Learning
Hmm, fairly normal few days with some odd other bits thrown in. To resume from the last (meaningful) entry, the situation... well, was never resolved, but went away anyway. It'll be back I've no doubt, but there's always something to keep my life interesting anyway. I've noticed that my happiness seems to now be tied almost entirely to monetary issues, and my ability to provide a future for myself and Shanna, and to some extent Graham - both will make their own way of course, but I know I'm still depended upon to make my fair contribution, and I will do so.
To that end, things have been looking better lately, which feels strange to be able to say because I'm still as much in debt as I ever was, and in fact although I recovered a little of it, Shanna's visit took me back to the edge again. £158.10 (close to $300) was spent on coach journeys alone, in fact. Despite this, I'm currently feeling much more optimisic that usual - the completed Cali system has now had somewhere around fourty hours of live trials and other than the problems I mentioned a week or so ago there's been no trouble, and even Darius used the word finished*. Cyrus' site has been complete for a while now, but we met him last week and agreed to the final touches. We're meeting him again today for tea, to answer anything he'd like to know, and of course to be paid. Darius also said he would pay the full ammount today, so if all goes as it should, we will be around £1,900 happier. Then, we give all attention to CaliHQ3 - if we can sell one copy of it before Christmas this year I'll feel satisfied. Four or five copies at three or four thousand pounds a time is somewhere between £12,000 and £20,000... and that is the kind of money we could and should be making, and the kind of money we can live on. Not alone, of course, enough between us, and if we could make that much we could certainly make more.
My confidence increases with every project we take on - we've always been good at learning new things, but it doesn't always produce the best results when you're working on something and literally learning as you go along. By now though, we've gained a lot of experience in a lot of different things... we were good before, and now we're producing better and better code. It's almost certain that there will now be RAWR3, which will be entirely class-based, and power the website portion of the CaliHQ3 project. The software portion will be written in C++ .net, which I am rapidly growing to love.
As a learning excercise, I decided to try using .net to write a new Yahoo messenger service client. I'd read a little on the protocol and it looked as though once you get past authentification, it's easy to use. This is true, but authentification is extremely difficult. I've managed to get a working implementation together, and I still don't know how it works - it was patched together from reading the few working implementations I could find - GAIM, Miranda IM, and a Perl module called NET:YMSG or something, which was designed for writing bots. I slowly managed to merge the mess of Tux-knows how many C files and assorted headers, strip out everything but the part that generates the response strings, along with the few other functions they need (MD5 and SHA1 hashing, and both normal and Yahoo-specific Base64 conversion), into something manageable. So now I have a bit of C code, called by an unmanaged C++ class, used by my managed C++ .net classes. Yeah... s'fun.
It's going well too - all the basic underlying protocol stuff is there, and just needs to be built upon and an interface to use it with. I should have a basic messenger capable of sending and recieve IMs with multiple people within a day or two. It also got me temporarily owned by Yahoo... I did something stupid without thinking, and rapidly opened and closed a socket connection to their server about fifty times in under a second. It didn't like that, presumably (and quite reasonably) interpreting it as an attack, and blocked my IP address without notice. So, I couldn't log into Yahoo any more and didn't know whether I'd been banned permenantly. After struggling for several hours using dodgy proxy servers, and the older YCHT protocol in another client, I was eventually able to connect with the YMSG protocol once again. Learned my lesson: don't play with servers, they don't play back.
It taught me a lot more about networking too though. All the things my college course should have taught me, in fact. Like how TCP works. For anyone that might be interested (which is probably nobody on my friends list apart from Graham, whom I've already told anyway), Ethereal is a very nice packet-sniffer, and completely free. I think I may have stayed up one too many nights programming though, when I start to see even my MP3 files look like CountingCrows::AugustAndEverythingAfter::RainingInBaltimore(); when glancing past.
I've made absolutely no progress at all on my diary entry, because I don't want to think about it. If I leave it, and forget things, I will seriously regret it... but I just don't want to face it. I don't want to have to think about all the details of what happened. Even now, I'm surrounded by things that constantly remind me of December... I can't believe it was almost an entire year ago. Actually, my music is the main trigger for most memories - certain songs and artists have just become attatched to certain places and events that I've been to or experienced. Counting Crows are the biggest offenders, followed quite closely by Switchfoot, The Wallflowers and Toad The Wet Sprocket. The first three are definately tied to last December, whereas Soggy Sprocket are more recent... in particular, I remember singing 'Desire'; when, where, and why, in perfect detail. There's been yet more additions to our collection too, but I think I'll probably have another, more musically-focused post sometime soon in which I can recommend some properly.
Had two strange dreams lately; one is lost completely, but the other I can remember the outline of. I was at the place where I did my work experience, and was asking around for the manager I worked with during my time there. They told me he did still work there, but not on that particular day. Since I could see him, I thought I'd at least take a look around for a bit, and ended up on some kind of quest for a certain department, which I can't recall, but was the kind of thing that you get in government conspiracy films. The BAE building got more and more complex, and eventually became a maze of corridors that belonged to some kind of aparment block.
