Since my last whinge-fest, Bank of America sent my debit card to my father's house back in Australia. When I rang up to ask for one to be sent to me, they had no record of ever sending one out, and promised to send me one to my work address.
Today, I receive an email from my father (in Australia) telling me that he's received another one.
GARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHHHH
We pushed out a new version of Blogger Web Comments. Update it from your Firefox extensions manager.
This release contains some minor updates around language settings (no more forced restriction to your system locale) and sending things in the query string (which users may find annoying - we may turn this off again soon).
My guest post on the Google Blog about what I have been working on (and have now delivered).
Thank you friends, for putting up with my email and IM silence over the past few weeks. I've been having the time of my life.
I've been working fulltime in the web industry since I was 19, and since then, I've always been the youngest person at whatever place I was working. Now, six years on, I come to Google and find large herds of people younger than me. This, combined with turning a quarter-century old today, is going to give me another midlife crisis.
I took down iswonderful because spammers were using the mail form to harass people (Dear Internet, I'm really very sorry), and I don't have the time or energy to add a captcha solution.
The bank (Bank of America) have had a great time with me too - first they got my username incorrect in my signup form, leaving me with no way of signing into their online banking service, this would be ok because I could recover it using my debit card. But then I never got my debit card, and then finally today I get a letter from them saying "we can't send you your debit card because your photo doesn't fit our requirements" .... this letter made me quite cross, because they were the ones who took the photo.
I also still don't have my Social Security Number (I have a letter saying it will take 60 days), because the person I spoke to thought my visa category was weird .. despite everyone else I know with the same visa getting their SSNs after a few days. Let's not forget how long it took to get that visa in the first place.
</vent>
But, it's all good - it's my birthday, afterall. Kung pow.
Also, Bank of America phone support was actually pretty nice.
P.S. Did I mention my temporary housing runs out tonight and there are only two places on the rental tour tomorrow? Whoopie.
So I've only been in the country for two weeks, but it has felt like years (in a good way).
Handy hint - when going to a country where they do things the opposite way to what you're used to (eg which lane of the road to drive on, how they write dates), don't take everyone's very useful advice of "just remember to do things backwards", because when you start to get used to it and start doing things properly, you'll still remember "it's backwards" and confusion will totally take you out.
Hence why anyone looking at any of my paperwork will determine that I now have two birthdays, one on May 12, and one on December 5.
Strangeness: Movies get 'R' ratings for strong language, and even late-night movies on TV get mild swearwords like FUCK and SHIT censored out. It's kind of strange because you watch drugs/violence movies like Traffic or Blow, and it takes the edge off what should be shocking - it's like "well, all these polite and well-spoken people are doing naughty things, naughty things must be good!"
So this week has been one of the most super nuts crazy weeks of my life.
My body never really felt that knackered from the jetlag, but it's contributed to my brain being more scrambled than I've ever known it to be - I struggle to find an analogy (the ooga booga caveman in a rock concert one was the best), but it is at once totally intimidating (everyone's so smart, I'm sooo stupid) and totally awesome. It's like whole trees of unused synapses are bursting into life, leaving no time for normal brain activity, so I sort of stumble around like some sort of paranoid, wide-eyed, drooling zombie.
Work's never ever been this much fun. I just hope I can live up to expectation.
It's 5am, and I haven't slept in two hours. Partially because of the jetlag, but mostly because whoever designed this apartment building decided that rain wasn't funky enough and designed it so that all drainpipes would end in bongo drums.
I was in the shuttle bus to my temporary apartment, and I was looking around in a jetlagged, cramped-plane daze, looking at all the little differences that make everything else seem overly weird, when it hit me "oh shit ... I live here now".
My parents both moved to Oxford, England to do their PhDs when they were almost exactly my age, I wonder how it must've been for them. Especially my mother, who six years before that had moved to Australia to do her undergrad.
It's two months 'til Lauren flys over here to start her post-doc at Stanford, I'm wondering how much I'll have changed by then. I suppose it'll be nothing profound; I'll just be fatter or something.
Oh, and since we're talking about acadenerdia, I handed in my final Masters project the day before I left. Fingers crossed.
So .. tired.
Well, my Japan trip is turning out a little boring - after sleeping for half of the plane trip, I slept for twelve hours at the hotel (from where I'm currently accessing the internet through a 'timetron'), ate breakfast (oh man, they have chips in the buffet .. total bacon and chip buttie time) and here I am. Aside from two convenience stores, it doesn't look like there's anything within walking distance, and the place seems to be allergic to providing people with maps. My flight leaves too soon to really let me go anywhere fun (even the buses into Narita city would only give me fifteen minutes there before I'd have to leave), so I guess I'll just have to come back some other time.
This non-city area (Narita) doesn't really feel all that different from Thailand, just cleaner and with even more politeness. And shop staff who will speak in English to the blonde european in front of me, but then refuse to believe I don't understand Japanese when it's my turn. Curse this half-asianness!
The removalists have done their work, and I'm left here in my empty apartment with my laptop, luggage and DSL modem. The only item of concern is bedding - my beds, blankets and pillows have gone by sea freight, so they'll arrive at least a month after I'm in my own apartment over there. This leaves me with an apartment containing the things I airfreighted (PC, Bike), and nothing to sleep on.
This is a pretty minor worry, but I'm fixating on it as otherwise I'll think of other things to get stressed out about.
Some non-standard notes for those doing the same:
Goodbye friends and family, we've said our goodbyes and that most of you have or will soon jet off to your own corner of the world, so may we be like that crazy slug thing that splits into bits that do their own thing, then squishes back into a crazy slug thing.
Goodbye Melbourne, it's been sixteen years since I moved to you from England, and in that time I came love you and your bonkers weather system more biglots than anywhere else. I KISS YOU!
:*
The removalists come on Friday the 4th of November, I leave Melbourne at 10am on Saturday the 5th, get to Japan at 18:30 the same day, leave Japan at 17:45 on Sunday, arrive in San Francisco at 9am the same day, then start at Google 24 hours later. Hectic.
I'm sure the excitement will outweigh the killer jetlag (work starts at the equivalent of 2am Melbourne time), and thankfully my temporary accomodation is only 5km (3mi) from work, which is a nice, comfortable, 'wake me up' walking distance.
