Xorg

UPS maintenance comedy

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:37:47 GMT

In need of a laugh? Check out this list of responses from UPS maintenance engineers to maintenance requests found on Coming Anarchy. If you've ever worked support, you'll relate..

Invade NZ

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:53:13 GMT

I'm certain this will amuse some.

Invade NZ - spoof NZ marketing campaign

via The Strategist

Games Appreciation

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:13:24 GMT

I'm quite enjoying this teaching thing; partly because of the content, but more because of the reaction we're getting from the students.

Today we played with the level editing suite that comes with Knytt Stories. I had each of them come up with a premise and sketches for a few levels, then showed them the basics. An hour later, well, the results were interesting - a lot of enthusiasm and some very odd designs. One, comparatively simple, illustrated futility - a complicated maze of invisible walls in which even victory was rewarded with death.

For me, the best thing is their enthusiasm - it's a good bolster when mine is flagging.

Next week, we're going to start talking about board games. That is, we're going to play one, then bitch about it.

Scoffing

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:32:52 GMT

I think I should try to wean myself off scoffing at things, just to see if I can, and to see if it makes me any happier.

Never fear, dear reader: I don't mean to suddenly become a fool who accepts everything - some things are worth scoffing at. Rather, I'm going to try to stop unconsciously or automatically scoffing at tastes and preferences I don't share or enthusiasm that seems to me unwarranted.

These are things that I can't reasonably dispute as they're far too closely wound up in the speaker's personal wiring, and so they're not at all appropriate for me to criticize.

Let's see if I can wind back my criticism to times when it is either appropriate or at least warranted..

Zerglenarg

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:52:54 GMT

The Spore Creature Creator's been out for a few weeks now, and people have been posting their creations throughout the blogosphere. So, like a sheep, I downloaded it and followed suit.

Here I present the Zerglenarg, a semi-deranged creature resembling a cross between an umber hulk, a dalmatian, and a soldier ant. Conceptually, it's not meant meant to be a real creature, but rather a manifestation of psychic emanations produced by people who, having taken too many psychedelic drugs, are convinced that there's a monster under their bed.

Edit: I should have mentioned - the spherical things sticking out from its shoulders are pom poms.

Kuula buried under Megaprim

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:23:41 GMT

In Second Life, everything is made from primitives - cubes, cylinders, prisms and so forth that you can place together to create pretty much anything. There's a size limit of 10x10x10 metres that's sometimes a real pain in the arse.

I'd heard of something called megaprims that allow you to make much larger blocks (for walls and the like) and, wondering how they worked, I found out why they're banned.

Kuula buried under Megaprim - in which, on Jan 11, 2007, Kuula and nine other regions (about 50 hectares in total) were struck by disaster - a massive sheet of 5m thick virtual plywood plummeting from the sky. Those underneath were not crushed, but caught inside the prim, causing bizarre and erratic behaviour

It's not quite the alien attacks of Sim City, but as far as virtual disasters go, pretty awesome

x-post from Meme Hazard

Virtual stage management

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:51:16 GMT

While waiting for pizza this evening, I read an article by David Allan Grier in IEEE Computer about the ways in which technology has changed entertainment, particularly the theatre, over the last 40 years or so.

In particular, he discusses how automated lighting, sound and so forth can afford a stage manager the opportunity to calibrate the response of the audience by controlling the timing of cues much more closely, much in the same way a live television producer does the same. What this has meant is that show production, in addition to be a massive organizational exercise, is now a performance unto itself.

Later, he goes on to talk about ways in which producers of other media gauge audience reaction and adapt accordingly - focus groups for TV and movies, golden ears for music, and now, with technology, learning systems based on customer profiling and crowd-sourcing, that can supplement socially driven recommendations such as friends or local record store owners - last.fm being a prominent example.

So inspired, here's an interesting extension that occurred to me:

What if specialized AI, running locally, could be injected into traditionally mass-produced media like music, TV, or movies to act as a kind of virtual stage manager? It could observe you, the audience, a focus group of one, then tweak the timing, the content, the tone, and even the script of media to better suit your current mood, your tastes, to stimulate you in ways to which you are more sensitive, or even to better fit your available time.

