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Tuesday, 09:26 pm, 12 April 2005 Thinking Script Working through the user guide for the ApeScript today. To-date the Noble Ape file format has been about getting variables in and out of the Simulation. Putting the additional scripting element in will require a manual page equal to the entire manual to-date. I am thinking about dividing the information relating to what the script does vs the script itself. Information about how the script is syntaxed and what the variables mean in the script adds three pages to the manual - each relatively long. Going out on a limb - I wish I had written a scripting language for Noble Ape about eight years ago. I think it would have been a very different thing if it had included a scripting language early on. I don't know if it would have added more users, but it certainly would have inspired a different class of users. What Are Memories Made Of? Our shipping from the UK hasn't arrived yet. In fact having boxed the house mid-January, we were told it wouldn't hit customs here until May (last month). It has sat on the docks in the UK since the end of March. Par for the course with an international move. One thing I did post was my doona/doovey which my wife refers to as my comforter. When I lived in the Shed in Australia, there were cracks in the walls and I needed a thick feather filled bedding. I got the highest rated one I could and it was left in Australia when I moved to the US in 1999. My mother brought it with her to the UK for my wedding in 2002. Much to my wife's amusement, I posted this item to myself in the US rather than send it via shipping. It arrived last Friday, but I only unpacked it today. Memories for me are more about music and to a lesser extent food than they are about items. Looking through my wife's boxes here I found two videos I made for my wife when we first started dating. It is interesting to see the Tom of 2000. Lots of photos I show on the videos - photos of family and other snaps - appear to have been lost in my move to the UK. Who was Tom in 2000? Probably one of the biggest life changing experiences for me was about three and a half months of solid travel in 1999. I met Wozniak for the first time over that period. Also Doug Rushkoff and hang out with Brian C. Wiles - who has totally dropped off my radar. I still send occasional card and emails to Rushkoff. The most interesting part of my travel was Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It showed me a part of the world I may never see solidly again. To get a sense of that part of the world and to travel to Sweden in 2001 gave me a perspective which is triggered occasionally. Looking back at myself on the videos in 2000, I seemed like a little boy. But I had been to University. Noble Ape (as the Nervana Project) had reached a level of exposure. But my life didn't have the middle-class normality that married life has. I lived in very basic digs with a minimum of stuff. It was a different life. Good night. Monday, 02:54 pm, 11 April 2005 I wanted to start this afternoon's entry with another set of Fred Reeds. This group is following the army narrative posted last month.  With the substantial amount of time I am investing in D@H currently, I'm missing the benefits of an almost solely introverted collecting hobby as my miniatures presented me in the UK. It is a funny thing. Working through the white paper with the D@H mailing list has been a collection of up and down emotions associated with perceived agreement from the group and then objections which are progressively being worked around. I found this working through the IGDA IPR Committee too. But my work with committee-like groups has brought about a progressive change. I've learnt to level some of the emotional highs and lows. Although when you put effort into something and you find disagreement and potential 'stop' points in your work, it is emotionally taxing. In contrast, I have come up with some reflective issues in terms of error display and testing/exiting with the scripting in the Simulation. I'm hoping to starting implementing the scripting code into the Simulation over the next week. Watch this space. Good afternoon. Monday, 02:30 am, 11 April 2005 Der Hund When I first started dating my wife she had a dog. Through our travels the dog has stayed with her parents. But now we are back in this part of the world her dog, Charlie, has become our dog. When I first met Charlie he would growl at me. I have memories of a lot of teeth and general protective behaviour towards my wife.  A file photo of my wife and Charlie around the time we started dating. Charlie is about ten years old now. He still bares a striking resemblance to the photograph with limited greying around the chops. It's nice to inherit a civilised dog. Although there was some initial teething issues with the sleeping arrangements, Charlie now sleeps on my side of the bed and generally likes to spend quality time pressed up against my side when ever I am sitting. Inherit Family I'm awake at this time thanks to a large family gathering of my wife's side and a collection of edibles that proved too rich to maintain quality sleep. This is the second or third relative gathering we have been to, coming back to this part of the world. The first clearly natural one we have been to, as the first two had some connection with our return. The normalcy of this whole