It's so hard to remember my life

I know I've not been reporting on much except work recently, but really that's about all my life will consist of in the near future. The interim report for the project is due in on Monday, where I'll have to report that my program can now solve games with about 40 cards in them, but still takes upwards of eight hundred moves to do it. I have a fair idea of how to make it a bit less appallingly stupid, but that involves a meeting with my project supervisor, and finding him is proving to be a problem.

In the meantime I've been trying to get some of the practicals out the way - in Multimedia we've been given the task of modifying videos in groups, and I thought a decent idea would be to get hold of some political broadcast (a Liberal Democrat one, perhaps) and add a laugh track to it. We'll either do that or a music video. Thankfully it's the last piece of groupwork we'll have to do this semester - in half an hour we're having the first meeting about the last presentation of the year, which was given out about two months ago and is due to be presented on Tuesday.

After that there will just be the solo practicals to clear up. I'm getting one done just now, and have just come up with this gem of a paragraph in response to "How do the expansions involved in an A* search relate to the complexity predictions?":

"To avoid an exponential growth in A*, |h(n) – h*(n)| must be below or equal to O(log h*(n)), where h(n) is the estimated cost of getting from n to the goal and h*(n) is the true cost. Therefore, the error in the estimation of cost must be of order of the logarithm of the true cost. With a problem that involves only low distances and depth of states it is difficult to determine whether this condition has been satisfied or not – however, it can be seen from the reported results that the A* search explores many more routes than the single path given by the Greedy search, and therefore increases optimality at the cost of also increasing the space complexity."

I think that's the best way of saying "I have no idea how to answer this question" that I've ever invented.

More Project

It can solve some games with 32 cards now. It's still totally stupid, but marginally less so than it was on Friday.

Project Update

In a major breakthrough in my project, my system can now deal a game of Freecell at random, play it flawlessly itself while adhering to all the rules, and report a possible solution path back to the user.

Trouble is, if I put more than three cards into the pack then it takes all the memory in the world to actually do it. Tomorrow I think I'll work on making my code a bit more efficient, because the commonly accepted target of fifty-two cards is quite a long way off.

Music Update

I haven't been writing in this much, have I? Much of my time has been taken in responding to that meme that I posted - I had expected a couple of replies at best, but I wasn't prepared for the record number of responses that it generated. I also hadn't expected thinking up replies to be so difficult. Naturally, after completing it I resolved to respond to as many other people's as possible, making the process as difficult for them as it was for me.

Recently I've had a significant amount added to my music collection, thanks to getting three albums as late birthday presents from various members of my family. I haven't really listened to any of them in great detail, but they can be summarised as follows:

• Heavenly - Dust to Dust: The cast of the rejected French version of The Matrix, singing about vampires. It's fantastic, trust me. I'd actually forgotten all about this album, and I'm surprised that anyone remembered that I wanted it.
  
• Gamma Ray - Majestic: The band now seem to be coming around full circle and approaching the style that they started in - unusually structured political/religious music. They're now playing songs that could have been written when they started in 1980, but in their modern, more aggressive style. The title track is appallingly dreadful, but the rest of it works.
  
• Stratovarius - Stratovarius: Timo Tolkki and the group have now completed the process of disappearing completely up themselves and have put together a self-titled album as their eleventh release, presented in an embossed metal/wood-effect laminated case. This comes complete with a bonus photo booklet and "rockumentary" (cringe). The title is actually justified, because it seems to be an album about the band themselves. On listening to the first couple of songs I thought it would be as disastrous as Kotipelto's "Coldness", but fortunately it picks up later. I find it amusing, though, that you can tell exactly which songs Kotipelto wrote the lyrics for due to their complete lack of synchronisation with the actual rhythm of the music.

Portimo	Lucius

Lastly, I have an image to further the point made in my last entry - there seems to be a sinister similarity between a certain wizard and a certain drummer. Surely it can't just be me.

There was a programme on a minute ago about how heavy metal makes you kill people. It was quite frustrating, really.

