The ‘Shipping’ forecast

Okay, I’m writing this while debugging some lit particle crash on a console. It takes forever to reboot, but just in case things get a bit dis-jointed it’s because I’ve hit a break point and I need to do something. It looks like some sort of memory overwrite, but you never can tell with these things.

Today started off like Monday’s tend to, no interest in doing anything at all. Anyway, modified some tools to support null pixel shaders in effects files. That took longer than it should have, then modified a load of stuff to do with attribute handling. Had lunch, walked the dogs. Did more work. Went to combat, which was fun. And now come back to this bug.

Ah, on the second run I’ve noticed there’s dodgy data getting into the draw list form the front end. That really shouldn’t be there.

Oh, think we may have found the problem, a pre-requisite is set wrong.

So shipping. Now this a bit of an internet phenomenon. It’s to do with ‘fandom’. So basically it’s lots of internet geeks deciding who should be in a relation’ship’ with who. It’s usually celebrities, or people on internet channels or indeed fiction. Now some of these can go a little bit far, as they then evolve into ‘fan-fiction’. If you just do a Google for ‘Harry Potter fan-fic’ or something like that, you will easily find dear Harry taking it up the arse from Draco Malfoy. And let’s not get into how Pikachu and Ash have rather illicit relationships.

You then also get this thing called ‘OTP’ which is short for ‘one true pairing’, this is where you feel that the characters in this ‘ship’ really belong together.

Now this is all fairly weird shit, so why the ramble? Okay it comes back to Dan Howell again, his ‘you-tube’ channel is called ‘danisnotonfire’ and yes he is very cute (he’s 23). I listen to his and Phil’s radio show. Now Phil ‘amazingphil’ is another ‘v-logger’. Now what a ‘v-logger’ is is basically what I do in text, but on a you tube channel. So they sit there and talk to a camera. I sit here and talk to myself. So the thing is, these two guys have known each other since they were what 16, they now share a house together in London after sharing a flat in Manchester. Neither has a girl friend, although Dan has blogged about various relationships in the past. Now these two guys are very friendly on camera, okay, whats presented on camera is very different to IRL (in real life), but you do have to wonder. Now I’m not going to write any strange fan-fiction about them doing a radio show and then disappearing into a sauna for some hot butt sex (there’s plenty of it about, Google is your weird friend). But sorry guys, as Sally said in ‘When Harry met Sally’, “Men and women can’t be friends without sex becoming involved.” There’s no way I can see you being together that long without a bit of cock worship. I’m not saying that every night there’s bowel ploughing (as I think both are probably tops anyway), but I’m sure a bit of Reading has met Leeds and some fapping has taken place. Does it effect me? No. Does it effect them? No. Good on you. But do please do a video with some sexy action:)

On the subject of scary fan-fiction I came across one on Justin Bieber, I think the person who wrote it has ‘come across him’ on more than one occasion. But describing the money shot as a ‘Biebergasm’ just made me piss myself. And for God’s sake don’t Google anything on the Harries twins.

I’ve found the bug now, it was to do with stale scenegraph data from the front end being read by the particle system.

Today I painted and generally worked pretty hard

This morning started off with a phone call from my mother which I promptly ignored. She’s fantasising about running aerial cables from her bedroom to the kitchen. Like I’m going to crawl under her fucking floor. Sorry, but if it’s such a chore to eat you breakfast in the lounge rather than one of your other 50 TV’s then you really have nothing to live for. I’m sure when I phone her and say my curtains need taking up three inches she will come up with a whole multitude of excuses why she can’t do it. Sure, while your coming up with a diatribe of bile, please enjoy your laptop, your tumble dryer, oh and that fucking cheese, I hope it overpowers you.

So anyway, stayed in bed quite a while. This isn’t because I’m lazy, it’s really because of our time differences. Jamie usually does early shifts then falls asleep when he comes home then goes to bed in the middle of the morning. So the only time we get any intimate time together is usually on a Sunday. No, we didn’t bang like the creation of the earth, we just cuddled and snoozed. We had the kids on the bed as well, Sasha decided she wanted to sit on Jamie’s head. It was family time, it was fun, it was needed. I got up and got breakfast for three, two quadrupeds and me. They didn’t need coffee, I did. Read the paper.