Recommendation: Digsby

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:05:26 GMT

I've been using the chat client Digsby for a while now, and it's pretty awesome. It's comparatively new (less than a year), but quite stable, feature complete, and adds a bunch of new features that simplify things substantially.

Cleanly integrates with all the traditional instant messenging systems, adding gtalk, facebook chat, and twitter.
Integrates mail and event notifications from almost any mail source, as well as facebook and myspace's event feeds
Free!
Almost cross platform - the initial release is Windows only, but they're releasing OS X and Linux versions soon
Lets you neatly merge multiple accounts on different services belonging to the same person. Then, just tells you if they're online on any service, and intelligently uses that one to communicate with them.

Given the proliferation of social networks and messaging networks, it's quite nice to have one tool that bridges them. I don't have to deal with the fact that not everyone uses the same tools - Digsby gives me a list of everyone, and when I want to talk with them, it just works.

I love tools that hide complexity without being simplistic.

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:29:00 GMT

RIP Cat / Me / Fuzzball / Pusskie

Took her to the vet this morning, found that the cancer, being locally invasive, had taken over the whole right side of her mouth and was proceeding to burrow into her palate. Even the vet was surprised at how quickly it had moved.

So, she's being euthanised; or, if you prefer, put out of her misery, put down, having the pain taken away. Pick your euphemism. At the end, when everything was decided, the vet made a small faux pas that would have offended some, I'm sure, but that suited my mood - "OK, well, I'll take her out back then.." Death brings out grim humour in me, and I guess I like language that doesn't hide the consequence of one's decisions and actions.

Anyway, the deed is done - there really was no other option, so I'm spared the guilt of having had her put down to save my misery.

Cat

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:28:50 GMT

It's looking increasingly likely that my cat will have to put down in the fairly near future.

Back in March, following a couple of weeks with trouble eating, the vet discovered a fleshy growth in her mouth. Apparently these are fairly common in older cats, and normally benign. In her case, it turned out to be cancer - a 'low grade squamous sarcoma', also common in cats. The vet said she might have a year left, if lucky.

Unfortunately, since the growth is in her mouth, she has trouble eating. When it was first discovered, the vet trimmed it back and she was happy for about a month. Now, though, she's clearly in quite a lot of pain, and seems to spend the bulk of her non-sleeping time pawing at the side of her mouth, sometimes with claws.

So, she's in to see the vet tomorrow morning. Seeing as there's little the vet can do aside from administer expensive pain killers, and since death is imminent regardless, it's likely she'll be put down in the next week or so.

She's 11 years old and has led a comfortable life - after her first year spent living at the Elizabeth St flat with me, rhinocrow13, manicgnome, and Nick Green, she's been living with my parents, where's she's had lots of space to prowl, a fire to sleep in front of, lots of food, and the occasional trip to Kaikoura for further prowling.

You might have noticed I haven't named her - this is because she doesn't really have a name. When she was first given to me at my birthday in 1998 I was a little too drunk to name her effectively and so, rhinocrow13, with his usual genius, named her 'Me', strictly in order to make puns such as 'feed Me', 'stroke Me', 'play with Me', and so forth. Since then, she's been 'Pusskie' to my mother, 'Pusk' to my father, and 'Cat', 'Fuzzball', and occasionally 'Stupidhead' to me.

Shariah law

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:47:20 GMT

A while back, there was a post on Coming Anarchy that referenced this fatwa concerning the question of whether a woman could, under Shariah, lawfully refuse her husband's request for sex if she is tired from having performed her other Islamic duties (such as nightly prayers).

I doubt anyone reading this will be impressed by the conclusion reached, and I'm in complete agreement - at best, it's medieval sophistry, at worst, it's little more than institutionalized rape. That's not what motivated me to write this post, though..

For those not in the know, a fatwa is basically a ruling on Islamic religious law issued by an imam or other Islamic authority. Since they're issued by a wide range of individuals and institutions distributed throughout the Ummah, they often disagree with one another, sometimes violently. Taken together, they're an organic body of law quite different to what we have in the West - probably the closest parallel is old English common law - Shariah, however, is much more diverse and, it seems, much less structured.