In between the farewell social engagements and finishing off my masters, I haven't had the time I would like to update MeHere, sorry about that (let's forget that I've managed to start and finish both F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 in the past few days). MeHere will probably get updated a fair bit when I'm in the US, as location-based stuff is just *so* much more useful over there.
And since I get asked: I don't have a timeframe for returning to Australia, I'm not even thinking that far ahead - unlike the H1B, the visa category I'm on lets me renew every two years indefinitely but I'm not allowed to apply for a green card. So it's not like I'm leaving forever.
My extra-cute-yet-evil younger brother Dene has just hit 16 and each time I see him from now on it's going to be like "omfg!11!eleven1 u r tall" ... I'm going to miss him like crazy.
To answer the most frequently asked question, I still don't know when I'm going - I still don't know anything about my visa. While those applying for H1-B visas generally get a 24 hour turnaround, I applied for a new type of visa made just for Australians - at the time I applied, the procedure for application wasn't yet finalised, so I was told that I might have to wait anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks.
A bit of poking around a few days ago revealed that other Australian Google employees who applied after me had two-week turnarounds, and as I'm now up to three and a half weeks I'm presuming that *something* is amiss (enquiries are being made). Since I got the job sometime in April and had expected to have left by the end of September, this extra waiting is excruciating. Further, the removalists require two week's notice, so even if my visa is granted tomorrow, I won't be leaving until November.
And in answer to the usual follow-up question, I'm spending my days working on my final Masters project. Though that's being hampered by a recent turn of sleeping terribly, as I tend to stay awake until the morning California time (~4am AEST) to see if the immigration lawyers have heard anything (they've been ever-so nice), and then I spend all day Australian time checking my physical mailbox.
I just want to get over there and start working.
I've now made three Greasemonkey scripts that use MeHere. You can find them on the MeHere site, or at userscripts.org/tag/mehere. The scripts themselves are pretty simple and most likely contain things that are wrong / out of place (particularly stuff around variable scope), but they should give you a good idea of what's what.
The past few nights I've been a bit restless, which is good as generally it gives me ideas to execute during the day. So now I've made a followup to MovinGmap called MeHere.
MeHere is open - you can connect Google Earth to it and follow yourself around there, and you can have your friends connect to you and you connect to your friends so you can all see each other running around within Google Earth in realtime. It also runs nicely in the background and offers up data in other formats so you could write Greasemonkey scripts to integrate it with any other online or offline location-based application.
Or you could just use it as a GPS tracker for Google Maps.
PS I did have even bigger plans for MeHere, and those may still be coming - I just thought I'd throw this out there.
PPS As I'm yet to actually start at Google (hurry up Visa), this has nothing to do with them.
Update: The site now has an example greasemonkey script showing how to connect to MeHere and do stuff with it (in this case, adding a 'show stuff near me' link to GeoURL). More to come!
It's 4am here, and I'm glad I stayed up - the DARPA Grand Challenge is on, and the website is doing a spectacular job of showing the current race status, with a self-updating leaderboard tied to a map of the course. It's especially interesting because most all the teams are going so well this year (last year, no bot made it past eight miles of the 100+ mile course).
I'm giddy - I know this is a sign that I'm behind the times, and that other people have done much nicer things with it, but finding FireFox 1.5's support of the 'canvas' tag gives me that same buzz I got when I discovered C++, JavaScript, Java and OpenGL and felt that I was about to be given a whole box of new toys (VML didn't give me quite the same high because it was a pain in the cods to use). Here's a five minute quickie (FireFox 1.5 or Safari required).
(No spoilers at all).
It's very rare for Australia to get a movie release before the rest of the world, so when it turns out that the movie in question is the long awaited FireFly movie, Serenity, then it's pens down, popcorn up.
As FireFly is long gone with small hope of resurrection, Whedon doesn't mess around when it comes to making dramatic changes to the FireFly universe, and through this Serenity manages to avoid the 'it's like a long episode' feeling that plagues such movies. Fans will find it a fitting 'end' to the series, while newcomers will get their money's worth in drama. It's not going to turn sci-fi haters around, and it's not the next Star Wars, it's just a great non-stop rollercoaster of a movie that you'll enjoy every minute of. Highly recommended.
On a side note, this was one of the first showings in Australia and the theatre was packed - suprisingly though, people dressed like Australian software engineers (it's a distinctive look) made up only half of the audience, with groups of young girls and middle-aged couples making up the rest. Super neat.
Since I do love information presentation, one thing I've always had fun doing is generating the stats reports for my various sites. After many iterations over the years, the following suits me best - 95% of the use I get out of the system is from the indented referrer lists.
Main Screen
Here you can see a short summary of the activity on all of my sites - next to the site name you can see 'hits in past 24 hours (unique hits in past 24 hours) - total hits'. The important bit is the indented list of referrers - the previous 10 referrers are listed and indented according to how long ago the hit was made. These blocks of text let me see how busy my sites without reading anything onscreen - you can see that bodytag.org is getting a lot more hits than glenmurphy.com because its 'last 10 referrers' is squished to the left. On the right you can see the page that was viewed by that visitor. Controls at the top of the page let me choose whether I want to see referrals from all sites not my own, all sites including mine, or all hits regardless of whether a referral was included (see this in the third image). Note that the indenting stops at about the 12 hour mark (poor riot.com.au).
Details Screen
Viewing the details for a site will show a longer list of referrers, as well as some more traditional bar charts.
'All hits' Details Screen
This just shows what happens when I choose 'view all hits' - you can see what looks like a single user 31 minutes ago clicking on all the menu items.
And that's that. I'm not going to pretend that they're the most user-friendly or immediately comprehensible reports, but they give me all the information I need and are usable even squinting through a hangover.
The main page is a PHP script that takes around 30 seconds to generate - hits are logged into and extracted from MySQL databases (each site has its own), though I suppose I could change it to parse Apache log files. There's also a smaller version that fits into my Windows taskbar as a toolbar.
So I woke up this mornin', and I can't remember the rest of the song, or even what it sounds like. There goes yet another almighty segue.
glenmurphy.com and this blog has been redesigned after I realised this morning that it was very hard for people who don't know me to figure out exactly what it is I do. Maybe that was part of the charm, but I think the new design is a bit more user-friendly (though I'll miss you, rolling transition text of cheap thrills).
The blog navigation could use some work, specifically around viewing individual posts and the archives (and how it's not exactly clear that you're on a sub-page), but I'm generally happy with how it all worked out.
