Yeah
Today is the first of January Two thousand and three. For the second year running, my retrospective has been eaten by a crashing computer, which I find ironic. My year though, boils down to this:
Mediarific, 21, Mailbombed, Carrie, Spike, Crash, Burn, Code, Pol, Pink, Move House,
[More...]
01/Jan/2003 11:35 — AquarionicsBlog Moss
And the first feature for Epistula in the new year is the return of my Blogroll :-)
Techie bits would be to say that it's now sorted by author rather than by last update (because combining last update with [E]2's fried outlook to life would put it almost permenantly out of date) and that Adrian, Corinne, LoneCat and all the other weblogs I read that blo.gs doesn't carry are now folded in, rather than hanging at the bottom
[More...]
01/Jan/2003 23:04 — AquarionicsDebuging Methods
This is the second approach to problem-solving when developing. The approaches are standard to all developers and run thus: When you're stuck on a piece of code, the first thing to try is to rename all your variables and all your dialog boxes using the filthiest words you can dream up. For some reason if the aim of your code was to pop up a dialog box or message, the minute you re-label that dialog box "yo m
[More...]
02/Jan/2003 21:56 — AquarionicsTwo Things...
A minor redesign.
I need an iBook. need. Damn. Must... not... buy... iBook...
[More...]
03/Jan/2003 01:17 — AquarionicsEleventy-first
So, to mark Tolkien's birthday, we went to see The Two Towers, and it was good. Full review coming soonish. I liked the fact they kept more of the spirit of the books in this episode - I found the first tended to avoid the spirit in favour of the words, which they occasionally cut.
Oh, and the Elvish was wonderful, natch :-)
[More...]
03/Jan/2003 23:51 — AquarionicsClever Spam.
I get quite a bit of spam. Spamassassin catches about 40 pieces per day. I look at most of it, mostly to see what types I'm getting most today. Yesterdays totals were:
- Misc: 21
- Leads, 100 Time Dated..FREE! (Cheap pencil refils with best-before dates)
- Colon Cleanse (Cheap, Clean punctuation)
- Viri: 4
- Search Engines: 2
- 419: 1
- Unrenderable Subject Lines: 14
- False Positives: 1
04/Jan/2003 00:42 — Aquarionics- Misc: 21
We'd like to be unhappy, but we never do have the time
Stuff I'm Working On:
- Epistula
- Well, yeah, it's a sort of constant. Next comes the Attachments system, followed by the Gallery. Most of the smaller hacks (like <Link> et. al.) will wait until I need a quick hacking task to get out of doing the washing up. Life's like that :). In the meantime, I have to import the remainder of the writings, code up the review system (A larger task than Articles, Writings and Journals because they require a different input interface)
04/Jan/2003 15:13 — AquarionicsDamn
This entry has no content. [More...]
04/Jan/2003 23:40 — AquarionicsSounds Interesting
So, Epistula now supports attachments in the form of sounds, and they are even in the RSS feed using the enclosure tag, which means that audioblogs will happen, and happen soon. I have also sent my sysadmin a little message asking him to put the addtype for the application/ogg mimetype in so these will download as ogg files rather than - as they currently are - as text/plain which is... suboptimal.
[More...]
05/Jan/2003 17:13 — AquarionicspingTrack
Today's discussion appears to be on cross referencing and comments, Simon references tantek's query on presentation of pingbacks/trackbacks/whatever as identical to comments.
I disagree, ish.
I like having comments on my weblog, because it means that occasionally discussion happens and it means that I get feedback from people w
[More...]
05/Jan/2003 18:51 — AquarionicsSelf Worth
According to HumanForSale.com (Via Laurabelle) I'm worth exactly $1,860,048.00. Putting me under half the worth of a Genius 6'4" Doctor, and three hundred thousand less than Laurabelle. So, kids, count this as a lesson. Not sure of what, though...
[More...]
06/Jan/2003 02:38 — AquarionicsHide & Seek
I've been accused of hiding behind geek entries, so a little update. There are various things happening at the moment, most of which I'm not announcing fully because of dirty laundry stuff. A few things are happening that are making me blind with rage when I look at them too closly, so I'm keeping my distance to give them a chance to resolve without me having to do anything I might regret - like move out. There's been a fun couple of weeks while ccooke has been wandering around the countrysid
[More...]
