My parents divorced when I was about nine. It was pretty hurtful. I was on the cusp, I think if I was much younger I wouldn’t have understood and if I was older I would have rebelled against everything. As it was I just sort of went with it. I almost don’t remember how I really felt about it, the emotion that I must have felt seems as distant as that of the others around me at the time. It was all so long ago that the idea that that my Mum and Dad were once together seems intangible.

Shoot the Moon, written by Alan Parker and released in 1982, is the most harrowing divorce film I’ve seen. It’s the only one that really portrays the pain of the real thing. The pit of my stomach sympathised. I have always been aware of how my mother and, to a lesser extent, my father must have felt and this film gave me brutal insight. Thankfully my parents break up had none of Albert Finney’s violence. While his role is exaggerated, however, there’s no doubt about the connection to reality and whilst his behaviour is horrific, the emotional turmoil that creates them must be familiar to every divorcee.

Yesterday, there were three seperate copyright victories (the MIT rebuke to the RIAA subpoenas, the complaint by OSV against SCO and the House of Reps rebuke to the new FCC media regs), it was a good day.

Last night I had a dream where I was with a scientist who’s work was measuring some coefficient of the world. He measured it to about 1.3. I was told by shady types (Illuminati-level shady) that it was actually 1.5. As soon as I told the scientist this, the world began to spin more quickly and was struck by huge storms with furious winds and masses of lightening. It was actually moderately scary, the scariest dream I’ve had for ages.

Today Mat’s remaining grandmother died and Adam’s old dog Ted was put down.

I did read The Call Of Cthulhu recently, but I sense a disturbance in the force…

I’m working hard to finish wwWebflow 2 for next week. Funny thing, I just changed the capitalisation of some file names, remove some capitals, went for the javaStyleOfCapping. Now the interface feels faster and less clunky, simply because I place such a high value on neatness. Am I insane?

By the way, whilst I really like electroclash at the moment, it’s all about the music. The antics of Peaches and Casey Spooner, with their five-costume-changes-per-song sex-on-stage pantomine bollocks, are just really annoying IMHO. I know that’s a big part of the scene for a lot of people, but I only really like the synths and maybe the attitude of the less well known, less arrogant acts, which is more about making fun records and pretending to be cool like all those eighties stars thought they were. Just as it was back in the eighties, when stars start to think they are actually that cool, they just start being twats.

Bought a whole load of Electroclash tunes on Friday. Nice. I particularly recommend A Touch Of Class Sucks for bits of rock, punk and disco all with a subtle electroclash flavour. I also bought the Open Up And Say…@<%_|^[!] Tigerbeat6 sampler. Lots of good stuff coming out of that label at the moment. A particularly good track by DJ /rupture. I will have to investigate more I think…

Then yesterday I got a call saying the Chiswick Vision Express had the sunglasses I’d liked back in. Having unsuccessfully tried to find more likeable pairs at the Oxford Street store on Friday, I went in, tried them on briefly and bought them on the spot. They even managed to make them up for me before they closed two hours later. I was late though and had to knock on the door to get in after they’d closed. I haven’t really worn them yet, but I’ll let you know how great they are. The greatest thing so far is that because I spent so much on my normal glasses I got a voucher that gave me £70 off the sunglasses frames… which were £70! Woo! The lenses were only £80 as well. A pair of designer prescription sunglasses for £80! It’s a deal.

I only went to see Hulk because of Peter Bradshaw’s review in the Guardian. Before that I had pretty much dismissed it as cookie cutter action film territory. It wasn’t really. Conversely, a lot of the red tops have dismissed with statements like “Lee has tried to create a cerebral action movie” (The Metro), but I don’t think that covers it either.

It’s difficult to nail it down, but I think the best way to explain it is “sophisticated”, a label only really The Matrix (not Reloaded) shares. It’s no normal blockbuster, but it has all the raw grunt, more in fact. Hulk’s smashing is ace, it really captures the total frustration. We’re not asked to contemplate the world as it is/was/might be. Some people think that is the case, but I think it’s just standard action plot fill, ignored in every other exploder, so why not this one?

