Just got back from a week's holiday, now commencing work on email + LJ backlogs..

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

For the life of me I cannot get my head around the differences between PPPoEoE, PPPoEoA, and PPPoA, and I am going quietly mad trying.

A good rule of thumb seems to be that if any IEEE standard is involved in something, it will be ridiculously complicated and confusing. IP, by contrast, was nice and simple. Ethernet framing was nice and simple, too, at least until the IEEE poked their noses in. I still remember trying to cope with the idea of having Ethernet II (DIX), Novell "raw" 802.3 and and 802.3+LLC frames on the same media, back in the late 90s.

*sigh*

</rant>

Edit: OK, I think I've got a handle on it now. To be fair, the IEEE don't seem directly responsible on this one, though I think we can still hold them to account for 802.2, which is used in several different ways in ATM encapsulation ..

Nifty.

Turns out mencoder can generate DVD-compatible MPEG2 streams which DeVeDe can successfully pass to dvdauthor:

mencoder in.ts -oac copy -ovc copy -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -o out.ps

The upshot of which is that I can losslessly convert Freeview (DVB-T) streams captured with my TV card to DVDs. Makes you wonder what all the fuss is about P2P, when the broadcasters in the UK are happily transmitting pretty high quality (BBC ONE seems have a near-DVD bitrate, for now at least), unprotected digital data ..

Evil, evil, evil. And stunningly smart.

Life imitates Stephenson (again); it's also doing a good job, IMNSHO, of imitating Gibson. Who'da thunk, back in 1992? Good old Fidonet seems so tame, in comparison ..

Daylight Savings Time begins in the UK at 01:00 GMT. Don't get as confused as my poor old media system:

( Confusion )

Note though that the timeline across the top is actually correct. Local time goes from 00:59:59 to 02:00:00, which is almost as odd to watch in real time as a leap second (23:59:59 -> 23:59:60 -> 00:00:00.)

Spoke too soon .. it's snowing again, quite hard. Shame I'm running out of dry wood ..

I have my little mini PC set up on the coffee table, and am geeking away a few feet from a crackling log fire. It's just a pity the snow's melted already ..

<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls

Arthur C. Clarke is dead.

Damn.

Welcome to Airstrip One. Will we have to change our TLD?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/16/1612203

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/16/1730221

Perpetual war

Edit: 2nd link fixed.

Meh.

Ow, ow, ow.

If I have ever mocked other people's smooth muscle pain, I promise never, ever to do so again.

Ow.

".. by E = h/t a carrot or rutabaga (small E, long t) might have a single, very low intensity conscious moment once per month or so."

- http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/documents/CogScipub.pdf

So it turns out I'm not the only one who's noticed it. As I limped into work yesterday, one of my colleagues looked at me, paused, and said "I think you've been watching too many episodes of House. At this rate we'll have to get you a cane."

It's a distinct possibility :/

So, it's 7.45pm and I haven't received any proposals yet. This isn't looking promising ..

I'm beginning to feel — and walk — a little like House. I'm guessing simple myalgia won't get me as much sympathy, though. Perhaps I need to get myself a cane.

Congratulations, Google, on making the Gmail web interface substantially worse with the new version. Time to go back to fetchmail and mutt, I think.

You know it's going to be a good day when two different people have already tried to kill you, before 9am.

I may have to give up driving around here during the rush hour.