Halloween

In preparation for this year's annual festival of knife-wielding children wandering the streets, Whitney did a fantastic job decorating the windows of the house with paper spiders and pumpkins. We had also prepared a genuine pumpkin earlier in the week, but unfortunately by the time this evening came round it had collapsed in on itself in a pile of mulch and didn't look tremendously frightening - on reflection, above the radiator wasn't the best place for it.

The only time I've ever actually seen someone guysing was when I was at a Halloween party at Graeme's, dressed as Eddie from Bottom. An eight year old rang the bell shortly after I arrived - the boy hadn't even got dressed up at all, so it was a disappointing effort all round. The door was answered by Rob, who is about seven feet tall and happened to be adorned with a hockey mask, tarpaulin and chainsaw, so I'm sure he paid for his chocolate with at least mild mental scars.

Whitney and I didn't know how popular the practice of going round to people's houses and demanding sweets from them was here, so to placate the hordes that may have been arriving on our doorstep we bought a huge bowlful of chocolates. It's now twenty-two past midnight, so it doesn't look like we'll be giving them out at all. On the positive side, though, that means that we now have a huge bowlful of chocolates.

Civilization

I feel that I've been rather neglecting Civ recently. I happened to find the original game a few days ago, and I'd forgotten what an inspired game it was. I don't think any other game can claim to span as long a time as 5000 years and still remain consistent throughout (if we ignore the occasional absurdity like villagers armed with hoes and pitchforks being able to defeat a legion of tanks.)

I was first introduced to the game when my dad got it for my tenth birthday, clearly so that he could play it himself. I hardly understood it at all at first, but after watching him playing it on his laptop when meant to be working (in fact, my manual remained at the RGU for about five years until I rediscovered it in a drawer while visiting) I eventually realised its greatness. It was also thanks to it that I was the only pupil in my school class to know what a trireme was and when the Hoover Dam was built - in 1000BC by the Greeks according to most of the games I played, seeing as I never really got off the easiest setting.

Jumping ahead a bit, Civ 3 confused me. They seemed to alter a lot of rules for no reason at all, and introduce absurdities like luxuries not being part of the tax rate but instead placed on the map. They also separated the Settlers unit into Workers and Settlers, meaning that my tactic of Build Outwards As Fast As Possible was severely hindered. Especially when moving them across a jungle, resulting in them all getting diseases and dying.

Civ 4 seems to be heading in the same direction if you ask me, with the whole thing just being overcomplicated with not only research and resources, but religion and special citizens as well. Ironically they claim that this results in a "faster, more streamlined game experience", but I don't think that this is what the game should be about - it's a game that you can turn on while half-asleep, stab an arrow key now and then, and suddenly realise that days have passed and you haven't eaten. I can't deny that it looks amazing, though.

The version of Civ that I have is "Civ 2: Test of Time", which I still believe to be the best of them as it hardly touches the classic rules but adds features such as a multiplayer mode - it's a mystery to me why no other Civ does this. The only trouble with it is that it seems to be the most bugged game ever. (Not including Fallout 2, of course - making halves of your car disappear when you reload the game will always be difficult to beat). The Notes and Cautions section of the readme is a hilarious read, and seriously, many of the comments in it wouldn't seem out of place in a computer science practical that had to be handed in in a rush. Two examples:

In the fantasy and Midgard Civilopedia, you'll notice several terrain types whose names we've prefixed with a "z". These are unused and duplicated terrains, and rather than have them mix in with the others, we've added to "z" to exile them to the end of the list. Please ignore these entries entirely.

Wouldn't preventing them from mixing in with the others be better accomplished by using the Delete key?

In the fantasy games, you might notice the Raganarok advance mysteriously appearing and disappearing from the Goblin or Stygian bodies of knowledge. Don't fret. It's being used by events as a flag and is only following instructions. The Ragnarok advance has no value whatsoever.

