Disco Robot Teleporter

The coursework specification for my Computer Animation module reads:

"Model and animate something you believe will exist in 2050"

Could you ask for anything better?

I combined three of my favourite words, a lot of spotlights and various other fun effects into the following:

Disco Robot Teleporter


There was a proper disco dancefloor underneath all that at one point, you can see an awful quality initial preview of it here - I'm not sure where that went in the final rendering, but as it took a day to render what I have, I'm not going to bother re-doing it.

Also, here's what the teleporter originally looked like - I couldn't get the fancy particles into the final rendering either:



Enjoy.
Xx

PS: I made it all in Blender, and it's a Blender Render. Grab me if you want more techie details.

Fun With Games

Faced with the choice of taking Immersive Environments and Games Design paired with Computer Animation - or Geographic Information Systems and Data Mining I tried, I really did, to pick the sensible options where I'd actually learn useful, re-usable skills for my future employability.

Alas, I failed, and I'm now spending half of my teaching hours playing with various games engines and 3D models. I'm not entirely sure what, if anything, I'm learning - but it's fabulous fun and mostly coursework based (which I thought was great, until I realised how much more work I've got left for my Final Year Project).

Here's some samples of the fun:

1. An Unreal level

No, not one of the exciting kind of Unreal, like Unreal Tournament - but just the physics and graphics engine. Oh well, I still made a fun little 'puzzler' out of it - and managed to submit the coursework with 13 minutes to spare. Let me know if you want a copy of the map (the runtime's free to download) - and here's some screenshots for now.


<sub>It has flames and noises and smoke and everything in game ^^


This holds a big glass ball, eventually - looks quite cool empty though I think.


Stained Glass; technically impressive, visually quite nice too.


The great outdoors.



Holes in the walls o.O


Another arty angle.</sub>

Also, if anyone cares, there's a step-by-step guide to how I made the level, that I submitted as part of my coursework, available here (yes I know one of the links there is dead, you'll work it out though, you're clever people).

2. Pacman 3D

The end of today's lab class simply stated 'Create a PacMan-like game'. I always wondered what PacMan would be like if he was actually a sphere, rather than a circle, and obeyed the laws of physics, bouncing off and around things. Now I have my answer; rubbish.


_{Yes, the graphics are rubbish - but I did knock the whole thing together in 30 minutes.}

3. Pumpkin

I was quite bemused when we were asked to create a small game whereby a pumpkin (complete with flickering candle innards) bounced around, opened a door and jumped off the end of the world. I had endless fun setting up the pumpkin to be smashed miles into the air by the force of the opening door though:

Trading

Amongst many procrastinations, trips to the pub and baths I've been working surprisingly hard on my Final Year Project of late; a Christmas idly spent will encourage guilt that way. I've changed from a civil violence scenario investigating artificial intelligence, through a multi-agent approach to an investigation into trust and reputation in an e-commerce scenario.

Don't Panic.

Let's explain..

Imagine, eBay. You want to buy yourself some electronic gadget. Everyone, co-incidentally, happens to be charging the exact same amount for this gadget - but you still need to decide who to trade with. Here you'll be looking at the reputation of users - as shown through eBay's central reputation system.

Now imagine Craigslist, GumTree, et al. There's no central rating system, instead you need to get at someone's reputation through a distributed set of other users. You'll likely ask people how trustworthy another user is.

My investigation is into which model works better, based on a variety of factors. For example, changing behaviours, communication trustworthiness (see below) and 'noise' in the system (making it hard to see what's actually happening).

A problem that crops up with both of these scenarios is that of trust. Note that trust is your perception of how likely someone is to be good/bad at a specific task. How much can I trust eBay's central server? What if people have been feeding it bad information? What if I can't trust the people who are telling me about other users on Craigslist?

--

I'm doing research into all of this, and it's getting pretty fun. The maths, however, is giving me some headaches - I don't like to see equations taking up half a page and filled with Greek. I think I'm over most of those hurdles, and I've been offered the chance to get some funding to stay on at Uni over the summer and put this together into a proper research paper, for publication in one of the fancier journals in this area of Computer Science.