There's a number of online repositories containing fatwas, some with comparatively liberal outlooks, others extremely conservative. I find them interesting because they offer a window into Islamic law and culture that I've not had before. While I'm sure there's a selection bias based on which groups are willing to put their fatwas online and in English, they still contain diversity of opinion, and really interesting to browse through.

Here's a few that I've dug up:

Fatwa Online - on the watching of sports competitions
Fatwa Islam - on suicide as a tactic in war
Islam Today - on the laws of war
Islam Online - on homosexuality.
Dar al-Ifta - an almost utilitarian ruling on abortion in the case of harmful deformity</a>

I'm looking at these with a similar perspective to someone visiting the zoo, and most of the time I'm either repulsed, accepting, or vaguely disturbed. Sometimes, though, I'm dumbfounded by the quaintness of it all. Take, for example, the particularly convoluted line of reasoning in the first link above, in which video recordings bypass restrictions on images by virtue of the fact that you can't actually see little sports people when you look at the tape.

Looking for NZ political blogs..

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:40:51 GMT

Following some comments by jwm last week, I've starting paying attention to a couple of NZ based political blogs; specifically, Idiot's rather liberal No Right Turn and the somewhat pro-Labour The Standard 2.01. I'm also a long time reader of The Strategist, which isn't really a political blog but frequently covers NZ defense issues, and Pacific Empire, a political blog with strong libertarian leanings.

All four are pretty interesting, and unlike a lot of political blogs, don't generally engage in a lot of slogan throwing and ad hominem ranting.

What I'm looking for, though, is a serious right wing blog so that I can hear about issues from that perspective - not that I expect to agree with it particularly often, but that I like to hear the full spectrum of arguments. Any suggestions? Suggestions of other good NZ policy blogs I should be following?

I'm looking for something that's focused more on issues than politics - I'd rather politicians play the popularity game somewhere outside my field of view..

Tax

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:05:51 GMT

I've come to the realization that, with the complexities of my various income streams and the complexity of moving to another country, with the tax residency and double taxing issues that involves, I need an accountant / tax agent.

Anyone got any suggestions of where I should look? Is there anyone you could recommend?

BMW GINA

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 02:50:22 GMT

The BMW GINA uses a rubbery fabric stretched across metal struts in place of metal skin. This makes the design seems eerily alive in places.

Coffee Brains IV

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:42:33 GMT

Once again, coffee brains is on at Chez Homer tonight

We didn't stay on topic too well last week, so we're re-using the same topic tonight. Here's the notes from last time:

This week's topic will be evolutionary and psychological explanations of morality, particularly focusing on the five part theory of Jonathan_Haidt. Here's two papers that outline the theory:

Moral Psychology and the misunderstanding of Religion (Haidt)
The Moral Instinct (Pinker)

You don't need to have read either of these to participate - all you need is a brain, preferably yours, and an interest in morality and its explanations.

One last thing - I'd like to try the idea of each person bringing along something they've seen in the news recently that's ethically challenging or interesting in some way. So, have a think if you get the chance..

Starting from 7:30pm tonight, going until the flatmates kick us out (probably 10 or 11 at the latest - aleph_naught has work in the morning, as may jwm.)

Random awesome

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:25:22 GMT

Fashion and body art by Lucy McRae and Bart Hess. Two websites - one and two

Beware, may contain clumping circles that look like skin infections. Apparently this distresses some people.

Coffe Brains - Part 3 - Moral psychology

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 03:47:45 GMT

Mostly due to the aforementioned hard drive crash, I've been quite tardy in organizing coffee brains for this week. Nonetheless, it's still on.

Courtesy of its denizens, we'll be running at Chez Homer. I've temporarily given up on commercial venues.

This week's topic will be evolutionary and psychological explanations of morality, particularly focusing on the five part theory of Jonathan_Haidt. Here's two papers that outline the theory:

Moral Psychology and the misunderstanding of Religion (Haidt)
The Moral Instinct (Pinker)

You don't need to have read either of these to participate - all you need is a brain, preferably yours, and an interest in morality and its explanations.

Starting from 7:30pm tonight, going until the flatmates kick us out (probably 10 or 11 at the latest - aleph_naught has work in the morning, as may jwm.)