Mm, now that I think about it, this update hasn't been tested on Safari at all. Oopsie daisy.
Update: MacIE It seems to work just fine in Safari. MacIE is another matter, but I'm willing to let that slide.
Now we play the waiting game .. we wait until I realise that gummi neon is a terrible choice and that the roly poly thing was much better. Ahhhhh, nothing like holiday induced stupidity.
Update Update: The server's working again! Woohoo!
So you can probably tell that I have a mega soft spot for Google Earth - years ago I spent a lot of brainpower on the whole annotated reality thing, and all I have to show for it are geocode.net/.org registrations, and a whole slew of project folders. But now Google Earth's network link does it better than I could've imagined, so these days I sort of sit at the computer with dad and dribble over the latest data layers instead.
Today we blew our stacks when we found Placeopedia, a Google Maps / Earth 'interface' to Wikipedia (KML link described on the 'data' page), then giggled with glee as we added live Australian weather radar and not-so-live global cloud coverage.
On a related note, if your interest is more upwards, you'd probably like Celestia - it's like Google Earth for the universe. Just make sure you go to max stars visible, then auto-magnitude and star shape set to 'disc' .. then zoom out biglots. Heavenly.
The sad thing is, I used to be a Keyhole subscriber before Google bought them and turned it into Google Earth, even back then it had KML, but I never put two and two together and foresaw this greatness. I'm so lame.
Visa application interview on Monday. Exciting!
The Whitsundays Islands were great. We spent three days on Daydream Island, and aside from some overzealous activities coordinators and the family-oriented beach-movie selection (The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants , Herbie: Fully Loaded) it was perfect. The weather was a near-constant 29C and Lauren didn't go insane from not being busy.
I also went without Pepsi Max and email for the three days - it's the first time I've done either of those things since about 1997. Probably explains why I had so many naps, come to think of it.
P.S The view from the plane flying in was very much like this Afterburner teaser image (note to future: linked site will probably change soon).
Sketchup, a 3d modelling package I adore a great deal (mostly for its crazily great interface - these days I rarely have any need for 3D modelling), has a Google Earth plugin available. I smell the augmented earth coming yet another small step closer.
I have just posted a long-overdue update to Duct Tape to allow it to work with Doom 1.3 and the expansion pack.
.. I think; I don't actually have Doom3 installed anymore, but apparently the fix works. This is yet another well-tested release brought to you by Glen.
This post is a bit late, as it's been two weeks since my last day at Ingena, but it would be remiss of me to leave without posting something about it.
I'd been at Ingena for a year after their aquisition of DeadFish, where I'd worked for three years. I hope I managed to help transition DeadFish's bigger clients (Telstra, Telstra Wholesale) across successfully, as for me it was a small bit of sadness to no-longer be working with them. In my final months, I had a super rockin' time working onsite at Australia Post as the UI Designer on one of their bigger projects (it had been in development for two years without a UI Designer, so things needed a fair bit of fixing) - lots (LOTS) of presentations/workshops to run, amazing and fantastic developers to be yelled at by, and a finished product that everyone seemed pretty pleased with.
So I'm stoked that I end my Australian career on a high note, and look totally forward to even more fun at Google. I start there in October, and am currently taking my first real break since 2000; some small things about OO coding never really sat well with me (and no-one could answer my 'why' questions satisfactorily), so I'm going back and writing some stuff in straight C so that I'll hopefully gain an appreciation for what I'm missing. It's been great fun.
P.S. I miss the people at Ingena so much I'm going back tonight for BEER BEER BEER!
Lonely Planet Worldguide has launched, and it's most extra-special to me because it is the first time there has been a public (as far as I know) and commercial use of Crumbler. Neato.
When developing shootem-blammo games, one invariably finds that they need multi-frame explosion sprites but unlike stock audio, there's really not much out there, so until you can afford a professional studio to blow things up for you, there's LHFire, available on LordHavoc's Dark Places download page.
It's a simple and powerful particle renderer that spits out lovely TGAs with the alpha channel intact. The image to the left is the sample 'spaceexplosion', and better looking images (from muzzleflashes to blood splats to hyperspace warps) are easily created with its inbuilt scripting language. Handy pants.
The results of the Assembly 2005 demo party are out. I expect that next year the browser category will be chockas with Flash on account of Flash 8's pixel-manipulation speediness.
Holy crap ... Most epic music to eat ice-cream by, ever.
Further compounding the greatness, they played at Hamer Hall, one of Melbourne's best auditoriums - the sound there is so awesome it could turn Twinkee Dink's Christmas Carols into heartwrenching power ballads.
Ahhh.
Things I've noticed from the IE7 beta (these are all based on 10 minutes with the software, so there may be bugs in my report):
Thanks to things more easily opening in iRider now, this probably won't be all THAT annoying, and hopefully these things are addressed for final.
Nice, Windows Vista includes navigable breadcrumbs, this is the sort of kick in the pants I need to update Crumbler (the public version on bodytag lags miles behind the commercial version).
It's been a while since I produced any new interactive stuff, so here's something I made recently that uses multiple webcams to track the position of a hand-held marker or person. The tracking data is then used to produce some interactive 3D imagery for viewing through dorky 3D glasses.
Here's some text from the "I can't be bothered writing this" description:
"Projector-based interactive installation artwork. Inspiration came from the ribbons used in rhythmic gymnastics and chinese ribbon dances.
By using multiple cameras to track the 3D motion of a distinct object (such as a torch) held by a visitor we can create and project a virtual ribbon, with the dancer and ribbon dancing on opposite sides of the virtual/real border."
There are images and videos on the proper Cut to Ribbons page. All a bit of fun, really.
I've been lusting after a Sony Librie eBook reader after hearing so many good things about its fabulous e-ink display, but one thing the reviews never touched on was how much text you could fit onto a page before it became unreadable. I had heard reports from some people who'd converted PDFs to images and said that the text was often too small and had to be converted upwards, but there was nothing on the font sizes of text presented from the default Librie LRF file format. (I'd much prefer to store my books as LRF plaintext than as images).
So I downloaded the Librie software which includes a nice simulation of the Librie and my fears were confirmed - despite the Librie display being quite small, the smallest font size is still so huge that space and time bends towards it. Unfortunately, short of turning all the pages into images of smaller text, there's no way of making the font any smaller. To make things mildly worse, the huge page margin (which is in addition to the artifical 'plastic' margin of the Librie's case) is not adjustable.