I'm rather at a loss to imagine why they decided to use a technology advance as a flag for other events. Even if it was absolutely necessary, it would have surely been easy enough to keep it hidden no matter whether it was there or not. In fact, given some sparesly documented source code, I'm fairly confident that I could go in and fix this myself within about four minutes.

Add this to the fact that a huge number of leftover files from the original version are present in the program folder, and it just looks a bit tatty. They even seem undecided about the name of the game - there are two very distinct logos on the box/manual and the game, and it's called "Civilization Conflicts" in some places and "Fantastic Worlds" in another.

Despite all that, though, dozy empire-building is sounding good at the moment. I may have to give up on writing this project report soon and spend a few days taking over the world again.

The results (and more waffle)

Responses to the challenge in my last entry have come flooding in, and neither of them were correct. Actually I was surprised at the lack of guesses, as when I ask something as mundane as what shape people like their sandwiches, it sparks a huge debate that keeps resurfacing in my inbox for days. Still, from these results I can conclude that not only is my password non-obvious, but people aren't really that bothered about what it is anyway - this makes for a pretty safe livejournal if you ask me.

I'm sure I was going to write about something here, but I've forgotten what it was. I've been doing my gigantic project plan on and off today (mostly off) and I've only got about three thousand words into it. With the amount of reporting and documentation that we're expected to produce, it's rather difficult to imagine when we'll have time to actually open up Emacs or some other less mad editor and get to work on the projects themselves.

Another inhibition to the completion of the project is the continual rediscovery of games that I didn't know I had on my hard drive - this afternoon Whitney was most impressed with Toejam and Earl 2 for its almost Tombi-like lunacy. It's true that there are no pigs with pitchforks in it, but not every game has adversaries like ghost cows or naked men in cardboard boxes singing "Figaro".

Speaking of Tombi, I noticed that it had a torrent at the bottom of this page if anyone doesn't think that they've had enough Japanese madness recently. Unless you're in ResNet, in which case you can't (but if you are in ResNet then I'm surprised that you can get to this page at all, to be frank). Enough of this - I'll try and gather some thoughts together and piece together something that resembles an interesting read for tomorrow.

The keys that I grant thee

Hacking isn't what it used to be. A few years ago it was something that required a degree of ingenuity, and possibly multiple monitors and a workstation in the basement. The type of hacking that we used to amuse ourselves with in school involved getting around the network's security, but that was mediocre at best, and once you'd found a way to the command prompt everything became too easy. Now, all that "hacking" means is asking someone for their IP address and getting them to turn off their firewall, or downloading programs that someone else has made to find out people's Livejournal passwords.

LJ seem to have become more aware of this recently, and have started telling me that my password is too easy to guess with every post that I make. I disagree with its obviousness, and therefore present this challenge to anyone who reads this post - to guess my password. Reply in the comments with as many attempts as you like. If you guess it correctly, I imagine I'd give you root access to my Windows box or something, but if you were that 1337 you probably wouldn't need it anyway.

To give some pointers to start off: it has nothing but letters in it, relates to one of my interests, and is a pronounceable word. (This is why it's so insecure.) People who've talked to me over IRC and seen my passwords when I typed them by accident have a bit of an advantage, but they're welcome to try anyway. Also, isn't allowed to guess because she knows it. So there.

Squared Cake Recipe

I've been inundated with requests for the recipe to the Squared Cake. Actually that's a blatant lie, I haven't received a single one, but I thought that writing it up would be a good way to keep on revelling in my bakery-inspired bigheadedness for a while. Besides, I think that having some sort of easily available recipe library (now two in total) will be useful in case I ever have to bake something in an emergency. It might yet happen.

Credit goes to Carol Vorderman off How 2 for inspiring this cake, for which I saw the theory about ten years ago but never got around to actually putting into practice until last week. That's where the idea came from - the actual procedure I just made up as we went along. It should make a reasonably large cake that should serve eight to ten people... I don't know, look at the entry below to get an idea of the size.