Exciting eh? IM me if you'd like more detail on any of it :)

Sokobina

I wrote a game!

You can download it here. You'll need Java installed in order to play it. If you don't know if you have Java, visit Sun's Do I have Java? page, and install it if necessary.

There shouldn't be any bugs left, but leave me a comment if there are. Also, please get in touch if you've made any cool custom levels, and send them across. You can find the levels you've made in the 'customlevels' folder that appears when you extract the game. Make sure you extract everything from the zip file before trying to play :)

There's a prize for the first person to beat every level. And yes, I do have a way of checking. If any of you CompSci folks manage to circumvent that then I suppose you deserve a prize anyway.


_{A screenshot from level 20}

Before you get too excited, I should point out that Sokobina is just another version of Sokoban (also known in English speaking countries as BoxWorld). I wasn't aware this genre was quite so popular though, when I started up I only had vague memories of a really cool Amiga game (this particular one had cavemen pushing rocks into holes, I believe).

I wrote it up myself for three reasons - to relive the fun of the game; to give some challenges to some friends I know like to solve puzzles and to work on my AI skills.

Only later did I find out that Sokoban, as a genre, is NP-HARD, and comparable to chess in the depth of the search trees you need to solve it with AI. In fact, Sokoban solvers have already been the subject of quite a bit of research, and for some harder levels, there are still no solvers that can do a decent job. I even found someone who wrote a solver for his Final Year Project - why didn't I think of that?!

I'm still working on an AI, which can then be used to find out if levels made via the creator are feasible or not. For now, there's just very trivial checking, so I'd recommend you play through your custom levels yourself (you can start a new game while the level editor is still open) to see if they're solvable before you email them to me or your friends :)

Let me know if anyone fancies dipping into the code and lending a hand, it's not too messy :)

--

Thanks for Forx for lending a hand with the graphics :)

Microsoft Student Technology Day

I've resumed my duties as a Microsoft Student Partner for this year, and the second treat* was an expenses-paid trip down to London for me and some friends for a series of technology talks from a few folks from Microsoft, including the CEO himself, Steve Ballmer.

The whole shindig was in Festival Hall, and started off with the CEO of Huddle.net giving some advice on how to start and run your own little start-up company, drawing on his experiences from starting Huddle. There were some really useful tips about how to deal with venture capitalists, how to get funding in general and how to get help and support from various groups, one of which I can personally vouch for - Minibar London.

Next up was 'The Science Behind Live Search'. Unfortunately, we didn't actually get to see much science, but saw lots of cool usage trend graphs - bit scary to see how much you're monitored as you search away. Also interesting to note that 40% of searches end in failure, 50% of searches are just repeats of something that person has looked for before and that enough people actually use Live Search to be able to gather reliable statistics like these ;)



The third talk was the reason I turned up - Artificial Intelligence by Microsoft Research. Given that my final year project's going to have a bunch of that stuff in it, it was great to see it explained, and the various formulae put into context. Cool presentation too - mostly based around computer games.



Next was Steve Ballmer...and if you've never seen him present then:

a) Find a YouTube video
b) Find a YouTube video

Seriously, the guy is hilarious. 'Exuberant' doesn't come close to describing his style. He also had some very interesting stuff to say about the future of technology, and really knew his stuff well.

We rounded off the day with a presentation from my old colleague Paolo, who got to show off the trendy Surface, which even has a programmable API and emulator that'll be released to the public soon. Sweet.

Edit: Found a video of a bit of Paolo's talk:



Get in touch if you want any more detail on the above, or some contacts to talk about this stuff with :)

--

*_{The first treat was a nice shoulder bag filled with goodies and software...and four RJ11-RJ11 adapters. Note that that reads 'adapter' not 'extension'. If anyone can think of a use for a RJ11-RJ11 adapter, let me know.}

Use Notepad++

Do Not Use Microsoft Notepad.