This is an issue for me given the slightly odd fashion in which I read which requires a lot of flipping back and forth up and down through content, and is exacerbated by the Librie apparently taking 1 second to update the display when turning pages, so if you read at a decent speed (say, 600wpm) then you will have to deal with 1 second pauses every 20 seconds or so.
I'd love to hear from anyone with hands-on experience with the unit who could correct me.
Some time ago I thought it would be a smashing idea if network admins could 'listen' to their network, with traffic load, type, origin and destination being rendered in realtime as different types/locations/intensities of background noise (eg birds, traffic). When everything was chugging along normally, it would fade into the background of the admin's perception, but when things suddenly change, it would draw attention to itself.
Well, Peep does exactly that, and sounds just as I imagined it would. Super awesome.
Ok, a bit more on the arty business I was talking about earlier - from Thursday evening 'Are We There Yet (The Sublime Project)' is on at Phatspace in Sydney (Oxford ST, Darlinghurst). In addition to some super work from some smashing AU/NZ artists, you'll also be able to see some of my interactive installation stuff. I believe it will run through to the end of July.
Also, sorry about all the downtime - turns out another machine at the hosting center kept nabbing our IP address. Naughty.
I leave for Sydney shortly on an art exhibition-related trip (more on that later). In packing my bags, I find I will be carrying:
.. ahh, the freedom of technology. At least give me back my pack mule.
One of the many fond memories I have of visiting family in Thailand is watching bizarre asian TV commercials, which are sort of this super special blend of 50s-era cheese, modern production techniques and that quirky asian humour that totally rocks my boat. Unfortunately, Thailand isn't really a rich country, so the commercials tended to be a bit crapper than they need to be.
Thank goodness we still have Japan, then. While great, these commercials aren't the highly amusing celebrity antics you might see on Japander, nor are they all glitzy like the recent Chinese World of Warcraft / Coke commercial, but they do give me a small amount of false hope that perhaps my crazier traits are hereditary.
Haven't seen this announced anywhere yet, but Google Earth is now live (and free).
Disclaimer: employer blah blah.
Google Maps now seems to have brought more of its satellite images into line with those in Keyhole. Though it seems like I still live on the wrong side of the crop.
For a long time I used to hypothesize the people I'd put into a 'perfect web nerd team', and once you excluded Batman, Darth Vader and all the models, two names frequently stuck out - Boodman and Pupius. Now, with Google's acquisition of the latter, I think I can safely say "The schircle ish moshtly complete, mish Moneypenny".
Crazy times ahead. Crazy times indeed.
But first, breakfast times ahead. Breakfast times indeed.
I will surely be hung, drawn and quartered for bringing attention to this given her attitude towards public attention (especially attention coming from the nerdy internet), but did I ever mention that my partner is a great big genius who wins prizes and stuff? Mmmm.. brains.
"A Monash University researcher who is helping determine why some organ transplants are rejected has been awarded a high commendation in the Premier of Victoria's 2005 Award for Medical Research.
Ms Lauren Ely, who is undertaking her PhD at Monash, is studying proteins within the body's immune system that are able to identify "foreign" cells and cause organ transplant rejection."
MS' Acrylic is now in free beta, and seems pretty neat, though I can't really tell as 2D vector drawing packages aren't really my thing at all.
Mmm.. Photoshop.
A new version of DART, an Augmented Reality toolkit for Macromedia Director users is out. From the news release:
For those unfamiliar with DART, it is a powerful, extensible AR authoring environment built on top of Macromedia Director. DART if available for free; the license (which is meant to be very liberal) is in each of the Director casts. DART is the product of a research project aimed at understanding how a wide variety of people think about creating experiences and systems that mix 3D virtual and physical spaces. So, what we really would like in return is feedback (what you think, what works and what doesn't, and what you do with it) and acknowledgment when you publish or distribute things built with DART.
I'd write more, but I'm too hyperactive, so just go and check it out.
So I promised I'd talk about Iain M. Banks' Look to Windward, a sci-fi novel that seems to be part of a greater series, with no information inside the book or on the cover as to where it sits within that series.
It starts slowly, and it took a while to get into the swing of things, but the story speeds up towards the end and becomes thoroughly magnificent, though never entirely gripping; as I remarked to Lauren, it is the perfect bed-time book as it is a joy to read, but you feel no remorse in putting it down and going to sleep, and with the exception of the last few chapters, there's little to force you to return.
The science is interesting and relatively low-key; instead of making a big deal of all the neato things Banks has thought up, it describes them as we would everyday objects - the amount of detail only extending so far as to inform the reader of function as related to the plot.
It's my first Banks book, and from other reviews I've read, it's one of his weaker works, which implies great things about the many other stories he's written. Look to Windward is moderately recommended, and I'll be off to the bookstore to buy more of his books as soon as my schedule allows.
Olympus have introduced a non-instrusive HMD. Ubicomp here we come.
My personal experience with such things says that users prefer displays that can be moved around their field of vision. There's a reason we point our heads towards things when we read them. I think I would enjoy glasses with say three built in low-profile LEDs that notify me of events (blink pattern and colour indicating what type), then a small flat wrist-mounted display for the actual reading (as wide as you prefer) rather than having the information in your face all the time. There also aren't too many instances where a HMD is that useful - you have to change focal length to read things, and it tends to be more distracting than anything else (which is of course, why I made one for my car .. hi again, Darwin!).
I think it could drive me nuts too - I'm one of those people who will absorb all text within my field of view during the briefest glimpse, parse a few words out and fit them together in my head, just have to go back and read it again to see if it really said what I thought it did (my version is usually much grottier), so if something's pushing text at me in my peripheral vision, I'm just never going to get anything done.
All that considered, it doesn't stop me wanting one of these gizmos so badly I could burst.
Lesson number four million and fourty seventy six when flying your brand-new indoor electric remote-controlled helicopter:
When you realise that, after all the modifications you did to your RC controller, the rear rotor control is backwards, don't think 'well, I can only tell what effect the inputs have on the rear rotor if the main rotor's spinning' (since it's proportional and with gyros and stuff).
And if you do think that, then don't get your heli up to speed and then start flicking the DIP switches at the back in the hope of finding the one that reverses the rudder input.
