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Saturday, 08:17 am, 03 January 2004 Up at dawn on a Saturday. The life of the 9-5 drone. My thought for today - has the Orc army arrived in town. My connection - my emotional connection - with the postal service in this country as been created over the better part of nine months worth of parcels. Some parcels, I don't remember how or where they arrived. Whilst others have been burnt into to my memory. Middle Class Singing Folk of Canberra - I'm Sorry! Honest Aside from the child-like emotions of a package in the mail, I spoke to my mother first thing this morning. The Peter Pandemonium video was a solid five minute topic of discussion. According to my mother, the players are still active in Canberra. Thus I withdraw any previous comments as advertising or otherwise for the parties concerned or the upper middle-class. It is funny. When I have written panning reviews that have gone to log, I always feel on edge typically for a day following. The illusion of public and private is something that internet publication is really about. It is something I have thought about quite a bit. Degenerative Musings on Internet Publication I don't think I give much away in my logs. Honestly. When I write I have a conscious image of people reading the Log both connected with the log and basing decisions on the Log. In its splendid one year history, I have received half a dozen emails from people I have never met relating to topics from the log. No hate email (yet). But the life described in the logs is either a fraction of my life (a conscious fraction - topics are off-bounds) or some academic musing I have. I rarely write about actual emotions as they occur. I don't know. I don't really get the sense that Barbalet's Log is the white bread of anyone's day. People do read it. But sometimes it is easy to hear echoes of an empty room when I type. Personally the Log, like the Noble Ape Simulation, stands for existential rights. If there is going to be a flood of offensive nonsense on the internet. It needs to have some offensive nonsense I have penned. I think the greatest failing of criticism is the young child response - if you could do better, why don't you! For all the bad logs I read, devoid of analysis, I can right the wrongs (write?) for five minutes of my day. Film-Making More Money Than... Before I go, this site; http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/ Interesting. How many thousands do people have to throw at bad technology? They are USD400 down and they decide to buy another USD500 piece of equipment from the same company? The film and narrative surrounding it is full of paradoxes. I would love to do a similar piece with still photos. It almost demands one. The cost of equipment from companies that 'support' Open Source - here we come. I don't want to use any NWA though. Potential Copyright, Publishing etc nightmare. I have plenty of my own stock rap for such a project. Good morning! Thursday, 08:32 pm, 01 January 2004 The Noble Warfare site is up and an initial logo designed. Nothing like the traffic for the first release. But for the time being some information for the interested. Good night. Thursday, 05:30 pm, 01 January 2004 Contrary to my musings, I got the UDP code to work! It is interesting actually. I suspect the Noble Warfare network interface will need to be extra simple to avoid unnecessary nonsense. In my 2000 UDP code, I wrote a comment about an ideal UDP interface just on top of OpenTransport - it is in fact that simple on other OSes. I don't know what Apple was thinking with OpenTransport. It is unnecessarily complex for a network interface. It has been integrated into Mac OS X with some UPP - don't know what the acronym stands for - but it means runs over the top of, basically. I wish I had the knowledge I have now, in the late 90s with Mac OS. I could have written some killer applications when all this stuff was new and golden. Now I am just gluing my models with the rest of the field. In fact, I'm behind once again. But with a uniform interface into the platform independent code, networking will be 'for-free'. It's dark here - so good evening! A footnote - as my wife has banned me watching this video whilst she is in the house - I might put in Code Rush. Code Rush is a video I got from the local PBS in San Jose (aka KTEH). I gave USD 120 for a copy! Code Rush is the story of Netscape moving towards Mozilla. And what happened after with AOL. A feel good film? No, more a feel disgusted film with dancing open source sell outs, crass bankers and hype-hype-hype journalists. Some classic lines though - like the journalist who can't understand why people will be excited about the launch of Mozilla when MS has already swallowed NS. Really the video is a tragic comedy. Good night. Thursday, 03:39 pm, 01 January 2004 Happy New Year Log-philes, Nothing like a public holiday to provide some leisurely typing time for the log. A number of dot topics for today. Reconstructing Yoof I have written a lot about the reconstruction of my yoof over the past year. Creating a legacy from nothing. Explaining myself through snippets of time. Childhood was not so much about things as memories. The items of my childhood seem to fit into a small box. So from these memories I have gone through periods of collecting items I knew in childhood. Yesterday a video came from my mother of a play I was in - Peter Pandemonium. As a child I sang, from the ill-fated Canberra Boys' Choir on to Gaudeamus (sp?). There was a glut of educated middle-class folk in Canberra. And before their children were old enough to smoke dope and inject narcotics, they were organised in leftist musical groups which were quite different from school choirs. The heartland of this was in the north of Canberra. The inner north - in the Shed district that I came to live in during my later years of University. It was a different world. When I reach University and found the average Australia was close-minded and anti-Semitic, I realised my childhood had been a very sheltered affair. In fact from Primary and early High School, I was quite detached. The middle class - the educated leftist middle class - was not welcoming. I have found it difficult to find welcoming groups through my life. But through skills I had, my singing, things I could do, I found myself in the leftist upper middle class folds. The paradoxes of the leftist middle-class with their children going to alternative private schools seemed very strange. As alien then as it does now. These were not my people. The politics of these singing groups was nasty and alienating. I was on the fringes and because my family paid for me to attend, I was welcomed as a pay cheque. There were Mafia-like family groups that held their children high. I ventured in to their houses on occasion. Always wood fires. Lots of white paint. High ceilings. Lots of books. These memories are clearly repressed. But I watched the video this morning with my wife. The Tom of 13 wandering around the stage. Half the actors were really poor actors. Really poor in their early teens. My wife asked, 'How can these kids have gotten the leading roles?' It was just the nature of the group. Tradition! Art inspires development! I have been rambling about Noble Warfare in these logs for a couple of months now. Maybe more. I commissioned some work from Fred Reed for the website. He finished the figures a while ago but through a series of errors the pictures haven't been available until yesterday. I scrubbed them up and here are a couple.   It is amazing the effect some art or mascots can have on a development. Fred too was impressed by the images - although I pointed out to him they were all his work. For me, the Noble Warfare development has moved from files to networking. The networking code comes on the UDP protocol. I had some old UDP code that I rehacked in 2000. But that isn't Carbon compatible. So more work to get Carbon compatible UDP code. Always with the work! Always extra effort. One thing I thought about is colour/height mapping in the file. That way Noble Warfare will be able to ice and Martian worlds too. Deep oceans or deserts. WeFunk-branded funk Another nice email from Prof Groove first thing this morning - although the Beats for Butta project is looking like it might be on ice. I asked him about the WeFunk branded funk. The funk component of WeFunk carries a lot of styles of music. I have always suspected that it was an emotional branding exercise on Groove's part to link Soul, (P-)Funk, Jazz, some Disco-esque stuff and other nondescript instrumental music. He confirmed this in a long email. What non-drinkers do on NYD I don't know what I am going to do with myself today. I was planning on dusting off some UDP code. But I might do some writing and reading too. My wife is at work. The Noble Warfare site needs to be designed to cope with initial interest and the build up to launch. So much work. So little time. Well, actually, some different time frames. I am thinking March now. Maybe sooner. Good afternoon and Happy New Year! [ Previous Log ]
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