06/Jan/2003 15:36 — AquarionicsTwo DVDs for the fan-boys on their dark office-chairs
Today, I finally got around to watching the Extended Fellowship Of The Ring DVDs. In this, I have to agree with almost every person who has reviewed it - it is a far better film than the original cinematic was. The charectors (Particually Gimli and Aragorn) are far better developed, and the opening is far cleaner - with Ian Holm/Bilbo reciting the "
[More...]
07/Jan/2003 03:20 — AquarionicsTests
The idea of drooling fangirls both scares me (lots) and interests me (a bit). But anyway, by popular demand (
[More...]a few people asked me
) the aforementioned tests of the audioblog system:
07/Jan/2003 17:08 — AquarionicsBash
#57169 +(118)- [X]
[More...]<Phaze> SOME HOT CHICK
<Phaze> JUST MAILED ME
07/Jan/2003 18:21 — AquarionicsThe Problem With Audioblogs
Why audioblogs haven't caught on much. Unedited.
[More...]
08/Jan/2003 14:52 — Aquarionicsmake world
A sort of offical note of the things you may have noticed already :)
I decided to get rid of the "Not Implimented Here" box, purely because it was both out of date, and almost finished. I replaced it with the "Recent Comments" box, as stolen without mercy from Burningbird, Not her code, but a similer idea. It reads the comments.rss feed and parses it into the form you see to the left. Since the front page is regenerated whenever anyone posts
[More...]
09/Jan/2003 01:16 — AquarionicsRetreaded tracks
Paul said, on my trackback implimentation:
What would happen if I trackbacked and pingbacked at the same time? Which I won't do. Just trackback today.
Good point. The Prackback stuff now checks for an existing reference before putting it in. And I can now even send trackbacks, w00t and verily yay.
So,
[More...]
09/Jan/2003 17:04 — AquarionicsMore Debugging
Lack of stuff happening, so another quote from the HackVan files:
[More...]Well, I just spent several hours tracking something down that I think is SO braindead that it must be called evil. I hope this will save someone else some hassle.
There's an NT box on my desk that someone
09/Jan/2003 17:32 — AquarionicsTracky baccy
So, Sam Ruby and Sarabian have both impliemented Trackback recievership, and I can try to ping them when I mention them now. Isn't that neat? I dunno, you spend ages looking for a reason to impliment trackback, then three come along at once...
I'm still debating on the "Impliment RDF Autodiscovery Data" issue. On the one hand, it'd be nice for
[More...]
10/Jan/2003 15:49 — AquarionicsOne more 'Trackback' Related title and I'll scream
Because I'm a moron, trackbacks broke. Trackbacks are fixed, and SQL errors are now handled better. This is the last time I shall mention trackback in an entry for at least three months, purely because I've run out of Amusing Trackback Related Titles.
[More...]
10/Jan/2003 16:45 — AquarionicsSubmit!
Invader Zim rocks.TVTome has more information. Nickelodeon canceled it. Kazza is my friend. That is all. [More...]
10/Jan/2003 18:01 — AquarionicsAlmost Perfect Initiation
It's twenty past seven in the morning. If you can see this, then the last seven hours have been productive, and blogger API support is working in Epistula. In order to do this, I've started the Great Rewrite of my admin interface, which means that currently the only way I can post it is though PowerBlog, which hates me. No, really, it does. It keeps crashing with no messages when it starts talking to Aqcom, which means something somewhere is buggered. My attention span, for example. I
[More...]
11/Jan/2003 07:27 — AquarionicsAnother client
Maybe I can post with this one :-) [More...]
11/Jan/2003 07:44 — AquarionicsMissed day
Today I woke up at 2pm to discover a letter from our housing agency saying that they haven't seen a penny of the rent this month, and to do something about this or else. The money having left my account on the 1st, I'm intruiged by this. Then I went shopping in the sales, for I am Payday Man, and HMV holds no perils for Payday Man. Then I wiped my computer and reinstalled windows, so it's running about 1000% faster. Go Me. None of this have got my new interface
[More...]
12/Jan/2003 01:55 — AquarionicsTrackBack & Field Research
Just got this Trackback thing working, and now there is this "Same Level" stuff that Burningbird thought up. Now, I'm thinking carefully about this, because it has a couple of problems to my mind, not least is the funness of a system that would automatically download the pages you Trackback to, looking for Trackbacks. I do this already for pingback, and combining the two would be heinously complicated. Not that it matters. I've mentioned how much I dislike the Trackback Auto discovery Thing,
[More...]
13/Jan/2003 03:51 — AquarionicsPlus one green
[More...]
