Navigate  Welcome to TheNutter.Net Links Home My Boxen TheNutter.Net Forums Software Library The old site Crappy- Visitor- Counter(tm) [197]  "The trick to taxation, gentlemen, is getting the maximum milk for the minimum moo. And these days all I seem to be getting is  moo." - Havelock Vetinari,  "Jingo" (Terry Pratchett) Webcomics  [07/10/08 - 00:24] Common Sense Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as knowing when to come in out of the rain, why the early bird gets the worm, life isn't always fair, and maybe it was my fault. Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you earn); and reliable parenting strategies (adults, not children, are in charge). His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a six-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition. Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job they failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer Panadol, sun lotion or a sticky plaster to a student; but, could not inform the parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion. Common Sense lost the will to live as the Ten Commandments became contraband; churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar can sue you for assault. Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realise that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust;his wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and his son, Reason. He is survived by three stepbrothers:I Know My Rights, Someone Else is to Blame, and I'm A Victim. Not many attended his funeral because so few realised he was gone. If you still remember him pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.     -- Nutter  [03/02/03 - 01:52] "Dude looks like a lady~" <Cue manic airguitaring> I found an anime music vid done to this track, and immediately I had to download an MP3. This track just rules. Anyway. Should the fact that 95% of the music I'm listening to at the minute is in Japanese worry me? <Stares blankly into space for a minute> The period since when I last made an entry here has been good for anime. I have got three new series at least, not to mention a couple of films. I think I may be addicted, I'm not happy when I'm not watching it, and when I finish a series I'm sad that that's it, that there is no more. Ah well, at least it's cheaper than smoking. Isn't it annoying that when you think "Right, I'll sit down and do a blog entry", there's loads of things you can put down, and yet when it comes to typing it all in, it's all disappeared. For example, there's a quote I heard in #megatokyo about why people like catgirls, but I can't currently find the quote itself. No matter, I'll find it later. Stuff to do:  * Make new logo for site.  * Make new background cos I'm bored of the old one and I need to try making one.  * Add more content to site.  * Start writing shell replacement for windows.  * Start writing Media Player replacement/remote control.  * Finish Perlbot. This shell replacement should be good, I think. Consists of a button in the middle of the desktop that, when clicked, spirals out into the menu, with more menus that slide or drop out, so programs can be organised into sections, for example media, network utils, games, etc. The running programs would be shown much like the normal desktop icons are shown, but lined up along the bottom of the screen, maybe in a semi-transparent boxout. The Media Player replacement is simply because I don't like the new wmp with playlists, it's too much like bloatware, but I would like playlists on the old wmp. So I'm writing my own one. The remote is so that I don't have to keep getting up and going over to Ginrei to change the video, pause, whatever, I can do it from Leona instead, who is currently in residence next to my bed, nearer the TV, which the vids play onto. Expect another entry whenever I remember, although it'll probably be soon. Saying that, every time I say it'll be soon, it ends up being a few months. Such is life.     -- Nutter  [22/09/02 - 18:45] Rants of an Alldays employee #1 So the thing that annoys me about the great British public is that no-one seems to read signs. Example: Outside our store is a sign saying "Play the National Lottery here", not a small sign, either, and still people come in and say "Do you do the lottery here?" Well duh, read the smeggin' sign! Or there's a sign in the middle of the photocopier lid saying it's out of order, and some bloke still fiddles with it, pushing buttons and stuff for a full 10 minutes before I go and point out the sign right under his nose to him, aside from the fact that there's another sign saying "Please call a member of staff before using the copier" so we can turn it on behind the counter. Signs plastered all over the lottery stand saying that the machine isn't working does nothing to stem the tide of people waving their slips around, waiting to hand over their money and get their tickets. Well, I could take your money, but you wouldn't get anything for it. Anyone stupid enough not to read the signs does't deserve to win £14 million anyway. The second thing that annoys me is that people don't seem to see when things aren't there. Perhaps this is linked to the first annoyance, people just don't see what they don't want to see. The