None of these are light weight. So there must be an intelligent way to establish a threading system that will distribute these sections between HyperThreads, multiple cores or multiple processors.

The next issue is the numbers question. Specifically, how many users actually have machines that could take advantage of these changes. I have two INTEL machines that are my primary development machines. A P3 laptop and a Celery desktop - cheap PCWorld must have. The P3 is mildly convincing emulating HyperThreading even though it is a P underspec.

It's impossible to do a comprehensive analysis of the user base of Noble Ape. So the musing continues.

What Ever Happened to... Toy Soldiers?

There has been quite a bit written online about the slump in interest in miniatures. Whilst the direct correlation between leaving the UK and the slump hasn't gone past your humble author, there seems to be a strong cause-effect relationship.

I exchanged some emails with Kirill Kavaev (aka Kirill Kavaeu) about why GW didn't fly him back to Nottingham to photograph his splendid vehicle.

A flashback from September 2005...

It wasn't a huge surprise. The staff at White Dwarf have dropped dramatically. In fact the web site staff have become the new staff at White Dwarf, begging the question is all outgoing content generated by the same small group of people. There seems to be a real doom and gloom aspect with toy soldiers currently. I think reducing the magazine staff and content produced by White Dwarf has a strong knock-on effect. I don't know what caused the reduction initially, but it has produced a sharp drop over the past year. Losing almost all the staff with more than a couple of years of experience.

General consensus of my regular correspondents has been that the decline through White Dwarf has been a long time coming.

The figure painting market has completely dropped too. Aside from Fred Reed and Kirill, none of my other figure painters still paint figures. Honestly I think there is a combination of reasons for this. Figure painting has always been about volume vs. price vs. quality. The painters with low volume at a high price have not survived in the most part - although Kirill maintains his market. You need a good equal weighting. Fred Reed conquered the market with the right volume at the right price with mind blowing quality.

There is a time predictive component to it all too. I am the age demographic of the recent upswing. Interested in my early teens. Shied away through sweaty smelly 30-somethings in my late teens and early twenties. Interested again thanks to location and a disposable income. Now thinking about more serious things, although my White Dwarf subscription - even with the wane in quality - is a monthly something to look forward to.

Bi-Pod Casting

With the success of the Noble Ape example movies, I have been thinking about doing audio information online too. It seems that any kind of content, folks will investigate. If they don't watch or listen to all of it, at least they have listened to some of it. There is an element of self-promotional dis-interest in this whole thing though. I don't know of the regular listenership to a Noble Ape audio program and the idea of putting another media online with a fringe following does erk me a little. But I might experiment with it when I'm feeling brave.

Good morning.

Happy New Year log readers. I have been traveling for the past week, hence the lack of updates. In fact, I'm still in transit thanks to a hotel internet connection I'm able to provide this update. The life on the road is all to familiar to me. The routine with living out of hotel rooms, washing shirts and packing an ever shrinking case... This was once my life.

Now, a fresh pot of decaf is my brace for this evening's narrative.

WeFunk on the West Coast

I spent a wonderful evening last night with WeFunk Show 292's Keynaan;

http://www.wefunkradio.com/show/2003-07-25

And his wife. After four and a half years of listening to WeFunk and about two and a half years of direct correspondence, funding drive donations, a digital camera and lots of spare bandwidth, Keynaan is the first person connected with WeFunk that I have actually met.

He and his wife put on a great evening. Very nice people and indicative of the calibre of WeFunk listeners. In fact listening to Show 292, Key actually drops some tracks towards the end of the show.

Critical Intel

I have been thinking about the INTEL move for Mac quite a bit. The timeframe for the INTEL thoughts, links to the MacWorld conference next week. It's highly likely the first consumer INTEL Macs will be launched. The history of the Noble Ape Simulation has been about small size and using the maximum amount of CPU possible. Progressively the Noble Ape Simulation's components - the parts of the Simulation that take certain amounts of CPU time - have been atomised into a series of about fourteen processes. Some of these components take about 10% of the CPU time, others take about 5%.

Reading about the optimisation differences on INTEL versus the PPC, a number of the algorithms used in Noble Ape could be rewritten to increase the optimisations. Aside from various mathematical loop alignments, hyperthreading makes me think about pushing the ape(x) into a true distributed version of the Noble Ape Simulation. Adding the weather to the Simulation put an additional 10% worth of CPU usage into the Simulation.

It begs the question, how much CPU time will be added with a true graphics environment. Interesting time for creating Alife.

Speaking of Alife

I now have a backlog of interviews for biota.org. It's an interesting place to be actually. Particularly with the depth and brilliance of the interviewees. Finding the right questions, the right approach and how to get this information online into something that is accessible for a broad audience. I am working through a couple currently where the interviews could become novellas.

One thing I have learned from the recent interview with Franco;

http://www.biota.org/people/francomalingri/

Providing a static interview - emailing a list of questions - sometimes produces a stilted interview. What I am going to try through the next couple is a series of single question approaches. Scattering the questions and giving a building spiral through the interviews. We'll see how it works out.

Good evening.