Looking Out To Sea

We are on our way to a Burns supper in Morningside this evening, though I feel unsure about the whole proceedings. 

Last year we went straight from a Sunday night roda to the Burns supper and generally felt great. Through some freak event I was the only fellow to wear a kilt and so was “volunteered” to give the toast to the lassies.

This year I feel much worse. I am not sure if this is medical problems, the effects of being back on a full dose of medication, work stress, the weather and travel, Helen’s studies or a grand mixtur of them all, but I will not be wearing a kilt this evening.

Out of the three capoeira classes since the beginning of the year I have missed two from injury. I need to feel more alive.

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote in this little box. My new job continues to form and my commute has been easier lately, since I’ve been getting a lift from a colleague who also lives in Edinburgh. I get back home in the evening much earlier, which is nice, though the start is still as early as ever (the alarm goes off at 5.30).

But I didn’t break this hiatus to talk about commuting, I promise. Last week was PyWeek, a twice-yearly programming challenge to write a computer game in the Python programming language. Nick was keen to give it a go, so between me, him and Mat we concocted an idea which was just interesting enough that it might be worth playing.

Due to some unforeseen problems we didn’t get much time to write code, so the game didn’t really come together in time for the deadline. I think, in fact, that the code was broken as zero-hour ticked over. Oh well.

Having started we decided to finish, so we all met on Monday night (for the first time since the challenge started…) and got large chunks of the game completed. It’s now playable, I think, though outrageously taxing and quite awkward for one person to play against themselves. The plan, then, is to iron out some of the kinks and see if we can pitch the difficulty at just the right level to make it addictive. Maybe we’ll get it transferred to an Android/iPhone app in the future?

I’ve known these guys for years but we’ve never actually sat down and written a program together for the fun of it. It was really interesting, especially since we were all basically learning Python from scratch for the purpose, and I was trying to remember what all this OO stuff is supposed to be about. Maybe we’ll tackle it again for the autumn PyWeek with a new game idea, more experience and maybe a bit more time scheduled to the task.

Right now I’m reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. It’s really enjoyable so far — whimsical and witty like a 19th-century The Princess Bride (not inconceivable). I’ve got a big ol’ pile of things to get through after that. I still have a book from my birthday in June and a bunch from Christmas too. I came away from last night’s book group with two more — Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili. I’d been swithering over this one until I noticed the author. He has produced some great science television so I thought his book might be worth it. And Under Milk Wood, a play I associate strongly with my father though I’ve never heard or read it. But I’ve been quoted it a lot!

I took along Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf but no-one was interested. I think a lot of people had book overload and weren’t taking new ones to read. We’re not having our next meeting until March so there will be plenty of time for people to finish the books they’ve got. Hopefully I can deplete my to-read pile slightly by then.

Had a go at Nick’s brand new copy of Arkham Horror last night. It’s a co-operative board game based around HP Lovercraft’s Cthulhu mythos, set in the New England town of Massachusetts and connected alien worlds.

I arrived at about 3pm. They’d already started laying out the board, sorting the pieces (more than 700…) and identifying the main game elements. We didn’t get started properly until Mat arrived which might have been about half an hour later. The same game was still going at 10.30 when I had to leave to catch the bus home. I learned on Facebook when I got home that the Ancient Ones had been defeated while I rode the bus home. So on a first attempt it appears the game took 6–7 hours to play.

Now I think you understand the scale and scope of the undertaking, we should look in more detail at how it works.

Interdimensional gates between Arkham and horrific other worlds open up at various spots around town. It’s your job to investigate these worlds by diving into the gates, and coming back to close the gates behind you. Oh yes, and killing all the monsters that flood through onto the streets of Arkham every time a gate opens.

This game plays like a regimented role-playing game, particularly battling monsters. Most things you do involve examining your own stats, examining the stats of your enemy, rolling dice for the numerical difference and seeing if you won/lost that bout. It’s quite a fast process to do when you get the hang of it, but because everything is stats-based it can be hard to remember which number gets subtracted from which number at each point.

