Rocky's Blog

I'm a font!

2012-02-01T10:32:00.000+08:00

I got bored...

I actually think my writing looks nicer as a font than it does hand written. Possibly it's the consistency, or possibly it's because I was a little more careful than usual and picked the nicer looking iterations of my letters.

This exercise also made me realise the extent to which my handwriting is really just a bastardised form of the Victorian Modern Cursive I learned in primary school. Specifically, with all the 'hooks' used for joining it up neatly sliced off. I remember that being a conscious decision at one point - I tried it without the hooks one time and thought it looked much neater, and I guess that thought sort of folded itself into my writing. This is probably why I still can't do joined up writing very well.

It also made me realise that my writing is a lot less neat than I think it is.

The Process
The first step was un-borrowing my graphics tablet from a friend. While it's possible to write them out on paper and scan them in, that would've made a fairly arduous process much more so, since a) my laptop doesn't work with the scanner, so I'd have to scan everything in one letter at a time on someone else's computer, and b) I would then have to trace, using a mouse, every single letter.

Next I fired up Inkscape (which, if you didn't already know, is a brilliant free vector graphics program) and set up what basically amount to the dotted thirds that primary school kids use to write on.

I did this for every single letter, upper and lower case, as well as the most important punctuation marks. When that's done, I imported them into a bit of software called FontForge, which is free and open source (like inkscape, and unlike the other option, which costs about $300). It looks like this:

It's a really powerful program, and not exactly noob-friendly, but the documentation is good, and I don't honestly need all that much from it. I get it to set up the metrics and basic kerning automatically (since I'm not really fussed about it) and tweak the sizing a bit, ignore the warnings it throws about my font not being standards-compliant, and export it, and install it.

If you too have nothing better to do you too can write in my writing, by downloading and installing the font file. For added kicks, set it as a system font, and watch my messy scrawl take over your title bars.

Alternatively, you could have a life.

Some Facts

2012-01-25T22:03:00.002+08:00

Here are some facts for you.

Fact #1
There are ants in my bedroom. My bedroom is on the second floor. The ants have walked across the yard, up my wall, through a tiny gap in my window. There isn't even any food in there. Why have they done this? I honestly don't know. But top marks for effort guys, just a sec while I grab the surface spray.

Fact #2
The average amount of time a member of our Steam group spends playing video games each fortnight is 23.7 hours. That means that each of us only really has six and a half days a week in which to meaningfully contribute to society. Or, if you look at it another way, it's approximately 7% of your life, or 26 days out of every year. That's almost all of February!

Fact #3
My computer is currently doing this:

And it's refusing all attempts at resuscitation.

Fact #4
Fact #3 is why Fact #2 is so bitter-sounding, because everyone is having fun without me.

Fact #5
Facts #2, #3, and #4 may be signs that I am experiencing withdrawal.

Fact #5
The presence of the word 'may' in the previous fact is a sign that that fact, is not, in fact, a fact, and is, in fact, an impostor. This fact is hereby promoted to the new Fact #5

Fact #6
Fact #7 is unrelated to the previous 6 facts (and impostor.)

Fact #7
Last Saturday was my first birthday in two years where I didn't have Hepatitis. I turned 19. I got a book and some t-shirts, and went out to dinner to a really nice Vietnamese place on Stirling highway.

Fact #8
I got bored on Monday, and catalogued all my books. All the books. ALL THE BOOKS. Look, see? Must validate obsessive behaviour with outside approval...

Fact #9
There is no Fact #9.

Fact #10
Fact #9 was a lie. Fact #9 was, in fact, "There is no Fact #9". Likewise, Fact #10 is "Fact #9 was a lie. Fact #9 was, in fact, "There is no Fact #9". Likewise, Fact #10 is ".

Fact #11
Fact #10 is recursive.

Fact #12
There is a Fact #9 There is a Fact #10, #11, and #12. There is, however, no Fact #13.

Crenelations are cool.

