Archive for October, 2004
Universally
The Internet is almost universally a huge disappointment. The amount of worthwhile, readable content is so diminishingly small that I find myself constantly bouncing back and forth between the same small handful of sites. And finding they haven’t updated in days.
There is of course a good chance that this is merely because the good content is so scattered and so badly promoted that the sheer wealth of bad content overwhelms it completely. There is also the chance that I’m just not looking hard enough.
I am regularly entertained by the posts over on BoingBoing (available as a Bearkey Alert feed if you’re interested), but the problem is simply that it’s not updated often enough (and it’s a very regularly updated website).
I’ve tried Fark as well of course, but the same problem applies. It might be updated often, but a lot of the time I’m looking for more than just links to comedy news stories in the Baltimore Sun.
What’s the solution here? Where is the site that provides intelligent comment on films, books, music and games? I’m not talking Gamespot or MTV here, I’m looking for something with a bit more depth, a little more high-brow. Does this site exist? Have I just not found it?
Brainfuck
Today was quickly heading towards obscurity, there was some cleaning, there was some reading, there was some Bearthing. But then I rediscovered something I first found many years ago, the programming language known as Brainfuck.
I was actually thinking of ideas for simple platform games at the time, and it just happened to popup during a search for something entirely unrelated. But, as these things often do, it completely distracted my attention from my original goal. So the first thing I did was write a Brainfuck interpreter, in what else, Bearscript. Notch that up as language interpreter number two on my CV. :)
I started with some examples taken from elsewhere. Such as this one…
++++++++[>+++++++++<-]>.<+++++[>++++++<-]>-.+++++++..+++.<
++++++++[>>++++<<-]>>.<<++++[>——<-]>.<++++[>++++++<-]>
.+++.——.——–.>+.
…which is the requisite Hello World script. But that wasn’t enough, I had to learn how to do this myself. Why very quickly taught me why this language is called Brainfuck.
My best so far…
++++++[>++++++++++<-]>+++++.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.+.
Not very impressive I’m sure you’ll agree. But what I love about this language is that in just 8 instructions it gives you all the power that you’d get from C or Java or any other language, because it’s Turing complete. I mean there’s no doubting it’s absolutely insane, but it’s still nice to know there’s a fully capable development environment there if I want it.
Not that I recommend you go and write an FPS in it or anything, but if you do manage to write something, anything, post it in the comments.
Note that complex Brainfuck programs can take a long time to execute and therefore longer ones tend to cause Bearscript to bomb out before their completion as it thinks you’ve written something which is stuck in an infinite loop. So if you do write something (or more likely, you copy and paste something from elsewhere), keep it short.
Learn
It was exactly one year ago today that I found myself moving into this flat. As I wrote then, it was a nervous time, rife with different emotions that even now I have strong memories of.
What cannot be denied however was that as that day went on, the nervousness passed and it turned into the happiest time I can remember. Although I’m not sure it was visible from the outside, there was an energy and definite glow within these four walls that will certainly leave a lasting impression on me. I fear nothing will come close to that again.
The past year has been the wildest of my 25 so far on this little planet of ours. There have been huge uppers and massive downers, followed by months of solid middle. I’ve made some catastrophic mistakes that I’m unlikely to ever forgive myself for, the repercussions of which I’m still living with today. I’m ashamed of myself for so many things, but mostly for turning into a different person against my better judgement.
The positive part of all this is that I’m aware of these mistakes. I know I made them, and I’ll be doing my darndest not to make them again. At least I can learn when I’m an idiot, even if I can’t necessarily fix the resulting mess (not through want of trying of course).
I don’t know what living here for the next year is going to hold, things are not what I thought they’d be this time last year, even this time six months ago, so I’m probably not the best person to judge. But I’m still here, fighting the good fight, looking out for what I believe in. And fingers crossed I’ll start having better luck with my wishes. :)
There’s hope yet.
Seed
Earlier this year I renewed my Apple ADC membership, at considerable cost. You may recall I did this for two reasons. The first of which was the hardware discount, which offers me around 20% off Apple products, which I figured would come in handy should I decide to buy anything over the coming year (I have resisted the new iMac thus far).
The second of which was their seeding program, which gets me beta copies of Mac OS X. Last year these were very regular, coming at around one a week, and it was great to see the new features of the OS develop over time. So far I’ve received only one copy, the one that was given out to attendees of WWDC earlier this year, and it won’t even install on my iMac.