Where X-Men 2 dissappointed my younger sister, this one will succeeded. It has all the childlike cool it could want and that’s a good thing. And the ending is pure cheese genius. Absolute genius.

I use Sendmail for SMTP because the current distribution of qmail is subtly broken for some reason on Jaguar. Can’t quite work out why and I need outgoing SMTP too much to sit down and play with it. Anyway, Sendmail requires that / not be group writeable. This is understandable as Sendmail is so riddled with security issues it really needs all the help it can get. Still, I don’t quite understand why Apple doesn’t change the default sendmail.cf to ignore the permissions at least. It’s a bit insecure, but who do they think is using Sendmail? Anybody running a big server will use a decent MTA. For that matter, why are they even shipping Sendmail? qmail is simpler to run, faster, better and more secure, especially if it’s being supported by the OS vendor. Postfix is also very good I hear. Exim’s pretty tight too. What on earth would make anyone choose Sendmail for a new OS? Especially a desktop one.

By the way, I mention this because they issued a software update this week and instead of removing the group writeable permission I accidentally removed group executable permission. Doh! I locked myself out of the machine and it wouldn’t even boot until I remembered about single user mode. Phew!

I got my new glasses today. For the first time in a long time I’m very aware of the fact that I’m wearing glasses.

I’d got ever so used to the framing of the world provided by the old pair and the new pair are quite different. They are much wider, which gives some things a crazy movie look. They are also a fairly different prescription on the left side, which is disorienting and a little painful. I can’t drive in them yet for this reason.

Stylistically, I haven’t gone that far out there. It’s just a big modernisation. I’ve still got rims, but they’re deeply rectangular, and they are designer (Calvin Klein of all things) rather than own-brand. They make my old glasses look distinctly shit, which I guess they were after all this time. It’s funny, I’d never really thought about it. My sunglasses are much worse and I’d just sort of singled them out. However, now I’ve upgraded a bit, I’m well aware of how much better I look. Indeed, I’m not planning to leave it so long before I upgrade again.

I haven’t upgraded my sunglasses yet, but given the change in the glasses, it will definitely be this weekend. I probably can’t actually bring myself to put my current sunglasses on ever again.

So Netscape is gone, that’s bad news for them, but not for Mozilla happily. It will continue apace. Their timing couldn’t be better almost. The Mozilla site has been redesigned. The new site is very good. It’s simple and usable and it’s attractive and very business-like. It seems to be eager to take on the mantle of the challenger that PPK would give it. Moz needs to learn a few lessons from Opera about impressing the suits.

The new site is a big step in the right direction if Mozilla is to climb to the top. In addition, I really think that the totally refactored codebases cut from the main trunk, the children of Moz if you like, Firebird, Thunderbird and Camino, represent the way forward for the newly formed foundation. These products fit into the bigger world of the web much better than the monolithic main product. They are more evolved and much fitter challengers to IE.

Netscape goes the way of IE Mac.

Interesting in the context of Peter Paul Koch’s recent Evolt article, which positions the current browser crop in a new war, but also really sad. Netscape were a silly company at times, but they also fought the good fight pretty well down the years.

RIP.

Been doing a load more Hype hacking. I’ve now got the new user signup process finished. This verifies you via email and is a bit more involved and sensible that the last version. It’s good. It required more in the way of framework. I slightly reshaped the Controller object to allow an arbitrary set of parameters to be passed slash delimited on the request path. The argument parts are then separated from the URL part and passed into the view class as an array. This means the view doesn’t need to know how deep it is into the “folder” hierarchy for it to access it’s arguments.

It’s getting a touch slow though so I decided to look into profiling. I found this article at OnLamp.com which describes the very useful Benchmark_Timer class, which is part of PEAR. I quickly got the output from Benchmark_Timer into CSV format and I’m now graphing it in Excel. Job’s a good ‘un.

