Stu's Rusty Bucket

Friday, December 31, 2004

Reso’s

I have decided next year (tomorow) I am not even doing a new years resolution thing. Pfhah. It doesnt work for me anyway so I am cutting the line.

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

The house of

Going to see the House of Flying Daggers tonight. Looks like poor lil Zhang Zi’Yi is type cast now. Crouching Tiger, Hero, Musa, Legend of Zu and now House of Flying Daggers..

Sure, there are other films in her repetoire but hey, if all I watch is the kungfu + wushu films, then to me, she is typecast! I might go watch memoirs of a geisha when it comes out but I dunno… It would be to strange to see something out of character.

Time to go cook dinner anyway, tonight I am making chicken tikka masala.. a beaut indian dish with rice mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

The Minster

Yesterday I took joy down to York and to the Minster. York is a really beautiful place and we had a great time. The minster is really old, first it was the site of a roman garrison, an old roman bassilica. On top of that around 1100ad the normans came and built the first of the cathedrals, later the larger minster was built expanding the norman minster into the huuge stone behemoth that the current York Minster is…

So we went around the minster, down into the crypt etc. Later that evening we came back to Evensong, which they do in an old traditional catholic way. Which is kinda odd since England converted all the old catholic churches to Church of England and protestantism, and York Minster is a Church of England chuch, not a catholic church…

Anyway…

Monday, December 20, 2004

Stuff

So I had a panic attack yesterday on the trai just before getting the train to Scotland.. So I kinda ruined that day out!! :( what a wuss. So I have rebooked the tickets to just after christmas, so WE WILL GO to Scotland.

Joy and I went to the movies last night and saw Blade 3. Ehh. Its ok but nothing great. Never saw number two so cant comment on the whole series. Certainly they could have got by without making this. Anyway…

The walk home was a bit slippery as the frost started to build up on the pavements. We got some subway for dinner which was very nice, brought it home and put it in the oven along side some apple strudle.. mmmmmmm. strudle was nice.

today we are going back down the street, joy saw a nice top in a shop window, but she continually does money conversions in her head (the us dollar is HALF the pound right now.. 50p to 1 usd...).

So its a big burger for lunch in the Aussie pub (Walkabout), some coffee etc. maybe the book store..

Xandros 3

This is just a quick entry..

I have found the linux distribution of my choice so far. The other night I got Xandros 3 Deluxe.  Its slick and smooth. Install went without problem. Wireless (sans WPA) is working fine.

Bootup could be faster, otherwise, its all very nice and I am very impressed.

Would have liked to see some more up to date packages tho.. ie: more up to date version of openoffice, etc.

The only thing I REALLY lack right now is a ‘palm desktop’ replacement. I have a Tungsten E which uses an updated OS5 with modified datebook/memo/todo etc thats different from the previons versions and no current palm link program handles it.

So yes, for the time being, I have trashed my Dragonfly BSD install :(

Thursday, December 16, 2004

What a day

Today has been a busy day. I did all the washing (two loads, light + darks), and all the towels and sheets and stuff as well as clothes. Vaccuumed, cleaned up, tidied, and futzed about.

why??

My lady is arriving on the morrow. 6am to be precise.

I have restocked the cupboards.

Done some programming.

hmm a busy day..

Oooh! and work rang me. shesh. I rang the agency yesterday to tell them I wold be off for 3 weeks, etc. And they took the message. So this morning the house phone goes, ‘Can you work tomorow?!?’… NO! Didnt you get my message! So I turn on my mobile and there is three messages, 8am, ‘Can you work’, 8:30, ‘Ring me! Can you work! etc’ and the last at 9 ‘We need you to work tomorow!’ pshaw!!!

grrrrrr.....

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Two Movies

There are two movies coming out, well three, that I want to see.

Blade Trinity, I liked the first one, never saw the second one, and want to see the third.

Some Natalie portman movie that outs, I think its called Garden State. Looks interesting.

and thirdly the Nicholas ‘I am act like a wooden plank’ Cage movie about treasure. Looks interesting too (so I liked Mummy + Indianna jones movies type things).

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Maps… Were on our way.

Aaah while on the phone to my folks back in Australia this morning the postie dropped my maps through the door. Two ‘footprint’ maps of the West Highland Way and the Great Glen Way are now in my hands. They are strip maps showing the trail and a little on each side with notes and mile markers.

Im glad to see the mile markers on the trail as it helps planning immensly. One thing I was thinking of was using these footprint maps to knockout a kind of ‘data book’ ala the AT, so I can see at a glance what streams and roads etc are coming up at what intervals…

Im kind of dissappointed that the GGW has lots of road walking, most of the trail infact, is a stone gravel path (it is also a cycle path with slight detours/separations for cyclists and walkers)…

But, it looks like I can wildcamp all of the GGW, which is good.

The other good bit is with these maps it looks like I can make my own detours. The highest point of the GGW is 1210ft and circumnavigates around Carn na Leitire (1424ft), I might instead, go straight over instead of around.

On the downside, although I will be going through the forsest next to Loch Lochy and Lock Ness, right on the shoreline is a major road that runs from Glasgow to Inverness… I will be back from the road by a fair bit, and hopefully higher to get good views but.... what a pain, The planners need to be shot. They should have put a road alongside the loch on one side, not both sides of the lochs!!!

Ohwell.

Wai!

Went up the street this morning. Scouts were begging for money aka packing your shopping bags for you and waiting with sad ass eyes for you to give them your coppers (well they wanted pounds but i gave coppers!).

bought a traditional meat pie from the bakers. mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..... loveing it.

wanted to get a small 35cl / 50cl bottle of my fav whisky but I havnt been able to find it anywhere… Tried Sainsburys, Somerfield, a proper bottle shop.. nothing. nada…

ohwell, I have a few other places to try before I go to brand number 2 (laphroig or ardbeg).

On a better note, my fiancee rocks up in 5 days!!! oooh Im so excited! Its gonna be a great christmas I think. Looks like the snow will stay away this year, so no white christmas… just a lot of frost and fog..

Monday, December 06, 2004

Single Signon and my I-Name

Well, I jumped the gun a bit, and have grabbed an I-Name…

=stu

Got in early to get my name so I dont end up as Stu10283710 or something… Might still grab my real name as an I-Name as well… But I dunno....

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Ruby : uname extension

I spent a couple of hours working on a Ruby extension, and created a uname library to give uname functionality to ruby across platforms.

check out http://mega-tokyo.com/programs.html

Ruby : ADO

I was poking around with ruby again the other night at database layers… Currently there does not seem to be much ‘good’ in the way of DB layers… There are some basic implementations of various things (mysql+postgresql) but nothing substantial, worse, they all speak differently.

So I was thinking of starting an ‘ADO’ type library that wrapped mysql/ms sql/postgres/firebird/db2 etc…

A nice common set of interfaces…

But where do I begin?

It would have to be written in C with a ruby wrapper.