13/Jan/2003 08:53 — AquarionicsSpare Cycles
Okay, New interface coded. Plus sides: I can now use any Blogger API app to post to it. Downsides: I can't use any Blogger API app to edit it, because the "Generally accepted" API definition (Which includes helpful things, like a title attribute to posts) doesn't appear to be completely documented anywhere. Also, I'm waiting for the next version of Simon's
[More...]
13/Jan/2003 15:32 — AquarionicsTry not to say I told you so
I go to sleep for eight hours and the world explodes, bloody USA timezones. Unbenown to me - and I suspect quite a few people - a new draft of XHTML 2.0 was released in December, which Mark has now read and reported on. The results are somewhat suprising, coming from who they do:
[More...]Standards are bullshit. XHTML is
14/Jan/2003 11:36 — AquarionicsSilence the thunder
Via plasticbag.org:
[More...]Are you children never satisfied? Do you find yourself buying them ever more toys that they seem to discard almost immediately? Do they have a strange menacing glint in their eyes that you find ungodly? Terrifying, even? Then get them one of the
14/Jan/2003 17:40 — AquarionicsBad Hardware Day
[More...]
15/Jan/2003 02:59 — AquarionicsWritten On Vellum
Stuart has converted ADPB to Vellum , and in doing so joins the limited club of people with home-grown systems, albeit his will eventually stop being so, if you see what I mean. He also joins the club of weblogging software with a literary style name.
And with that, I shall follow his example, and go to bed, for it is twenty to
[More...]
15/Jan/2003 03:37 — AquarionicsWe've struck pure moron
So, Today I was surfing, and discovered...Welcome to The Buffy Network. It has come to our attention recently that a lot of visitors to this website do not have the correct setting on their computer when they try and access the site. For example, 0.82% of visitors are using Netscape - which does not support the kind of html coding we use. 2.10% of visitors dont have Java installed and/or turned on, Java is essential for some of the pop up windows we use.
[More...]
16/Jan/2003 20:16 — AquarionicsBad hardware day II, Revenge of the mutant card
This is dedication for you. It' two thirty ay-em, and I'm writing to tell you why I'm not writing.
This is a followup to the Bad Hardware thing which - in case you didn't listen to it - dealt with my buying a Soundblaster Extigy Coollness In Hardware Form box'o'tricks. Then taking it back because it didn't like my USB port.
I replaced it with a SBLive 5.1. Now, if we put the Extigy on the "Matrix" level of cinematic cooln
[More...]
17/Jan/2003 02:50 — AquarionicsReturn
Hey look everybody, Laurabelle is back, and using Moveable Type :-)
[More...]
17/Jan/2003 09:40 — AquarionicsDouble-plus ungood
This week has not been good.
In fact, this week has sucked in a massive, gaping way.
It starts with the fact that this week has been the most expensive week in my entire life. More so than renting a house in Cambridge, More so than buying a new computer, the pay cheque that cleared tuesday left my account like water though a drain. And, because work starts again on Monday, I\'ve been doing necessary things like getting a bike (which I now have, along with pain) and new glasse
[More...]
17/Jan/2003 20:00 — Aquarionics13 Bits.
- Aquarionics will return when I can compute again.
- I've written four chapters in the last two days.
- Details on how to ping blo.gs when you've done an entry are here
- Next thing for Epistula is the Events and Users systems, which together will allow you to get a) emails, b) XML-RPC pings or c) RESTful acknowledgements whe
20/Jan/2003 00:07 — AquarionicsDay
Have caught cold. Stupid cold. Throat feels like coated in tar, nose blocked, was downing honey and lemon drinks like water until ran out of honey.
Read though entire archives of MegaTokyo this morning. Broadband Good.
Chapters written: 5
[More...]
Books Finished: 5. Go Me.
ISA Network Cards detected: 1
ISA Network Cards talking to the network: 0. Stupid cards.
20/Jan/2003 12:37 — AquarionicsHmm
[More...]p|,34|? 7|-|3 |=|_()\V/|33)(-
20/Jan/2003 12:44 — AquarionicsNever saw the sun...
I belive in Karma
Sometimes life goes down, other times it goes up, and always, always swings from one to the other very quickly. Last autumn, then, would be an example of a high point, when I got a job, when
[More...]
21/Jan/2003 14:08 — AquarionicsFood of love
On Monday July 27, I begin a new project. I will be recording an album of a band for a very famous Producer. The band is relatively unknown other than within the Record Industry which, for the most part, is currently filled with bitter losers of the biggest bidding war in the history of the music business.
The tale of a Mixing
[More...]