(A detailed example. You are travelling the streets of Arkham and come across a monster. You’re on an errand and don’t want to dally so you attempt to sneak past. Roll N dice, where N is the difference between your Sneak and the monster’s Awareness. You’re aiming to throw a 5 or 6 to win. N will be large if you have a high Sneak value and your monster has a low Awareness, and the higher N is the more likely you’ll throw at least one 5 or 6. If you win, you can continue on your way. If you lose, receive damage for being caught unprepared while sneaking past, then proceed to do battle with the monster. First, test your mental fortitude: is this monster so horrific you go mad at the sight of it? As above, roll N dice where N is the difference between your Will and the monster’s Horror. Receive damage to your sanity if you lose. If you still retain your sanity, roll N dice where N is the difference between your Fight and its Combat rating. Many monsters have a toughness rating greater than one, and that’s the number of successful rolls you need to throw in order to kill it. If the number of dice you can throw is less than its toughness rating there is no way you can win this fight. Run away!)

The basic mechanism is quite straight-forward but the number of modifiers, special-cases and special adapted rules quickly spirals out of control.

The complexity of the rules is made so much worse by the awful manual which describes them. It’s 24 pages long and is terrible. It introduces terms which it makes no reasonable attempt to define, has an incomplete index, introduces descriptions out of order and sometimes omits them altogether. Sometimes whole paragraphs are devoted to making simple scenarios more complex, less transparent and altogether harder to follow. We wasted so much time hunting backwards and forwards through the book looking for “what to do in event of…” and eventually gave up. We probably accidentally omitted about 20% of the rules just because they’re not introduced in any sensible order. It seems altogether unlikely that we would win the game on the first attempt, doesn’t it?

But for all my complaints — and there are many — the game itself seemed powerful and worth investing time in. Once the rules are internalised (or easy to research: there are manuals written by fans available online) it should be easier to gather some momentum. In the last hour or so of play we seemed to move through the steps faster and with more fluidity, although there’s a good chance that’s because we all wanted the damn thing to finish.

If anyone does sit down for a game of this I have a couple recommendations: start earlier than you’re thinking and get more table space than you think you’ll need.

I’ve set up an account on BitBucket and published the initial commits into a Thud repository. Mat’s also joined up so hopefully we can get this project ticking along nicely with some good changes. Also some testing, which it is currently lacking. I’ll have to look into whatever unit test frameworks are used in the C# world. (I’ve just started contributing to Banshee too, so I hope to take some of the practices from that larger project and try my hand at them on Thud.)

Most of what I’ve done to Thud so far is just importing the old code into Mercurial and uploading it to the BitBucket servers. Since the original code is all Mat’s my first problem was learning how to commit code in someone else’s name. Thankfully that wasn’t a difficult problem:

$ hg commit --user "A N Other <another@example.com"

Visual Studio and MonoDevelop both spew auto-generated files around your project directory and I’m not sure what most of them do. I tried not to include anything that wasn’t too much like source code, but it’s still possible I’ve included useless extras or omitted something that is needed for building the project. So that’ll be another learning curve where I must patch in necessary files.

The only new code I have added cleans up the logic used when moving pieces on the board. There are still plenty more changes to be made, especially to improve testability, and I’ve started storing these in the bug tracker. Having a bug tracker is quite cool. :-)

During this period of tedious and unfruitful job applications I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m either a horrible person on paper (I refuse to believe I’m a horrible person in real life) or I need more experience in the object-oriented managed-runtime languages. To wit, Java and C#.

The Java language has failed to get its act together in the last few years and, at least on paper, I have some experience with it since all my university work used Java. (I’m also watching Nick’s updates to remind myself. An RSS feed attached to his bitbucket account makes him dead easy to stalk learn from.) So I thought I’d get myself some experience in C#. I’ve nabbed a project that Mat made a couple of years ago (a game of Thud! from the Terry Pratchett novel of the name, itself based on a Norse board game) and, with his permission, I’m going to whip it into shape.

I know for a fact that it runs fine in Mono, since I knew that two years ago when he first knocked it out, and Mono has come on a long way since then. At the moment it doesn’t do very much and Mat admits that it isn’t great code on the inside either. That’s all fine by me though. I can familiarise myself with the code base by cleaning it up before I decide where the new features need to go.

I hope to keep this and ComicBake going alongside each other, since there are a number of differences besides the subject matter:

1. Thud! doesn’t have to think much for itself. The program pits two users against each other across the network, so there’s no AI involved. The set of valid moves is very small so the game logic is not tricky. ComicBake, on the other hand, is me trying to encode a set of heuristics to simulate what an artist would do in the same situation.
2. One is old-fashioned imperative code, in the object-oriented style. It’s fairly staid C# too, not using many of the recent innovations of the language which make it differ nowadays from Java. The other is obviously purely-functional Haskell: higher-order, expressively-typed and immutable.
3. I can update and release ComicBake when I like. I haven’t checked with Mat whether he’s happy for me to publish the code/changes or whether he wants it just “between friends”. It can just be a learning experience, though obviously it’s a better one if I can point potential employers to it and say look, I can code.