So it was with great disgust that I saw an up to date seed on Suprnova today. I didn’t download it, but I hate the fact that I can get better access to the latest updates by stealing than I can through the official channel that I’ve actually paid for.
Come on Apple, let the Select ADC members into the party.
Wink
I’ve had a bit of a sleep problem this week. I hardly slept a wink last night, even after going to bed early. I lay there for hours and even when I did drift off, it was never for very long. I had periods of really disturbed sleep about a month ago as well, but I seemed to get over it. Now it’s back with a vengeance.
And that’s why, after almost falling asleep at my desk all day, I’m now going to retire to bed early. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to get through the day without needing to prop open my eyes with matchsticks.
Consolidator
Apple today, in what was actually a bit of a surprise, revealed the iPod Photo.
Does anyone else think that this seems a little bit pointless? It can’t take photos, so it’s immediate use as a device consolidator is out the window. Secondly, you can’t plug it directly into your camera, nor does it have a slot for your memory cards, instead requiring you to sync your Mac/PC with your camera first, and then your iPod. Thirdly, exactly why would I want to carry 25,000 photos around with me anyway? Is it really the case that people are showing off their photos so much that they need them to hand at a moments notice? I can’t think of any time I’ve felt at a loss because I was unable to show my photos off on a television.
Edward suggested that they could let people put their Keynote presentations on them, and then it would be easy for them to be plugged into a projector. This would at least be a reasonable use, but wouldn’t it be much better to buy an iBook and use that both to create the presentation and display it?
There seems to be only one use for this device, and it’s what sells any new technology. Pornography. The new iPod Photo is good for just one thing, and that’s porn on the bus. 25,000 bits of porn in fact.
It’s no coincidence that the iPod scroll wheel can be controlled with one hand you know.
Challenge
I’ve added a counter to the right hand side with just exactly how much time is remaining before Bearthing should be completed. Of course I’d like to think I’ll meet that date (December 24th) with days to spare, perhaps so I can use the remaining time for some Christmas shopping, but I think we all know that’s unlikely.
But don’t let it be said that I back away from a challenge.
6,000
Yesterday, according to James Ussher, the universe was 6,000 years old. It was a thorough investigation into the Old Testament that led to his discovery of this date (October 23rd, 4004 B.C.), so I hope you all celebrated appropriately.
It is important however that you celebrated at the right time, because one cannot be too accurate when dealing with events like this. The exact time your celebration should have begun was midday, it would be silly to think that God would create the universe AFTER lunch.
Care
Today I finally managed to move away from working on Bearscript and other behind the scenes stuff, and actually get something public facing on the screen. The Bearthing administration system has finally been started.
What will no doubt become an absolutely massive piece of code (the current Bearkey/Chatbearv2 system clocks in at around 9,000 lines for the main script alone), requires some extra special care and attention. Starting with a completely blank page (I’m not using any of the existing admin system), I like to get my rhythm going early and make sure that the decisions I make now are the right ones, both in the code structure and in the user interface design.
So I spent most of the time today battling with HTML and CSS, trying to get something which is both pleasing on the eye and easy to use. I think I’ve come up with something pretty darn good, and certainly in comparison to the existing admin system (what I’m typing into now), it’s a massive improvement.
I also wrote the universal Bearkey authentication system in the early hours of this morning, which will allow any Bearthing powered site to hook into that user system without them ever seeing the email address or password that is used to login. Adding Bearkey authentication to your scripts is as simple as…
$userid = bearkey.auth()
if ($userid == 0) {
bearkey.login()
} else {
output “You are user id ” & $userid
}
With about 61 days left until the completion date, and an administration system on the starting blocks, getting everything done suddenly feels like an achievable goal.
Domain
How come after a domain has expired and hasn’t been paid for, even after two months, it still isn’t available for re-registration?
I can understand giving people the benefit of the doubt, but they might be in more of a hurry to pay their bills if they knew the domain was going to be completely lost within 30 days if they didn’t.
I guess I’ll just have to keep waiting, and continue to hit whois six times a day.
Tablet
I bought a scanner last week because like I talked about, I’ve been learning to draw Marvin. The picture attached to that post required no digital touch up at all, it’s direct from the scan of my pencil drawing. All I did was remove the paper grain around him so he had an outline. This means that his colour is also coming from the grain of the paper.
