Needs more polish

Weapon of choice

2012-01-22T12:40:00.000-08:00

After 7 months of fairly hardcore OSX usage (on a relatively underpowered Mac Mini) I'm finding using Windows both less relevant and, given my latest project focus, harder to use as a default development platform. More and more of the tools and packages I want to use are freeware, and the more I dig into open source hardware, the more I realise that using Windows to develop in is not the best choice. And the correct choice is, obviously - Unix.

Not OSX? I hear you whisper ... Oh yes, you wanted me to say that. Except the really obvious thing I've found over the last 7 months is that I spend a lot of my time in a terminal window, ssh'd into a remote box somewhere doing stuff the old fashioned way. In fact, my machine is becoming increasingly less relevant - the relevant machine is in the cloud, or in that cupboard over there, or under the stairs ... The glitzy GUI is really a thin veneer over a command line which takes me to where I want to actually be. Increasingly, I'm finding my windows-centric CLI skills give more cumbersome results than the equivalent linux results. I've got used to using Bash and Python for the small stuff, I can just about steer Vim between file creation and edits and I'm getting comfortable with greps, finds and some of the other linux CLI utils. OSX makes this effectively seemless, helping me transition between my Mac and a remote Ubuntu/BusyBox/whatever distro. Windows just puts spanners in the way - the file system is different, the tools for security are different, all of the commandline tools I'm getting used to work slightly differently.

So I'm biting the bullet, and from this month, I'll be using raw Ubuntu for my local development. Sure, I could set up a VM or a box in the cloud, but this means I can stop scratching my head and fighting the urge to work inside the prison I've built for myself. No More spending an hour hunting for the Windows install of something before giving up and switching to a different language or my Ubuntu VM.

Once that's set up, I'll be delving into CMUSphinx4, PocketSphinx and Arduino. After that, world domination.

Tinkering

2012-01-21T18:43:00.000-08:00

I've recently bought an Arduino Uno and a small selection of components. I have high hopes that my dream of a voice-controlled house can take a step closer to reality - the only remaining missing piece of the puzzle is the time and inclination to glue everything together from software stack down to the box the end result goes in for my first prototype. There's something quite primal about making motors and sensors work - tapping in some numbers on a keyboard and watching a servo spin is darned cool.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

2011-11-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

This post is in no way endorsed by Boss Alien, and is entirely my own mini rant.

Boss Alien has had the pleasure over the last six (count em!) months to be developing some really splendiferous products for iOS. Mobile hardware (including phones and tablets) is an obvious growth area in the next decade - if you think that smartphone is cool, just wait until they are that good but cost 50 bucks and everyone else on the planet can afford one. THAT is a market to aim for.

I am a lover of technology, have been for pretty much my entire life. I've mostly been a Windows PC user for the last decade, but before then I followed the path most of my geek generation followed - Spectrums, C64s, the Amiga vs ST wars - all fantastic bits of hardware which had flaws but you could forgive them. And the best part was that the fanboi-ism normally had some sort of counterpoint - you point out a flaw in your friends' device, they implicitly acknowledge it by coming-back-atcha with a flaw in your gear.

iOS requires you to use Macs to do development on (sure, I could hackintosh, but there be dragons). So I've had the "pleasure" of using a Mac Mini and a Macbook Pro at work and at home now pretty much exclusively for the last six months, and for the most part I think they are capable machines with many excellent features, but ...

Oh, but. Where to start. I can list off a litany of absolutely shit design flaws in this hardware, but it seems like any mention of Apple design issues is simply met with a criticism-swallowing black hole - no acknowledgement, no rebuttal - the best I can ever hope for is the occasional sideways "Oh, Timothy" look from my beleaguered colleagues when I go off on a rant.

Here's a few for starters, so you can see where the wrath rises from. My macbook pro has a small divot on the front to let me open the machine, which requires TWO HANDS to use. That divot is so sharp, I have actually cut my wrists on the points before while opening the machine. Yes, that's right - opening the laptop lead to blood.

Then there's the keyboard layout, which has cost me days in retraining my muscle memory, and how it's utterly non-trivial to switch keyboard maps, and how the hash key has moved entirely off the primary key set - great for coding Python.

Then there's all the fun and games using Finder, which is such a badly named utility it's untrue.

That's without even stepping close to the cost/performance curves, or the requirement for extra hardware just to plug in a monitor with DVI, or the hideousness that is iOS development profiles, or ...

Now the point of this post is not to rag on the hardware and ecosystem - but rather to highlight that it is valid and just to rag on the hardware and ecosystem. Apple are good at what they do, but by god they are a long way from perfect. If I read one more post this month anywhere on the internet where the reality distortion kicks in on changes like the Mac App Store sandbox proposals, how Kindle "just isn't quite as Apple-y as Apple" or similar, I'm going to melt down. I'm really getting tired of seeing how otherwise rational people get subsumed into love for these products to the point where all else suddenly becomes a non-viable choice.

I guess I'll look back at this post at some point (when we begin Android development, no doubt) and laugh at myself, but it feels great to get this out.

End of rant!

Tired

2011-10-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

I had expected the last couple of months to be pretty hard work, but good lord. Some lessons learned, I think. Good job I still like pizza.

Eff Eff Ess

2011-08-28T02:38:00.000-07:00

To whoever stole the badge off the boot of our car - karma will get you in the end, of that you can be sure.

Git and Subversion, or There and Back Again.

2011-08-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

Around the end of our first month at Boss Alien, we had been using Git for all of our code revision control (including coder art assets and the Unity project contents). While setting things up was fairly painless and managing local commits was fairly painless, we had various issues and problems while trying to use Git to do merges when people pushed and pulled from the Origin (mainline on our primary Git server).

We had attempted to use a few different OSX GUIs for Git, and the only one that we tried that worked to our initial satisfaction was Tower. Unfortunately there was a bug in Tower that made merges give incorrect results. (This bug has since been resolved with a test case that I sent them). Because we couldn't find another decent GUI, we ended up doing things using a commandline, and that really is not the best way to have people using Git. Merge issues continued to crop up whenever we tried to reconcile parallel changes. After an awful lot of messing around in Git configuration files we managed to get a bearable workflow using P4Merge, but it was still a pain in the arse compared to using a GUI.

This caused us to switch to Subversion, as well as the hope that, because Subversion uses a single server model rather than a distributed version model, we would be able to use the File Locking mechanism in Subversion to help us mitigate the issues with "merging" binary assets. Really, you can't merge binary. This leaves you with three choices - pick yours, pick theirs, don't mess with the file in the first place. With a DRCS there is no way to enforce "don't mess with this". With something like Perforce or Accurev, there are mechanisms to allow you to say "I have this file locked, you can't mess with it".

The main binary assets like models and textures will occasionally cause this problem, but it's rare - you're much more likely to have a single contributor modifying these files and conflicts simply don't arise in that change flow. However, some of the key files in a Unity project (scenes, prefabs and a few others) are currently binary files. Apparently this will change in a future revision of Unity, but working with them right now means that either you can't (easily) collaborate within a scene, or you need to very carefully structure your scenes and prefabs so that other people can modify subsets of assets without breaking the subset you're currently working on.

For projects the size of the ones we're working on, this is annoying. It will undoubtedly cause lost work, but it's probably not going to bring the project down. Any larger, though, and you'll most likely end up in a situation where you just can't work because you're contending with other people changing the same binary files.

Once Unity moves to a text (mergeable) representation of these files, the problem will be drastically reduced (although there will still be undoubtedly painful merges, as we saw using Renderware on the Potter games).

So, to get back to the point - we wanted to have Subversion put a lock on a scene file, for example - to say, effectively "Tim's changing this, so you can't". Not elegant, but in theory it should work. Unfortunately, in practice it doesn't work - in Unity, you can quite happily write over the file without any warning, meaning you end up in the same place at the end of the day - you have a local change and a remote change, and one of you just lost their work.

Subversion brings with it another (in this case, pretty much insurmountable) problem when you're working with Unity. the structure of the Subversion repository is held in hidden directories (.svn directories) inside each directory in your repository folder. This is annoying when trying to copy folders around in your project workspace, as you need to be very careful that you don't move or copy the hidden .svn directories. If you do, then the subversion client will give you all sorts of horrible problems, like thinking a directory exists when it doesn't, not allowing you to add a directory it thinks it already has, that sort of thing. This caused us a good few hours of pain, definitely more pain than resolving Git merge issues.

That's something we can work around when using Finder or windows Explorer. It's simply not something we can work around when moving items in the Unity project browser. When you move directories around inside Unity, it also moves the .SVN directories with it, and you've just broken your local working copy. Unpicking these issues is, pretty much always, more effort than simply redoing the work. Today, I've had three cases where I couldn't redo the work, because I'd lost local files after doing updates in Subversion and I had no way of persuading Subversion to put files back or retrieve them from history without totally deleting my local working copy and starting again. This is simply not a viable workflow.

So, primarily for this reason, we're moving back to Git today - it's not perfect and I'm sure we'll see issues with it, but at least you can work inside Unity without breaking the source control with seemingly innocuous activities.

Logo

2011-07-21T14:14:00.001-07:00

We have a logo. Next up, business cards, attitude and schmoozing.

Six killer weeks

2011-07-11T15:38:00.000-07:00

It'll be six weeks tomorrow since Jason and I started Boss Alien. B&P joined on the first day, and Jay on the second. in that time we've created two deliverables, shifted development to a totally new environment platform and target platform, spent a shedload of cash, moved into new offices, signed a lot of contracts but most of all we've had a fantastically fun and exciting time and as of today we're officially in business - we're not just doing stuff, we're getting paid for it.

If you had told me that we could be in this position in less than two months, I've have told you that you were obviously criminally insane and no, you couldn't have any of my money. How wrong I would have been.

Next month - the story of how we trashed the most promising business opportunity ever ;) (Or not, hopefully!)

Huge *HUGE* thanks go out to the boys involved, and also to the girls involved - without the support network this would simply not have happened and without the hard work, effort, trust and involvement we'd have nothing more than a promise and a lot of hot air. My missus and Jason's missus both stood up and said this was ok, which has to have been one of the scariest things for them to do, even though it hasn't seemed like that.

Phew. if we can keep this pace up for a year, we'll be halfway to the moon.

End of an era

2011-07-08T11:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't watch the feed yet, but the last shuttle is now up in space. I have a horrible feeling, a dread really, that unless some private citizens or companies pull out all the stops, we're about to stagnate and move into one of those hideous futures where 200 years from now we're stewing in our own soup, 20 billion humans on the planet wasting the resources by fighting over them.

I'd prefer the future where we're shuttling around from bases orbiting the planets, taking in the sights of Jupiter and Mars, living in the asteroids. Sign me up for that one, please.

Proper kisses

2011-07-08T11:28:00.001-07:00

So very, very cute. And a bit sloppy.

EC2 and ejabberd

2011-06-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

After attempting various flavours of setup, I finally managed to spin up an EC2 instance and get ejabberd working on it this evening.

Things to note:
* use the 64-bit recommended micro AMI. (ami-45cefa31 : it's CentOs, but you'll manage).
* download the latest ejabberd in binary form from process-one.net:

$ cd ~
$ mkdir jabber
$ cd jabber
$ wget http://www.process-one.net/downloads/ejabberd/2.1.8/ejabberd-2.1.8-linux-x86_64-installer.bin.gz 
$ gunzip ejabberd-2.1.8-linux-x86_64-installer.bin.gz
$ chmod +x ejabberd-2.1.8-linux-x86_64-installer.bin
$ ./ejabberd-2.1.8-linux-x86-installer.bin

* do everything as ec2-user - don't sudo anywhere.
* check the service is stopped:

$ ~/ejabberd-2.1.8/bin/ejabberdctl status

* ensure you add "localhost", the instance short hostname and the instance full external DNS name to the list of hosts. Search for the "hosts" stanza in the config file.

$ nano ~/ejabberd-2.1.8/conf/ejabberd.cfg

* don't forget to open up ports 22, 5280, 5269 and 5222 on your security group.

If you spot any errors during installation, or ejabberdctl status gives strange results or failures, then something bad has happened - wipe the image and start again.

So after a good few hours of tail-chasing and examining inscrutible Erlang logs, the devious plan of wiping the instance and starting again each time things went south eventually worked! I can now chat using Jabber to my EC2 instance, and our cunning plans move another pace forward. Excellent!

Signs and portents

2011-06-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Gabe has become very communicative over the last few weeks, often initiating conversations now. Granted, his spoken english consists mostly of grunts and vocalisations that only Nic and I would understand - but his repertoire of signs is growing immensely, not only learned but created.