example for this is our cigarette cabinet. Now, sometimes, as is to be expected, someone makes a cockup with the ciggy order, which means we don't have a particular type of ciggy in. Let's call this Type A, to avoid copyright infringement. So the entire shelf of Type A is empty, the one that is obviously for Type A because of all the Type A labels down the side, and people come in, take one look at the shelves, and say "Can I have 20 Type A please?" Mate, if you can see any on there, I'll give 'em to you for free. And they say um, and after looking carefully at the shelves, proceed to ask for every type that we don't have in stock, before asking for the ones that they came in for in the first place. Now, if it wasn't for the fact that every damn person who comes in here for fags does it, then I'd think they were doing it just to piss me off. Number 3, and currently last on the list of things that annoy me about working at Alldays, is people who have no idea about money. I said 32p, you arse, not £20! Ok, you say, what if they haven't got anything smaller? Then they shouldn't be buying 32p packs of chewing gum or whatever. We ain't a change service here, you know. When I've just put my till on, I only have £50 change anyway. I actually get a kind of pleasure from giving people a couple of handfulls of change when they've given me a £20 note, knowing it's pretty unlikely they'll get it all in their wallet. Then they have the audacity to ask if I have any notes, and I want to reply that if I had any notes, do they honestly think that I would waste my time counting out £19 of change? But of course, you can't say that, cos of the old adage, the customer is always right. Bollocks to that, is what I say. Ooh, and another thing. People who ask for "a small bag". "Do you have a small bag there", they say. They don't say, however, whether they want an actual small bag, or just a bag in general. Usually they only want a normal bag anyway. No, we have regular sized bags, just like everywhere else. Actually, at one point we did have some small bags, and anyone who asked for a small bag got one whether what they had bought would fit in it or not. And while we're on the subject of bags, people who ask me for a bag when I'm obviously not in any position to get them a bag, ie, when I'm getting their change, they annoy me too. *sigh* Next Rant: Asshole customers I have known and hated (And a few I've liked) $Blog system> End rant...     -- Nutter  [19/09/02 - 01:10] Puppies!!! See title. :P Finally, Sorcha got around to droppin' her sprogs, so now we have 4 little babbie Sorchas in the house. Only got the one pic at the minute due to the battery compartment on my camera being busted, and all the batteries are dead anyway, so I'm currently limited to the length of the mains adapter lead. Some time soon I'll get around to putting an extension lead in there and getting some proper pics. Click the pic for a bigger version.     -- Nutter  [03/09/02 - 02:21] Bordom strikes! Got bored, decided to do more on the puters page. It's almost all done now, apart from some info I need to get on a couple of them that I don't have over at this house. Should be able to get the details within a week or so. Anyway, what with it being 2:21 in the morning, I'm going to sleep now. One of Leona's more useful features, she warms up the bed nicely. :P     -- Nutter  [02/09/02 - 22:19] And weeeeeeeee... Sometimes I amaze myself, and sometimes I scare myself. This is one of the times I scare myself. :P I was given a lappy a while back, as payment for repairing a friend's PC. It's only a P166 with 32MB of ram and a crappy little HD, and half the keyboard didn't work, but I've never been one to turn down free puter equipment. And so I brought this lappy home, and called it Leona, swapped the HD for a bigger one, threw Red Hat 7.2 at her, and left it at that. She didn't get used much, I think I used her as a web server a couple of times for when I was testing my website and stuff, but nothing too stressful. I had decided a while before that it was a bit silly trying to use her for IRC, cos half of what you typed ended up disappearing cos of the dead keys. Anyway, somehow or other, Leona ended up coming over to my Dad's house with me, so she got plugged into Ryoko until such time as I could be arsed to put Gentoo on her. Which never actually happened. About a week ago I got bored, and did what I usually do when I get bored, I started looking for something to take to pieces. And my eyes fell upon poor little Leona. Half an hour later, there's a neat little pile of puter bits on my bedroom floor, and I wander off to find something to read. Last night I brought home some free beers from work, and I drank most of them. I'd already been to the pub, so I was a little bit drunk by the time I got upstairs. And my eyes fell upon poor little Leona. So I got to, rather drunkenly, thinking, and I dug out my screwdrivers. I didn't actually think I'd be able to get Leona working again when I took her apart, but seeing as she didn't work too well anyway, I didn't think that was too much of a loss. Well, drunken old I not only managed to get her back together, but I managed to get her keyboard working properly, all keys firing on all cylinders, I managed to get the