Generally speaking, I tend to find that if something look too good to be true, it probably isn’t. The “lemon meringue pie” served in the university cafateria today, for instance. Another potential for instance can be found here:
Because the trailer for Terminator Salvation look far, far too good to be true. In fact, it looks pretty spectacular, in my opinion. It looks like some of the best, most intelligent, elements of Battlestar Galactica*, and that epic future war James Cameron mercilessly teased us with… starring Christian Bale. Who, silly voice aside, makes a damn near perfect Batman.
I ask you (yes, you): is this possible?
* Yes, that would be the new Battlestar, not the old one.
It isn’t the first time I’ve thought this in the past couple of days, and I expect to think it at least a thousand times more in the foreseeable future. The problem in this instance is that I can’t tell by eye if the bed and the two cabinets will fit to the left of the bedroom window.
Crap. I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
A week or two ago, my flatmate Bruce told me that he and his girlfriend, my other flatmate, Sabrina were moving on a pastures anew. They wanted their own place, and so March would be their last month month in our current flat.
Shit.
But no, after speaking to my very friendly landlord, I found out that I will not be tossed out on my proverbial arse, I will in fact be able to stay on for three further months, essentially at my current rent, and with the whole flat to myself.
Pretty cool.
So, of course, my thoughts naturally turn to important matters:
Where will I move all the furniture to?
Because, of course, you have to move the furniture around. That’s just what you do.
How will I implement the ideal centralised media and file distribution system?
This, too, is just something you have to do. If you’re a bit of a nerd, that is.
But what happens at the end of the three months I previously mentioned? Well… in a slightly terrifying display of domesticity, on my good lady’s return from working on her dissertation project down south, we pick up the lease of the flat.
While it’s a fairly common and reasonably accurate maxim that you have to spend money to make money, I find myself wondering if the same is true of energy. To reword and disentangle the metaphor: Can you save energy by using energy?
Here’s a my train of thought: You have curtains in your house. It’s possible to fit a motorised unit and automate the opening and closing of the same. This would same ostentatious, lazy and wasteful. To have a computer, sitting, always on, in your house, which decides when this should happen would seem to increase these negative factors.
But…
During winter, you try to close the curtains to keep heat in. Doing this early means you miss out on daylight and, furthermore, you have to turn on artificial lights. Doing this too late means that you loose heat through the windows. There’s is probably a converse example in hotter climates than this, in which your house gets too hot in the middle of the day if you don’t close the binds, meaning you have to turn on the air conditioning.
So then, at what point does the energy used to run the computer become a good investment? What if it has sensors inside and outside in order to measure the temperature gradient, and so it can choose the best time to close the curtains? What if it also manages your heating? What if it intelligently turns out the lights in rooms you’re not in? Reminds you that you turned the oven on but haven’t actually put anything in it… Makes damn sure that you get out of bed in the morning… and so on…
Some not work related computery bits and pieces have been percolating around my head for some time now. I think we should talk about them for a while. That is: I’ll talk. You listen.
I’m probably going to write a couple of more techy blogs, all loosely interrelated. I am going somewhere with them, but I’m not entirely certain as to how much of this journey I will share with you.
First of all, I’m going to talk about the fairly simple computer related concept of “Call by reference” versus “Call by value”. This is fairly basic computer science (though I wish they’d taught it properly earlier on in my course). It’s possible (probable, even) that this example (or variations of it) has been used a thousand times before. I’m not going to go look for one (or the absence of one), I’m just going to write down my own particular take on it. I assure you that any plagiarism I’m about to commit is in no way deliberate. So, without further ado…
Let’s say you want to send a specific piece of information to someone via email. Let’s say it’s part of today’s featured article on Wikipedia (William I of Orange, at the time of writing). In today’s connected digital world, you have too main options. First of all, you could send them the information itself, like so:
There are several things your recipient can do with this. They can read it. They can edit it, but this will only edit their local copy. The original remains unchanged. If they want to request that a change be made, they can, however, edit it and send it back to you. This is “calling by value.”
Your second option is to send them a link to the information:
This, again, allows them to read it. They have to follow the link to the information it points to first, though. This time, if they make an edit (this being wikipedia) they actually are changing the original copy. They can also see what other information is around it, and if they feel so inclined they can change that is well. You might consider this to be an undesirable consequence. This method has the aditional advantage, however, that you did not have to take the time and effort to make a copy, and the amount of information you had to actually send is significantly smaller. This is “calling by reference.”
If you deal with this sort of thing on a day to day basis, you may well be aware that when you do this sort of thing in a computer program you have another option. You can send a constant reference, which would be analagious to sending a link to a website the recipient has no write access to. For example:
Tonight is burns night. This, in case you are unsure, is the annual celebration of the Rabbie “The Baird” Burns and his works. The traditional food to be eaten on this occasion is haggis, neeps and tatties. Unfortunately I’m not much of a fan of my adopted nation’s national dish. Happily, there’s a vegetarian alternative available and it’s damn tasty.
