Derailing the train of thought

Image via WikipediaSo here we goes, a test to see how well the train of thought can handle a very large black coffee first thing in the morning with no effort at censoring the brain diarrhea. Mmmm lovely words.
This morning I'm attempting to build stuff, which can get on your nerves pretty quick when each build process takes about an hour, and its someone else's code your building so you got no gaurantee it'll actually work, gah people, so sitting around waiting for stuff to finish gets real old real fast.
On my right I can see Zemanta is pulling all sorts of strange images and related monkey poo, its funny cos the stuff its coming up with is just as disjointed as the gibberish I'm writing. Read an interesting comic there yesterday, "Death - the time of your life" by Neil Gaiman, gives a quick insight into the life of a gay singer and her lover, and what happens to them and their friends when Death, portrayed in this case by a teenage girl (I think), or a gothette as described in the book. Pictures of Mr. Gaiman in various states of rough looking-ness have now appeared. I wish I could get away with writing stuff and looking like that all day. Sweeeeeeet....

Was also reading stuff on lucid dreaming, something I've long been interested in. Imagine being in a really cool dream and being able to take control of it, going on a wild rampage through the solar system, trying to make the sun go nova. Actually there's an interesting thought, if you could take control of your dreams and do anything you wanted, in an environment where there can be no consequences, what would you do? Would you go on a murderous rampage, slaughtering millions for the hell of it? Imagine yourself to be a giant zeppelin, possibly made of lead, that farts its toxic wayt through the sky causing untold disasters? Or would the fantasies be.... naughtier? Untriguing....

Damn caffeine and its wearing off-ness.

So lets say the new iPhone launched on Tuesday, that being two days ago, by the way if I was an early adopter I would probably be WHOPPINGLY pissed at Apple right about now, and you've decided you can't live without one, and like me are too cheap to sign up for a long and expensive contract to get one, just how long do you think it will take the new beasties to appear on eBay? A swim sounds good right about now actually.

Clever lad that I am I managed to bust my glasses last Friday, and (should've gone to SpecSavers) had no spare pair to tide me over. I'm quite lucky in that my perscription is pretty light, so I really only need them for computer work. On the downside I'm a Software Engineer so computer work accounts for approximately 9 hours of my day. Went to SpecSavers on Tuesday and got a new pair, two actually, substantially stronger and sturdier than the last ones, so hopefully the ear piece coming off in my hand wont be such a problem.

Something else I was about to write has just disappeared.

Came across "The Lives of Others" group blog there recently thanks to a friends page (Prototype of a Person) and its a really interesting blog, a fascinating project. Obviously one of the appeals of the web is anonymity and the ability to say what you normally couldn't, but with this one there's got to be an element of group think kickin in at some point? If people are posting regularly to this thing, is it possible that the tone and content of the posts will begin to influence each other so that the blogs will become more and more similar so that the many becomes the one? Will each poster be able to maintain their individuality or just become part of the gestalt?

I'd love a really good speech to text interpreter so I could spew this stuff out nice and fast and top of the head instead of having to slow down and do it all throught the irritation of the keyboard. A neural interface would be good too.

Comics Rock. Redshirts are expendable. Buy low.



My brain hurts now.

Lego hacking tomfoolery

Image via WikipediaI love the way that there are so many other people out in the world who love to dig in to a beautiful piece of tech, in this case the LEGO Mindstorms RCX kit, and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with it.

I got a set a couple of years ago from my girlfriend for Christmas, and at the time, because the bundled software wasn't the may west, I wasn't able to do a lot with it. Since then I've branched out a good bit into the wilds of open source code and custom hackery and discovered LeJOS (lejos.sourceforge.net). At it's core its a tiny JVM, based on (drum roll please) TinyVM . There are versions available for both the RCX, the older model that I've got, plus the NXT, the oh so wonderful beautiful shiny, fandiddlyastic new one that comes with aaaaaaalll sorts of goodies. There also other packages available in other languages, such as C#

What this gives you is the ability to write your own Java code to make the funny wee robots do damn near anything. The new version gives full access to the bluetooth commands (I think..) , so if you went with this OS, you'd be able to do fancy stuff like construct a motion detecting robot that looks like Johnny5 (God bless this woman, she is a LEGEND), that fires off lego rounds and chases people around the room. (I think I'm drooling on my keyboard...)

There's also a handy wee Eclipse plugin for both the RCX and the NXT that will do all of the interfacing between the machine and the brick for you, meaning that all the programmer has to do is write the damn code.

