You can argue that I did nothing useful today, and right now that I’m a drag on humanity and a general all-around waste of oxygen; I’d have difficulty defending that accusation. I did complete Mad Professor Mariarti today if that counts for anything?

I very rarely get unexpected telephone calls, mainly because I’m very protective of my phone number. However this morning was an exception, “Did I know anything about Bitlocker?”

I was tempted to answer “More than enough to know I wouldn’t be using it” but I figured that both had the potential to strike wide of the mark humour-wise and probably the hole was already dug so advising against spade-work even in jest was redundant at this point.

Instead I replied that I did and that it was a full-disk encryption tool shipped with Windows 7, Vista and Server 2K8. Apparently on the strength of this I might be getting a call from someone who was having problems with said technology.

I stared at the phone for a little while partly hoping it might ring because I was now intrigued as to what the problem was, but also partly hoping it wouldn’t because I was already having one of ‘those days’ and adding another problem especially if it was a particularly thorny one I could do without.

Anyhow after an hour it seemed that the whole question became academic because clearly I wasn’t going to get that phone call. I wonder what the problem was...

I’ve ported software before, admittedly mostly between languages and tools on the same platform although there was that time I ported an application from a DEC VAX to Windows – that was fun. Anyhow what I hadn’t done before was use CygWin to build an application, however that was my plan for today. My intention was to build the only tool I’ve so far found which understands Acorn Archimedes Soundtracker and Digital Symphony files which is called XMP. I went around in circles several very frustrating times until I realised that my path was a little polluted and contained 2 installs of GNU C++ which wasn’t helping. Eventually, and after working through several more configuration screw-ups I finally had an executable.

Having thrown every Archimedes era music file I could find at it, it played them all. I was jolly pleased, but this was only part one of the job. Next I wanted to persuade the Winamp plugin to build; this it turned out was a lot more troublesome. I tinkered with makefiles until I finally got the damn thing built. But then Winamp simply failed to start using my newly built plugin; something was clearly wrong.

I made a giant mug of tea and mulled over the problem; opting to accompany that with a rather tasty (if I do say so myself) chocolate muffin. Perhaps being on the bleeding edge was my problem here, so I downloaded at earlier version of the software which came both helpfully and equally irritatingly with an already built DLL. Slightly reluctantly I tried this with Winamp and it worked perfectly. I could now enjoy my old-skool music collection on current hardware and even convert them to a more portable format.

But damn that wasn’t the point, I didn’t want to use someone else’s build I wanted my own. Perhaps an alternate toolset might help. I’ll trying building with WinGW instead. After waiting a few minutes for a multitude of components to download I finally had a working environment. Would you know it, it worked first time. I now had a DLL build from the latest version of the source which worked flawlessly.

So while it took much longer than it should have, it was a useful learning exercise and more importantly I can now play all that delightful retro plinky plonky synthesised music from the lazy hazy Acorn filled summers of my youth.

Feeling the need to restyle this, my meagre online presence, I am looking an ANSI art for inspiration. Not because I have any skills in that direction really, but simply because I’m on a bit of a retro kick at the moment what with the Acorn Archimedes and Sinclair Spectrum emulating and the Soundtracker playing.

Having found several, ancient in internet years, tools for painting in ANSI and having utterly failed to produce anything useful from them I’m now making custom brushes in Photoshop instead. I suspect that might end badly too, but for the time being it’s fun.

Having just purchased a Wired magazine I’m walking up the street perusing the front cover when a woman intentionally puts herself in my way.

“Hello again.”

“Erm, Hello... Again?” I reply looking a little quizzical.

“We met yesterday, I was a little drunk; but you were very polite about it.”

“Polite sounds like me, but I wasn’t out yesterday”

“I didn’t give you my number then?”

“You didn’t I’m afraid.”

“Oh”. She looked a little crestfallen. I momentarily considered offering her the chance to give me her number now, but I thought better of it.

“Well good luck finding my doppelganger.”

Adding “See ‘ya” somewhat redundantly as I walked away.

I’ve no idea what to make of that incident, I probably could have handled it better but I have no idea how.

While I didn’t see the live coverage of the Chilcot inquiry today, I did have the dubious pleasure of being in the company of some individuals that had been protesting there. They were frankly rather loud and rather drunk which does seem to be de rigeur for placard wavers these days.

What we need are more eloquent, informed protestors. I absolutely support those, but drunken probably ill-informed rent-a-mobs aren’t in anyone’s best interest.

How our paths crossed you might wonder, well I made the mistake of attempting to coax food from a glacially slow Burger King at a motorway service area. While I was waiting, the hoard descended. Repeatedly demanding “they wanted it their way” drew a stony faced response from the employee manning the till who’d clearly heard that one before.

When it comes to cascading style sheets I really should keep my mouth shut. I am very much not a CSS Ninja. CSS is the quacking duck of the internet; smooth and serene on the surface but splashing and flailing and spinning its webbed feet.

CSS wrangling is a lot like trying to plaster a wall made from sacks of ferrets. Every time you get a smooth surface the wall shifts from underneath and the plaster falls off one end and a grotesque lump appears at the other.

Then when you batter it into submission while the wall stops moving thankfully, colours start bleeding through everywhere you don’t want them. So you then have to slap even more plaster on, until the coating is so thick you seriously worry that it’ll detach from the wall under its own weight. Either that or dry so unevenly that cracks appear everywhere.

Anyhow, having stretched the plastering metaphor to breaking point and well beyond I must make a mental note to once again remember not to presume “simple” CSS styling requirements are actually simple to accomplish. More pertinently, when saying “sure, I’ll take a look at the CSS on your site” and thinking it’ll only take a few minutes replace minutes with hours and banish any thoughts that you won’t be cursing the inconsistency of rendering because you undoubtedly will.