Folks over on UNIX have a range of good Notepad tools - from KATE through to Emacs, but even those barely compare to my favourite little Windows tool. Presenting...

Notepad++

"Notepad++ is a free (free as in "free speech", but also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement, which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment."

_{Click to embiggen.}

Before I get a bit geeky, let me assure you that Notepad++ isn't some over-the-top tool for programmers alone, it's also just a great, handy little notepad. It comes with tabs (just like those in your web browser of choice), and handy little features like the 'find and replace in all open documents' one, that makes changing the same thing lots of times a doddle.

Even better, it has a vast range of languages supported with syntax highlighting. So, just open up a HTML file in Notepad++ and all of the tags will be one colour, all the strings another colour, all the comments a bit smaller and another colour...you get the idea.

It also has a good concept of nesting. If you have an XML style list, with elements inside other elements, you can click on a little '+/-' to hide all the elements you don't want to see - ideal for working with big chunks of XML or HTML.

There's loads more too - go try it out. You can thank me later :)

Imagine Cup 2008

Having paid a short visit to the finals of the Imagine Cup 2008 - as well as working across the office from the folks organising the UK's contribution to the whole shindig for the year, I thought I'd share a few of the more interesting entries I came across in this annual student technology competition, with a 2008 theme of 'Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment'.

Project SOAK

Overall winners, and a group of thoroughly nice chaps, the team behind Project SOAK decided to have a crack at reducing some of the water wastage used in agriculture (70% of water used on the planet goes into agriculture, don'tcha know?).



A range of sensors, displays and automated irrigation/hydration systems ensure that water isn't just needlessly dumped on ground that doesn't have enough - and also ensures that dry areas get enough of the stuff, so that crops don't wither away and die. It even ties in with mapping software, weather reports and SMS (for those emergency reports). Pretty cool stuff.

AcidRain

Ah, the Irish - everyone loves the Irish. These chaps, I believe, showed so much dedication to their project and faith in their work that they could easily have won the overall prize.

Their project, AcidRain, consists of a 'one size fits all' conversion kit which can get any diesel engine running on just vegetable oil - better for the environment and certainly better for the pocket. They're using Windows CE for the whole system - and no, Windows crashing wasn't the reason a tow truck had to come out at one point during their journey.

Their journey, that is - from Ireland all the way down to Paris. In their own car, which they'd fitted with their vegetable oil system. Hardcore.


_{The journey}

Team Austria - Photography

All of the entries for the photography competition came up with some impressive stuff, but my personal favourites were the folks from Austria. I'd recommend you view Team Austria's Photos yourself, complete with obligatory environmentalist sublines. I can't pick a personal fave, but here's just one example of their work:



City Rain

Built by some absolutely crazy Brazilians, City Rain is a SimCity-esque game focused around urbanism and sustainability. There's a quick video below, or you can just download the game and have a quick play yourself.



TreeTalk

Team TreeTalk from Korea literally listen to trees. Seriously. Apparently the electrical impulses produced by a sick tree are different those produced by a healthy tree, and by feeding these impulses into an algorithm they've invented, they can tell the difference, and monitor the health of a forest remotely. Leet or what? I get how all the technology works - but how on earth did they find out that trees produce these impulses in the first place?

--

That's that, you might want to browse the main site for details of some other cool stuff that people have made. I'll possibly be entering next year with a cool little idea I've come up with, assuming I can fit it to the theme and find a team to build it with me (along with the time myself!) - more on that if I do get around to it - would rather not publish the idea right now.

PRINCESS

As part of my 'teach myself Perl' initiative, I've been knocking together a little game I made up one long car journey by the name of 'PRINCESS'. Just like in those puzzle magazines people used to take on trains before mp3 players and knives became popular, the aim is to get from one word to another, changing one letter at a time.

The twist in PRINCESS, is that you're playing against someone else. You'll be given a starting word (say, 'beat') and each of you will also have a secret target word ('princess' and 'frogs' maybe). You can change one letter at a time each (that is, change an existing letter, add any letter, or remove any letter), but you must make a real word on your go.