.. because instead of reversing the input you want, you might reverse the throttle input from 'almost none' to 'almost infinity', sending the helicopter at MAX POWER towards you before smashing into a chair and shattering the main rotors into extra sharp super spikey death blades.
Have some before pictures:
At least I'm still here. IN YOUR FACE, DARWIN!
Oh wow, just wow. The BBC will be offering free downloads of Beethoven's nine symphonies.
When I was learning piano, pretty much every piece I chose as part of my repertoire for the exams was by Beethoven - I detested Mozart and only had minor infatuations with the other composers. I guess the closest most apt description of my afflication was by a super talented friend who stated that I just liked 'dramatic music', which is true enough, and makes me predisposed to secretly enjoying all sorts of crappy scores in pre-battle scenes of cheesy films.
Mmm.. Cheesymite scrolls. I sure hope I can get Vegemite in America.
This Slashdot comment by user Bob_Robertson presents an excellent viewpoint on why the new top-level domains (e.g .xxx) do more harm than good.
"What is surprising is the number of otherwise smart people who cannot grasp this. Since the DNS system is already difficult for humans to use by itself (eg. coke.com or coke.net or coke.int or coke.org or coke.ny.ny.us) because they are trying to use it like an index rather than a registry, they then advocate adding yet more TLDs. Yet it is the very use of TLDs that has confused the difference between an index and a registry in their minds in the first place, as well as caused the shell-game problem of which TLD to look under first."
As another user pointed out, if nothing else, the newish '.biz' extension makes for quite a fantastic spam heuristic.
So on Kottke's recommendation, I just watched Primer, and it reminded me of the super excellent Cypher, in that low-budget sci-fi sort of way.
Highly recommended if you're into thinking-person's sci-fi.
I generally detest being told anything about movies, as I then spend my time watching the movie thinking "ooh, is this the awesome bit that person was talking about yet?" .. "ohhh, is this the bit they thought was sad? ooh, it's not that sad, I'm not crying yet* .. ooh, maybe that's because I'm thinking about it too much .. damn people who told me things!". So for that reason, I tend to not explain things beyond "watch it" or "don't watch it", nor do I watch trailers.
*I once managed to have a sob during Honey I Shrunk the Kids; I mean, the poor man, thinking his kids are all stuffed up like that.
I was talking with a friend about Battlefield 2 this morning, and the subject of how much I used to love Counter-Strike came up, which got me thinking about a few things:
CS is a solved game for me - I know exactly what to do and when, what's left is just a matter of teamwork/reflexes, which is uncontrollable/boring.
And I've been thinking about this .. for some people, that's enough. There seem to be non-exclusive variants of gameplay appreciation:
- People who just enjoy being able to move things on the screen (ie all of us who played shit shareware in the 90s).
- People who are in it for the cinematic experience.
- People who are in it for the mental aspect (I particularly enjoy the fast-thinking game in 1-1 duels in most indoor FPSs)
- People who want to get a higher score than anyone else.
My problem is that a lot of games, particularly console games, are ignoring (3), and seem to cover it up with devices such as low-damage, which makes thinking and suprise less important than the ability to keep a stream of fire on a moving target.
I spend a lot of time thinking about gameplay, as it's a subject very close to the whole 'user experience' thing that I enjoy so much. Raph's Keynote at the GDC about patterns and the brain and how they related to fun really hit close to home on a lot of things. Patterns are awesome.
Just not knitted ones, those are boring.
SproutLiner was designed and built one weekend when I was supposed to be doing something else for someone else. Like many of my projects, it was just an idea that I had to get out of my system.
Unfortunately, that mentality (and my schedule) doesn't lend itself towards constant maintenance of the software, so I've released everything under the CC-GPL licence. Partly this is to allow people to deploy SproutLiner on intranets and so on, and secondly it's to ensure that SproutLiner doesn't die a slow death because I keep kidding myself and my users that I'll find consistent blocks of time to update it.
So without further ado, if it tickles your fancy, please head to the currently rather plain SproutLiner Source page.
For much the same reason, I'm aiming to soon release Freelook in the same way.
UPDATE: It should be noted that the backend code (PHP) is tiny compared to the frontend code (JS) and is mostly just a bunch of SQL queries, so Sproutliner could be ported to other platforms quite easily, and I suppose it wouldn't be hard at all to make a standalone Python version if you used something like GadFly or SnakeSQL.
Ugh, I entered the title for this post into Blogger just before I popped out a few days ago. Unfortunately, just like my real TODO list or items Starred in Gmail, I take that action as "Well, I've taken care of the hard part (remembering it), I guess I can just actually do it later".
A shame, because what I was trying to talk about was The Perry Bible Fellowship, a comic I found so immediately pleasant that it made me promptly forget about Wulffmorgenthaler for months.
As I move to bigger projects, bodytag sees far fewer updates than it used to. However, it recently passed the four-million pageviews mark, so it's about time I came clean.
Despite the presence of many other pieces, all of which took far longer to make, over two million of those pageviews are to cursory. What's mildly boggling about it is that cursory is popular only in Russia, as only one or two non-Russian sites have ever directly linked to it, and 95% of the Russian sites that link to bodytag only link to cursory and not the front page. It's not a fad thing either, as there have been a steady stream of hits from different and unique Russian websites in the four years since cursory went up.
It'd be interesting to see if there were any social/cultural reasons for this.
Also note that I've disabled the 'blogger users only' restriction on the comments. Amazing times.
Oh how I wish the title of this post were a lead-in to describing a recent purchase; the Bumblebee Stereo Camera promises to solve most all webcam stereo problems by providing a wide-angle (up to 100 degrees HFOV), hi-res (up to 640x480@30fps or 1024x768@15fps), calibrated (no barrel-distortion), synchronised stereo video input.
Unfortunately, as hinted at by the 'email us for a price' line, it's a little past even my reckless spending habits at ... US$1995. HNNGGG!!
Still, since people seem to be flocking here from Google searches for stuff about multiple webcams on one machine, I figured you might all be interested.
My favourite band of the past two years, Sigur Ros, is touring Australia. I have my ticket, where's yours?