~ Squared Cake ~

Stuff Needed
6 eggs
Castor sugar
Self-raising flour
A conversion table, probably
Chocolate powder
Icing sugar
About two hours for the manufacture (much less if using two cake pans)
A spare night to let it solidify
The oven preheated to 190°C
An appointment at the dentist

Sponges

1. Ideally, you should have two eight or nine-inch cake pans so that you can do both the sponges at the same time, but we used just one. Grease and flour one, grease and chocolate powder the other.
   
2. For the plain layer, beat three of the eggs, 1/2 cup of castor sugar and 3/4 of a cup of self-raising flour in a bowl, then pour into the plain pan.
   
3. Do the same for the chocolate sponge, replacing about half the flour with chocolate powder.
   
4. Bake both of these for about twenty minutes - test them with a cake tester (or, if you're as ill-equipped as us, just use a knife).
   
5. Leave the cakes upside-down to cool and solidify a bit for half an hour. The reason to leave them upside down is to try and let them settle into a reasonably flat shape, as you'll be stacking them - it's up to you to decide whether this actually helps.

Squares

1. Here's the interesting bit. Using a bowl or a plate or something as a template, cut a circle into the centre of each sponge. The aim is to leave an outer circle of about the same width as the height of the sponge. It doesn't matter if it's a bit off, but be careful that you keep the knife reasonably upright and don't tear the rest of the cake too much with it. The best way to cut it cleanly is to use a small knife, stick it in the cake, then induce a muscle spasm in your hand to rapidly twitch it up and down as you cut round. Remove the template and run the knife around the trench to free it of the outer circle.
   
2. Once that circle's done, do the same again with a mug in the centre of the smaller circle that you've just cut. Try and make the layers roughly equal in width - it doesn't really matter about the size of the centre, as you can even cut out another circle if you're feeling confident.
   
3. Swap the two middle circles of the sponges round - the sponge recipe is quite sturdy, so it should hopefully be easy to do this without breaking them. You now have two complete cakes of alternating flavours.

Stacking

1. Mix up a positively obscene amount of chocolate icing. I don't know the measurements for this, so you'll have to use your imagination. Spread this icing between each circle so that they're glued together.
   
2. Cover the top of one doctored sponge in icing, then place the other on top of it. Make sure that they're aligned with each other.
   
3. Slather this entire arrangement in as much icing as possible - the icing for the outside should be fairly thick but still spreadable. Ideally, you don't want the concentric cracks in the top of the cake showing through, or the join in between the layers.
   
4. The decorations are optional, so do whatever you like. We made up a bit more icing (plain this time) and piped it around the edge of the cake using a small plastic bag. The top of the cake was done by piping parallel lines on to it, then dragging a fork lightly through them (but a skewer would be much more suitable). If you're going to do this, make sure the icing is still wet, otherwise the tracks you make will show. If you get this decoration to work, award yourself a biscuit.
   
5. Cover the cake with a bowl, turn the lights out and sing it a lullaby.
   
6. Eat the rest of the icing and stay up all night. (Largely optional.) The icing on the cake will have solidified.

Slicing

1. Because of the large amount of icing, this is a pretty sturdy cake. No matter how well you've glued it, you have to be careful when cutting the cake, or the squares will come apart. Saw into it gently, and make sure that you've separated an entire piece before trying to move it - any tugging and you'll probably only get half a slice out.
   
2. Take photographs of the cake and post about it on the Internet.
   

cake²

Whitney anbd I hoseted bineer she's kissing me i can't type aaaarhg hosted dinner last night for , and . It's testament to how much the popularity of LJ has increased when you can refer to an entire dinner party by their usernames. It's also an indicator of the usefulness of the Internet when most of the recipes used in the meal were found as a result of searching on Google.