The title is a reference to this Daily WTF classic.

On Sunday night we were invited to a Hallowe’en party (and very nice it was too) with horror movies. When we arrived a film was on but the sound was down and there was music playing instead. We spent the rest of the evening watching a series of films without any sound, which was remarkable fun. To be clear, these were black-and-white horror B-movies such as The Killer Shrews (in the long tradition of horror movies it used dogs dressed in hairy coats to simulate the giant shrews, ineffectually). Guessing the plot and laughing at the effects was much more fun than following the story was ever going to be. I’ll have to remember that trick for future occasions.

The evening’s party playlist was also interesting because it seemed more-or-less random apart from the titles being each related in some way to horror. It’s great that we now have the technology to create random playlists by entering keywords into the computer, and get out the eclectic variety of Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), Born as Ghosts, the Rocky Horror Show soundtrack, Monster Mash and the Cranberries’ Zombie.

A year ago we were at a wedding in Glasgow. Six months ago we were at a wedding in Milngavie. Obviously I needed an excuse to get a haircut again so I neatly arranged for my aunt to get married on the May Day weekend — cunning, eh? — and we went down for a great weekend on the south coast of England. My aunt Pamela and her family live in a little town near Worthing, only five minutes walk from the sea. They’ve been together for nearly as long as I’ve been alive but clearly decided it was worth getting this marriage thing done at some point! Their daughter said lots of people were asking whether she was happy to no longer be a bastard, which is a strange question if ever there was one. Does bastardry get removed retroactively? :-)

Unusually I was the only person there in a kilt, which was strange but quite enjoyable. I assumed there would be at least one other Scotsman there but apparently not. Stranger, though, was how unusual it seemed — it’s like the other guests had never seen anyone in a kilt before. Lots of people asked us “so are you Scottish?”.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We flew down on Friday night from Glasgow because Helen was in class until 5pm. The train from Gatwick was easy though I couldn’t help being alarmed at the names of places we passed — are Lancing and Goring-by-Sea quaint villages or ways to die in battle? Pamela picked us up from the station and we stayed in their spare room for the duration of our visit.

On Saturday morning the house was transformed for the post-wedding reception. My mum and her other sisters and brother came in and everybody swept and mopped and made sandwiches and so on.

The ceremony at Worthing Registrar was in a fairly small modern room. The readings were lovely and the couple looked incredibly happy. Back at their house we drank champagne and the weather blessed us with a warm sunny afternoon. Stood in the garden talking nonsense to various people who wanted to know why I was wearing a kilt…

After the best man speech and the cutting of the cake and consumption of more sandwiches we all trooped out to a cafe on the beach front for a meal and live jazz and dancing. The food was excellent and the band really good too, and I think everyone really enjoyed themselves.

We left at the same time as my mum who was driving back to the cottage they had hired in Arundel. I don’t know why we departed at that point but realised when we got back to the house we were staying at that the people with the keys were still chatting back at the party. We sat on a bench near the front door in the darkness, drinking whisky from a hipflask and enjoying the silence. It’s such a strange quiet place: no traffic, no street lights. Just darkness and silence.

Next day we sat round the kitchen table in the conservatory while the rain lashed the windows. Mid-afternoon it had died down a bit so a bunch of us trooped out to a restored 18th century windmill which was really good if you’re a bit of a nerd like me, though the weather was crap for it. They didn’t have any wind-milled flour in the visitor centre shop because it had all sold out. They only mill once or twice a year but clearly we arrived at just the wrong point.

In the evening Helen and I took the train into Brighton to see some friends who were also in the area for a few days. We forgot/left behind our phones so had to wait around in the cold at the arranged meeting point wondering “is this how things were done before mobile phones?” and being a bit miserable. The rain had stopped but the wind was bitter. Some guy was skinny-dipping in the sea beside the pier and quickly turned from pink to blue when he came back out. Then his friends — loose term — proceeded to slap him with his leather belt while he tried to get dressed again with numb hands. I don’t think I’d be sticking my neck out to suggest alcohol was involved.