I’ve drawn plenty more Marvin’s since this one, many of which I’ve scanned in and some I’ve tried to then touch up and colour digitally. Each time I scan him, his colour is slightly different. Not a whole lot different, but different enough to be noticable. I think it depends on so many factors, like what options I pick in the scanner preferences or how many mistakes I happened to have erased on the pad to begin with.
This colouring would of course be solved after digital colouring, but my attempts to do that have been universally awful. Trying to do any kind of artwork (well, apart from pixel-based sprite stuff) with a mouse is almost impossible, especially when I’ve been enjoying the freehand movement of the pencil so much over the past few weeks.
Therefore on Sunday I ordered an Intuos3 graphics tablet from Wacom which arrived today. It’s a very nice bit of kit, with a small touch pad and three buttons on the left to go along with the actual A6 drawing area. It was also very easy to setup, on both the Mac and the PC, with the installation being flawless on both. The PC installer even asked less questions than the Mac one, which has got to be a first.
Unfortunately, and here’s where the story takes a turn for the worse, I seem to absolutely suck with it. It’s not the tablet’s fault of course (although I’m not necessarily that impressed with the Corel software that came with it), I just seem to have a real hard time using it. All I managed to create last night was a mess, and not once did I come up with anything that remotely looked like a cute cuddly teddy bear.
So somehow I’ve got to find a way to combine the paper drawing with the scanner and the tablet so that I can actually produce something that looks less like a blob, without having to spend days working on it. This is probably going to mean drawing it on paper, scanning it, and then shading and colouring it with the tablet. I actually thought this was going to be easy at one point, but now writing a programming language seems simpler.
Britain
I must admit to only having seen a few scattered episodes of the first series of Little Britain. Out of however many episodes actually made up the full run (seven or eight I think), there’s certainly more than a couple in there that I didn’t see. When I did see it however, I found it fantastically funny stuff, so when I saw that the new series started tonight I didn’t hesitate at all before marking it as a reminder in Digiguide.
The second series is always a difficult one to pull off, especially when you’re probably working under much more pressure than you were before. The expectation is higher. And since the first series was so successful they’ve even been bumped up to BBC1 instead of BBC2 (after it’s shown on BBC3 of course (BBC Heaven!)), which may have given them the idea that the comedy had to be slightly more high brow.
But since tonight’s episode featured a woman at the local church fete projectile vomiting over a vicar, the parents of the only gay in the village talking about the people they knew who also took it up the chuff (or enjoyed water sports), and Vanessa Feltz being spat on at the slimming club… well then I’m pleased to say there doesn’t appear to be any chance of that.
Cheese
I noticed tonight that the packet of Wotsits I was eating had a big "Best Ever!" graphic on the front right corner.
I’ve often wondered about food production, what really goes on behind the closed doors of these large facilities. Like Birds Eye and their large selection of chicken related products. In my head I picture large rooms full of chickens with trapdoors in the floor leading to chutes that deliver them to giant chicken mashing machines.
The trouble is that I have the same picture in my head for companies dealing with lamb and beef products. The same rooms, the same trapdoors, the same chutes. Just the requisite sheep and cow mashing machines instead. Much like the chicken ones, just a larger spatula to scrape the bits of meat off the platter and onto the next stage of production.
When it comes to the Wotsits, do they have teams of scientists working on new ways to improve the flavour further? Is there really that much you can do with a cheesy corn puff snack? And if they are now the "Best Ever!" is that because they’ve developed a new patented cheese injection moulding process that locks that taste right in? And up until they improved things so much, did the scientists go home at night feeling inadequate because they were unable to come up with the ultimate expression of snackery? I’m sure they were unable to perform sexually until they’d cracked the secret of the puff.
Of course what might be most troubling is that I have the same picture in my head for the Wotsits. Giant rooms, trapdoors, chutes… and a bunch of cheeses hoping they won’t be next.
Hills
Like most Sunday nights, I settled down at 8pm to watch this weeks episode of Himalaya with Michael Palin. Unfortunately it didn’t start until 9pm, so I had to stand up again and come back later.
I’ve watched almost all of his shows on DVD recently (Around The World in 80 Days, Hemmingway Adventure, Pole to Pole) and my enjoyment of them has not wavered one bit. I’ve been a little disappointed in the first couple of episodes of Himalaya however, because there’s always been a certain picture in my head of exactly what we would see, but there’s been so many towns and cities that I’ve wondered when we’d see him really trecking it out in the mountains.