Dinner & Snow

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 05:25:58 GMT

I got a call from seraphs_folly wondering if the dinner was still on, given the snow. Out my way it's stopped, and is only really a smattering. Furthermore, looking at the rain radar, most of the heavy falls have passed to the north already.

So, dinner's still on.

disk failure

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:54:36 GMT

Tonight, I am enjoying the delights of disk failure.

At about 10pm, it seemed like certain files were simply not there (mostly drivers and other system files). I figured it was just Windows, and rebooted. Unfortunately, when the OS tried to load, it started reporting files missing.

It was about at this point where things started getting weird.

I booted up linux, which failed, reporting that the drive cylinders referred to did not exist. Thankfully, it worked fine in recovery mode, with the notable exception that all of my partition management tools failed to run. The windows drives appeared to be there, and full of data. OK, I thought. Clearly Windows has eaten itself, and taken part of my boot record with it. Not out of the ordinary, unfortunately, just time for a re-install.

Unfortunately, that didn't work - windows setup couldn't see the existing windows partitions in order to repair them, despite the fact that i could get into them in Linux. Sigh. Attempted to install Windows onto a secondary drive in order to shuffle data around on the original drives, and re-create my Windows partition. Oops, I forgot about Windows great habit of re-writing the master boot record. Oh well, I'll fix that later. Hmm. Secondary drive refuses to boot. Stupid 5 year old ex-laptop HDD in a dodgy bay.

OK. I'll use linux to shuffle the data around, then re-format the old Windows partitions, and.. No. Wait. Can't get into Linux now, rewrote the master boot record. OK. I'll just find my Linux CD. It's .. at uni. Damn. Right. Screw it. Overwrite the linux partition with Windows. Wasn't really using it anymore, anyway. Doing that now, posting from laptop.

Thankfully, data loss will be minimal; I fastidiously keep backups, and everything important lives in a subversion repository I can restore at an instant. At most, I lose my save games, recently downloaded stuff, and have to install everything again. Could be a lot worse.

Slideshare

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:45:21 GMT

If you're in the business of writing and delivering presentations and you think that there might be people out there interested in seeing them, I heartily recommend SlideShare.

It's simple - make an account, fill out your profile, then upload presentations as PowerPoint files or PDFs. Then they're viewable in your browser using their flash widget. You can restrict who has access to slides, or make them public. There's even a full screen presentation mode; in principle, you could substitute it for actually hauling copies of your presentations around with you - just bring them up in the browser..

Anyway, I've chucked up a bunch of old presentations from my Masters. Later I'll upload some more recent works including the lecture slides for Educ122. All available at http://www.slideshare.net/xorgnz

No brains

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 06:27:00 GMT

I probably should have posted this earlier..

I haven't organized anything coffee & brains related for tonight, largely because I'm spazzy and disorganized today.

However, there _will_ be one on next week - I'll have details up tomorrow.

Phoenix photo

Mon, 26 May 2008 23:57:45 GMT

I wasn't going to post anything more about the Phoenix Lander, as the media's picked it up now, and I don't have a lot to add.

But then, I saw this photo..

It's Phoenix decelerating with its parachute in the Martian atmosphere, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Not a high quality image, but there's something totally awesome about this. It's not just telemetry and indirect guesses - that's a man-made probe, landing on an alien world, and we can actually see it.

If you're not in awe of that, what exactly does it take?

via The Planetary Society

Animated map of England through first millenium

Mon, 26 May 2008 11:58:52 GMT

Just quickly, I wanted to link to this rather awesome animated map of England from 0 -> 1050 CE, drawn by Curzon at Coming Anarchy

Steam Engine

Mon, 26 May 2008 10:17:32 GMT

Over the weekend, I encountered OECake, a demo application of a 2D physics simulation called the Octave Engine. It models gravity, particle interactions, and momentum, as well as evaporation and condensation of water particles.

So, I made a steam engine.

Phoenix

Mon, 26 May 2008 00:06:19 GMT

Phoenix has landed..

Sounds like everything went off without a hitch - they didn't even lose radio contact during atmospheric entry..

Now they're just waiting for verification that the solar arrays can be unfurled..