The centrepiece was a roast chicken, cooked expertly by Whitney despite being a vegetarian. (Her dad owns the biggest barbecue in the world and he's even more vegetarian, I don't understand it.) Despite watching a video on how to carve a chicken beforehand - "Slice here, here, here and here. Done." - that was the most problematic part, and it took a large amount of sawing and chiselling to get the bird apart at all.

Squared cake! (I've never been quite so excited about a cake before.)

However, the part of dinner that I was responsible for was the cake - Squared Cake, in fact. It was a theory that I'd wanted to try out for ages, but never got around to actually doing because I'm usually defaulted into making sticky toffee pudding when foreigners or other people with hearts that are too healthy are around.

To manufacture squared cake, you use two different coloured round sponge cakes (chocolate and plain being the most obvious choices, but others work as well), cut out concentric circles from each of them and swap alternate layers over - we used a bowl and a mug for this one, so that the width of the circles was roughly equal to the height of the cake. These are then stacked on top of each other and coated in a positively toothbusting amount of sugary icing (enough to glue each layer and track together as well as disguise the fact that it's been doctored in such a way from the outside). You can see evidence of trying to liven up the top by dragging a skewer across different coloured icing, but we didn't have any skewers so I had to use a fork and it looked a bit silly.

The thing about this kind of cake is that you don't know what it actually looks like until you cut in to it. Fortunately the squares had stayed together reasonably well, but I think a little more icing between the circles would have made it a bit more cohesive. Nevertheless it looked impressive, and I've therefore added that to the list of things that I'm allowed to make in the kitchen without the fire brigade on standby.

Additionally you have to admit it's pretty fantastic geometrically. I could go in to the Mathematics department with it, declare "I've squared the circle" and watch their heads explode.

Ice Swipe

Hopefully I've got here before this propagates all around the Internet - I was pointed to this game recently, and I think it's really quite clever. I haven't seen one done quite like that before.

Gamma Ray - "Majestic" Samples

The cynical might say that Gamma Ray's image is a bit nicked from Iron Maiden. I'd be inclined to agree.

After the entirely unexpected release of "Majestic" a few weeks ago - the first studio album of theirs since 2001 - Gamma Ray have put up song samples on their website. The band, who are coloured blue, seem to be in the late stages of another change of direction - they started out as a political band with Queen-like influences, then gradually moved towards a science fiction theme, and now they seem to have dropped most of the Queen similarity and started to write something that borders on aggressive Christian rock. However, Kai Hansen's dislike of America in general is still very apparent, so that's good news all round.

I might as well put down some of my thoughts on the samples, even though I know that there's only one person on my Friends list that will bother to download more than one, and I'm not sure if he's got time out of his busy schedule of singing and door-opening to read this, but that's life.

1. My Temple - Even by Gamma Ray's standards this is pretty violent for an opening track, and is almost reminiscent of Heart of the Unicorn (but not as glass-shatteringly high). This is growing on me even though I didn't like it much at first - it sounds like it gets more tuneful just as the sample ends. It also uses the lyric "You've got another thing coming" in an obvious nod to Judas Priest, which is a nice reference that you can be smug about if you get it.


2. Fight - After the calm intro, this song erupts into Henjo Richter's trademark Send Me A Sign-alike arpeggios. There's an unusual fast section in the chorus, but the rest of it is familiar, and I've always liked Richter's songs the best, so that's all right. Oddly enough, the second track of Stratovarius' new album has the same title. Curious.


3. Strange World - This is awfully weird, as there's about five seconds at the start of this song that sound like Dragonforce, or possibly lift music (decide for yourself). There's a classic Gamma Ray choir background, but it's a bit slow for my liking.


4. Hell Is Thy Home - Despite the lyrics sounding like something out of Thy Dungeonman, this is typical Gamma Ray weirdness. It doesn't seem very melodic to me, and almost as if the song is trying to go in too many directions at the same time.


5. Blood Religion - There's not really enough of this song to comment on, but the introduction is very recognisable - powerful Queenesque choirvocals, a staple of the band from the very beginning.


