Remember a few years back an unlikely couple got together? Well, an even stranger pairing just occured down here in Aberystwyth. I ought not to say who it is, but the bottom line of this LiveJournal post will say it all for those who can read it.
In other news, the Nintendo GameCube that Claire bought for me us with the money her dad sent me for my birthday arrived
today… I want to go home and play!!!
I had a particularly strange dream last night. I’ll relate:
[some bits at an airport that I don’t remember]. Claire and I boarded an aeroplane. It was somewhat unusual as a ‘plane in that it seemed to be carrying cars, a bit like short-run passenger ferries or the channel tunnel. In addition, each car’s “space” had tall hospital-like curtains that could be pulled around it in a square to isolate it from those around it, providing some kind of privacy.
After having looked around the rest of the ‘plane, I returned to Claire’s car and looked out of the window, and saw that this lead on to what initially looked like more storage for cars (like the segment we were in), but later appeared to be hung under the wing (yes, out in the open). No cars on it, though. Thinking this was strange, I tried to open the window. It turned out we’d already taken off, and the air pressure difference, coupled with several hundred mph speeds, pulled Claire and I from the aircraft and started us plummeting.
A few moments of lucidity (which isn’t at all uncommon in my dreams) later I was able to deploy a parachute, as was Claire, and we sailed through the clouds and circled while we attempted to work out where we were. As it turns out, we were over the edges of Antarctica, and with some effort, we were able to maneuver our ‘chutes such that we landed (roughly, in high winds) on the shores, rather than in the water!
For some reason this dream had been influenced more by Disney than by actual geography or biology, because Antarctica was populated not only by several varieties of penguin, but also by polar bears. Some of these polar bears were able to talk… through the medium of visible “subtitles” and sign language… and one of them was kind enough to tell us about a research station nearby that he was “able to get in to”, and we were relieved that we would not have to freeze to death. At the research station, the friendly polar bear demonstrated how to climb up to a window, and helped me to do so too. I prized open the window and climbed inside while a huge crowd of the animals (mostly penguins) stood and watched.
As I was doing this and Claire was beginning to climb up, too, three humans with guns appeared on the horizon and began shooting at us. Claire hid among the penguins and I took refuge in the research station, but it turned out that the shooters had keys and they came in and found me, and, soon after, found Claire. They originally planned to kill and eat us, but I persuaded them not to by offering them my services as a landmine disposal expert (landmines, it seems, are a significant problem in the Antarctica). I’d lied – I wasn’t by any stretch an “expert”, but this didn’t seem to be such a problem as, while I was scavenging the supplies at the station for tools to use in finding and disarming landmines, my alarm clock went off and I woke up.
Just thought I’d share it with you all on account of it being so weird. Right: now I need to step out of the office to deliver Claire’s cashcard to her, which seems to have been left in my wallet, and then I can get on with some work!
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Yay. Woo. I’m 25. Etc. Quarter of a century old. [Insert meaningful speech here.] Ahem. Thanks to all of you who came to Troma Night yesterday and saw my birthday arrive; and in particular to those of you who brought me alcohol. Bonus.
As I seem to have been given at least two (three if you count expansion packs) board games for my birthday, and it is Geek Night (Aberystwyth’s favourite alternative board games night), tonight’s Geek Night will be extended such that it will start not at 7pm as usual but at 5pm. This’ll give us a chance to play not only the usual favourites, but also some of the new stuff – Gloom, the designer card game with funky semitransparent cards, in which the aim is to make your family as unhappy as possible and then die, while trying to cheer up the other families and give them happy lives – a great oppertunity for nanofiction; Il Principe, a renaissance Italy strategy and resource management game (why do the Germans make all the best board games, by the way?), and the 5-6 player expansion for Seafarers of Catan, which finally completes the main published tree of my collection of the Settlers of Catan games. Oh, and we’ve also got a copy I’ve assembled of my interpretation of the Programmer’s Nightmare card game, which Claire and I playtested yesterday and it seems to work… although anybody without a grounding in Assembly language might find it somewhat confusing.
So, hope to see you all at 5. Or at 7. Or whenever.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Haven’t posted to my weblog in a while, owing to a lack of internet access. Will get things up-to-date soon.
Claire and I are just leaving Preston, heading back to Aber. Hope to see those folks who are there already soon!
Many boxes are packed. Car is full of stuff. At 9am tomorrow, we start moving things. As stated before, all help is welcome!
This means that our internet connectivity is likely to be shaky for a few days, so, if you need us (or if something goes amiss: e.g. Abnib falls over, Dan & Alex fails to update, etc.), phone me rather than e-mailing or looking for me in the usual chat room. My contact details are on the “Where Is The Sharp?” page, along with our new address and other information.