It looks like too much time is being spent on the getLinks() function from DataObjects. Whilst DO is a great framework, I did have a suspicion it wouldn’t be the fastest thing ever. I suspect each getLinks() call results in a DB query. As getLinks() is run once per message displayed, ouch! There are ways to optimise though, even if it means going back to using a join for the core loops.

Been doing some work on the new new Hype codebase tonight. As of this afternoon we had messages coming from the DB. Now we have posting, logging in and out, setting permanent logins and a bunch more background support framework. Only another 25 years until release!

I made Toad in the hole! This is the first time I’ve made batter. Hell, it’s the first time I’ve used flour as an ingredient. I started late so it didn’t really have time to cook all the way through. It was a bit eggy still at the bottom, but it was perfectly edible. More the batter equivalent of al dente than undercooked.

The batter had Thyme, the sausages Rosemary. It was quite a herby number. It was fit and most filling. Mmmm, good.

Mat shipped me his mixer. It’s a Vestax PMC-05 Pro II and it beats the pants out of my old one. The crossfader was so shagged on it as to be useless (leaky on both sides) even if you could muster the strength to push it across. Still them days is gone and now I can chop to my heart’s content. Thanks Mat!

Louise and I went shopping yesterday. We don’t shop really. I buy stuff compulsively night and day but online mostly. Louise doesn’t shop because she has very little spending money. As I’ve been bringing in a fair amount recently I gave her an allowance and demanded she buy clothes. She bought a nice cream linen suit and a lovely pink top and some other bits. Job well done. I also wanted to buy some clothes, but no where has trousers baggy enough for me any more, :-(.

I’m going to get some new glasses soon as well. I went into a store to try some frames and a sales guy asked me what I was looking for. “Something a bit more up to date” I replied. He turned to Louise and joked “I’m glad he said that and not me!” I took it in good humour, but it confirmed my hunch that it’s seriously time to upgrade. I went into Vision Express on Oxford Street expecting usual high street opticians fare. No, it’s designer boutique central. I’m going to get some superfly George Clooney sunglasses I reckon. I’m sick of the fashion dark ages, where’s my wallet..?

I got a Bluetooth dongle today. It’s neat, installation was a case of sticking it in the USB port. My new phone (Sony Ericsson T610) has Bluetooth. It and the Mac totally love each other:

• iSync merged my calendars and contacts seemlessly
• System Prefs picked up on the phone for use as a network interface
• With the Salling Clicker, I can remote control Mac apps through Applescript. It can detect when I go out of range and perform any action then
• I can transfer sounds, themes and wallpapers on to the phone easily. I haven’t opened Photoshop yet, but I will.

Ahh, life is good.

I’m currently listening to all my MP3’s that have the word fuck in the title. About two and a half hours worth, heavily beefed up by two Chris LIberator mixes, one called Clusterfuck and the other called It’s Fuckin’ ‘Avin It.

So Hixie blunders on the list and announces that the WG is looking at the centering problems we’ve all been fighting about for the last few days!

Obviously this is good news, but I can’t help getting the feeling that they just aren’t really thinking about the outside world too much. If they were then the argument would have been cancelled with a single line email: “In progress after CSS 2.1”.

Mental note: The W3C is an elephant. It’s not going to do anything quickly, stop expecting daily feedback.

I had another tiff on www-style today. Somebody asked about block-level centering (both vertical and horizontal). I think this is the fourth or fifth time somebody has out of the blue come on to the list and asked about block centering, there is a need for it, but nothing is being done. The people who represent the working group can’t even be bothered to come on to the list and talk about it. I can kind of understand this, it’s an old issue. By why is nothing being done? Why is there no process for resolving these kind of suggestions formally? Is the W3C at all interactive? At the moment it seems to be asleep. The people who argue with me on the lists are just other people following the mantra of “The Right Way”. Where’s the plan of action? I don’t want to still be having these arguments in a year’s time. I want to move forward and I hope they do too.