I've gotten all of the underlying basics up and running on my home system, or I had before it presented me with a delightful BSOD. Luckily I run an Ubuntu dual boot, and all of the shiny bits run under that too so I can just shift over. Whenever I actually get around to creating something useful is a whole other story. See related articles for other fun.



Note: Google just handed me this lovely little snippet of Lego-like goodness. Oh the fun we could have.....

Related articles

• Lego Warehouse
• Lego at MIT
  

Youngest Nova

This is pretty cool. Youngest supernova in the galaxy was recently found to have gone boom approx 140 years ago, called G1.9+0.3 and located about 26,000 light years away. There's a section in that article stating that "Astronomers have been puzzled, however, by a shortage of young supernova remnants in our galaxy. Only half a dozen have been found, as opposed to the more than 30—roughly two a century—predicted to exist." To my flighty imagination that conjures up fun images of star harvesting, artificial star longevity and so on. Or even fleets of Vogon destructors farting about in the sky, quietly demolishing solar systems while no-one watches.. Imagine the fun you could have spinning wild ideas around over a drink or fifteen:


AlienDude1: "My round"

AlienDude2: "Cheers buddy"

AlienDude1: "So what should we do with that crappy little yellow beastie sitting out in the Orion arm?"

AlienDude2: "Come on man, we've been working all week, no more work talk!!"

AlienDude1: "No seriously, we could have some fun with this one! Remember that time you got wasted and spread those black holes around the galactic core and used them as pockets for a giant pool game?"

AlienDude2: "How was I supposed to know they'd join up!! Not my fault the whole damn core is collapsing, blame Supply, they left them lying around!!"

.....

AlienDude2: "(Smirks) It was a good game though, right? Did you see that last trick shot? Knocked two gas giants and three moons into that star!! It flared like a bad fart after a hot curry! The rings were still spinning on the way in..."


AlienDude1: "Let's make this one a game of explowhumping planets!!"

.....

.....

AlienDude2: "What?"

AlienDude1: "You take a planet, right, and pump it full of custard. Then you spin them round their orbits real fast, and tilt them around so they spin out, and see which ones collide first!!When they hit the explode apart, and cos they're full of custard they just go 'whump'!! You can bet on the winners and everything, it'll be great!!!"

.....

.....

AlienDude2: "You seriously need to get out more"




Ah the fun of aliens that are just like Dublin Corporation workers...

What makes a good story

Recently subscribed to Neil Gaiman's blog, and reading some of the comments on it and what people have to say on other sites it got me thinking.

I'm a big fan of the Gaimanator's work, so much so that I've just ordered over €100 worth of his work off Amazon, including Vols 1 and 2 of The Sandman. Never read it but I hear its fantastic work. I already have several of his other works, including 1602, a fantastic piece set in 1602 in the Marvel Universe.

Frequently people write into him asking, How can I become a good writer, What are your secrets, blah blah blah, and to do him credit he doesn't just tell them to fup off, he does give a reasonable answer to people. But a separate question still stands of what actually makes a good story?

For me personally, its got to have characters with real depth, or at least the possibility of depth. Characters that are blatantly two dimensional are, to put it bluntly, crap. Similarly the universe it's set in needs to provide a convincing backdrop to the story, so it can't be hard sc-fi set in pinky pony land. You've got to have some real meat to the story, something that will draw you in and hold your attention, something that will physically stop you from putting that beast down until youve milked every last drop of literary goodness from it.

The more I write and think about this, the harder it actually appears to be to quantify... Obviously there are always different criteria for different people. Some of my favourites would include the almighty HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Discworld series, a short story called Flowers for Algernon, I am Legend, and sweet Jeebus too many to write down. But its an interesting subject, one of those things that drags you off on a tangent and wont let you go.

Maybe that means that the question itself qualifies as a story :)

Quality of life vs. Love of the job

We've all heard the ads on TV recently about work life balance, about how everyone should take time to ensure that their work doesn't overshadow their personal life. For a lot of people this can be a major struggle. The average person gets up early, goes to work, spends the bulk of the day there, and then returns home through another painful commute, to find that there is really only enough time to have dinner, crash out in front of the TV, and go to bed.

Obviously in these cases measures are needed to redress the balance, whether it be working shorter hours, working closer to home, or just structuring your days better to avoid the feeling of living a life that consists of work-bed-work-bed... For most people this is the case and with a little effort it can be done. But what about the people who don't feel any such problem, the people who, instead of having a job, have what can only be termed as a vocation?

