Aquarionics

Since I have discovered Blogger

Since I have discovered Blogger (click the link below for details) I am using that for the diary. It still means I compose it on my notebook, type it up at home, and then paste it in, but it means I no longer have to wade though my HTML to do it. Which is nice.

Anyhue, Yesterday's Diary entry:

Damnation. Some how, in the infinate causality of the universe and such, I managed to spill tea on my Keyboard. Now, the M$ Keyboard I use is probably one of the only M$ Products I use on a reguler basis (along with my Intelieye mouse and Word97) and I have no complaints whatsoever, it is comfortable, useable, and totally unwaterproof. Or, more precisly, Tea proof. Therefore the blasted thing is sitting about three feet to my left, on my windowsill, after having been washed clean, drying in the Sunderland Sun, which, sadly, is currently hiding behind a bank of clouds in the same way it does most days.
So I am typing on my old Acer non ergonomic, non nice, almost non-usable keyboard cheifly because the Shift keys & keypad wern't working on the other. This limits todays entry.

"One more week to go,
One more week of sorrow,
One more week until we break for easter,
6 more days tomorrow!"

You could call this a Hard Week. With one assignment deadline this week, two next week, the locking of my Network Account, as well as what can, and should, basically be described as "Other Stuff" I want to go home, Now.

I have been forced to add another name to the Hall of Shame (which I may even post) of mail order suppliers that are, to coin a phrase, totally useless. That company is Addons.co.uk. Don't even go there, don't buy anything. I ordered a DVD Drive from them about a week ago and it still hasn't arrived. Not a suprise, really, 28 days for delivery and all that, but I discovered that they removed the money from my Visa on the same day I sent my first complaining E-Mail. Odd that. If I don't get a reply to my e-mail tommorrow, I am going to have to phone them Monday, which I don't want to do, mainly because I will have to do it with my Mobile, and that will cost a bomb. Gah. Horrible Companies.

In other news, Mandrake has been ordered, and my computer will be penguined soon.

Hey ho. Daily update resolution still active

In other news, my What's Cool page is online. Basically, if I find something I like, I press a button on my browser and it's added into the blog. It's at http://www.aquarionics.com/cool.html so go there.

Oh.. My... God.

I have been publishing this for the last two weeks to THE WRONG PAGE!!!!

I am a moron. I deserve to be shot.

Ok, redesign of Aquarionics is finished

It's strange, our flat, which used to be close, has drifted. Matt went home on thursday without me noticing, and I havn't seen two of my flatmates for days! Never mind, only a few hours until I go home.

Ahh, the sweet smell of Home.

Ok, Due to Windows on my 'pooter being less stable than a one...

In other, related, news, my Windows install has decided that it's life as a working install is over, and now is the perfect time to die. In fact, I've suddenly started getting messages saying "Windows is Unstable". I waiting for more messages informing me that Water is Wet.

If you look to your left, there is a box. In that box are the lastest good things from C-Net and the Worlds Greatest Search engine. Basically, Use them. Google is the best search engine I have ever used, and C-Net (in addition to Slashdot) hold most of the news you will ever need.

Back

There are a few missing pieces of this giant jigsaw I call home, namly Play isn't uploaded yet, and most of the AFE Photoes are in limbo until I have time to upload 2 megs on my modem line :-)

Apart from that, if you see any problems with the site Tell Me about them!

Eeek, Broken links. Not only is Play still dead (you'd think...

The Grand Return

For it is written that decisions made at 1am will haunt you forever. I mean, how long would a weblog system take to write?

There isn't anything fancy in the new system yet (Well, except for the category system. And the fried caching - done in the simplist way possible - but I stopped putting in the more complex stuff in favour of getting myself back online.

That was a week ago. Then Warcraft III arrived... and Unreal... and the FotR Extended DVD... and... well... Sorry :-)

Not all the content (Read, hardly any of the content) is back yet, Notably RSS feeds are broken, writings is down, and Forever is missing in action, as is my current blogs list. All will be coming back soon. Don't touch that dial.