This week however, that moment came. And what a moment it was. The majestic beauty of the surrounding scenery, around Annapurna and then eventually further North-East at Everest base camp was quite unbelievable. His own exclamation that he now felt like he was in the Himalaya’s echoed my own feelings on the matter. This is what I imagined it would look like, and the sheer scale and dramatic surroundings did nothing more than remind me what an incredible, yet fragile, planet we live on. I would like to take leaders of warring nations out there and show them how we’re really all in this together, and there really is more to life than shooting your neighbour because he believes in a different god than you do. It’s that kind of place, the kind of place that inspires change.
Of course, it hasn’t stopped the Nepalese from fighting with each other, so maybe it’s not that good an idea.
Documentaries like this are exactly the reason the BBC is so great, where the license fee can be spent on simple programs like this. There’s no fancy camera effects, no thumping soundtrack, no D-list celebrities in a jungle and certainly no members of the general public making fools of themselves to get on TV. It’s just a man showing you the parts of the world, without being condescending or dumbing things down, you’ll probably never see for real.
Not that I wouldn’t like to do so, but I’m not good in unknown situations, being far too nervous and uncomfortable to be able to handle most of what he does (not to mention being nowhere near fit enough to climb as high as he did last night). Strange exotic lands with foreign languages and cultures are great on television, but I would never have the gumshun to brave it alone.
Of course, with a camera crew with me and the BBC doing all the organisation, I might just be persuaded.
Forgettable
Today was one of those days that really didn’t seem to happen. Sure, I got up, showered, dressed and spent most of it working on Bearscript and Bearthing… but it still doesn’t feel like it was real.
An instantly forgettable day in every definition of the phrase, nothing stood out, nothing made it interesting, nothing stopped it from being a monontonous meandering through the ocean of banality.
I enjoyed Beverly Hills Cop though.
Sunglasses
This week Google released their latest search tool, allowing you to search through the files on your own machine (Word, Excel, Outlook email, AIM chats, text files, IE browser history and some others). It’s not something I have a great use for, I use iChat on the Mac rather than AIM on the PC, and don’t tend to write a lot of Word documents or create a lot of Excel spreadsheets. As for mail, I’m a Gmail user.
Gmail, the Google email service and victim of regular attacks from the tin foil hat brigade (all because Google think it’s a good idea to give you advertising you might actually be interested in) became a part of my daily life since the moment I first used it. I find it indispensable because it has solved my problem of trying to collect email on more than one machine. It’s also faster and with a better interface than almost any desktop mail client I’ve ever used, really showing what can be done with a web application after some effort.
And then there’s the Google Toolbar that not only helps me find the pages I want on the web, but then helps me find text contained within those pages once I’ve found them. Best of all, I use the Google spell checker every night when writing my blog entries to make sure I don’t make too many embarrassing mistakes. Or I use their calcualtor to convert measurements, so I know how many Newtons of force sent Marty back in time.
So it’s my success with Gmail and the Toolbar that made me install the desktop search tool, and although I don’t think it’s going to give me as much benefit, I can still recognise the same level of detail in it’s design and feature set. The integration with the Google site is impressive, seeing results from your own machine right above results from the rest of the web, or getting an extra Desktop item next to the existing links for Web, Images, Groups, News etc… it all feels so natural. All my ideas on how it should work seem to correspond with how it does work, and that’s such a rare thing in software.
The success of Google, especially as they branch out into new areas, has brought more and more detractors out of the woodwork. And I’m sure as time goes by, they’ll start to do things that deserve some of that wrath. But for the moment all I see is a company who has created the best search engine, the best webmail, the best desktop search tool and the best search toolbar, none of which have me worrying for my safety or my privacy.
I now have three bits of Google software running on my machine, and since there have been rumours of a Google browser, and even a Google instant messenger, I look forward to the day when I have five. If past history is anything to go by, they’ll be the best in those fields too.
Has
I listened to the new Wiliam Shatner album tonight, Has Been. If the sole purpose of music is to entertain, then this album does it in style. It works purely because Shatner is clearly aware both of his limits as a singer and the perception the general audience have of him. Ben Folds has done an excellent job of writing songs to match his strengths and there are often regonisable moments of Foldsism in the lyrics.
I also played Fable for about an hour and a half, the first time I’d opened it since receiving it on Saturday. I’ve been through the initial training, become a hero, left the guild, done my first quest and now I’m off to meet a man in a bar. It’s been a fun experience, especially when I get a chance to swing my sword about like a fool.