Finally they turn on the GPRS support for my new phone! I needed a SIM update to use it, but Orange’s SIM updating system has been out of action since the weekend. When it came on today, I had a brief surf, posted to Hype in glorious Technicolor of course and then decided to have a pop at making a MIDlet.

A MIDlet is a Java application designed to run on mobile devices, phones, palmtops, etc. MIDP defines the execution environment and a shoal of other standards define the APIs and everything else. A lot can be acheived. The MIDlet can gain access to almost all of the phone’s faculties and apps can provide lovely graphics or interact with a host of network services over HTTP, SMS or potentially other carriers. There is even an API for multimedia, however, the T610’s implementation of this doesn’t extend as far as controlling the camera :-(

Being a relatively experienced Java programmer, knocking up the source for the Hello world MIDlet was a doddle. The next bit was however annoyingly hard. Once the code was finished I compiled it into a class file. Nothing new there. However, there remains several steps. The class needs to be blessed to run on the KVM device virtual machine. The blessing tools are only available for Linux, Solaris and Windows. So I duly downloaded the J2SE SDK and the Wireless Development Toolkit from Sun on to Louise’s machine. This built the required files and blessed everything.

I shipped the files up to Gradwell and add the MIME types required for the JAR file and it’s descriptor to this site’s root .htaccess file. Everything looked good. I had even tested the app on an emulator that came with the WTK. I managed to download the file to my phone fine as well. However, it didn’t run. Perhaps it needed to be signed, or blessed some other way?

No props to Sun on the tools for this one. Usually they are very good for this kind of thing. I absolutely can’t believe that they’ve shipped a binary blessing tool, preverify, that isn’t written in Java! How’s that for shooting yourself in the foot? The dev tools are crappy as well, providing little more than a button to push and giving me corrupted screen nonsense at the same time. Why not ship this as a batch of Ant tasks? That way I could do it all on my Mac without any extra effort from them. In addition it would fit into the development cycles of a lot more developers than releasing some shonky app to do it. Dave Dribin has provided a set of tasks to work with the WTK, but these do not get round the problem of not having a compatible version of the binary tool to hand.

Multinational megacorp rating: lower.

I made a pretty graphic for ben2. I made it once, Illustrator crashed, I made it again. Grrr.

Today I gave a pretty large sum of cash to charity, divided roughly between adopting some Chilean jungle, a regular donation to the WWF, an annual pledge to the EFF and one-off donations to Amnesty, FOE and Oxfam. A nice balance of the trees, the animals and the people I think. The animals lost out a bit because the WWF doesn’t accept one-off payments, but hopefully the FOE will help them a bit and other people will give more because animals are fluffy.

To be honest I feel shell shocked. The money is a tenth of what I got from the sale of my Dad’s company, but the effect on me is very different. Grabbing money was easy, it was instantly acceptable and soon it was like it was nothing special. Giving it away however was hard. Louise made me feel sad because she will earn less than the amount I’ve given away today in weeks of marking papers. The fact that the money will maybe prevent some other people from having to work so hard is small consolation when somebody so close to me is sad because her hard work seems in vain. If there’s one cause I should give money to, it’s her.

In addition to positive spending I’ve recently been indulging the shameless materialist in me, though I don’t feel very proud to say that right now. I’ve spent a lot of money on things like a new mobile phone and insurance in the last few days, as well as levelling debts. I paid Louise back a very large amount that I owed her credit card as well as settling up with Rob for previous work and Mum for the loan she gave me at the end of last year. I also had to pay off the Inland Revenue, I haven’t paid any NI for about a year and a half and they billed (and fined) me for that a couple of weeks ago. I’ve spent almost as much in the last two weeks as I earned last tax year! My income has also been high due to my stock sales. My poor debit card is practically on fire and I’m feeling almost out of it. I still owe the house bills account some cash so I can’t quite cut my card up yet, but believe me, it’s on my mind.

Crazy crazy.