radiac.net

"Oh, end of the month? Sure, that'll be no problem."

Why did I say that?

Never mind, all done now. Well, done enough for this stage - I'll have a meeting or two before it's all finalised, which gives me time to do lots of testing. And what's more, I'm actually a week ahead of the schedule I said I'd be working to, and on time for the schedule they thought I said. Result.

Anyway, I'm tired, and since it's my birthday tomorrow (OK Peter, today), I must get my beauty sleep so my hideous face does not crack all of my beautiful presents. Night night!

I'm 22 now! Only 10226 days until I'm 50...

After getting to bed at 7.30, waking up at 11 and working till 1, I went out for a birthday lunch with my gran and then frittered the afternoon and evening away. Not having much work for the first time in months, I checked I could complete the hotel level in hitman contracts in under 10 minutes, it being the only game I have on this computer. But I just checked my e-mail and have found out that I do actually have lots of things I should be doing, so I'm working again.

Thank you to everyone who has commented, IMed, SMSed or spoken to me today to wish me a happy birthday!

It's been snowing all day, and it's really built up in parts. I went for a walk in the wood near my house today, and there was over 6 inches in parts! Crazy.

Photos coming soon.

Yesterday afternoon Leela came over and we went into town for a Shakeaway. We went back to her house and watched a film, it was all very pleasant, and then she started to get ready to go to her friends house, who lived just around the corner from me. Well, she made some excuse to pop into my house on the way...

The living room lights were off, and I went in to find a surprise birthday party! For me! Loads of people were there, and it was surprising and fantastical, and there was food and drink and presents and cards and decorations and it was great! Thank you everyone! I was given soft toy versions of all the Looney Tunes characters, a multi-picture frame, fridge magnets and chocolate, and lots and lots of alcohol. There were also people with cameras who probably have photos of my shocked face, so I'll try and steal them and put them on here sometime.

Yay! :)

So, I come to my computer this evening to do some work, and after about 10 minutes of listening to music and sorting things out, my computer freezes for a couple of seconds, accompanied by a loud clicking noise from the hard drive. Erk, I think to myself. I guess this hard drive is failing.

The fact that it's my seventh this year (yes, 7th) is actually a good thing, because with each failure I learn a new lesson, and it is always that I'm really going to miss the thing I just lost. After losing most of my e-mails and work and music over the years, I've got all of these on servers that are backed up using the fantastic Unison, which leads me to the lesson for today: I need to write a script to back up my saved games.

Unlike previous hard drive failures where I have frantically scrambled around my drives hunting for crucial files, unable to read the screen through my floods of tears, today I spent a few comparatively calm minutes copying over my saved games for Hitman and Half-Life 2. Tomorrow I will go to PC World and get a new hard drive, spend a couple of hours installing the OS and applications, and I'll be on track to meet this weeks deadlines.

Backups kick ass! </smug>

It was my birthday yesterday! For the third time this year, yay! :)

Leela came over with breakfast and lots of presents - the new Lemon Jelly album, Dodgeball dvd, a book called 'The curious incident of the dog in the night-time', and a box of extremely tasty cookies and flapjacks. Then we went out for lunch and had a sandwich at that place that used to be called Mudd - they were like Pitstop sandwiches, only with less bread. Very good. Then we went and saw Hotel Rwanda at the cinema - not a particularly cheery birthday film, but it was very good and well worth seeing. We then went to Pizza Hut and ate far too much food, and I was in pain all the way home. I then read my book while listening to my cd, went and said hello to Tristan when he got back, saw the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then accidentally finished the book before going to sleep.

I have enjoyed my birthdays this year very much! Thank you everyone!

My replacement hard drive arrived yesterday, which is good. It was delivered to the shop on the corner because I was out - I looked up the signature on the ParcelForce delivery tracking service, then looked up the name in the phone book. I think I would make a good detective, apart from all of the paperwork, I don't think that would suit me. I see myself as more of a rebellious yet stylish LA cop who busts drug lords and slave traders and child pornography rings while dealing out my trademark catch phrases and having a witty repartee with a convicted fraudster who I have broken out of jail to help me solve my cases, all the time firing hundreds of rounds from my revolver with pin-point accuracy, but with none of them hitting anyone because this is a family show.

On Monday I had also asked my dad to send me my Windows 2000 cd - his package arrived today, and contained 'Sony M-crew for Windows 2000'. That is not my operating system, it is the software to control my usb hifi that is at home. Oh well, he tried! So now I will have to laptop it and wait until I go home next week, then I can also pick up driver and application cds (oh yes, and the games).

