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Thursday, 07:47 pm, 27 January 2005 Exhibit A...  Planet Noble Ape, now with weather effects. Name two things wrong with it. (1) Obviously, no colour. (2) Polar spherical co-ordinates. The solution to (2) is to use triangular spacing which will reduce the number of points and possibly produce interesting geometrical mapping for the weather. Soon to see. Good night. Wednesday, 10:36 pm, 26 January 2005 So... I am working through the post Ape at Home theory. Looking at the network connections and the mechanisms of picking up information from a site and creating a peer-to-peer network based on that information with security and information locking etc. As my primary development comes through Macs - Carbon bound Mac OS 9 machines - the networking options are relatively minimal using the legacy Open Transport technology with a number of limiting overheads. I have played with Open Transport through Carbon for a number of months with mixed success. Basic firewalls seem to cause problems which can't easily be worked around. Coming to the rescue for those with newer Macs is CFNetwork Services although I am worried about the overhead of both technologies in terms of downloadable size. One of the options I am working with currently is a standalone utility I am codenaming NOaH or Noble Organism/Outbox at Home which acts like email for the Noble Ape Simulation and Noble associated developments like Noble Warfare. Working on the transmission every minute methodology as opposed to every 10th second seems to give freer API elements. It's classic public key stuff with the bolus of information encoded for both the sender and the receiver with a registered component thrown in for good measure. The element of HTTP for the initial server list and UDP from then on seems to lend itself to something like Darwin at Home. In concert with this exploration is a rekindled interest in Planet Noble Ape - in particular adding weather to the planet simulation. I'm hoping to put it all together in time for a mailout mid February before I depart. Projects can keep my mind off the move. Good evening. Tuesday, 11:08 pm, 25 January 2005 Now For Some Serious Nerd Business... Some interesting dead ends from my recent musings in the Mailout. It turns out the graphics development was a dead end in terms of arrays of points. A little slower in the Noble Ape Simulation case. An interesting point though, it may still work with the colour implementation of Planet Noble Ape. The main reason is the ordering of below water, water and above water. These things exist as points in space in the graphics rendering but these points in space can be ordered and drawn in order from below water to water to above water which avoids some overwrite paradoxes that occur particularly with the below water to water overlay. Moving the Planet Noble Ape development into something current has been a long time coming. The code still works with the original GPI, but porting it to GPI2 shouldn't be too difficult. Then all that will need to be maintained is GPI2. Through the recent graphics modifications of the Simulation, I toyed with removing the GPI version all together. The only platform that requires it currently (and this is the original GPI) is Linux. The development priority has maintained Mac, Windows and distant third, Linux. But in the interim, grouping the directories so the Simulation code is interchangeable with the Noble Warfare development is the aim. Good night. Monday, 09:58 pm, 24 January 2005 It's been a while since I last had some miniature images online. This group of three come from the Kirill Orcs in Space commission. Kirill is making moulds for me for an extended WWII-styled Orc group. I wanted to start small with the international move.   As you can see, the quality lends itself to a secondary commission. The man's a genius. Good night. Sunday, 09:34 pm, 23 January 2005 Sunday night seems to be primetime nerd TV. From 6.45 to 8pm the channels fight for that all important nerd demographic. Tonight we surfed from the Scrappy Races on Channel 4 that featured my former Physics classmate Karen last year - no one I knew this year. Fifteen minutes into that we switched to the Antiques Roadshow but finally we turned midway through to... Time Commanders - Series Two Leaving the UK, I will only see the first half of the second series. Watching it tonight it dawned on me that this is a program for children and children at heart. The Total War engine appears to have been improved slightly in the initial combat movement. But it is Medieval Total War scenarios with the Total War: Rome engine. I did like some of the theatrics and the flying combatants at the initial clash with cavalry - a good improvement. The format of the show has changed quite a bit. Priming the contestants (combatants?) is very good and Mike Loades and Dr Aryeh Nusbacher were back in full force. Barbalet's Log is