Project Progress

Today I've been continuing my SH project (well, starting it, to be honest) and I've now got a working simulation of Freecell. True, it's all through the command line and it's easy to break it, but it's not bad for an afternoon's work.

Oh, and Harry Potter 4 is pretty good. I never noticed how great Lucius's hair was before. He looks like he could be in Sonata Arctica or something.

Addendum

Also, taking a break from the "All memes are rubbish" policy for a moment (as the deleted eighth instruction told me that I MUST post this on my journal or be dead within a week...)

Leave your name and...

1. I'll respond with something random about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.

Amazon Anomalies

Well, the comment-generating title in the last entry almost worked - I got comments all right, but most of them were letting me know (quite fairly) that they objected to the title, rather than having read through the entry defiantly as was my hope. Therefore I will compensate with something mildly interesting.

A few of the computer science students went to a presentation on Amazon a couple of days ago. Most of it was about how they ran their database spread across a huge number of servers, but there was a brief section on some of the more unlikely things that Amazon sells. A quick search around shows a surprising amount of stuff that you'd never come across while browsing the site normally:

• A Qwert Shmarble (No one really knows what this is)
  
• Similarly, a Qwert Stiker Flaggle
  
• A $5.5 million box of chocolates
  
• A large number of other items from the imaginary company EBSQA, including a Pen on a Rope and some asdfasdfg pipecleaners (or, if you prefer, fjdksfj pipecleaners, which are apparently not as cute or cuddly but more fuzzy).

All those are just imaginary items that were left in from Amazon's testing stage, but we were pointed to a number of genuinely strange things as well...

• A huge amount of loaves of cheese, with the current record holder being a three-stone block of mild cheddar
  
• Ice Cream by Mail (I'm still at a loss to imagine how this would work)
  
• A 30-horsepower NorTrac bulldozer
  
• Quite a large selection of vehicles, actually, including...
  
• A JL421-class Landcruiser, if the traffic in St Andrews gets too much for you.

Thanks to that search, my "Recommended Items" box is now pretty surreal, but at least the family's Christmas is pretty much sorted out.

[Edited because I typed this just after getting up and somehow managed to misspell "qwert" twice.]

Games (Girls can probably skip this post)

Thanks, everyone, for your cards, e-cards, reminders that I'm now an old man, and so on for my birthday - especially to and for being absolutely heroic and getting me Red Dwarf VII and Civilization IV, respectively. Civ IV doesn't exactly run on my computer because it's getting on a bit now, but upgrading is what birthday money's for. At the moment I can only see how impressive it looks - very typical of Microprose in the early days, with a polished look and a top quality manual that's so heavy that you have to get someone else to hold it up while you turn the pages.

For the last three years I haven't really played games at all, with a couple of exceptions, but it's only now that I'm getting back into them. At the start of the year I played UT online a lot on the Truff suite of servers after being starved of it on ResNet, and was quickly kicked off the Beginner and Intermediate servers for being too good. After being dumped into the main servers instead, I'm struggling to keep up with the experts.

I installed Diablo 2 a while ago as well. During my last year of school, a lot of my time was spent at home playing that (largely because I only had nine hours of class a week and my first one was last period on a Tuesday) but when I got to the Arcane Sanctuary it was time to pack up and go to St Andrews, so I never finished it.

While playing Diablo 2 there's a continual argument going on in my head, because even after getting back to where I left off I can't decide if it's any good or not. "Stop playing this," one side of my brain will say. "It basically amounts to repeatedly clicking on people."

"But it's clicking on people, avoiding being clicked on and then clicking on stuff to sell later," the other side will argue.

"Stop it - otherwise you'll do something really stupid like post this conversation on your Livejournal," the first side will finish, and go and sulk. The other side will take over, as it knows that there are only 9,234 experience points to go until the next Level Up, and that means my character will be able to learn a new set of spells, and also let me use that enchanted hammer that I picked up a while ago... and the cycle goes on from there. With the arrival of Civ IV just as I've got to the Arcane Sanctuary again, though, all my time will be sucked black hole-like into its shiny interior and I'm doomed never to be able to complete the game.