I have terrible luck with touring bands - I really got into Nirvana around 1994, at the same time they 'disbanded'. Following that, REM, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead and Tori Amos all got loved within six months of their last Australian tour for years. So by the time Radiohead came out, I had lost most of my interest but still went as I was determined to finally see a popular band I had liked at some point. Tori Amos is also touring soon, but I've mostly gotten over that infatuation, too (especially when you take the ticket price into account). So you can now see why I'm super pleased as punch that a band I actually still LIKE is actually COMING HERE.
For what it's worth, I spent most of my time reading 'The Diamond Age' by Neal Stephenson while listening to Sigur Ros' '( )'; like Swedish twins, the combination and interplay lead me to fall in love with both.
PS I got the 'With Teeth' DVD, and it still sucks. The only difference is that the suckiness comes from all around you instead of from the front.
After the 'ye olden dayes' slog of The Baroque Cycle, I decided it was time to get some more hardcore sci-fi, so I picked up Charles Stross' 'Singularity Sky' on the strength of the title; having lapped up all of Vernor Vinge's books and essays, I wanted more more more singularity-related fiction, and this proved to almost be the ticket.
Like almost everything in these information-saturated days, Singularity Sky starts off a little slow, and at no points does the sci-fi really grip you by the short and curlies - we read about the effects of a technological singularity on an unsuspecting population, but it's more of an unexplored aside to the main story, which is a nice old-school scifi adventure, with the relationship between the two protagonists providing most of the incentive to read on.
While Stross is great with words, it feels like he wrote with someone standing over his shoulder with a whip at the ready for any time he did something remotely unexpected; throughout the book you can see the hooks for clever little plot twists, but they're never reeled in, and so the story proceeds in a fairly straight line with no knock-you-on-the-floor suprises.
Here's where it gets difficult - Singularity Sky is a more than satisfactory read and I'll probably curl up with the sequel, 'Iron Sunrise', but I find it a hard book to gush about - sci-fi lovers may find it a little flat, and readers new to the genre are much better off with Asimov, Clarke, Vinge or Stephenson. You can probably best consider it 'easy-reading' sci-fi - suitable for a quick and dirty distraction without the mental work of some of the heftier novels out there.
Next book on the pile is another recommendation from Slashdot - Iain M. Banks' 'Look To Windward'. I've never read any of his work before, and I know it's not the first in the series, but the darn sleeve didn't mention which one was.
After some more experimentation, it appears that framerate issues come from the image being too dark - doesn't matter if the image is dark because you've set gamma, exposure, brightness or gain, if the image has a very low average brightness, the framerate will plummet, even with 'auto' everything off. I don't recall this happening when I was using just one camera, but that was on a different machine a long time ago.
Because the framerate varies with brightness, and because the brightness changes all the time, the sync issues mentioned in Part 1 are not predictable. Fortunately, the good old "z += (newz - z) / filteramt" 'filter' came to the rescue, and for as long as the cameras maintain a reasonable framerate, things go well.
To be honest, this whole thing would be a bzillion times easier if TrackIR cameras (with their framerate and optics geared towards this task) could show up as VFW devices, but my questions to Naturalpoint regarding that got bounced around internally, then went unanswered. Then again, I suppose they really might not want to talk to me considering I kinda made a competing product. Doot de doo.
A pair of Quickcam Pro 4000s arrived yesterday, and despite the knowledge that they would work simultaneously, I spent most of last night grappling with them (in between reading bits from The System of The World).
After a bit of experimentation, I realise now that the 8.xx-series of Quickcam drivers are terrible; try as I might, I could not expose any controls other than 'auto'. I'm not sure if installing the whole Logitech suite would fix this, but there's no way I want all that junk on my system. So back to the good old reliable 7.30 drivers I went (nicely still available on Logitech's FTP server).
These drivers aren't without some problems - with the exposure set really low, bright colours and their surrounds become greyscale, whereas what surrounds that remains in colour. Probably not so great for colour tracking, but I'll worry about that later. Further, for some reason, at random, one of the cameras will drop to 2fps. Not that useful, and again I'll have to spend some time figuring out if that situation can be recovered from without a reboot as installation stuff generally has to be able to run for around 12 hours without breaking. For the moment it doesn't matter too much, as the shutter glasses tend to stop working after an even shorter interval, and that problem most definitely does require a reboot.
But when the suns and moons are aligned and things deem themselves fit to work properly, then it works even better than I'd hoped - with many thanks that the QCP4000 doesn't suffer from the same terrible barrel-distortion that afflicted its predecessors, as well as a bit of trigonometry, pretty accurate marker position estimations can be obtained. It's like System B1 but in 3D.
Unfortunately, it all falls to bits as soon as lateral motion is introduced; as I'd expected and forgotten a while ago, one camera almost imperceptably lags behind the other due to minute differences in startup time and so on. The end effect is that one image moves ahead of the other, the horizontal distance between the two marker images changes, and the depth estimate then borks up completely.
How this is counteracted will depend entirely on the nature of the sync issues - should it be constant, then our life is made easy as once the value is known, we can project backwards in time so that the image that is ahead is back where it should be. Should it be random, then we will yell and shout and probably use a whole bunch of smoothing 'til it works. Either way, it will be documented here.
Sidenote: everyone should all be getting full-feeds, if you're seeing truncated posts, it's possible that your feedreader (bloglines included) is subscribed to the old feed and is experiencing some problems with the redirection. Unsubscribing from that one and subscribing to the new one should fix it.
It is 02:10, and I've just finished the final book of The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson's Political-Science-Commerce-History-Fiction Adventure 'trilogy'. While certainly not provoking the paroxisms of "I will have this man's babies" ecstacy induced by some of his other novels, I feel like a better person for having taken part in the imaginary (and not-so-imaginary) lives of its characters.
The first volume, Quicksilver, took me months to read; I was battered by its giant slabs of seemingly inconsequential descriptive text, and only picked up its sequel (The Confusion), on the strength of my love for the author's earlier work. This new book sat there until months later (three weeks ago), I finally started upon it and became so entrenched that the final volume, The System of The World, was purchased and devoured in a few red-eyed nights of marvellous sleeplessness.
It is, however, a hard series to recommend as it takes so long to get wound up in the world - I estimate that it is around the 1000th page, somewhere in the beginning of The Confusion, that the story starts to kick in. For this reason, anyone I recommend it to may end up beating me up if they make such a magnificent investment of time without the deliciousness taking hold. One should probably go and read Cryptonomicon as an entree to the series - it is to The Baroque Cycle as The Hobbit is to Lord of The Rings.