Designation

Another day, another design. Well, a regression in actual fact. I came to the conclusion that nice as the other design was, I didn't activly like it. The result was that I've now regressed back to mid-2001 for the time being until I work out what the actual new design is going to be. Meanwhile, Comments is nearing actuality. Really, though, I should get back to work...

Telecomuniculture

Okay, so in the course of work (developing games for mobile phones for the next week and a bit) I've been playing with GPRS and watching the news in the mobile world. The ideal is somewhere near Paul's vision, in that Microsoft currently want to design a box that syncs with your alarm clock so it can, for example, tell you that the traffic is murder and you're going to have to leave early. This is an idea I like. Stuart's, however, is an idea I'm scared of, because the future is now.

Bluewater is a FOG shopping centre hiding in the Kent countryside just south of London. It was slightly lacking in mobile coverage, so they employed NTL to help it along. The results are that each customer with a mobile phone can be tracked though the centre, the central system can tell which shops they go in, how long they stay in the centre, and where they go. They can even send text messages to the phone, with special offers they might have missed.

I'm not really paranoid about user tracking. I don't block cookies, and I'm not exactly a difficult person to track down. (Really. According to Google this site is 12 for "Avenell", #1 for Nicholas-Avenell, Aquarion and Aquarionics, and Nine of the top 10 results for Nick Avenell are me, even if I don't go by that name very often any more), And I activly like the idea of a CMS that follows me around a site and recommends other things I might like. I do, however, object to being told it isn't happening, and that it's being done for my privacy and security.

In other fun and exciting news, Category based browsing has been written and enabled, although I still have to do the index for it. Oh, and writings is back, although none of the old content has been put in yet.

Really Complicated Syndication

Okay, In a move that will no doubt please all those livejournal users who have failed to see the last weeks articles because they read it via LJ's RSS feeds thing, Aquarionics is now serving RSS - and, of course, ESF feeds.

Update: Okay, it seems that LJ doesn't do RSS 2.0 feeds. all.rss will become 1.0 tonight, with an RSS2 feed later...

Of course, it *should* use ESF :-)

Q

Okay, So that would be definitions of "Tonight" that match Thursday,. Well, they share one of the same letters...

Last night was the office Christmas party, where I drank a significant amount of London Pride, ate some of a significantly nice Chinese meal in a significantly nice restaurant, and significantly got back home at about 1am, having had a very nice conclusion to a significantly sucky day. Yesterday morning, in fact, was one of the worst mornings my final year project group was accused of racism. And, as I had to do then, I'm not going to explain why just yet, in case it stops happening.

Please let it stop happening.

And in a little while, I'm going to Bath for LoneCat's graduation, back sometime tomorrowish. Then I have to get comments back before the 21st (Comments display works, I just haven't done the form & validation yet)

Um. Yeah, social commentary stuff. Weblog Conference Good. "Meatspace" horrible word. BBC Streams Good.

The Name's Mas. Christmas.

So I went Christmas shopping, and got stuff for siblings, parents, girlfriend and housemate. Oh, and me.

It's terrible. At least this time I spent more on the presents than I did on me, but these are all things I've been meaning to buy for ages, but I really should stop it. I keep accidentally buying things people are getting me for Christmas...

Today, to pick a random example, I bought the first four Lemony Snicket books, a new JC Grimwood paperback, the fifth Preacher book, and Catch22, which I've been meaning to read forever and was on offer. Then I left Borders. I went into Game and bought Tropico Gold to replace my original CD that got scratched. I walked into HMV and bought Monopoly Tycoon (Which is a CitySim based around the Monopoly world). Yesterday we went to Sainsbury's and I accidentally bought a couple of James Bond DVDs (Two for the price of one. Evil, I tell you. Old fiery-eye himself could learn). I failed to accidentally buy the Buffy six box set, but on the other hand failed to buy myself some new pillows or - and since this was the other reason for going out I'm quite miffed at this - go in to book an appointment for some new glasses.