I don’t get it. To prove to myself I could complete Super Bust-A-Move in Classic Mode, I did it again, by a slightly different route (you have some degree of choice over the levels you do as you progress through the game). I finished on a different level set, and got this final screen.
It’s not as weird as the last one I saw, but I’m still finding these at least a little confusing.
Claire and I are moving tomorrow, so if you can help out, please do! We’ll be kicking off at about 9am at The Flat and going on for most of the day. Drop in to The Flat or The Sharp at any point during the day, or give us a call, and we’ll give you a job to do. Thanks in advance!
Abnib Version 1.0 was a funny little beast. It was built to accomodate for about half a dozen bloggers, but ended up with about nine or ten. It worked, though, and the principle of aggregating the blog entries of our friends and our friends’ friends took off. Abnib 1.0 had a few major flaws: firstly, it only showed a summary of the post. This was partially because all but two of the bloggers thereon were using free LiveJournal accounts, and a limitation of free accounts at that time was that you could only get the first couple of hundred characters of a post at once. Another limitation was that the site design was columnular – each person had a column of their own, which dramatically reduced the space available and made in-post images impossible. Furthermore, Abnib 1.0, which updated itself wholly or partially every time it was visited, was as slow as a dog.
Abnib died when I accidently deleted a few key files for which I didn’t have backups, and that was the end of that. However, with Gareth‘s help, it was reborn in August 2004 as Abnib 2.0. This was powered by Planet, a Python-driven flexible feed aggregator which is used in all kinds of places for just the kinds of purposes we use it for. Jon went a step further and added an interesting new style to it, and we added the Abnib Gallery (Abnib 2.1), a place for all things Abnib to share photos. Abnib became a real “centre” for our fun little crowd, gathering information on Troma Night and the RockMonkey wiki, as well as the usual weblogs. The release of Abnib 2.2 brought extra abilities much-requested by users, such as the ability to “hide” the community feeds. That’s where we are now.
However, all is not well. There are a few key things I’d like to see improved in Abnib:
So, in order to fix these problems (among others) and implement some new features, I’ve begun work on Abnib 3.0. This new version of Abnib will:
It’s all powered by a new weblog aggregation engine called Phatnet, which I’ve been building for the last few weeks specifically for this purpose. And it’s pretty damn gorgeous. But that’s not all. Experimental features which might end up part of it now or later include:
Hopefully, I can get Abnib 3.0 finished and released later in December. If you want to see what’s been done so far and how it all fits together, take a peep at the Abnib 3.0 Preview (it updates every few days, so it’s no good for actually reading blog posts on, but it should give you an idea about some of the features: try clicking the “More Posts…” link at the bottom or on people’s names in the sidebar). It’s ugly as sin, but hey. Feedback appreciated.
Just completed Super Bust-A-Move in Classic Mode. When you win, you’re presented with the following screen (the text slowly fades in a line at a time):
What the fuck?
On Wednesday, 14th December 2005, Claire and I are moving house. For those of you who are allowed to know where we’re going, here’s a map and things [update: link killed late 2006]. You’ll need to answer two to six weighted-value questions of your choice to demonstrate that you actually know us and aren’t just scary stalker types before you get the address, but these have been geared such that most of our friends and family are able to come up with sufficient answers to “get in”. And if not, just get in touch with us and we’ll tell you what you need to know.
Yesterday, I received the following text message from Liz, out-of-the-blue:
Hey! Hope your[sic] having a great time. Yes i[sic] care. L x
I thought that was a little unusual, but as this is Liz (who once sent me a text to tell me to “stay sexy”), I didn’t think too much of it.
Today, while I was in the RockMonkey chat room, where Liz was logged in as well, I was even more surprised to get a text from her (after all: she could just have typed her message to me). This one read:
Our stats coursework is back. I got 83 per cent. So so amazed. L
She announced this to the chat room at the same time, and so I started to wonder whether she’d meant to send me this message, and, of course, on a similar train of thought, whether she’d meant to send me the previous message.
<Ava_Work> You were so impressed with yourself… you texted me, too [as well as telling me here]! =o)
<LizH> sorry I was trying to text other dan [her boyfriend]. Damn what else have I been texting you. If itas anything naughty im sorry. Im so gonna have to start checkinigwho im txting now
For a moment, I was tempted to write this blogpost and make up that she’d texted me something naughty. Like, “Dan, I want your cock in me right now.” But then, if she’d have been sending me messages like that, I’d have not for a moment thought that it might have been destined for somebody else.
