
I've just tried to get a natural harmonic out of my guitar, and managed on the first attempt. I'm not sure where the problem was all along. 12th fret seemed really easy. 5th was not so, but 7th was reasonable. In conclusion, I was pleased. :)
Wednesday 5th January 2005
Song: Evanescence - Imaginary
"Theres nothing sexy about skin and bone, urgh. You gotta have some junk in the trunk"
- Amy Lee
So true... :)
Tuesday 4th January 2005
This is insane, but felt it was worth mentioning. A snippet taken from Slashdot.
As a person who has spent some time programming and troubleshooting windows, I'll throw out my favorite saying "The more you learn about Windows, the more you are amazed it works at all".
Seriously, I remember troubleshooting a boot/registry problem and I got this freeware/shareware program to log all registry activity. It would even do it for a whole boot. At the time, a win2k boot had between 120,000 and 150,000 registry read/writes!!!
120,000?! What the fuck can they all be for?!
Sunday 2nd January 2005
I like people... I especially like people who seem to like me. :)
Driving lesson tomorrow. I'm scared.
Saturday 1st January 2005
Song: Robbie Williams - Angels
I now know how to change an Escort's throttle body. Go me!
What's more useful than that though, IMO, is knowing what one is. Cars fascinate me. They're so simple, yet I still am amazed by their design. I was originally content with just knowing suck, squeeze, bang, blow. But now I want to know more! Carburettor's are something that I still know nothing about though. I also wanna know a bit more about brakes.
I ended up not staying at home for new years. Went to the pub with brother, Ollie, Rob, and Marc. Wasn't bad on the whole. Learnt a lot about Rob's past, which was pretty cool; got easily beaten at an arm wrestle, which was embarrassing (Rob's freakishly strong); and got to level 29 on Pang, which is awsome.
Some pikey girl (Sarah?) spoke to Ollie, and invited us to someone's house party later in the evening. He then seemed to be on a mission to get her number for the rest of the night. Which he got in the end. She also promised breasts, which she never delivered despite several reminders. Though she was far too drunk. He called her about a minute after she'd left the pub, asking her to come back to show us the breasts, and she said to meet her outside in 5 mins. Somehow, the maths didn't add up. She never actually gave us the address of this house party, heh. She was far too drunk. A lot of people she was with got thrown out, for having broken two glasses. They were also very drunk, and it looked like the sort who would have accidently left their ID in their other jacket, too.
I bought the last of the four live Corrs DVDs yesterday, The Corrs Unplugged. First off, picture and sound quality are outstanding. The thing that I really liked though, was that it was pretty much all done in one take, with no editing. Before a few songs, a guitarist or two will hit a few notes, and there's some chat amongst themselves (not to the audience) between songs that got left in as well. Best of all, at the very end of Runaway (played with no drums, and with Caroline on piano) she hit the wrong key. It was the second to last note, heh. She then looks hugely ashamed, as Andrea's eyes widen and she looks over. Jim then says, "That was played in the key of F demented", and then someone else shouts "Don't worry Caroline". Quite amusing. I just thought it was cool that they didn't edit it out entirely, or redo the song or something. However, going back to the CD of it, I noticed they'd taken out this fuck up of hers, and the talk that followed. But that's ok... I prefer the DVD anyway. On the whole the performance was brilliant. A huge string section was sat behind them, which helped make every song sound as good as in studio, in addition to a bit of brass, and an organ. Nifty. :)