I also picked up Carmageddon: TDR 2000 at a car boot sale the other week. I had heard that it wasn't as good as the others in the series, but I felt I didn't have much to lose for 50p. I can see why a lot of people were disappointed in it, actually - the whole dynamic of the game has changed, and the emphasis is far more on actually racing now rather than wandering off on your own to explore. You only get two more seconds for running over a zombie even on Easy, and unlike the original two games where you'd regularly get about three minutes added to your timer for ramming an opponent, now it's incredibly pleasing to see even a nineteen-second bonus appear on the screen.

All this means that you've got to zoom through a level on the predetermined track, while shunting people around when the opportunity presents itself - what happened in the previous games was that you'd end up with about four hours on your timer and be free to do pretty much what you wanted, but the timer is capped at about five minutes now. This makes the game a lot faster (indeed, some of them could go on for hours in the other two games), and it could be argued that it stops the levels from all becoming the same, as you have to race on a track rather than explore the same areas repeatedly. It does take some getting used to, though.

The only real problem I have with the game is that I'd like it if it was easier to run over zombies. In the first game you got points for them if one so much as touched your vehicle, in the second game it got a bit more realistic, but now you can hit them at about eighty miles an hour and the most they'll do is moan a bit and then get up again.

Have I finished? Yes, probably, I've got to drive to Architecture now.

What?!

Wednesday, 16th Nov. 15:52:52
Subject: Christmas Party 2006

Hi,

This year's School Christmas Party will be on Thursday 15th December. The basic idea is the same as for the last two years: you give Scott Walker, Stuart Norcross or me £10, and we source food and drink for the evening. Location is the Jack Cole Building, start time around 6.30 - 7.00. We need the money by close of business on Tuesday 13th at the latest.

This year we'd like to have a kids party as well, starting at about 5.30, ending around 7.00, with jelly & ice cream, a visit from Santa, and a small gift. We think £5 per child should cover it. Again, talk to Scott, Stuart and/or me for further details (not that we've put much thought into this, yet).

We have an exciting entertainment package lined up this year: Ishbel will give a karate display, with background music supplied by Bernie on the bassoon. Andy will give a dog-handling demonstration, accompanied by Norman on drums. I will be juggling five flaming clubs whilst Ian Gent cycles to Kirkcaldy and back. The SH band - David Newton vocals, Rob Howell as DJ, Eleonora on guitar - will be performing songs written by Graham Hamilton. No-one in JH has any interesting talents, as far as I'm aware.

Following a risk assessment exercise, we have, with regret, been forced to suspend both the fish-tank surfing and the "asking Ron for a raise" competitions. You are still allowed to ask the fish-tank for a raise, though.

If you have any questions or suggestions, contact Stuart, Scott or me.

Tom Kelsey
School of Computer Science

Twenty-one

I have somehow managed to become 21 without thinking about it. It's supposed to be a very significant date, but I don't feel any different. At the moment I can't even remember what possibilities have now been opened to me, apart from being able to buy alcohol in America if I ever have any reason to. I suppose that as I've fulfilled the additional requirement of having a licence for over three years, I'm now allowed to teach people to drive.

What I'm not allowed to do is skip the fast approaching PSAC lecture and then write a report on it for Friday. I could actually have done this a lot sooner, but I thought the presentation we were given last month was a dreadful one on which to write anything, so I took the risk of leaving it until this week. The option of catching up is practically non-existent anyway, as when I checked my notes for the first, I found that they started as follows:

"PSAC Thingummy 1 - Something

Write two pages of gibberish (Formative).

This is a report."

I don't actually remember writing any of that, which probably indicates how much attention I paid to the presentation. I'd better go and get some better notes for the second one now.

(Also, I've only just realised how badly written the previous entry was. I think all the essays and reports are taking it out of me, and I'm gradually forgetting how to write, even though Whitney told me last night that I write "very well, for a scientist." Charming.)

Murdering Songs and Policemen

Before last night, I had no idea that had quite such a large following at karaoke. I knew about the Facebook group, but still wasn't prepared for the enthusiastic crowd that gathered in the Union, or the version of "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" personalised in his honour. It seems that he's become the new Benedict, which is possibly the greatest achievement that either of us will achieve at university.

