To St Andrews

I hope you're all really cold, you lunatics.

(NB. I may just be bitter about having gone past the days when arriving at the all-night garage at 5:30am wearing a dressing gown was considered normal behaviour)

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

I don't know what Kieran thinks he's playing at (is he still the system admin at WiredSoc?), but trying to navigate Wired just now is like playing a text adventure game written by a sadist who was having a particularly bad day. I promise that this is what I've just got.

I have no name!@wired:~/public_html/agent$ whoami
whoami: cannot find name for user ID 13007
I have no name!@wired:~/public_html/agent$ ls -l
ls: ldap-nss.c:1374: do_init: Assertion `cfg->ldc_uris[__session.ls_current_uri] != ((void *)0)' failed.
Aborted
I have no name!@wired:~/public_html/agent$ ssh
You don't exist, go away!

And I was almost feeling motivated to work on BugRIT, too. (In case you were wondering - no, I have no idea what the middle line means either.)

Kingdom for a Frost Gem

After its disc never leaving the PS2 since we got it last month, we're nearly at the end of Kingdom Hearts now. It's really quite impressive how they got a Square/Disney crossover to work without it being unintentionally hilarious.

The only obstacle in our way is that Whitney insisted that we go for Ultima Weapon on the first play-through, which essentially means trekking around the game and beating up monsters to get several rather rare items. And unlike in Final Fantasy 8, there's no handy way to refine or upgrade your items into other ones if you have enough of a lower level (Potions to Hi-Potions to Mega-Potions to X-Potions, for example) - everything's completely separate from each other and you have to keep finding exactly the right enemy and hoping that they'll drop the right thing.

A solution comes in the form of the White Mushrooms. These red-hatted things appear at random around the game, and promise you rewards of specific items if you help them by throwing the right spells at them. You have to watch their moods to decide what they want you to do - for example, if they're shivering they need Fire cast on them, a need for Thunder is represented by a light over their heads for some reason, and Gravity is used to bring them down if they're floating in the air waving their arms about comically. The last spell you cast on them determines the item you get.

Except these mushrooms don't want to co-operate, and their item drops are random too. They keep giving me common-as-muck Shards instead of the all-important Gems, and on the occasions that they give something more substantial as a reward, it alway seems to be something called "Mystery Goo". This is supposed to be the rarest item in the game, but thanks to those mushrooms I've got about thirty of them in my inventory and have no idea what to do with them. Sadly there is no in-game option to threaten the Mushrooms with a large frying pan and some garlic, which would probably convince them to make the process a bit quicker.

But once that side quest's out of the way, it'll hopefully be very easy to sail to the end. We've got the choice of playing Alien Hominid or Dark Cloud next - I've no idea what either of them are like, but I've played through almost all of Dark Cloud's sequel (including chapter 8, which the pesky Japanese developers included past the end of the game). That was possibly the biggest game in the entire world in terms of what you could actually do in it - on top of the standard dungeon RPG was a city builder, trading, fishing game, golf sim, fish racing, Japanese photography-type thing, and various other bits and pieces. And the plot was something to do with restoring the origin points of the world so you could go back into the past to change something to affect the future, so that you could go back into the past to correct the origin points, so that you could change the present, so you could go back into the past, to change the present, so you could go into the future and - [gunshot]

BugRIT Demo Instance

Owing to the phenomenal response that the last post about this gained, I thought I'd mention it again. I can think of exactly one person on my Friends list who might find this mildly interesting, but if you want to take a look at it, I have now put up a fully working demonstration copy of what I am now calling BugRIT.



The logins set up on the system are admin and dev for the developer accounts, and test, Bob and Jim for the testers. All accounts have the password pword unless someone's changed them.

I don't much care about what happens to that database, so feel free to add, edit and remove things as much as you like to try it out - see the Help link for more details of how it's meant to work. I was quite proud of that bit.

(And in case you're wondering what this actually is, it's a way for keeping track of reported bugs and issues while writing a program. An advanced sort of electronic to-do list.)

