the corner office

Today, in summary:

Some work on Artificial Intelligence. Thank dog this assignment is basically a repeat of the last 3 years of Formal Logic wrapped into 4 chapters. Not done yet, but hopefully tomorrow it shall be done. The additional good news is that the embarassment known as COS340, Computer Graphics, is not an issue assignment-wise, since they dished out full credits for all assignments handed in, and lowered the credit requirements to 80, which means the two assignments I got in are enough to get me into the exam. I'm pretty disappointed, because I kind of relied on the assignments to actually force me to get to grips with OpenGL. Now it's a load of gunk theory for the exams, and perhaps my own effort to do some OpenGL programming. Like that's going to happen :-(

Blogwise, I got some decent colours going. I settled on a spiffing blue scheme that appeals to me, at any rate, and is hopefully passably readable. After a bit of fiddling, I also got Mike's IMG logging hack going.

Of course, the real notable event of today was getting off my butt and giving the Volvo a good wash. I've steadfastly refused to take it to a car wash, I kinda felt some irrational need to look after it myself. So this afternoon I got decked out in my Sunday worst, hauled out the cleaning stuff and screwed my back up in the process. But she's looking brand new again. I realised that it's quite possibly a good 5 years, if not more, since I made any effort to wash a car. My Kadett either went to the car-wash, or else I left it covered in crap to discourage people from stealing it. Fat lot of good that did me...

Add another 'phone home' feature with Windows XP - it synchs its time automatically, with Microsoft, unless you specifically disable it (by double-clicking on the time in the task bar, and updating the properties).

These things freak me the hell out.

Well, I finally decided to reboot into my Gentoo partition on my home PC. I've been SO keen to get going with Linux on the desktop -- there are really two things which have kept me from spending more time in Linux. Firstly, UNISA assignments. That's not the end of the world, because I could reboot or learn to use Linux tools wherever possible.

The second, and biggie, is that with the working hours I keep, if I can't run Notes on Linux, I can't use Linux.

So, this evening, I decided to give WINE a bash (no pun intended). I've tried this repeatedly over the last 2 years or so, and I've always run into troubles. The closest I came was using an evaluation copy of Codeweavers last year, but even that wasn't stupendously impressive.

So, to my pleasant surprise, this time around it wasn't too bad. With Gentoo, a simple 'emerge wine' to get the latest WINE (20030618), and a copy of Notes 5.0.12. I was expecting the usual pain, and didn't have any. Simple call to setup.exe, and followed the instructions. No major tweaks to the config file, no dll overrides.

So this is typed using WINE!

(WINE is more of a pain to type than wine, and so I'll stick with wine from here on out)

Of course, whether I can develop using wine is another story, but that's my next test.

Declan Lynch's BlogSphere is rather cool. I've been using it to store (private) entries for a week or 2.

There's only one problem - I don't understand it. My web experience is, sadly, virtually nonexistent.

So, as a personal project, I'm going to try to build my own website using BlogSphere for pointers. Lessee what happens.

Should that be mii?

Inspired by a blog (forget which) I did a google for my name. It turns out the net knows about roughly 4 Colin Pretoriuses:

1. me - which seems to be anything IT-related
2. a photographer
3. a Tai Chi / Martial Arts expert
4. someone doing geneaology research.

Thank heavens my old web site, which a previous ISP had up for years after I'd left, is gone, and Google has forgotten about it. Never again shall my old poetry be foisted upon the world, that's for sure.

Rather frightening as well, how Google makes it very easy to research a person. Google turns up a post I wrote something like 6 years ago on a technical forum... all the more reason to think twice before posting anything, anywhere!

I'm a hermit these days, meeting up with friends hardly ever happens, and clubbing is largely a thing of the past for me. The Beloved scheduled an outing for us, though, at the Red Room with P and L - a new alternative club with an 'upmarket' flair, according to the flyers.

Rather decent. I was rather into the goth-industrial scene in my lesser 20's, and my happiest memories are of gritty clubs in the inner city, real urban jungle stuff. Clubs in basements, castle-like monoliths, the 3rd floor of an abandoned office building, abandoned warehouses, hell, even the old Joburg gas works. Places with atmosphere, goths and punks and metalheads and rivetheads and sundry social debris all being the kinds of people our parents warned us about. So I've always been sceptical of this whole 'northern suburbs alternative clubbing' thing. I never quite got how people in 2-grand outfits could be taken seriously in any meaningful outside-the-box societal context. Not that I feel too strongly about taking any particular stands against society for longer than a day or two at a time, necessarily, but when you are 'rebellious' you do not hang out in upmarket clubs in the 'burbs. It's just not right.

