I saw John Draper briefly over the weekend. He's producing digital television and digital audio content currently. He has been asking for my feedback and cheer-leadership on the audio project in particular.

He was heading out of Las Vegas and decided to drop by. I live a hermit-like existence here for the general passer-through, I guess. My wife works over the weekend. She is with-car, leaving me to go for long walks with Charlie, muse about Noble Ape and related stoof.

http://ales.johnpdaigle.com/wales/index.php/System_Design_Document#Current_Software_Architecture

I found this through the reference logs of nobleape.com. I'm now being referred to as an open source software architect of note. I think in similar terms of graphic design problems. You can be naturally and aesthetically gifted, or you can take three months to produce a CD cover. Barbalet as software architect? Perhaps the Simulation is an example of longterm evolution rather than brilliance.

http://www.nobleape.com/mailout/oct05.html

I got the October Mailout out yesterday. Some good quality ramblings, more than usual actually both in volume and content.

Finally, I have been playing with Google Earth. I'm pleased to say I added the Shed as a Google Earth marker, and updated the Shed page in the process.

http://www.nobleape.com/shed/

The auto zoom in from the link is very cool.

Good afternoon.

It's been ten days of pretty solid traveling, hence my lax entries. Apologies to the regular readers.

I have updated my music section following clearly out all our CDs for some more Buy Barbalet's Clutter on eBay.

When I was first dating my wife I made CD for her of all my listenable recordings. Steel Traffic [8Mb MP3] is something I like to be reminded of every year or so. I used to play for hours on the piano in the Shed. The problem with five and three-quarter minutes of piano representing years of playing is that it will always be disappointing. The piece is a function of my digital equipment being set up for the first time and record being pressed. I didn't know how many minutes I could record and nearly six seemed enough.

In addition to the music, I wrote a document about getting the current version of the Simulation to look like the Apple CHUD tools version;

http://www.nobleape.com/docs/on_apple.html

I haven't written a lot about this delta but I wanted it covered in documentation - particularly the recent changes. Tuning in to this week's WeFunk, I googled Nathan and Sanjay to find any photos/information online. Nathan appears to be roughly two years my senior with Sanjay more than six years older than me. Ironically it appears the latter link is for Sanjay displaying Noble Ape.

It is strange. I never thought 29 would feel this young. Good night.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002528.html

Maybe my sense of irony is lost on an intellectual audience. The fact that the comment is now receiving reviews... Priceless.

Good night.

I spent a couple of hours of yesterday afternoon reading the Spark v. Activision v. Spark documentation. Now in the public domain (I've collated them here for ease of download);

http://www.barbalet.net/spark_act/

It is a fascinating warts-and-all look at contemporary game development. The contracts and the related documentation that have been moved from company confidential to something anyone can read are phenomenal. Fascinating cases. Fascinating documentation. It gives an intimate insight into game development relationships with studios and publishers. Spark's website is particularly interesting to review whilst reading the cases.

http://www.sparkunlimited.com/

Good afternoon.

Quinn of Apple

When I first visited Apple in 1998 I met Quinn. Whilst we didn't exchange many words, nor have corresponded since, he is one of the folks I remember at Apple because he had developed software for Mac sufficiently specialised enough to be employed by Apple in 1995. Occasionally I wonder what happened to him and having that thought intersect with me being near a Google search dialog today produced my rediscovery of his site.

Current Developments Doc

I am working through the third installment of the current developments with the Noble Ape Simulation document. It's always been an interesting one to write because it contains a good deal of future prediction as well as some historical reflection.

To be honest, I don't know how many people read it or whether it factors in to anyone's decision to download the Simulation or read more on the site. It is a document that has existed like a doorstop for the past three and a half years. Perhaps not as a guide to the monthly mailout deltas, but a guide to the general direction of thought on Noble Ape.