Moving desks

For a number of reasons involving some people moving around at work and some other people coming in to the office to spread the cost of the rent around, I've now moved to one of the two desks nearest the end of the office. After having two almost completely empty rooms with two of us in each of them when I started in November, we're almost using all our space now, and as the company I actually work for takes up two offices at the end and two desks outside them, it must be doing wonders for our rent.

A desk move is surprisingly difficult to get used to, and after one day in my new location I have a variety of feelings:

One of the new people has his mobile phone set to bellow the squeaking, grinding sound of a 56K modem when anyone calls him. This is annoying.

There's a generator on the roof right above us that occasionally makes an immensely loud humming noise when it suddenly turns on (provided it isn't busy falling over). This is also annoying, but more so.

On the divider between my new desk and the lead architect next to me, there is a plastic horse. It's wearing an orange capsule from a Kinder egg on its head, and has a laminated label stuck to its side reading "beeeeerrrrr". (I counted the letters.) This is weird.

Speaking of the lead architect's desk, it's buried under about five tons of paper, and the pile is beginning to creep under the desk at floor level as well as around the divider, slowly threatening to swallow me as the black and white tidal wave edges ever closer. This is intimidating.

The boss keeps a semi-automatic NERF gun in his office that sounds genuinely like a drive-by shooting when the trigger is held down. This is worrying.

But despite all that, I've gone from being an entry-level programming n00b to sitting at the previous lead consultant's desk in just over five months. This is really quite amazing.

Stirring up trouble

List of things to blame for yesterday

• Computer games


• Virginia Tech University


• Television


• Koreans


• Marijuana


• Rap


• Microsoft


• Computer games


• Immigrants


• Alcohol


• Kim Jong Il


• Radiation


• Wal-Mart


• Fred Durst


• Resident aliens


• Gremlins


• Canada


• Grand Theft Auto


• Marilyn Manson


• PMS


• Fridge magnets


• Computer games

List of things definitely not to blame for yesterday

• The free availability of lethal weapons to the people of a country that doesn't trust its citizens to handle fireworks

I should add (before this entry causes too much trouble) that I honestly don't believe that guns should be banned in America. They're now too ingrained into the society, and outlawing them would make sure that only the criminals could get their hands on them anyway. Nor do I really think that the availability of guns itself was the cause of this. Rather, it was the way that society allowed him to get this mental without ever noticing.

But to be logical about it, the gun probably helped.

Bug Tracker

I've been doing some work to the still-unnamed Bug Tracker recently - thanks to the help of Whitney, who unlike me can see in colour, it almost looks acceptable now. Most of the features that need to be done are on the admin accounts so that I won't have to go into the database to change anything around, and the side of the system that the testers see is pretty much finished (apart from a few obvious stylesheet problems).

You can log in using the username "tester" and the password "anything" if you want to look at it. You can even try to break it and add any problems to the existing issue list.

This is something that I think could really be useful for the rest of the Click community if I get it right.

TV

Happy Feet is the most disturbing film that I've ever seen. When Whitney and I put it in the DVD player this evening we were expecting a family film about tap-dancing penguins. Instead, we were treated to an uncomfortably sexual musical with overtones of religious persecution, narrated by Robin Williams doing an impression of Barry White. Featuring tap-dancing Hispanic penguins. And it was written by someone called George Killer! That tells you all you need to know.

And no matter how emotive an episode of Doctor Who may try to be, I just can't take anything seriously when it has Dougal Maguire as an anthropomorphic cat.

Aaaargh!

I've recently been trying to get a new sound for my music, as I've been using the same SNES-like samples for a number of years now and I feel it's time to move on. The trouble with trying to find new instruments is that you need to find ones that sound not only good on their own, but also along with your other samples. And with the vagueness of requirement for a "voice" instrument, that's more difficult than you might think. VSTs are electronic instruments that contain special effects far beyond those of the normal samples-with-volume-information that I usually use, and they're all the rage now (even though they're primarily used in electronic genres like dance), so I downloaded a few and tried them out.



I should point out that this is just one window among the pack I downloaded, which offer layouts of varying sizes and complexity, each containing at least six waveform windows and more dials, sliders and switches than the average NASA spacecraft. We learned in HCI that replicating real systems exactly on a computer doesn't work because we use computer interfaces in a conceptually different way, and this is a practical demonstration of it.

