On the Blog

Favourite Things

2009-09-10T11:10:00.001+01:00

Downshifting V8s and opposite locking.
Gun oil and tyre smoke, Grindhouse flick shocking.
Femme fatales,
Katanas,
Bullet time,
Sin.
These are a few of my favourite things.

Spine

2009-05-11T10:59:00.003+01:00

"Barrichello may quit over Button", says the headline.

When did Formula One drivers morph from swash-buckling playboys into sulky school boys? Man-up, for fuck's sake. You should be snorting coke off a stripper's back in Monte Carlo not whingeing to a reporter.

First Flight

2009-05-02T22:34:00.007+01:00

I've been experimenting with Microsoft's game programming framework, XNA. It didn't really kick off until I found the free physics library, JigLibX.

JigLibX is brilliant and makes a lot of very difficult things very easy. I still need to get my head around 3D matrices, though, before some things will make any sense.

Here is where I am so far, though. The first seven seconds are pre-flight checks, BTW.

It's like Orville Wright and Igor Sikorsky were right here in the room, isn't it?

Next steps:-

Implement a chase view so it's easier to control. Control inputs are a bit ham-fisted at the moment and the current IdiotWithAHandyCam viewpoint makes it tricky to tweak.
Animate the rotor.
Write the rest of the game. (It will be like Defender, but in 3D, with flocking, stampeding critters and mutants for Jonny.)
Bung it on XBox Live.
Wait for the cheques from Microsoft to give the postman a hernia.

I knocked the chopper model up in Wings3D. If you're interested, here's a shot of it in Wing3D with its wires on:-

If you're not interested, here's two more:-

PovRay Organic Structures

2008-09-13T03:54:00.010+01:00

I had the idea a while ago to use the Conway's Life algorithm as a cheap way of generating some interesting looking 3D structures.

Conway's Game of Life is usually played out on a two dimensional grid upon which gliders, puffers and all manner of weird and wonderful "organisms" burst spotaneously into life and wriggle in strange attractive ways.

If you draw each successive generation at increasing altitudes, though, effectively mapping time to the third dimension, some interesting structures result.

By using some of Povray's party tricks, like blobs and layered textures, I can generate all kinds of weird and wonderful structures from alien landscapes to fields of cacti.

The blobs hide a lot of what is going on there and, looking at that image, it is impossible to see the link with Conway's Life at all, so here is exactly the same structure with more traditional boxes and much simpler texturing. The lighting sucks. Sorry.

With more appropriate textures, there are some cool sci-fi cityscapes to be found.

Early days, but encouraging stuff.

Of Feeds, Mashups and Podcasts

2008-06-27T15:30:00.009+01:00

After publishing the unofficial Lazlow News RSS feed, I've added a couple more feeds in a similar vein. Here is the complete list:-

The Lazlow News RSS Feed: All the latest news items scraped from the news page at Lazlow.com.

The Unofficial Lazlow Podcast: The latest episode of the Lazlow Show in podcast format.

The Top Gear Columns RSS Feed: Clarkson, Hammond and May all have regular newspaper columns that are also available as RSS feeds. This is a little mashup that merges them together into a single feed.

Chicken Grease

2008-06-27T14:34:00.009+01:00

My favourite writer-on-the-web, StavrosTheWonderChicken, is back on the blog after a hiatus of something like way-too-long.

"I have operated on a few simple principles for more than two decades now, with good success.
First, do no harm. Or as little as possible.
Second, do not suffer fools or Bad People. They will rob you of your life.
Third, make choices with an eye to minimize future regret. In other words, imagine you were on your deathbed looking back - live your life to make that old bastard as peaceful as possible about dying.
Fourth, learn and wander. We may or may not be hairless monkeys, but there is wisdom out there. It may be an evil world, but there is beauty. Find it.
There is no meaning -- in anything -- but what our minds create. To search for meaning is to make the same mistake as those who search for happiness : both meaning and happiness are mental constructs superimposed by your mind on top of the actual conditions of your life. Seeking them in externals will drive you mad if you're smart, or guarantee you failure if you're persistent."

If that isn't a manifesto for every pre-mid-life-crisis-philosophical-assassin-poet out there then, gods damn it, I don't know what is.

Peace, love and chicken grease

Double-click definitions

2008-06-23T16:34:00.004+01:00

A colleague recently pointed me to a neat little feature of the New York Times website. When reading an NYT article online, double click on any word in the body text and the site will pop up a window showing the glossary entry/definition for that word.