You can't use a word that's already been used, and you can pass on your go.

The two player version can be pretty fun (unless you're playing against my computer player, who always wins), as can the single player (I can get from 'beat' to 'princess' in 9 moves, can you beat that?).

I'm currently working on beefing up the speed of the computer player (he currently takes a fair amount of time once we get down to long words, but I suspect this issue may be due to Levenshtein rather than myself). I'll release the code once I'm done there.

The game's pretty fun, but the coolest thing so far has been allowing the computer to pick a random start and target word from the Scrabble 'TWL' dictionary. When it does this, games are often impossible, but I find myself playing again and again just to see random words.

My favourite so far is 'microgrooves'. I have to use that in a game of Scrabble sometime. I'd even get 50 points if I put 'grooves' onto the end of 'micro' for using up my letters ^^

--

An alternative version you can play in the car, by the way, is to pick a random starting move and then simply go around the group changing one thing. The loser is the first person who can't make a word.

No-one can say a word that's been said before, or a derivative of a word that's been said. So, you can't have 'shotguns' or 'shotgunned' if you've already had 'shotgun'. Feel free to argue about multiple meanings all you want for extra entertainment ('page' = piece of paper, 'paged' = received a text message, so it's not a derivative of 'page' - etc).

Ghost is also good fun, and requires nothing other than brains, ears and vocal cords.

Final Year Project Proposal

I've just submitted my proposal for my final year computer science project, entitled:

Centralised and Individualised Machine Learning in a Multi-Agent Simulation

Sounds cool eh? You can read the detailed proposal here.

The above isn't too technical a document, but if you're just too lazy to read it, here's a quick overview:

I'm going to create a virtual world, and fill it with 'people' that are capable of interacting with the environment and one another. I'm then going to give these people one of twenty of so 'personalities' that I've defined, to give the world a bit more flavour and sense of reality. These are my 'dumb' people.

I'm then going to introduce some 'intelligent' people that will originally know nothing other than how things are currently going, and how they want them to go. They'll use reinforcement learning (a type of machine learning/artificial intelligence) to get from A to B. These guys will then interact with the dumb people as they see fit.

Finally, I'll have some kind of 'chief' person that all the intelligent people will report back to. It'll therefore be the most intelligent person in the virtual world, and will be able to give advice/issue instructions to the intelligent people.

Read the next paragraph

The example I gave in the document is a super intelligent police chief, controlling intelligent police officers, looking after a dumb populace - but I'm not definitely going to go with that. So, any other suggestions of scenarios that I can put my three types of people into would be Extremely Welcome. Seriously guys.

Also, any other feedback, experiences in this field, technical advice, or links to useful documents/books/resources/code would also be appreciated.

Xx

Screw Google

I recently stumbled across the Google Treasure Hunt - a puzzle contest designed to test problem-solving skills in computer science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia.

I got my first question generated for me;

You are at the top left of 66x46 grid. You can move one position down or right at any time (ie: from {0,0} to {0,1} or to {1,0}. How many possible unique paths are there for you to reach the bottom right of the grid?

After half an hour or so, I had a brute force general solution for this, involving lots of iterations, lots of checking against previous results and lots of random numbers. It worked, and was accurate up to a grid of dimensions 8,8 (3432 solutions or so), at a speed of 1000 nodes/second.

Not really ideal.

I emailed the problem to a couple of maths lovers, and then continued trying to do things the computer science way. I've now got a lovely recursive algorithm to solve the problem - and it only takes up 11 lines of code! It can count at 1million results (not nodes) a second, and I've been trying to run it on the 66,46 grid ever since I wrote it.

The first time I managed to get an Int32 Overflow, as the answer's apparently over 4.3billion. The second time (with Int64 firmly in place - let's hope the answer's not bigger than 16,000,000,000,000,000,000) the counter reached about 6.5billion before Microsoft IT Corporate Policy decided my machine needed to be rebooted. The problem with a sexy 11 lines of code is that there's not really much saving of state to be had on reboot.

