Yesterday was yet another very busy day, it being the day that the 4th years had to hand their projects in (at 2pm).

The day before I’d e-mailed them all telling them if they needed any assistance out of hours that they should phone me up on my mobile. None of them did so dispite a couple of them having problems with printers and software during the night.

One of the problems was caused by LyX, the LaTeX based word processor deciding to send SIGHUP to the whole process group instead of just ghostscript after a picture was added to the document. Even after upgrade to the latest patchlevel it still did the same thing. So I hacked out all the kill() calls and got a version which worked well enough. Even though the 4th-year basically lost 8 hours of time she managed to get the project report in 3 hours late. As far as we are all aware, this was actually ok in the end, thankfully, seeing as the project is a third of the overall degree.

On top of this fun was more fun with Word and coaxing the colour printer to keep working. Sometime in the night the printer lost a spring on a door so it no-longer keeps closed, but it’s not an important one. Over the last week it’s been well overworked!

As for myself, I’m bored. At least the weather’s getting better this afternoon.

It’s been a busy week at work. Lots of things cropping up, lots of things needed to help the 4th year undergrads get their projects finished and printed dispite Microsoft Word’s best efforts to destroy files and generate unprintable crud. Thank goodness OpenOffice.org.1.0 was able to open and print the files Word itself couldn’t, that’s all I can say.

Thankfully, the Tektronix Phaser 740 printer hasn’t been playing up so much recently. It’s only jamming about once every 20 pages at the moment. I’m still going to have to buy a new feeder unit after the Antalis paper soured the stainless steel rollers.

On a lighter note, I managed to finish “Thief of Time” the night before last. Not bad at all. One of the better volumes in the Discworld series. Then again, I do have a soft spot for Susan Sto Helit.

As for life outside work.. currently there isn’t any. The social life *is* likely to pick up in about 3-4 weeks time for a little while but that’s all on the horizon, really. Love life doesn’t exist. I’m not sure what other lives I’m supposed to have, but they seem in deficit too. At least I’m pretty comfortably mediocre unlike many people I know who are going through very hard times and I hope and wish will feel better soon, though I know that the sort of pain they are having to endure only eases with time. I can but offer my sympathy and help if they want it.

That’s Life. (they say.. whoever they are.. Esther Ranson maybe?)

I meant to talk about the latest Pratchett novel I’ve been reading in my previous posting but didn’t get around to it.

I’m half way through “The Thief of Time” and so far it seems pretty decent. At least he’s not made the mistake of using numeric dates so far, unlike in “The Truth.”

I can see he’s been influenced by “The Matrix” quite a bit, and all the silliness historians churn out using the little facts they have or the absence of facts to generate an elaborate model of history.

On the whole, so far it’s quite fun.. how it ends, we’ll have to see. At least Pratchett doesn’t go for the quick round up of the story at the end like Neil Stephenson seems to, which is a good thing.

This morning’s been “interesting” at work with lots of stupid people breaking various computer systems, most of the mice in the undergrad lab committing suicide (they’re all the same age, so it looks like the beggers have a timebomb in their hardware somewhere) and various other things.

Still, having fixed those things I can and put the others on hold until I can actually fix them, I’ve got through the morning. If there are thigns which I can’t change, I don’t worry about them.

Anyway, the weekend was nice and restful. Saturday afternoon was spent (mostly) window shopping. I picked up Terry Pratchett’s “Thief of Time” for £4.99 at WH.Smith’s along with DVD’s of “The Dish” and “Highlander” under their “2 for £20” deal. £10 per DVD is about the right sort of pricing level in my opinion, as I’ve said many times before.

(Coo.. as I type, the heavens have opened outside and it’s torrential rain.. I do like to be able to see outside from my office, unlike my previous office where I could only see a corridor.)

Sunday was spent a lot of the time reading (funnily enough) with time off for watching the Grand Prix (Ferrari need a good kicking for what they did at the end) and getting some food. I also caught “Titan AE” on Sky Premier. Some of the graphics were nice, though they reminded me a lot of “Freespace,” the PC game. The story would have been better without the cutesy characters which just got in the way. Either make a good SciFi film or a cutesy kiddie pic, the combination doesn’t work!

Hmm.. should I go outside and buy my baguette for lunch or do I merely raid the snack machine and stay dry? Tough question.. I think the snack machine and the prospect of staying dry is getting more and more appealing. 😉

It’s Saturday afternoon.. So far today I’ve managed to get up and get dressed, I’ve got the grass in the back garden cut. After watching the qualifying for tomorrow’s Grand Prix I did the weekly shop and now, after eating lunch I’m couch potatoing.