When you look to see how this is achieved, it's actually blindingly simple and, with a little monkey grease and Google's define: operator, possible to get it working on pretty much any other website.

If you want to have a go (and you have Greasemonkey installed) you can find the script here.

It's a bit quick-and-dirty, and might not play nice with your popup blocker but have a dabble and let me know what you think.

A Coercionary Tale

2008-05-20T16:31:00.005+01:00

My own latest honk if you love Borges (and Gibson) moment surfaced when a search for the accidental death of a DJ that never lived was interrupted by a rapper with a stolen book of rhyme.

Loc: "Relax, fool! No one's gettin' dumped on. I'm a warrior poet. I tell a coercionary tale about life on the streets, you know?"

I suppose it's more Malaprop than Borges, but I think he would have approved.

Lazlow News Feed

2008-05-12T15:22:00.008+01:00

I hate blogs without feeds. Whenever I run across a blog or blog-style site that I like, the first thing I do is hit the little orange icon to subscribe in Google Reader. I quite often unsubscribe very shortly thereafter, but that's another story. If a site doesn't have a feed, as a rule, I rarely return.

As with all good rules, though, there are the odd exceptions and one very odd exception is Lazlow.com.

If you have spent any time playing the Grand Theft Auto series of games (I am clinically addicted to the PS2 versions) then you might know Lazlow from a number of the in-game radio stations (he's the one that sounds like Kermit).

Lazlow has an occasionally smart and funny news page on his site; so occasionally smart and funny in fact, that I thought it should have an RSS feed and, in the absence of an official one, I rolled my own.

If you want to subscribe and stay up-to-date with Lazlow's news click here : The Lazlow News Feed

Liberty City News

2008-02-29T15:59:00.006+00:00

Bad news from "the worst city in America (again)" delivered straight to your iGoogle homepage.
It's bleak, it's largely inaccurate and almost exclusively funded by organised crime. Why get your news anywhere else?

Rockstar Games publish a widget that displays humourous fictional news stories from Liberty City, the setting for Grand Theft Auto 3, Liberty City Stories and the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV.

What you see above is a simple gadget that wraps Rockstar's widget so you can add it to your iGoogle homepage.

Note that you don't need my wrapper gadget to put Weazel News on your blog or website, it's just intended for iGoogle.

Still Gunning for the Buddha

2008-02-05T16:40:00.000+00:00

I just saw the Buddha in Chiswick,
waxing lyrical on nuclear physics.
I leveled my gun
and he started to run,
scratch one more fat dubious mystic.

Tao Te Ching Two

2008-02-01T15:43:00.000+00:00

You can add the Tao Te Ching gadget to your page now, by the way, by clicking the [+ Google] button just below the gadget. At least one person has viewed it after explicitly searching for "google gadget tao te ching" but they don't appear to have taken it any further.

It's always nice to know why, you know?

If you were searching for a gadget like this but it's not what you were expecting, please leave a comment or email to tell me what you thought. That way I can improve it.

One interesting piece of news: I have approached Ron Hogan for permission to use his modern interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. No reply yet but I'll keep you posted.

Tao Te Ching Gadget

2008-01-31T16:12:00.003+00:00

Anyone got any comments before I publish this in the gadget directory?

The version in this post shows a random chapter but the iGoogle version has an alternate mode that shows the chapters in sequence, one per day.

The Ravenous Teeth of Demons

2008-01-29T10:19:00.000+00:00

A short snippet from a short story I'm writing about a serial killer in the trenches of the Somme. Here our shell-shocked screw-up anti-hero slides into a flashback as he sits out a barrage.

Mortar and artillery fire burst constantly as he made his way forward, it's point of concentration seeming random, a dull thump-thump-thump in No Man's Land one moment, an ear splitting crash on the ground between the trenches the next. These closer strikes seemed to suck the breath from your lungs and then explode with a furious roar, filling the trench with a storm of grit and smashed timber. The captain shrank against the wall, crouching and curling into a foetal ball to shiver and wait for the giant to pass him over and go thundering back into No Man's Land.

He stands again in No Man's Land, knuckles white on sweaty rifle grips, his men ranked behind him, waiting to die. Shells whistle unseen overhead and burst, shaking the shattered ground, rending flesh and spirit with a furious anger. Onward they tread into the nightmare chatter of machine guns, the ravenous teeth of demons snatching young lives and dragging them away into the fog of war. Yet there he stands, anointed with some unwanted charm, a curse, to watch untouched as all around him fall.

