Older blog entries for blah (starting at number 4)

Spent a lot of time learning about SGML today, made fair headway. It's a bit of an acronym fest but I think I sorted out the worst confusions. I now have to move on to learning the docbook DTD which is what Free Software projects like LDP and Gnome use. I'll probably try and markup my vim work for practise and will then hopefully be able to move onto helping with Gnome docs.

Today I am worried, very worried.

From what I can work out, possibly co-ordinated by the CIA as part of a Y2K rescue plan, someone is stealing time. I had hours when I got home and yet only managed to rough up one section of my article - I must have been frozen staring at the screen for hours! And no that's not a description of IRC.

Did watch Englands less than convincing qualification for the European Football(soccer) Championship against Scotland. That said getting the result is the important bit.

Downloaded the new Mozilla milestone, M11, which is a lot more stable and does seem faster than M10. Still think the whole license thing is a pity as it makes it less than useful for the rest of the Community.

So being the book addict that I am I decided recently that I need to review my C knowledge thoroughly - complex declarations and complex pointers were/are a bit hazy. Now this is all well and good if you don't know me, but if you've been to my flat you'd know I have like 9 books on C/Linux programming so really this is farsical(sp?). I put it down to the fact that I really like reading books, I have a poor memory and for whatever reason I am just one of those people who remains piddling round the foot-hills, perfectly happy, rather than trying to climb the mountain. Anyway, got a good few hours of that done and am reasonably happy that I understand more than I thought; though less than I'd like. </P>

Spent more time this evening working on my vim info/article. Worked on how to personalise settings - got the manual info but need to test it all works properly and check for other sources. Not sure what I am going to do about the length though and the style is a bit 'dense'/pedestrian which I'm concerned about. Probably have to brutally cut bits out and try to fluffen it up a bit....enough of the culinary metaphors already! </P>

On the technical front vim has stronger configuration options than I realised or general 'opinion' gives it credit for. The layering of text which is slated for version 6 is a great feature - and one I swear I thought of independantly so was quite surprised when I saw it (I'm sure many a programmer has thought of how useful it would be to be able to toggle seeing comments) and I'm looking forward to it - if you've ever seen how verbose my comments you'd be looking forward to it too ;-) </P>

Another weekend catapults itself to an end far too quickly for it's or my good. Seem to have spent all day reading through vim helpfiles trying to make sure that I understand the vagaries of C indenting correctly. My 'article' is now far too long and overly complete which is to be expected from me - I really need to just learn lots of things enough rather than one thing too much. I can't use most of the info I got today because it is too deep for a light article, and I'm extremely unlikely to use it myself - but at the end of the day it gave me pleasure to understand it so I'm not really begrudging. I'll crack on with it the next few evenings and aim for finishing by next weekend, best to set a deadline or I'll keep researching until I lose interest.</P>

Other things we did were to buy a dishwasher - pointless creeping featurism came into play so that we now have a time delay function; did people forget how to press the start button? ! Watched Mel Gibsons Payback which wasn't as bad as I expected, the twist at the end was quite good. Ness(gf) watched Voyager on video so she was happy - darn video store gets them one at a time every month or so which can make a season really, really drag! </P>

Long day watching England win against the Scots in the footy so didn't get as much done as I should have. Worked some more on my vim article which is going OK. The more I scratch the surface the more options and features that are useful for programming - hard to find the right balance between discussing a feature and doing too much detail. Chilled out a bit on #gnome where there were some interesting discussions.

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