Friday, Maz hosted a soiree at her gaff with Christmas drinks and nibbles. It was a grand evening with two fantastic dishes: home made sausage rolls (my mum can testify that they are just about my favourite snack food), and baby new potatoes wrapped in bacon. Wow. Damn good. We had wine. We had port and we even ventured into the territory known as Baileys. That is not to say that we had sexual relations with Chris. Because he ain’t gay. Or so he keeps saying

Saturday we all convened at the Varsity for some nice and healthy fried food. I couldn’t stomach any food so I handed my delicious breakfast over to Simon and just drank my orange juice and coffee (with a twirl). Afterwards a few of us ambled to Home Bargains to get some, er, Bargains for our, *cough* Home. We then went to Alex and Laurens house, did various movements resulting in hanging of decorations, and then went to pick up Maz. Then we did the whole transformers thing, (parents in disguise). We all transformed into our respective parents and rolled out. *cough* What I mean is that we went for a Saturday afternoon stroll with friends around a particularly nice part of Birmingham. It was called Clent Hills, and the pictures may be found here. Post walk we went back to our dwellings and did what ever people do in dwellings, and then ambled over to Alex and Lauren’s house for food, and a very macho and heterosexual evening of watching Strictly Come Dancing. *cough*. We had gnocchi and bacon in a white sauce (very tasty) then we made our own pizza’s with Alex’s sauce and dough. Now. If you have ever been in a pizza place and though “Why don’t they have pizzas with pineapple rings with mini scotch eggs in the middle with streaks of bacon and a generous helping of cheese on top?” I can confirm why. Because it tastes foul. Not chickeny, but really bad. Anyway, ambled home afterwards, read my book and crashed.

I have found the flaw in the Apple Mighty Mouse. One that mice since the dawn of two buttons haven’t suffered from. A problem so grave that it kinda screws up gaming. Not that I have been gaming on my shiny new computer.

You can’t press Button #1 and Button #2 at the same time. Damn.

This is always a horrendous task where there is no one “universal” solution to the problems that various programs present. There is a good article over here. This is a good read, I also suggest grabbing the papers that the article references.

Well things have been busy, I finally plumped up the monies for a iMac, I went for the 20″ version and so far I am very impressed. The screen is delicious and makes writing code so much better than on my laptop. I have played with ScreenSpanningDoctor that allows me to use my iBook VGA out to plug an additional screen into the machine which ends up giving me oodles of space. The transition from iBook to the booted iMac was grand with all my applications, settings and home directory coming over nicely. All I need to do is give the machine a better chance and put some more memory in the damn thing. At 512mb, it grinds a little and doesn’t do itself any justice, I am going to grab a 1gb stick to join it, it should then fly like things that fly really fast and look, er, sexy.

Last week I was in Sweden again, this time for a brief update on work and the Christmas ‘do’. It was good fun and showed me what the Swedish do for an Christmas celebration. It was all good, except the Rattlesnake chilli drink I had the night before and the various shots of schnapps which was not playing nice games with my stomach.

I spent some time putting together a present for Webbies birthday (he was 26 today), and it turned out really good. I used iMovie to put together a 13 minute movie containing various clips, photos, and humorous segments with me wanting to do a “Jonny Vaughn” impression. It went down very well. I then used iDVD to put a dvd together with the afore mentioned film as the main feature, joined with TheGMan, The 203 Gaybar, and Rovolution – my previous productions! All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience. I am currently re-compressing the main video to DVD Widescreen resolution in H.264 to see what quality comes out, then I shall re-compress it to something much more web suitable and provide a download. I think I am definitely going to investigate getting a DV camera as well as laying my hands on Final Cut Express. iMovie gets the job done, but there was so much I was itching to be able to do which I can only assuming a more capable application will provide. We shall see. I might even go for something more organised and put a script together. See if I can’t put together some sort of script and get some people to act somethings out. It’d have to be funny though.

This evening we went out to Pizza Express to celebrate Alex’s birthday. It was a good laugh and nice to catch up and see various people. I believe Alex had a good time.

I found a good site for wallpapers particularly those that work nicely on widescreen TFTs here. These work for the 1680×1050 resolution the iMac exports.

Don’t drink people – it’s bad mmmmkay ?

I have released ferite 1.0.2. It has the following fixes:

- Fix for a threading issue that caused the engine to crash with a memory issue.
- Fix for rmi and a lack of parsing of arguments within function calls.
- Fix for rmi that caused the starvation of network sockets within the server environment. The new fix forces the GC to be run when in blocking listen mode and also forces the shutdown of network sockets.
- Fix for array code that would cause objects to have an inflated refcount and cause scripts to not deleted objects within the GC
- Fix for refcounting issues within the assignment of objects
- Fix for building on CYGWIN: required -no-undefined on the libraries and a missing header in aphex_thread.c
- Fix for class/namespace modifies on a class/namesapce that already exists

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[04:51] * RobertEri pets his cat and plots his scheme for world dominance
[04:52] RobertEri: Wait, this isn’t the right room.
[04:52] RobertEri: I must be on the wrong server.
[04:52] RobertEri: Sorry.
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