pretty high on the search list for Dr Nusbacher on Google. I was impressed that my heavy Time Commanders narrative last year has prompted such a high Google rating. I recommend his own website for the avid searcher. In Other News... The monthly Mailout went live this afternoon. Possibly the last for a couple of months. Good night. Friday, 08:33 pm, 21 January 2005 Be Careful What You Wish For... After my last Log entry, I received an email from Bruce Damer, asking if I wanted to pick up the maintenance of Biota.org. I've been visiting the site for the past eight years and there hasn't been a lot updated over the past four. The main issue initially has been updating dead links and finding folks who have changed jobs and websites. From the site link, you can see I am part way through, but decided to put the partial updates online as an incentive to get it done quickly. There is still quite a bit to be done. I am averaging about two major pages an evening. But now the template is done, it is a matter of pasting and reformatting text and testing links. It's a great site to be working on and I'm hoping after the initial drabbing, I'll add plenty of images and interesting links. Interviews are also something I want to put on the site. There are a lot of folks developing internet accessible ALife. I'm sure many of them want some degree of exposure through a site like Biota.org. Lots of work to be done. Good night. Monday, 09:50 pm, 17 January 2005 Covert Ops Items Things are turning up that didn't make it into packing boxes. Together my wife and I have found about half a packing box worth. Still a good small percentage. Not enough to lose sleep over. With this shipping group this departure, I had a more carefree attitude. The final numbers were 20 boxes down to my wife and 13 to me. They have to be declared differently on the customs forms. Writing Online vs Burn Out I watched Justin's breakdown movie at lunch today. I must confess I had to fast forward over some sections of it. Marriage is the only answer for extrovert nerds to dampen the highs and pad the lows. The golden rules of weblogging appear to be have a life that doesn't go on the net and make sure that you respect and write around people who have asked not to be written about. From the get-go with Barbalet's Log, I knew a couple of people were totally off-bounds. Family members who have asked for images to be removed of them that I had online, long before the Log, I knew they wouldn't want narrative contribution. I think most of the folks whose logs I read regularly clearly have another life too. For me, I don't write about work or politics. Neither seem edifying. I don't write a lot about my time in Australia and very infrequently about my life in the US through the tail end of the speculative technology boom. Both these things seem relatively unimportant in narrative terms. Yo Shed Boy! My interest in narrative was sparked today when I downloaded the Darwin@Home launch MP3. About nine years ago, a nineteen year old Tom shown a year later in yesterday's entry, lived in a shed in Australia. Slowly developing a project which was renamed Noble Ape. Developing Noble Ape in isolation, I always wanted to participate in the event that was ALife conferences and papers. But Noble Ape and really my remoteness, age and poverty meant Noble Ape was never integrated in the fold and all the books written on ALife never mentioned Noble Ape. The names associated with ALife didn't include mine and the story ends there. There were four Biota conferences. I tried really hard to give a paper at the first two. I missed the third because I was travelling and I was invited to give the keynote at the fourth before it folded and was reborn in a different format. I think I had left the US by the time the fourth happened. Listening to the MP3 of the launch, it reminded me, through all the names that were mentioned that whilst I had developed Noble Ape in various directions over the past eight and a half years and gotten some credits and publicity along the way, I still wasn't part of the ALife crowd. What the MP3 did present was the culture of public funding in the US and technology development (possibly sustenance) through government funding. I wrote to Bruce last week and gave him the annual break down of Noble Ape in response to a 'How's it all going?' question. The dot points virtually came from the top of the December '04 Mailout which was fresh in my head at the time. The final point I made was that the development continued to move forward through the model of complete self funding and working on it 'after hours'. In general, from the launch talk, I think Bruce and I share the same vision of ALife development although we approach it through different means. I'm hopeful for the Darwin@Home project if Bruce can harness the initial momentum. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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