He now uses signs and words for "no", "all gone/finished", "more", "down", "goodbye", "bed/bedtime", "up", "dance", "ukelele" (his own creation), "cheers", "hungry", "play", "bird", "cat", "monkey", "space", "thank-you", "stop" and "dip". he also says "star", "mum mum mum" and occasionally "dad dad dad" but the mu and da syllables are so prevalent I can rarely tell when he actually means me or Nic.

I'm kinda impressed, especially when he's the one who starts a conversation.

You utter git

2011-06-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

What a week for learning new things. I already knew the basics of port forwarding and punching holes in firewalls, and a year or two of occasional linux usage has put me in a great position to set up the infrastructure for our fledgling company.

This week, I have set up a linux server (Ubuntu 11, very nice), Git and Gitolite from scratch (learning a hell of a lot about SSH on the way), got Git working across our network, punched some holes in the firewall, figured out how to make SSH only use RSA keys, and finally got remote access via a dynamic IP mapper through into our office box. As far as I can tell, it's as locked down as possible (arbitrary SSH port, no password access, no VNC access, arbitrary confluence port, no guest logins) but we now have a Wiki and a git repo that we can use from home.

Git is actually very nice to work with, once you accept some of the choices they have made. I know for a fact, though, that not being able to lock binary files exclusively will cause us headaches at some point in the future. We need to structure our Unity projects to mitigate consecutive edits of binary files (like prefabs and scenes). This may be enough of a problem to move us back off Git and over to something like Perforce or Plastic, but I sincerely hope not.

There really is something quite - primal, I guess is the word - about ssh'ing into a box, messing with authorized_keys and coming away with a clone of the git repo on my windows box. It all feels a bit magic.

I think it's going to stand us in excellent stead when we begin setting up ejabberd on an EC2 instance next week. Roll on the crazyness for a few more weeks!

Elite spending

2011-06-07T12:02:00.001-07:00

Today's "in the hole setting up the company" total is £1337. That has to be good karma right there ;)

Home Alone

2011-06-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

I don't think this is the first time I've watched Gabe alone, but it's certainly been a while. What a wonderful afternoon - beer, burgers, our boys and weather to die for. More of these please!

That's it, the whole worm is in my belly now

2011-06-02T15:01:00.000-07:00

"64-bit editions of Windows Vista or Windows 7 require the iTunes 64-bit installer"

in the smallest font you can imagine, in the fine print at the bottom of the left hand side of the page. Thanks, apple, that's another 5 minutes I'm not getting back.

Half a worm

2011-06-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

Oh god, I'd forgotten just how crap iTunes is.

Apple products are not made to be used by people who have anything other than a mac as their desktop machine. I'm sick and tired of trying to work around ridiculous issues and limitations with apple hardware and the iTunes ecosystem as a whole - even on a Mac it's not that bloody good, but on a Win7 machine it's just a complete disaster. I think spending a couple of months with my Nexus S has spoiled me. A mobile device you can drag files on to? oh emm gee. A setup process that says "log in using your gmail account - and done!" ? no, that would be too bloody easy.

I've had my new gen4 touch, sitting at the screen that politely shows me "connect to iTunes now, sucker" for three feckin hours and I'm still no further forward. I'm assuming that only a clean reinstall of iTunes will fix whatever issue with whatever background service is stopping the device being recognised and zzzZZzz. seriously, zzzZZZzzz. bored of this. waiting for the 4.3GB download of xcode was positively fun compared to this.

All change

2011-06-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

So - I've left Black Rock. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, what an excellent bunch of people. The last few months were a bit stressful (and tedious in equal measure). I'm going to miss the benefits of working for Disney, but perhaps I'll miss the politics of working for a large business slightly less so.

I'm sad that Gabe won't get more opportunities to visit Disney parks on the silver pass. I'm sure he'll scream blue murder later in life when he realises I've just deprived him of every child's dream. Ho hum.

What next, you might ask? all two of you who read this. And the answer is - my own company! I'm starting up with an old friend, and we're going to be doing cool stuff on mobile devices. Plans are afoot, schedules are being drawn up, stuff is being paid for. It's too early yet to announce our name (unlike some other Black Rock babies) or our project, but I'm super hopeful that we can talk about all this next week.

I'm basically feeling EXCELLENT about this. super woop. It's the scariest thing I've done in forever, and if we fail, there go my life savings and we're back into sell-the-house-to-eat territory - but you know what? we're not gonna fail. We have a small crew of feckin brilliant folks together to get this off the ground, and it's going to kick ass.

my point is floating

2011-05-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

This will be, hopefully, the first of a few more technical blog posts. It's grand detailing the minutia of my life but occasionally I need to think through a problem or two, and the results can be interesting.

I'm currently writing an Android app in my spare time. I'll skip the details of what the app does for now, but I'm working with location information (GPS coordinates) and I'm passing around results from the phone to a database.

While converting from numbers to strings (part of the HTTP POST code) it dawned on me that, as previous experience has shown, trying to keep precision in numerical values while they are represented as strings often has issues. I'm writing out a double to a string in Java - that's all good. I can pull that back into the GAE python code as a double - in python, floats are double precision by default. Next question - what precision does the GeoPt GAE datatype honour? the docs simply say "floating point" - is that single precision or double precision? Assuming it's talking about the python type rather than the java type, hopefully it means double precision.

This might sound nit-picky, but given the range of values for longitude (-180.0 through 0 to +180.0) the precision of the number can make the difference between microns and metres in world space.

For single point values, If you're working around the zero line (at the Greenwich royal observatory) then the most precise value is around 2^-127 - a very small number indeed. in decimal, this is equivalent to 10^-38, so given the required precision in decimal degrees , this is so small there's no named SI prefix for it.

If you're on the other side of the world, however, then you're plus or minus 180 degrees, give or take some precision. this gives us a fixed exponent (2^7) and values for the lowest significant bit of the mantissa in the range of 0.000015, give or take - so if you add a single insignificant bit, you're moving your geo point by around 1.5 metres. That's not insignificant.

Doubles add another whole stack of zeros here -it's safe to say you've got at least 10 zeros before your changed value shows up, which is sub-millimetre accuracy - safely inside the tolerance of any real world geo fix, and probably good enough for any spacial positioning work that's trying to correctly locate physical space. So that's good to know!

Fantastic day

2011-04-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

Today, while being something of a downer for Jesus with the cross and the nails and all that stuff, was an absolutely glorious day for me, the missus and the bairn. We spent a lovely afternoon up on Devil's Dyke with Jay, Sal and Jack, eating steak, drinking G&Ts and watching the world go by. Gabe ate enough for three babies, certainly considerably more than Jack did. He also met his first real live horse.

It's a long break for me now (and who knows?!) so I'm going to get stuck into the side projects I've had on the cards for months now. Advice abounds.

What a couple of weeks

2011-04-08T01:35:00.000-07:00

it's been a mental couple of weeks. Big changes for me personally at work, along with some sun. Bought a Kindle - that's pretty cool. Gabe properly running around now, he's pretty much walking at all times now indoors.

Oh Canada

2011-03-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

An old friend offered us accomodations in Montreal, and we'd have been crazy to pass the opportunity up, so we came over for a visit. As per usual, I wasn't sure what to expect, other than what we saw on google street view. I had the impression that people would be fairly evenly split between french and english speaking natives in the city, which mostly held out for spoken conversations. The metro system, advertising, signposts on streets, etc were all (or virtually all) in french - which after a day or two wasn't really too hard to work out for the most part. I can pick together halves of most sentences, but not quite everything. It's reinforced my belief that if I ask people to speak slowly, I can mostly understand. I can't converse in the language to save my life, which is unfortunate.

I wish I'd had a decent roaming data plan instead of this (admittedly fantastic while in the UK) O2 PAYG data plan - We had access to complimentary internet but that's no use whatsoever when you're out and about - and that was where we needed it most - for looking up locations on the map, checking train times, translation services, that sort of thing.

One of the big lures of a smart phone is that it's a utility device (at least the way I use mine, anyway). It's effectively an extension of your brain, a streetmap, a location service and more. None of that is available to you if you can't get data into the thing, which is a real shame - with the amount of local storage I've got on the box, I should be able to cache huge amounts of relevant data (like all of the google map data for a location and the surrounding area, or translation dictionaries, that sort of thing). For cloud services like live audio transcription, sure, you'll need a net connection. Next time I'll be more prepared. I certainly didn't expect to be paying close to a pound per text.

As for Montreal itself - well, I think we're still digesting whether we really like it or not. We certaily saw some beautiful things, and some areas of the city were a delight to walk around. Other areas were pretty grim, which I'd expect from any city really but it certainly wasn't what I expected from the ends of the metro lines - in most cities that takes you far enough out to be in the suburbs - not Montreal.

The important part was seeing some snow - and even better, watching it fall while sitting in a jacuzzi ;)
Definitely an eye opener of a visit.

And like usual, the travel aspect (the portions outside of our direct control, at least) have gone to hell, and we're apparently waiting for a pilot to arrive from Toronto. We're looking at another couple of hours sitting in the bloody airport, listening to other people's music, screaming children, and plagued coughing and sneezing. have I ever told you that I hate people in general, and all humans in particular?

Apart from the nice ones, that is. And maybe the pretty ones. They get a free pass.

Watching from afar

2011-02-24T14:11:00.000-08:00

Nic and I just watched Discovery STS 133 launch on a really short window (2 seconds left). What a fantastic piece of technology, what a fantastic view of the launch and what an amazing process involved to get the bird into space.

I'm totally gutted that we didn't get to see it launch from the causeway - I'll be mounting the tickets and putting them up on the wall somewhere, as that's our only link to how close we came to watching it live.

Good luck to you, Discovery crew.

Legends

2011-02-19T03:13:00.000-08:00

LoL has sucked me in, somewhat. Halfway to 30 now, enjoying playing a game competitively again. SC2 just freaks me out too much to play properly competitively - at least with LoL there's other folks to rely on to carry the game.

Gabe is so close to walking properly - he keeps taking a couple of steps then dropping to the floor. What a lazy boy.

It doesn't matter which side you are on ...

2011-01-28T15:07:00.001-08:00

If you go around shooting guns or blowing stuff up and you kill innocent people in the process - you're a bad guy.

minus 50 DKP

2011-01-27T15:34:00.000-08:00

Some days I really wonder what the point is.

For most people, it's obviously not what I think it is.

Random mishmash

2011-01-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

Interesting times at work, proper chinese style.
Gabe has most definitely learned the "milk" sign - however, when he uses it he means "I want".
He also can't say Tiger yet. He can point, though, and he uses the pointing finger to great effect.

Indie games are really picking up steam right now ...

Tuck that in, young man

2011-01-12T14:31:00.000-08:00

If anyone had told me 20 years ago that one of life's guilty little pleasures would be tucking my child in to bed, I'd have laughed.

One whole week

2011-01-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

We've had an entire week of Gabe going down in less than 5 minutes in an evening. A couple of nights he's barely made a peep, and one evening he didn't cry or complain at all. It's a bleedin miracle!

If we can keep this up for the next 15 years, I'll be a happy man.

A new year

2011-01-01T07:26:00.000-08:00

2010 was fantastic for many reasons - a new member of our family, living in our own home for the first time together, and some opportunities at work that let me expand my skillset and horizons. It was also pretty sucky for a few reasons, not least of which was the constant colds and sickness we've all suffered with, especially Gabriel. Not getting to see the shuttle launch despite our best efforts was also a huge downer.

To start off the new year, Gabe has come down with some sort of vomiting/diarrhea bug. Fingers crossed this is the last major sicky he gets this year, it would be lovely to have him hale and hearty for a month or so.

This year could be great, and it could be terribly sucky. I think the impact of the global economy manipulation that all the major governments are colluding in could actually hit this year - keep an eye on the price of gold, if it continues to rise while the stock price rises it's a sign that things may go south very fast. As long as everyone keeps believing in the system it'll all be fine, I guess.

I hope everyone has a great year this year, and the "wanties" doesn't involve us all wanting for the basics of a decent quality of life!

Gabe's first Christmas

2010-12-24T04:55:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping this year he spends more time playing with boxes and wrapping paper than he does with the toys, as that will give me free reign to just buy him boxes and wrapping paper next year.

He's a sharp little guy tho, so he might notice.

Snow joke

2010-12-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

Har Har.
I ended up watching the snow melt on Saturday - quite a fascinating experience. There was a visible line on the road dividing tarmac from snow and ice which progressed upwards at the rate of a few inches per minute. Every time I glanced out of the kitchen window at the outside table, another inch of snow would have vanished from the original foot. by 7am everything was totally clear.

I'm hopeful we'll get another drop of snow and that we'll be able to make it out on to the downs for some slidey action. Maybe next year. For some reason this reminds me of the winters of my childhood.

Long month

2010-11-29T12:39:00.000-08:00

Yet, as days slip by, one has to acknowledge that life ain't getting any longer.