P.S. Go do that.
My apologies to anyone being hassled by the feed - I recently switched to using Feedburner, and while everything seems hunky-dory and old users are getting redirected correctly, some weirdness remains. If you just got jammed with a summarised post rather than full-text, then hopefully that should be fixed now.
In related news, at the same time I finally stopped using Outlook, I stopped using Newsgator and swapped to bloglines fulltime for my feed-reading fix; the combo of gmail and bloglines is working out great, although I do remember that the only reason I ever used Outlook was for its calendar and addressbook for syncing with my mobile, and now I have neither of those things. Doh.
For the longest time I couldn't figure out why Trip, which used to load instantly, was taking almost a second to load, making it totally useless. I tried many many things (mostly recompiling with combinations of switches I'd never heard of), until I finally realised, not 10 minutes ago, that the common item between the computers upon which it is slow is the presence of a virus scanner.
After some testing, it appears that the scanners (AVG and whatever the Symantec one is) scan Trip each and every time it's run, causing all sorts of bothersome delays. So if you're experiencing troubles, try turning virus scanning off for just the Trip file (if possible).
There's still a slightly odd bug where Trip randomly likes to take 10 seconds to start up. Suggestions appreciated.
I've also uploaded a new version to the Trip homepage, the only difference is that it's now static-linked, so it shouldn't require MSVCRT71.dll. EXCITING STUFF!
UPDATE: I have tracked the problem to MS Anti Spyware, although other 'realtime' spyware/virus scanners may also cause delays:
Microsoft antispyware's security agent causes intolerable delays to Trip's startup time, making it mostly useless - deactivating the agents one by one does not help - you have to disable all of them via the tray menu's 'Security Agents Status > Disable' option...
While we're on the subject of JS and speediness, quirksmode has a great article on comparative speeds of innerHTML and DOM methods in regards to creating new content on all modern browsers.
Quirksmode's test hits pretty close to home as it simulates a situation that is the biggest source of performance issues in Sproutliner (the creation of a single large table). The article's conclusion is that innerHTML is a whole lot faster, which thankfully somewhat validates the current use of innerHTML to create all elements in Sproutliner.
The article also compares two methods of using innerHTML, the results of which are consistent across all browsers and just a little bit suprising.
In writing megs and megs of JS, you often come to a junction of two ways of doing things, and wonder 'mm, which is faster?'. For example - lookup tables vs recalcuating the desired value; we're taught that lookup tables are the right way to do things, but how can we be sure? JS is so high-level that all sorts of inefficiencies may exist, and for very large lookup tables, the increased load time may not be worth it.
Well, this is what Jeff Greenburg's JavaScript Optimization Guide addresses, and despite the fact that it's getting on a bit (Mozilla/FireFox is much much faster these days), it's still a required read for anyone into this sort of thing.
Further, if you feel like benchmarking your own JS functions, bodytag has a JS Benchmarker, built just for that purpose (well, that's not entirely true - originally I just wanted to see if i^2 was faster than i*i, but things sort of went out of hand).
Of course, given that he works on the product responsible for this blog, who can say what's tru3@1@!2.. Aaron is the bee's knees and I submit to his mighty hallway jousting skills!
It apparently gets otherwise smart people very riled up to learn that I still use an Internet Explorer shell as my primary browser, so here is my defense and explanation.
In the screenshot above, you see the top-left corner of my desktop - it establishes a simple hierarchy that moves diagonally (with a bit of wiggling) from top left to bottom right - Application Launcher > Application Chooser (taskbar) > Web App Chooser. Laid out as it is, the app list in the taskbar is far more expandable and useful than the default bottom-aligned taskbar, however it is the 'Web App Chooser' that is the most important, and is the core feature of the amazing iRider browser.
iRider is a tabbed browser, but tabs in iRider have two important properties - they can be pinned, and they are hierarchical. As an example of the former, see the slashdot, gmail and bloglines tabs - they are pinned, and will remain there even if I close iRider or drag-close all tabs (more on this later) - this is essential given that apps like gmail and bloglines are just as (or more) important to me as desktop apps, and I need them readily accessed at any time.
The heirarchical nature of the tabs can be seen below in the 'Cheese - Wikipedia' section - from here you can see that I've started reading the 'Cheese' entry, and have opened tabs for 'pasteurization' and 'home cheesemaking', and from there have dug deeper - the tree of tabs lets me know how each tab relates to the others, allowing me to maintain a tree of thought and to quickly switch contexts with minimal confusion and impact.
Opening multiple tabs at once from a page is a matter of selecting the text in the page that contains the links, and pressing the 'surf-ahead' button (normally right-mouse, but middle-mouse for me so as not to interfere with StrokeIt). This feature is especially handy for opening every image in one section of an online image gallery. Closing off or pinning a 'train of thought' is similarly easy - just click on the little 'x' or 'o', and drag upwards to close/pin as many windows as you want at once.
Once I got used to these features of iRider, I found that no matter how much I tried, I could never make FireFox my primary browser. I've stated that as soon as someone makes a FireFox extension that does it, I'll switch, but so far I've tried the various tab plugins, but they lamentably never came close. Perhaps I should do it to learn more about FF extension creation.
Of less import, below the apps in the taskbar, you can see a webpage I created and added to the taskbar that screenscrapes a few news and weather sources every 15 minutes and presents them in a format I like. It's not normally that high, giving more room for the app list, but I put it up there for the sake of the screenshot. It's a recent addition, and I'm currently testing various styles and types of information (eg latest forum post headlines), it's all very interesting trying to make things sit on the edge of cognition without interruption. Perhaps I should look further into the Longhorn Sidebar research that went on before the sidebar was scrapped.
FWIW, I ran into iRider a long time ago in this post on Scoble's weblog, which mentioned that one of the guys on the IE team really liked it, so I gave it a bash, didn't like it, then eventually gave it a longer and more thought-out go, after which I bought it and have never looked back.
Soon up: Fitts' Law, Dragging, and how they relate to the positioning of my desktop windows.
SproutLiner now supports direct linking - simply go to http://sproutliner.com/lists/[listname]. Like going in through the input field, if the outline you've specified doesn't exist, it'll create it automagically when you go to the page.
Next up, password protection and notes.