Elaine Paige started, so was definitely time to crack on. I sanded a couple of bits that needed finishing and the cracked on with the painting. The first coat was awful, really patchy, I was quite worried. I painted the door frame in gloss, drank much coffee, bought a heli off eBay. Second coat however went on like a dream. Really love the coverage and the colour. To be honest it needs another coat, I have enough paint to do this. I’ve ordered a special roller to re-do the corners. I’m really quite pleased. Still, lots more work still to be done. But I did a nine hour shift of quite hard physical work. I’ve had a bath, shot-gunned a rather nice New-Zealand and the Indian take-away has arrived. I’ll count that as a successful weekend. I’m oddly quite enjoying life at the moment, even if it is rather expensive.

Well I successfully blocked my mother, and bought some curtains

So this morning I had a bit of a lie-in followed by breakfast for all. I then got into adding the new alloy bits to the CX2. Stripped it all down a rebuilt it. Bound it to the Dx6i. Took it for a test flight. The gyro had to be backed off to a point it was off, so it’s giving me serious tail drift. This is apparently a common problem. I’ve ordered a head lock gyro to see if that works better. I managed to chip a blade, bust the battery holder and a skid, not too bad. I did really enjoy the rebuild, it’s sort of like maintaining a kart again, but without the freezing cold and slightly less industrial.

Had lunch, then went to Tesco’s. Had to queue half hour to park. Picked up pills. Drove over to mothers and picked her up. We went to Gardiner Haskins which I don’t think I’ve been to since I bought carpet tiles. Managed to get the exact paint I wanted. Then we looked at curtains, managed to get two pairs and a nice pole for a good price. They are going to be slightly too long though.

She moaned about not being able to access my blog any more. She said she didn’t mind though as she didn’t read it much anyway. Then she moaned some more and asked how I did it. I said if she read the blog I go into the exact detail…..oh, never mind.

I’m really liking the Blade MCX2

So woke up this morning without any ill effects, so must just of overdone it slightly at spin. Did get a headache late afternoon though, but that’s nothing unusual.

Got a letter from the doctor to say they need to review my prescription before the next repeat, although I should have enough now to last through Christmas.

Played around with the MCX2 quite a bit. This is a co-axial heli, so fairly stable. I’ve programmed up some new settings on the Spektrum Dx6i and it flies really nicely now. It also has the advantage that I can fly it pretty easily indoors. So I’m going to get some good practice in on this. Also I have all the alloy parts to rebuild the CX2, so I’ll probably give that a blast tomorrow.

Went to pump. Did more work. Quiet kind of week really. Nothing wrong with that.

Another heli joins the fleet and a headache

Back on multi-threading again, thankfully near enough finished the platform specific stuff now.

Walked the dogs. Well actually just walked Sasha as Dillon didn’t fancy it.

Went to spin. Came back and then had a headache which is rather annoying. May be coming down with something. New heli arrived and a quad copter. Heli is good to fly and fairly stable. Quad is very twitchy but fun.

Bish bash bosh

So today was all about multi-threading again. Which can lead to all sorts of fun. Basically I’m building render lists in multiple threads and then executing them in order. This in theory is simple, in practice it leads to many hours of thinking and banging your head against the keyboard. By the end of the evening however I’ve almost got it all working. Still lots to do.

Jamie had his ‘Game of Thrones’ lookalike Callum round. He ended up doing Jamie’s make-up, the less said about that the better. They ate at Nando’s, I’ve still never been there.

I had some success with an ebay order, I complained that the tracking number was for someone else. They said it never got dispatched so was going by next-day courier and they were including a quad-copter as well. Bonus.

Went to Pump.

So when I eventually sat down this evening it was time for IP blocking part two. So yesterday I worked out how to get the new ip address as a text file. Tonight’s fun was to try and do something useful with it. So I decided to go for a bash shell script. First thing to do was repeat the grep line to generate the file and called it newip.txt. Then do a check to see if it was zero length, if it was then just exit as we can’t do much. If it contains something then check to see if oldip.txt exists, if not copy new to old. If they both exist then compare new to old, if they are the same then nothing to do. If they are different I then invoke ‘sendmail’ and echo a small file including the new ip address. Finally set this up in crontab. I’ve got this set up on a user level at the moment, but I have a feeling it will need to be changed to root or when I log out it won’t run. Next step is going to be rather more complicated I’m sure.

