My second cousin, Brian Watson, visited today. I hadn't seen him in years, as he works for ICI out in Singapore. He assures me that "Singlish" is for real, and that Singaporeans really do finish all their sentences with "lah". Excellent.
Lies, damned lies, and dreadful puns
Via Slashdot's Freshmeat box and the Ruby-DOOM home page, I arrived at the website of veteran PC game development demigods, id software, and stumbled across this page from which I will quote verbatim:
Hovertank 3D (1991)
The first 3D PC game ever!
Lies! Outright lies! If someone fancies explaining quite how "Hovertank 3D" qualifies as any more 3D than, say, Stunt Car Racer (1989) or Elite (PC version 1987) then please, feel free to leave a comment.
Now, I'm as much of an id fanboy as the next long-time PC gamer - Doom was great, and Quake was even better. But that's no excuse for trying to rewrite videogame history! The guys at id need to keep their egos in check...
[00:00:33] * paul20 is now known as paul21
Gentlemen, insulate your ceilings.
War-driving, the practice of driving around an area with a laptop and wireless card in search of unsecured wireless networks, is officially passé. The latest craze for suitably loaded geeks is warflying!
PS I know it's unfashionable to steal links from Slashdot, but a number of my regular readers aren't Slashdot readers. So I'm providing a service, mm'kay?
e-tail Therapy
<@Urthworm> The optimal blog title is always a pun. You have a pun, so write an entry ;-)
How very true.
I just ordered an M Audio Ozone. What looks at first like an overpriced little MIDI controller for my sound module, actually doubles as a 24 bit / 96KHz USB audio interface, with a plethora of connections on the back and a microphone pre-amp. And it fits in a rucksack. Cool.
Why is this useful? Well, my laptop's present audio facilities comprise a generic AC97 cheapset (I just coined that) without so much as a line-in. Connected to the Ozone, it will become a viable platform for recording the piano, guitar and sound module, and hopefully, if the Ozone's latency is as low as promised, for experimenting with softsynths as well. And of course, the little keyboard is perfect for controlling the XV-2020 on stage. I need to acquire some rackmounting kit to play that game, though.
If I don't start churning out some decent music with all of this kit, I deserve shooting.
Remind me again how I was going to make a fortune overnight.
It is done. This afternoon, I filled out and handed in an innocuous peach-coloured A5 form that will consign me to a whole extra year studying the obscure branch of mathematics known as Computer Science. Erk. My revised year of graduation is 2006. Double erk. That's, like, the future, maaan. And all for an MEng instead of a BSc.
Said James, helpfully: "Is a masters in computer science even worth the paper it's printed on? ;-)" Well, I sure hope so. Time will inevitably tell.
Life-changing decisions aside, today was quite uneventful. I spent an uncharacteristic six hours on campus indulging my "core skills" - alternating between writing code in DCS and playing piano in the Music Centre. Specifically, I've been brushing up on sockets programming in Linux, a field I haven't touched in over a year, and as a side effect, refreshing my slightly shaky knowledge of essential terminal tools like vi and screen. Piano-wise, I'm gradually gaining the confidence to just play the damned thing without worrying about other humans wandering past and overhearing. It's strange. Put me on stage at a gig with my digital piano and I'm fine. Put me in a rehearsal room with either of my bands and I'm the same. But put me in an echoey room with an acoustic piano and let a load of fancy classical types maraud around outside with their sheet music and their Diplomas, and I'm too scared to play without the soft pedal depressed. Why? The fact that I'm literally making it up as I go along shouldn't necessitate quite such a furtive attitude in the presence of "proper" musicians, I'm sure.
On that note (ho-ho), I'm going back to the recording studio with The Stolen tomorrow, to finalise a few more of the five tracks that we laid down in a marathon seven day stint last month - an experience that I'm going to get around to writing about here sometime!
Before I go, I should also mention last Saturday's Radiohead experience at the Nottingham (Ice) Arena. I went expecting somewhat lesser greatness than the Shepherd's Bush Empire gig in May, and frankly, my expectations were met. A heavy bias towards their newer electronica tracks and the utter lack of "intimacy" provided by the stadium setting both detracted from my enjoyment of what was otherwise a solid performance. Pretty lights and big screens abounded (abond?) as one might expect at an event of such scale. The "nostril-cam" mounted on the microphone atop Thom's piano was particularly interesting.
Bye for now.
I've redesigned again. I was thoroughly sick of the old style, and I was looking for something to occupy me to avoid working on my Database Systems coursework. I'm fair pleased with the new look, but I'm sure it'll pass. I give it six weeks. And all I need to do now to make my site vaguely worthwhile again is rewrite dozens of pages of hideously out of date content! Maybe tomorrow.
Link of the hour: GARFIELD. It amuses. It's procedurally generated. It's practically indistinguishable from the real thing.
I've been recording a couple of things with my new sound module, like this short ambient track (Ogg, 1.15Mb). It was only ten minutes work, so it's not exactly groundbreaking, but opinions are most welcome.
Disconnectivity
That was a good waste of a few hours.
I drove to campus for the 12pm Data Communications and Networks lecture, but hit the becurs'd level crossing just as it was changing from amber to red, and chickened out of running the big metal barrier-flavoured gauntlet. (I would've made it if I'd just gone for it, as well.) So I sat there for fifteen minutes, then progressed to a campus where, thanks to yet another obscure conference type thing, parking was a rare and precious commodity.
All this made me late enough to decide to skip the lecture and "do something productive with the time instead". Equipped with trusty laptop, I headed up to Rootes bar where I thought I might perform much-needed updates to the BandSoc site. Wireless network connected, but no DHCP to speak of. Oh.
So I tried the library, a good ten minutes of busy pathways and staircases away. Same story. I plugged into one of the RJ45 wall sockets. No change.
Another walk, to that last bastion of working networks, DCS. Their "Experimental Laptop Network Connections" were indeed operational, but sadly were only allowing network access to DCS machines.
So I came home again, and here I am. Isn't it nice when things just work?
Game spaces
In these wacky times where a colossal 120Gb hard drive will cost you less than two PC games, I wonder just how different things are for Joe (PC) Gamer from, say, 1996. Back then, he might have had one hundredth of the disk space he has today - just 1.2Gb, yet each game occupied just a few dozen MB. Today's games demand 1GB, 2GB, or more - the drives may be 100 times larger, but so are the games we install on them. And after allowing room for Joe's tens of gigabytes of MP3s and DivX movies - unheard of seven years ago - he actually has room for far fewer games than he did in 1996.
And while I'm at it, what happened to the practice of installing a game's core files to the hard disk, while leaving level data, music and FMV to be streamed from the CD-ROM? The modern DVD-ROM drive is surely swift enough to cope far better with this kind of task. I guess that "back in the day" it was both an effective anti-piracy measure (CD burners were still >£200 and SCSI-only) and, with the limited size of hard drives, a practical necessity. Nowadays games, if they do use the CD to play, just nudge it on startup for copy protection. Developers see no point in making their own lives more complicated by leaving data on the disc-with-a-"c". For those of us who haven't quite got round to purchasing that second 80GB drive, though, it would be rather convenient.
Workshy
Just a quick hello entry, as work is eating most of my time and my inclination to use remaining time productively. I wish the office had air-con.
Cool(er) things:
Contiki - A multitasking OS for the C64 (and ported to other prehistoric platforms), complete with TCP/IP stack and web browser.
The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator - An age-old oft-quoted probability truism goes Java chic. Fun for at least a minute or two :-)
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