What I needed, was an oven, so I could cook, obviously. After wandering into several people's houses, I eventually found one in a rather large, expensive looking section that was at the top of the building. Unlike the lower levels that were dark and cramped, this was light and spacious. I crept around quietly, but it seemed that the only occupant was a girl, who was asleep on her bed. I turned on the oven, and realised that although I'd now found one, I'd left the food a long way away, down in the lower levels. I decided to turn back, but not wanting to have wasted the journey, I thought I'd see what there was to eat here. In her freezer, I found some caeks, and so (naturally), I stole them.
The girl woke up immidiately, and a chase ensued. I was fast, very fast, but she wsa faster. Running out of her apartment led into a huge open area with glass panels and long flights of stairs leading up and down, reminding me of a department store or shopping centre. I ran down the steps as fast as I could... but she didn't have to. She could somehow just 'glide' down them, and so as I reached the bottom, out through some glass doors into a wide bridge-like structure lined either side with grass and trees, she caught me. She immidiately had complete control - she wasn't at all threatening, but we both knew she would win if I tried to resist. She asked me why I stole the caeks... and I just felt like a helpless child. I didn't know... I'd just wanted them and taken them. I had no answer for her, so I just told her the story of my quest for an oven. She listened calmly until I was done... and then I kissed her, and woke up.
Finally, just a strange thought that I had the other day. A strong smell of lemon juice came from somewhere, and I found myself thinking 'Mmmmmm... what a horrible smell', lol. I hate the smell and taste of lemon, but it made me think of the only occasion where I'm usually exposed to it, which is when pancakes are being made. I like pancakes. I found it quite interested how I'd 'liked' something I actually dislike, just because it led to something I did like, even though I wasn't actually going to get any pancakes out of it.
My sleep pattern is utterly destroyed; I've been going to bed about 8:30am and getting up at 2 or 3pm, which not only is not enough sleep for me, but is becoming dangerously habitual. It's 4am now and I've got there without noticing - not so long ago I'd have been well aware by the time I started to hit 2:30. Even Shanna's visits have got a little later, and with no reason to go to bed I just stay longer and longer.
I suppose then, that I should go to bed now. Today is quite an important day after all. Of course, there's no logic in using that to justify anything; today is an important day regardless of how much sleep I get, and it's events won't be in the slightest affected by my tiredness. Anyway. Yeah. Bye.
* Or a synonym; I wasn't actually present and am going on what I remember of what Graham said, so am possibly misquoting
To that end, things have been looking better lately, which feels strange to be able to say because I'm still as much in debt as I ever was, and in fact although I recovered a little of it, Shanna's visit took me back to the edge again. £158.10 (close to $300) was spent on coach journeys alone, in fact. Despite this, I'm currently feeling much more optimisic that usual - the completed Cali system has now had somewhere around fourty hours of live trials and other than the problems I mentioned a week or so ago there's been no trouble, and even Darius used the word finished*. Cyrus' site has been complete for a while now, but we met him last week and agreed to the final touches. We're meeting him again today for tea, to answer anything he'd like to know, and of course to be paid. Darius also said he would pay the full ammount today, so if all goes as it should, we will be around £1,900 happier. Then, we give all attention to CaliHQ3 - if we can sell one copy of it before Christmas this year I'll feel satisfied. Four or five copies at three or four thousand pounds a time is somewhere between £12,000 and £20,000... and that is the kind of money we could and should be making, and the kind of money we can live on. Not alone, of course, enough between us, and if we could make that much we could certainly make more.
My confidence increases with every project we take on - we've always been good at learning new things, but it doesn't always produce the best results when you're working on something and literally learning as you go along. By now though, we've gained a lot of experience in a lot of different things... we were good before, and now we're producing better and better code. It's almost certain that there will now be RAWR3, which will be entirely class-based, and power the website portion of the CaliHQ3 project. The software portion will be written in C++ .net, which I am rapidly growing to love.
As a learning excercise, I decided to try using .net to write a new Yahoo messenger service client. I'd read a little on the protocol and it looked as though once you get past authentification, it's easy to use. This is true, but authentification is extremely difficult. I've managed to get a working implementation together, and I still don't know how it works - it was patched together from reading the few working implementations I could find - GAIM, Miranda IM, and a Perl module called NET:YMSG or something, which was designed for writing bots. I slowly managed to merge the mess of Tux-knows how many C files and assorted headers, strip out everything but the part that generates the response strings, along with the few other functions they need (MD5 and SHA1 hashing, and both normal and Yahoo-specific Base64 conversion), into something manageable. So now I have a bit of C code, called by an unmanaged C++ class, used by my managed C++ .net classes. Yeah... s'fun.