I decided to have a go myself, but wasn't confident enough to attempt a song myself as I was unfamiliar with pretty much everything on the list. Eventually I found The Final Countdown, which was just about the only song to which I vaguely knew the tune, even though Whitney is of the opinion that it's dreadful. I managed to come up with a performance to match this opinion.

I know that being "good at" karaoke relies very little on actually being able to sing, but I like to think that I have at least some ability for it, and every time I perform karaoke I manage to provide a huge amount of evidence to the contrary. There always seems to be very little relation between what I think I'm singing and the horrendous noise blaring out of the speakers. It might have helped if I'd heard the song in under a year, but I sat down afterwards thinking that I'd somewhat dented Jamie's reputation.

The next morning, the three of us drove back up to Inverurie once again. On the way we were subjected to a surprise roadside safety check. Actually, the officer who waved us in to the layby seemed to be taking the "surprise" element all too literally, as his method of getting our attention was to leap out of the road in front of me and wave his arms wildly. I braked as safely as could be expected in the generous second-long reaction time he'd given me, but he still had to leap out of the way as I sailed past. It's just as well, because I imagine that having bits of him sprawled out on my bonnet as the check was carried out might have reduced my chances of passing somewhat.

After driving slowly in a daze and wondering what to do, I reversed into the layby from the other end. He didn't seem all that bothered by his brush with death, and sent another officer to my car to perform an extensive set of checks on functions of my car, some of which I didn't even know existed. At the end he concluded the car was fine apart from the horn and one of the lights at the back. "I should give you a 21-day ticket," he said, "but I'm not going to bother." Stellar police work. I drove out again, the only after-effect being that I was still slightly shaken by the encounter with the suicidal police officer.

A True Livejournal Entry

I like to think of most of the journals on my Friends list as examples of how journals should be - beacons of coherency in the swamp of directionless anger that spews forth from the keyboards of most of the site's users. As part of this effort I try to keep my journal as something relatively amusing and uplifting to read. All this is about to change, however, as this entry is going to be a true LJ entry - full of venom, bile, raisins, and other nasty things.

I blame the dentist. If she hadn't moved my appointment from Friday to today, I would be happily in Cupar doing my project plan at the moment. ("Happy" may be an exaggeration considering the "project plan" bit, but I'd still feel a lot better.) But with an appointment today, I'm having to make two trips up and down the road during Reading Week.

I was going to take the car, as seems logical, but before I left my mother managed to convince me to get over my hatred and use a series of buses to get me up the road. Her reasoning was that not only was it marginally cheaper, but she has a huge paranoia of me driving anywhere, especially places that involve roadworks, double roundabouts or other vehicles. The fact that I've been driving for over three years now and that in a week I'll have fulfilled the requirements for teaching people to drive seems to be a non-issue here.

So despite the Megabuses invariably being late, slow and garish, I booked two journeys on them, making sure that I had chosen suitable times to link up with the appalling service from Cupar in both directions. I'd have to wait an hour in each direction, but I thought I could keep myself busy for that length of time.

On Monday morning, just before leaving for the bus, I picked up the timetable and noticed that the buses didn't run on local holidays. It was a local holiday, as it happened. In retrospect it might have been a good idea to drive to St Andrews, leave the car there and take a different service, but that didn't occur to me at the time, and it was getting late anyway. I frantically turned to one of the Internet's greatest achievements, Google Maps, and found a number of long-stay car parks in Dundee.

After a brief drive, I arrived over the Bridge of Death and trundled round looking for a parking space. "Long stay" in Dundee apparently means "under ten hours". The one car park in the area that I'd looked at that genuinely offered long-stay parking cost £20 per 24-hour period. I decided to give that a miss, and with time until my bus was due to leave rapidly running out, I pointed the car in the direction of the big car park in front of the sports stores.

