Articles – Page 110

AbNib & Str8Up!

Oh yeh; and, in case you hadn’t noticed – AbNib is down. And it’s not my fault! The server fucked up something rotten, but seems to be okay now. And whoever posted a comment to one of my entries the other day and had it not-appear; sorry: same issue.

I’ll try to get AbNib up again on Wednesday – my backup is at the office, and that’s when I’m next at work.

Went out to Str8Up! (Aber’s LGB Society’s event) at Bar Retro last night. Great night out with silly cocktails and dancing and general merriment. And I’d forgotten quite how horny it is to watch two guys – or two girls – getting it on. Fun in the sun.

And in other news, Tonari no Totoro, which I ordered from Japan on DVD last week, hasn’t arrived yet. It’s a great film. I hope it arrives in time for Troma Night on Saturday.

Next stop: Mecca, for lunch!

Parcel Of Goodies

Woo and indeed hoo. Just when I was about to wander down to Richley’s and take advantage of their sale on jeans (having had a nasty shredding-related accident with one-too-many of my existing pairs of trousers a couple of weeks back), my Auntie Anne sends me a parcel of goodies, including several pairs of trousers (including one with a million pockets, or thereabouts).

I think I’ve put on weight since the last time she sent me any clothes. [measures waist size]. Yup; I’m two inches fatter than this time last year. Well; there’s an incentive to lose it again.

In other news; I’ve almost completed an exciting little project that will provide some amusement to those of you who attend Chez Geek Night (BTW: it’s on Tuesday this week, so we don’t end up in a fight with the Irish Band again). No; it’s not a computer game version (although I’m hoping that the author will allow me to write one, one day)… but I think you’ll like it, anyway. Details tonight or tomorrow.

Yay! No more lectures today!

First Part Of My Dissertation

Gave a presentation about my dissertation today in a poster session which is worth 0.825% of my mark for this year. Seems insignificant, but they say that it all adds up. In any case, it went very well; people seemed interested in the technical side of my ideas and nobody bothered to ask any questions that I couldn’t answer, so that was fab.

Bryn and Claire have spent the evening so far playing Mirror Mode on Mario Kart: Double Dash. I’ve been configuring Apache to cope with a funky new SSL certificate, which would have been a lot easier if Bryn hadn’t misled me into thinking that a command had a different name to that which it actually had when I asked him for assistance. Wally.

And now we’re off to Chez Geek night! Woo. And, indeed, hoo.

Happy Wednesday, everybody!

I Am The Mario Kart God

I’ve just beaten Mario Kart: Double Dash‘s “All Cups Cup” (the cup you gain access to having already beaten all the other cups – including the Special Cup – at the maximum engine power) at 150cc! Which makes me a happy bunny, ‘cos now it’s unlocked all the tracks… backwards! Another excuse to waste lots of time.

In other news, AbNib now has a really annoying banner ad that I can slap onto pretty much anywhere I can post to. Like here, for example:

[image removed]

I promise I’ll try to refrain from doing that again.

I have lectures in the morning. Better put the rubbish out and go to bed. Goodnight;

Being Charlie Kaufman

Just watched Adaptation with Claire and Paul. Absolutely fantastic – a post-modern marvel. Put simply, it’s an adaptation of a book entitled The Orchid Thief – a true story about the author, Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), meeting John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a horticultural specialist who collects endangered orchids, set to the backdrop of Charlie Kaufman, the film’s writer (Nicholas Cage), trying in vain to write a screenplay version of the book, The Orchid Thief. The film spans four billion years, with particular emphasis on the last 17, and, despite the best intentions of the in-film screenwriter, manages to include guns, drugs, and a car chase… and not so many flowers.

I’d never thought that Charlie Kaufman could ever produce anything quite so mind-boggling as Being John Malkovich, but he really has. My mind boggles still. Watch it. And invite me along. <wink>

Artificial Intelligence For Dummies

I’ve just written an artificial intelligence gamebot, designed to pseudointelligently play simple board games which involve a finite upper number of moves and a board of tokens – for example: Connect Four, Noughts & Crosses, Go!, or Othello. It uses the (appropriately-written) rules of the game in order to pre-anticipate a vast number of moves, and select the ‘best’ ones based on the likelihood of them winning. It’s not terribly powerful, but I’d never written such a widely-scoped A.I. before, and I fancied the challenge.