All that can be ‘sed’

Today was working on the joys of multi-threading a renderer. Which is actually rather complicated. The good news is that after a fairly long battle all is mostly working. I reckon another day should shift it, although how much of a speed gain it’s going to be is yet to be determined.

Ordered bar stools.

Went to the gym and did spin. It’s with a guy called Paul who think’s is American in the same way that Tim Westwood thinks he’s black. He only knows two sentences, ‘Tap it up’ & ‘Sprint’. I popped into Tesco’s on the way back and picked up some corks and sterilizer. Also some paint for the coving.

Did some more work, then transferred the red to the other bucket. Started the white off, needs to come up to temperature first.

Sampled the red, it isn’t bad, pretty drinkable.

Then I started playing with a little linux pet project. I want to get the IP address from a mail log for a certain user, but I want it to be the most recent entry. And I want to do it using only command line utils…okay one step at a time. First lets just get all strings associated with this user. So start with ‘grep’ then, so ‘grep user=tim mail.log’. Sorted, now have an output of every line for that user. Okay, now only want the latest entry, so we’ll pipe that to tail. ‘grep user=tim mail.log|tail -n 1’ sorted, that gives me one line. That line looks like this though ‘Nov 8 18:58:03 mannmansion pop3d-ssl: LOGOUT, user=Tim, ip=[::ffff:192.168.0.0], port=[65568]’ etc. So now lets get rid of the front bit up to the ‘ffff:’, ‘grep user=tim mail.log|tail -n 1|sed ‘s/^.*::ffff://’ and that gives you the output ‘192.168.0.0], port=[65568]’. Now let’s get shot of the end bit, “grep user=tim mail.log|tail -n 1|sed ‘s/^.*::ffff://’|sed ‘s/].*//'” and finally you get the output ‘192.168.0.0’. I’ll work out what to do with this exciting information tomorrow.

Okay, settled on paint colours

Started this morning rather late as it was Monday and I really don’t do Monday’s.

Working on a couple of bugs, nothing exciting, but by the end of the day I had everything sorted. More fun stuff tomorrow.

Went to combat, was good fun. Came back and did more work. Finished very late.

Decided on all paint colours and types, going to get ‘endurance’ for the walls as apparently it’s washable. So will get all that ordered up.

Need to transfer the wine tomorrow and start on the white.

No matter how much I used Jamie’s willy as a cyclic control, I was unable to make him hover

This morning started with breakfast for three, that’s me and two dogs. I then let the dogs outside. We had sex. Thankfully everything worked as it should this time and I banged harder than November the fifth.

I got up and started painting. Basically that’s all I’ve done all day, sanding and painting. I’ve got two sections that need more work but I’m going to order the top coat this week. At some point I’ve got to call a halt and I think I’ve reached that point.

I won another helicopter.

Had a bath. Now sat down watching some telly, will then eat and probably pass out. It’s been a long hard day, but quite enjoyable.

I think Tesco vouchers for Virgin airmiles then

So woke up and had breakfast. Okay, I woke up, dogs annoyed me until I fed them, so fed myself at the same time. Cruised porn, walked the dogs. Had a quick sausage roll (that’s not a euphemism).

Drove to Staverton. Considering the weather has been piss poor all week, when I got there it was clear with virtually zero wind. Up we went in G-GJCD, I took it from about 50 feet. Today we did more ascents and descents but this time while performing 360 degree turns. My level-offs and roll-outs were pretty much perfect. I then flew it to a hover reasonably well. Spent some time hovering, not very good today. I think actually the other R22 hovers better. Did a few landings and take-offs.

I won another heli on ebay and it was in Tewkesbury, so I swung by and picked it up. It needs a new central shaft as it can’t even take off without falling over, so ordered a load of parts for that.

Looking into swapping our 400 odd quids worth of Tesco vouchers for Virgin reward miles. Worked out we can get two premium economy seats to LA and just pay the taxes, so will probably do that.

I’m cooking tonight, so quick bath and then on with the curry. DIY day tomorrow.