2012-01-17T10:22:00.000+08:00

If you play enough Minecraft (or depending on your definition of enough, too much Minecraft) you eventually develop certain architectural quirks. All of your buildings end up being variations on a theme. For example, if you are James, you build a gigantic elaborate palace and maze-like mine at bedrock level and decorate the entrance with giant dwarf statues made of diamond.

And if you're Morgan, you find the nearest mesa and hollow it out, and put a tree farm on top and a massive pit underneath, and then get bored and start building a gimmick like a giant dome or a giant farm or a giant glass-covered-valley.

And if you're me, you build a house which is predominantly above-ground (possibly even to the extent of flying), consistently smaller than any other house on the server (and often not even big enough to be practical), use absurd amounts of glass and put crenelations on top, because crenelations are cool.

And that's what we're going to talk about today, kids. Crenelations.

Crenelations, in case you didn't already know, are the patterns of up-and-down lumps which get built into the side of castles. They're also called by the much less interesting name of battlements. The actual lump is called a merlon, and the gap is called a crenel, and in the middle ages they were exceptionally useful for standing behind while people were shooting arrows at you, while still being able to duck out and take pot-shots of your own. They, along with most of the other features of castles, stopped being useful around the time gunpowder made its way to Europe in the 12th century, since although several inches of stone is great against arrows, it's not so great against cannonballs.

In Minecraft they're not quite so useful, because if other players wanted you dead they'd use dynamite, and skeletons are too useless to warrant a defensive structure purely for their benefit. Plus, if you make them starting at floor level they're too low to be useful, but if you make them starting from one up they're too impractical to shoot over. There are some workarounds using half-blocks, but essentially they're decorative. They make even a messy cobblestone pile look like a badass fortress. Observe:

Hideous pile.


Badass.

But, because of the way Minecraft blocks work, only certain sizes of buildings will crenelate neatly. Specifically, it needs to have an odd number of blocks on both sides, or else you'll have to put two blocks together or leave corners uncrenelated, which looks stupid. Because it's been a boring day and I feel like writing some code, I'm going to express this very simple maths in the form of some Python functions.

First, let's figure out whether your structure will crenelate neatly or not. This function, given two side lengths, will return true or false. Basically, it works by testing if the side length / 2 gives a remainder or not.

def crenelate(sidex, sidey):
    if sidex % 2 == 1 and sidey % 2 == 1:
        return True
    else:
        return False

Cool. Now, in the past I've made the mistake of designing a building based solely on the outside, when really it's the inside that counts. Aww. But seriously, that's why my current tower on the server looks fine on the outside, but is tiny on the inside, like some kind of anti-Tardis. Because a 5x5 building on the exterior is only 3x3 on the interior, which is basically as small as you can get while still being livable. So this function will give you the interior space of the building from the exterior.

def interior(sidex, sidey):
    dimensions = tuple(sidex - 2, sidey - 2)
    return dimensions

That's just stupidly simple, but whatever. Finally, just fo' fun, I'm going to work out how much material you need per level of the building. After an embarrassing amount of experimenting, because of the way sides share corners, each side needs one less block than their length. At least, that's the easiest way to think about it. And since we're talking about a rectangle, that'll be 2x + 2y - 4 every time, but by the time I'd figured that out, I'd already written the code below for 2(x-1) + 2(y-1), which works out to be the same anyway.

def materials(sidex, sidey):
perlevel = (sidex - 1) * 2 + (sidey -1) * 2
return perlevel

Then it's a pretty simple task to string it all together to spit out some output. Here's the finished script, you'll need Python installed on your system to use it. Or you could wait until I get bored next, and turn it into a webpage. WHO KNOWS.

And that? That concludes today's rant about crenelations.

Movies Wot I Have Seen Recently V: HAT TRICK'S REVENGE

2012-01-16T19:21:00.004+08:00

Last week, I went to three movies on three consecutive days. This is what I thought of them. May contain traces of spoilers and other nuts.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
I wasn't really sure what to expect here, since I hadn't seen the first one. Fortunately, after the first ten minutes or so there's no references to the first movie, and honestly it wasn't that difficult to pick up what was going on. As an action movie, it was excellent. Any scene with explosions or gunfights in it was really well put-together (especially the train scene, but maybe that's just because I'm a sucker for fights on trains.)