There was a restaurant that came recommended (“English’s”) but was full so went next door. I think this place was called The Gallery. Food was quite nice though we did end up with a green-dye-swirled meringue as the base of the Pavlova. We later discovered that there is a Brighton shop which sells meringues swirled with a variety of dyes, though why they chose the St Patrick’s Day meringue to build a Pavlova around is anyone’s guess. Eating was made difficult through laughing at the colour.

We spent Monday back in Brighton again with our baggage this time. Absurdly enough, Brighton, tourist town that it is, has decided that left luggage is the work of the devil and they’ve removed every trace of it from the public facilities. We know this for certain because we asked at the bus station, the train station and the travel centre. This curtailed our day as we couldn’t really wander comfortably around with several bags of luggage. We cut our losses and went to Gatwick early. Checked everything in and had a nice meal at Cafe Rouge in the secure area while watching the board for our gate to open.

We got back to Edinburgh on time but sat on the runway for a while because our berth was being occupied by an EasyJet flight that wasn’t moving. Don’t know why. We got in eventually, though I didn’t mind because I had my book with me. Aeroplanes are much more comfortable on the ground, without the noise and the juddering and the earache. It helped that the plane was mostly empty.

There should be some photos of all this to come but they’ve not been sifted and cropped yet. I’ll put up a post later on with photos when they’re ready.

A conversation over IM earlier today. I’m the guilty D in this exchange.

M: Then all you need is a sofa on wheels, and you can really travel in style.

D: I know where I can get one of them! Ssofa so good you might say, but how do I couch my idea in more marketable terms? I don’t want to lounge around all day, I want to chaise the big money!

M: Those were terrible.

D: You can’t deny the joy of punning — have a go, you ottoman.

M: You are a bad man.

D: It was all going so well, and then I just went and put my futon it.

M: I’m going to report you to the ‘Law and Order: Misuse of Puns’ division

D: Will they lock me up and take me away in divan?

Five minutes pass.

D: Oh no, I’ve killed him.

Last weekend Mat invited us round for an evening of bad — nay, terrible — movies, centred around his bargain purchase of Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus. We also saw a bit of Batman & Robin that was telly at the time, and I Know Who Killed Me, a horror movie.

Mega Shark really was as bad as we all imagined. The acting was just short of terrible, but the overall artistic vision was disastrous. It’s amazing how many “armed guards” there were in this movie, standing in the background in laboratories and offices, all wearing dark glasses despite the moody lighting.

I took particular enjoyment from the “science” scene, in which the marine biologists mixed arbitrary liquids in test tubes until they found that right combination that luminesced. (Don’t worry, it wasn’t all taxing science in the laboratory: there was time for a sex scene in the supply cupboard. Unusually, it’s legitimate to say that it was a necessary part of the plot.)

The shark and octopuses were a bit lacklustre. I was hoping for some old-school giant rubber tentacles reaching over boat decks and maybe some stop-motion or something. Instead we were treated to the same three clips of shark swimming, shark fighting octopus, octopus swimming, in various combinations. It was just like watching Saturday morning cartoons again.

The sizes and capabilities of the monsters are ludicrous to say the least. How fast does a shark have to be swimming when it leaves the water in order to overtake — and maul — a cruising 747? Answers on a postcard.

The title Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus doesn’t hide any aspect of the film from you. It’s exactly as you imagine. I Know Who Killed Me is another daft title but this one was apparently meant with all sincerity. Lindsay Lohan is abducted by a serial killer and then Lindsay Lohan turns up a few days later claiming to be a different Lindsay Lohan but bearing all the wounds which identify this particular serial killer.

This film wasn’t as bad as I expected. I don’t know if that’s because of drastically lowered expectations, or whether the elements of goodness shone through the rubbishness. Lohan did win two Golden Raspberry Awards for it, tying first and second place for Worst Actress, which I think is a bit harsh. She was far from the worst thing about this film.

Last night I saw a pilot for a modern version of the 80s classic Knight Rider. It was about as rubbish as you’d imagine, though the Hoff got a little cameo as the main dude’s absent father. And they ended on the original theme tune. But the rest of it was still crap. Reimagined, reworked and rebooted series can work very well — see Star Trek: TNG, Battlestar Galactica — but the real work is not done by the computer graphics people. You need good stories, believable plots, interesting characters! Wikipedia reveals that the series had one (shortened) season and was dropped. Hardly surprising.

I’m looking for more so-bad-it’s-good movies if you have something to recommend(!). Fixed in my mind is Battlefied Earth. Any others?