Niall's Weblog

On our boat, cold, in the midst of a particularly lonely sea. Clouds sitting overhead, fat fearsome and lazy, refused to let any sun filter through. Biscoe was standing on the deck, eyes dulled by the frozen wind, struggling for a matchstick to set his meagre smoke alight. Both hands were in pockets, clenched against [...]

While in general I appreciate very simple, no-nonsense user interfaces for applications that work efficiently on the console and so can be used via SSH, there are times when increased visualisation is very useful. Specifically with regard to my BitTorrent client, Unworkable, the default user interface is exceedingly simple. Inspired by the ubiquitous scp program [...]

Just yesterday I was sent a link by a good friend to the English translation of a short story called Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov. I had never read anything by Chekhov before, but I was familiar with a number of Russian authors – Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Tolstoy – all of whom I enjoyed [...]

I have just tagged, packaged and announced version 0.3 of my BitTorrent implementation, Unworkable. My goal with Unworkable is to make releases frequently – hopefully twice a month or so – with incremental improvements each release. The hope is that each release should be of a higher quality than the last. Therefore I try to [...]

Just committed the bits for Unworkable to build under Windows, using Cygwin. The code changes were pretty minimal – specifically, Cygwin lacks getaddrinfo() – however this was a relatively simple matter of bundling the KAME implementation (which is BSD licensed) in the source tree and building and linking with that if it wasn’t found. The [...]