6. Condemned to Hell - I'm sure that this was in Command and Conquer.


7. Spiritual Dictator - Kai Hansen seems to occasionally try and emulate Richter's style, and this is one of those songs - the broken chords are soon replaced by a dead giveaway Hansen Eastern-style melody, though. The chorus sounds great, but the sample ends just as it gets good. This is one of the most Christian songs on the album.


8. Majesty - This is the title track, but it just seems to go nowhere. Hopefully there's something more "majestic" out of the range of the sample that's been provided.


9. How Long - After an intro that sounds more Finnish than German (it could have been written by Stratovarius or Sonata Arctica), this is a religious/political song like the ones from Gamma Ray's early days, and even goes as far as to include lyrics from a couple of their oldest works. It's either genius or a severe lack of creativity, depending on how you look at it. The bridge is rather awkward, but the chorus is amazing.


10. Revelation - Again, there's not a lot of this song to comment on, but it's very recognisable as another of Henjo Richter's, and the sound is very reminiscent of the introduction to The Winged Horse.

Overall, the album sounds pretty decent if not absolutely amazing (for that, I think I'll have to wait until Gamma Ray's sci-fi obsessed younger brother Iron Savior finish their new work), and it's probably one to investigate once it's around.

Bored in the Lab

Disclaimer: Among all my entries, this one is unique because it doesn't actually have any content.

Driving my way in to University this morning, I had the unique experience of being stuck behind a bungalow. I had reached the end of my street and was about to turn when the house loomed in to view and sailed past, blocking the already frustratingly slow road out of Cupar. It was actually a lorry with a large prefabricated building on the back, but it still took ages to manoeuvre around it. Manoeuvre's such a stupid word, it has too many vowels for its own good.

And we spent about half an hour of the lecture this morning discussing how to do subtraction (with the lecturer being very enthusiastic about binary operations). Now all that's left to survive today is a two-hour special on Reports and Presentation Skills, and other things that we all already know - happily, cakes are provided in the middle. Senior Honours is a great life.

My youngest brother and his amazingly long hair have a girlfriend now. It was a bit of a shock, that.

Why I'm So Great

I recently received a testimonial from the RGU so that I can show prospective employers something impressive that isn't my largely fictional CV. Because I don't really have any ideas of what to write in my LJ these days, I thought I'd post it here. Uncharacteristically for me, I've put it behind a cut so that you can get your sick-bags on standby.

---

David was employed as VLE Administrator in the Department of eLearning at the Robert Gordon University from 4th July to 16th September 2005. He assisted in the development and testing of the RGU Virtual Campus, a complex web application with 25000 users. His responsibilities included co-ordinating system testing, data entry, checking of data accuracy, and user support.

David particularly impressed me with his ability to easily fit into an existing team and he used his excellent communication and people skills to work well with members of the team at all levels. In his time in the Department he had regular contact with users in a testing and support role, and I received unprompted positive feedback about David from several of our clients.

In addition, David is organised and has the attention to detail which is vital for the development of polished IT products and services. He is also analytical, is able to solve problems on his own and works well under his own initiative.

I have no hesitation in recommending David as am employee. I am sure he will do well whatever his chosen career.

Regards,
Big Important Organisational Web-Developy Type Person

Tribute to the Past

While looking through the vast Retro directory on my laptop at the Burn, I realised that once again I hadn't updated the online list of my collection for ages. So this evening, much to Whitney's enthrallment, I've been cataloguing my abandonware. The up to date (and stunningly HTML-decorated) list is online on my Wired account. I may do one for my ROMs as well in the future, but I think that's enough copyright dodging for one entry.

If there are any requests for sending, reply in the comments and I'll email some zips out.

ModPlug Unplugged

Just after my total number of song downloads had reached the 40,000 mark, Modplug Central has been smashed to bits by a hurricane and then erased entirely by a faulty hard drive. It's slightly bad news as I was planning to put a link to the experimental version of my music site in my next release. Still, I'd appreciate any comments that people may have on it if you can stand the utter pretentiousness of it all. Happily, none of the links work now, but the actual files are still up at the ModArchive.

