Well, as you know, I'm not one to break with tradition. However, I have made a small exception this New Year; rather than wait at my computer until midnight, when I click send on an email and click 'Save entry' in my news script (like i have for the past 3 years), I decided I would go out to the pub. However, our society is based upon traditions, and without them it would crumble. So, to help do my part to maintain society, I wrote a little perl script at 1 am and stuck it in a cron job. And hopefully, it'll fire off correctly, people will get emails, this post will be made, and life can return to normal :)

And so, without further ado...

May the new year bring you more joy and happiness than the last. Even if it was the best year of your life :)

Well, I'm back. Had a good time last night - some photos are here, and if you want to see video and audio of Chris walking' home, email me :)

If the girl who repeatedly said that she would 'want that photo' is reading this, there were only two.

Unfortunately I didnt get a photo or mini video of her retarded boss (called Craig or Clancy or something); now he was funny. I would say that he was very very drunk, but by the way he never seemed to go and get another drink, I'd say he's always like that. He also seemed to spend the night flirting with a woman whos boyfriend didn't look too impressed...

Anyway, I'm bored, so I'm going to watch television and play chess against myself and cheat when I'm not looking. And probably still lose.

I've just realised that I've now had my driving license for over a year. A year and 12 days to be precise. No accidents, only minor damage to the car (exhaust pipe snapping and hacking up the rear tyre), and I haven't been stopped by the police once. Not that I've needed to be, of course. I'm a perfect driver. Never go too fast. Ohhh no.

We've got frost outside that has been there since Sunday. Not nice. And our central heating is still playing up...

If you check my guestbook, you'll see my wonderful friend Tomris has taken it upon herself to inform you of my new name. Yes, she isn't just beautiful and intelligent, she can make up good names too. Or so she thinks... :)

Well, it's time to take the Christmas decorations down again. Now, I remember that on the 11th of December I said I'd be implementing some of my ideas by the time I took down my Christmas decorations, but... well... I would have done, but I've forgotten what they were, and I didnt write them down anywhere.

So if anyone knows, please tell me. It was probably a search engine, a MySQL back end for some stuff, and oooh, I've remembered one of them now... bbiab :)

I'VE DONE IT!

I know what some of you have been saying, like 'Yes, he may be a culinary genius, but I bet he can't manage baked beans'.

Well... HAH! I have now proved all you nay-sayers wrong! I have done it! I have cooked and eaten baked beans!

Cooking instructions for this will go in my guide to cooking asap - I am aware how badly students of the world need this information, and I will endeavour to have it on there by the end of the evening.

So far so good... I wrote:

Description of problem:
I can hear someone talking in the background - crossed line? Quiet, but loud enough to hear what she's saying, and it is very distracting to hear someone ordering underwear when I'm trying to hold a conversation.

This has been the case since I got the line sometime in '99, but last time you said you'd send someone, nobody turned up, and since I use the line mainly for internet, I gave up. However, she has a very loud and nasal voice, so I thought I'd try again.

And I got the following reply:

We would like to apologise for any inconvenience you may be currently experiencing. A fault has been identified.

We expect to respond to this fault within/by 1 working day.

Note : You can now receive FREE regular updates on the progress of your fault via SMS text messaging on your mobile phone. Please enter your mobile number in the box below and click on 'Go'

Nice!

Now, let's wait and see if it works this time...

Yes, it's the guide you've all been waiting for, you can stop flooding my mailbox with cries of 'Where's the guide to baked beans, I can't stand toast much longer!'... it is finally up, and you can read it in my Guide to Cooking.

Good luck!

Went to Harvesters for lunch with my mum and gran. It was very pleasant, especially their 'Rocky Horror' - chocolate fudge cake, cream and ice cream. Very nice.

I'm getting there with that thing I said I'd do. I've written a very nice little script to generate thumbnail images of any URL I specify - works on about 50-75% of sites I've tested it on, which is quite a good hit rate methinks... However, when I hook it into the site or not is another matter, since I want to use a mysql backend, but I want to move the site over to USML anyway, so I may just wait till I have finished that before I do...

I'm still working on this virtual tour for the tonbridge school website. It's now nearly finished, which is nice.

However, at 6 minutes past midnight, my tour table in the mysql database seemed to jump back about 4 months of its own accord.

I had noticed that there was something wrong by 10 minutes past, but I assumed it was my tour script messing up the field of views (4 months ago, I hadn't put any FOVs in the table). So I spent about 20 minutes testing the script before finally deciding to check the table directly and see what was there.

So I logged in, did a select on that, and all the FOV fields came back NULL. I thought 'This is odd, my FOV column has disappeared...', spent another 5 minutes looking over the whole of the tonbschl development site scripts for something which I might have done which may have caused this. But again, I couldn't find anything wrong. Then I thought 'Hmm, I wonder if it's as if it stepped back 4 months...', I checked, and two new entries I added about 2 months ago were not there.

It was as if the table had decided to empty itself and load in a copy of the table which I didn't have any more (I write the tour stuff into CSV files first, it's easier to edit).

So I asked Gaima at Notnet (my hosting company) if he could have a look at the logs and see if anything had happened. He sent it to me, and there it was... the table emptied, filled up with the 4-month old data, emptied again, filled up again... it was as if someone had run the loading script on the 4-month old csv file. Twice.

And then I remembered something.