21/Jan/2003 15:48 — AquarionicsSalesmanship
Nine years ago today Lorena Bobbitt made headlines after she gave her husband a homemade chop (ouch!) and was acquitted on grounds of +temporary insanity. The same insanity appears to have affected our buyers, and we have done the same to our prices, bringing you some of the +best deals in the UK.
Ebuyer's most recent "E-Blast" NewsletterUmm.... but.... ewwww
[More...]
21/Jan/2003 19:14 — AquarionicsSomeday
<Someday, I'll be a writer. I'll be known for my sparkling wit and wide worlds and visions.
Someday, I'll be a top 100 blogger, with hundreds of thousands of people reading my words.
Someday, I'll have the confidence in my abilities to be a geek.
Someday, I'll stop beliving in Karma, and waiting for the big meltdown
Someday, I'll stop beliving in Karma, and then I'll be even less ready than I was this time.
Someday, I'll own an iBook.
Someday, I'll g
[More...]
22/Jan/2003 01:02 — AquarionicsAgain
Maotherboard arrived.
CPU apparently broken.
Could be memory
Have ordered both.
Can't afford this.
No choice.
*sigh*
[More...]
22/Jan/2003 13:15 — AquarionicsAnother Tomorrow
Motherboard still here.
Memory & CPU are not.
Too many orders yesterday, It'll be there tomorrow. Don't worry! We won't charge you for the next day delivery you especially paid for!!
.In other news, Spamassassin caught my 1000th piece of spam this year (I get too much spam
[More...]
23/Jan/2003 10:31 — AquarionicsUncrash
Okay, in case it esacaped your attention, I crashed, and crashed badly, yesterday morning. I wasn't going to post any more depressing stuff to the diary, but I have, and I apologise. Eventually, this ever growing pile of crap would crush me, and crush me it has, and so I can now get on with digging out.
Almost.
Computer will be fixed tomorrow (or had better be, I've replaced every componant it could be now), then comes the fun bit. I update my CV, then start building a new websi
[More...]
23/Jan/2003 19:48 — AquarionicsHobbits
Frodo is wandering through Hobbiton on his way somewhere, when suddenly
[More...]
he decides to pick up a brick and throw it through a window.
"Argh" says the person inside. "That Evil Halfling threw a brick at me!"
"Well?" says someone else inside, "Throw it back then." and indeed, the
brick comes sailing out of the window and thwacks Frodo square on the
arm, and bounces harmlessly onto the grass.
"'E's not even hurt!" cries the voice, and starts t
23/Jan/2003 20:15 — AquarionicsFair Use
SteveD:
[More...]Gary Nicholass
Google have archived pages that, for various reasons valid to myself and others, I have removed from websites. That is my decision, taken according to my morality, the opinions of others, or due to changing circumstances.
More to the point I own the domain names and all the content therein. What right have Google to
23/Jan/2003 20:29 — AquarionicsSprit Level
Today has been a level day.
This morning, I got up at 8am to a doorbell that hadn't rung, because my brain was now used to the idea of a doorbell waking me up at 8am.
Boo Morning.
At 9:30, the bits for fixing my computer came, I installed with no problems and (thanks to the fact I've now replaced every central componant) it works.
Yay Technology.
I installed Windows 2k, and Syndirella (which rocks) and then we went to meet friends for lunch at The Dojo,
[More...]
24/Jan/2003 21:56 — AquarionicsChairman of the Bored
So I got bored and redesigned. For some reason, Moz <1.3 is ignoring the
[More...]margin-top:on the content block, so you can't see this text. If anyone has any idea why, answers on a postcard please. Moz 1.3a and IE seem to handle it fine. Bloody browsers...
25/Jan/2003 02:15 — Aquarionics22
22 years ago today, the being currently known as Nicholas "Aquarion" Avenell entered this level of reality.
Happy Birthday To Me.
[More...]
26/Jan/2003 00:00 — Aquarionics22nd Birthday
[More...]
26/Jan/2003 00:00 — AquarionicsNew, Revolutionary Diet Pill!
So, I was surfing this evening, when up popped a window with this in it (mirrored in the attachment below)
Nice to see that good taste in naming runs true...
[More...]
26/Jan/2003 19:02 — AquarionicsAttachment
I hate HTML4
So, the way I'm supposed to do inline objects is the <object> tag is it? Well, to quote someone famous, Duck that. Of the roughly sixteen million possible attributes it has, six million are just rephrasings of the opposing six million, and the last four million are obscure and pointless. Why is the HREF called DATA or CLASSID anyway? It's not an id, it's a URL FFS. Grr. Anyway, so my attempts to do an attachment system were foiled by HTML4 being crap, coupled with th
[More...]