But I'm mellowing with age, and the Red Room impressed me after all. The usual 'niteclub' off the foyer of some little hotel. This time round, a rather obscure place the far side of Honeydew, the sort of place that was a 'country inn' until urban sprawl caught up with it (to me, anything outside the circle highway in Joburg is still the 'country', but it's not really true anymore.) I digress...

The club is completely covered in red carpet (hence the name), plenty of seating, busy but not crowded. Also, and this is a good thing -- none of the more hardcore than thou attitude that's infested goth/industrial/alternative clubs in the last few years. A good mix of alternative music, Indie, and 80's classics. Jeez, I danced for the first time in (well, years, probably). One doesn't turn down the opportunity to shuffle about to the Cramps or New Model Army these days...

The mix of people mirrored that, and (this is what surprised me), most of the folks seemed to be late 20-somethings, early 30-somethings. Less angst, less BS and pretension, and more people gettin' down and enjoying themselves. It's slated as the new 'Le Club' (Le Club was an inner city legend, with many personal fond memories for me), so if I'm too old and the world's too different to head into Joburg City Centre to git down, then I suppose the Red Room's the place to go.

We ended off the evening with a Bimbos raid, the only fast-food chain that's 24/7 in Joburg. Of course, being the only place open at 3 in the morning, and most people wanting munchies at that time of the morning not really caring about the quality of what they're buying... the food can be a gamble.

I'm the biggest klutz on the planet. Our flat is a mess and if something is in the way (network cables are a biggie), I'm inclined to trip over it. Allow me to repeat that for emphasis: I am a klutz and my tendency to walk into anything and everything is so chronic that Ronwen occasionally worries about whether I am suitable genetic stock as a potential father to her children. I can understand her concern. If our children were to inherit my propensity for collisions with household objects, we can well expect to be visited regularly by a less than credulous Social Welfare worried about the bruises all over our rugrats.

I came rushing down the stairs to the lounge this evening and missed a step. My barefoot and winter-frozen foot missed a tiled step and my arch came crashing down on the edge of the next step. My foot is now stuffed, and I'm staggering around like a drunken neanderthal.

I made some progress on Formal Logic, finally got through chapter 3 and onto chapter 4. As usual, the theory looks dandy and then the assignment questions make me feel like an idiot because I don't know wtf to do. So through the exercises we go...

Today I downloaded and installed Mozilla 1.4. One gripe: when I upgraded, the text in the (hmm), 'status bar' at the bottom was too small to be readable. This wasn't the case with the earlier version of Mozilla I'd been using. I managed to fix it by upping XP's message box font size. A small trade-off, but why did they have to go change this?

There are 3 things I really like about Mozilla:
a) tabbed browsing
b) no pop-ups
c) it's free software.

I love Mozilla to bits. When I got onto the net in '96, my first web browsing was done with Netscape Navigator version 1 (!!). Of course, I downloaded Navigator 2 almost immediately, and Netscape 3 came out around the same time -- but NN3 was a bit too resource intensive for my Powerbook 520, and I didn't use it a lot.

When I moved to Windows in '97, I stuck with NN until 2001, by which time it was just too unstable, and rendered almost nothing properly. I felt like a traitor moving to Explorer, but now I'm back! Apart from internet banking, and a bare minimum of sites, I'm a Mozilla user again. Feels good :-)

I've done some testing of RSS readers. I tried out AmphetaDesk, which has a web interface to an .exe backend. I don't like the layout, though, I like nice drill-downable stuff. I'm busy trying Feedreader, which I'll try out for a bit longer. It certainly does make life easier than trawling web sites!

{Editor (again): I'm probably breaking blogiquette by not providing links to these apps' websites. By the time my grandkids get to read these posterity posts, I doubt the sites will be there, and I'm working on the assumption that nobody else really is interested in whether I prefer Feedreader over Amphetadesk}

Hello, my name is Colin. Does this work properly?