Archive for April, 2000

Photographs - USA

Wednesday, April 5th, 2000







New york.


Albert Einstein.


The rear of the White House in Washington D.C.


The Capitol building in Washington D.C.


Abraham Lincoln.


The plane home.

Photographs - Random

Wednesday, April 5th, 2000


Stonehenge.


My parents.


The total eclipse of the sun, August 11th 1999.


The Jenner family, September 1997.


A wooden owl from a bird park in Germany.


The control tower of a remote airfield in the German countryside.


A pretty mountain scene. I have no idea where it was taken. I just found it on my hard disk.


My friends in the 6th form at Budehaven School, 1995-1997.


A mysterious crystal sphere found in the woods.


My brother Paul, back when he was cute.

Photographs - Friends

Wednesday, April 5th, 2000









Andrew with a beard! Shock horror!





Jim often liked to revise here.




Julian has a terrible affliction. He has a girl growing out of his back. It wouldn't be so bad if she didn't keep so many secrets from him:


Just after this happened, this happened:


I don't know.


Someone doesn't like Jules at all.


The guy on the left is a teletubby, er... Steve.


When Ray misplaces his pint, someone must pay dearly.


A2, where I lived in the third year. I learnt years later that this room was also Stephen Fry's room in his third year.


Scholars discussing philosophy in the bar. Probably.


Vince on the LIPS (Large Inflatable Pink Sofa).


Bruno can work magic with a piece of paper. He's famous for it. Just ask any physicist who was present at Malcolm Longair's last Fields, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics lecture in Easter term 1998.





Sometimes it all gets a bit much for Jim.


Ray *really* needs a bottle opener, but it's floating away on the other punt!


Jules is happiest when he's in hiding.


I don't know what was going on here. I don't think I want to know, either.


...as he drank the mysterious potion, a terrible transformation began...


George still can't believe she accepted Michael's proposal.


Dave expounding. On something very important, no doubt.


Jennie has a part time job as a playboy bunnie (sic).


"Hey, let's see how many people we can fit on Lewpen's lap!"


Dave is actually worshipping a mountain of beer in this photograph.


That was the occasion it all got a bit noisy for Jim.


Dave learning the facts of life.


Ray with his friend, Swirly the fluffy snail.


Jim was a game show host in a previous life.


I'm not sure what Jennie is doing to Dave in this picture.


Jules getting down wif da phat beat.


Jennie doing evil things to a drink.


What's going on here? I have no idea. Answers on a postcard please.

If you can think of any other good captions, please send them to me.

Library repository

Tuesday, April 4th, 2000

Whoever invented DLLs has a lot to answer for. I suppose they seemed like a good idea at the time - make everything into a library so that you only need one copy of it on your hard disk for all the programs that use it. Unfortunately, this has caused everyone's hard disk to swell with loads of stuff that is never used - you have to have the whole library even if the programs you have only use a tiny part of it. And there's no way to tell what a DLL does just by looking at it, so you can't delete the ones you don't use. I'm sure there's still loads of duplicated code as well, because it's often easier for people to write their own DLLs than to figure out how to use the existing ones. I guess that's closed-source software for you.

In order to keep download times down, software authors often leave out commonly used library files. These can sometimes be difficult to track down, so here I hope to put all those annoying files, as well as a few essential utilities, drivers and decoding/decompression programs. If there's one you think ought to be here and isn't, let me know and I'll upload it. Also if you have a more recent version of a file I have here please let me know.

New 4/4/2000: The files are now in alphabetical order for your convenience.

ARCE.COM (6K) - Decode ARC archives.
ARJ.EXE (75K) - Decode ARJ archives.
BWCC.DLL (43K) - Common controls for Borland software.
CMDIALOG.VBX (9K) - Visual Basic common dialog boxes.
COMCT232.OCX (76K) - Common control activeX control.
COMCTL32.OCX (229K) - Common control activeX control.
COMDLG16.OCX (38K) - Common dialogs activeX control.
COMDLG32.OCX (61K) - Common dialogs activeX control.
DEBOO.EXE (7K) - Decode BOO archives.
DOS4GW.EXE (141K) - DOS protected mode extender. v1.97.
GZIP.EXE (36K) - Decode files with have been encoded with the unix "gzip" utility. Such files are often tarballs, so you might need one of the TAR utilities (below) as well.
Icq V2 (1,397K) - Old version of the ICQ client, suitable for use with older PCs or NT machine you don't have the necessary permissions to install a newer version on.
JAR.EXE (195K) - Decode JAR archives. Not to be confused with the other sort of JAR archive (used with Java) which is actually a ZIP file with the wrong extension.
LHA.EXE (25K) - Decode LZH archives.
MAC.EXE (8K) - Turn Apple Mac text files into DOS text files.
MCI32.OCX (76K) - VB multimedia control v5.1.4319
MCI32.OCX (82K) - VB multimedia control v6.0.8418
MOUSE.COM (12K) - DOS mouse driver. Works with most standard mice.
MSVBVM60.DLL (680K) - Visual Basic 6 runtime.
MSVCR70.DLL (152K) - Visual C 7.0 reuntime.
MSVCP71.DLL (129K) - Visual C++ 7.1 runtime.
MSVCR71.DLL (177K) - Visual C 7.1 runtime.
MUNPACK.EXE (22K) - Decode MIME-encrypted files.
OC25.DLL (246K) - Not sure.
PICCLP16.OCX (23K) - Picture clipping activeX control.
PKUNZIP.EXE (34K) - Essential unzip utility for DOS.
PKZIPFIX.EXE (8K) - Fix (some) broken ZIP archives.
ROT13.EXE (8K) - Decode text files which have been encoded with the ROT13 protocol. Text that has been encoded with ROT13 looks like: jryy, irel zhpu yvxr guvf, npghnyyl.
TAR.EXE (50K) - Extract Unix "tar"balls.
TAR32.EXE (81K) - Extract Unix "tar"balls with long filenames. Requires 32 bit windows.
THREED16.OCX (73K) - 3D custom control activeX control.
UNACE32.EXE (42K) - Decode ACE archives.
UNP.EXE (20K) - Decompress compressed EXE files (compressed with PKLITE, etc.)
UNRAR.EXE (31K) - Decode RAR archives.
VB40016.DLL (460K) - Visual Basic 4 runtime (16 bit).
VB40032.DLL (378K) - Visual Basic 4 runtime (32 bit).
VBRUN300.DLL (224K) - Visual Basic 3 runtime.
WINSCK.OCX (62K) - Not sure, may be a trojan.
Wintalk (190K) - Windows version of Unix talk client.
WW.EXE (9K) - Word-wraps a plain text file so that no line is longer than 79 characters.
ZOO.EXE (25K)- Decode ZOO archives.