It's running away again now (205 million and counting), but that doesn't actually matter, because apparently Google decide to generate a new question every time you log in to the Google Challenge, and so I don't actually have the opportunity to answer this one! Instead I now have to mess around with filesystems...

Screw Google :(

Javascript in a Blogger post

I tried putting in some custom javascript into just a single Blogger post earlier, and simply couldn't understand why I couldn't get it working. It turns out I'd simply forgotten that Blogger, even in 'Edit HTML' mode automagically adds in <br /> tags for line breaks. As such, I ended up with the following when I went to 'view source':

<script language="javascript"> <br />
function toggleLayer( whichLayer ) <br />
{ var elem, vis; <br />
if( document.getElementById ) <br />
// this is the way the standards work <br />
elem = document.getElementById( whichLayer ); <br />
else if( document.all )

... and on. Not the best code I'm sure you'll agree. Hope this help anyone else with the same problem :)

Guitar Hero Geekery

Geeks like computer games.
Geeks like building stuff.
Geeks like writing software.
Geeks like retro computing.
Geeks like to win at everything.

Geeks like Guitar Hero.

Here's what happens when we put all of these together.

1. Slashbot
Slashbot is the creation of some engineering students from Texas, and is a fully mechanical solution to automating Guitar Hero. We've already got some solutions that just fire off signals to the game, having hacked the controller - but this bot just reads the notes from the screen, and then physically presses the buttons on the controller. Very cool stuff.


_{Cliffs of Dover. I'm almost this good..}

2. Shredz64
Shredz64 is about bringing the whole Guitar Hero experience to the Commodore 64. Click that link to watch a couple of videos, but this should give you an idea of what we're dealing with:



3. Lego Guitar Hero
Ever wanted a Lego Guitar Hero Controller? No - me neither. But it's still farking cool that someone's gone to the trouble of making one, and that it's fully functional and playable.


_{More pictures on the link above}

4. Finally...
No subject-specific geekery can ever be completed without answering the age-old question - Will It Blend?

Twitter - A Beginners' Guide

0: What is twitter?

Twitter, often called a 'micro-blogging' tool, is 2007's answer to social networking. Wherever you are, you can post short messages answering the question 'What are you doing right now', for others to view. Likewise, you can view what your friends and e-friends are doing too - or even use it for quickfire conversations.

I got into it quite a bit back when it launched, before losing interest as few of my friends would use it. I now have a few friends using it, so I've taken up the habit again, and I'm writing this guide in the hopes of getting a few more.


1: Getting started

Let's start with the basics :)

1.1: Register
The first thing you'll want to do is sign up for a Twitter account. It's a quick and painless process, and they won't sell your details to dubious 'adult entertainment' sites :)

1.2: Find your tweeting friends
Dancing With Myself was an 80's classic courtesy of Billy Idol, but Talking To Yourself is just a symptom of mental illness. Pop onto the Invitations page to find anyone in your Gmail/Hotmail/other address book already on Twitter and start 'following' them - or invite some more. Once you spread the word a bit more, other people will start following you, and you can then stalk watch them too.

1.3: Customise your Twitter page
Upon purchasing a new Role-Playing Game, any self respecting geek will spend the next 8 hours designing their character and picking a name for them. Likewise, I imagine you'll want to customise your page.


2: Set up your devices

Hard though this is for me to contemplate, but apparently Cool Stuff^TM can happen when you're away from a computer. Rather than just ringing a couple of your favourite people, why not tell the entire internet straight away?

2.1: Mobile Phone
On the devices page, you can configure your mobile phone to send and receive texts from Twitter. I personally just use the sending feature, as I got annoyed at being woken up at 3am to hear what people were drinking. Texts are just your standard network rate, and will count as freebies on any contract - and there's no charge to receive them.

2.2: Instant Messaging
Those enlightened few amongst you using GTalk or Jabber can add twitter@twitter.com to your friends and tweet directly from your IM client. The rest of you, just move along...nothing to see here.

