Archive for May, 2003
Delay
It looks as though Chatbear v2 might slip into early June. Which is a real shame, since development was moving on such apace for a while there. All I have to do is write some help pages (easy) and document all the tags that you can use in each block (time-consuming and tedious) and it’s finished. There’s a couple of minor things I want to do with the admin system and I’ve been told about one bug, but none of that’s going to take much longer either. So why the delay into June (and the obvious subsequent push of the start date for charging into August)? Motivation. I seem to have none at the moment, for this, or anything else. I think coding is just getting me down, I’m not enjoying it at all. Work seems more of a slog than anything else, and even though Breeze seems to have come together over the last couple of weeks into something which is now building up pages on Titan quite easily, I still have a nagging feeling that it’s all going to go horribly wrong.
Maybe I’ll go search Google for techniques on how to focus better.
Masters Of Doom
It’s been a while since I read a book from start to finish. Certainly this quickly. I’m not stupid or anything, I usually just get sidetracked after getting about three quarters of the way through something. But putting aside everything else this weekend, I managed to get through this one and enjoyed the experience. At the end of it, I’m not quite sure what the author wanted me to think, but I’d still recommend it.
Incorrect ETA
My new iPod turned up yesterday and very nice it is too. It certainly seems a little thinner than the old one, but may just be my imagination. It’s all loaded up now, although it was more of a hassle than I expected.
I have a Powerbook (I’m typing this using it), but all my music is stored on the my Windows PC. So rather than have to copy 30Gb of music over a wireless network and then onto the iPod, I stuck a firewire card in my PC and installed the software that came with the iPod. Firstly, it seemed like it went through 15 Installshields as everything was copied over, but thankfully it required only minor user intervention. It did however require a machine restart, which is just ridiculous. Not as ridiculous as Musicmatch however, which is without a doubt one of the worst pieces of software I’ve ever had the misfortune to use. I initially tried to copy 18Gb of music at once onto the pod, and after 45 minutes of hard disk thrashing, it eventually crashed without copying a single file. Ok then. Plan B. Smaller chunks. Still crashing regulary. Plan C. Plan D. Plan E. Copy, crash, copy, crash. Eventually, I had to do it three albums at a time. THREE.
Some more examples of how bad it is - the increasing memory usage (it was using 135Mb of memory by the time I was finished), the 45 second delay in sorting my list of albums (something Winamp does with no delay), the horrible interface design, terrible skins (heck, just the fact that it uses skins at all is a mark down in my book)… who wrote this thing! It’s up to version 8 now as well (I’m using 7.5) and they still haven’t got it right either.
Now, the cynical part of me says that Apple did this deliberately so they could show you how easy it is on the Mac (and it is easy, you just plug it in and… and well that’s it, you plug it in and it works), but I’m not sure how good a business decision that would be.
Just Stuff
Well Saturday is finished, two hours of Sunday are gone, and I’m still looking for something to grab my attention for longer than 20 minutes. I fixed the ID3 tags on a lot of my MP3’s in preparation for the iPod (which according to the package tracking system has an ETA of the 7th May, meaning the timezone difference between here and Taiwan is a bit different than I thought), watched the finale of the current Friends season (the power of Usenet), downloaded some average game videos from Gamespot (the new Tomb Raider game looks like every previous Tomb Raider game), read some pages on the Interweb, converted allapple.com to a discussion only site using v2 (which threw up some bugs which I also fixed), created a couple of holding pages for the Help section of Chatbear v2 (so they didn’t just look like broken links), watched the second half of the FA Cup final and the Grand Prix qualifying, watched the program about the Big Read 100 nominations for the favourite book of the country (which was really unexciting) and finally, thought very hard about doing something much more productive.
A good chunk of Sunday is going to pass by really quickly (almost 10 hours of sleep coming up + 3 hours or so for the Grand Prix), after which I’ll probably just sit here and do nothing really very constructive again. Really I want to be writing the Chatbear v2 help, coding some of Breeze/Titan, whipping up the new company website or even one of my many other projects.
A boy can dream.
New iPod
I’m pleased to say that Apple shipped my new 30Gb iPod today, and I’m even more pleased to say that they didn’t ship it using Irish Express Cargo - the world’s worst courier company. I don’t expect I’ll see it before Monday, but I’m really looking forward to loading the thing up. Being able to put my entire collection of MP3’s on there is the number one reason for upgrading (I have about 26Gb worth) as I have a real aversion to having to decide which music to carry.
I’ll say one thing though, you know technology is marching on apace when your MP3 player has a larger capacity than your laptop.
Server Moved
Well here we are on the new server. Isn’t it nice. Honestly I’m sure you’ve not even noticed we’re somewhere new. Which is good.
With everything moved across, it means the only thing left to do on v2 is some help files and a smattering of HTML. Maybe I’ll tackle the first part of that tonight, which is documenting all the tags you can use in the 90 available blocks. Honestly I can’t think of anything more tedious, but at least if it’s out of the way everything from that point on is just typing bullshit.
Star Trek: Nemesis
Just watching the second half of this, and you know, I quite enjoyed it. A lot of the reviews were really negative and I had started to believe this was going to a bit of a disappointment, but really I was pleasantly surprised.
I read the script many months before the film was released and really enjoyed it. Mostly it came across as I expected, with some things I was worried about solved and some things I thought would be great turn out not be as good as I’d imagined. But really they stayed pretty close to what I saw. Certainly the end was a worrying point, but the whole B4/Data thing didn’t end up quite as mushy as it was written. There was certainly some bits cut out of that, including lines about Beverly going off to Starfleet Medical. The bad dude (and that’s a technical term) was really good, and his death scene was particulary evil. And overall, cheese was kept to a minimum, even Data singing at the beginning wasn’t too cringeworthy.
Overall, one of the better ones, and thankfully no whales to be seen. Shame it’s the last one there’s going to be, I do really like this crew, much more than any other since.
And if you look, Wil Wheaton is there at the start, and even gets his name in the credits despite not saying a line. Now that’s not bad is it.
Server Move
So the great server move has begun, moving everything Chatbear and Bearkey related from Verio to memset. Honestly, it doesn’t get much more fun than this.
But hey, at least using Debian might make it easier to maintain in the long run.
