I now have two SonyEricsson P900s sitting happily in my office charging. And running their somewhat boring demo slideshow app, which is beginning to get quite annoying (it plays sounds every so often).

R2 is now streaming several TV stations over the NZ internet. This would be a wonderful productivity destroyer, if daytime TV wasn't such utter crap.

I've got message constraints working in BeanShell for field accesses! Yay!

For those of you who are new here: my MSc involves doing stuff with message constraints, in an attempt to implement something similar to dynamic alias protection.

For those of you who didn't understand the last sentence, don't worry: I'm not always sure what I'm doing either.

Also, I left my iBook PSU at home, so I'm forced to use NetBSD for most of the day to conserve power. Not that matters; emacs on X is much better than any editor on Aqua. And GNOME's font-twiddling application lets me turn off hinting, so all my fonts look as nice as those on the Mac; I noticed on my Linux desktop at home that the boring textbox widget was even bothering to kern text onscreen (at least with some fonts).

Well: I'm back from Waitarere. A small coastal settlement north of Levin, where some friends of ours have a bach that seems to get borrowed by many people. There was no cellphone reception, no internet. And it was good, at least when I wasn't worrying about impending deadlines (insert Jaws theme here).

Having ended up listening to the KLF's Chill Out, I can't help noticing how similar parts of the Future Crew demo "Second Reality" sound to track 9, "Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard".

In some attempt to prove how woefully behind the times I can be, I downloaded some CDs from Allofmp3.com. Despite the name, they do AAC and Vorbis too (for most stuff) and don't appear to be too dodgy, despite being based in Russia. And they're cheap: their US$0.01/MB rate is about what going over the traffic cap of my TelstraWhatever cable connection costs. I only got 50Kbytes/s downloading, but then I was filling up the rest of my 2Mbps pipe with downloads from the US.

I still haven't really set asterisk up properly yet, but I did manage to get things working well enough to let me make outgoing calls to the PSTN via freshtel, who are an Aussie IAX call termination service. I then proceeded to use it to call my brother in Christchurch, complete with occasional garbled audio, and codec problems (hint: use GSM). But I'd really rather use a somewhat more direct route: anyone know of an NZ-based SIP/IAX<->PSTN service?

I've discovered that the S3 Virge card I use in my dual-head setup at home to drive the second monitor can't quite keep up with the refresh rate of my slightly newer 17" CRT, with the result that when the framebuffer is modified, you get snow on the display, exactly^* like what you got in CGA text mode when you modified video memory without waiting for the vertical or horizontal retrace.

^* Except that my CGA card couldn't quite cope with 1280x1024.

Imagine the iMovie lightning effect, but applied to your vision. Yep, that's what I've got at the moment. Don't know why. Looks really odd, though, and makes reading somewhat difficult when it gets in the way.

Sitharus says he's taken to playing TA again, and that PC Gamer says it's the best game of all time. And also that StarCraft is just a rehash of WarCraft II with different graphics. And I agree with him completely on both counts: the only games that have ever been able to hold my attention for any length of time have been of the RTS genre, and of those, TA would have to be the one I've had the most fun playing.

TA's UI meant that the micromanagement so common to realtime strategy games was reduced to a bearable load, and it didn't have missions like the Command And Conquer "here's one commander unit, blow up their base with it" that would cause me to give up in despair after having my single unit killed five times in a row. I'm only disheartened to hear that it's not available for OS X, so I can't play it on my (still reasonably shiny and new) iBook - but I only had a copy of the PC version anyway.