A nice, quiet start to the holiday. Got up late, we went into Helston’s Tesco and bought some food for Christmas and then did very little during the afternoon other than playing Oolite for a bit.

This evening, after a nice dinner, I discovered “The Fantastic Four” playing on Sky Movies 10 so watched that. I’m glad that I didn’t spend any money (other than the Sky Movies subscription) to watch the film. It was OK as a distraction but nothing to make an effort to see. It was definitely made using an action movie by numbers kit. I understand that there’s a sequel in the works. Hopefully it’s better than the original.

That’s about it, really.

It was a very cold, frosty and foggy morning which greeted me when I opened the blinks this morning, just the sort of weather you want when you’re planning to drive 270 miles. Still, by the time I left at 10:55am it was at least light and you could see a couple of hundred yards, though it took a good ten minutes to thaw the car windows enough to be able to drive off.

The drive down the country was mixed. Along the Oxford to Swindon road there were tantalizing gaps in the fog, giving beautiful views of a crisp, frosty morning with all the trees and bushes encrusted with bright frosting shining in the sunshine and contrasted by a deep blue sky behind. Unfortunately, these gaps in the fog were all too brief. The fog finally broke at Exeter, where the air temperature suddenly jumped from -1C to a balmy 6-7C.

Otherwise the five and a half hour journey down was uneventful. So, now I’m ensconced down here in Cornwall for almost two weeks, the longest break down here since last Christmas. I really do need the rest.

Well, it had to happen eventually. I’ve done the full switch over of all my A/V equipment at home to digital formats.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been racking my brain over how long it’s been since I last used my SVHS video recorder for anything other than timeshifting programmes and worked out that it’s probably been about three years. Although the machine works perfectly, for time shifting it can be a bit of a pain if you’ve recorded a couple of programmes, looked at one or two at the beginning of the tape and then need to record another one at the end. I’ve been thinking, therefore, about getting a PVR for a while but I don’t want to be tied into Sky with Sky+, the DVD recorders weren’t flexible enough and degraded the quality to fit a number of hours into 4.7GB and the HDD recorders didn’t have a means to write the programmes off onto longer term storage.

However, last Sunday morning, as I was buying a Christmas present in Comet I noticed a new breed of PVR, a HDD based machine with a built in DVD recorder.. or is it the other way around?
Wibbling about DVRs

On this day in 1986 a momentous happening occured:

The SEND command was removed from use on the original EUCLID system by
University College Computer Centre.

The SEND command was used greatly by the undergraduate community via the
MISC.YAP and POOL.GOODYAP talking programs and it was a hard blow to us
hacker types.

So, independently, Alec and I wrote within the day basic replacements for
the talking programs which no-longer worked. I produced POOL.CONVERSE and
Alec POOL.CONFLAB. Subsiquent to this first day, we got together, along with
Robert Newson and made our programs work together. The final upshot of this
was the development of Bullet about 18 months afterward (after much talking
in the Pi office.).

So celebrate and make merry!

This was previously posted in the notices folder on Bullet earlier this afternoon.

Just testing out the web browser. It seems to work OK

This morning I picked up from the Post Office delivery centre my new smartphone, the just released Palm Treo 680. (Which meant that I had to get up at 6:25am! Blurgh.)

My thoughts so far:

Good bits relative to the Treo 600..

• Nice screen.
• Lighter and nicer looking
• Faster
• Mocha telnet works.
• The e-mail client does IMAP properly, just downloading headers and then the message body on demand.
• All the cards (SIMM & SD) are enclosed.
• Non-volative RAM so that data’s not lost when the battery runs down.
• The keyboard is far better and easier to read.
• It’s not locked to a telco and you can upload and download MIDI files and MAP3 as ringtones via USB without paying the phone company a penny.

Bad bits..

• The battery’s smaller and hence shorter life (slightly)
• I’ve found a bug which can stop the whole device from functioning.
• There’s no reset button, you have to remove the battery.

As for the bug, it looks like while the phone is hibernating the battery and signal level sub-systems are still sending screen refresh requests to the display sub-system. When you unlock it and wake the device up the UI spends a while updating and refreshing the display and it unresponsive to the touch screen or the buttons. It’s locked up a couple of times during this refresh deluge.

Still, it is definitely an improvement and only days after release so bugs aren’t a surprise really.

I went to Parcel Line‘s web site to track a shipment and I got this page instead:

I didn’t know that Parcel Line was run by Sun Microsystems Ltd. 🙂

Those of you who hanker after the days of Elite can now re-live the whole thing under MacOS X, Linux or Windows with a re-implementation (the authors say inspired by) called Oolite.

Here’s a promotional video on YouTube.

Some wally locked their bike to mine at work this evening so I had to take the bus home. Grrr.. It also means that I’m going to have to take the bus to work. That’s £3.60 I’m having to spend unnecessarily and it’ll take me nearly an hour to get to work (as it did to get home tonight). What a pain.