I feel I now have to take back everything that I might have once said about dance music. It may consist solely of arpeggios, synthesized chords and 80 minutes of the same drum loop, but that's because you need a PhD in particle physics just to understand your instruments.

Maybe I'll just actually learn the guitar instead.

Crystal Towers 2 - Speed Test

After a rather long period of total inactivity I finally pulled myself together and got to work fixing the chronic speed problems that everyone but me had in the last prototype. The link is below, and if the game ran slowly for you last time I'd appreciate it if you could try it out again and let me know how badly it works now.

CT2 Speed Test

As far as gameplay goes, nothing much has changed from prototype 2, although there has been a bit of cleanup done in general. The things I've done with regard to speed are replacing all events and actions that continually hammered an INI file into ones that only check it when needed (which is common sense, really) and putting the rotation quality down on small objects that rotate. The blades on the wall of Ironworks don't rotate at all now, and I'll have to replace that with animation of my own.

I hope this works.

An adventure

After walking into my parents' bedroom I searched around on the sideboard, but the only thing I found was a small yellow kiwi living in a tub of margarine with a bed made out of pipecleaners. When I picked it up it grabbed onto my finger with its single large triangular tooth and refused to let go, but it was just trying to cut my nails into the right shape so that was all right. Coming downstairs again, I remembered that we had to free the ghosts from the castle by making them solid again, but the obvious solution of combining the small green transparent ones didn't work because they were magnetic and repelled each other.

Eventually we had to summon a portal into Leonardo Da Vinci's workshop, and the man himself drew a network of toothpaste, jumpers, etc. on the ground while we held a Seder around the dining table. The portal had to be summoned away from any maps or charts, which is a bit of a job in Leonardo's workshop, but we somehow managed it while avoiding the noise from the office party being held next door. There was a window into the office and someone from TV was there too, but he looked exactly like Bryan from Whitney's flat in Oxford so no one was interested.

Later on we had a get-together in the living room with the neighbours, where my brother ate all the Skittles and one of the women from next door kept talking too much. I turned her volume down but began to feel bad about it, so I removed the barricade of chairs blocking the door and went into the bathroom, where I caught a bus to Boston Airport. Along the way I realized that it was going to take too long to get there, so I went to the middle door of the bus and opened it telepathically using the small brain that I kept in my shoes. Seeing the opposite bus stop was on the other side of the road, I took a set of twisting stairs down under the bridge that more resembled a ladder from their steepness, all the time thinking what I would say about this in my Livejournal. Descending into darkness, I was hit by a passing vegetable before losing consciousness.

Later on that night I had a dream. I can't remember what it was.

An old game and a new TV

I sat next to a fantastic old Russian woman on the train home yesterday who watched rather enthusiastically over my shoulder while I played Grand Theft Auto. In truth I was rather embarrassed about doing anything illegal while she was watching and sort of pootled around the city aimlessly, trying to remember where the completely non-offensive delivery missions were. She actually laughed when I shunted a couple of emergency vehicles out the way, though. It was a bit weird in all honesty.

I made a throwaway remark about buying a new television to replace the one in the living room this week, and it's been taken rather more seriously than I thought at first. We now have the most gigantic cathode ray tube TV I've ever seen sitting on the living room table - it was a display model at Best Buy so we got it very cheap indeed for what it is ($190 if you take back the cost of the gift card that we got for buying it). Spending the equivalent of a hundred pounds doesn't seem like anything to me now, and ten years ago I was on 50p of pocket money a week. How things change.

As we have no transport of our own we took a taxi home, the driver being confident that leaving the boot half-open would be fine even though we could hear the boot lid thumping on top of it every time we went over a bump. And after finding out that it was just narrow enough to fit through doors but not narrow enough so that you don't scrape all the skin off your hands while trying, and a minor flattening of Whitney's head when we moved the old one out of the way, we got it set up. It's now sitting dominating the living room looking gigantic and silver and intimidating. It looks fantastic when I put Crystal Towers 2 on it, though.

I've also entered a Gameboy-styled game making competition on one of the Click community members' sites. So far I've discovered that four-colour graphics are just as difficult as full-colour ones and that I still can't think up a decent idea for a non-platformer game, but I'll keep you updated on just how badly it's going.