On arrival, I saw that it had two car parks - one that only allowed up to ten hours, and another that allowed 24 hours for £5. This was the best I could do - if I didn't park, I would miss my bus. As there was a £60 fine for exceeding my alloted time, I quickly formulated a plan... I would have to get Whitney to come in to Dundee tomorrow lunchtime and stick another ticket on the car. I felt awful thinking of asking her to do that, but by this time was the only option left.

So I parked, found I didn't have change, and ran into JJB with fifteen minutes to go. After wandering around for ages I eventually found the cash desk. Its operator was happy to give me change even though he seemed suspicious that I was needing as much as £5 for it, and I dashed out of the building again and bought a ticket.

"£5: Until 23:59, 7th Nov", the ticket that came out declared. Apparently, 24 hours means "until midnight". I sat in the car looking at the ticket, considering any further options, and it was at this point that I gave up.

There was nowhere to park, and even if there was, I was about to miss the bus I'd paid for. I phoned to rearrange things about picking me up, asked Megabus if I could cancel my return ticket, found I couldn't, then departed for the journey up to Aberdeen that I had wanted to take in the first place. £10 worth of petrol, plus £12 Attempting-to-take-the-bus Tax - two unused journeys and a useless parking voucher.

The trip took all of two hours, and the car in front of me for most of the time had the word "WOE" as the end of its number plate. I felt it quite appropriate in the circumstances.

When I arrived at home, my mother suggested that I take my return journey down again, then instead of using the car on Friday, the three of us could all take the bus up. I quickly dismissed this plan as "insane", as not only would it be more expensive than taking the car again, but it would involve buses - something for which my hate augments every time that I have to use them. Like Harlan Ellison wrote, "If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundred of thousands of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for buses at this micro-instant". (NB. Quote may have been modified slightly.)

And this entire journey was for this purpose - to go into the dentist's practice, have her unscrew all my teeth and put them back in opposite directions, and be charged a further £20. And I've just found out that the curry I was going to have for lunch has sultanas in it. I think it's obvious to conclude by saying that I've had better days.

Welcome to the Machine

Good heavens, LJ's updated its interface a bit since this morning. In fact it's probably the most major overhaul that I've seen since starting this about two and a half years ago. It looks like it'll be useful, but it does have the Facebook-like disadvantage that there's a constant reminder of people's birthdays over on the right, meaning that I have even less of an excuse for forgetting them.

But dolphins are what I really want to talk about. I've mentioned before that I have a lot of unusual phobias, but there is one that I recently found out is shared by many people. I am scared of Ecco the Dolphin.

I'm not quite sure what it is that makes that old Megadrive game quite so unsettling, but I can fairly confidently guess that the haunting music plays a large part in it. It's also the whole weird presentation and storyline of the game. At the beginning you're swimming happily with the other dolphins, you mess about for a bit getting used to the controls, eventually you decide to see if you can jump out of the water - and suddenly the others are sucked away by a huge storm and you're dumped back down, with water water everywhere, alone on a wide wide sea, without even an albatross in sight.

Yesterday I decided to confront my fears and start the game up again. The screen that you're presented with at first gives you the choice of entering a password or starting anew, neglecting to mention which direction is which. I tried left and found that I'd accidentally gone to the password screen, so to get out of it I put in a row of letter Ns, thinking (as would be logical) that when I pressed Start it would reject the password and bring me back to the choice screen.

I'm more scared than ever now.

Multimedia

Of all the classes that I have this year, the Multimedia course is a rare case because it's one that I actually look forward to going to. Yesterday we were having a lecture on colour followed by two presentations on DVRs and virtual reality, but this soon descended into a lengthy discussion about the French and building our own Matrix. In addition to that, the questions that we're handed out are absolutely surreal. Normally you'd expect to be given tutorial sheets involving calculations about Amdahl's Law or some other immemorable formula, or perhaps discussing advantages and disadvantages of something or other in the modern computing blah.

9. If you gave a child a paintbox containing red, green and blue paints only, will they be able to mix an adequate range of colours to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

10. Superman's uniform is blue, with a yellow S on the chest and a red cape. How would you make an image of superman flying without recourse to his superpowers?

I think I'll just stick to writing about path trees and benchmarking for now.

General Message

"A" and "lot" are two separate words.