Or is it? According to Some Smarties at Harvard, Teleomerase production really does make a difference in mice. That had been artificially impared, but still.

Reproduction is the usual method for longevity of kind, at least until immortality becomes de rigeur. One has to wonder how much the effort takes off our mortal lifespan, as listening to Gabe's constant screaming probably lopped a good year off me this month. Hopefully the research will catch up around the time he gets a job.

It's been a chinese interesting month, after the wonderful holiday (tinted with the abject failure of STS 133 to launch). A possible change of focus of work, mid life crises abound, yet another bloody cold upon cold upon sickness. I went through a spate of crazy good ideas (if only I had a replicator/manufactory, I'd be halfway to rich by now - for prior art, picture gesture-to-text using rings and local positioning, no more typing or even swiping on devices, just wriggle your fingers) along with all the crazy AR stuff I've been blabbing about for years. I have a feeling that the RnD folks at work will crack some of that stuff, especially the AR world-geo overlay, just as soon as we get comfortable with the gyros in the latest handhelds. Tangent, but in a few years everyone will wonder just how the hell they ever managed without being able to sweep their mobile across a view and see - their friends (and their friends mood / bank account / waiting time ), their nearest cashpoint, the bus turning the corner 10 streets away, the nearest taxi/burger king/police station.

The other interesting idea I had tonight was consensual observation/reporting. I saw some dude tagging a window with spray paint, but was not in the mood to stop and challenge. If I had a mobile - that had video recording and geotagging - and if I could press a "tape this shit and send it to the rozzers" button - would that change society? "I'm observing you, dude. No point giving me grief, it's already on tape." We're nearly there with all the video capture that happens, but the leap to realtime is the discriminator. Think video 911 in reverse. Add another person (or two, or ten) and you've got some pretty compelling evidence right there, probably with enough capture to synth the whole scene back out again.

Corner cases and the opposite perspective are a goldmine, by the way. Think of every problem you ever bitched about and turn it on it's head - there's your opportunity.

The other dweller has been the constant niggle that capitalism really is crappy at resource allocation, regardless of the plethora of hype to the contrary. Surely it would be more efficient for society if people in their cars just gave folks a lift? Technology is certainly an enabler for that, as soon as we stray into AR, trust ratings (visible over your head, natch) and groupthink access to your public dataset. Yes, I would like a lift into the town centre. I'm not a crazy, and I might even be your new friend.

Saving up for Virgin, then.

2010-11-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

This week has been a total rollercoaster - every day we've been planning to go the next day and watch the shuttle launch, each day edging slightly closer. Yesterday we were up at 4am in a huge thunderstorm, knowing our chances of seeing a launch that day were around 10%. Today we were up at 4.30am, with hopes of seeing a launch much higher - odds were looking to be about 60% that the wind and weather would allow a launch, without any other mechanical problems.

Sadly, the problems reared their heads just as we arrived at KSC on the coach, around 8.15am this morning. After a bit more analysis, it's been confirmed that the earliest the shuttle will launch is now November 30th. We'll be out of the country much sooner than that.

Still, unless you take a chance you're never get to see the cool stuffs.

God speed, Discovery.

Preparations

2010-10-30T06:56:00.001-07:00

Packing in progress. hopes high. Fingers crossed that american engineering is all it's cracked up to be.

Just causeway

2010-10-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

Nic managed to snag us causeway tickets for STS-133. If all the heavens align correctly, we are going to be treated to a view of the shuttle launching from around 6 miles away. Fingers crossed everything goes to plan!

Gabe says ...

2010-10-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

Ahhhhh ahhh waaaaaahh

Ahhhhh waaaaahhh ehhhhh waaaahhh ehhhhhh

hopefully shortly he'll be saying zzzzzzzzzz. Until that time, adieu.

The answer to life, the universe and everything

2010-10-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

is 42.

Today, if one arbitrarily takes the Y/M/D digits as 101010 deserves to be known as Douglas Adams day, in my humble opinion.

and the question - well, that's the hard bit, isn't it?

I've been pondering this (for the majority of my life, as always) and I'm wondering if it's really as simple as ticking boxes on a list. For some people, it's travelling, food, company. For some people it's experience, music, adrenaline. For some it's solitude, peace, contemplation. Many things overlap, many things are mutually exclusive. Most people have different definitions of the things that go together to define their place in life, their destiny.

For me - adrenaline is high up there. Laddering in SC2 over the last month has been an experience like no other, although I'm not sure I actually enjoy it! Travelling is actually something I'm not hugely fond of, but arriving in new places is something I love. All things technological is definitely a defining part of the human experience for me, so watching the shuttle go up (fingers crossed) could well be one of my defining moments.

Next month is going to be cool as hell, that's for sure ;)

Teething trouble

2010-09-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

I think we got off lightly the first couple of teeth - Gabe's been in a stinking mood for days now, crying and straining constantly.

Here's hoping his teeth arrive soon.

Earn that gold

2010-09-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

After being very scared to play online (mostly due to the insane adrenaline rush that comes with a game against real opponents) I girded my loins this evening and dived back into the pain that is the gold league.

After a 5 game winning streak, I think I'm finally improving (or their balancing is making up for the crappy run of games I had earlier in the month). I'm also pleasantly surprised at the quality (socially) of the opponents. They have all, apart from a couple of exceptions, been very sporting and nice folks. New friends on the list!

Timestealing

2010-09-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

Starcraft 2 continues to suck my time down. I'm absolutely loving it, and beginning to get past the adrenaline-rush induced shakes that come with playing online competitors. I've gone back to basics with my strategies, and I'm beginning to get to grips with how to play again.

Gabe is starting to stand up - he pulled himself to properly standing inside his little baby prison yesterday. Not long before he's falling over regularly. I guess we'll need to get a bannister and baby gates sorted very soon!

A couple of weeks holiday has led to some painting and hopefully a nice spot on the wall for our incoming Charlie Harper.

Life is good!

Charmed, i'm sure

2010-08-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

After watching yet another company breeze through tens of millions of pounds to make a game that I think I'd like to play but I'm not willing to spend 30 quid a month on; and after seeing another friend end up with their last month's salary unpaid and all the shenanigans that go with losing a job, moving house, etc; I have come to the conclusion that actually, I'm a very lucky bugger.

Sure, I'm naturally talented and smart and all the ladies want to be with me. But To have a career over (nearly) a couple of decades and not to be fired or part of an operation that burns to the ground - that's a charmed life.

Jimmy, I hope it all works out for you and your lovely missus.

Starcrafting

2010-08-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

No blog posts so far this month because Starcraft II is out.

I've written up a couple more posts, but they need revisiting before revealing. Soon!

Finger food

2010-07-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

My boy is a fickle customer - he laughs a lot, but it's rare that something that amuses him one day will elicit the same giggles the next day.

Today's giggles came by gently gumming the ends of his fingers while singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". He found this absolutely hilarious.

Making your child laugh has to be one of the best pleasures life holds ;)

Adventures in the land of functional programming, part 1

2010-07-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

I've been programming for a long looong time now, not only in years (over 30) but in terms of a proportion of my lifespan. I've had some formal training in programming while in the beginning stages of a degree course, but the vast majority of my time spent programming has been using techniques and knowledge that I've acrued through practice. I've made many mistakes, and in the beginning at least, I rarely had anyone telling me that my approach or technique was a bad one.

To give some perspective on just how far back we're talking here, my first programming experience was on Research Machines Link 380z machines at school. My first program was intended to print the time, but I managed to put a bug into a two line program, and instead of the time it printed "Tim" over and over again. Given that's my name, I was instantly hooked. It also shows just how terrible I was at ensuring my code was correct, and that's something that's barely changed over nearly 20 years of professional programming.

I've written in a variety of languages, starting with BASIC on a ZX-81 at my dad's house, followed by BASIC on a Dragon 32 at home (and similar experience with Spectrums and Commodore machines). I modified production code written by someone else while trying to complete a game on the Dragon, and had a foray into assembly on the BBC Micro and Spectrum.

Various diversions around making music (Soundtracker and Octamed being the instruments of choice) and graphics followed, before I wrote a program to generate horoscope birth charts, which was my last non-professional step before the games industry.

Writing games is very, very different to just about any other programming persuit. The hardware is always constrained compared to any desktop machine. The expected outcome of a game is something visually stunning, audibly impressive, containing animation, effects, and a whole host of other gloss while essentially performing a simulation of a world running to some constrained set of rules, and by the time I started programming games, this was all expected to happen in real time. In other words - assuming you've got an NTSC telly, you've got exactly 1/60th of a second to figure out the result of simulating 1/60th of a second of your game world and also to draw that result.

It's incredible just how much you can achieve in that timescale (especially so with modern hardware like the PS3) but even when I was writing game code for the SEGA Genesis, if you consider games like Lemmings that emulate the behaviour of tens of critters all walking around in a world - it's pretty darned cool. Of course, to get those results (including all the shiny graphics) you had to cut every corner possible, shave every instruction from the list of instructions, and cheat like a mofo in every action you took.

To give a concrete example - when writing Shadow of the Beast for the Mega CD, instead of accurately modelling what happened when the beast responded to the jump button (how heavy is he? how fast is he moving upwards? apply gravity for 1/60th of a second ... how fast is he moving now? where is his position now?) we simply had a table of numbers which we added to his current screen height, that looked roughly like this: 7,5,4,3,2,1,2,1,0,0,-1 ... Yes, I typed that list in by hand, and tweaked it a few times till it looked right. No, it's nowhere near an accurate simulation of a velocity curve, but who's counting?

Every action in a program has a cost, in terms of how much memory it uses and how long that action takes to perform. On the earlier consoles, even things as simple as multiplying numbers was a very expensive thing to do - if you could stick with multiplying by powers of two, that was a lot cheaper. Don't even think about using floating point values! And when you've got 8 memory registers and 32k of main memory to play with, then you make damn sure you don't waste even a byte of it (and sometimes you make damn sure you're not even wasting bits).

Pretty much every one of these tricks is actually terribly bad if you look at a program in terms of how likely that program is to contain errors and bugs. Starting from questions like, Is your math correct? (obviously, no!) but leading on to, is the program performing the same actions as it was a second ago? (well, no - I just wrote some self-modifying code there because I needed to reuse the memory, so it's definitely not). Is the data in memory you just created from that calculation the same as it was a second ago? (well, no - I re-used that memory to do something totally different a few milliseconds back.) Does that function give the same results when you give it the same input? (it should, but it doesn't - because that global variable there got changed by some other function elsewhere and now it makes the result twice as big).

Over the years, I've moved from simple to complex to insanely complex hardware, and from teams of one or two people to teams of 50 people. The largest programming team I've worked on had over 100 people actively changing code during the last couple of weeks of crunch.

The resulting code is a mess. Elegant? - sure. Fantastically clever? - sure. Brilliantly constructed given the constraints? always.

Correct? Never.

Every single game I've ever worked on had at least one bug in it when it shipped. Some have hundreds or thousands.

Of course, you can blame my lack of skillz as a programmer (and indeed many people have!) but ultimately the reason these bugs are there is twofold. First, the techniques and methods used to write the software mean the bugs are possible. Second, the techniques and methods used to write the software mean the bugs are mostly invisible except under certain circumstances.

There has to be a better way, surely?

If you're expecting an unequivocal yes, then you've obviously never written a program before. But there's options. See part two of this series for more details.

One world, idiots

2010-07-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

I bought myself a really tasty piece of kit this week, a Korg NanoKontrol. this little beauty lets me control various aspects of music via sliders, knobs and buttons while I play, and allows me to add expression to what is otherwise fairly automated music creation.

In the package I also recieved a coupon to get money off Ableton Live, which seems to be a fantastic piece of sequencing and performance software. I've been demoing it for a few days, and thought, why not? I'll see how much money the coupon gives me off.

So, I go to the Ableton shop, and find that I can buy their Ableton Intro package for 99 dollars or 99 Euros. Given that I'm downloading it, I'll take the 99 dollars, thanks! (A quick google shows that one Euro today is worth around 1.18 dollars). I then have the revelation that the coupon will either grant me 30 Euros off, or 50 dollars off.

Obviously, thinks I, this is a no-brainer! I'll buy Ableton Intro for 49 USD, I get some software, Ableton get a sale, everyone's happy! So I enter all my details.

At which point the website decides that I'll be paying in Euros instead, and reprices the coupon to 30 Euros rebate instead of 50 dollars, taking the grand total from £32 to £58.

Erm, no. No thanks. I'm not giving you twice as much money on a whim just because I live somewhere else in the world - we're talking about SOFTWARE.

So, no sale. Sorry Ableton - you had me on the hook, you had me putting the virtual box into my virtual shopping cart, you virtually had a sale - but you lost it at the last hurdle.

Where does the week go?