You can even get other people's tweets sent to your IM client too - choosing which ones you want. Once again, set this up on the devices page.


3: Publish your Tweets elsewhere

Try though you might, you're going to end up with some friends who aren't geeks. They won't install one of the many Twitter readers, nor will they visit your Twitter page. But they do need to know what you're eating, and how it tastes. So let's get that important information a bit more in their face.

3.1: Facebook
There's a little Facebook app by the name of TwitterSync that can automatically synchronise your Facebook status with your Twitter updates. Unlike other Facebook apps, it won't ugly up your profile, and it's very slick, well featured and reliable. Highly recommended.

3.2: Windows Live Messenger
Twessenger is one of the few Windows Live Messenger add-ins you can currently play with, and it'll update your subline with your tweets. If you want to install it now, I'd pay close attention to the README.txt you get, as the interface is still only half-done from the Windows Live side. Works fine and safely for me though.

3.3: Your website or blog
Twitter Badges are customised so that with just a click or two you can have your Twitter feed on your Blogger blog, Live Space or other site. Alternatively, if you're the kind of guy or girl that likes to do things yourself, you can just use the RSS feed that your tweets generate.

As a final note, Twitt-Twoo should be your choice if you're on Wordpress.


5: Other random Twitter crap
Like every web 2.0 meme that exposes an API, Twitter has a million other applications which take advantage of it, or not - as the case may be.

5.1 Twitter/maps mashups
TwitterVision is a mashup of Google Maps and Twitter which shows you the most recent tweets worldwide, and where they were posted. It's a fascinating and time-consuming way to procrastinate, and an app in which you can lose yourself for hours at a stretch.

Some people have recommended GeoTwitter as an alternative, but I find it a bit clunky and ugly. TwitterVision's the way.

5.2: Rich Desktop Client (Windows or Mac)
twhirl is a gorgeous, flashy little desktop app built on the exciting new Adobe AIR platform. Super-powerful with multi-account support and online/offline support. If you've not tried AIR out yet, this is a good starter app.

5.3: Vista Gadget
Twadget - possibly the worst application to follow the Twitter app naming convention. Sounds more like something one could be arrested for in the middle ages. Useful if you're a Vista fan though.

5.4: Mac Widget
Twitterrific is your alternative if you've got a sexy little Mac and you haven't yet formatted it and put Vista on ;) Cool little Widget, and absolutely beautiful.

5.5: Outlook integration
Brought to you via OutTwit - not very good looking, but useful for those of you who live inside the world of Microsoft Outlook.

5.6: Firefox integration
The most popular Firefox plugin for Twitter is TwitterFox, which adds a little symbol in your status bar, which can then pop-up a textbox for updates. Personally though, I much prefer TwitterBar, which integrates slickly with your address bar, without getting in the way.

--

That's all folks, hope it helps - and feel free to start following me.

Xx

UpShot

Today I've spent most of the day in front of the TV, playing with XNA Game Studio 2.0. I've come up with a relatively fun upwards scrolling shooter, a bit reminiscent of Xenon II - and others of that genre.

One of the major failings of XNA is that it's bloody hard to actually share your game out to someone else - so I'm not going to bother with that until it's complete, but here's a screenshot:



As you can see, it's still somewhat a work in progress - although that's mostly aesthetic. I've got little numbers rather than healthbars, and random images grabbed from the web instead of actual texture for my ships, bullets and other such things. The bullets are in fact just the logo from Tie-Dye Heart.

The worst enemy in the game is the German at the moment. The French are weak cowards who hide as far away from the player as possible. There's more, but you get the idea ;)

It's even got some retro-sounding soundtrack that I put together using some free clips from BBC OneMusic which is frankly a superb service - and one I'm very impressed.

There's only a few 'levels' for now though, and the powerups are a little too...powerful. If you can stay alive for more than five minutes your bullets will take up half the screen and obliterate any enemy nearby. Still though, fun to play and fun to make.

