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Monday, 10:13 pm, 14 March 2005 Delirium, the Last Bastion of the Sober... Sorry for the lack of Log entries recently. I have been out for three days with a heavy cold and fever. The merits of international moves is always that your immune system needs a version upgrade. I reflected through this time that heavy fever is the only opportunity I have for mind-altering experiences during waking hours. I developed the early part of the Simulation when I was bed-ridden in 1996 with glandular fever. When Written For Apes... This time my heavy fever initiated the development of the ApeScript interpreter. Very interesting evolution of the scripting language. For a start, no functions, creation of variables through simple declaration, not definition per C, C++, Pascal et al. Second, variables that update in realtime. For example, rather than taking a vector function, you set test_angle to a number and then test_sin and test_cos change accordingly. You take a point_x and point_y as test points on the land map, and point_z changes dynamically. This interlinking of variables - some exclusively output, some both output and input, none just input - makes for a very interesting language dynamic. The big issue in the initial interpreter development was finding a subset of all the arithmetic and logical operators in C and creating a realistic subset which take a single instruction to execute (with priority). I've written a two pass interpreter with some success. I will go back and write a one pass if it proves too slow. The limiting factor is what the script will actually be used for and how much processing is required for such things. The initial aim is to rewrite the being_cycle code in the script. Ironically, this may reduce the size of the Simulation program but require at least one ApeScript dependency file. With all this development, the final names may change. Over the Desert... My wife and I crossed more desert by car today. We ended up in Las Vegas just after lunch. I am a huge fan of CSI, thanks in part to my wife's insistence that we watch it to see Las Vegas. My initial impression of Vegas? It is like anywhere-America off the strip. We went into an off-the-strip casino for dinner and I was reminded of my dislike of casinos. In about 1998, I was skipping meals living in the Shed supporting the early Noble Ape development. It was an interesting time for me. At that time, getting a good internet (dial-up) connection was really important. As I was living on a shoestring budget, food became the luxury commodity. I remember going out with a long-time family friend to a restaurant that had slot machines. He put AUD20 or so into the slot machines for nothing back. I remember thinking, I could have eaten for 3-4 days on that money. A relatively small amount of money but even squandering that at the time seemed insane to me. Now I am more philosophical, different strokes for different folks. Some may view it as glamorous. It just isn't my scene. Good night. Friday, 10:24 am, 04 March 2005 Nothing like working late on your own project on holiday. I removed the interdependency with the Noble Toolkit, now to port it to Noble Warfare and release both source zips. Hopefully online in the next day or os. Resplicing Big Tyme(sic) Following my narrative on the Mannie Fresh album, whilst walking through the desert yesterday I picked up Big Tymers - Big Money Heavyweight. Unfortunately it was a remix album rather than the original. One bad mixing style permeated throughout the whole disc. A Beautiful Life was my favourite but it probably comes from the heavy sampling value in the DJ. Working back over four years of missed music will be interesting. The remix on ...Heavyweight was so bad, I thought I would dig-out an installation disc for SoundEdit 16. I mixed my CDs back in the late-1990s with SoundEdit 16. I wanted to crisp up some of the bad mixes. I travel light and as I was packing up Wilmslow, I packed up most of my CDROMs for shipping rather than flying. PMFC For Life... No luck with the SoundEdit installation disc, but I found a CDROM with old images.  Taken around the time of the first anniversary of the development (circa June 1997) in front of the Shed, the picture features a sleep deprived Tom and Peace Master Flower Cub wearing the trademark gasmask, feather and purple cape. Peace Master was an early mascot of the Noble Ape development. I still have the bear although I didn't ship the gasmask to the US in 1999. Good morning. Thursday, 07:00 pm, 03 March 2005 This is the View... I've been going on four mile walks during the day. Mainly because I walked about three miles a day in Wilmslow and I always felt I needed an extra mile. About half way through my walk, this is the view.  Seeing the mountains with snow - on the horizon and not particularly visible thanks to the quality of my camera - is a lingering memory from this part of the world. Although the snow covered mountains look small in the photo, when you are confronted with them, the blue sky and the desert seem small. Thanks to days like today, I'm regaining some colour from four years of living in the UK. Noble Ape in a Kit I have been using this holiday time to work through a number of issues with Noble Ape. Particularly the page faults. Page faults seem to cause some paradoxes in development. I can't eliminate them - even partially - but I am trying to reduce them greatly. In addition to the page fault reduction, I am continuing to work on the Noble Toolkit. This work has reduced the structural logic of the code to a simple question - can the code be used outside the Simulation? Lots of the Simulation code is dependent on other sections of code when it need not be. Working through the dependencies and resolving them is producing some interesting results. More on this in a future Log update. Darwin@Home Mailing List The Darwin@Home mailing list kicked off yesterday; http://www.darwinathome.org/join/joinlist.html Bruce has requested my support as an informal cheerleader to get the discussion flowing in the right direction. I have a distinctly different personality through organisations than I maintain in my personal life. I can afford to be kick-back in my personal life, I guess. Good night. Tuesday, 09:16 pm, 01 March 2005 Greetings from the desert. My laptop is back on the net after a week of in-between computers. Trying to get my modem working from the UK, I gave up and found a modem card after about thirty minutes of walking. You can find consumer electronics even in the desert. I'll Take an Al Zakawi and Two Bin Ladens... Arriving in the nation of toys and the nation currently fighting a faceless war, I thought aside from numerous airborne and marine toy soldiers, there would be Iraqi and Afghan antis to fight against. But going through Toys'R'Us and other smaller toy stores I haven't found a single terrorist or AK47. How can kids play with toy soldiers with no enemy? What would a game of soldiers be like? I imagine it would get boring fighting against ghosts. Perhaps toy soldiers are just an extension of dress-me dolls for girls. Darwin At Home Update A day or so after my arrival, I was in a teleconference with Bruce Damer and Todd of the USC D@H team. My first question to them was; How many ALife/AI in a simulated environment exist that could include/use D@H? I mused about this last month. My personal feeling is that there aren't enough active ALife projects to sustain D@H as a community development. My solution, which I put to Bruce Damer, is that Biota.org/D@H starts evangelising the projects to University students. Thus encourage University students to create their own ALife projects or join existing ones. Mind of... Mannie Fresh The soundtrack of my past week has been the latest Mannie Fresh album. Travelling around the world in 1999, Mannie Fresh's style was first appearing in the music ''media''. Although I have generally been against synth-rap, Mannie had a good classical education and his tracks were more than synth-rap. Good rap seems to be evenly dependant on the production (including beat/samples/synths etc) and the lyrics. Mannie worked with hungry artists - young talent willing to hone their styles. It's surprisingly easy to record a rap track. Making it work over an entire album like 400 Degrees falls on both the producer and the artist. The new Mannie Fresh album had some weak tracks, but my favourite track on repeat in my MP3 player is the DJ mix of his previous familiar tracks. Rap's resurrection is the respect of musical history. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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