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Sunday, 09:55 pm, 18 April 2004 This entry is strictly for the programmers and the miniature fans. This weekend turned into a recovery weekend thanks to days of grey. The spring weather hasn't yet arrived and as a result a large portion of the weekend was spent with hands on keyboard. Either working on the Noble Ape Simulation and Noble Warfare theory or playing the Sims. A game I found on my wife's craftroom floor. I haven't played the Sims for a few months and dusted off the game for a family of three up and coming execs. But to the nerd narrative. I received another update of the first case from Fred Reed for about three months. In fact, I don't know when the case will arrive, but Fred is adding more majestic paint-jobs. The Commissar below is one of my favourites although not quite finished in the shot.  An interesting thing happened to me this weekend. I discovered that allocating a series of pointers internally in the Simulation gave an assorted mix of virtual memory and actual memory points. For the non-programmers who are still reading, modern OSes support virtual memory which, rather than RAM, is hard disk space. Virtual memory is the poorer cousin to memory. It is super slow and unreliable. Taking a series of pointers that were combination virtual and actual memory created a number of speed issues. The solution, a roulette situation for one big internal pointer that the Simulation then cut up. Not the best solution, but the cleanest for the time being. Memory management is central to Noble Warfare. I'm hoping to have a duelling unit battle online in the next week. The reality, probably nothing. Good night. Wednesday, 08:28 pm, 14 April 2004 What has been my biggest mistake? Inspired by Mr Bush's senior moment, I pose the question what has been my biggest mistake. Limiting to my adult life, I think the biggest mistake I have made is not to be confrontational for my own safety and representation. My safety and well-being has been compromised probably half a dozen times in the past nine years of adult life. Being kind to people who are clearly not working to my best interest has been my greatest failing. I avoid confrontation at all costs and this produces a toxicity which in some occasions has caused me actual damage. In all these situations, time has been my friend. I have a relatively good constitution to bide my time, bight my lip and find the right time to slip into the shadows and get on with my life. This has required some pretty phenomenal location moves. The biggest mistake I made through the development of Noble Ape was not understanding that I could do Noble Ape as a hobby and not as a job. That I could make better progress and not compromise the development by doing it in the evenings and where possible on weekends. Not realising this sooner has been a mistake. Emotionally, probably talking on a cell phone on the train in upstate New York and being kicked by an old man for talking on the phone. That gave me adult emotional scars. Communication is not the utmost importance. Good night. Monday, 03:02 pm, 12 April 2004 Interesting, if not somewhat frustrating, past couple of days. I have been working on a low-level interpreter for integration into the Noble Ape Simulation and Noble Warfare. It seems relatively robust, but I keep coming against the same problems. If I do A then B is slower, if I do B, then C requires A, so C is slower and so on. I will have it optimised over the next couple of days. Then I will put it online. I have been feeling down about the Noble Ape Simulation documentation. It is all totally out of date and reading through it, I feel I should scrap it all and start again. It doesn't feel like my work and it doesn't represent the current work. Good afternoon. Saturday, 07:10 am, 10 April 2004 WeFunk Live... I woke up early and I tuned in for an hour and a half of WeFunk. It was a tight show. It's good to hear them get back into the groove. The first funding drive show was cool. The second one was more depressed. I guess I use WeFunk to boost my spirits during the week. I called Nick and chatted for a few minutes. The main topic was the Butta track. The news is he was down to record a rough cut on Thursday but he left his rhyme book at school. Just the Spanish track. I'll get a rough cut of the Spanish track during the week. I have the beats cued and ready to go. It's going to be interesting. I am doing a net edit and a radio edit. The radio edit, they pay royalties, so I have a slightly greater range. The net edit, it has to be strictly Barbalet. But even with the rough edit, I will put out a net version. I think keeping everything open is important. The stuff I am putting together has a contemporary feel. There is lot of cutting. It's quite jumpy. I have some understanding of the Spanish rap genre and it typically plays on the slower Spanish/Mexican music. Horns? But this is going to be a long way from that. Interesting. A mixing of styles. Memory management The first thing I did for Noble Warfare was write a small tight memory manager. And I think I will be adding it to the Noble Ape Simulation in the next version (0.667). The idea of having memory management for an application as small as the Simulation or Noble Warfare seems a little strange. But both do their own graphics too. So it seems right that memory management is part of the equation. So for the novice, basically most of what software does relies on dynamic memory. That means the software asks for memory when it is needed and either goes through a rejection process or through detailed contractual negotiations to get the memory it needs. For a simple application, this isn't really an issue. But if you want to get memory and give it back quickly, you don't want to waste time with the contractual negotiations. This means getting a large memory grab when the application is first run and controlling it within the application. Returning to Contributing For a number of months, recent months, I was noticing a change where I felt comfortable being a consumer. This change in philosophy impacted on my development time. In fact, the recent lack of logs indicates the amount of my free time I have been putting into the Simulation and Noble Warfare. In contrast with the consumer Barbalet period. I'm not explaining this well. The narrative in the logs about the middle class and living in the Shed indicates two opposing views. I don't think the Shed could have been considered anything more than poverty living and poverty development. Yet I was very productive when I wasn't a consumer. Being a consumer, making purchases, takes my time away from working in desperate circles. The desperation of poverty has assisted with my pragmatic and sometimes-obsessive development. Good morning! [ Previous Log ]
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