I let it out for it’s first run this afternoon, and started a game of Connect Four with it. Here are the results:

I took the first turn, and put one of my pieces into the first column of the grid.

The gamebot took the second turn, picked up an enormous handful of pieces, and put six of them into the grid (two in the first column and four in the next four adjacent columns). These four-in-a-row, of course, won it the game.

Perhaps I need to define ‘cheating’ for it. Hmm… back to the drawing board…

Pretend You’re A Traffic Police Officer

…and one day, on your beat, you catch a guy driving the wrong way down a residential one-way street. Well; that’s not very good, so you flag him down and investigate. Upon reaching the car, you discover that he is driving the wrong way down the road as a result of a lack of due care and attention – he was using his laptop. Moreover, his pants are round his ankles and he’s using his laptop to look at kiddie porn. As if this isn’t enough, he’d been downloading said illegal porn using an internet connection hijacked using wireless networking gear.

What do you charge him with?

The full story here.

Rage Against The Monkeys

I’ve been thinking about a popular mathematical document easily available on the web, More Monkey Business, which uses the maths behind the otherwise inconceivable “infinite monkey problem” (if a million monkeys at a million keyboards^etc.… also known as Usenet…) as a gateway to argue against molecular biology’s evolutionary theory, which states that life ‘came together’ out of primordial soup as a result of a ‘miraculous’ coincidence.

It states, for example: “From a strictly mathematical perspective, the idea that life arose out of a pre-biotic soup is about as reasonable as the idea that Hamlet could arise out of alphabet noodle soup.”

What the author, and many creationists in general, fail to realise, is that there is nothing fundamentally ‘special’ or ‘miraculous’ about life. Life is nothing more than a series of stable, perpetual (although not eternally-perpetual) chemical reactions, and the fact that we see it as anything more than this is an example of our failings as rational entities to realise the fundamental truth about our existance: that life, intelligence, and humanity are nothing more than basic chemical processes examined at a level of blindingly indefinate abstraction.

Or, at least, that’s what I believe.

Read the article. It’s good.

Windows Longhorn Continued

It turns out that Windows Longhorn is a lot like the child of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but (at this early stage) less stable. Just what we’ve come to expect.

On the other hand, it’s a lot faster than I might have expected (considering its dependency on the .NET framework). If you play with the pre-release version, though, be warned: you can turn off the themes and make it look like good old Windows 2000 (yay!) if you like but doing so isn’t very well implemented and it’ll make at least a little bit of a mess of all your Explorer toolbars.

Internet Explorer 6.05 introduces (at long last) some of the features that all of the other popular browsers have had for ages – including a download manager, security features, and pop-up blocking.

The ‘sidebar’ sucks. It really does. Lots. And it leaks memory all over the place.

I couldn’t actually find anything new in Internet Information Server 7.0, but then: I couldn’t check the documentation as they haven’t finished writing it. It’s existence, however, does lend weight to the suggestion that Microsoft will be making a Longhorn-powered platform for the Windows Server family, too.

Anyway: enough geekspeak.

AbNib, Version 1.1

I’ve taken a step towards fixing AbNib. It now works correctly with Alec and Andy‘s LiveJournals, and loads significantly quicker by not updating the live-feed of everybody’s journals at the same time. Yay. Also, have swopped out Claire (who was never updating her blog anyway) for Bryn, a proper Welshman: give him a read!

I’d still like to finish AbNib one of these days… soo much to do…

I should be working;

Alcohol, Psilocybin, Troma, Caffeine, And Other Things That Are Bad For Me

Troma Night on Saturday was another good one: we think we’ve got the recipe of attendance numbers, film content, and other silliness just right now. I’ve even promised to update the Troma night web site when I get round to it.

