The great Torchwood catchup has started - first the second half of series one, then series two, followed by the new Dr. Who. Watching it in one of my three monitors whilst doing other things, because generally I'm not that interested in Torchwood.

In summary :

Greeks Bearing Gifts - not bad. Fairly predictable. Seems like all of Torchwood have now shagged someone/an alien.
They Keep Killing Suzy - wow. This episode is definitely worth watching; some definite originality (now *that's* plotting!).
Random Shoes - I can't help feeling this is Love and Monsters for Torchwood. It's decent enough, although I never really found it particularly engaging. Fortunately the ending is much improved over L&M.

In other news my PC appears to be hanging after long periods of uptime. Personally I suspect this is a combination of Vista, multiple monitors and Nvidia's shitty drivers. Diagnosis has begun..

I've not been doing much coding this week as I was busy on Monday, at biphoria on Tuesday and the pub on Friday, leaving two days to achieve stuff. My Vista install has been a bit unhappy, so I took the opportunity to rebuild it onto the new Hitachi SATA II disk I had. It has, afterall, had a load of SP1 builds and drivers on it.

I've also upgraded from 2GB of PC640 DDR2 non ECC RAM to 4GB of ECC (non buffered) 5300 RAM, and bought a 2GB ReadyBoost compatible USB2 flash drive at the same time to see if it had any effect.

Overall, I've managed to move things into a state I'm reasonably happy with, thoughts :
( vista stuff )
I can't seem to see a way to index zip files by default... must research that.

Relating to external drive boxes, spride noted he didn't trust fanless external drive boxes. I echo this, and in particular do not recommend buying an IB-361-STUS-B black Icybox SATA to e-SATA/USB 2 caddy. First, the mechanism uses an easily losable key that can't even be attached to a keyring, it doesn't fit thicker SATA drives, they get rather hot, and the power adaptor and cable are of poor quality. Buy something else..

On the other hand, I do recommend the caddy less internal Icybox IB-168SK-B. There's also a version with a fan, or things like the Scythe Kama Bay can be installed above it. If you need to swap drives in a case, this is strongly recommended!

Still, at the moment everything seems to be nice and fast - which it bloody should be, considering the amonut of hardware it's got.

All went quiet on my journal about exult porting to PalmOS, but that doesn't mean I've been entirely idle. I have, however, been less than single minded on it because frankly I'm going through the bits of stuff I don't want to do. There seems to be a tidier house, some more food, some happier kittens, less books to read and I've at least *looked* at the source code each night.

As mentioned, the shittiness of Palm memory management means that even a Zodiac 2 (an 128MB memory device with 2 SD cards) has only 10MB heap, so I decided to have a quick look at optimising the memory.

Suffice it to say I have spent far too long farting around with compilers, libraries and debuggers. Tonight, I have managed to compile exult. Of course it dies on startup..

Anyway, useful information to remind me and others is

Visual C++ 2008 is out (has been for a bit) and works properly in Vista x64 without whinging about admin privileges. There are 64 bit versions of SQL Server Express.

The latest platform SDK contains both 32 and 64 bit compilers.

The platform SDK contains most things, but not DirectX. That's another 448MB download.. (Not really unexpected; things like the Exchange SDK are separate too. At least everything is free.)

SDLMain.lib is broken in Visual C++ 2008, and probably other versions (2005) too, due to a dependency on fprintf/other file i/o functions and linking problems with msvcrt etc. I can't be arsed to fix it and used the horrid workaround of just sticking the win32_sdl_main.c direct into exult. I could compile in MingW, but I suspect the compiler is VC++ is more optimised.

Remember that there are *two* registries under Windows 64 bit. The 32 bit registry is branched off KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node, KEY_WOW64_64KEY allows 32 bit code to write to the 64 bit registry. This explained why editing Aedebug and/or 'Image File Execution Options' was doing precisely bugger all (I was compiling exult 32 bit under 64 bit Windows).

WinDBG -IS on the windows debugger will install it as a postmortem debugger. Of course a) you'll need to edit the properties to insist on admin privileges when run under Vista as otherwise it won't have permission to stick values in the registry and b) If you run the 64 bit debugger under 64 bit Vista it'll stick the values under Aedebug on the 64 bit registry, and thus you'll have to manually fix it for 32 bit apps.