In the mean time, I am very tempted to install some linux distro like Ubuntu, but... I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered to sort out hardware issues using dodgy non-manufacter-supported patches so that I can work in 1600x1200, or get sound working, or get onto the internet. I can't be bothered to faff about with wine so I can run my work programs and games slower than my expensive computer should. I can't be bothered with dual-booting, kernel patching, source compiling, back porting, dealing with package or library conflicts, software that just won't compile, or working with non-standardised laggy and buggy UIs. So I will not be wasting a day installing an inferior operating system that I will wipe off next week. I have work to do. Right after I finish this entry...

I am fed up with software written by developers who know best.

Open office falls into this category. I just typed 'February 2005' into a cell in a spreadsheet, and it converted it to '01/02/05'. Did I mean 01/02/05? No, if I'd meant that, I would have typed it in - I actually meant the whole of February. So I have now spent 10 minutes looking for the option to turn it off, haven't found it, and have given up, opting for the add-random-characters-to-confuse-their-parser approach.

This is of course not a problem that open office is alone in suffering from - writing HTML tags in Microsoft and Open Office versions of Word, for example, creates major headaches. Quote marks are converted into so-called smart quotes, hyphens are converted into special characters for extra-long hypens - these characters are not 127 bit ASCII characters so I've got to run all of the documents through regular expressions to swap them to their non-smart equivalents. And for those people who are asking what am I doing writing HTML in Word anyway, please tell me an easier way to convert a badly formatted word document into decent HTML. No, please, you would halve my workload.

It's not just odd users with obscure tasks that run into these problems either. Ooh, it looks like you're writing a letter. You've put a number at the start of that line - you must be writing a list. The software has been written with the assumption that people are going to use it in a certain way, and it just can't cope if you move away from that, even slightly. A lot of my software suffers from the same sort of problem; SmartFTP assumes you want your windows tiled horizontally, Outlook Express thinks you only ever recieve new e-mails in your Inbox, and as for Flash... well, lets not get started.

That's not to say that we shouldn't have exciting new features. I can see that smart quotes would be a very good idea if I was producing a document for print, or that I would want '1st February 2005' converted into a numerical date if I was rubbish at remembering that February is the second month of the year. But please, I beg anyone reading this who writes software - give us the option to turn the fancy things off. Or even better, ship your product with them turned off by default, and offer a quick and easy way to show us the features you think we will want. I can't believe I'm about to say this, but Macromedia had a good idea - when you fire up Flash for the first time, they ask you if you are a designer or developer, and tune your IDE experience to that.

I just wish software developers would stop thinking they know what their users want to do - you really don't have a clue. There are clearly some people out there who are capable of writing extremely good software, but by forcing features on us that we don't want, it makes it virtually unusable.

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of this is my life. Today I am going to talk about nothing in particular, before rattling on about something that only I am interested in or have any clue what it is that I'm talking about, and then finishing before I fall asleep at the keyboard.

The past few days have been busy but fun. I was going to go home on Monday, but didn't leave until Tuesday because I wasn't feeling well at the weekend, so decided to put off the journey until I was convinced that I was not going to throw up all over the inside of my car while in the outside lane on the M4. And then on Wednesday it was the Roman Romp, so I decided to come back in the afternoon for that - yes, 300 miles for less than 24 hours at home, but it did allow me to pick up my windows and vice city CDs so that I could reinstall my computer, which is now working perfectly. Anyway, the Roman Romp was great fun - lots of drunk people doing drunk things, but none of that from me, oh no. Not for the wont of trying though, I did drink quite a bit, but not enough as it turned out, so my participation in the revelry was limited to wearing a toga. The rest of the past few days has been spent working, how dull.

You may have noticed in my countdown box on the left something about APM, that package manager I've been meaning to write for several years. I wanted to get it finished before I started on CAPMS, that CMS I've been meaning to write for several more years, but I decided that it was too boring to waste my time on, and that I could do it after CAPMS after all. I have therefore started work on CAPMS in earnest in my currently somewhat limited free time, and it's all starting to look rather exciting. I say 'exciting' rather than 'good', because 'good' implies I have actually done something, whereas 'exciting' is rather more ambiguous and allows me to get away with using it to describe the act of reading bits of papers and writing ideas out in a text file. It should be noted that the 42 days mentioned in the countdown box for the self-imposed CAPMS deadline is also slightly misleading; I'm planning on getting the core and a few of the important supporting scripts finished by then - the rest, all the fancy stuff, that will come later. Still, it's a start.

In other news, yay.org.uk appears to be doing very well - lots of links have been submitted, which will keep me nice and busy. Thank you to everyone who has submitted links - I really must get on and write that bookmarklet customiser so that I know who's submitting.

And now, as promised, I will depart. To all those now on holiday, good luck with the revision and coursework!

When putting on those muff-style circumaural headphones (you know, the ones that cover your ears), check the insides for spiders...