The shadowy threat I've been hinting at for the last week has come and gone, leaving just a dark stain of it's presence. The company that is retaining the company I'm contracting (horrible word. Verbing wierds language) for decided to stop doing so, thus the project I was to move to got delayed, thus my contract was not going to be renewed when it ends on the 23rd December. This is bad, because I like working where I'm working, and kind of object to being kept hanging - not by the company who hired me, who have been helpful and hopeful throughout - but rather the fact that it had to happen at all. It's been resolved in a non-optimal but unpessimal way in that my contract will indeed cease on 2002-12-23, but will restart again mid to late January, and I can coast until then. All the above has made my new year's resolution to pay more attention to my cash-flow so I can survive weeks like this without panic attacks.

Hence the influx of media, BTW. Now I know work will continue at some point, I've allowed myself some spending :-) Reviews on the above will happen - it's the promise I made myself when buying them.

Oh, and hello Livejournelers, you are once again back with us after my sabbatical. For those of you unaware of this saga, it goes like this: Livejournal has the ability to add RSS feeds as LiveJournals, so that people who pay LJ.com money can add them to their Friends List (So it appears on a list of the most recent entries you're interested in). Somebody (Either Sam or Rho) set up Aquarionics as one. I don't mind this, really. I wouldn't publish an RSS feed if I didn't want people to use it, but my problems with this implementation are threefold. The first is that by default all syndicated journals have LiveJournal's internal commenting system enabled, so people can make comments on the items in my RSS list. Now, I'd really rather this didn't happen, since I have my own commenting system (all right, so you can't post to it currently, but that's not really the point) and I'd rather not have my comments spread across three or four sites.

Secondly, there is apparently no method of changing an RSS feed's details. Aquarionics' feed moved from /rss/all.rss to /meta/all.rss. The original was only linked to for a week, but apparently the address was taken from the announcement post by whoever did it, which should teach me to modify links, so I've now hacked Epistula so that /rss is exactly the same as /meta, but it's a horrible kludge.

Thirdly, LJ's engine automatically produces RSS feeds of all journals (just add "/rss" to the diary URL). This includes syndicated accounts.

So I raised an Issue on LJ's support forum. The problem is that because it's an Open Source venture, we have to wait until some enterprising hacker with some CFT decides to fix it, or until the paid maintainers do. Since it's not a problem for the people who use LJ, just a problem with the people whose feeds are used by them, I doubt it'll be fixed anytime soon, so I kludged it, and downloaded the source. Time to brush up on my perl...

Day

Apologies for the lack of insightful comment over the last few days, combined stress of possible employment, christmas shopping, bills, cheques failing to clear, paying for food and general all-inclusive stress have conspired to stop me from doing anything very much outside getting stressed and attempting to destress again. I didn't even redesign for christmas, which is a first in the 5 years of running this website in it's various forms. Rest assured that for January 1st - Aquarionics.com's third aniversary - something will happen. I may even finish the comments interface :-)

Eitherway, I wish you a Merry Christmastime whether you celebrate it or not, may you be having a good time. carefully phrased celebrations to you all.

And with any luck, this year I won't have bought the same thing for my girlfriend as she did for me. Yeah, sickening, isn't it?

Discussion Matrix

Whilst other people may be listening to the queens speech, watching Bond Films, playing with presents or stuffing turkeys, I was being industrious. Abnormal for me, I realise. Anyway, I have finally written the Comments interface for [E]2, and thus is the empire forged on a solid block of truth, justice, and people making comments in little blue boxes.

The main new thing about the new comments system is something I haven't done yet, which is tied in with the new user system. Basically, registered users will be able to attach events to comments, such as an event to send an email when you get a reply, or an XML-RPC ping, or a Pingback ping, or something. Also, comments will trigger pingback pings as well as diary entries. Well, they will when I do the crossreferencing stuff properly...

Also back is the various RSS, RSS2 and ESF feeds, including an RSS feed for comments. These are now sitting in the Meta section for your gaze to fall on. The code for the new commenting system is sitting in src, and in it you can see that I've abandoned the generic output templates for forms until I write or find a library to do them as I want to. Comments on obvious holes in the system, or anything else for that matter, are welcome :-)

Other Half Live

Hmm. You can tell I designed the new AqCom at 1600x1200 by the way the logo looks oversized at 1024x768, let alone anything else. Must fix this.