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A proposed improvement to the Windows updater. I seem to be doing quite a lot of these lately.

Oddly enough, Service Pack 2 is working fine on my machine, even though I seem to have had to install about a hundred and fifty individual little updates since I reinstalled last weekend, and they're still coming in daily.

Code, mostly, now that I look at it

The Clickteam chatroom is down, so my time away from the code at work will have to be spent typing things into here instead. I've been staring at a stacktrace all morning and my eyes are now pointing in opposite directions, but I've almost solved a problem that I've been working on since the beginning of the week (see the last post for a brief summary of why it's taken so long).

The issue was that the Publisher would work fine if it was left to run, but was slightly overenthusiastic and carried on regardless if you ever happened to cancel it. After going step by step through about two thousand lines across ten or so individual classes, I've now successfully got it to crash when you cancel it, which is not exactly what I'm aiming for but a definite improvement.

I finally opened up Crystal Towers 2 again when I was on the train, so I got the chance to work on that a bit as well. It's amazing how you can see a problem immediately on Monday morning after spending all day on Friday looking for it, and just about the same applied here - the catastrophic slowdown throughout the game has now mostly been removed because of reworking everything that read an external file, but there are still some problems in the enemy handling section of one level. This is probably because I'm asking the computer to calculate rotation angles and sine functions on every frame, but I have a clever idea on caching the results to solve that. This should probably be in my other journal. Never mind.

I'm sure that there was going to be a point to this post when I started writing it. As an experiment I wore my USB drive with its handy neck strap on the walk from the station this morning just to see if I was beaten up or not, but I didn't even get any strange looks.

Now I've got something to do - proofread an essay from Whitney, who was explaining to me this morning why using mouthwash is like selling your soul to Satan.

Debugging other people's code causes some strain on professional relationships

Music, videos, and two lists

Going back home for a week was also an opportunity to see what music had found its way on to the family computer (formerly known as my computer), and I came back with a few more albums from Richard on the iPod's file partition. After circumventing Apple's cleverly thought out copyright protection system with a simple copy and paste on my own computer, my music library has increased dramatically. One of the highlights is a band called Falconer, who sound rather like Kamelot would have sounded like in their early days if they hadn't been catastrophically dreadful. The opener "Quest for the Crown" is good apart from two minor details.

List 1. Things wrong with Quest for the Crown

1. That's the title of the first King's Quest game.
2. It sounds exactly like Brave Sir Robin.

And I've just found out it isn't actually the opener even though the track listing on the file says it is.

Most of the new collection is comprised of albums from Helloween from the period after Kai Hansen left but before Andreas Deris arrived, when they were sort of floundering as to what direction they were taking and bordering on the edge of dementia. This is evidenced in the following list:

List 2. Song titles I can't believe Helloween used

1. Pink Bubbles Go Ape
2. Kids Of The Century
3. Heavy Metal Hamsters
4. I'm Doin' Fine CRAZY Man
5. Les Hambourgeois Walkways
6. Red Socks And The Smell Of Trees
7. Irritation (Weik Editude 112 In C)
8. Grapowski's Malmsuite 1001
9. Anything My Mama Don't Like
10. Deliberately Limited Preliminary Prelude Period In Z
11. Hey Lord!
12. Lavdate Dominvm [sic]
13. Moshi Moshi~Shiki No Uta
14. Escalation 666
15. Sun 4 The World

There's also another thing I noticed recently - from its entire sound and music video, I thought "Power" was written in the Eighties (for obvious reasons), until I realized a few weeks ago that Andi was the voice on it. My first thought then was that the Treasure Chest 'best of' album that I got it from had a reworked version, but it genuinely was from 1996.

Another band that's very much stuck in the Eighties is Gamma Ray, but their approach to best-of albums is exemplary. Unlike bands such as Iron Maiden who release collections every three years to get "new fans" ("quick cash"?), they went to the trouble of asking fans to vote for their favourite songs across their previous albums, then rewrite and rerecord them with the modern band members. So what would normally be something that everyone had already paid for became a new album in its own right.

But their music videos are pants, there's no way around that.