As a mystery though, it was a bit disappointing. Everyone knew from the start who the villain was and that he was planning something, and when they eventually found out it turned out to be pretty... whatever the opposite of diabolical is. Plus, while Robert Downey Jr. does a decent job, a lot of the time he ends up looking just plain crazy instead of crazy-but-brilliant.

Basically, I spent the whole movie wondering why I was watching this instead of the new season of the BBC's Sherlock, which is awesome.

Tintin
This was fantastic. Just watching the opening credits is enough to get your hopes up for this movie, and for once it doesn't disappoint. It's pretty much a classic Spielberg adventure movie, with some clever motion capture stuff layered on top to make everything look more stylised. I like that they decided not to go with an origin story like every superhero movie ever and instead let Tintin's character already exist. I really like the plot, which actually feels like a Tintin mystery (unlike Sherlock Holmes). I like that they avoided making Tintin the generic all-American boy hero - he has no problem with using guns and isn't totally confident all the time.

And what I really, really like is crane jousting. Seriously, that needs to be a thing.

The Muppets
George Lucas needs to watch this movie. Because if you're going to revive an old franchise in what's basically a cash grab, then you should at least have the balls to be self-aware about it. I seriously don't think the fourth wall lasted more than five minutes, and never passed up an opportunity to subvert a serious plot point for laughs. And it had some really catchy tunes.

We're probably not the main demographic though. Sure, a lot of the humour and celebrity cameos are funny to us to, but someone pointed out when we were leaving that we're basically between the two main groups, those being younger kids, and the people old enough to remember the show when it was on TV, who probably have said kids by now. Still enjoyed it though.

Highlight of the movie? The cameo they used for the 'human version' of the protagonist. Which I'm not going to ruin, 'cause you should really see it for yourself.

--

Having watched three adventure/mystery/hijinks movies in a row like that makes me wish that was something that happened in the real world. The world needs more diabolical criminal masterminds and consulting detectives and destitute sea captains and boy reporters and absurdly-clever dogs and sentient puppets and... okay, probably not more evil oil company chiefs.

The History of the Internet

2012-01-14T19:01:00.003+08:00

The internet, or Intercontinental Network, was a communications system which has its origins in a series of pneumatic tubes constructed in the late 1800s beneath the Atlantic ocean, as a cost-effective and reliable means of connecting the European telegraph system with that of the United States. The network is widely regarded as the first true global network.

Origins
The internet was commissioned in 1857, following an earlier inquiry by the US congress into “The Feasibility of Interconnecting the American and European Telegraphical Networks, with the Aim of Forthwith Facilitating Straightforward Inter-continental Communication and Commerce.” The newly created NSA, or National Signals Agency, was given the task of testing the project’s viability, and coming up with the required technologies.

NSA director at the time, Edgar Wright, was in favour of a direct approach, by simply laying regular copper telegraph wires along the seabed. This was to prove costly, due to the high cost of securing enough copper. Additionally, the wires were prone to breaking in strong seas, necessitating a shutdown of the entire network while the wires were reeled in and replaced. After several electrocutions caused by the massive amounts of current required, this approach was finally scrapped and an alternative put into place, creating the internet in its final form.

Technology
The system decided upon was described thus by head engineer Nicholas Frost:

“Telegrams intended for European destinations are sent to one of several sites along the eastern seaboard. Upon arrival, they are dumped directly to a bit of paper strip by trained operators - ‘routers’ . The messages are then packed into canisters, and sent through a pressurised subsea tube, and upon arriving in Europe, fed by hand back into the network.”

The system was praised as “efficient” and “ahead of its time”, and neatly circumvented both the voltage problem and the difficulty of translating from American Morse Standard Code into the Pegg System in use in Europe at the time, as messages could be relayed in human-readable form and re-encoded at the receiving end. The pipes were also significantly less prone to breaking, and could by the early 1900s could be ‘patched’ with submersibles.