cooling fan working right, althought it doesn't actually make much difference to her temp, but that's not the point, and I managed to reformat her and install Win98 so that I can use her to get on the net with my mobile over the IR port, which never actually seemed to work right in Linux. And all would seem to be good. It worries me that I can be more productive while drunk than I ever have been while sober. A note to put on my CV, I suppose. "Good worker, just add alcohol." I have been thinking recently about voice synthesis, and to a lesser extent voice recognition. A lot, if not all, voice synths work by synthesis of phonemes in the correct order. My thought is that instead of synthesising the phonemes, how about having a file containing a whole load of samples of someone saying the phonemes instead. Phonemes, for those who don't know, are the individual sounds that make up words, for example, the "th" sound from "the". The thought that followed this was that possibly you could teach a puter to take what someone is saying and break it down into these individual phonemes, then match them up to a dictionary of phoneme combinations to figure out what is being said. Now, I've probably just gone and described how all voice recognition software works, but hey, it's all down to how the software is written, ain't it. We shall see... I really need to get back into writing Perl again, there's a few things now that I should start/finish writing, and I haven't got an excuse now that Leona works right, cos I can write where ever I am, although her battery is a little lacking. Meh, I'll get around to it at some point. I've got to write an update script for this webpage, get it so that all the diary entries are in one file, or possibly a MySQL database, and get the two rowspan numbers to update to take account of how many entries there are, although thinking about it, I could just have a script that takes the top 3 or 4 entries from the file and displays them, then have the older entries to go into an archive later, when I work out how to do it. Next thing on the list to write is Pho's MP3 listing, sorting, all singing, all dancing, webpage script for all the tracks he's written. I have several ideas on how to do that, it's just working up enough energy to be bothered to sit down and write it. It's the problem I have with writing any scripts at the minute, I think about doing it, and then I think Meh. *shrug* Third to write is my IRC server. Not any IRC server, though, this has a useful modification to the standard. It has the ability to become a web of servers, rather than the usual spider shape. There's gonna be a page up in a minute describing this in images, cos that'll make it easier to describe than I can in words. Fourth and currently finally, finish off Mnemosyne, my IRC bot. Kinda got sidetracked from her by the IRC server idea. What else to put. Hmm. If you read Exploitation Now regularly then you'll know that the story, it would seem, is finished. This is odd. I can't help but wonder if it's permanent, or if another story will be forthcoming. Ah well, only time will tell. Well, time and Poe. Time, I think, for something else to be done. Bath sounds like a good idea to me. And all this entry has been written on Leona, and most likely uploaded from her too. :P     -- Nutter  [17/08/02 - 22:01] Hmmmmm... Well, I had written an entry to be added when I was near a net connection, but it appears to have not bothered to make the trip with me, so I'll have to add it in later. Anywho, there's a new page on the site, finally, little boring, but it keeps me happy, so I care not :P It's a page about my boxen, link is at the top of the menu bar. Weeeeee, I have much ram! I now click on an icon, and the program starts almost instantly! *grins* 'm happy... Got Neverwinter Nights, too. Which is nice. I think I'm just about getting the hang of it, but I designed my character with a little too low a health level. Oh well, shit happens. I'll post more when I can be bothered.     -- Nutter  [21/07/02 - 01:22] "How bright the moon is tonight, bwanas..." "I don't think bwanas is the right word, Uncle. Maybe effendies or something." Walking the dog through the wood. Bugger, thinks I, the torch battery's dead. <Note to self: Put torch battery on charge...> So I'm now walking in the dark trying to get my night vision to adjust. So then, there's this bright light through the trees. Coo, the moon's bright tonight, thinks I. As it happens, it was a car. But a few steps later, there's another bright light through the trees, and this time it IS the moon. And it's unfeasibly bright. I mean, not your usual, oh look, the moon's big and yellow kind of bright, I'm talkin' yer full-on Ow, that hurts my eyes kind of bright. Shame I don't have my camera over here at the minute. Woulda made a great pic. Not a cloud in the sky, and yet still oddly warm. Oh well, have to look again tomorrow night. Got me a job at Alldays Newsagents in Thornbury. Oh the excitement. </sarcasm> Oh well, at least it'll help pay the bills. Got the PSU replaced in Ginrei, she's now got 400W to play with. Cowboy Bebop. Sweeeet. It's managed to take the lead as Sam's Favorite Anime Ever. :P And the movie's cool too. I've got all 26 episodes of CB other than episode 