Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

The tarp over our skylight has been flapping in the winter wind, making a lot of noise at night, and it sounded like a house invader — or ghost — shuffling about where he shouldn’t be, and thus kept me up. Not so much kept me up, but kept waking me up, and as a result my sleep was in bursts. This meant that today during the day I was tired and couch-slept much of the day, but on the bright side it also came with vibrant and well-remembered dreams…

I dreamed that I was visiting at Ashley and Scott’s house, which for some reason has been the setting of my dreams the last few nights, although in dreamland they live in a similarly idyllic but otherwise completely different home. Last night they lived not in the countryside, but on a sandy beach. After a strange party, for lack of a better word, I walked out onto the calm of the beach and looked out across the water as the waves lapped the sand. It was dark, and the sky was full of stars, more stars than I’d ever seen. For some reason not only were the stars thickly spread and crowded, but they were flashing on and off quickly in unison. And even though it was dark, I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day — my gut saying day, but my senses saying night — so I turned around, searching the cloudy upper sky for the moon or the sun so I could estimate the hour. When I saw what I assume was the moon, which was full, it was shining brightly and completely engulfed in a heavy halo of blue flames. I wasn’t afraid and it wasn’t apocalyptic… but it was something important.

It looked a little like this.

Feel free to analyze me. Caitlin says the blue flame is just because our tarp is blue.

Last night Nefarious and I read for a solid two hours, and today for another hour, which got us through to the end of Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets. When she was in California a few days ago a babysitter played her the very end of the movie (I assume that was coincidence, not an attempt to be a spoil-sport), which I was worried was going to take the fun out of it for her because it gave everything away just before we were able to finish reading. Not to disrupt the sinister cackle that the end-wrecker-babysitter laughed in my imagination, but it actually made it even more fun because Nefarious kept shouting out what she thought was about to happen (75% accuracy) and I feigned disagreement, so fate’s evil plan failed. Tomorrow is movie night and we’ll watch the BluRay version in full, and then on the weekend we start reading the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, which comes in at close to 500 pages — they seem to get longer and longer!

Assuming the weather stays cold enough for ice, and the forecast says it’ll be warmer but still freezing, we’ll spend the weekend skating and maybe even trying out our new sled if we get more snow (a possibility). I also want to start on a new art project. I don’t think I’ve painted all year!

I’ve posted the source code to the latest version of ZenCASH here, including the resource files, icons, and main code (which is a well commented 5,348 lines long, the equivalent of a 35,000 word essay). In the same spirit I posted the source code to DoDuck, the tool I use internally for speeding up my management of the Duck/Peanut blog. What it does is quite simple — it looks in my Eudora mailbox for that email address, and any time it sees a new email come in, it grabs the image (from either the attachments folder or the embedded files folder) and saves it alongside a text file containing the email (in both full “as-is” and simplified formats), and avoids doing it over again by keeping a little database of emails and message hashes using a very nice pure assembly FNV (Fowler-Noll-Vo) function that was taken from the exemplary PB Crypto Archives. It’s really nothing special. I did hit an interesting snag when the program was accessing files in the “\Program Files\” heirarchy — Windows 7 considers these “protected”, but instead of failing (such as giving a file access error), Windows makes a copy of the file you’re accessing and puts it in a new “safe” directory and accesses that file instead. It does this completely invisibly to your program, so your program thinks it’s accessing the file from inside the protected directory. The troubling part is that the very first time you access the file, you get a copy of the “real” version of the file that is up to date, but from that point on, Windows does not check if the original file has been updated (nor does the modified virtual file get pushed back into the true directory), and it keeps working with the file in the safe directory. As a result, the two files can become increasingly out of sync. However, I discovered that if you run the program as administrator — something that Windows is discouraging more and more — that it will use the correct file, and ignore the “safe” copy… I’m sure there’s a better way to do it (I imagine you can mark a directory as safe), but for simplicity I solved the problem by just setting that application to run as administrator. Annoying though because it’s a tricky bug to track because it all happens without Windows telling you.

I mostly like drawing the icons. I’ve been using IcoFX, which is free/shareware software…