[citation needed]

I was happily looking around Wikipedia a bit, trying to find the name of a certain chap from Greek legend for an XNA game I'm writing (Bellerophon was the fellow I was looking for, by the way) - when a little something caught my attention in the article on Pegasus:

"On the last day of his life, when Zeus transformed him into a constellation, a single feather fell to the earth near the city of Tarsus.^{[citation needed]}"

Now, asking for substantiated references for events that the Greeks weren't even too sure about seems a bit harsh - but if that's the done thing...I thought I might join in.

The articles on Jesus were very carefully worded (all 'the Bible says' and 'according to Luke') so I couldn't have much fun there. I was tempted to edit certain other pages - such as publishing this preview:


_{Click to embiggen}

Eventually, the temptation to vandalism faded - but I decided to go and look at some other examples. If you fancy watching some hilarious arguments online, then I'd recommend looking up the 'history' and 'talk' pages of various controversial Wikipedia articles. Chuck Norris for example.

There's also days worth of entertainment around the Mudkip(z) meme. Highly, highly recommended reading.

Comment Emailing & Bonus Comic!

After much hacking around with PHP I've finally accomplished the trivial task of having an email sent out to the team when a comment is posted over on Tie-Dye Heart. So, now you've got no excuse for not leaving the odd comment whenever something tickles you or gives rise to a thought.

It was, as I've said, a trivial task, but due to various issues it took me a while, and as such I've written up a little guide on ComicCMS for anyone else out there using ComicCMS who wants to get comments and emailing working.

I also put up a little bonus comic, Critical Mass on Tie-Dye Heart to celebrate, which I'm sure the artists will kill me for once they see it (the reason they do the drawing, not me, is all too obvious) - but I didn't want to waste their time with something so trivial as drawing a graph.

Enjoy, comment, smile :)

More signal, less noise

When I'm not in sweet, sweet bed, I tend to live in one of two places - the Internet or Outside. It's always been a bit of a toss-up as to whether I should qualify things with 'IRL' and have people assume I'm talking about the Internet otherwise, or whether I should say 'online..' and have people think I'm talking about 'the outside' unless I say otherwise. This applies to conversations via any medium.

The introduction of #xkcd-signal however, has clarified all of that for me. Unless I explicitly state otherwise, anything I say refers to my life online, from now on. I've been drawn back into the clinging, soul-leeching world of IRC again by a simple, but absolutely brilliant concept.


_{I love XKCD}

The chat channel #xkcd-signal is governed by the almighty Robot9000 ["The most generic, unoriginal name for a bot that we could think of"], and the mission and purpose of that robot is to prevent decay in the signal to noise ratio.

To that effect, it will mute anyone who types a sentence which has ever been typed before in that channel.

They threw in the logs from another channel too, so there's now about 2million lines of conversation logged. Say anything which matches one of these lines, and you're muted for 4 seconds. Re-offend, and it's 16 seconds...and up and up and up. There is a decay too though, but anyone who gets a bit too ahead of themselves with "lol", ":)" or "hai guys" is likely to spend a few days in silence.

It's great fun to play chicken with (they're not a humble lot, I managed to get away with "Looks like I'm wrong") and you'd be amazed at how long a full conversation, with no cheating (adding in pointless words etc - do that and a live moderator will mute you) can go on without a single sentence repeated. The guy behind the idea thinks we could go on for a decade with no real problems.

Connection details, more background and reasoning can be found on the XKCD blag - highly worth a read (and not just for that post).

The whole thing, by the way, is written in perl, which is awesome. I've started learning it myself, and it's so cool to have, amongst other things, a postfix unless:

print "We have no bananas" unless $bananas;

Not quite as cool as lisp, but much more useful:


_{Clickety-click click click}

TechReady6 is over!

I'm finally home from Seattle, and just a little jet-lagged, but it's certainly been a week to remember. I've been out there attending TechReady, a Microsoft internal training conference, and I've had such a brilliant time.

