Treasure Tower

It's finished! And because I like you all so much, the readership of my LJ is getting it first - it can be downloaded from its own minisite. Or you can click here if you'd prefer a direct link.

Now to write it up and put it on TDC...

~Wong

Well, the new system for the Quotebook seems to have got off to a flying start, with someone enjoying the Sleigh-popping episode from the Chinese restaurant so much that they voted it up no less than twenty-six times.

I actually have a number of projects going at the moment, and am trying to tie them all together into something coherent - I have a temporary page set up as an index so you can see the overview of what I'm actually doing with my ridiculously inexpensive webspace. (By the way, Treasure Tower should be finished very soon indeed.)

Back in reality, the Principal has now announced that people who can't graduate this year due to the strike are going to be given general degrees, and their full degrees when possible, possibly as late as autumn. I have already written to several newspapers.

Revenge of the Quotebook

I was bored this evening, so I went into the Quotebook code again and wrote a Boost feature so that viewers can nudge the quotes that they like the most further up the "Boosted" list. It's a bit like Bash.org, but not as well written. In fact the code looks almost as hideous as one of Gyles Brandreth's jumpers at the moment - if I'm ever going to update the site again I'll have to sort it out somehow.

Nevertheless, you can now visit, enjoy the nostalgia (if you were around at the time most of them were taken) and also let others know which ones are the best by clicking those red arrows. There isn't a limit to how many times you can boost a quotation, so you can click-battle the quotes that feature you to the top depending on the amount of free time you have. I've already boosted a few arbitrary ones to test them, including quite a hysterical contribution to today's HCI lecture from .

Call to Arms

If you're someone out of my rather diverse friends list that is still in St Andrews, it would be helpful if you read this all the way through. It's a bit dull, but it's important.

A large stress that's been hanging over the class like a badly placed grand piano recently has been the ongoing situation with the lecturer strike. I haven't mentioned this before, but it's becoming worrying - I thought that it would only last a few weeks, but it's now getting to the point where my exams aren't being written, my project might not be marked, and I might not be able to graduate unless I come back after summer. A couple of weeks ago, all those ideas just seemed melodramatic, but they're becoming increasingly real as each day goes past.

The latest email update on the strike from the student union is that "the teaching union is prepared to discuss the possibility of resuming negotations with regard to eventually solving" the matter, which sounds pretty laughable, but with a bit of luck the negotiations today will have helped somewhat. In fact, there is also the possibility of a temporary solution being implemented within St Andrews so that we can get our work marked.

But here is the problem - the Principal of the university doesn't believe that it's a major problem because he has only had about fifty replies from the entire student body concerning the situation. Therefore, the CS class went up to the lab this afternoon and sent a heap of individual emails to him about how concerned we are about our uncertain graduation. One of the more irate members of the group sent an additional one off to the AUT with the subject line "You greedy, selfish, inconsiderate bastards".

I'm not suggesting that people go that far, but to make the students' situation understood, people need to contact the principal and let him know of their concerns. I'll even give you a link to his email address so that you can do it without leaving the page (it'll only allow mail sent from another St Andrews email). Even if you're not graduating this year, or your lecturers aren't on strike, there are people in rather dire situations that may be helped a lot by as large a student response as possible. It doesn't have to be a long or complex email - just anything expressing concern about the ongoing strike and asking him when it can be resolved would go a long way.

In summary: Help!

Back Into The Light

The project was handed in at 2:45pm yesterday. It's rather difficult to believe that it's over.

I woke up at about 8am that morning, and had a nagging thought that I needed to change something before I declared it finished. Suddenly I realised that a part of my search method was probably causing the program to fail to solve a few games, and hurriedly changed that section of the code so the user had the option of whether to discard future states or not. Then I realised that I hadn't written a significant amount of JavaDoc (the section of code that makes the rest of it vaguely understandable) and blitzed through that as well.

When I arrived in St Andrews, there was a minor miracle in that my supervisor had actually opened up the file that I had sent him. Admittedly his feedback amounted to "Go and print it", but it was very relieving nonetheless. And off to Reprographics I went. My fascination with this department was documented last year, and the mood was pretty much the same. They have now moved to a convenient dark basement somewhere in a building in the middle of the town, though, and I had to park miles away at the harbour and walk through the pouring rain worrying about the state of my black and white pages.

