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Monday, 08:53 pm, 29 November 2004 The Mailout went live tonight. Always fun to get it out. Another month of pottering and two miniature painting updates. The first, the boar bikes from Fred Reed and also the latest commission from Kirill. Hard to imagine they are only 28mm high. Fred had real fun with the bikes! Two totally different conversions - same concept. Kirill's work is always a good mix of WWII dark and near futurism. Both stunning. Good night. Saturday, 10:40 pm, 27 November 2004 From Static to Static I woke up at about 3.50am this morning. Listed a whole score of stuff on eBay and waited for WeFunk. The event was a DJ Static solo show. A unique mix of about ninety-five percent hip-hop and five percent sample moment funk. The real trick with the Static solo show is tempo. They build to a fast paced exit. It's almost symphonic. But at about 1.10am Montreal time, the RealAudio transmitter went to static with some background beat. After about twenty minutes of this, I went back to bed. I haven't heard a Funkdoobiest Static mix. I'll check the replay on Monday. I emailed Static and Nick about the break in the stream. Nick emailed me back. The RA stream tracks the radio transmission so with transmitter repairs, the RA stream picks up only the weaker secondary transmitter. Analog to digital! Old Cats and New I rewrote the low-level 'Ocelot' code today. The mixing of map and height information about a year ago now missed some serious optimisations. I was able to cut the code down a good thirty percent. Getting feedback through code, getting a sense of improvements, it is definitely the fun part of developing. I am writing a good section on Ocelot in the November Mailout. The past day's work will feature heavily. Small Children Look Away Now! To top off a long productive day, I received an email and images from Fred Reed. As I received the images, I was watching a program about the Medicis of Florence. Commissioning art. This is a current commission Fred was working on today. My wife has a particular dislike of Fred's darker commissions. She points out I would never be able to display them in good company. I wonder if someone viewing this site for the first time would appreciate the breadth of Fred's work or why I would have a collection of highly detailed orcs, goblins and demons as prize possessions. I don't even play the games. One needs to embrace paradoxes occasionally. It is a splendid piece not intended for the occult. Awake for more than eighteen hours. Good night. Thursday, 11:03 pm, 25 November 2004 For the past couple of weeks I have been reading about Carbon Events. The next addition to the Noble Ape Simulation I want to make is a proper threading model. The Apple threading model related to their own interests in optimising the cognitive code in the Simulation. In contrast, I want to divide the cognitive code and the landscape rendering. I think this will provide a more even balance for the general processing. But Carbon Events are an early threading path because you need to think of things like - if this section of code is timed and this section of code is independently drawn - what will happen. Locks need to be established and this is taking some head scratching. The current Simulation is a very linear thing indeed. The irony about Carbon Events is that Apple hasn't done the best job with example code. After months of looking I have found some information and example code external to Apple. But when you search for information on Carbon Events with C source examples, this site and the Noble Ape site both come up in the top twenty with - you guessed it - musing about the difficulty in implementing Carbon Events and the lack of documentation. Almost laughable. I will be sure to put plenty of documentation online about the pitfalls. One thing I will need to create in the near future is a proper threading diagram of all the possible processes and what data locks are needed. It will all be worth it. Good night. Wednesday, 09:50 pm, 24 November 2004 G-It's About Time... I touched a G5 for the first time today. It has been a year and a half of developing and maintaining G5 related code. Code which Apple charges developers to study - Noble Ape. Having run the Simulation briefly on the G5, I realised I had never done this before. Although through the months of development and integrating threading code etc I had thought about the effects of running the code on the G5, I had never touched the arrow keys and seen the landscape spin. It was a moment of somewhat saddened reflection. A year and a half. Better than when I was in Australia. A good four years of development lag time in Oz. NoPod My new toy is a UKP69 MP3 player/memory stick. Four WeFunk shows plus some space for additional tracks. I don't know how it is effecting my walking to and from work time. I hit a particular favourite - a Nasty Nas mix in Show 291 - on the way in this morning. I broke into a run and ran a good 500m before I hit a slow walker and traffic. On the way home, I found myself listening to the intro banter of Show 281 and I though to myself, perhaps this is slowing my walking pace. I haven't listened to music walking to and from work for about a year. But now, returning to it with my MP3 stick, it seems something calming and familiar. The luxury or WeFunk-whenever is great. I finish tonight's entry with a Fred Reed work in progress. I commissioned him to design and paint two Space Ork boar bikes. I received these snaps today. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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