Previous years have involved me working at The Edinburgh University Jewish Society’s annual Rabbi Burns Ball* and getting together with groups of friends of various sizes. This year was just a quiet one in the flat with my good lady, however. We did make the food a little fancy, however:
Picture stolen from previously mentioned good lady’s blog.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve just remembered that I’m also supposed to have a whisky.
Today I was walking home from work and absent-mindedly listening to music, when I noticed that that my supposedly shuffled iPod was displaying a definite preference for one band in particular. A band I haven’t really spared a seconds thought in some years. As I walked I hatched a plot a write a blog post regarding the nostalgia this inspired. So I arrived home and thought to have a look on youTube for some reference material to post…
There is a reason I have a marked preference for the combination of a heavy rock music and female vocals, and her name is Aimee Echo. In the late nineties she fronted a band called Human Waste Project with vocals which managed to be both sugary sweet and ragged at the same time. My youthful self took notice. My youthful self also attended a festival called the “Ozzfest” with his friend Rich and said friend’s father, where he found Human Waste Project to be a late addition to the bill. My youthful self promptly had the back of head damn near blown off by one of the best live shows he had (or was ever to) see.
As it turned out, that was to be their second to last show. Aimee Echo left the band, who sounded like this:
and formed a new one, called at first Hero and then theSTART, who sounded more like this:
Though I like this second song, I find that the raw edge is missing from her voice. This is probably due to the more electronic sound of the new band and thus the requisite multi-tracking of a voice I don’t feel requires it. The point is I don’t like the second band as much, not least because this is the only song of there’s I found which has much of a chorus.
So where was I… ah yes, I was searching youTube for content to post. What I found was a lot of presumably live videos. I saw one for “Dog”, thought “sweet!” and clicked. The video loaded. Aimee Echo was talking into the mike. “So a long time ago… there was a band in the nineties… called Human Waste Project… and we are them…”
Hang on… this is a new video… and then the opening riff gave me goose bumps…
I’m aware the sound quality is awful on the video, but here it is:
A bit of frantic web searching promptly revealed that yes, gloriously, the band were back to together. At least to some extent. They’d played two shows in 2008 (well… more like one and a half, since the first one was actually the encore from a theSTART show) and were rehearsing for a reunion tour.
It’s when things like this come together that I’m given to smile inwardly and think that perhaps there is someone “up there” who likes me.
For what it’s worth, another lady who had an (arguably stronger) effect on my musical taste is Sandra Nasic. So, for the sake of completeness, here’s a couple of videos of her singing with her (now defunct) band, “Guano Apes”, and another of her providing guest vocals on an Apocalyptica song.
Apocalyptica, in case you were wondering, are a group of Finnish ‘cello players, who once exclusively played Metalica covers, but now play original material. Here’s another one, this time with Corey Taylor:
So I like computer games. This isn’t news, really. Not in a hardcore live-to-game type way, more in a general fondness type way. That said, I did, as a youngster in an age before mobile phones, catch a bus to the next town so I could play a particular arcade game in what was (on reflection) a seriously dodgy little shop. That game was Street Fighter 2. It was a pretty great game, and it pretty much changed everything as far as the gaming industry was concerned. It spawned a bunch of sort of sequels which were mostly very popular, a couple of prequels, which were also very popular, and an actual sequel… which ditched most of the characters people loved and wasn’t as popular.
Coming out a couple of months is Street Fighter 4, a sequel to Street Fighter 2, but a prequel to Street Fighter 3. More about that later, but to complicate things further, there’s also a new version of Street Fighter 2, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, or as I’d like to call it: “Street Fighter 2: Really Fricking Pretty Edition”. What it is is a revamped edition of the “original” Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo with redrawn graphics, new music and rebalanced game-play (all the characters are about equal now). So now (refering to the images below), instead of looking like the image on the left, the character Ken now looks like the image on the right.
Pretty cool, huh? What’s really weird, though, is that they didn’t change any of the game mechanics, so it still plays like it always did, thus:
Which is a little jarring, but apparently necessary. Why? Because there are still large touraments with this game and some people actually count the frames in order to get their combos right. Weird.
But what of Street Fighter 4? Well it’s still the same style of 2D fighting game, but it uses what I think is the most beautiful graphics engine I’ve ever seen:
This gives it a gorgeous cell shaded / traditional Japanese art type look which I really like. Also, even though the game-play is 2D, the engine is 3D; meaning it’s not limited to pre-programmed graphics, and so Ryu can actually react to the fact that he’s probably about to get dropped on his head, in real time. What’s more, when you pull off a more spectacular move, the game can get a bit more cinematic on your ass:
Credit where credit’s due: I stole all the images from wikipedia and Games Radar. Click any of them to jump to the relevant article.
Posted by harveynick 
Posted by harveynick 
Posted by harveynick 