process catches me from our life as gypsies. Good night. Friday, 10:41 pm, 08 April 2005  Friday, 02:49 pm, 08 April 2005 Sorry for the lack of Log entries. It has been a busy week. I had an entry queued on Monday but I never got around to posting it online. I've got enough to write about today, so I cut it for another musing. D@H White Paper for the past week I have left the D@H White Paper gathering dust. I'm a firm believer in getting things out ASAP before they become tired. This, in part, is my bad with the scripting code. I'm dragging my heels with the last two sections and tinkering on the edges. It will be fixed soonish - I promise. The D@H White Paper has three main requirements; As it sits snuggly up to 1,000 words - it's more a leaflet than a white paper - it wasn't too much stress to draft. But getting the final fiddly words ironed out. Cutting about twenty percent and adding two paragraphs by request of the mailing list, it should be released in the next couple of weeks. Because the mailing list goes Google-public-searchable, the full drafting process is available for review as well as the white paper. IGDA in 3D... that's 3 dollars My work as co-chair of the IGDA IPR Committee has been flooding my email recently. Some calls for old programs I sent back to Bruce Damer's DigiBarn and his compu-historical links yielded both titles. As the co-chair, most of my work is administrative but it's nice to actually contribute to the legal foray on occasion. Something I must invest some time in with the IGDA is the ongoing quality of life issues with game development companies and salary. Over the past month I have received both the IEEE engineering salary survey and the Game Developer magazine's salary survey. For my level of experience the games industry pays between 25-30% less, on average. You'd really need to be nuts to work for a games company with that distinction in salary. Through my life in the UK, I found that living middle class with some freetime and the potential for hobbies was better than working 16-18 hours a day with half a day for weekend if you were lucky. I find it really strange that folks would opt for the lifestyle of the games industry in terms of conditions and (lack of) salary. The irony is that I probably couldn't do my work with the IGDA IPR Committee if I worked in the games industry, nor Noble Ape, nor projects like Darwin-At-Home, nor contribute a paper to IEEE. These community projects require a certain amount of free time. This work, community life, personal life balance is something that serious companies take seriously. Personally I would like to see a rating of corporate ethics. I don't want to buy shoes that are made in sweat shops. I don't want to buy games that are made in sweat shops. En Scripting... I have been working through the scripting code. The more I look at if/then problems, I come back to changes in the existing code. It is the nature of circular spiral development. I've read quite a bit about development methods. I implement a number through my tinkering. None intentionally selected at the start. The momentum of coding often leads me initially. If I can write something in a week to completion, it will be better than months of working and reworking. I'm hoping to complete the initial scripting code to the time of the Mailout. Fingers crossed. Good afternoon. Saturday, 07:51 pm, 02 April 2005 Over Orchestrated Beatles Sets... The day after the WeFunk Funding Drive 2005 Show. My men, Loe Pesci and Butta Beats, came through with some solid freestyles. Loes took the line of the evening with a politically incorrect reflection on the story of the moment. Lots of shout outs to yours truly thanks to the CND250 I sent CKUT this year. It seems ''pennies on the dollar'' of enjoyment that the WeFunk crew have sent my way musically through the year. Sadly this year's funding drive has been universally flat. I accidentally tuned in to another show whilst assembling my sample play and found most shows are down. The show before WeFunk, Weekend Groove, that usually tops $1,000 was having trouble reaching $300 this year. I don't know what the issue is? Loe Pesci, who is now sufficiently regular on the email to me to be an official ''Regular'', gave two solid shout outs. Here is my set of samples from the show, please read the warning below before you download. In order; Please note I have not censored this collection of samples. They may cause offence to a wide variety of folks including children and Catholics. If you suspect this may cause offence, please don't download the sound sample. Groove seems to occasionally play orchestrated Beatles songs. Having been to Liverpool and having lived near Blackburn, Lancashire, the songs seem to have more emotion to me now than they once did. De-Mac, Slowly... Increasingly I find myself using my Windows laptop over my Mac. In part, my Mac laptop is slowly dying. Various bits aren't working and I am progressively moving important source onto the Windows laptop for continued development. I have been dragging my heels a little with the scripting language. All there is to-do is the if and while statements. I am planning on having a parser separate from the Noble Ape Simulation to keep the resource size down. We'll have to see how the final version looks. Much to be done. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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