Tony Hart :( (by sarah)

It turns out Tony Hart has died aged 83, as without him the Wiggly Pets would never have existed I felt it only right to do a post about him over on Salaric Craft. 🙁

It would have been nice to actually meet him.

Bizarlly this and watching the old Wind in the Willows with Jean has made me want to annamate the Wiggly Pets once more. I remember speaking to a BBC bod about it a couple of years ago but then never heared anything about it and then that thing on CBBC appeared which looks similiar so I think they must have already had that in the pipe line :/

Oh well went I get some spare time (next millenia at this rate) I will animate them myself - I have a few other things I would love to turn into animations too! And as always being me they cover a broad range of tecnics that are probably now redundent with modern pooter power which makes me all the more excited as maybe I can just muck about on the pooter and get something that looks right.

Not right now though - far to much stuff to do:/

RIP Tony and thankyou.

Muddy Jean (by sarah)

Why oh why did I ever get Jean white mittens? Jean likes going over and helping Barbara with her housework and laying the fire etc... then they turn up and I put Jean in coat, boots, hat etc... and they wonder off to do various things in the garden.

Then between 15 and 45 minutes later a very muddy Jean invariably comes back into the house having to jump for the door handle.

This day I had her mittens freashly dry from having gotten the stains from last time out. Her pink coat was still drying but there is a nice long navey blue one which Violet gave us. Jean went out in that and her hat and mittens.

She returns with mud all up the back of the coat and the blackest pair of mittens I have ever seen - 'my glubs are wet mummy!'

And so they are back in the wash leaving me scrabbling for another pair were she hasn't lost one of them :/ I am reminded of Beatrix Potter to be honest - well she is three and I'm sending her out side were there is mud - mud how does it get into her hair?

Jean’s Introduction to Economics (by sarah)

Jean keeps telling me not to work 🙁 She wants me to play with her instead but I have to do some work when she's about, though I really don't like doing it and it really depends on weather she's in the sort of mood were she's happy to say just sit and paint.

Our conversation went like this:

'Mummy don't work - play with me!'

'I will play with you in 20 minutes Jean I have to finish this first.'

'No'

'Yes'

'Why?'

'So that we can get money'

'For my house?' (her money box)

'No so that we can buy food.'

Jean hits the heater in annoyance, 'DONT DO THAT IF YOU BREAK IT WE CAN"T REPLACE IT AND THEN WE WILL BE COLD!!!'

'We can just go out all day.'

'No we can't Jean you need money for that.'

'Silly mummy we go shopping!'

'No Jean you need money for that.'

Puzzeled look, 'I'll get my house and horse.' (again her two money boxes.) I had explain it wasn't enough money and thats why I was working besides it's hers and would she like to pay it into the bank? Things then got a bit abstract and I was engander of doing a Mr Brown in Padington Bear.

'Oh ok, I'll make dinner mummy, to help.'

'Good girl Jean.'

A blue toy pot appears with a plastic chicken leg and some construction blocks from something that isn't lego. 'Soup mummy to keep you warm.'

'Thankyou Jean.'

Monster Blogs Sorted (by sarah)

I have spent the last few hours sorting out an issue on the Monster blogs(Blue, Red and Yellow). As some of you might have noticed the links were broken and appearing as non-clickable ugly text with all the markdown visable 🙁

We had been trying to chase down the problem for weeks when another blog I set up was showing the same issue - I was in the visual editor.

It turns out there is now a visual as well as HTML editor on WordPress blogs. This has cuased me lots of unnessascery work involving manually going through and removing unwanted tags :'(

I have gone into more detail on the Web-Empire blog as I felt it was information that needed sharing.

Ugarit interactive restore (by alaric)

Ugarit is coming along nicely. I've written the interactive archive exploration/extraction shell, although it's still a bit ugly (mtimes are still just displayed as a number rather than in a human-readable format, and the fields in ls -l outputs aren't padded to fixed widths, you can only cd up or down one level at a time rather than using a path, and little things like that).

Here it is in action, starting from the top of an archive with a single tag called Test that has two snapshots at different times. current just refers to the most recent snapshot of the two. I extract LICENCE.txt then take a look to see how it came out.

> ls
Test <tag>
> cd Test
/Test> ls
time<1232405984.074> <snapshot>
time<1232405984.162> <snapshot>
current <snapshot>
/Test> cd current
/Test/current> ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1000 100 time<1231987453.0> README.txt
lrwxr-xr-x 1000 100 time<1231988569.0> LICENCE.txt -> subdir/LICENCE.txt
drwxr-xr-x 1000 100 time<1232013672.0> subdir
drwxr-xr-x 1000 100 time<1232155290.0> .svn
prw-r--r-- 1000 100 time<1232052740.0> FIFO
crw-r--r-- 0 100 time<1232154570.0> chardev
brw-r--r-- 0 100 time<1232154578.0> blockdev
/Test/current> cd subdir
/Test/current/subdir> ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1000 100 time<1231987453.0> LICENCE.txt
drwxr-xr-x 1000 100 time<1232155290.0> .svn
/Test/current/subdir> get LICENCE.txt
Extracted LICENCE.txt
/Test/current/subdir> bye
-bash-3.2$ cat LICENCE.txt 
Copyright (c) 2008-2009, Warhead.org.uk Ltd

All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Neither the names of Warhead.org.uk Ltd, Snell Systems, nor Kitten Technologies, nor the names of their contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

It's getting there! The only thing that's really holding me back now is that I have limited Internet access in the evening to read the manuals for the Chicken eggs I want to use.

Mainly, I need a command-line argument wrapper, and an encryption engine.

I want to offer the choice of no compression or deflate compression when writing into the archive, but that each block should be marked with a prefix byte stating its compression algorithm so that a block can be decompressed no matter how it was compressed, as long as your copy of Ugarit knows the algorithm - I'll add lzma, and make it the default, as soon as I've written a wrapper to liblzma.

Then I want a choice of encryption algorithms, which I plan to do by writing a wrapper for libmcrypt, rather than using the cryptlib interface for Chicken I've already found, as I don't seem to have cryptlib in pkgsrc on NetBSD, and libmcrypt looks nice and simple.

There's a standard Scheme library for command line parsing, called args-fold (yes, another form of fold...), which does a similar job to getopt libraries. But I don't have it installed yet. And I need to check out a Scheme library I saw for indentation-delimited syntax, that might make for a configuration file format more appealing to parenthophobes...