Well; yesterday saw the final Troma Night ever to take place in The Flat. Not to worry: there’ll be more at The Sharp, as I’m currently calling Claire and I’s new home, because “it’s like The Flat… only a little bit higher.” Still, it feels odd taking down all the film posters and things and packing all the tech’ into boxes.
It’s amazing quite how much stuff we’ve accumulated. We’re taking the oppertunity to purge some of it. I climbed into the attic here and started emptying it yesterday. This resulted in a find of:
Most of this ‘spare’ computer tech is going to CRAFT for recycling, unless any of you want it, in which case come and claim it today and it’s yours. We don’t have an attic where we’re going, and we’d rather not fill up the spare bedroom with stuff just because we never use it – if we never use it, we don’t need to keep it!
Don’t forget, we’re moving Wednesday and all help this week – Wednesday, and Thursday/Friday for packing, moving, and cleaning/unpacking, respectively – is much appreciated. And a huge thanks to Paul already for doing the washing up, which is no mean feat!
Right – Claire’s complaining that I’m not helping her find the TV remote, so I’ll go do that. Jimmy – we’ve acquired a copy of last night’s Space Cadets (which, of course, we missed as a result of an overlap with Troma Night) so if you want to see it, come over sometime during the day.
Back to the packing;
Those who found themselves confused by my programming recipe the day before yesterday can now be a little less confused (hopefully): here’s the explanation.
The program is written in an esoteric programming language called Chef, who’s sole purpose is to be able to write computer programs that look like recipes. There are even competitions to write programs in it that can also be cooked as real dishes. It’s a strange world. Each of the ingredients is a primitive kind of variable (for the non-programmers: a named entity [eggs, penne pasta, etc.] that can contain a value). The values that these variables can be instantiated with are numbers, and the numbers are given at the start of the line. Therefore, at the start of the program, eggs=3 and penne pasta=56.
These are “put” into the mixing bowl one at a time. The mixing bowl is a stack – the things put in to it first appear at the bottom, with other things on top of it (for the non-programmers: stacks are immensely useful in almost all programming languages, so programmers tend to have no trouble with being told “the mixing bowl is a stack”). So, when the first item (penne pasta) is put into the mixing bowl, it (and it’s associated value, 76) sits at the bottom of the bowl, ready for other things to be “put” on top of it.
However, we do some more complicated things, such as “adding” a birds-eye chilli. “Adding” is not the same as “putting”. When something is “added” to the mixing bowl, the value of it’s ingredient is added, mathematically, to the value of the thing at the top of the bowl. So, for example, when we add “1” birds-eye chilli to the mixing bowl which contains only “76” grams of penne pasta, we end up with a mixing bowl containing just “77” grams of penne pasta.
“Combining” is another Chef operation. After we’ve put the fresh ginger (17) in, we combine it with the cinammon (5), which results in a multiplication of the top item in the bowl, resulting in 85. “Removing” the birds-eye chilli (1) reduces this number by 1, because the “remove” operation means “reduce the value of the ingredient from the value of the ingredient in the top of the mixing bowl”. Later, we “stir”, the mixture, which moves some of the values in the stack around (read the spec if you care). And eventually, we “liquefy” the contents of the mixing bowl, which turns the numbers into their Unicode equivilent (typically letters): N, A, M, T, A, C, and S.
The baking tray is the output buffer (buffet?) in which things must be placed to be output to the screen, and the “serves” directive indicates which baking tray (we only have one in my recipe, but the language specification allows for multiple bowls, trays, and even delegation of sauces and other side dishes to other chefs – see the recipe for Fibonacci Numbers with Caramel Sauce [and notice the recursion – “caramel sauce should be served with caramel sauce”]) we output to the screen.
Jon earns himself a pint from working through the program, the mad fool that he is. There was a flaw in his logic, though, that made him come up with “NAMTACS” as the answer: he forgot that the baking tray, too, is a stack, and that the order of the ingredients is not changed in the transfer from the mixing bowl to the baking tray (check the spec!)… when popping ingredients out of the baking tray, they come out in reverse order. A pint to Paul for spotting his mistake. The correct output is “SCATMAN”.
Thanks to David Morgan-Mar for this fantastic programming language. He’s also the man behind LenPEG, an image compression algorithm which, for selected images, can achieve lossless compression at a ratio of 6,291,456:1, and HQ9++, an object-oriented language which provides the most code-efficient possible method ever to write test programs such as Hello World, 99 Bottles Of Beer, and the Quine program, although nobody has ever successfully written a Fibonacci generator or a Towers of Hanoi solver in it.