2010-07-17T02:05:00.000-07:00

I started this week with good intentions, and ended up spending most of my time writing music and playing with my new NanoKontrol.

Still, I managed to get the cable run sorted from downstairs to up, even if I didn't manage to get anything under voice control yet. I'm not too far off!

It's amazing how fast a week goes ...

All tied up

2010-07-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

A week on holiday brings with it a clear horizon and the promise of getting stuck in to all the work I've been thinking (and talking) about for the last six months.

I've got a spool of cat5 waiting to be put to good use and some cable trunking. Next up, I need to figure out where to drill and which floorboards to lift, both upstairs and down. I'd like to have some neat RJ45 sockets linking the upstairs and downstairs, and I'm also thinking of putting a media/compute server somewhere out of the way and that's probably going to mean I need to get some power and network cables under the stairs.

I've also made good progress on getting some hooks into the Microsoft Speech API - PySpeech looks like it'll do most of what I want, although I'm not sure if I can feed off the voice recogniser without it interacting with the operating system at the same time. The accuracy seems good for phrased dictation, but not so great for single word command sequences which may screw with my plans. I might have to break my command strings into discrete flows and make each stage gate on a selection of similar sounding words. I'm also unsure of how it interacts with different speakers.

Hopefully by the end of the week I'll have the infrastructure in place to voicerec from the bedrooms and the living room, and possibly one item in the house under voicerec control - I'm thinking of starting with an IR transmitter for the various media boxes. TIRA and USB-UIRT both look viable, although I've yet to find a UK reseller. If anyone knows of an alternative option please enlighten me - I'm basically looking for a transmitter/reciever box that connects via USB and has some form of programming API, with the intention of recording button presses on my existing remotes and playing them back to control my satellite and tellybox.

Every week has one WTF in it

2010-07-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

although my weekly WTF frequency is considerably higher now Gabe's around.

Local minima

2010-07-03T04:04:00.000-07:00

There's a guy who lives over the road from us. Even though we've been living here 6 months, he's never bothered calling, welcoming us to the neighbourhood, anything like that.

He's quite happy to park outside my house, tho. Rather than reverse into his own space, he'd rather drive forwards into the double space outside my house and park in the middle of the two.

That's about as lazy as you can get.

And justice for all

2010-07-01T01:10:00.000-07:00

the Finns have just declared that broadband is a legal right for every citizen.

This may seem like fantastic news, but on closer inspection one has to wonder if it will simply mean more people spouting pointless trash on Facebook.

Still, the future starts here and all that. Good for you, Finland!

Leadership and solitude

2010-07-01T01:07:00.000-07:00

I stumbled today across an interesting lecture given to students at West Point earlier this year.

I should probably get a copy of Heart of Darkness, I've not read it yet.

Kideo for June

2010-06-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

Some more vids of Gabriel.

Gabe trying to crawl
Silly noises lying down
Satellite baby
What became of the monkey
Gabe in a flat cap
First baby rice
Burping
Silly noises and bouncing

Faster pussycat

2010-06-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

Virgin are now trialing speeds via DOCSIS 3 of over 100Mb/s (and touting 400Mb/s as feasible). I'm torn.

On the one hand, these kinds of speeds are exactly what the modern internet is waiting for. By modern internet, I mean a couple of simulaneous high-definition media streams (for comparison, BD bit rates are around 40Mb/s). One isn't enough? I hear you ask - but in my house there's two of us, and occasionally we'd like to watch different content at the same time. Alongside this, a couple of torrents or background tasks soaking up another 20-50Mb/s seems perfectly reasonable to me - not all the time, just some of the time. A sustainable peak 100Mb/s looks like nice headroom for bursty usage that occasionally gets close to that - after all, you'd not expect to drive a car that struggled to hit 70 mph, would you? Honestly, I manage just fine on my "lucky to hit 5Mb/s" connection, just like I manage ok on my pushbike even though my car can top a ton with ease. A 100Mb/s net feed would be like heaven.

On the other hand, the fact it's Virgin fills me with dread. Their AUP and traffic management policy both suck, along with their happiness to give your details to all and sundry while running deep packet inspection on your traffic. Shudder. Let's take their current "XL" 20Mb/s service as an example. If you take their traffic cap in the evenings - 3.5GB before they drop the throttle to restrict your network performance by 75% - you can max out your connection for the grand total of 24 minutes before they choke your internet for 5 hours. 3.5GB is a lot of data, you say? Sure - but if you're getting an HD feed at BD bit rates, that's 12 minutes of your movie and then you're gasping for bandwidth.

One would hope that on faster lines, their traffic caps would rise (and indeed on their peak XXL product, there's no traffic caps - hooray! but every other plan has one - boo!). However, at this point the numbers just start looking ridiculous. What *is* a reasonable cap when your bandwidth is 100Mb/s? is it 5GB in one block? 10GB? 50GB? Just what the hell are you going to be doing with all that data anyway?

The obvious answer to this question is - binning local storage, and treating the net as a media library. Which is the ultimate end game here, let's be honest. Physical media and local media storage just don't make sense when you can have what you want, when you want, where you want - and who wouldn't want that? Local temporal cache - sure. Plastic disks or tape cassettes? No thanks, I've got boxes of the damn things in my loft.

The real paradigm shifter isn't consumer behaviour though. It's producer behaviour. Always-on video feed from home to wherever you are. Sharing your local CPU resource with the cloud (and potentially monetising that CPU dead time). Acting as a legitimate seed point in a distributed file system. Participating. This is what your machine (or local network) will be doing once everyone has always on connections that approach fractions of a gigabit every second. This is the cool shiznit, and it's not far off.

Of course, the chances of me getting it any time soon are non-existent - from recent experience, I have enough negative telecoms karma to cause any order I place to vanish into another dimension. At least I'll get to watch other folks use the internet like we've always dreamed it would be.

New balls please!

2010-06-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

After watching the Mahut - Isner match for a few hours, which is now heading into a third day
One can't fail but be hugely impressed by their sheer stamina and dedication. They've nearly put as much time into that game as we used to put into a full Kara run when we started playing!

Great to watch, and probably a good place to stop - I'm sure there were a lot of folks in the crowd who needed a wee, a pint and some strawberries.

Teeth and wisdom

2010-06-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not exactly sure what the definition of wisdom teeth is (and no, I'm not going to wiki to look it up, that would be both cheating and a buzzkill).

Gabe's first tooth is now protruding far enough out of his gum to give you a nasty nip when he bites down. it's not particularly visible, but damn can you feel it.

Given teeth and wisdom go hand in hand (or at least, one hopes they do), here are a couple of links to wisdom for Gabe to read when he's older.

http://stuffnoonetoldme.blogspot.com/

http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/

May he be as wise in life as I was stupid, and may he never fall flat on his face because he wanted to hold onto a cigarette and a pint of beer more than he wanted to protect his good looks.

Chinese blog spam

2010-06-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

When will it ever end? As a father, won't someone please think of the children?

Opening one's eyes

2010-06-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

Tonight has been one of those serendipitous occasions where everything one reads is relevant to one's current situation.

Thank you, Fark, for providing exactly the thread I needed.

Easy life

2010-06-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

Chores done, clothes put away, dishes clean, garden watered, recycling sorted.

Tune created, Prince of Persia and Metal Gear 4 sampled.

Easy life!

How to say Incompetent in six easy downpayments

2010-06-02T09:01:00.000-07:00

Addendum - Again, after speaking to Colin and David in customer services, they have resolved this issue (and this time within 15 minutes of me contacting them!). These guys rock. If only the rest of the BT customer services could be as effective.

After the exemplary treatment I've had at the hands of the BT special division who can actually speak english and are obviously based somewhere near this country, I thought I'd keep my bile in check, but seriously - this is beyond a joke.

British Telecom - you are evidently run by a malicious computer with no regard for human feelings. Because if you're not, the alternative is too ridiculous to comprehend.

ARE YOU ACTUALLY EMPLOYING PEOPLE TO PISS OFF YOUR CUSTOMERS?

If you are, then they're doing a fine job.

If you are not (and I honestly hope to god you're not) then WHAT THE HELL.

so after the total trauma that was moving house (see parts one and two here), I thought that since, you know, we actually had a phone line, that would be the end of the worries.

No, says BT. I will ensure that you are totally dissatisfied with the experience. So although I paid for all associated charges and the like, three months ago I got my phone line disconnected. When I finally managed to get through to someone in Bangalore or wherever the hell the BRITISH Telecom (the hint should be in the name, surely) customer services department was, they informed me that I had missed a bill and was late paying it, and had consequently disconnected my line.

Which bill, says I?

The one that we sent yesterday, says the CS rep.

You do realise that we don't have teleporters for the postal service here in England, says I? I haven't even seen the bill yet? and it's Sunday? The post won't arrive until tomorrow at the earliest? Am I making a shred of sense here?

Oh, I understand that, Sir, says the CS rep. However, you were late paying for the line connection charge on your last quarter too, which is why we've disconnected the line.

This is, of course, the line connection charge that had already been waived because I WAS MOVING HOUSE AND THE ONLY REASON FOR CONNECTING A NEW LINE WAS BECAUSE ... WELL ... I HAVE NO GODDAMNED IDEA. But regardless of the logic behind it, I didn't owe any money at all at this point. Having the phone line disconnected was slightly frustrating, to say the least.

Various calls to India in vain, but a direct call to the folks who originally helped me install the line and the issue was (I believed) resolved, and the line reconnected.

(As an aside - the internet was working just fine during this debacle.)

So this quarter's bill has just arrived. and on THIS bill, I've been charged for late payment (£7.50) and an "other one off charge" - £17.62 for reconnecting the line after the disconnection.

you've just charged me £25 quid because you're incompetent, and obviously have no way of tracking why, when or how any of the actions you take occur. All of the relevant details are in your files. So why charge me? Am I a problem customer? Did I do something to someone in BT in a former life that I'm not aware of?

Assuming that something dubious would happen this quarter, I'd overpaid my bill (I'm not sure if I'd paid 10 or 20 pounds, but I wanted to ensure I was in credit to stop any line disconnections this time around). I guess I'm too much of a cheapskate when it comes to being in credit.

This is not a huge amount of money. I will not starve this month if I need to pay an extra 25 pounds. I will, however, be cancelling the service just as soon as I possibly can because you know what? I'm furious. I'm actually furious. I'm paying for a telephone service that I hardly ever use simply so I can get ADSL and it's raising my blood pressure and shortening my life expectancy, and nothing is worth that.

(Edits have occurred to remove swearing ... I should know better, really.)

Moral lessons for my child, part three

2010-05-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

I think this is the third one - I forget. One, many, ...

Anywho. Gabriel, here's another sparkling lesson for you to learn once you're old enough to read.

Happiness comes from within.

Sure, you can buy experiences that will make you happy for a short while (in a variety of forms) - but if you're not happy in general, buying things won't fix that. In fact, it's likely to make it worse, especially if you go into debt (even for a day) to get that fix of whatever.

If you want to be truly happy, be comfortable with your own company. The easiest way to do that is to be honest and decent with those around you - treat people with respect. That way, you'll find that you don't stay awake at night worrying about things you did or said. You should be able to spend a day alone without feeling wierd about it, and you should be able to do things on your own; make a phone call, go shopping, see a movie. Sure, doing those things with company is more fun - but if you can't manage it with just yourself as your crowd, then you'll never be truly happy.

If you want to be truly happy, make sure you can live with the regret you'll get from something that could go wrong. If you can deal with the consequences, do the deed! Never be afraid of taking a chance - but always think it through first. I have plenty of regrets, but if I had to do things again I doubt I'd do much differently. It's better to regret the things you have done than the things you haven't.

If you want to be truly happy, then find the happiness within yourself and give it to others. Even if they don't want to share it with you, it doesn't cost you much.

FizzBuzzLol

2010-05-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

plagiarised directly from a comment by KingOfTheMoon on Slashdot.

For anyone who is interested in working in my industry - if you can't trot this out (in the language of your choice) then you might be better looking elsewhere.

HAI CAN HAS STDIO? I HAS A NADA ITZ 0 I HAS A VAR IM IN YR LOOP UP VAR!!1 I HAS A ANZER ITZ "" BOTH SAEM MOD OF VAR AN 3 AN NADA, O RLY? YA RLY ANZER "Fizz" OIC BOTH SAEM MOD OF VAR AN 5 AN NADA, O RLY? YA RLY SMOOSH ANZER AN "Buzz" MKAY OIC BOTH SAEM ANZER AN "", O RLY? YA RLY VISIBLE VAR NO WAI VISIBLE ANZER OIC VISIBLE ":)" BTW DAS A NEWLINE IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 100? KTHXBYE BTW IMMA SO GUNNA GET HIRED! IM OUTTA YR LOOP KTHXBYE

Democracy

2010-04-24T02:34:00.000-07:00

When men were originally figuring out civilisation, democracy was as much an experiment as a process. In Athens, males who had earned the right to vote were citizens, and all citizens were expected to participate in the governance of the people. Important posts were filled from the pool of citizens by lot - effectively removing all of the ridiculous expensive machinations that we see in our political machinery in the UK today. Anyone who was interested could be involved, but being interested didn't start you on the road to overwhelming power or control over your fellow man - it simply meant that your voice was relevant.