Still, it could be worse - I've been following the maintained by , and it made me realise how I hadn't yet noticed the absence of a fire alarm. I remember the frantic struggle out of bed whenever I was woken up by it, the shock of it going off behind my head, and waiting in the rain playing "Always look on the bright side of life" on my guitar while the firemen and engineers completed their slow tour of the building, only for it to go off again a couple more hours into the night. So I was thinking about how I'm free, and they're still living under the tyranny of that bit of red plastic.

I laughed for hours!

Feel the Burn

I had forgotten just how exhausting two days of doing nothing at the Burn was. The reason that it's so tiring is that most people get about six hours of sleep during the whole weekend, with the rest of the time taken up by playing Monopoly, guitars, or anything connected to the projector. will no doubt be pleased that I demonstrated The Last Eichhof on it at one point, but when it came to put Zero Wing on I found my version of it didn't run. It's probably just as well - being computer scientists, we could have joined hands and recited it in unison.

The presentations this year seemed a lot more technically in-depth than last time, essentially meaning they were much more difficult to sit through. The one that I jointly gave, "The Junior Honours Project and Where It All Went Wrong", was one of the more well received, but it couldn't compare to a hysterical talk on Internet addiction, delivered deadpan by one of the new JH students. I may have terrible flashbacks of boards filled with 1337speak glossaries for days.

So with the Burn trip finished, my last year of university will soon be over as well. I know that sounds a bit premature, but it honestly felt like we had been there the previous week rather than a year ago, and if the next year goes as fast as that we'll be in the Real World™ before we know it.

The Stubble Update

mentioned to me last week that I could now use BitTorrent. This has been true for a while now, but after years of living in halls and having my ports blocked and transfers monitored, it had never actually occurred to me that it was an option. So after learning all the three year old terminology, we've now been downloading Iron Chef episodes from a fantastic site that Roja mentioned the other day. I'd forgotten quite how hilarious it was.

Early last week, Whitney bought me a new shaver as an early birthday present, because I was once again losing the ongoing battle with my facial hair. It continues to grow relentlessly despite my best efforts at curtailing it, and you'd think that after seven years of shaving it would have got the hint by now. The new shaver, which is foil-based and therefore new to me, is a lot better at getting rid of it even though it does feel like having my face electrocuted every morning.

Because it refuses to stop growing, Whitney also suggested that I give in to my hair's onslaught and grow a beard. This has been going on for a reasonable amount of time now, and the proto-beard is now ready for others to view, rather than making me look like a fourteen-year-old who's trying to get in to an 18-rated film.

Powwidge

Whose idea was it to get Jonathan Ross to narrate a programme about Ronnie Barker, one of whose major works was "Porridge"? The unintentional hilarity of the voiceover made it a bit difficult to concentrate.

Excitement! Suspense! Boilers!

"The boiler's broken," Whitney announced to me as I came in from lectures. This is probably one of the more frightening things to happen when you're just starting out living independently - in Melville I never needed to worry about things like the boiler unless my hot tap became slightly less scalding than before, or when they over-enthusiastically added something to the water that inflamed all the residents' skin when they showered. However, now that we're in Cupar it was a matter of having a large amount of metal in the kitchen at head-height that may explode without warning. I looked at it and found that it was blinking its lights frantically, so decided that it was best to turn it off.

After finding the helpline phone number, I was taken through a large number of pointless checks on my address and serial number before it was revealed to me that all I had to do to restore balance to the Force was turn a black bit of plastic underneath the boiler quarter of the way round, therefore putting more water in from the mains and repressurising it. I thanked the engineer and hung up, unable to shake the feeling that I'd just asked something equivalent to "How do I change my homepage in Internet Explorer?". But it was nice to know that our lives aren't at risk just yet.