In terms of time, money and rampant fanaticism, Nine Inch Nails rates as my favourite band, ever. My first exposure was a blind purchase of 'The Downward Spiral' as I'd heard that this band with the funny name would be responsible for the audio in the then yet-to-be-released Quake. Within a week of first loading it into my discman, I had bought all albums I could lay my hands on.
Unfortunately, it was a long time between album releases, and by the time 'The Fragile' was released, NIN and I had moved in different directions - with a few exceptions, the slow, softer, pop-industrial songs never really struck a chord and it was only a bootleg copy of 'Closure' and the excellent 'And All That Could Have Been' DVD that kept me mildly interested in the latest Trent news.
Now we see the release of 'With Teeth', an album that sees a wide range of musical styles, and some suprising new vocals from Trent which stand out most in 'Only', and are hinted at in the 'The Hand That Feeds' single.
Unfortunately, I don't really like 'With Teeth' that much - it doesn't get the blood flowing - a lack of innovation, an abundance of repetitive screaming, and a strangely ever-changing intensity and tempo lead more to a sense of confusion than to the audio bliss we're used to from NIN. It's possible that some of these complaints are rendered void on the 5.1 DVD-A release, but I doubt it.
Not recommended.
As an aside, if you can, get the Japanese release, which has two half-decent bonus tracks that really deserve to be in the main album.
Unlike the extremely daft Ridge Racer, Wipeout Pure is a blessing, an amazing game that is somewhat marred by a lack of content.
I will admit that, being a PC owner, I only ever got to play the PC release of the original Wipeout; Wipeout 2097 refused to run, and Wipeout Fusion never made it past the PS2. However, the Wipeout 2097 soundtrack, won with a subscription to Hyper magazine, turned my life around - it gave me a love and appreciation of Electronic Music and alerted me to the existence of The Designers' Republic, an act that derailed my computer programming ways for a few years to pursue design.
So despite the fact that I never really played it much at all, Wipeout was a huge influence on my life, and when I purchased my PSP, I saw fit to trek all over California looking for a store who still had it on stock.
Loading the game is a somewhat tedious process of skipping over intro movies and 'press[ing] start to continue', but once you're in, you stay in - a variety of play modes, and a rather steep difficulty curve keep things interesting, though after coming from some of the bigger racing games, it does feel a little flat only having two unlockable ships and a handful of one-way tracks.
The racing itself is like Formula 1 Ballet - elegant and insanely fast. Success comes from smooth control and knowing the perfect racing line through corners and over the many boosts. Though (and I may be wrong) the game appears to cheat a little - on your first lap, the AI-controlled ships seem to have supercharged engines and all rapidly overtake you, forcing you to spend the rest of the race catching up.
Control with the D-pad works well, and although some users swear by the analogue controls, I found the nub useless for performing small course alterations on account of large amount of initial force required to overcome its static friction.
One small departure from most 'good' racing games comes from the speed of your ships and the massive acceleration and decceleration involved - you rarely get into furious neck and neck contests with other craft - more often than not, one of you is flying past the other at a rate of knots. It's not really a problem though, and helps conserve the flowing pace of the game.
Highly recommended.
It is worth noting that after a lengthy Alpha period, the Beta of Processing was recently released. Processing is a fantastic environment for graphical programming, and serves as a great introduction to Java. About a third of the pieces on bodytag were built using Processing.
A testament to its power and ease of use came when we needed to develop a pie-chart visualisation of site usage for a major corporate client - we tried many many commercial and free Flash and Java solutions, but most produced charts too ugly for us to associate with, and the others mysteriously refused to work on the client's particular workstation configurations. Close to throwing in the towel, I gave Processing (then Proce55ing) a bash, and within 10 minutes I had exactly what we needed - another 10 minutes and we had frills like rollover interactivity and audio.
For me personally, perhaps the most important aspect was that Processing gives you access to the raw pixel buffer for the screen, something that many languages like to abstract away behind a useless collection of drawing functions.
I've since moved on to doing a lot of artwork in C++, but Processing remains as an important part of my arsenal, and like Python, it fills me with pure 'coding joy' each time I use it. Highly Recommended.
After some time working on computer vision projects, most people get bored of using just one camera and decide to go for stereo-vision. Afterall, once you've gotten over the pain of getting a pixel array from your camera in your language of choice, how hard can it be to get arrays from multiple cameras?
UGH.
After ordering two of Creative's Live! Ultra webcams for their deliciously wide-angle lenses and tasty USB2 speeds, I found out that Creative's drivers don't allow the simultaneous use of multiple cameras. In fact, if you want to get input from multiple cameras you have two choices:
I suppose that this is my punishment for straying from Logitech (whose cameras I love) to Creative (whose past cameras have all sucked).
Update: In what may be a series, you can now read followup information on this.
Hello.
Well, a few people were prodding me to get this thing back, and I was starting to feel the urge to write again, since my writing skills have taken a bit of a beating recently, and in the past I had found that regular personal writing was the best cure for NOT WRITE GOODER ENGLISH.
Quick background: I started with the 'online journal' thing in about 1996, then stopped around 2002ish, and now I'm back. For the longest time I really didn't like the term 'blog', but now I'm over my youthful 'I was into it before it was cool' indignance and am doing a good job of pretending to be a grownup.
... Although now I notice that 'blog' isn't even in the Blogger spellchecker. Weird.
For the first half hour of Namco's Ridge Racer on the PSP, you gleefully wish all your mates were there to watch your most excellent powersliding skills - it seems you can do no wrong as you overtake even the beefiest of opponents through the tightest corners.
After an hour of this you start to notice certain weirdnesses sticking out at you, and finally, hoping against all hope that your suspicions are incorrect, you fly into a tight corner and powerslide in the wrong direction. Dismay hits as you watch the outer edge of the corner pass by your front bumper, your car mysteriously floating itself through the turn. Yes, as soon as you put your car into a powerslide, Ridge Racer blesses it with magical powers to see it pass through the toughest turns without a scratch. Sure, it's an arcade racer, but Ridge Racer makes Daytona look like Falcon 4.0.
There's still some fun to be had despite all this - the 3d engine does a decent job and there's a tonne of races and vehicles to unlock. It makes a nice diversion from Wipeout Pure, and you'll find yourself picking it up every now and again for very cheap thrills - Ridge Racer is entertaining, but in no-way satisfying.