As well as speaking to and hearing from lots of guys in various product teams (the ones who write Windows, Office, Visual Studio etc etc) I've also had a chance to meet loads of other evangelists from around the world - all of whom are also doing cool stuff and playing with great toys.

"Blog about the conference, don't blog about the content" was a guideline given out that I'm unfortunately going to stick to, but believe me when I say there's a hell of a lot of really cool new MS stuff coming out both soon, and longer term. Keep an eye out for some of the amazing stuff being announced at MIX08.

Also keep an eye out for some beautiful announcements coming from Adobe around that time-frame too. TechReady wasn't just about Microsoft technologies you see - we also need to know what's happening all over the industry if we're to do our jobs properly. As a result, I'm now a complete fan of Ruby and Adobe AIR too - can't wait to get some free time to start writing some code with those two. If you're into coding, buy me a drink sometime and I'll talk your ear off about those two :)

More posts to follow about various fun in Seattle, going to have a nap now I think, then resume trawling the pile of emails that built up in my absence. A teaser for now though...one of my draft posts is currently called 'Dancing on the tables' - and I've left space in there for a video...

Xx

A quick hello from Seattle

This trip in one word:

Unhealthy

I'm not sure I've eaten a single vegetable since I arrived here. I'm becoming swiftly addicted to American junk food. I spend the entire day (8-6!) sitting in sessions, watching cool people presenting about ultra-cool stuff. I then pop back to my hotel room for all of...fifteen minutes or so. After that it's time to go out for another inordinately unhealthy (but gorgeous) meal, and lots to drink.

I'm sure something happens after that too, but I have no idea what. Then it's back up at 7.30am to start the whole thing again. The only exercise I get is moving between bars, or walking from the hotel to the convention centre and back.

I choose to walk despite the fact that my hotel's one of the ones on the 'shuttle bus' route to the convention centre. Only the ones which are close enough to walk don't get a shuttle bus service. I'm so hardcore I walk it anyway - though it's such a dissapointment not being "so near the hotel that shuttle transport will not be provided and taxi fares will not be reimbursed" as you can clearly see below:



Picture taken from Live Maps' directions from the hotel to the convention center centre.

On the road again

Sporadic blogging on my part is generally due to one of two reasons - either I'm doing very little of interest, or I'm doing a whole lot of fun stuff.

This week, I'm happy to say, has been the latter. I've been filling in for someone on the Inspiration Tour - a set of three hour presentations to students, with the aim of getting them enthused about technology in general, and showing off a heap of cool Microsoft stuff along the way. I was around to present on all the cool stuff in Silverlight - though I also gave a hand with XNA, and then with general questions on .NET and anything else which came up.

Yesterday I had the fun of presenting to a couple of hundred folks at my own University (Aston) which was great. I resisted drawing the New Aston Logo during a demo where I happen to say the line "obviously, you can see I'm not an artist in any way", as I was wearing my Microsoft hat, but it was very tempting. They've got the logo up outside the main building now too, and it looks simply horrible. I cried inside.

Things went pretty well there, people seemed to enjoy themselves and feedback scores were pretty high - with some nice comments left about me (apparently I 'captivate the audience', don't you know). However, they could have gone a lot better - because although I, and the other guy filling in, really knew our stuff, we hadn't presented it to students before - and I'd not really spent much time with the slide deck and demos I was using.


_{Some might question the merits of my 'standing in the centre of the audience' presenting style. But it gets results.}

Today, on the other hand, over at Brunel University, went superbly - everything was smooth and slick and polished and feedback scores were through the roof. The half hour for Q&A at the end over-ran and we managed to handle all the tricky and technical questions superbly, if I do say so myself. And if I don't say so myself, the feedback forms certainly do.

Newport tomorrow, for the same gig, and then I'm done with that forever - which is a bit dissapointing, but given that I'm writing this from the office, having just finished a 'day's work - I won't be sad to see the back of this and have enough time to keep up with my day job.

Oh and Friday? Off to Seattle for 10 days with work. Things might be a bit quiet around here whilst I'm out there, but I'm sure I'll spam you once I get back.

Xx