We've lost many aspects of true democracy in our current electoral system. Most British citizens have a vague understanding who represents them. Most British citizens probably don't know what their representative stands for, or if indeed they actually represent their views. Most laws are discussed by some minority of the total Representatives. Most Representatives vote along the lines their party dictates, rather than with the majority view of the people they represent. Most laws are aggregates of confusing, and potentially totally orthogonal, legislation - often bundles of smaller rulings to one end with something unrelated slipped in there that goes under the radar.

Given the way they vote, given that there is absolutely no demand of accountability (i.e. checking that when they vote they vote for you) - is it any wonder that our political system is mostly steered and fought for by moneyed interests and the media? Do you have the time and effort to put into trying, single handled, to steer a political agenda?

I think there are better ways to run a society. Technology has the potential to be an enabler of a true direct democratic process. It has the ability to inform and corral results with no bias, and it has the ability to provide a platform where any relevant voice can be both heard and counted.

I'll be putting some effort into establishing my vision of that platform over the coming year. If you're interested in helping, please get in touch.

(Addendum - the gender bias in this post is pretty evident on second reading, which is both of historic interest and something I find disagreeable. rest assured I believe that men and women should have an equal voice in society.)

Stepping away from the surf and setting up on the beach towel

2010-04-24T02:20:00.000-07:00

My wife and myself are taking a break from Facebook - partly because it's a vampyric timesuck nightmare with very little payoff, and partly because it has all of the drawbacks of being at a large party and none of the benefits. Of the various time sinks I've "invested" in (recognising that something to which you devote time for no tangible reward can hardly be termed an investment) it's probably the worst - at least with WoW I was levelling up.

The weather here is about as fantastic as one could hope, and we have an adorable son who is becoming more interactive and vocal day by day. Spending time with him really is an investment. I'm hopeful we can do more of that and less of the internet trawling.

War is not a game

2010-04-05T14:29:00.000-07:00

Wikileaks today released unedited footage from a gun camera of what is described as an Apache helicopter.

The craft opened fire on a group of 8 men, killing all but one. That man attempted to crawl away, and was very nearly removed from the scene by a black van. Before his rescuers could get him in the van, the helicopter opens fire again, destroying the van and killing some of the occupants.

Listening to the comms chatter reminds me of some of the more gory games of Modern Warfare or Planetside I've played, and were it a game, I could empathise with the testosterone, fury and hatred that's evident in the video.

It's not a game. It's footage of an event that occured in 2007. Two Reuters journalists were killed by the american forces captured in the footage, and children in the van were injured (and were incredibly lucky not to be killed). The other civilians in the footage were not so lucky.

To see this kind of footage live is disturbing - not so much because of the actual video content, I've seen that and worse many times before in virtual environments. No, the most disturbing content is that these are people - real people - and those responsible for killing them are treating them as much less than that - they are treating them as targets, as some "unknown enemy". They talk about the victims, before during and after the shooting, with a complete lack of respect. They glory in the murders they commit.

Regardless of the justifications and motivations for this invasion, one has to watch this footage and appreciate that this is, ultimately, the end result of paying people to kill each other and giving them guns and bullets to do it with. People die. Real people die. there will always be collateral damage. There will always be mistakes. There will always be bloodthirsty angry men willing to direct harm and anger at people they don't know, to justify that act later as "the right thing to do".

One has to also wonder - why was this event covered up, and blatantly lied about by the forces in charge? If they lied about this, how can you ever trust them when they describe all of the other events in Iraq; or indeed every other war they have engaged in? This is not a new event - covering up mistakes and process is just about standard practice with most militaries these days.

Here's some links for posterity - I suggest you only watch if you have a strong constitution.

http://www.collateralmurder.com/
http://www.vancouversun.com/Leaked+video+shows+military+forces+shooting+Reuters+journalists+civilians/2765874/story.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8603938.stm

Wikileaks has been persuing this video for a while now (weeks at least, but most likely months) - why has no other newspaper, reporting service or reputable mainstream media provider not been trying to uncover the same information? What has stopped them from digging?

Other Operating System

2010-04-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

I own a PS3, which on balance is a fantastic piece of kit. I really don't watch BluRay movies much, but I play a lot of games and I watch a hell of a lot of TV, mostly streamed off the network from my PC (and shortly from my media server once I get one set up).

For anyone who still watches broadcast telly - you have no idea how fantastic on-demand TV is. Watching a season of something to catchup is just bloody brilliant, and movies on demand just can't be beat either. Of course, this being the UK, it's virtually impossible for me to legitimately pay for a service that provides the experience I currently enjoy (either streamed via my PC, or directly to my PS3). I'm sure it'll arrive in the next couple of years (most likely in some form similar to Hulu and Netflix ).

I also enjoy listening to Spotify - i'm incredibly close to being a paid-up subscriber. If I could get it on my PS3, then I'd pay tomorrow. (and by PS3, really all I mean here is "on my telly box what lives downstairs").

Fundamentally then, I have a supercomputer acting as an audio and visual media server connected to my lovely big plasma, and all is (very nearly) good.

All i'm really missing is a VNC connection back to my PC, and a few other nice web utilities. I should be able to do most of this via the PS3 browser, but in daily use it's great for - well, browsing, and not much else. It's certainly not functional as a web platform - crappy flash support, no HTML5, etc. What it does have (for the next day or two!) is the ability to install another operating system (basically, some flavour of linux).

Finally biting the bullet last week, I prepped my PS3 for installing Linux so I could use a decent browser, get VNC support, and all the other pleasures of a proper operating system on my tellybox. I forked out 50 quid for a nice mini bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo. I really was super-looking-forward to this.

And then just before April Fool's day, Sony decide to remove support for Other OS.

If only this was an April Fool story. It might even have been mildly amusing.

The justification appears to be that Sony are worried about piracy on their console, and consider the ability to launch another operating system a security risk. What they seem to have missed is that although there is an outside chance that this could be used to break the security on their platform, there is a very large installed base of users who actively run Linux on their machines for a variety of reasons, pretty much all of which are perfectly legal and reasonable (for example, academic research).

So, I've gone ahead and installed Linux before I take the plunge and remove the ability forever from my system, just to see what I'll be missing. Shame on you, Sony. Most definitely not shiny.

For the future

2010-03-23T16:24:00.001-07:00

Two posts to come some point in the future - early vs late (and the work/life/time implications of this) and moral lessons for my child part two.

Notebook

2010-03-23T14:13:00.001-07:00

With age, comes great forgetfulness.

I would very much like to carry a notebook, ideally one that read my thoughts without any transcription effort. I've had 10 good ideas this week and only had the opportunity to capture two on paper.

The fucking music industry

2010-03-15T15:10:00.000-07:00

This rant is for you, Mrs Pepper.

All you music industry leeches, just fuck off and die. Seriously.

Music costs fucking NOTHING to make and NOTHING to distribute. I know, I've done it. I have a CD out there from my younger days that 5 FUCKING MILLION people bought. All told, I paid a couple of hundred quid for the hardware and it took me a few weeks to write and record.

Do you see me moaning and bitching that people could possibly listen to those tracks? NO! I got a real fucking job and earn my ongoing wage through continued hard work and effort.

People whistle a tune, do you want to fucking CHARGE them for it? People like a tune you've made, does that mean you get a free ride forever?

Not any more, you fucking leeches. Too late, you missed the boat to change your business model. Keep your manufactured Pop Idol dross, keep your new signings that no-one wanted to listen to in the first place, keep your payola radio slots, keep your fucking tedious repetitive heard-it-all-before stable of five thousand artists who all sound the fucking same.

Apparently Panorama tonight was about the music industry. I haven't seen it, but I bet Simon Cowell or Louis fucking Walsh was on there moaning about how they are not rich enough. Fuck off.

Bounce bounce bounce

2010-03-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

Bounce bounce bounce!
Bounce bounce bounce!
Bounce bounce bounce!
Bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce.

this is Gabe's favourite song this afternoon, sung in time to the bouncy chair going up and down.

If you wish to sing along : C E G, C E G, C E G, hi-C A G F E D C.

I don't owe you anything, internet guy

2010-03-11T06:08:00.000-08:00

I visit a variety of web-developer type blogs and news sites over the course of my average week, and there's a repeated theme (which ties into all this ACTA and digital economy furore over the last couple of months) which goes like this:

"Ad-blocking is bad. I make my living off you seeing my ads."

Pardon me, internet guy, but I don't owe you anything. Not one red cent. If I want to improve my browsing experience by refusing to download your adverts, that's my business and my business alone.

If you don't want me to see your content, don't publish it on the internet.

If you don't want me visiting your site because the traffic costs are too expensive for you, then put in a paywall. You will immediately benefit in the reduction of traffic costs because chances are very high I'll not be back.

If you want to publish content, and attempt to make a living off that (and it's possible, I've seen many people who do) then great - go for your life. Don't think that gives you a right to dictate how I use the internet. If you can't make a living because people are not clicking on your adverts, that is your problem not mine. If putting your content out there is too expensive for you or is not making you the money you want ... change your business model.

The affordability of being

2010-03-10T12:59:00.000-08:00

If you live in the UK, then elections are (finally) looming. I say finally, because we've been in the power of an unelected leader for the last couple of years, which stinks of every bad kind of politics there is. Much as I loathe Gordon Brown and everything he's done to set this country down the path to destruction over the last decade, at least we'll have the chance to rectify it.

Of course, that relies on everyone making the effort - making a statement, and (I guess, if one is to subscribe to our outdated and notably ineffectual and feeble electoral system) making a vote.

I'm strong in my political beliefs, and I think fairly well informed. I'll certainly not be voting for Labour or Conservative. This will probably render my voice mute, but short of wholesale destruction casting a vote is the only way to be counted.

Are you informed? Do you know where our money goes? do you know who your local MP is? Do you know what they stand for, and whether they come close to representing your views when you vote for them?

If you don't, here are some links that you will hopefully find enlightening. Use at your discretion.

Look here for budget info (www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org)
Look here to find out about your MP, including their voting record (www.theyworkforyou.com)

I'm not going to attempt to sway your vote, but in the name of the noodly one, please be informed about your choice. Make it count for the right reasons.

Body of evidence

2010-03-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

When I was younger, I'm pretty sure my mother and father took a multitude of photographs, and most likely some video, of myself and my older brother. As far as I can ascertain, very little evidence of these media exist. I do have memories of my father running slide shows, and I know that my stepfather was interested in photography at various points in our youth. Where did these vanish to? Are they stuck somewhere in albums, boxed in a loft? Have they been jettisoned as irrelevant artifacts of our younger lives?

I'd like to think that those images would have value to myself and my family as time goes on. The older I become, the more value I place on my place in the world and my story within it. Scattered moments of staring at family albums when I was 12, feeling persecuted and terribly embarrassed, would probably hold huge emotional relevance to me today.

Gabriel will, for better or worse, most likely not face that fate - unless the interwebs and society as know it change fairly radically, or Flickr / Picasa / Facebook suddenly decide that the cents worth of disk space I hold from them in exchange for targetting their adverts is actually considerably less valuable than now. Most likely he'll come of age in a time where all the photographs, video, audio and other media that we've captured of him will persist in some form that will literally be embarassingly easy to find. Creating that media is as trivial as it has ever been, indexing it slightly less trivial but still not a terribly onerous task.

To parallel the effort I'd have to put in to discover my former selves captured in chemicals, I'm going to forgo providing any links. Gabriel, if you're reading this - it's all on the internet somewhere ;)

Prune juice

2010-03-03T13:30:00.001-08:00

I think an explosion is imminent.

Babies and the common cold don't mix

2010-02-02T14:05:00.001-08:00

My son Gabriel has had the pleasure of a cold for the last week, and it's certainly made him a miserable little bugger. And who can blame him - I've had (one assumes) the same cold, and it's made me a miserable big bugger, along with laying me out for the weekend. If my mother had not been visiting, I think we'd have had the archetypal weekend from hell.

Two things have been cycling through my addled brain all weekend. One - who the hell did I catch the cold from? Two - what is it that makes it socially acceptable to go out amongst the masses and spread your fsking plague germs around so that I end up catching your lurgy?

There's a few culprits, starting with my wife's mother who was so desparate to see her new grandchild that she came to the post natal ward in a flu mask "so that she wouldn't spread her cold". Not subtle! Then there's the selection of scummers and vagrants who travel on my beloved no. 50 into the centre of Brighton. Coughing your lungs up over the seats in front of you seems to be jeu du jour.