"Hello," soothed the Reprographics man as I came in, gliding smoothly over to the desk and instantly melting all my stress away. "What can I do for you?" (I hadn't considered that he had a name before, but I found out on this visit that he's called Duncan. I'd always just thought of him as Diazepam in human form.) I explained the need to print two copies of a project report and he took me into the computer room. I walked behind him, surreptitiously looking down to see if his feet actually touched the ground.

I needed somewhere to put the report in order after printing the colour pages, and decided to make it a bit special and visit the Library for the first time in my life. It was a unique occasion, after all. I didn't actually see much of the building, staying in the first floor reading area and putting pages into various piles. It was actually more reminiscent of a game of cards than I would have cared to admit. And after that, I walked back and dropped it off for binding with Captain Valium, then went back to the lab to radiate some smug for a while before picking it up again.

Finally it was brought back to the lab, signed, shown round proudly for a while, and handed into the office. Then I drove home, blasting the triumphant chords of Weballergy from the car speakers while stuck hopelessly behind a tractor for ten miles.

Now that I have my receipts in front of me, I notice that they say I purchased "Misc Stationary" [sic]. I find this fairly appalling from a department that dispenses stationery as its primary purpose, especially as they're anything but stationary. It was so much more convenient when they were in the Purdie building, next door to computer science.

Do you want to see it? I put it up here. And today I think I'll go in again and watch the Junior Honours people demonstrate their stock market software. And calmly wade through the final rush to get the report in by 4pm.

Dream and Project

I've just remembered what my dream was about last night. I dreamt that my recent illness was being caused by a buffer underrun error. The project has rendered me irredeemably insane.

Tomorrow I'll go into the lab again, meet with Ian, who won't have read the report, then give up and PDF it anyway. Then notice mistakes, and PDF it again. Then print it off anyway. Then go to Reprographics and get it bound. Then hand it in. And finally, it will all be over. 3,240 lines of source and 30,020 words of documentation. Ironically it still isn't the longest thing I've ever written. But it seems the longest.

Yet Another Post

So, the new Doctor Who, then. Catwomen, nuns/nurses. Twitch, collapse. Anyway, I should also mention that I somehow missed the episode of the previous series that featured Cassandra, and she is quite possibly the most disturbing thing I've seen outside of the early Peter Jackson films. I was only able to cope with the sight of her because of her resemblance to one of the weeping doors from Knightmare.

I have written an alternative solver for my project so that I can just set it running overnight and get hundreds of results from it, therefore lending some credibility to my report. Showing that it's not terribly good at hundreds of Solitaires is much better than showing that it's not terribly good at just a couple of them.

Actually I'm fed up of writing about the project. I'll update again on Friday, when it's over and done with. Apart from the final demonstration. And the class presentation. And...

STOP

Windows-haters will be enthralled to hear that my computer suffered the second STOP error of its lifetime while I was delivering people home yesterday. Whitney was removing a DVD from the drive when it suddenly decided that something chronic had happened with its USB drivers, and displayed the fabled Blue Screen of Utter Catastrophe informing her of this. In fact, most of the bottom half of the screen was garbled into nonsense, meaning that not only had the computer crashed, the error screen trying to report the crash had crashed as well. Top marks for effort.

It did make me wonder why the colour blue was chosen for the screen. Red, while more appropriate for such a serious error message, would have looked too terrifying, as would black. Yellow or green would have just been sickly, so it looks like it was the only colour left.

To assist in curing it, I awarded the computer a night while switched off (something that hasn't happened since February), and everything seemed all right again by the morning. It even restarted twice in a row perfectly a couple of days ago, and while it's quite a worrying sign when this is a genuinely surprising thing to happen to a computer, it's a step in the right direction.

Translatificator

I'm fed up of this project now - all that remains are a huge mountain of fiddly bits that I can't really be bothered with, but which have to be done by the 24th. All that I managed today was to produce this, which was most helpful for the recent goings-on over at The Daily Click.



Update: Looks like we broke the site.

People are weird.

When driving into St Andrews today, Whitney and I heard an interview on the radio about reactions to the bird flu that's been discovered dangerously near us in Cellardyke. People were saying that it'll probably "be good for the tourist industry in the long run". That's going to be a difficult one to market, isn't it? "Visit Cellardyke - bird flu capital of Scotland!" We could provide discounts on infections to parties of over six. The mind boggles.

Who let the Stroggs out?