26/Jan/2003 20:06 — AquarionicsMuppets in web-space
As forwarded by AFP's Gary Nicholass,
[More...]A message to clueless website authors
by someone called "Night Owl", which is sorta like the Wasp manifesto only with more swearing.
27/Jan/2003 09:24 — AquarionicsPong
Pingback is back in action. It went down because I'm a moron, and didn't check Pingback when I integrated Trackback. Fool.
[More...]
27/Jan/2003 15:02 — AquarionicsArticlality
I was trying to find an article in it's section, and realised that it was impossible. So I rewrote the articles indexing function to do so by category. Oh, and writings. Oh, and coded half the user system, so passwords arn't hard-coded any more (Bad Aquarion, No biscuit) and I can log in properly. Next up, account creation. Possibly. If I don't do something else entirely.
[More...]
27/Jan/2003 21:31 — AquarionicsThis your country, this is your country on war
Drugs are bad. look at where drug money goes. Taxes are good, look at where tax money goes.
[More...]
28/Jan/2003 23:52 — AquarionicsContinuing Theme
[More...]
29/Jan/2003 10:56 — AquarionicsSmall Screen LoTR
Lord Of The Rings: The TV Series:
(Via Añejo) [More...]This is a fansite dedicated to the much loved "Lord of the Rings: The Series" television show, which was produced by Warner Bros. after the huge success of the Lord of the Rings movies (directed by Peter Jackson).
29/Jan/2003 18:55 — AquarionicsTech
Once of my quests in life is to introduce my significant other to the delights and wonders of being a Gamer. Not in the D&D type sense, but in the Quake, Doom, Unreal, Warcraft, Tropico, Monkey Island, GTA, The Sims, Command and Conquer type sense. In this, I appear to have succeeded, because she's been playing Planescape:Torment all day.
Planescape is one of the best RPGs out there, and certainly the one with the best plot line. Baldur's Gate may be huge (And we are talking about
[More...]
30/Jan/2003 01:44 — AquarionicsDusting Archives
Jonathan takes Dorathea to task for taking Mark to task for Mark's archive system.
Seeming as how my archive system works much like Mark's, only (From Dorathea's POV) worse because you have to choose a year as well as everything else (It's still three clicks, because my month
[More...]
30/Jan/2003 11:59 — AquarionicsPolitics, Geekdom and a little Comic Relief
So, Mr Bush gave his speech on the state of the union, and I watched the BBC news report of it, in which it pointed out that it sounded more like a sermon than a political speech.
George W Bush is a problem, because he is quite plainly going to go to war no matter what happens. My problem with this is that someone we didn't elect appears to be dictati
[More...]
31/Jan/2003 00:15 — AquarionicsOnly Snow
I woke up this morning to discover a crisp brightness to the sunlight that I recognised. "It snew". This shouldn't be suprising. Yesterday it was snowing in the morning when LoneCat went for a job interview, it was a blizzard when I went to collect my new glasses (Which are so thick now that the legs don't close properly on one pair, and the other pair has had to be sent back for adjustments before I can pick
[More...]
31/Jan/2003 09:56 — AquarionicsCheques for Free
So you remember "Save Karyn"? Karyn is a valley girl who ran up about $20,000 in credit-card bills before somebody, somewhere stopped giving the stupid bint money. Her reaction to this was not - as society dictates - to get two jobs and stop paying for cable, but to sell some stuff (Good move), Keep her current job (good move), and ask the Internet to pay her credit card bills.
Hmm.
Didn't do anything, wasn't offering to do anything, just st
[More...]
31/Jan/2003 16:56 — AquarionicsWhich OS Are You?
Which OS are You? [More...]
31/Jan/2003 18:50 — AquarionicsFontastic
So, Nick Boalch (Who I know from another life, same life as I know Stuart and Paul from, in fact) also has a weblog. Paul has started using Trebuchet MS after seeing it there (Paul, your HTML is broken on your latest entry, btw) dispite the fact that having all headers as Trebuchet MS, as well as the main Aquari
[More...]
31/Jan/2003 23:24 — AquarionicsData for this is generated by Lifestream, which is open source. No. There isn't an RSS feed.
All original content © Nicholas Avenell 2000 to 2012, reposts, quotations and most tumblr content remain the property of whoever created it (Click though to the originals for the best citations I could find)