Of course, even in my workplace which is populated with intelligent hardworking folks, there's a collection of people who simply must attend even though they are visibly leaking fluids.

One would surmise that the elementary mathematics (1 person off for 5 days = 5 days of productivity lost; 1 person off 2 days, spreads cold to remaining 30 staff, who are each off for two days before struggling back in to work = 62 days of productivity lost) would be enough to persuade firms to persuade their employees to stay the hell away.

Are the lemsip adverts really that convincing? or is it the stories of doom and gloom in the Daily Mail about how many millions of pounds are lost every year to people pulling sickies?

Whatever the reason, one of you bastards gave me and my son their cold. Shame on you.

Junk DNA is IP circumvention

2010-02-01T13:40:00.000-08:00

Postulate one: while in the process of copying (or otherwise cloning) coded media, one can state that some minimal subset of the whole (not necessarily a workable subset of the whole) cannot constitute a meaningful proportion of the original media, meaning that it cannot be classed as a copy. Take the canonical case of a single bit of a movie file. At some point, the sliding window will represent some meaningful proportion of the original work, much like a collection of grains of sand becomes a heap, but there is established law in many societies that dictates fair use cases of subsets of media considerably larger than a single bit.

Postulate two: one can create a second work, larger than the original coded media, but containing the original coded media. If large enough, the original coded media can be contained in a form that is difficult or expensive to extract without relevant information, and potentially virtually invisible without relevant information.

Postulate three: if one exposes the entirety of the second work, yet restricts the relevant result of a copy or clone to only the sections of the media that correspond to the first work, then one can be said to have not copied the second work at all (by only allowing a restictive selection) but actually given access to the entirety of the first work.

Is junk DNA an IP circumvention mechanism?

What the hell are you all afraid of?

2010-01-23T14:22:00.000-08:00

According to security services, a terrorist attack is highly likely.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/7056833/Terrorist-attack-is-highly-likely-security-services-say.html

Where? no idea.
When? no idea.
Who? no idea.
Why? no idea.

BUT YOU MUST BE AFRAID. BE SCARED. BE VIGILANT.

after all, you might see something suspicious and foil a terrorist plot all on your own.

What the hell is the point of this story? What the hell is the point of this supposed terrorist threat scale? Why does the government want us to live in a state of fear?

Answers on a postcard please.

A week in the life of

2010-01-16T02:57:00.000-08:00

The last week has been pretty crazy, to say the least. I'm utterly in love with this new little man in my life, although I have to say the crying thing really isn't my cup of tea. What are my cup of tea are all the other little noises, the twitches, the bemused looks. When he lies staring at me while I rub his feet.

Gabriel is a boob demon, and while we're not trying to establish patterns just yet, we're noting down when he feeds (mostly to check he's getting enough and that Nic gets some rest when she can). Today he fed twice overnight, and is now heading up for his "every hour and a half" routine that he has been in the last couple of days.

I'm a lot more relaxed than I thought I'd be, and even (dare I say it) less tired. Nic is still pretty exhausted, but she's slowly learning to sleep when he sleeps and snatch the occasional 30 minutes or so when I can keep him occupied when he's awake. It's a learning game for everyone, I guess.

We both had a moment a few days ago - myself on Wednesday, Nic on Thursday - where we were sleeping with him in our arms and fell asleep ourselves, to wake up to a soundly sleeping baby. Both of us instantly went into panic mode - "Oh my god, the baby isn't breathing" - And then realised that actually, he was just fine - super snug, in fact. I think that's the first step down the road of not being terrified that he's going to die every waking moment. Hopefully we can continue down that road as he gets older!

The start of the last week was just hideous. Nic's labour was long, ended in an episiotomy and a nasty tear and a forcep delivery when we'd hoped for (but not explicitly demanded!) a c-section after the first few hours proved a very labourious (if you'll pardon the pun) exercise. I have a feeling that Royal Essex County were running at, and possibly well past, capacity on the day Gabe was born, as the moment he was born pretty much everyone vanished from the room, and we were basically left to our selves for the next day.

When we did finally move downstairs to the post-natal ward, instead of the private room we'd been promised the day earlier we ended up on the ward with three other mothers rotating in and out of the beds around Nicky. No space, very little privacy, constant noise, and hardly any staff around to help out with the process of moving Nicky out of hospital and back home. She was getting no sleep at all over the nights, and was only managing to sleep when I came in to hospital and walked Gabe around. Of course, this being brighton, fathers have to go home at 8.30pm and are not allowed back in to visit till 10am the next day, so Nic put up with three days of this before finally flipping.

The last day in hospital was simply ridiculous. We demanded to leave, and it took the entire day (from 9am to 6pm) to arrange Nic's medication, have a doctor finally come and check over Gabriel (yes, three days after he was born!) and to sign the paperwork. All available midwives appeared to be in triage mode, and it looks like teaching new mothers to breastfeed is higher up the priority list than organising and signing discharge papers. Eventually I had to collar a midwife and follow her around until she sighed, went into the office, signed a piece of paper and gave it to me.

When we finally got home, Nic was super-emotional (understandably) but got a few hours sleep in between feeding, and excepting the occasional crazy moment she's been steadily improving sleepwise and moodwise up to today. We even had visitors yesterday, which with Jay and Sal was ok, but with Nic's sister and kids - well, just a bit too much stimulation I think.

I'm now proficient at sip-feeding, bottle-feeding and changing shitty nappies. like Jason said, it's really not so bad after you've done it once - it becomes more a routine thing.

And the boy himself? he's just wonderful. he's noticably more alert today than last week, very energetic, and hasn't lost any weight between birth and today. he eats incessantly - we put him on a bottle of expressed milk last night to give Nicky a break, and he ate and ate and ate, well past the point of full, then spat a load of it up on my T-Shirt before demanding more boob from mother. Wonderful stuff!

I have a son!

2010-01-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

The last 48 hours have been a combination of the most boring, exciting,scary, fantastic, revealing moments in my life. literally minute to minute things changed, and while my wife suffered through a fairly hideous labour, the end result is beyond belief.

I'll post later on the more mundane revelations of the whole affair; of which there were many, including the sudden change in midwife process from pre to post birth, the neighbour in the post ward with her 6th spawn ("11 if you include my partner") and the ridiculousness that two inches of snow brings to life.

However, today is the birthday of my firstborn. Here's to you, my excellent son.

Snow day

2010-01-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

I love snow, and we've had another dose of it. I wish I was on holiday.

While the council didn't manage to grit our road, at least they've been kind enough to deposit a pile of grit at the bottom of the hill for residents to use.

I hope it clears before the baby decides to come, otherwise we're in for an interesting trip to the hospital...

My favourite times of day

2009-12-24T03:11:00.000-08:00

11.11
13.37
23.11 (11.11 but in the dark)

something draws my eye to the clock at this time, I have no idea why.

That ain't customer service

2009-12-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

Today's tale of asshattery comes from Tesco's.

We're carless (not careless!) so we often arrange for grocery deliveries online. We booked in our christmas shopping delivery nearly a fortnight ago for this evening - a 7pm till 9pm slot. Assuming that they wouldn't turn up (because of the weather, slippy roads and other general slackness) we rang them up today at lunchtime.

"Of course we'll be delivering - in fact we're loading your food onto the van right now!"

did they turn up?

No. no they didn't.

But of course, they'll arrange for our delivery tomorrow, because we're ... well, one would assume that we're now a priority delivery, right? I mean, we've just had our order cancelled even though we checked that it was coming not 6 hours beforehand?

No. the best they can do is Tuesday (no good, we're out) meaning the earliest slot we can make is Wednesday.

Anyone care to bet on whether they'll actually turn up on Wednesday? because I'm assuming that they won't.

I understand that it's cold out. I understand that the weather is bad. That is why we rang up. If they'd had the decency to tell us that they were not going to deliver - If I had known that they wouldn't arrive - instead of helping the neighbours clear out the road (so that the van would have no problems getting to our house) I would have walked to the local Sainsbury's and got at least enough food to see us through till Christmas. It's an hour walk, but I had all day to do it.

Speaking to their customer service was the usual fruitless persuit. Sugary words and a "oh, well, terribly sorry" attitude do not help me. I need the items that I ordered, that is the only thing that matters to me. I don't want to hear apologies or platitudes, I want to hear how I will be the first customer in the queue to have my order satisfied, in preference to anyone who placed their order after me.

After spending 15 minutes getting more and more irate, my wife took over the call, and decided that we would rebook for Wednesday the 23rd. I'm probably going to get the shopping after work each evening for the next few evenings anyway, but we assumed that it couldn't hurt to take a Wednesday slot. Right? Right?

So, this is what we get greeted with when we check the delivery slot time.

First off, the time slot is Tuesday 5th of January. Nice!

Next, we see that the order is 30 pounds more expensive than the original order we placed a week or two back. So, we decide to take a stroll down basket lane, and spot that some of the fresh produce prices are a wee bit inflated.

That's right - 7 parsnips, £10.92. 3 Leeks, 5.94. And you really don't want to know how much the bananas and carrots cost.

Needs more polish, Tesco. Not shiny.

Ikea Jenga

2009-12-06T01:31:00.000-08:00

After moving house, my wife and I have made strident efforts to throw away the mountain of crap that we've accumulated with our consumerist ways over the last couple of years. The mountain is still huge, but boy, you shoulda seen it when we moved last time.

While the floor plans say otherwise, I'm convinced this new house is significantly smaller than our old place overlooking the sea, and there was no storage in the house when we moved in, so a trip to Ikea was required to furnish our new gaff. Being the type who likes efficiency, we planned to do the whole house in one trip - wardrobes, bookcases, computer desks, chests of drawers, DVD racks and a few other bits and bobs. Basically, enough boxes to fill half a transit van.

So, now we have a house half full of boxes of stuff, and half-full of boxes containing boxes that will contain the stuff from the boxes once I unbox and construct them. I now have some wierd matroska box situation going on where the only way I can make space to make the furniture is to stack boxes inside boxes, and carefully slide stacks of boxes from one place to another. It may sound like a fun game, but Ikea Jenga is going to kill me at some point when I get crushed to death by a load of old CDs.

Hopefully by the end of today, I'll have everything unboxed and constructed, and we can start putting our clothes and books somewhere where they will comfortably live until the next time we move.

Sir Valence

2009-11-27T11:13:00.000-08:00

It's quite incredible, the bond between our ruling elite and the media conglomerates. It's almost a chemical attraction. One has to wonder just how far you will let them go.

Finally, some MSM attention is being directed at the upcoming surveillance society that we're all being pushed towards. Virgin Media have announced publicly that they are going to inspect everyone's internet traffic in an effort to identify "unlawful file sharing".

Just to be clear, this means that if you're a Virgin customer, you're now paying to be spied upon by your ISP, and they have just given up any pretense of common carrier status. I'm sure other large ISPs will be next. Even if you are totally innocent and have never even considered file sharing, your traffic is being explicitly monitored.

Doesn't that make you feel all safe and warm inside?

Given that someone has stated that certain types of file sharing are unlawful (certainly not me or the majority of my peers, but someone somewhere) one has to wonder, what is the next thing they will determine is unlawful? How much money does one have to pay to move an activity (copying a file) from unlawful (I got this file from site A) to lawful (I got this file from site B)? What about "I already own this album, so I'll listen to it" (legal), back it up (dubious), download it from some website (illegal), or a torrent (here they come to disconnect your family internet connection).

The time has come to make a stand, and I'm standing up.

I will not purchase any more media that has been RIAA or MPAA or BPI certified. I will not vote for any candidate that believes these people have a right to dictate how my internet connection is used.

Make your voice and your wallet count. Join me.

To be, or not to be

2009-11-25T13:45:00.000-08:00

My current internet provider is Be Internet. They're not super-cheap, but they're not insanely expensive either. I've been with them for nearly four years now, and they're bloody brilliant. This endorsement does not come with any kickbacks from them, although if you are persuaded then I'll be happy to formally introduce you.

The reason I raise this is because they've been in the tiny minority of people who, while moving house over the last month, have promised and then delivered. They gave me a date for connection, they connected me on that date, they sent me an email saying I was working, I plugged in my modem and I had a connection. Hallelujah.

Bloodsucking

2009-11-19T09:09:00.000-08:00

A big shout goes out to the owners of the open wireless access point somewhere in my vicinity. You've allowed me net access where Vodafone failed.

Given the near-magical turnaround on my land line, I've got high hopes that we'll be able to get a proper connection to the interwebs up next week, potentially even for my birthday. That would be a fantastic outcome. In the meantime, I'll undoubtedly make use of the local access point for some light surfing and email. Given that it's someone else's connection, I'll endeavour to keep the traffic low.