Uses
While primarily used for routing telegrams, there were some experiments with other uses of the network. In 1899, American Express leased a tube, and experimented with sending banknotes and other financial documents directly rather than as electrical signal dumps. This achieved some limited success, but the service eventually proved unwieldy and was closed in 1905. Other attempts to send small cargo through the tubes was likewise unpopular, primarily because the 1-inch diameter tubes could not admit anything large or rigid enough to be worth risking the integrity of the tubes for. There was some discussion of opening other pipes for pneumatic cargo transfer, but these were never put into practice.

Criticisms
The network was criticised by many telegraph operators, including Samuel Morse, as being ‘inelegant’, and relying on human transcription rather than direct transmission. It was also not capable of carrying telephone signals once they were invented, where electrical cables might have been adapted. Despite these issues, ‘the tubes’ as they came to be known remained in use until the mid-20th century.

The tubes were also criticised for being susceptible to internet piracy. This involved anchoring a ship over a tube, and taking advantage of any give in the tube to hoist it aboard. Once cut and spliced onto a suitable pneumatic pump, the likes of which were readily available from hobby catalogues, the pirates could send and receive packets for free, or exchange illegal packets with other pirates without the knowledge of authorities. Despite legislation and numerous crackdowns, pirates continued to plague the network until its closure.

Closure and Impact
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent entry of the United States into World War II, there was significant discussion on the future of the tubes, due to the threat of German U-boats sabotaging or intercepting network usage. The possibility of encrypting wartime communication was raised, but was vetoed by Winston Churchill, who (following the efforts of Alan Turing breaking Germany’s Enigma cipher) was hesitant to let even coded communications fall into enemy hands. The decision was made to close the network and instead focus on solely electrical means of communication, such as radiotelegraphy.

After the war, the pipes were never reopened and remained disused for many years. Eventually in the late 1970s, the tubes were removed from the seabed because of concerns about the lead content of the rubber in the cables and its possible effects on deep sea marine life. However, much of the terminology was adapted for use on the fledgling electronic network, with terms such as ‘router’, ‘pirate’, ‘bits’, ‘packets’, 'patching', and even the name 'internet’ being adapted to suit their electronic equivalents.

The History of the History of the Internet
This is developed from a story Morgan and I spun when someone asked when the internet was invented. I said 'the 50s', which he immediately followed with 'the 1850s, that is', and we sort of bounced off each other the whole time, while keeping a totally straight face and being entirely serious. It was apparently quite believable.

Clearly we should become con artists.

I can juggle now.

2012-01-05T14:31:00.000+08:00

I'll be honest, that was a lot easier than I expected. If only learning to drive was this easy.

I've been told that I juggle backwards, and that instead of going over the top, my balls should be going underneath.

...

No, there is no way of discussing juggling that doesn't inadvertently lead to balls jokes. The way I juggle apparently is a 'trick juggle' that is actually harder than normal juggling though, so as long as I don't let on that I can't actually do it the regular way, everyone should be suitably impressed. Much more impressive to me though is the fact that I've yet to hit a ceiling fan despite it being the middle of summer.

I wonder if I can legitimately put this as a skill on my resume now?

The review post

2012-01-03T13:40:00.000+08:00

A Game of Thrones
I got this for christmas, which is code for "I've heard a lot about this book, but don't want to spend my own money on it, and don't care enough to hunt it down at the library". This, it turns out, was a mistake. I should've got into this series a long time ago. For comparison, my brother was reading Inheritance, the last Eragon book, at the same time. By a few pages in, he could predict the entire story. When I was reading Game of Thrones, I thought I could too. Then people started dying.

I finished it in under 2 days. This stuff is like crack. I MUST READ THE NEXT ONE FDSFGDFDFSGDFDFSDFGSDFGDFS.

Doctor Who
Christmas special! It was actually Christmas-y for once, instead of just happening at Christmas. Also very genre savvy, ("There are some sentences I should just stay away from.") which was funny, but should (and probably will) just stay a one-off. The highlight:

I know!

Speaking of Doctor Who...