I'm home. I wandered down though London with no trouble at all, did presenty things (Out of four people I managed to get two gifts that they already had - both of which were half of the total present, which means that I at least got it right) whilst I got a nice new watch, a grill, a marble-run and a new cafeteria. I like spreading the present part of Christmas over two days :-)

Kind of a busman's holiday, since I got two computers back working again and helped order broadband in less than 24 hrs of being here, but nothing unexpected. The problems are where nothing has changed (the village in the middle of nowhere, for example) and everything has (one of my brothers - I have two - moving into my room). I come back, and people are talking about writing, or writing about writing in fact, so a couple of cents of data then...

A tendency towards writing is what brought me to blogging in the more general sense. A diary has been on this site since the end of January 2000, and I joined Blogger - and the blogging community - as of about April that year. I was 19. I write because I can't not write. I write what I am told are entertaining posts on Usenet, I write short stories that make me question my abilities, I write articles to display here and occasionally elsewhere. I've been published in electronic form two times and in print once - it was a fanzine. Why do I write this journal?

Our chief weapon is feedback. Feedback and soapboxes. Our two main weapons are feedback and soapboxes. And archiving. Our three main weapons are feedback, soapboxes, archiving and dissemination of information. Four. Our four main wea... I'll come in again.

I write for feedback.

I live for feedback; I'm a constructive feedback junky. I may not like it, but I still want it. It may stop me writing for a while, it may make me question my entire stance on publishing to the web, but I still want feedback. The worst thing about writing mainly for Usenet is that after a while people start going "Aha, it's him. He's funny. Ha. Next post" and all the writer sees is a black hole into which they are posting things. I'm a performer; I came to writing as an actor, I need the audience reaction, so I write so that people will say what they think. Unless it's destructive, in which case though I need to ignore them, I can't. But I still live for feedback.

Soapboxes.

I write for a soapbox to stand on. I don't have any right to my opinions on most things beyond media - which I am a consumer of - and interfaces to other websites - which I have to be able to program for. But I have this place where I can rant and rave about the state of the transport network, the good things about Christmas, the holes in the education system, Napster, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. *Anything* and people read it, probably because they are expecting examples of #5.

Archiving.

I write so I can read my life in two years time when I have forgotten.

Dissemination of Information.

I write so that people will know where I am. So my parents know I left home at 17:10 and might be here by eight, that I arrived safe home from a convention, so my friends know that I'm still alive, so that the people who give a flying fuck of my whereabouts and wellbeing can do so without having to ask.

Entertainment.

And for the real reason I plead the fifth. Entertainment. I write things that might possibly amuse and entertain, though there doesn't seem to be much of that recently. I write to comment on my technological betters, to demonstrate I'm still alive - if occasionally only just - but mostly because some people find things I write amusing and enjoy reading them. I still don't understand why, though.

All this stuff about "Weblog writing" smacks to me as navel gazing, though. There is no such thing as a typical weblog. You can't say weblogs fill a valuable niche in the news world because many weblogs have the literary worth of a life-sized sugar model of Hamlet, and not only couldn't care less, but are popular because of it. On the other hand, there are many blogs whose owners I would fall at the feet of and worship that are fantastically readable yet have no deep meaningful touch at all, they are just well written.

We are not the cement of the establishment, nor are we the wrecking ball. We will not effect the people, because we a just a small subsection of The People. We are just the division of people who want to write of the division of the people who want to. the first rule we break is to throw out all our assumptions about 'what is good writing' said Burningbird, and I strongly disagree. Good writing is still good writing, and nothing weblogging does can change that, Good writing is writing that is readable. There are as many examples of bad writing on the web as there are of bad design, there are millions of angsty poems out there by teenagers convinced that Anne Rice books are deep, edgy and gothic. The fact that there are many of them does not make what they are doing "Good Writing" and neither does weblogging. It's just a new style and a new forum, and it may change the world - it certainly has changed mine - but it's still the people who can write writing for the audience who want to read it.

Two Things...

A minor redesign.

I need an iBook. need. Damn. Must... not... buy... iBook...