Claire, Paul and I took some magic mushrooms, acquired from Little Amsterdam, Aberystwyth’s first sex shop (scoring each of us at least one purity test point we didn’t already have). Apart from potentially enhancing the general feeling of drunkenness that comes about from Troma Night; the only effect of Claire & I’s limited (experimental) dose came later, when we giggled incessantly about the idea of penises with hands. It was funny at the time. Claire went out like a lamp and reports weird dreams. I couldn’t get to sleep until about 4:30am. Weird. Paul reports little other than a feeling of weightlessness while travelling home.

On a not-too-dissimilar drug-related note, overdosed stupidly on caffeine on Tuesday and pranced around excitedly, like a fairy, before throwing up. Not so good. Felt somewhat better after that, though.

The Matrix: Revolutions

Watched The Matrix: Revolutions last night at the Commodore. It was pretty much what I expected: great special effects and a less impressive plot than all of it’s prequels – improved only by having experienced the plot ‘asides’ of the comic books and stories and by the (sucky) computer game and (great) Animatrix. Unfortunatley I ‘saw it all coming’. Perhaps I am The Oracle?

Nevertheless – for those of you who’ve seen it – I can imagine the conversation now:

“This fight scene is perhaps the most ambitious and beautifully-choreographed use of computer graphics ever.”
“Hmm… it’s not quite… enough…”
“What?”
“The computers only took a few weeks to draw it all. Let’s increase the render time. Do the whole thing again, but this time in the rain.
[sounds of visual effects technitians hitting the floor]

Some Days You’re The Statue; Some Days You’re The Pigeon

I’m at the office. It’s almost 5pm. So far today I’ve achieved what should be estimated as approximately 7 days work. Some days the code just flows. I like being me.

On the other hand, it may be that I’ve just written the wrong 7 days worth of code – as in; the 7 days worth of code I should be starting next week. Despite having achieved the entirety of my work schedule for the next month, I haven’t yet finished what I was supposed to be doing this morning.

My boss is pretty level-headed and appreciates the way I work, though – that if he doesn’t expect me to do things in the order he asks, and he doesn’t mind that some days I achieve nothing but surfing the web and posting to my blog, and that other days are like this one, with immense productivity. I’m an outlier even by software engineering standards. I’m a bit of a loose cannon. But in any case; I’m worth more than he’s paying me and we both know it, and neither of us care terribly, so everything’s pretty damn sweet.

Got my assignment in on time. Think I’ve done it quite well (actually went to the library and read old journals and books and things – very scary and academic and cool at the same time: after all; it’s just about possible to pass a comp. sci degree with Google as your primary reference). Time will tell.

Chez Geek night tonight at the Ship. Looking forward to it.

The Most Expensive Pizza Night With Friends… Ever

Vauxhall Corsa: £2,515
Ford Fiesta Zetec: £2,745
Petrol to get the above two cars, containing Bryn, Claire, Kit, Adam, Liz, and me to Shrewsbury and back: £20
Three stuffed-crust pizzas, one plate of mixed snacks, six soft drinks with free refils, two double chocolate sundaes, two portions of chocolate cake, one portion of cheesecake and one portion of fruity sponge stuff from Pizza Hut Shrewsbury: £68, plus tip

Celebrating Liz’s birthday and a fun night out with great company: priceless

Goodnight;

Shedloads

I have shedloads of work to do: a whole heap of stuff for Bovini, a bit of catching up with my self-imposed tight schedule for my dissertation, a worksheet on formal methods for software engineering [PDF]…

…and then there’s all the other stuff: gotta do my laundry, remember that it’s my dad’s birthday next week, write some more Three Rings code. By rights, I should be busy.

On the other hand, I celebrated (finally) getting my student loan cheque this week by buying a copy of UFO: Aftermath (good, but buggy – buy it if you’re a fan of the X-COM series, but otherwise, pirate a copy in a week or two when it’ll be in heavy circulation), and I’ve been playing that a lot instead of all the things I should be doing. Still; it makes a change from NetHack (I have copies on my university user space compiled for both Windows and Solaris, now; and keep a copy on a *nix box I can log in to remotely, just in case) and Puzzle Pirates.

Probably going to be a busy weekend.

P.S. Read the reports of Paul’s attempts to get himself evicted by tipping off Enviromental Health about how unfit for human habitation his house is on his and Kit’s blogs, if you haven’t already. I can’t be bothered working out the URLs: find them on AbNib