The symbol path should be SRV*<local path>*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Irix problem appears to be due to gdb being broken.
Download gdb source, run configure, run make. Make fails. *arse*

Get pissed off that the response on Nekochan is 'buy a commercial compiler' when every other OS out there has a working release of gcc and gdb, although I'll fill in the forms at SGI and see what I can get for free (MipsPRO doesn't seem to be floating around *cough* 'other sources', either). Temporarily give up trying to figure out why the makefile failed, and decide to look at the PalmOS/Zodiac port instead.

Find that PalmOS desktop for Zodiac is difficult to find (not a surprise), but also not supported at all in Vista. However, also find that *NO* Palm Desktop is supported on any 64bit version of Windows. The only working solution is to use a copy of VMWare Player to run an image created by VirtualPC (VMWare player can't create images, VirtualPC doesn't support USB).

Yes, I do intend to do projects for more up to date hardware in the near-ish future.

It's hardly surprising that Palm failed in the marketplace, and a lot of their damage was self inflicted. Whilst the death of PDAs in favour of mobile phones or converged devices was no doubt inevitable, Palm spent years repeatedly fucking up their market. It's also a sad state of affairs when a handheld (the Tapwave Zodiac) created by a company that went bust in 2005 still has no real contemporary competitor..

The plan last night in an effort to actually Achieve Something, was to spend the night continuing to try porting exult to Irix.

Of course, I got a bit distracted. There was ( domesticity, Squeaky Cat and playing with winterms )

Of course then I remembered that it's possible to put CE.NET 5.0 on the system, so ( there was a lot of faffing with java and tftp )

Whilst this was happening, Spotty Cat was trying to get me to throw his toy and becoming increasingly irritating. Hullo Mr. Closed Door. How do people work at home with cats around?

Then ( Bloody X wouldn't work between Irix and Vista )

I then actually managed to look at fixing the crash in exult on startup, the result being ( debugging is a bit broken and may be an arse to fix )

Tried aubergine, chick pea and spinach dish last night. Shouldn't have bothered. It tastes just about ok when combined with rice, but considering the 1 hr 20 minute preparation time is not worth bothering with again. This is getting to be a recurring feature with the 'free from' book - other than the nut roast, which is quite tasty. I suppose this may be a side effect of being free from both dairy and everything else too..

My Planescape:Torment CD 2 has a scratch in it :( :( :(. Oh well, time to use my bittorrent box to fill in the files that I can't read. Also, Vista SP1 networking is being unusual - sometimes it works extremely well.. and other times it is laughably bad, what gives?

Scan finally have my Rapesco CT-45 stapler in stock - huzzah - a cable stapling I will go! I've also been pointed at Toolstation, who have 5,000 staples for about 9 quid..

Now, time to do battle with DRAC II cards again, and give CPL a call. I suspect I shall be ringing round other cat rescue places as CPL are being rather crap at calling back and there's only a week and a half till K-day.

I was slightly premature in deciding my backup solution was fixed, after GTAK ran out of memory, did something to grab all of the non paged pool in XP which also made the hard disk driver unhappy. Have resorted to IBM's PSNS (Personally Safe 'N Sound), which appears to work fine after the esoteric interface is conquered. Still, at least now I'm actually backing my system up properly - it takes about 3 hours - which probably isn't too bad for backing up from XP to OS/2 via Peer Services running on a 300MHz Pentium 1 substitute, and a DDS-4 drive connected via UW SCSI.

Also, after having a regular whinge at the Microsoft Vista team for being consistently crap I've been granted access to Vista SP1 after taking the approach of 'be part of the solution, not just endlessly whinging'. Time to install it on a separate hard drive and have a go.. Ulp.

Also, the joys of DIY and fixing stuff to walls. I have been using these Nylon plasterboard fixings. Basically, they're crap unless the wall is straight plasterboard. If you put them near the edge of the wall, it runs into the baton. If you put them into a wall between the houses it runs into some mesh backing or similar, but just about works.

..and if you put it into the drywall leading to the outside it leaves a 1cm hole after banging into the brick. fuckers. I just *love* it when a description says 'plasterboard, medium weight fixing'. It doesn't say 'don't stick it on drywall'.

What it should say is use this instead, and chuck the ones you already have away. So, it's now time to polyfiller the gap, then drill into the wall and use a normal, big rawl plug and long screw to go into it. Joy.

Everything is just a pigging hassle. What with work and life and so on, it's taking well over a week to put up a set of speakers. I've not even thought about the wiring yet, which needs the out of stock Rapesco stapler from Scan, and then no doubt the wire painting so it blends into the wall..