Palfrey's life

I haven't posted in a while (wow, 5 days....), mostly because I've just been concentrating on a whole bunch of other things.

This week has been interesting, moving from a fuck-up, to solving the fuck-up with some serious geek-fu, to actually getting something to work. This all kinda started on Wednesday. I'd decided that I needed to spend a bunch of time in one block at TNO (as opposed to one day/week), to try and solve some of my "get the blasted protocol to work" problems, so I was going to be there for Wed-Fri. The days went as follows

• Wednesday - Have 2 hour meeting re: can we think up new cool demos to implement in the next 3 months. Then, proceed to manage to accidentally reprogram the reprogrammer. Translation from geek: I'm up shit creek without a paddle, as I've just turned the paddle into a small pile of splinters. This is a not good day


• Thursday - Spend some considerable time attempting to get hold of a new copy of the reprogrammer firmware. Crossbow (makers of the reprogrammer) aren't being helpful, so I concentrate on finding a program to download firmware from a working reprogrammer. Of the 3 tools that might talk to my hardware, only one is playing nice, but that's not the one with a download ability. Eventually resort to hacking AVaRICE, and extending it's "verify" function to download to file. I'll make the obvious note that if this had been closed-source software, I'd have been fucked until the manufacturer wrote this functionality themesleves (Satan will be skating to work before this happens), and that the maintainers of the software will be recieving my patch once I've cleaned it up a bit.


• Friday - With the fixed reprogrammer, I manage to *finally* get T-MAC working. Woo-hoo! Ok, it's still a bit flaky but the basics are working *very* well right now.

Other things of note: Got hold of the PROMOOD FTP login details, I'm now vaguely hacking around with a new version of the site. PHP is there, but no GD support, so gonna have to find another way to do any image gallery auto-thumbnailing. Attempting to find out whether we have database support, but it's a bit tricky right now.

• More things learnt from B5 "All answers are replies, but not all replies are answers".


• Watched HP3, never thought I'd see "hubble bubble toil and trouble" set to choral tune. Dutch subtitles renamed a few people which was weird. Nevil got renamed to "Marcel" for example. I can't even remember what the subtitles said for Dumbledore, but it began with a P


• Userfriendly does "Blog", to the tune of "Lump"


• Grokdoc went up, and I spent a little time there.. only to have the Slashdot clusterfuck effect on Wiki's make things a little difficult. It's calmed down a bit now tho.


• Dog toy or Marital aid?


• Started watching some Smallville (Bittorrent is my friend). It's pretty cool, but he's a moron for picking Lana Lang over Chloe Sullivan (shit. Just realised *both* of those women are younger than me. Think I'm getting old)

Sleep patterns are fucked, I couldn't get to sleep until 6am this morning. I've got this bloody week-long project and Dutch exam to cope with this week, so need to be vaguely alert....