Well, to be exact, I remembered four things. I remembered how about 4 months ago, I was loading stuff into the table using a script which I was storing in the images directory. I also remembered that about 2 months ago, I updated the script and moved it into a directory which was out of reach of the web server. My brain also reminded me that at about 11.30 I had told Andrew Rowson about the flash map which I'd spent a long time working on, and gave him the URL. Add that to some of my fondest memories of Andrew ...), and I had worked out what had happened. Such as him rebooting the linux machine at school by trying to log on - he hit CTRL+ALT+DEL - while I was shelled in and editing files from the other side of the room... I heard a beep, my session hung and beeped, I turned round and there was Andrew saying 'I didn't do anything, it rebooted itself!'... don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy, but...

Andrew had been snooping around the development site, and had stumbled across the four month old loading script which had been left forgotten in the images directory. And, being the curious type, he clicked on it. It ran, emptied the table, filled it with the old data, gave his browser a 500 server error (it was not designed to run from apache, so didnt give any headers), so he hit F5, it ran again, yada yada yada.

All in all, I spent over an hour trying to work out, and fix, what went wrong, and poor Gaima spent about 15 minutes looking through logs and stuff for me. So, why am I telling you this? Apart from, obviously, pointing out that Andrew is a menace to the internet, hell, the world of computers, and shouldn't be let near them, and especially not development websites with old unused and forgotten scripts lying around in... Well, I dunno. I thought I'd just make a news post for today.

Had a haircut by the way. If you want to see a photo of it, email me :p

And I'm thinking of starting up a Rocky Horror club, for those of you who have enjoyed one of them at a Harvesters. Then we can all meet up at a Harvesters one day in a few years time, eat Rocky Horrors, sing camp songs and recollect the good ol days when the men were men and the women wore skirts. Or perhaps it would just be better to forget that idea...

And if you didn't follow the link above to Gaima's shiny new website, shame on you. Go there now: www.gaima.co.uk...

I forgot to tell you that The Parole Officer (funny Steve Coogan film I saw 3 times in the summer) is coming out on dvd on the 18th March... I pre-ordered my copy 2 days ago :)

Today was the last day of my holiday - back to Bath tomorrow morning, have to get up at 8ish. Hmm, I should probably go to bed soon...

Tonight I was invited to Alexine's birthday meal thing. We had a food in pizza express, followed by the pub. Very pleasant, and if she's reading this, thanks :)

Also today I read an article on Unreal Tournament 2. It looks very pretty.

And Andrew now lets you chose which colour theme you wish to look at his site in. Nice :)
(although my pride forces me to say it was my idea :p)

Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you about the outcome of my BT fault report. I woke up early one afternoon to find a message on my answer machine... it was something like

Hello Mr Terry, we have tested your line and didn't find any faults. Now you can either pay us to send someone out to tell you this, or stop wasting our precious time with your dumb problems. So you can hear someone ordering lingerie, big deal. Get over it and stop whining.

Of course, I paraphrased it slightly, but that was the general message.

Needless to say, I haven't followed it up.

I'm back at uni...

The webcam's on again...

I'm listening to some techno remixes of the tetris theme tune at the moment - quite like this one :)

And I'd just like to say that I downloaded 2GB of files in under 30 minutes. I was getting 1.5MB/sec on them. It was very nice.

Pobk has a new site - www.gotworms.co.uk. Go look.

I've been taking exams today, yesterday and the day before that. First it was Architecture and Operating Systems - not too bad. Then Number and Structures - extremely bad. And today it was Programming. Kick ass.

Going to watch 'Scary Movie' followed by 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas', possibly followed by 'Go' and/or 'Leon'.

Just have software engineering left tomorrow at 4.30 (pm, Bath isn't quite that sick). So that'll be fun.

This weekend I've watched 'Scary Movie', 'Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas', 'Miss Congeniality', 'Leon' and a few 'Spaced' episodes, done a lot to the tonbschl site, fixed up Cletus (if you don't know who/what Cletus is, you'll find out in a month or so). Tomris visited my site again, she is upset that the post about her has been archived, and wants me to keep making news posts about her so she stays on the front page. Hmm... is this enough? ;)

I really should do some revision for my exam tomorrow.

I cooked sausages today. It was very exciting, and tasted even better... wow, my life is one big adventure! And what an adventure; tomorrow I'm going to try making something new - Canneloni! Well, the canneloni isn't particularly new - I've had it in the freezer since last term, but it's new to me - you know what I mean.

Hmm, Tristan came in while I was writing that paragraph. We watched another two episodes of Spaced. Hmm.

I REALLY should do some revision for my exam tomorrow.

Well, I've finally got radiac.co.uk back... I got it on freenetname before I understood the ways of the hostmaster, and, rather than pay the £80 release fee, I decided to let it time out in September 2001. Thanks to nominet and notnet, it took a while, but it's finally mine again. Yay :)

Same content, different logo. radiac.net is still the primary domain, subdomains (radicam, guides and quake 2) only work on radiac.net, and since the site runs off SSI not USML, there may be places (such as the welcome message :p) where you visit radiac.co.uk and see stuff about radiac.net... I could fix it, but I can't be bothered :p

And Tristan just sent me to this.

I have, at long last, finished my Perl servers.
There's three:
Fluffy the Pointless Forking Server
Nevil the Pointless Non-Forking Server
Cletus the Non-Forking Chatroom

Check them out at http://radiac.net/perl.