Looking Out To Sea

Three silly websites for you:

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

I “think” you’ll be “amused” by these photos of signs, advertisements and “serious” notices with excess punctuation.

Photoshop Disasters

Photoshop can be made to do amazing things in hands of a skilled artist. But skilled artists are expensive and won’t hang around doing DVD covers for straight-to-video slasher flicks forever, so these people made do with what they had. I nearly shot Fanta out of my nose while reading these…

Judge A Book By Its Cover

Laughing at dodgy book covers is a hobby in itself.

On Friday, Mat came round and we played Thud. As a means of exploring the territory, honest.

I’d asked him and a bunch of others if they could solve a trig problem I was having¹ which led to me explaining why I needed the answer, which led to Nick saying he’d like to get involved with this project too.

I’m writing a server-based game of Thud, so that Mat’s GUI client will have something to play against. Obviously big gobs of such a server is player AI for non-human players. Nick is the only one out of the three of us with genuine AI credentials, which will be helpful.

At the moment I’m throwing together simple heuristics as social potential fields and implementing them in the almost-bluntest way I can imagine. I haven’t got round to making a communication protocol yet, though it shouldn’t be difficult. The best step will be to look at how Mat’s client works, since the shorter the distance between the semantics of my protocol and his the better.

Naturally we’re going to have some hardcore language-advocacy arguments — my implementation is Haskell, Mat’s is C# and Nick wants to write in Java to play with a 3D framework he’s got his eye on. All in good spirits, of course. ;-)

If this comes to fruition in any way (I honestly don’t know how keen the other guys are, or how much free time they have for such things) it should be good fun. Solitary programming is enjoyable, but collectively working towards some goal provides an extra level of challenge and satisfaction.

Last night we were out at [our friend Chris’s birthday party] [chris], with the theme of Board Games. Helen and I decided do go as Guess Who? with a bag full of disguises.

[chris]:

Inevitably we didn’t start preparations until quite late in the day. We got some fake fur from Sarah, for facial hair, but didn’t have anything to stick it with. She suggested tit tape — alas, ten past six on a Saturday is the wrong time to shop for such things.

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Went for a wander down to Stockbridge via the Water of Leith yesterday, and got caught in the rain while we were out. Thankfully we were both wearing spring-weather clothes and the rain was quite light.

We ended up in Avoca on a little side street, which was friendly and had excellent pub food. The steak ciabatta Helen had looked very tasty, and my chilli con carne was excellent, and the rice really fluffy too. Helen also had a sticky-toffee pudding which was very fluffy and oozing the volume of syrup Nigella would be proud of.

We met Sarah out there and she gave us some fake fur (more on that in a later post). It also turns out she didn’t realise we had a new flat, so that was pretty cool to have a chat about. We’ll need to get her round to our current flat for pudding some Sunday night, before we move away.

I’ve been fiddling with Mono lately, the free software implementation of the Microsoft .Net system. I say, fiddling, mostly just looking at. My good friend Matt wrote a network game of Thud! in C# for Windows. I was trying to get it working under Linux.

I’m happy to say that migrating a Visual Studio project with MonoDevelop worked flawlessly for me. Then I just hit Build Project and it worked. The game is human-player only, so I wanted to write a rudimentary AI to play against. (I don’t really know how to play, so I think I could beat me fairly easily.)

Then I hit this bug in the Mono system which causes complete failure whenever you try to open a network connection — but only if your machine has a dynamic IP address. Yeah, I know…

I wanted to simplify the networking protocol (currently it’s the default .Net serialisation system, which is rather opaque). That will have to wait until I can play the game without crashing it.

This is a round-up of things that don’t deserve their own blog posts.

• My birthday seems to fall right in the middle of Homeopathy Awareness Week. The ignominy.

• Last week Rowan Williams appeared to have contracted Hovind’s disease, a condition common in the United State of America, with symptoms such as absurd mischaracterisation of biological theories. The speech took place on 17 March as the first of three lectures, Faith and Science, Faith and Politics and Faith and History. The official transcripts of these lectures have not appeared online yet. I still don’t know whether he’s merely a nutty man with bushy eyebrows or something even weirder.

• I’m re-reading Neuromancer for the Nth time and I’ve only just noticed that the Finn wears a tweed jacket. I don’t know how, but I always pictured him in a dishevelled wax jacket. Also, despite the nay-sayers, it’s still an awesome book.

• I’ve decided not to wait to get myself an Eee PC. The beefier one probably won’t appear until the end of the year and I can always upgrade if it seems worthwhile. Now I just need to find someone who has them in stock…

• If you’ve got some time to spare, and especially if you hated learning mathematics at school, you should read Lockhart’s Lament (PDF). It’s captivating, entertaining and educational — even funny! — not to mention an extremely accurate picture of what school maths was like. (Incidentally, if you search for lockhart's lament there is a lot of discussion, and in nearly all of them someone has pasted the same mini-critique about it being in a “historical vacuum”. It starts “As I see it, Paul Lockhart’s essay would be much more powerful if…”.)

• Our internet connection still seems well screwed up so I can’t access Delicious from home. So if anyone checks my saved links you’ll not find anything new. Sorry about that.

• Alien loves Predator has been updated for the first time in what feels like forever. Now when is Everybody Loves Eric Raymond going to take the hint and follow suit?

That’s all folks.

I must ramping the excitement up to fever pitch by now. You probably can’t take any more of this, right?

At the end of last week we received a payment demand from the surveyors, which we paid so that they would give their valuation to the building society. The building society phoned Helen today to say that they haven’t received it yet and could we hurry up and pay. Naturally we weren’t best impressed, as we’re now nearly halfway through another week and we’re still where we were last Thursday.

Phoned up the surveyors who admitted that they’d been talking crap and yes we had paid and yes they would get this information to the building society. Thanks guys, don’t feel we’re rushing you along here.

One thing is that the building society seem convinced we are getting the keys on 23 May. We have heard this date rumoured elsewhere, but no-one has explicitly said that this is it. How come everyone else seems so sure but us?