Sometimes it’s so nice not to have any plans at all. Later today I’ll probably wander into town and see if I can get the latest Terry Pratchett book cheap in Borders or W.H.Smiths. Then again, I might not bother.. the choice is all mine.

All that washing of my car last week were all to no avail. The starlings which seem to use my TV aerial as a perch and/or latrine have managed to hit every panel on my car except the rear driver’s side door.. but they obviously tried, as there’s an indication of a missed impact on the tarmac beside the door. Maybe I should stick a van-de-graaf generator on the aerial and zap those little birdies. The stuff they got on the windscreen wouldn’t even wash off with the help of the wipers along with the washer fluid.. I think they must be using some sort of superglue or polymer resin.

After yesterday’s hotbed of LJ postings and comments it seems everyone’s run out of steam today.

Maybe there’s only a finite flux of comments and yesterday’s huge outpouring emptied the whole reservoir and now we’re having to wait for it to refill.

Anyway, who cares? 🙂

Today’s been a pretty dull day in more ways than one. Firstly, it’s been a day of not very interesting work and the weather’s dreary too.

Still, tomorrow afternoon there’s a Sun Technology Seminar over at the Computing Labs which includes a free lunch and (gosh) information which is not for general release on upcoming wonders of Sun marketting, sorry, technology for which I’ll have to sign a non disclosure agreement. This will be, of course, a software technology ‘cos in the hardware stakes Sun is dropping behind on the raw performance side.

If you were strapped for cash and needed a computer to do lots of number crunching, would you:-

1. Buy a Sun Blade 1000 with twin 900MHz UltraSPARC III processors (which under benchmarking show that they are a third less efficient than the current x86 processors per clock cycle) and 1GB of RAM for around £10,000.
2. Buy a dual Athlon MP 2000+ machine with twin processors, 1GB RAM and more disk than on the Blade 1000 plus a complete set of spare parts for £5000 which is basically twice the raw computing power.

Hmm.. tricky, eh? The Sun is more reliable, yet the Athlon box is almost disposable but you can maintain it yourself for half the cost.

It seems that I’ve been given the honour of a special community by kickadee because, unlike Ian I didn’t have one already. How nice of her. Still, I’m not sure being in the shadow of Ian is such a good idea. 🙂

Jen’s entry in her journal yesterday has got me thinking a great deal too.. both about the ephemeral nature of life and of word contruction. It’s good to think.

PS. Here’s a link to the community.

It seems quite a while since my last entry. I think it’s a little under a week, however.

What has happened to me in that time?

Let’s see, Jerry suggested that the weekend just gone would be a good time for them to visit me, so they turned up Saturday lunchtime, we had a fun day and they left Sunday just after lunch. It was a pitty that Jerry had a bad stomach on Saturday though.

That and the night out to celebrate Arwen’s passing her DPhil (PhD for anyone outside Oxford) viva on Friday evening and having to pay 17 quid for a meal which I would have concidered a mere snack are the only two anchors on the week.

The visit of Jerry, Em and little Laura had other effects, such as lots of cleaning on Friday night and a bit on Saturday morning in preparation for their visit. A mad rush on Saturday morning trying to do things I had to do before they arrived etc.

At least yesterday I managed to have what seemed the first relaxing day in ages. I even managed to wash the car and wax it!

Ever since I wrote a comment in Smiddly’s journal last week about detaching and looking at life from a totally disjoint perspective, and having done so to write the comment, I’ve had problems re-attaching. Indeed, I’ve felt choked, as if wanting to cry for most of this time with no need to actually cry or knowing why I’d want to.

So:

Addendum to user manual:

Do not use detached mode as this may cause system instability.

Other news:

Other than this it’s not been a bad week. Unexpectedly busy at the weekend though. Sometimes I would have liked a busy weekend, but this weekend I wanted to sleep. Oh well 🙂

It’s Thursday evening already!

The week’s flown by, well other than then continuing hassle of trying to build KDE 3.0. I got the Linux build mostly done, the only problem being that the helpfiles didn’t work. The Solaris build got stuck in kdelibs with some very terminal errors. I’ll start from scratch on both of these and document the failures so I can pass them on as bug reports.

I see On/ITV Digital have finally died. I’m not that surprised, really. They rushed to market about 6 months to a year before the technology was ready because otherwise they would have been left in the dust of SkyDigital. Unfortunately, because the technology wasn’t fully ready they weren’t really up to compete anyway. Well, that and Sky had the resources behind it to kill the competition using marketting and loss-leading which On Digital just couldn’t do.

Still, it is quite sad. The technology had potential and the user front-end, IMHO, was far better than the one on Sky set-top boxes.