19, which has some weird sound codec. Apparently several people have come across this, and yet none have a solution. Suppose I'll just have to keep looking. Currently writing this on Ryoko, my K6-2 Gentoo Linux box. She's holding up well, considering she's in dire need of an emerge --update world. Half the stuff's Gnome 1.4.1 and half's Gnome 2, and it's all getting confused. Have to take her to Rich's some time and update it all. Right now, she's editing this in GEdit, playing MP3s in XMMS (personally I prefer mpg123, it uses less CPU, but XMMS has better support for playlists. Ie, it has them.), encoding Pho's latest album again cos of a couple of jitter errors from some incompatibility with his burner and my DVD drive (very odd, some of the CDs he gives me have CRC errors on some files, and some of them are fine. It's an LG burner, and apparently another mate has the same kind of problem with the same make of burner...) and copying the contents of my portage cache to another drive as a backup, possibly to be used in the installation of Gentoo on another machine to be used as my web server. I need a lappy. If anyone has a background like Ed's on Cowboy Bebop, the one with the smiley yellow face, if I can have a copy I'd be much obliged. So now the b33rs are taking effect, and I'm typing this while examining the roof and getting a crick in my neck. I'm actually slightly worried how well I can type looking at the roof, I type worse than this when I'm looking at the screen. Guess I'm tying the monitor to the roof tomorrow then... :P Go try out the Ragnarok Online beta test. There's still a few bugs in it, but that's the entire point of a beta test, after all. I like it. It's a laff. <Listens to Pho's album again, and ponders about trying to draw Ed> Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually reads this page, as opposed to just coming here from a web search in the mistaken belief that I actually have anything useful on my site. And if they do sit and read it, what do they think? Well, I've got an e-mail addy, people. So feel free to mail me to tell me what a sad bastard I am. <Wonders where his e-mail link went to, remembers it was taken off for spam protection.> Gah. nutter at thenutter.net. That'll do. <Goes for a lie down> I really shouldn't drink when I'm in this mental state... *shrug* Oh well... Ah, download the Neocron Offline Demo, as advertised by the Neocron Stripper at i10 :P She didn't actually strip (Shame...), but from that point she will always be known as the Neocron Stripper. I pity her. :P Days to GameCube: 0 (I've got it) Days to my 20th Birthday: 0 (I'm 20 now) I need to update more. And some actual content other than this bloggy thingy'd be good...     -- Nutter  [01/05/02 - 05:02] Life just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it? I got made redundant the other day. What a pain in the arse. I have plans for what I'm going to do next, but I'm gonna keep quiet till I see whether it'll work out or not... I now have my PC running off two PSUs. One for the mobo, the fans running off the mobo (CPU, chipset and one case fan), and I think the floppy, and the other powering the HD, DVD, Live Drive and the other case fan. Seems to be holding up, which is nice considering that added together I don't think they reach the recommended wattage, but there you are. Suddenly my mind has gone blank. *stares at AnalogX NetStat* Apparently in two days I've downloaded 1.03GB since the last reboot. Uptime on my internet network connection tells me that was nearly 14 hours ago. Hmm. Must be running slow. *kicks till the download speed goes up* That's better. Peak value of 193k a sec. WTF?! Uploaded 46MB? I ain't uploaded crap. Oh well... Gonna try uncapping my cable modem soon, try and get 512k upload too. Oh, hang on, Kazaa Lite Evil is still running. Oops... :P My evil GeForce2 MX400 seems to be overheating. This would explain the system freezes when doing 3D shite. And seeing as I don't like burning myself on my graphics card (actually happened... O_o) I decided to shell out a paltry £8.99 on a chipset fan. The Thermaltake Crystal Orb, in fact. As has been quoted on IRC many times, Mmm... Shiny... Wait till I get the neons and the window kit, then it'll be niiice... In other news... My leg appears to have started bleeding for no apparent reason... Ok, that's sorted... Where was I? Oh yeah. In other news, I have a Farkin-Yooge-Monitor(tm). 21" F-Y-M(tm), in fact. It's a workstation monitor, so it's got one fixed frequency for each mode, but 5 minutes poking and locking various refreshes to modes with Powerstrip, and all is good. Now all I need is for the cooler to arrive so I can play anything without it locking up. Oh well, it should arrive today. Last thing before I go, if you like Linux, and you have a few skillz, then check out Gentoo Linux. It'll get the most speed and stability from a machine, cos each program is specifically compiled for your machine when you install it. It can even recompile the compiler when you start installing it, if you want. Only word of warning is, it needs to download a fair old amount in it's current state to get a working X workstation, so broadband is a good plan. Days to GameCube: 3 Days to my 20th Birthday: 8     -- Nutter  [11/04/02 - 12:24] Dammit... *sigh* Last night I managed to blow up my PSU. I asked the guy in the shop when I bought it if it would handle an Athlon, he said yeah, he thought so. Shows what he knows. Probably why that shop's currently for sale. And the really annoying bit is, I can't afford a new PSU this month, and I'm supposed to be buying a GameCube next month, so I'm not sure where I'm going to get a new one from. Probably gonna have to nick it out of the 333 in the big tower. Bah...     -- Nutter  [09/04/02 - 18:35] Wow! Some actual effort being put into the site?! Well, yes. Kinda. Tonight I WILL start work on the update script, otherwise I'll be forced to chop my own fingers off, one at a time. Although that would then make it even harder to write the script... Hmm, I think I'll just forget the whole finger-removal thing. Anyway. I now have a nice new PC! No longer am I held back by the crappy 450MHz I have been forced to live with since about this time last year! I am now rocketting along on an Athlon XP1700+, muahahaa, etc. However, this is just a stopgap measure while I gather cash for the monster box, details of which will be posted soon. The main problem with this new Athlon is that for some reason, graphics in AvP2 and Black and White are corrupted, large polygons just randomly drawing themselves, often right over the camera. Which obviously makes playing the game a little... interesting... i10. It was a laff. Could have been better, but could have been a lot worse. If Dabs and Overclockers had hurried up with the orders then I would have had a nice machine to take along, as it was I had to take a Celery 333. However, it performed remarkably well considering it's crapness, the only major problem being a lack of hard disk space. But there you go. Anyway, Phil's written a bit about i10 at [oV]'s website, so you can go read that. Because I'm Super-Sad-Man, I'm gonna make a page about all my puters tonight too, I think. And I put the random quote thingy at the top. So sue me. :P     -- Nutter  [18/01/02 - 13:40] An update Right then. Let's get some more content on here so it doesn't look quite so bare. *puts on his "talking-random-crap" hat* First off, more links to webcomics have been put up. Yes, I read far too many, and while I was looking for buttons for the bar I started reading another one. By the time I get this page as finished as it's gonna get, I'll be reading every damn webcomic ever written! :P Ah well... Anyway, I've re-added the hit counter to the left side bar, although it's going up pretty fast cos of all the times I'm reloading the page testing things, but I haven't had any time to do any of the other scripts. The hit counter may very well get retired due to having a much better one installed on this server that gives me more stats. We shall see. Next thing will probably be a random quote thing down the bottom of this page, and then some more pages. Cos there's only 1 page at the minute. Which is crap. Not the page, I mean the fact that there is only one. And some links to sites other than webcomics wouldn't go amiss. And then maybe I'll think about doing the page update script. Maybe. Ho hum. What else? Oh yeah, I remember. I decided to increase my drawing skills slightly, so with some help from Mac Hall, I give you: Me. :P Click for a bigger version Blah. Ok, it's not that good, but it's reasonable considering I didn't have a scanner at the time, so that's a photo of a sketch, reduced to 2 colours, tidied slightly, then coloured. And it's much better than anything I've drawn before. I can't draw to save my life normally, I musta just been in the zone or something. I'm gonna try drawing Phill next, so we shall see. Right. *looks up* That looks like enough for the minute. :P Two things to say quickly, take a look at the forums if you aint got much to do, there aren't many people on it at the minute, but then that's why I'm asking you to look at it. :P Also, today's recommended webcomic is Mac Hall. Read the archives. It's funny. Big up da Exiles crew!     -- Nutter  [06/01/02 - 06:37] You have no idea... ...how happy I am right now... :P It's taken me from when that was posted down the bottom up till now to get this displaying right with all the columns in the right place in the middle. Stupid HTML tables, having to have yer TRs before the TDs... It'd all have been so much easier if I could do it the other way round... Ah well, can't have everything, can we? All this code is clunky and badly designed, but soon I'll have a clunky and badly designed perl script with a nice front end to help me update it. So I'm not too fussed. Things should come along a bit faster now, including the adding of the other webcomics I read regularly... (Woo.) :P     -- Nutter  [06/01/02 - 06:35] Test of the new frame code... Ok, if this works, I will be an incredibly happy man...     -- Nutter  [12/12/01 - 11:36] Testing... So. Here we are then. Finally I've got around to getting a basic structure down. <Raises an eyebrow> Was it worth it? I think it's coming along a bit like I'd planned, I was thinking animated buttons for the navigation, but the anims didn't want to come out right, so I guess I'll just have to make do with a little javascript rollover... Ho hum. Anyway, that's it for now...     -- Nutter