My dad is going back to Saudi Arabia soon, and this time he's being accompanied by Jack Straw. To talk to some Middle Eastern princes about missiles. I'm beginning to have doubts about him actually being a university professor now.

My projectless boredom has been temporarily warded off by the purchase of Quake 4, which was going for cheap on Aberdeen University's classified list. It's most similar in style to Quake 2, but is more like Doom 3 than anything else. It feels less like a Quake game and almost like a House of the Dead-style shooter at times, as the concept of free movement has largely been used so far simply to travel between one amazing set-piece firefight and the next. I'm also rather worried about the slow speed of walking, very similar to that of Halo (a game which was so slow that the multiplayer matches resembled Chariots of Fire with added missiles). But I haven't tried the online mode yet.

Remember this?

I'M BORED
come to gatty
BORED, not SUICIDAL

And the reason I remembered about that snapshot of student life (which would surely have become a bash.org classic if the moderators had any sense of humour) is because I'm having a completely new experience - I'm bored. The project is almost finished, the report is as far as it's going to go for now, the user guide has been written, and I've done as much to Treasure Tower as I can usefully do at the moment. All that remains is waiting to receive room submissions from other people, and seeing as we're all going to be dead from bird flu in about a week, I'd rather like to get the game finished as soon as possible.

I would start up Modplug and try and get back into music writing, but I seem to have lost all ability for that at the moment and with Modplug still down, it seems a little pointless when there's an entire album worth of material still unreleased. If anything, I'll have to find a replacement "voice" instrument, because I get the feeling that the one I'm using at the moment is making my music sound far too happy, especially now that I'm experimenting with writing in a major key.

I promised myself a day in bed yesterday, just to feel what not working for a day was like, but that didn't happen as I just picked at the report for about four hours again. I have been keeping myself vaguely amused with my 2.5GB retro directory - rediscovering Super ZZT in particular, which is a lot better than I remember despite there not being anything remotely Super about it compared to the original. But it does feel like I'm just trying to come up with more and more ingenious ways of wasting time.

Silent Hill

I thought I'd do an update to prove I'm not dead. My project report is now at over 20,000 words and is approaching seventy pages, and I've reached the stage where I'm just picking at it rather than writing anything meaningful. So I've decided to leave that and work on something else - the trouble is that with Treasure Tower almost finished as well, I have a distinct lack of projects to keep me amused.

Therefore I've been going round the IMDB in between applying for jobs. The first point I noticed is that I can't believe that this is on it. I suppose now that it's had a DVD release it has every right to be, but it's still rather surreal.

Much more sensibly, I am finding myself most excited about the upcoming release of Silent Hill. Throughout its development, the plot seems to have been shifted around multiple times, but it now seems that it'll follow the storyline of the first game with Harry replaced by a new character called Rose. (And while it might be a strange decision, this might be for the best, because at least there's no possiblity of including the infamous "radio" line.) It takes elements from the first three games, though.

Have a look at the trailer - I'm just amazed how closely it follows the introductory scene of the game (though the graveyard scene later on looks a bit weird). However, it looks to be breaking new ground in being the first game-to-film conversion that isn't catastrophically terrible. And I'm sure having Sean Bean in it can't hurt.

No Project

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I did not look at my project or report today. It was fantastic. I did start up Eclipse, but it was only to write a ROT13 codec, which was vastly entertaining as you can imagine. (I think "ROT13 codec" is the epitome of computer science phrases that sound impressive but actually aren't.)

So I'm going to celebrate by posting this meme instead. Actually it was an idea from years ago that I thought I'd crowbar into a meme. I realize that this is utterly puerile, but what can I say - I thought it was hilarious.

Open up your music player of choice, and find songs with "Heart" in the title. Replace the word "heart" with the word "arse".

Someone or Other - My Arse Will Go On (Dance version)
Crush 40 - Open Your Arse
David Newton - Arse of the Beast
Dragonforce - Arse of a Dragon
Gamma Ray - The Arse of the Unicorn
Hammerfall - Arses On Fire
Heavenly - Carry Your Arse
Helloween - In The Middle Of An Arsebeat
Nightwish - Swanarse
Silent Force - Arse Attack
Stratovarius - Eaglearse

Snigger, hoot, snort. Actually, the lyrics for "Heart of the Beast" become absolutely amazing when mutated in this way, but that's enough of this for now.