It's going well too - all the basic underlying protocol stuff is there, and just needs to be built upon and an interface to use it with. I should have a basic messenger capable of sending and recieve IMs with multiple people within a day or two. It also got me temporarily owned by Yahoo... I did something stupid without thinking, and rapidly opened and closed a socket connection to their server about fifty times in under a second. It didn't like that, presumably (and quite reasonably) interpreting it as an attack, and blocked my IP address without notice. So, I couldn't log into Yahoo any more and didn't know whether I'd been banned permenantly. After struggling for several hours using dodgy proxy servers, and the older YCHT protocol in another client, I was eventually able to connect with the YMSG protocol once again. Learned my lesson: don't play with servers, they don't play back.
It taught me a lot more about networking too though. All the things my college course should have taught me, in fact. Like how TCP works. For anyone that might be interested (which is probably nobody on my friends list apart from Graham, whom I've already told anyway), Ethereal is a very nice packet-sniffer, and completely free. I think I may have stayed up one too many nights programming though, when I start to see even my MP3 files look like CountingCrows::AugustAndEverythingAfter::RainingInBaltimore(); when glancing past.
I've made absolutely no progress at all on my diary entry, because I don't want to think about it. If I leave it, and forget things, I will seriously regret it... but I just don't want to face it. I don't want to have to think about all the details of what happened. Even now, I'm surrounded by things that constantly remind me of December... I can't believe it was almost an entire year ago. Actually, my music is the main trigger for most memories - certain songs and artists have just become attatched to certain places and events that I've been to or experienced. Counting Crows are the biggest offenders, followed quite closely by Switchfoot, The Wallflowers and Toad The Wet Sprocket. The first three are definately tied to last December, whereas Soggy Sprocket are more recent... in particular, I remember singing 'Desire'; when, where, and why, in perfect detail. There's been yet more additions to our collection too, but I think I'll probably have another, more musically-focused post sometime soon in which I can recommend some properly.
Had two strange dreams lately; one is lost completely, but the other I can remember the outline of. I was at the place where I did my work experience, and was asking around for the manager I worked with during my time there. They told me he did still work there, but not on that particular day. Since I could see him, I thought I'd at least take a look around for a bit, and ended up on some kind of quest for a certain department, which I can't recall, but was the kind of thing that you get in government conspiracy films. The BAE building got more and more complex, and eventually became a maze of corridors that belonged to some kind of aparment block.
What I needed, was an oven, so I could cook, obviously. After wandering into several people's houses, I eventually found one in a rather large, expensive looking section that was at the top of the building. Unlike the lower levels that were dark and cramped, this was light and spacious. I crept around quietly, but it seemed that the only occupant was a girl, who was asleep on her bed. I turned on the oven, and realised that although I'd now found one, I'd left the food a long way away, down in the lower levels. I decided to turn back, but not wanting to have wasted the journey, I thought I'd see what there was to eat here. In her freezer, I found some caeks, and so (naturally), I stole them.
The girl woke up immidiately, and a chase ensued. I was fast, very fast, but she wsa faster. Running out of her apartment led into a huge open area with glass panels and long flights of stairs leading up and down, reminding me of a department store or shopping centre. I ran down the steps as fast as I could... but she didn't have to. She could somehow just 'glide' down them, and so as I reached the bottom, out through some glass doors into a wide bridge-like structure lined either side with grass and trees, she caught me. She immidiately had complete control - she wasn't at all threatening, but we both knew she would win if I tried to resist. She asked me why I stole the caeks... and I just felt like a helpless child. I didn't know... I'd just wanted them and taken them. I had no answer for her, so I just told her the story of my quest for an oven. She listened calmly until I was done... and then I kissed her, and woke up.
Finally, just a strange thought that I had the other day. A strong smell of lemon juice came from somewhere, and I found myself thinking 'Mmmmmm... what a horrible smell', lol. I hate the smell and taste of lemon, but it made me think of the only occasion where I'm usually exposed to it, which is when pancakes are being made. I like pancakes. I found it quite interested how I'd 'liked' something I actually dislike, just because it led to something I did like, even though I wasn't actually going to get any pancakes out of it.
My sleep pattern is utterly destroyed; I've been going to bed about 8:30am and getting up at 2 or 3pm, which not only is not enough sleep for me, but is becoming dangerously habitual. It's 4am now and I've got there without noticing - not so long ago I'd have been well aware by the time I started to hit 2:30. Even Shanna's visits have got a little later, and with no reason to go to bed I just stay longer and longer.
I suppose then, that I should go to bed now. Today is quite an important day after all. Of course, there's no logic in using that to justify anything; today is an important day regardless of how much sleep I get, and it's events won't be in the slightest affected by my tiredness. Anyway. Yeah. Bye.
* Or a synonym; I wasn't actually present and am going on what I remember of what Graham said, so am possibly misquoting