Chameleon Circuit - Still Got Legs
I've pretty much had this on repeat constantly since boxing day. It's basically songs about Doctor Who. And not just stupid novelty songs, it's actually really, really good music. Normally (*coughColdplaycough*) with an album there's one or two songs which are really good and the rest is filler, and I think it's probably a good sign that literally every time a new song starts I find myself thinking, "No wait, this one's the best one". Really excellently made, and really cool lyrics. Seriously, you need to listen to this right now.

Steve Jobs' Biography
...what? We ran out of books.

Without a doubt the worst book I've ever stayed up all night to finish. Although admittedly that was because the owner of the book was leaving the next day, and not because it was actually good. There's no revelations in there that I didn't already know from browsing things like folklore.org, and a handful of obituaries and the writing is pretty uninspired. It seems to be a pretty rushed job, put out to capitalise on his death, because it really needs editing. The guy uses the same quotes and anecdotes over and over, without referencing the fact that he's already used them, and the book jumps around to follow individual threads of his life in non-chronological order in a way that sounds logical but is really just confusing. As in, it will follow the development of the iPod, and then jump back six years to talk about his marriage some more.

In short, don't bother. You'd get more from Wikipedia.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T20:59:00.000+08:00

So yeah, December happened. Apparently without me noticing, judging by my post rate and the fact that I looked at my watch this morning and said, "Oh crap, it's January already?"

From the top then:

I went down south for a couple of days, which was nice, but any relaxationifying which I got from it was undone by losing 80 hours of my life in the form of a corrupted Pokemon save. Which was probably my fault for pulling it out of someone else's DS while it was switched on. Protip: even if you're not playing the game, and even if the game in question can't even import from older Pokemon games, don't pull out the cartridge while the system is turned on. I reckon I'll start from scratch eventually, but I'd like to think of something interesting to do with my team first. Morgan suggested all dual-typed water Pokemon, which would give me Mudkip, Lotad, Chinchou, Wingull, and maybe Kingdra, Sealeo, Tentacool or Surskit.

Maybe. If I can be bothered.

Also there were loads of flies, which seemed to annoy some people more than others.

I can't remember if it was before or after going away, but we played laser tag. I was organising it, and then Matt invited a bunch of his friends too, and suddenly it was a grudge match. We won, by virtue of us having a couple of slightly better players, but I suspect mostly because there was only one team of us and two teams of them. By which I mean, Matt was the real winner, because apparently he has more friends than me

I had a couple of shifts at work. That was good. Soccer games are much nicer than concerts, because they're shorter, and we knock off earlier. Plus, they're quiet, so I can practise my juggling. That's going well, by the way. So are most of the other things-which-totally-aren't-goals, with the exception of learning to drive. That's the most important, and thus the one that I'm putting off in favour of the others.

Then, there was Christmas, which meant three massive meals in a row (Dinner with neighbours, breakfast with mum's family, and lunch with dads.) The food was excellent though. Someone brought up the fact that all the times I was saying 'last year', I meant the year before last, since last year (well, it was last year last year when I was saying it... Stupid new year's day.) I was away. That was a bit surreal. It really doesn't seem like a year.

I got a nice stack of books, and some DVDs, but definitely the standout present (and pretty much the only non-book, now that I think about it...) was this:

It's a Lego watch. A Lego branded watch, with Lego stud buttons, and Lego clicky band.

I know.

So that was Christmas. Boxing day we went to Rottnest. I never bring enough shirts, and end up wearing the same ones over and over again, which is kinda nasty. This time wasn't any exception. We saw dolphins, and some nice sunsets, which I didn't take photos of. 12 months ago I would have, and other people on the boat did, but there are plenty of pictures of dolphins and sunsets around (possibly even too many). I'd much rather have the memory of seeing dolphins appear just fifty metres away, and swim over to the boat, and follow us, than have a few photos. So that's, y'know, personal growth or something.

Also, we ran into these guys again, on holiday here for a few weeks to drop one of their daughters here for a stint living alone. Nothing much has changed. Much gentle ribbing was had over dinner.

I only got back yesterday morning, so I've only just done a few things like watch the Doctor Who christmas special, and use Matt's iTunes account to buy an album, so expect a 'reviews of stuff' post in the next couple of days.