One may wonder if this activity is legal, and my current take is that it is - barely. Security of wireless systems is taken seriously by every third party provider in the country now. Every other access point in the area which is in a default configuration is locked down. This leads me to believe that anyone who has an open wireless access point has done so deliberately with the intention of being a good Samaritan for folks like myself. I intend to do the same when my network connection arrives, although I'll undoubtedly try and put in place some traffic shaping so that MACs which are unknown get a small slice of the available pie. Given that access is therefore implicitly granted, I'm not in contravention of the aforementioned act.

One has to wonder how society will react in future as connection to the Internet becomes more (and eventually, totally) pervasive. Being without a connection, even for a day, disrupts my usual routines - I'm unable to look anything up online, place food orders, check email. All of these things that are now comfortably second nature (not rationed, not carefully doled out) become glaring issues. I'm sure the same could be said of phone access over the last few decades, although that's mitigated somewhat with mobile phone access. I've purchased a 3G dongle to ensure that we have some form of connection across the 5 computers in the house, but when that fails to find a network we're back at square one. At least we can fall back to dial up now that the phone line is in place.

My child will be part of the first generation born where the Internet isn't just there - it's everywhere. How cool will that be?

BT phone home

2009-11-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

I'm rarely in a position where the effort of a large corporation surprises me. I've had situations with various companies in the past where I've been left thinking, "Is this really how you treat your customers? Is everyone going through the same pain and problems using your service? remind me again what I'm paying you for?"

Today, the big corporation finally bit back. BT have connected me up to the phone network in a little over a week from my first request, and a little over two days from where my ire was noticed. This is nearly a fortnight faster than the previous date I was given. To say I'm gobsmacked would be an understatement, and I'm thoroughly impressed with their customer service.

As a technically savvy bloke, I'm probably more aware than most of what's actually required to connect up a phone line and transfer a number around. At the end of the day though, I really shouldn't care - all I want is to be able to pick up my phone and hear a dial tone, and I can do that now.

Big thanks to David and Colin, and to the BT engineer who arrived on my doorstep at precisely 8am this morning. Good work, fellas.

A new hope

2009-11-18T01:51:00.000-08:00

After my obscenity-laden rant on Monday, I felt much better. I assumed that nothing would occur after said rant other than my blood pressure reducing to a sensible value, especially given that I have a regular audience of - well, not many people at all.

However, railing at the wind seems to work sometimes - especially when certain readers are able to talk to certain people who obviously have the ability to make things right.

On Tuesday afternoon, while traipsing boxes from one house to another, I had a call from an excellent chap called David at BT, and our conversation essentially boiled down to "how can we make this right". the order for December got cancelled, and a new order is now in place for the end of this week.

This is utterly fantastic, and I take back all of the hideous dark ranting in the previous post - it may have been justified and it may have got some results, but there's no need to lump everyone working for such a huge company in together. It's good to know that they can pull it out of the bag when it matters.

One can only hope that everyone who has similar issues gets a similar resolution. Oh, and also, one can hope that this time the date they've given us will actually stick.

Oh, and if my brother is reading - dude, you're a star. Add another one to the stack of favours you're owed.

Useless bastards

2009-11-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

Update, as of 19th of November - BT did good. please read the following posts for the details. I'll leave this post here as a reminder to myself that rude language is uncalled for.

That's right, BT. You are a bunch of useless timewasting bastards. If I could legally kill you all, I would.

If I didn't need your landline for a decent internet service, you know what? you could rot in hell.

So the story so far: I ring up the day after I confirm my house is in fact my house. Pretty stressful, but you know, I've been expecting a bit of stress - house purchasing is supposed to rank right up there with the best of them.

I get a very helpful chap who organises my phone move. Unfortunately for me, the phone line in the new house is still active, and they apparently need to give some legal notice period before we can switch from our old house to our new house. The kindly gentleman gives me a selection of new phone numbers to pick from, because I'm not able to take my existing number with me. We arrange a date, a fortnight away (26th of November). I ask for ex-directory, which is fine. The gentleman explains that if I can persuade the old house owners to disconnect their line, then we can simply ring up and confirm a new date. I am left with a not-too-disgruntled feeling.

So, the next day, my heavily pregnant wife rings up the old house owners, who confirm to us that they have indeed disconnected the phone line. Taking them at their word, I decide to ring BT back to arrange a newer date.

Oh, can't do that, says the new girl - Carla, from Leicester. Even though it's most likely someone from India, because BT don't actually employ anyone who LIVES in this fucking country, by the looks of it. So - can't do that, the engineers would have to cancel your order and rebook it. the earliest they could move it to is the 23rd, and it would be a load of hassle, so please, just fuck off and stop bothering us. Of course, that was not what she said word for word - the politeness and appeasement was simply dripping from the conversation, but in essense, that's what she means.
So I say, that's fine - three days forward is better than no days, right? please, cancel my order and rebook it for the 23rd. Oh, and can I have a reference number for this call please, CARLA. Thanks.

Oh, no, I can't give you a reference number. tell you what, sucker - I'll ring you back, she says. So I wait. Holy of holies, 30 minutes later, she does ring back - and she's even got a new booking number for me. Yes, your line is disconnected in the new property. I can't confirm the date, you'll have to wait for the engineer, but it should be around the 23rd. No, I can't confirm the number.

So I'm thinking ... bollocks. this hasn't been arranged, has it. She's basically lying to me.

Nicky gets a whiff that we're not getting anywhere, and decides to go to bat. She spends 90 minutes on the phone (so far we're up to about 3 fucking hours just to get our phone service moved from one house to another, which I KNOW FOR A FACT is as simple as entering two numbers in a database somewhere and pressing "activate".) They can't find any trace of the previous order number (surprise surprise) so we get a new one. And this guy promises point blank to my pregnant wife that we'll be connected on the 18th.

Excellent.

Or is it?

Of course it fucking isn't, this is BT we're talking about. Useless shower of bastards.

Today, email arrives. A new order number that we've never seen before. Our phone service will be connected on the 2nd of December (that's right, three weeks after I tell them I want to move house). A different number to the one I've been told about. And they haven't tracked that I want to be ex-directory.

FUCK YOU BRITISH TELECOM.

seriously, if Virgin weren't so shite, you'd be down a customer, but they're nearly *nearly* as bad as you are, and BE internet are just wonderful, I'd hate to give them up.

There may be a short delay in service.

Life's a funny thing

2009-11-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

First antenatal class this evening. Fairly informative, but the imagery left something to be desired. If I wanted to see pictures of naked women in pain, I could have got them for free on the Internet.

Still, if my other half learns enough to conquer her fear, then it's a good thing ;)

Three strikes?

2009-10-28T15:09:00.000-07:00

"Lord" the right Honourable Mandelson.

Is he right? is he honourable? I'd like to propose that he's neither of these things. He's not right, in that he's totally wrong about his proposed three strikes legislation, and he's most certainly not honourable by any definition of the word other than "it's a word you can stick in front of your name if you are a Lord". If one uses the definition that one would expect - adhering to ethical and moral principles - then he's pretty much the opposite of honourable. I'd go so far as to say that he's a lying, cheating, unethical scumbag who takes backhanders wherever possible, schmoozes with the rich bunch, and uses his position for financial gain over and above any service to our country.

And don't forget that he is unelected - he's in a position of power that was gifted to him by Gordon Brown, who is also unelected.

But, to the matter at hand. Three Strikes legislation, at it's simplest, is intended to stop people breaking copyright legislation by cracking down on people who share files. If they are identified to have broken the law enough to be given three warnings, then they get their internet cut off. At first glance, this might not seem too ridiculous, but give it two glances, and the holes immediately appear. For one - who is supposed to spot this supposed lawbreaking? ISPs in the UK are legally protected from the implications of carrying third party traffic - they have no liability for the traffic over their network, and they achieve this by one simple rule - they don't look at what you do. It's equivalent to the royal mail not being required to open everyone's letters to see what's in them.

The only way to enforce such legislation would be to force ISPs to examine traffic and report "bad" traffic to some central authority. Of course, some people in government would love the right to do this, but as soon as you start enforcing examination of the data flowing over the network, then the ISPs will become responsible for every type of traffic they carry, and that's the thin end of a very large, very fat wedge. What happens when you post a picture of your children and someone considers that child pornography? Do you think it's reasonable for some third party to have the right to read every email you send, and listen in on every phone conversation you have? looking at what the Communications Decency Act proposed, and the legal response to that, it's exactly the end result that will inevitably happen as soon as you enforce examination of the contents of your internet traffic.

The proposal also fails to take into account personal liability and responsibility with regards to who owns or maintains the internet connection. What happens if my child gets three strikes on my line? does my internet business lose connection? What happens if the line is a shared or communal line? What about one strike each for three students using the same internet connection?

The real nail in the coffin is the idea that the traffic itself will remain visible and examinable. As soon as this legislation comes into effect, then the first thing that will happen is that people will switch to using software that forces encryption of their traffic, making it much harder (and potentially impossible) for someone to examine the traffic and determine that they are breaking the law. There's proof of concept software out there already that shows that this works, is real, and is viable- the only thing stopping people switching to use it is any real reason to move away from the software they are comfortable with. Having their internet disconnected would be enough of a spur for most people.

And what does Mandelson achieve by bringing this legislation into effect? Will it make people buy more media? Will curtailing copying put more money into the pockets of the creative industries? Virtually every third party survey and poll says no. People who consume media will often buy that media, so stopping them from consuming it will reduce sales, and stopping piracy does not mean that all of those copies would be converted into sales. The math and rhetoric simply does not add up.

One thing that will add up however, is Peter Mandelson's bank balance. I'm sure he'll enjoy discussing this with his friends once he pushes it through the commons.

For Marek

2009-10-21T12:39:00.000-07:00

One of my team at work died, last night. He was a splendid chap, very funny, always happy, and obviously deeply in love with his wife. He will be missed, by myself and all of the other folks who knew him. My deepest sympathy goes out to Virginia and his family.

Filtration system

2009-10-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

Mass market media is often discussed in terms of being a filter on society. 50 years ago, when you could count the number of Television broadcast channels on one hand, and when most news came via newspapers published by a small subset of powerful media companies, I can see how that is relevant.

Society is comprised of individuals, and we each have our own stories. Filtered views onto this make a lot of sense - How could we possibly cope with the information overflow that would come with being directly exposed to hundreds of stories from other people's lives? How could we make rational decisions and be informed of pertinent world events when someone somewhere is dying right this second?

Except this is exactly what we are exposed to now, with social grouping tools like Facebook and Twitter and with story aggregation tools ranging from Google news to Fark. Media is no longer a filter, it's a multiplier.

The established mass media still fills a role, but that role has become less informational and more like a bragging teenager. This is understandable given that their audience has always been the buyers of advertising space rather than the consumers of the media themselves, but without the crutch of legitimacy that comes from being a relevant informational stream, many television channels, newspapers and radio channels are falling back on creating their own story streams, playing off the exposed lives of a tiny subset of the real world and creating a huge amount of noise around these people as though they should matter to the rest of us.

I find it terrifying that huge portions of our population really care about a pop singer dying (Michael Jackson or Stephen Gately, take your pick). Sharing the information once is relevant, constructing a story around that information is fiction. I find it terrifying that similarly huge portions of our population seem to think that the empty posturing of a has-been model and her washed out pop-star ex husband are deserving of such lavish media attention, when lives could actually be changed if any of a thousand other people had the same airtime to disseminate their knowledge and views. Where is the Johnny ball of the naughties?

So, we've lost that filter that mass media used to provide, and I think our society is being lead by the hand in the wrong direction by the established powers. However, their downfall has been at hand for long enough now to make them pretty much irrelevant, if you have the willpower and foresight to simply avoid them. Starting with Digg, Reddit and Wikipedia, you can construct your own filter, participate and weave your own stories. You don't need the mass media, you never did - it was always the other way around.

Who's the boss?

2009-10-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

A fantastic blog post about the hierarchy of The Office caught my attention today. I enjoyed the post and the author's writing style enough to branch out into his other posts, which is fairly rare for me. Look for Venkatesh's blog RibbonFarm in my list over to the side there.

Don't worry, I'll wait.

I occasionally (not often, I'll admit) worry about my place in the world, whether I'm doing the right job, whether I'm doing the right thing for my team, my company, and even Disney. It's interesting to see a deconstruction which implies that most people are either in this for themselves (it's all about the money, baby!) and where people who buy into corporate policy are effectively used as career fodder - where working at a company, devoting your time and effort to creating something, are seen as somehow less valuable than amassing wealth and climbing the ladder to the top.