I’ve found the controls to be a little confusing. It uses every single button on the controller, sometimes more than one at a time, and trying to remember what they all do and what order to press them in is a little more of a challenge than I would have expected. I’m also completely dreadful with the bow and arrow, although this might also be control related (in fact, to save my gaming prowess, I’ll say it is control related).
The game looks great, but there is something about the graphics that is stopping me from being drawn in completely, although I’m not sure what it is. I keep seeing things popping up, not scenery in the distance, but things around me, grass that seems to suddenly appear, or strange texture changes. Characters don’t step on stairs properly and water sometimes splashes as you move through it and sometimes it doesn’t. None of these things are particularly bad in themselves, but when the rest of the world looks so good around them, they tend to stand out more. There’s also an awful lot of fencing in, invisible walls blocking your access to gaps in fences for example. I wanted to go down to the beach in the opening town, or splash through the water in the guild forest, but I wasn’t allowed. If the idea is to draw me into the world, don’t constrain me quite so much. And if you have to, think of more creative ways to do it.
But like I said already, it has been a fun experience, and that’s what counts at the end of the day. I’ll keep playing some more before passing any serious judgement. And then I need to play some more Burnout 3, as that’s being seriously neglected right now.
Muppets
I spent all night watching episodes of The Muppet Show, and what a jolly good time was had by all. I love the Muppets, there’s just something inherently funny about cows, sheep, penguins, rats and ducks, all dancing and singing along to some well known song.
The episodes I’ve watched so far have included Roger Moore, Lynda Carter, Christopher Reeve, Mark Hamill (with C3PO, R2-D2 and Chewbacca), Sylvester Stallone and Peter Sellers, so there was certainly no shortage of celebrities who were willing participants in the madness. There’s just no show like this anymore, and probably never will be again.
One thing I’ve always wondered though, do Ralph and Dr. Teeth have big arguments before the show over who gets to play the piano in the scenes that require it? Doesn’t Dr. Teeth get annoyed at Ralph stealing so many members of his band for the opening number?
Property
Over the past few months I’ve had cards through the door from Remax Estate Agents, letting me know that if I wanted to sell the flat, they’d be happy to help. I’m sure the owners that I lease from wouldn’t be too happy about it, but Remax certainly would be.
Yesterday I found out that Remax are a worldwide estate agent and not just a local one (I’m sure everybody else already knew that), so tonight I took a look at their website to see what they had.
I was in luck, and managed to spend a good hour or so looking at houses in random places around the world. A lovely six bedroom house in Victoria, BC, lots of houses in the Caribbean that looked like those the drug dealer would own in an action film, and a massive house with it’s own tennis court in New Zealand. And those are just some of the highlights.
Most surprising were the prices, a lot of them a lot cheaper than I imagined they would be, especially the drug dealer palaces. It certainly hit home just how expensive property in the UK is.
DS
Having already pre-ordered my Nintendo DS from Lik-Sang, I’m pleased to see that after reading more about it tonight that it appears as if Nintendo know what they’re doing. Since Super Mario 64 is my favourite game of all time, I’m especially pleased to see that Super Mario 64 DS is not only a launch title, but seems to take the original and build on it in a number of ways. Four playable characters, 150 stars, new levels, new power-ups, additions to the existing worlds… I’m sure a whole number of ideas that they had when making the original that had to be cut for time reasons. Maybe the missing rainbow stage will make an appearance.
Nintendo do seem to be on the right course. Create something which offers new possibilities in gameplay experience (two screens, touch screen, microphone, wireless networking), but still try and stay as cheap and portable as possible. It’s not important that you be the fastest kid on the block, just that you manage to run the furthest.
On the other hand Sony seem to be going for complete technical dominance with the PSP. With the computing power of the PS2, movie and MP3 playback and a large, gorgeous screen, there’s no doubt it’s the superior machine from the geek lust factor point of view. But if it sells for twice the price and has a quarter of the battery life, will the general public really care? Do Sony really think that people are going to re-purchase their entire movie collections (which we’ve all just bought on DVD) so we can watch them on tiny screens on the bus?
Nintendo have beat off every challenger to the Game Boy dominance over the past 15 years and it’s easy to see why. There have been faster, smaller and cheaper options, but at the end of the day it comes down to balance. And at the moment, Sony seem to have forgotten that.