And other than all that, I wish you a retroactive Merry Christmas and a still-valid Happy New Year!

what a stupid name

2012-01-01T10:36:00.000+08:00

"The Eyrie"? Seriously? That sounds like it was thought up by a pretentious twelve-year-old.

Oh, hold on a sec... it was. Derp.

Right, well, that's gotta go. Happy new year, everyone.

3 Months

2011-12-16T11:24:00.001+08:00

That's how long uni break is. For me, this is an unprecedented amount of time to have off. Technically, the break between finishing year 12 and starting uni was bigger, but I spent a month or so of that overseas, which sort of broke it up a bit. From this side of Christmas, they look impossibly big. Like one of those desert highways that just keeps on going, and although you know that there's something at the end of it, it's so far off that it stops being a physical location and becomes an abstract concept. Like, "Oh yes, somewhere at the end of this strip of slightly differently coloured gravel is Monday the 27th of February 2012, but you can't see it because of all the horizon in the way."

That was a bit of a laboured metaphor.

The point is that while it seems to be really far away- actually, because that date seems so far away - it would really be absurdly easy to just do nothing for three months. (Which, I suspect, is not an altogether unpopular option.) And doing nothing is like chocolate cake, in that a little is delicious, but three months of nothing else will leave you diabetic and empty on the inside, and when you look back on it, you feel a little bit sick.

Again, maybe not the best metaphor.

So instead of just sitting, and playing video games, and watching entire seasons of TV shows in one night, I reckon I should probably try to do something productive. Think New Year's resolutions, only a month early. Except they're a load of carp*. They're always vague and totally unrealistic. I need some non-vague ~~non-un-~~realistic things to do, so that I can look back on this three months and say, "Yeah, I achieved something in the break." I hesitate to use the word goals, because it comes with a lot of self-help-y baggage, but really that's the general idea.

So how many to do? Enough that I can switch between them, not so many that I can't do them all. Five seems good. Here we go then:

Finish learning to drive, pass driving test, get log book, and put at least 5 hours in it.
I might even go so far as to book my test so I've got something to aim for.
Read all the books on the SF section of my book list.
(This will be easy.)
Run until Humans vs. Zombies. I died on the first day both times this year. Next year I will win, by running away. This will require practise.
Learn first aid. A senior first aid certificate is both a plus for my resume and something I feel like I should know anyway.
Learn to juggle. Because a) I am tired of not being able to juggle and b) I can tell people I spent all holidays learning to juggle. Yay conversation, etc.

This isn't all I want to do, but if I can do these, I'll be satisfied that I haven't wasted these holidays.

also HEY BLOG NO POST WHOOPS EXAMS AND STUFF SORRY.

*That's a typo, but I decided to leave it in.

Snack Science

2011-11-22T17:37:00.001+08:00

I have a problem with snacks. A problem which needs to be solved. Solved using science. Science and math.

Cave approves.

'kay, so allow me to elaborate. When it comes to doing thing in the kitchen, I have no problems. When that thing becomes things, plural, I start developing problems. In that I can't do them at the same time, I always end up doing them sequentially. Like a computer from before about 1990, I am chronically incapable of any kind of multitasking. Parallel processing? HA WHAT'S THAT.

Specifically? I can't make toasted sandwiches and tea at the same time. And since both these things need to be, y'know, hot, I have a problem. But never fear, a solution is at hand. It comes in the form of a project network.

If year 11 mathematics seems like years ago (probably because it was, derp) let me refresh your memory. Project networks are those things that look kinda like this:

Thanks to Shenton College's super duper secure intranet!

and lets you plot out a series of tasks, based on their prerequisites, dependencies, and time to complete.

If memory serves, when constructing a network, you first make a list of all the tasks which need doing, and their time to complete, and their prerequisites. This means I need once again to take to the kitchen with a stopwatch.

Task

Time taken

Boil kettle

2:32

Prepare cup
(ie: tea bag and sugar.)

0:30

Brew tea.

That settles that then.

Add milk