Wanta Book Plug? Wannoshay Day.

2008-01-22T16:02:00.000+00:00

Time to drop some Blur and grab a beer, people. Seize the day and squeeze it 'til the itch goes away.

Today is Wannoshay day when the cognoscenti jam the Glock in the glovebox, pull over to the shoulder and give the Buddha a break (we know where to find him).

The Wannoshay Cycle by Michael Jasper...

...takes place in a world where terrorism has spread to America in the form of repeated bombings and violent attacks. Adding to the chaos and paranoia, three dozen alien ships crash-land in the middle of a blizzard, landing in the Midwest of America and Canada.

iSuggest lives again

2008-01-22T15:55:00.000+00:00

Google have disabled one way of specifying in-lined gadgets but there is another way.

I have updated the gadget in the directory and (hopefully) canceled the request for it to be removed.

Please allow a few hours for your caches to catch up.

Dubious Sage

2007-12-13T16:36:00.000+00:00

It might be down to the translation, but it looks like Niccolò Machiaveli had nothing on Lao Tse:-

Without Action
Not praising the worthy prevents contention,
Not esteeming the valuable prevents theft,
Not displaying the beautiful prevents desire.
In this manner the sage governs people:
Emptying their minds,
Filling their bellies,
Weakening their ambitions,
And strengthening their bones.
If people lack knowledge and desire
Then they can not act;
If no action is taken
Harmony remains.
- Lao Tse, "Tao Te Ching"

Pulp Taoism

2007-11-28T22:37:00.000+00:00

This is awesome.

A Tarantinoesque update of the Tao Te Ching.

If you can talk about it,
it ain't Tao.
If it has a name,
it's just another thing.

Tao doesn't have a name.
Names are for ordinary things.

Stop wanting stuff;
it keeps you from seeing what's real.
When you want stuff,
all you see are things.

Those two sentences
mean the same thing.
Figure them out,
and you've got it made.

I can hear Samuel L Jackson reading that as clear as day.

Benchmark

2007-11-16T11:06:00.000+00:00

Sometimes I feel like I'm getting old. But it just occurred to me that I know I'll be old when I no longer get xkcd.

I have a while longer yet.

One for the Gmail wishlist

2007-11-08T10:53:00.000+00:00

It probably applies to all email clients really, but today I wanted to send my sister a screenshot by email. That involves hitting Alt-PrtScrn, firing up XnView, importing from the clipboard, saving to disk and then attaching to an email message.

What I really want to be able to do is hit Alt-PrtScrn, open Gmail and click "Attach from Clipboard". Gmail will guess the Mime type and offer a link next to the attachment to change it if required. The level of client interaction required to have that much control over the clipboard is probably impossible without some kind of Java/Flash/Silverlight plug-in which I hate. Still, I can wish.

Xkcd. You do keep an eye on the ALT text, don't you?

2007-10-15T09:35:00.000+01:00

You have to let your mouse hover at xkcd for the full punchline.

iSuggest fixed again

2007-10-11T14:19:00.000+01:00

Google have again changed the way ac.js works. They are quite at liberty to do this because it's not supposed to be a public API but it ain't half a pain in the arse.

I've updated the gadget but it might take a few hours from the time on this blog entry for caches to expire.

Thanks to Fred for the heads-up.

Don't be evil?

2007-10-10T11:11:00.000+01:00

Google have swiped a patent from under the noses of Sun Microsystems. Sun's legal people are reviewing the patent before the company will make any comment.

Google nabs patent for Sun's Project Blackbox? | The Register

Isn't this just a teansy bit evil?

WryIronyInstanceFactory

2007-09-11T14:52:00.000+01:00

Steve Yegge often waxes heretical about the power of the noun in Javaland and madness that ensues when JavaNoun naming conventions dance with GoF design patterns. You can see the same thing in the way Martin Fowler names his bliki posts.

I like to imagine Fowler sitting down of an evening in his slippers, sipping Horlicks and chuckling under his breath as he devises new ways to wind Steve Yegge up.

ASCII Goggles

2007-09-11T10:46:00.000+01:00

William Gibson recently linked to some Russian ASCII Goggles, some VR type goggles that filter a live video feed of your view. What struck me most, though, was the headline itself -ASCII goggles.

ASCII goggles are like beer goggles but just for geeks.

When you sit fiddling with painstakingly adjusting the indentation of a function until it looks just right, you have your ASCII goggles on.
When you're in the zone, world tuned out, coding in a caffeine tunnel, you have your ASCII goggles on.