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So we were sitting around at work yesterday, and one of my orkers of bovines asked if anyone could remember the name of the utility that allowed a non-readline enabled application to use readline. I'd never heard of such a thing, but one of the other developers piped up: rlwrap. Wow. What an amazingly useful little app. There's something to be said for working in the same office as the rest of your team. What you lose out in terms of privacy and quiet coding time, you more than make up in terms of information exchange.

Well, my brief dalliance with Facebook lasted less than a week. In general, I've avoided MySpace and Facebook because there's simply nothing there of interest to me. But a friend had been playing Block Star, a Tetris game, on Facebook, and had found that none of her friends were able to come close to her score. So eventually, I gave in and create a Facebook account so I could play Tetris. Sure enough, I beat her high score, which gave her something to aim for. She was pleased. I was pleased. All was good.

But then, Block Star was withdrawn, and replaced with Tetris Friends. But the general consensus seems to be that Block Star was a much better game, and a lot of the Block Star players are now upset that their favourite game has been removed, with only an inferior and less playable version in its place. They're promising to implement some of the features that Block Star previously had in the coming weeks. But they're not there yet.

Of course, I wouldn't know about that, because I can't play it. Firstly, it's now in Java, rather than Flash. It seems that not only is it Java, but you need a Java 6 plugin, where I only had Java 5. WTF? You can quite easily write Tetris in Java 1.1. Why the need for the latest and greatest? Morons. But it gets better. My friend still wanted to see how I did on the new version, so I grabbed the new plugin, only to be told that I couldn't run the game anyway. You see, it doesn't work with Linux. There's a note on the first screen, explaining that it doesn't work on Macs either. So, Windows only then. Well done. Java's "write once, run anyway" mantra has never been true. But for a browser plugin? I'm sure you need some special talent to make an applet be platform specific.

Firstly, when you have a working application with a large base of happy users, replacing it with a substandard application is never a good idea. Yes, the new one uses the officially licensed Tetris engine and brand. Do you think any of the end users care about that? How do you think they feel about the Tetris brand now? At the very least, waiting until Tetris Friends was feature compatible with Block Star would have been a smart move. And the decision to move to Java 6, *and* to make it Windows only? Dumb.

Ho hum. Here endeth my Facebook experience.

As some of you might have seen, Camden Town was badly damaged by fire last night. Camden has long been somewhere that those with alternative lifestyles congregated. The high street is full of tattoo and piercing parlours, places selling punk and metal clothing, record shops and the like. In addition, it has several markets, which all offer something different than you'd find in a normal faceless corporate shopping centre. The extent of the damage isn't yet clear, but it looks like it's mostly the eastern lock market that's suffered.

As yet, the cause of the fire is unknown, but I can't help thinking that it's awfully convenient for the corporate interests that have been lobbying to pull down much of Camden and start afresh. Camden has always had a vibrant feel to it, but I'm sure the fire damaged property will be sold off to the highest bidder, who will tear the remains down and replace them with yet another set of bland, faceless shops and offices, eroding just that little bit more of Camden's soul :-(

Last night I met up with Jorg. He'd come over to London for a short holiday, and I'd arranged to have a few drinks with him after work. He's the first person I've known online that I've later gone on to meet in real life. We're both fairly introverted, and even though he's someone I know and like online, I was somewhat nervous that it would be a case of long embarassed silence if I met him in person. Fortunately, it worked out somewhat better than that, and we chatted away reasonably freely for a bit before I had to head off and help my girlfriend prepare for her art exhibition.

So what's he like? Physically slightly taller than I'd imagined. For some reason, I was expecting him to be shorter than that. Vocally, he had more of an accent than I had anticipated. His written English is so good, I rarely think of him as being a foreigner. But even so, he embarassed me with how good his English is. I could have conversed with him in French or German, but it would have been slow and awkward as I fished for the right words and struggled with the grammar, but in English it was smooth and free flowing. He's not only fluent, but uses many of the mannerisms and nuances of language that are the mark of a native speaker. Overall, it was a successful event. Of all the people in the circle (as was), he's the one that's most similar to me, and I'll certainly take the time to meet up again should our paths coincide in the future.

So today was the big sales pitch for the product I've been developing. We'd gone into one of our largest potential customers, a multi-billion pound company, and a big win for us if we can sign them up. The meeting started well. I had none of the expected problems getting the laptop working with the projector, and the presentation was pretty slick. Magicpoint rocks.

Then came the part where I had to demo the software. I'd taken a snapshot of my development code from when it was fairly stable, and copied it over to the laptop. I'd done a trial run in the office before we left, to make sure it all worked, and having satisfied myself that it did, I didn't touch anything, just in case it broke. Which, of course, it did, in the middle of my demonstration. Fortunately, just enough of it worked that they could see what it was meant to do, but I could really have done without it going wrong. It's fair to say I'm not exactly in my boss's good books right now...

Despite that, I think the pitch went well, considering the circumstances. We'll have to wait and see whether it materialises into a deal, but they seemed reasonably interested.