I have always thought that the best thing to be doing is something creative. Creating something that myself or society can enjoy or derive value from (even if it's for a second, like a smile or singing a song) is more important than establishing a history or a position of wealth or power. It's a fundamental truth that you can't take that stuff with you, so you may as well enjoy the ride - and hell, if you're going to enjoy it, why not help the people around you enjoy it as well? If the joy you bring happens to last a lifetime (Say, you invented something cool like the internal combustion engine) then so much the better. Attaching the value of that thing to the concept of wealth storage seems to be the big flaw in this whole process.

I have been musing about this a lot recently, and I think I need to mull it over a bit more to get to the point where I can braindump in any form that will be a coherent read, so I'll leave it for now, but the gist of it is - it's not the love of money that's the root of all evil. The love of money is just the emotional response of people who can't see there is more to value than bartering chips. No - the root of all evil really is money itself, the separation of the intrinsic value of a thing from the thing.

Where did all the money go?

2009-10-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

some pretty interesting news over the last few days.

First off - american bank insurance.

the FDIC is, essentially, bust. It has enough reserves to cover a few more banks going bust, but given that over 100 have gone bust this year already, chances are they're going to run out of money. Who is going to stump up the shortfall? I'll give you a clue - it's not going to be the banks.

Second - gold prices.

It's been a fair set of up and down swings recently, but given the mind-bogglingly huge amount of money the US, UK and other central banks are printing and releasing into their economies, supply inflation was inevitable. Price inflation has been "negative" for the last year, but anyone who thinks that can continue given that house price falls have mostly been pegged by the governments and banks, and given that oil prices are double their lows from last year and moving up again - well, I think it's pretty safe to say that the combination of those three things only points one way, and that's big big inflation in the coming couple of years.

The governments will do everything they can to lie to the general public about the reality of this, and any business (take Nationwide as an example) that has a vested interest in green shoots, recoveries and the like will be tooting the "everything is fine" horn - but it's not. It's a long, long way from fine.

Lastly - the dollar as a world currency is beginning to show cracks.

The Chinese have a huge vested interest in helping maintain the value of the dollar, due to the massive amount of reserves they are sitting on. However, if the Fed continue to print money, China know that their stock of paper will dwindle in real value, and fast. They will have to shift from relying on exports to internal consumption to maintain growth, but given the poverty gap of the majority of their citizens compared to most first world countries, they can do that in spades as long as they can afford the energy. Which leads to the conclusion that they will most likely want to separate their dollar reserve value and their energy costs, and unless they cash in those paper reserves, the only other alternative is to stop buying oil in dollars.

Many other governments are talking about pricing oil in a basket of currencies, and if this doesn't happen soon I'll eat my gold.

Gold may be a pretty bad hedge in times of inflation (historically it's been good and terrible depending on circumstances) but there's one thing that's nigh-on useless in times of inflation, and that's cash in the bank.

Reality check

2009-10-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

One of the issues I have with the MWI multiverse theory is infinite state proliferation. Let's take some starting assumptions - reality begins with a single state, it progresses in a quantized fashion (it "ticks"), and the state change duration (the tick length) is equivalent to Planck time.

After a single tick, assuming every possible variant is explored (every "choice" that can happen does happen), you have three options, which really resolve to two possible subsequent potential states. Either the exploration of states collapses back to a single state, or every single possible state continues as a new existent reality (effectively an infinite number of new states), or a subset of that infinite set continues. Without any way to quantify the effective subset to some finite subset, that really leaves two options - one new reality, or an infinite number of new realities.

Bear in mind, that's after one tick - and you get roughly 10 ^ 44 of those every second. So the complexity of the possible choice sets (if the multiverse does not collapse to a single state after each tick) is a proliferation of an infinite number of choices for each starting reality, every tick, again and again.

If an infinite number of realities boggles the mind, how much harder is it to comprehend the vastness of allowing all potential realities to propagate, as would be required if the set of possible states did not collapse each time the state progressed?

And if the set does collapse back to one reality, what dictates the choice, and surely that precludes continued exploration of each of those infinite choices that have just collapsed, ruling out the opportunity of existing or exploring the multiverse (hopping realities, that sort of thing).

If one assumes that the complexity of the reality state is not actually infinite, but is in fact bounded by some finite but hideously complex state (as an arbitrary example, "counting up" all the available particles and extrapolating a finite state complexity from that) then that would suggest a comprehensible non-infinite set of reality choices, even though the complexity does still scale at a nearly mind-boggling rate.

However, if that's the case, then even if the multiverse is comprised of every possible alternative state that could have ever existed - it's still not infinite. That means that it's possible to rule out some hypothetical states from the actual set of available multiverse states, assuming that one states with an infinite number of possible hypothetical states.

If one takes current computational parallelism as a paradigm, it could be hypothesised that "running" the multiverse equates to execution of all available reality states each state change transition, followed by selection of the valid state. Parallels can be drawn with our current understanding of quantum computing although I wonder if the execution is speculative (leading to a collapse of the reality set) or continued. If the Copenhagen interpretation is to be believed, the observer is the fundamental cause of the collapse, but not given credit for the result of the collapse. However, given that the observer cannot be treated classically but any observation should be regarded in itself as a quantum phenomena, what does that mean in causal terms for the initial state split or propagation?

Just because I can't wrap my head around the vastness of it all doesn't mean it's true. Still, it makes my brain hurt.

Moral lessons for my child part one

2009-09-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about how I can bring up my child to be a moral person, without (to paraphrase Douglas Adams) all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. Hyperspace being, in this case, organised religion.

See, I love many things about Christianity (specifically Church of England flavoured Christianity, as that was the faith I was born to). The architecture kicks ass. I like the smell of many of the churches and cathedrals I've visited. There is a sense of serenity and peacefulness that comes with being in those places. I'm also a big fan of many of the moral lessons taught both by extension of bible verse and by the community directly involved in, and surrounding, the machinations of the church.

I'm really not a big fan of the particular brand of fairy tales that they preach, however, and this is one of the two major turn-off points for me about most every organised religion (the second being the inevitable group of crazy fundies who kill, maim, hurt and oppress each other in the name of their god as though these things are good things). I just can't, in all good conscience, tell another human being (in this case, my child) that they should believe in something just because I do - and especially because in this case, I'm pretty certain that I don't.

My own faith (or lack of) aside, one thing that I can do is come up with my own, codified list of things that I do believe should be practiced by my child, ideally with use cases and justifications. I'm going to leave aside the majors like murder, theft and ox coveting for now; while I truly believe that they're great moral rules, there's no value in me listing them.

so, here we go.

1. Always be polite.

use case: When buying a bus ticket, or groceries in a shop, say "I'd like (my item), please". When presented with the item or exiting the bus, say "thank you" to the relevant person.

why: Politeness is social grease. Just like grease lubricates a mechanism, so politeness makes social interactions run smoother. It costs you only the time to say it, and could make a huge difference to the other person's day.

2. Tell the truth.

use case: Someone asks you if they look good in that dress. They don't. Tell them that (in your opinion) they don't look good. They then put on a different dress, and they look great in it. They ask you again. Tell them that they now look great.

why: Truth is your currency of trust. Trust is hugely valuable. If people don't want to hear the truth, then they shouldn't ask you the question - this is their problem, not yours.

State of the nation

2009-09-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the G20 pittsburgh summit with my usual synical eye, but the videos of students being teargassed on their own campus - it's disgusting. After similar situations in London, where peaceful protests lead to the death of an innocent bystander I'm beginning to fear that the inevitable result is an armed revolution at some point.

If the powers in control of these events continue to treat their own citizens as criminals, to the extent of suppressing any form of peaceful protests, what options does that leave civilians? Where is our opportunity to voice our concerns? How are people supposed to stand up and be heard when they are forcibly and violently suppressed whenever they try to do so?

In America, where carrying weapons is an accepted part of the culture, there's an often quoted phrase - "Soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box. Use them in that order." Given the history of rigged elections, state controlled lobbying and denial of peaceful protest, I'll be surprised if the move to ammo box doesn't happen in the near future. And at that point, the powers that be will only have themselves to blame, and will have very little recourse to open up a sensible discussion.

When the elite manipulate elections, the economy and people's right to assemble, how do you get your voice heard?

Staycation

2009-09-25T07:40:00.001-07:00

Myself and the wife have had another staycation week, and I'm loving it. We hired a car and visited the Isle of Wight and Canterbury Cathedral, and then I've spent a couple of days doing very little other than sleeping and housework mixed in with watching the latest american TV.

After all the recent globe trotting, I've come to appreciate just how wonderful our current house is (especially now the noisy witch next door appears to have melted). I'll be sorry to lose the view. I guess you have to give up something when you decide to spawn a new process.

Ah, how times have changed.

2009-09-08T06:44:00.000-07:00

Permit me to make a comparison which you might find interesting.

John Locke, 1689, epistle dedicatory contained in AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMANE UNDERSTANDING.

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THOMAS, EARL OF PEMBROKE AND MONTGOMERY, BARON HERBERT OF CARDIFF LORD ROSS, OF KENDAL, PAR, FITZHUGH, MARMION, ST. QUINTIN, AND SHURLAND;

LORD PRESIDENT OF HIS MAJESTY'S MOST HONOURABLE PRIVY COUNCIL; AND LORD LIEUTENANT OF THE COUNTY OF WILTS, AND OF SOUTH WALES.

MY LORD,

This Treatise, which is grown up under your lordship's eye, and has ventured into the world by your order, does now, by a natural kind of right, come to your lordship for that protection which you several years since promised it. It is not that I think any name, how great soever, set at the beginning of a book, will be able to cover the faults that are to be found in it. Things in print must stand and fall by their own worth, or the reader's fancy. But there being nothing more to be desired for truth than a fair unprejudiced hearing, nobody is more likely to procure me that than your lordship, who are allowed to have got so intimate an acquaintance with her, in her more retired recesses. Your lordship is known to have so far advanced your speculations in the most abstract and general knowledge of things, beyond the ordinary reach or common methods, that your allowance and approbation of the design of this Treatise will at least preserve it from being condemned without reading, and will prevail to have those parts a little weighed, which might otherwise perhaps be thought to deserve no consideration, for being somewhat out of the common road. The imputation of Novelty is a terrible charge amongst those who judge of men's heads, as they do of their perukes, by the fashion, and can allow none to be right but the received doctrines. Truth scarce ever yet carried it by vote anywhere at its first appearance: new opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. But truth, like gold, is not the less so for being newly brought out of the mine. It is trial and examination must give it price, and not any antique fashion; and though it be not yet current by the public stamp, yet it may, for all that, be as old as nature, and is certainly not the less genuine. Your lordship can give great and convincing instances of this, whenever you please to oblige the public with some of those large and comprehensive discoveries you have made of truths hitherto unknown, unless to some few, from whom your lordship has been pleased not wholly to conceal them. This alone were a sufficient reason, were there no other, why I should dedicate this Essay to your lordship; and its having some little correspondence with some parts of that nobler and vast system of the sciences your lordship has made so new, exact, and instructive a draught of, I think it glory enough, if your lordship permit me to boast, that here and there I have fallen into some thoughts not wholly different from yours. If your lordship think fit that, by your encouragement, this should appear in the world, I hope it may be a reason, some time or other, to lead your lordship further; and you will allow me to say, that you here give the world an earnest of something that, if they can bear with this, will be truly worth their expectation. This, my lord, shows what a present I here make to your lordship; just such as the poor man does to his rich and great neighbour, by whom the basket of flowers or fruit is not ill taken, though he has more plenty of his own growth, and in much greater perfection. Worthless things receive a value when they are made the offerings of respect, esteem, and gratitude: these you have given me so mighty and peculiar reasons to have, in the highest degree, for your lordship, that if they can add a price to what they go along with, proportionable to their own greatness, I can with confidence brag, I here make your lordship the richest present you ever received. This I am sure, I am under the greatest obligations to seek all occasions to acknowledge a long train of favours I have received from your lordship; favours, though great and important in themselves, yet made much more so by the forwardness, concern, and kindness, and other obliging circumstances, that never failed to accompany them. To all this you are pleased to add that which gives yet more weight and relish to all the rest: you vouchsafe to continue me in some degrees of your esteem, and allow me a place in your good thoughts, I had almost said friendship. This, my lord, your words and actions so constantly show on all occasions, even to others when I am absent, that it is not vanity in me to mention what everybody knows: but it would be want of good manners not to acknowledge what so many are witnesses of, and every day tell me I am indebted to your lordship for. I wish they could as easily assist my gratitude, as they convince me of the great and growing engagements it has to your lordship. This I am sure, I should write of the UNDERSTANDING without having any, if I were not extremely sensible of them, and did not lay hold on this opportunity to testify to the world how much I am obliged to be, and how much I am,
MY LORD,

Your Lordship's most humble and most obedient servant,

JOHN LOCKE


2 Dorset Court, 24th of May, 1689




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