.. I think it’s about time for some more stuff here. Not much has happened since the last post of mine, no wait it has. I have the First Evangelion Movie Evangelion – Death (True)² (AKA Evangelion Death and Rebirth). It took much time, but thanks to Gnotella, it became mine late yesterday afternoon. Now all I need to do is to rent 21-26 (or as many of them as possible) to see them, this will be a weekend job I think.

PHP assignment is done including the Mod10 check (that works with real cards — what a bonus), I just need to do the writeup.

I checked my start and cjb accounts this morning. Some kind soul requested my slashdot password so I now know what it is. (hmmm). Also I’ve taken 5 minutes out of my day to unsubscribe to spam hitting my cjb (and hence pop) account, this is a bad thing normally but the addresses I was responding to had the company name in them, oracle_related_spam@ bad_blue_spam@ and so on, much fun was had.

I downloaded the now free Tasm5 last night to do some win32 asm programming just for a laugh, and it’s surprisingly easy to do hello world message boxes (not that a one line vbs script can’t to that either, but still). I also downloaded futurama episode 314 yesterday, mmmm futurama. 315 isn’t on the server in real media, bugger.

Evangelion Collection 0:5 comes out on the 13 June. I’m wondering if I should get 3 and 4 now and then wait till 6 comes out to get 5 and 6 together or wait until 5 comes out and get 3, 4 and 5 at once. Another note: The movies will be released on DVD before Christmas 2001, I’m not sure if they mean region 4 release or region 1, DAMN these DVD region Codes.

aquadextrous, adj.: Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes. — Rich Hall, “Sniglets”

Tomorrow is the First International Towel Day in Douglas Adam’s honour. That’s pretty cool I think.

Php assignment is so near to completion that I’m going to do it today / tomorrow / weekend / sometime. Just need to do the Mod10 bit and then it’s done.

I installed the United Devices program today. I was not impressed really, or maybe I have high expectations. The user registration part seem straight forward until it says, Sorry that Member Id is taken, here have this random one, thanks a freaking lot. At least it can be changed on the web site which has the neat little Is this ID available thing, pity they didn’t put that into the program, or if they would force you to signup over the web site and then type in the member name and password into the program when you first run it. I dunno, also it’s cruncher (the part that does the work) is single threaded, and for some short sighted reason they only allow you to run one instance of it, so it’s only using half of my idle CPU time, while Distributed.net gets the other half for the time being. The other thing is it seems that the program doesn’t buffer unprocessed work units, which means on completion of a work unit, you have to be on the net to get another one, or your (now) idle cpu time just goes to waste again (or to dnet which buffers blocks). The buffering and single threadedness things are mentioned in the FAQ with the sentence “We are working to add this functionality to a future release.” I hope the future release is soon or I won’t bother running it at all, dnet is so much smaller and friendly. Also United Devices program only runs on Windows, damn. Another thing I found annoying, it changed my screen saver settings without asking me … grrr

Is my winge over yet you ask? No, I’m not done yet, quit your whining.

Portland’s FTP server is either full (like now) or down. This is gettting beyond rediculous, I may be forced to email some people I know in the USA and plead for web hosting, who cares if it’s off a DSL line, it’s gotta be better than portland if it doesn’t host 250k sites.

My winge is over.

I’ve been playing around with GnuPG lately, it looks and works well as far as I can see, it integrates with pine very nicely. My public key is here. While on the subject of nothing in particular, here is a good number plate. This is nugget of dnet’s car…

527 retrains later, I’ve been connected to the net for 4 days straight =)

Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore. — Cecil Beaton

After spending at least an hour to get a SQL INSERT … SELECT statement to work I thought I should post this. Make sure if you are using INSERT … SELECT that the table you are inserting into has AUTO_INCREMENT on it’s primary key, otherwise you’ll only get one row inserted and then spend bloody ages bashing your head against the keyboard and drinking coke. After all this time PEBKAC : Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.

I spent yesterday and today downloading more futurama episodes from a top secret server who’s web page is getting DNS lookup failures, yet the server is quite fine =) I’ve nearly got all of 311, and I’ve got 60% of 310 (I’ve already got 312, 309 and all before) in real media (I’ve still got 312 and 310 in DivX) The only catch with this top secret web server is, it’s bloody slow and I mean that I can max out 3 connections to it with bandwidth to spare even though I’m connecting at 19200 !. Maybe it’s hosted on a 56k modem in Antarctica, or not.

Opera 5.0 is nice, very nice. It’s even got ICQ built in, that has to be a good thing right? Bottom line, Opera is still damn fast, and small, 2.18Mb to download for Win32 (You need a JRE still, or it’s a bigger download). And only 1.58Mb for linux, but I haven’t tried that one yet (none of my full time linux boxes run X, funny that). I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but CDRecord is very kickass on win32 (Windows2000 in this case, provided you have an ASPI layer, easy fix though). Nero made some nice coasters out of some Redhat 7.1 ISO’s I came across, but CDRecord came through for me, the best things in life are free.

Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.