Spare 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 IXR library, which will fix a known issue, allowing me to send stuff back in exactly the same way as the Blogger implementation does. However, right now Powerblog hates me, and keeps crashing.

Have I scared everyone off yet?

I only ask because the flood of comments seems to have stopped, just as I was getting used to it... :-)

So, today I bought a bike, as promised.

There are three ways to do something like this. You can either read up every word on the latest trends, thoughts, scams and makes, or you can take a friend who knows this sort of thing along, or you can do what I did, which is to pick a salesperson in the middle of the January Sales and say "I'd like to buy a $foo, but I've no idea what type". They will SYN/ACK on this and start firing packets of data at you, which you have to decode, assemble and process at the same time, requesting resending of packets where appropriate, normally ending in @items, from which you chose an appropriate item based on the information in the packet stream. The important point is the packet stream. If you attempt to interrupt it - as most customers who claim not to know anything will do - with ah, the ${technical data}, I've heard of that, isn't that the $item that will <#include "bullshit.h">. At which point, any sensible salesperson gets a Ceramic Tea Holding Object alert, and will -9 the sales pitch in favour of <#include "ahh_sir_is_an_\*informed\*_customer.h">. Because I display geek traits, my reaction is more to listen, so now I know where British built frames are superior, why they sell what they sell, and why it's half price, not to mention the differences between the .jp and .us twist-grip gears. Sometimes, just listening to the salesperson and agreeing with them will get you a discount. So I did this, wandered around the bikes, listened to the spiel, then bought the blue one.

Go on, be surprised, I dare you.

But I bought the blue one that the salesperson told me was the best - but not most expensive - of the range. No, it wasn't the cheapest, but if I wanted a bike that would fall apart between here and work, I'd have bought one with amusingly detachable handlebars.

Chairman of the Bored

So I got bored and redesigned. For some reason, Moz <1.3 is ignoring the 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...

Back to normal

The CavLec tribute is down, I'm back to normal. I am, in fact, a moron. I saw Dorothea's post on Aquarionics’ oscillation and thought "Wha?". I haven't had any flack for this, so I wondered what she was talking about. Then I realised. Epistula is a fried system, and I didn't delete the cache when I redid the design, so the only things that had the new design were the stuff that was generated after the post in question or isn't cached (Like the "Add Comment" page) or was regenerated due to changed content (The relivant archives and categories are flushed when a post is added or modified to them), so the Gallery, Articles and any other page that was generated before midnight last night were still Aq6, instead of Sunset. I'm a fool.

It's taught me some things about CSS, and has reminded me how much I like playing with other peoples designs :-). Ahh, home sweet home...

Fixed

We've been bouncing a bit today, first because I ran out of disk-space quota (Meaning [E]2 created empty caches, then saved and used them. Ick) then because I took the opertunity to fix the front page redirection system. This meant finding redirects for all the most common 404s on the site, thus the article below got written in a hurry. I probably need a Projects section.

This was just in time for blogsnob to stop responding in such a way that php stayed waiting for it, which meant that the page wasn't loading. Cue Aquarion panicking and trying to regress back to previous system because he couldn't work out what was wrong...

Anyway, New Stuff soon.

Momentary Pause

Pol (The person who hosts the box that Aquarionics, Afphrid, and Affordable Hamsters live on) is transfering World to a new box. I'm in the process of moving the database and the sites over (I can put mod_rewrite rules into .htaccess without crashing apache!! Yay Not-Raq!!!), and the mysqldump has just been taken. This means that any posts, comments or Other posted between now and whenever the transfer happens (Note to self: email Kevin) won't be kept, and will fall into the ether when the server dies on the 13th March. So, if you want to try to break my comment system, now is the time to do it :-D

For the first time ever, I'm moving server without moving design :-)

Return

I’m back.

Not totally obvious, is it? You wouldn’t belive the problems we faced merely getting the site back online, DNS things, email things, and the ongoing lack of housing thing. We appear to have chosen to go to Norfolk for the time being, if not only because the price we are paying for a three bedroom small terraced house in Cambridge will rent a three bedroom detached mansion in Norfolk