Take, for example, programmers. As a group, especially the nerdier of the bunch, we tend to have an almost obsessive desire to learn more about our chosen profession, its no hardship or effort to take some of our vanishingly small amount of personal time to do something work related, because its not just work related, it is, in a very real sense, who we are. The typical nerd/programmer will think nothing of taking the time or effort after work, or on the weekends, to play with some new technology, or language, or just do something that's fun. I recently got it into my head that it would be a great idea to program my LEGO Mindstorms kit using Java, and try to find some way of adapting it to be accessible over the web. This could take days, if not weeks, of work, but it doesn't matter because its part of who I am.

So, in this case does the work life balance matter so much? Or is it in fact a case of the balance being reversed, where the old impression of nerds ("You need to get out more!!") applies? Its a subject that could probably do with some investigating, and more than likely already has, but its still interesting to think about.

Preferably inside, where I can get a good solid WiFi connection ;)

An effort to seem intelligent

	Mixture between nanotech, architecture, and nature, with a little ethical focus on the side. Recently talking to a friend of mine (architecture student, big into the archy scene) who mentioned a couple of projects he was working on, which I'm not going to give away here, but it got me thinking about the possible overlap between certain disciplines. That and the horrendous amount of sci-fi I've read. Lets say that some time in the near future the problem of true Von Neumann systems are cracked, giving the human race the power to manufacture at a molecular level. This basically gives us a capability to build practically anything, producing numerous paradigm shifts in several fields, from the a shift to the rod logic style computing as envisaged in Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age", to the biononics (nanodevices operating and interfacing at a deep biological level) shown in Peter F. Hamilton's "The Dreaming Void", to the more mundane efforts of reprogrammable clothing , and even way up to environmental scrubbers. There would also be major shifts in materials science, as materials which are now being manipulated at a molecular level now display a whole host of new physical properties, for example the surface tension of a water droplet all of a sudden becomes a major factor. The question then arises - if we suddenly arrive at a point where we have the ability to do, almost literally, anything, what is to stop people from doing it? Now this isn't entirely a bad thing, as we would see an explosion in human creativity, vast new areas opening up for expansion, medicine advanced exponentially, and so on, as well the ability to create almost any structure and have it be smart, self-maintaining, and reconfigurable at the drop of a hat. But there is also the flip side of this - what if some despot gets his grubby hands on it and decides to key a nanobot keyed to mangle DNA with certain characteristics, say blue eyes... While the ethical issue has always been a bit of a laugh to most people, it will become more and more relevant as time goes by. As a species, large scale ethics is not something we're particularly good at, the analogy I generally prefer is that if the human race were a single person, it would be a teenager battling through the latter stages of adolescence. Now to tie it all in: at the beginning I mentioned nanotech, architecture, nature and ethics. Lets say for example that someone was to design a house, a free standing configurable house, that incorporated both nature and nanotech in its design. Lets say it was a 2 storey edifice with living roots instead of foundations, which provided heat by geo-thermal tapping, water directly from the root system, oxygen from plan life living in and around it, a wildly variegated ecosystem of, say, savannah flora and (small obviously) in one area, heat gathering/shedding plants growing from the roof, a whole host of different ecologies co-existing symbiotically in building. Such a building could even incorporate food production into its design. The nanotech within the structure would be responsible for managing, monitoring and maintaining such a diverse ecology, as well as for providing all the elements a technological civilisation would come to expect, communications, computing power, entertainmet. It could even be intelligent, self-aware. Such a house could be very well be viewed as "smart", self repairing, eco friendly, etc... It could even be considered, in a very real sense, to be alive. Yay the pundits cry!! Utopia has been discovered!! But what happens if this smart, self-renewing, self-maintaining, self-aware edifice decides that it doesn't want anyone living in it? Do we declare this a travesty and force our view on it, or possibly worse, eradicate all traces of intelligence and self-awareness from it, thereby committing genocide? Numerous people, much cleverer than me, have debated the possibility of an AI conflict, and the various benign or apocalyptic outcomes thereof, so I'll keep my nose out of it, thank you. My question instead is at what point do we take stock, sit down and make a rational and mature decision as a society that this is what we want to do? When do we take responsibility for what we are trying to do, and lay ethical ground rules for the creation, development and treatment of these new entities? The sooner the better I would think.