Recently...

Recently I've been getting "this is happening right now...!" thoughts every now and then, which is much more than usual. But in the last couple of days, it's become "Is this happening now, or is this just a memory?". That happened about 5 minutes ago, last. It's so incredibly odd - I honestly wasn't sure for several seconds whether I was viewing a memory or experiencing the present. I think that mental state links in with "passive activity" that I've probably mentioned before.

Idea

I don't think it's at all worth bothering with all that for the purpose of our communication, Chris. Just my feelings though. On the other hand, it strikes me that there are no (effective) means for groups of people to communicate online, and not in real-time. Mailing lists can just get messy and annoying getting emails in your inbox all the time. This blog works, more or less, but the commenting system doesn't really lend itself to our situation. A wiki might work a bit better, but its structure would really need to be thought through carefully.

I'm thinking of a topic/conversation/thread based structure, where people can add their thoughts to it. Here's a working title for such a service: "The Big Conversation". I think it's actually quite a neat idea! Although, mailinglists do follow pretty much exactly the same scheme, except for the layout and access mechanism. Something to think about, Chris...

Oooh, I went to a snooker club this afternoon with a friend - £5 life membership, £3 an hour (with student discount) up until 7pm. Not bad! The cues and tables are excellent as well. It's called WT's, and it's on a side road on Newmarket Road just after APU (heading out of the city centre). I think you should join up James, we should have a game sometime.

This blog, perl, German magazines, updates...

Cool about your design Mark :) Seems German computer magazines are pretty cool like that, I had Blind Fury in a German magazine years ago - Although that must've been a bit of a shitty magazine, considering... hehe

I agree with your comment on comments, James... It's not that big a deal to read comments seperately, but it would be nice if it just displayed them underneath the post in this case - What I was thinking is if we used Blogger's sftp upload feature to upload the blog to my web-space, I can wrap all this up in some Perl scripts so we can format it how we like (you could design the CSS and template, I can get Perl to put things in the right place) - That way, we could have comments underneath posts, or even folding lists of comments using CSS or something like that (that'd be neat!) - Could even have new-comment notifications along with bookmark links at the top of the page... You'd still update using the Blogger interface, but you'd view it from whatver domain (I could set it up so my main site points to it, or a subdomain). What do you think Mark? If you do a page design, I'll do the scripts.

Just did my scripting techniques exam - Think I did quite well there, hopefully heading for a first in that module :) One of the questions was a real bitch though, shame I didn't learn any .Net, could've done an easier question :p

Anyway, your thoughts, guys?

Updates

Blog changes:

• Both of you are now admins! Don't break the site, please.
• Blog name changed to "The Contemporary Annals [...]".
• Potentially: I can change the subdomain (I think), from markrian(.blogspot.com). Suggestions? I didn't wanna change it yet cos then neither of you would be able to get here.
  

Instead of me commenting to the relevant blogs, I think it'll just be a lot easier to write my own. In fact can I suggest that instead of comments, we just write a new posts? Comments are handled rather cumbersomely, I find, making them a pain to read/reply to. Just try to dump a stack of comments into post so things don't become too messy.

Now James, you say you got up an hour early for a lecture? Duddums. What time was your lecture? Midday? DAMN, you must be exhausted.

Chris, I understood what you said, but I don't see how a script can cause X apps not to run, unless there's more to it than that ;o

As for news on my end, I've received all my exams results back. Maths was by far the best, with a score of 68% (almost a 1^st), leaving Materials and Mineral Sciences a distant 2^nd at 47%, and Physics just scraping a 3^rd (in both senses). Bearing in mind I actually did absolutely no preparatory work, apart from the work I did the previous term, I think I did rather well. I now have shitloads to do before Monday, which is ridiculous, and I want to cry.

More excitingly, I was emailed yesterday by some guy who found my ChrisLord.net design on OSWD.org. He told me he loved the design and will use it when he reworks his site. That's not the exiting bit; I get that all the time. He went on to tell me that the design, my design, was mentioned and referred to in a German computer magazine, describing how to quickly and easily set up a great website!

!!

