Advogato blog for dancer

29 Dec 2002

Sun, 29 Dec 2002 21:39:05 GMT

Still chugging along. Not dead yet. :)

27 Apr 2002

Sat, 27 Apr 2002 11:55:32 GMT

Nine cardiac arrests now. Or maybe ten. It's a little harder to keep track than you might imagine.

It's also an interesting excercise to transfer fame-in-application-development into the consulting arena. It's working, though. A transfer to linux for a customer a year ago has cut their systems TCO by a whopping 90 percent, including consulting fees, training, and whatnot. Much niftiness to be had by all.

Now for the educational part of our little session...No, wait. I might post it as an article instead.

8 Jan 2002

Tue, 8 Jan 2002 04:30:17 GMT

Took a nasty fall today. Damned ankle folded up under me. The pain and shock triggered another cardiac arrest, which was a bloody nuisance, but has now passed. Fun, fun, fun.

Spent some effort bringing Exult code up to snuff with g++ 3.0. I think I've found a library bug in the handling of std::streambuf, but there doesn't seem to be a clear reporting path for the library.

19 Nov 2001

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 07:12:26 GMT

The move was completed in 8 days, following which I caught a cold. Bah.
The two cats seem to be settling in well, and I've been picking up with my customers and site visits again. All in all things are going well. Attacked the (new) back lawn with the push-mower, and looking forward to a fine crop of peaches.
Soaking up Buffy Season 3 on DVD in two-episode chunks, as time permits of an evening. Still some boxes to unpack, and everything needs sorting and arranging.

10 Nov 2001

Sat, 10 Nov 2001 09:48:01 GMT

Still moving house. Man, five days so far.

8 Nov 2001

Thu, 8 Nov 2001 04:30:51 GMT

Moving house.

27 Oct 2001

Sat, 27 Oct 2001 11:40:35 GMT

Still here. I just haven't had much to say...Certainly, it would be difficult to say it without ranting. Otherwise, life is good, and I'm floating along consulting at the moment.

Consulting is nice. You go and do, and the customer is happy, and you're happy, and the thing is done. In full-time work, you lurch from disaster to disaster, and nobody ever seems to be happy (unless they're planning to bail out).

I'm enjoying myself.

16 Jul 2001

Mon, 16 Jul 2001 17:42:07 GMT

Hmm.
Simultaneity can be handled iteratively. Within limits.
To a point. Sigmoid activation function deadlocks can spread across a layer. Urgh.
Knowledge vs Reasoning. There is a line.
Layers. The mind accumulates crap through the day, then paves generalisations and abstractions over it during REM sleep. This then forms the concrete slab for the next day's accumulated crap and exceptions.
When did you last spend a bit of time thinking about quantum manifolds? I mean, really.
Atomic valencies, high-energy particles, and molecule sieves. Eratosthenes, where is thy ribose, hmmm?
C++ is still short a few string types.
Q: Will I be the first person to bring an FPU to it's knees handling audio-mixing? Perhaps. There's a lot to be said for a floating-point audio pipeline.
Layers. I see a faint glimmer of my transparent colour key creeping in on the edge of some sprites. Hmm. I'm pretty sure that I shouldn't. Considering that it's a fairly ugly puce, I really don't want to in any case.
32x32x32 pixel blits give me double the frame-rate of 64x64x32 pixel blits, despite the fact that I'm doing four times as many of them. Either we're not at home to common-sense, or the amount of data in the blits is considerably more optimal for the underlying metal. I prefer the latter option.
Two robotics muscle solutions have presented themselves. One is organic, the other not. Honestly, what was I thinking? If you can't pull, then push...The trick is where you push, and how, then the result is the same as a pull. I can build it, but if it's electrical, there's issues of power (of course) and muscular crosstalk. On third or fourth thoughts, muscular crosstalk may be an advantage...a feature, rather than a bug. How small can I make it without having to machine parts? I'm guessing about four centimetres long with a maximum diameter of about 8mm would work well if I can manage it. Anchoring? My subconscious suggests tungsten. There's probably a good reason.
For pity's sake, people, remember that virtual methods cost you an extra pointer dereference (and an add). Duh. Do try to learn something about computers. Even if it hurts, okay? You're supposed to be IT professionals...

25 Jun 2001

Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:45:42 GMT

Still here. Chugging away at code. Not much to tell, really.

20 May 2001

Sun, 20 May 2001 16:09:46 GMT

Let's get out there and kick some shell, Commander - The Arturo War, Season 2, Episode 4: The Battle for Nova Londinum

Dreaming strangely and long. The above quote from last night's efforts. They're starting to come with titles, credits, soundtracks, and occasionally commercial breaks. Unfortunately, most of my dreams appear to be made in the 70's with cheap special effects (and awful haircuts). It's not freaky yet. If one of these films or series ever appears in the external world, then I shall be duly freaked...but not today.

ARGH! Looks like Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 just got the 'Microsoft Xbox Kiss Of Death'. Change them to suit a console, and they just won't be the games we want to play. Don't change them to suit a console, and they won't make enough dollars to get a PC port after the 6 or 12 months that the Kiss requires. I am bummed.

Cabled and wired and moved appliances between here and Preston. Results are more than satisfactory. Now, I just have to acquire a particular Akai remote.

Thought about EMP cannons. Delivery of a focused EM pulse to a target is easy (at least over short distances of say, 20 or 30 metres). Detaching a coherent fluid magnetic matrix from the point of generation and handing over to the delivery guide seems trickier. Oh...wait. No, I have it now. Duh. I should have thought of that two days ago. That brings us back to the power requirement again, but that was to be expected. Not a toy to be operated from a car cigarette lighter.

Can discriminator-bridged backpropagation be applied to a self-organising Kohonen network? I mean if I track input and output sets in a sequential short-term memory buffer with an applied discriminator, then apply backpropagation techniques to the Kohonen network, will I have guided organisation between circumstantial inputs and actualised outputs? Has anyone tried it? Do any of you actually lay awake nights thinking about that sort of thing?

P2P developers: MD5 is both order and length dependent. Think about it. C'mon guys...the secret is to bang the rocks together.

Is there any current real-world analogue to myomer (other than kelp or actual muscle tissue)? You know, the whole contractile-response-to-electricity thing.

Entropy is just another statistic.

Some days I don't much have to wonder why it is that most folks don't seem to understand half of what I'm talking about.