Week of 11th December, 2000

Last Week

Monday, 11th December

Night shifts start tonight, and by next Monday, I'll have done 12 shifts in a row, because I've got freelance in Central London Wednesday and Thursday, again on nights. Fatigue City, here I come.

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Tuesday, 12th December

Got up to date on the cartoon strips I collect last night - Calvin and Hobbes has moved to another site, and that site is glacially slow, even down the work lease. I'm not surprised, the daily pages are about 50kB in sze, even without the graphics. This is surely excessive - 50k of text and Javascript to display one 17k GIF image? Having looked at the source of the page, I suspect they're doing lots of tracking - certainly all the images are served via another site, the URL of which is prepended to the actual graphic URL.

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Wednesday, 13th December

Freelance in Central London tonight and tomorrow night. Posts will be sparse, I'm not getting my sleep.


I went shopping for various goodies from the local discount warehouse this afternoon. One of the goodies was a new printer, an HP Deskjet 840, for UKP80 plus tax, which is as cheap as I've seen in any mail-order computer catalogue. That's part of my Christmas present to me - with, I stress, Jane's agreement. I'll install it this weekend, networked using the SohoBasic print server I've had sitting on the shelf for some considerable time - that way I won't have to turn Celery on when I want to print from Fujisan.

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Thursday, 14th December

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Friday, 15th December

Last night's freelance was not fun - I got thrown into running their version of multi-channel automation, while most people sloped off to the Christmas party. I don't know this kit well, what do I do if it goes pear-shaped? Which of course it did - Aloysius P. Murphy was rubbing his hands with glee. I didn't fall off air, but the schedule on one of the three channels succeeded in losing just over 13 minutes of material - why I don't know. I hope that hasn't blotted my copybook at this site.

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Saturday, 16th December

Last night, I discovered something - the site that now serves Calvin and Hobbes also serves Garfield, and they've got the complete archive on line (via the clunky, track everything user interface, of course).

On making this discovery, I tried a brainstorm - I went direct to the image URL - and IT WORKED! They haven't locked the server down tightly enough, I can get the images directly, without waiting for each page to load. I wonder how long it'll be before they realise, and bar direct access. Of course, you have to edit the URL directly, there are no handy "click for next day's strip"`buttons, nor yet can you get a directory. There must be a way to script this. I remember seeing mention in print of a little command line utility ( listed specifically as running on NT, but probably a WIN32 app) that would get a named file via HTTP. Wrap a script around it, to generate the filenames, and Robert's your Uncle.

Big snag - if I remember the name correctly, I can't find it. The original mention was in a computer comic that I've probably thrown away for want of space to keep it, and the magazine website requires registration before you can do anything - even view their privacy statement. I can understand registration to post to the forums, but to view the site passively? I don't think so, especially since I don't know what I'm signing up for - I could be saying to them "Spam me to the max". I doubt that, but I don't know. Of course, I could sign up from a disposable, Web-based email account - I might try that.

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Sunday, 17th December

After posting the above yesterday, I set to to try to install the new printer. First I had to find a suitable physical location, which turned out to be one of the newest shelves - high up, just above eye level, but you don't need top access to HP8x0 series printers. I plugged the SohoBasic print server in, ran a CAT5 cable from the network hub on the other side of the room, plugged the power leads in and switched on - no smoke. So far, so good.

Now for the software. The print server installs an interface to itself on the machine, allowing you to assign a printer to the virtual LPT port, which I did. Then I loaded the HP printer driver, and told it to use the print server I'd just installed - all this on Celery. And it worked like a charm - I like things that work first time. Despite the issues some people have with HP kit (mostly under NT or Win2K) I have had nothing but good results from their kit under Win9x, and Win3.11 before that.

The last job was tidying up the temporary rats nest of hanging wires, and as I did that I took the chance to free up a wall socket, by moving the hi-fi minisystem mains plug onto the same 4-way dis-board.


Today, after getting severely disturbed by family noises while I was trying to sleep, I typed up the Neighbourhood Watch newsletter. I've mentioned this before - even though Dad doesn't run the Watch group any more, the newsletter still comes to me for typing. He keeps saying that "this will be the last one", twice a year, but I don't see it changing - he's too obliging.

I thought I might have to take the file in to work tonight for printing on a laser, but the HP840 made a very nice job of it - even the scanned inage of the sponsor's shop is sharper than the DJ320 rendered it, so that's a result.

Now I have to dump the artificial Christmas trees we (that's us, and Mum and Dad) have been using for the past five or six years - they've finally disintegrated. Jane was forced to buy a real tree, and at this late date the choice is limited. The tree we've got is about 1.4 metres in height, and looks pretty bushy, even in it's packing net. They'll decorate it while I'm down in Wales, collecting my Mum - tomorrow.

After that, there will be some quick discussion about receiving RAI, the Italian national TV broadcaster via satellite - this with Simon, my brother-in-law, and his wife (who is Italian) - and then on to work for the last of 7 successive night shifts, and I'm shattered even before I start!

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