As for your site Chris, why would you need a new design? And what exactly do you mean by "redesign my website to use [Perl]"?


P.S. I've just noticed that my computer clock is showing extraordinary amounts of drift... about 5mins/day. I knew something wasn't right! Any ideas Chris on how to correct this? NTP daemons don't work behind this (fucking) proxy...

EDIT -- Here's an email from the guy about the magazine!

Mark,

> Glad you like the design! The icons/images are attached.

Many thanks !

> You say that my design was mentioned in a German computer magazine? I know
> this is a bit vain, but can you tell me the exact name of the magazine and
> the issue number which mentions it? I'd very much appreciate it!
>

c't magazin für computer technik (German) : Issue number 3 from 24
January 2005

Article : Praxis - Instant-Websites : They are speaking about creating
websites using templates (commercial and free) and they tested some free
WYSIWYG editors with your ChrisLord_dot_net_v45 template.

Best regards and thank you again,
Romain

--
Romain Petges
http://www.petges.com

Thoughts

Mark, I think you should update the name of this blog to "The Contemporary Annals of a Convergent Trio on Divergent Paths" - I like it, and seeing as James suggested it, I'm assuming he likes it... And the blog being called 'markrian' is a bit annoying :p

Anyway, during revision, I've come to the realisation that Perl is an awesome language :) So I'm going to redesign my website to use it... But this also means I need a new design - I was thinking of using your essay design Mark... Unless you want to design something new and fairly similar? :)

Also, if I don't speed up this revision slightly, I'm only likely to get quite a low mark, unless Perl plays a much greater part in it than it has in previous papers... (I hope it does)

Unionroot causes all X apps to segfault on startup it seems... Need to debug that, probably my mounting scripts messing things up somehow... Everything seems to work find though outside of X, so it's gonna be a hard one :/ Need to get someone to test Opie ideally...

Not that that means all that much to either of you I guess :p

How's things going with you two?

[Edit: btw Mark, rhythmbox in Debian unstable now supports wmas! :D]

General update

Just had another exam... Didn't go too well, but hopefully my coursework (A, 70+ :)) will bring it up - I've almost certainly passed at least, but I'd quite like to get over 60 (unlikely with my performance in the exam though...).

I had Operating Systems yesterday, which I think I already told Mark in an e-mail (or did I?) - I did pretty well in that, very pleased :) I should do well in the coursework, so I expect 65 overall at the very least - and hopefully over 70 (1st).

In other news, I finished my preliminary work on a unionfs based root-filesystem for PDA's in OpenEmbedded - It seems to conflict with X at the moment, which is obviously no good... There's something wrong because I had it working before, so I'll experiment a bit with that... I'd like to get it done pretty soon - Minimo has finally started to become pretty good :) Check these shots out:

• Minimo bookmarks
• Minimo small-screen rendering

It loads and runs pretty fast as well I can confirm :)


Also, Microsoft are about to REALLY shoot themselves in the foot :) Looks like they'll be a fair few migrations to different systems quite soon I think.

I'm sure looking forward to the exams being over... Got one that I'm really not going to do well in again tomorrow :/ (although once again, a good coursework mark should save me)

Blog name-change

What shall we call this blog?

I suggested 'The Three Muskateers', but Mark quite rightly pointed out that that was quite gay. He then suggested a variation of Two Blokes and a Blob (e.g. 2BnB, 2B&B, 2BB, etc.) - which I'd be quite happy with...

Any other suggestions?

Leave a comment on this entry.

First post!

My first post on my blog!

Now, the question is how to let more than one person post to this blog, whilst appearing as the correct person. Hmm. Possible? Perhaps! -- UPDATE! Yes, it is possible! How quality! :o

Don't worry too much guys, I can change the name of the blog at any time ;o

Wow, I'm rather impressed with Blogger - excellent interface, quick to set up, no gay ads... :) And, group blogs!

I've not got much to say at the moment, other than I have a lot of work to do. Oh, James, you're probably not aware that I've quit rowing now (well, am quitting)... It turned out to be just too much. I have enough trouble keeping up with work as it is :p

Well... guess it's time for me to be hitting the ol' dusty road...