Oh dear.

Somehow, a power spike managed to bugger only my SuSE partition, without hosing either Darwin or Windows. OK, thinks I, just slap the old rescue DVD in and...ah. The rescue DVD is scratched to hell. So, off I went to Borders bookstore, in order to buy a new distro, and they only had bloody Red Hat. How annoyed am I? Very.

So here it is.

OK so it's not much, but surely it's a start. The Cambridge Z88 is, among other things, a mighty fine emulator of the DEC VT52 terminal. Apart from a couple of things. One is that it only has eight lines compared to the DEC's 24, and the other involves certain key combinations. Well I decided to decompile the terminfo entry for the VT52 using infocmp, and create a Z88-specific entry using tic.

It's not great at the moment, I've only addressed the screen height thing. But hopefully I'll be able to add to its usefulness. Another project being planned is a reverse-engineering of the Eazylink file transfer system, to create a Unix client.

Well it's nearly time for me to go home, and that means that my various retro computers might get a bashing. Actually, I'm thinking of developing something for the Spectrum, but haven't got any sense of direction. Maybe a web browser (as proof of concept) would be nice, but I expect it's been done before. E-mail client? Usenet reader? Neverwinter Nights clone?

If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to comment.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life, as someone said.

Actually, today is the first of something, for me. It's the first day in a long while that I haven't had tonneloads of tutorial work to do in Solid State. Therefore, the epic Lord of the Pings will get a complete new whole couple of thousand words. The whole thing will also be changed into a slightly more luser-friendly text format and will appear here when updated. Enjoy.

Apologies for the rant. I've managed to determine a system whereby English members of the /. community can be discovered. If there's a funny comment, and it's been modded flamebait or troll, then this almost certainly means that a British poster has been modded down by an American moderator.
Now I'm not trying to incite a flamewar, or mock the American people, but please, moderators; if you see something you don't understand, don't just mod it down, consider whether it's ironic or sarcastic.
Maybe in this, the 20th year of the smiley :-), we should come up with a system to designate British humour. I hereby announce the UK smiley (also known as the ironicon) £:-).

What with having got two tutorials out of the way today (yippeee!!!) I now have no work for this afternoon. This means I can get back to my pet project - a program to calculate the Madelung constant of crystals!

Well, it's not quite got to that stage, as I realised I need objects that are points, objects that are vectors, objects that are ions, objects that are unit cells, etc. So I think before I can actually write the program I've got to create around half a dozen classes, then work out what to do from there :-/

Thus far it's taken over a week, as a side project. For more programs wot I wrote, check my homepage and someone else's. I also wrote a mean version of Light Cycles for the Amiga, but I don't think the source code's online.

BTW is anyone actually reading this rubbish?

Woo-hoo! For today is the first time I have something worth writing in my journal!
I'm getting a Cambridge Z88! W00t etc. For those of you not in the know, and too lazy to follow the link, it's somewhere between being a laptop and a Spectrum. OK so apart from having BBC BASIC as a builtin, there's not much development can be done on it (I do believe, however, that they have a form of CP/M available. IMBW). But it *does* have a 20hr battery life (off four AA batteries), and can fit something like 3Mb of flash RAM on it. Cool!

All I have to do now is get my QL mended....