Bay Are A

I'm flying back to the Bay Area for the first time since May 2001 next Monday. I'm not doing too much there - a meeting and then flying back to Las Vegas - but none-the-less it reminds me of all the adventures I had in the region. I used public transport quite a bit. I could have used it more. I should have used it more actually. To get up to San Francisco. To go out to nice areas and buy/read books. To enjoy the elements that were the Bay Area. But my life there in 1999-2001 was relatively focused. From all the flying in 1999 and 2001, it seems I was really only there for 2000 with a good six months of travel and brief touch downs in the other two years.

In prelude to this trip, I'm having a record string of early nights. It's a funny thing going to bed at 10pm and actually having dreams I remember. The coherence of good REM sleep is something I don't naturally experience. I feel my life is connected to my fingers on a keyboard, generating ideas, but occasionally it is good to cognitively detox.

Burning Pockets

I was looking at Bruce Damer's pictures of Burning Man yesterday. It reminded me of a conversation I had with John Draper when I saw him this year.

I asked John about if he had been to Burning Man recently...

''Too commercial, two hundred and fifty bucks a ticket!''

But Bruce keeps going. I think the increase in the price has clearly changed the folks attending (from Bruce's photos).

Good afternoon.

Quite a busy few days.

The Noble Ape Simulation 0.672 was released a couple of days ago with a couple of last minute changes that initially looked like a bug, but it turned out to be expected behaviour. The ApeScript code is only run during daylight. The debug output is only outputted in the first daylight cycle, otherwise you get a blank file with the correct time/date stamped information.

As there were substantial and productive changes for research projects, I announced the release on alife-announce. I get the sense that the mailing list, through it's traffic has a very broad, academic, more right of centre subscription than biota.org's various mailing lists for example. Certainly the bounce information that came back to me was very .gov/.edu centric.

I've been reflecting on the history of Noble Ape rather heavily over the past couple of weeks. It started with a biota.org request for an interview to describe what the AtHome project was and where it was currently. This turned into a broader interview about ALife hobbyists - who are they and why do they do it.

I think in particular of AIPlanet's creator Dave Kerr. Dave and I have a number of similarities in our development experiences as remote ALife project developers. Around the same age. Surprisingly similar inspirational reading lists and ideas - but quite distinct projects and separated (for the initial part of respective developments) by at least 12-20 hours of flight time. But we both share the sense of the underdog. We both tried for years to be accepted, to find mentors and the same time evangelists for our projects and a number of shared experiences dealing with academics and companies.

My personal view is that ALife has been relatively good to me. There are a generation of circa 1980s and early 1990s ALife developers who have very successfully publicised their isolated work and continue to get credit. Some email me occasionally, most don't. I think of Noble Ape as being a second generation ALife project as I do AIPlanet. This is the idea of AI in a simulated environment rather than more traditional ALife.

The current issue with ALife is educating another generation of ALife developers. I try to do it with Noble Ape through developers like Pedro. But there is a broader issue with the ALife community that I am trying to come to terms with through Biota.org. It's a convolution currently. I'm hoping to meet Bruce Damer in the near future and have a long chat with him.

Autumn has come to Las Vegas. My summer wears are now ill-equipt for the chilly snaps I'm experiencing. I stupidly gave Charlie a bone from dinner a couple of days ago. He's not the dog he used to be. I was woken five times last night with demands for a walk which I honoured in various states of shoes and jacket on. The poor fellow hasn't been feeling well ever since the bone.

I'm impressed by the speed of Luna's growth. She has nearly quadrupled her weight since I found her. She still has elements of feral about her but is generally becoming a good pet.

Good morning.

My DJ's Cuttin' With 'Em

I was watching Cops on Friday night and I saw an ad for Fidelity featuring Paul McCartney. Thanks to the joy of the internet, I can actually show you and advertise for Fidelity at the same time (546k WMV).

Can't stand the baby-faced Beatle. I'm a John man myself. But the thing that caught me about the ad was the start. It's Tone Loc's Cuttin' Rythms. In fact my favourite part of the record. Could it really have been a Wings sample?

Sure enough it was - Band on the Run. With all the other smutz going on, I thought they must have taken the master recordings and removed everything else. Well it turns out with a simple sound editing, you cut the major parts of the beat. The highs and the lows in a standard audio editor and you get the Tone Loc sample. What a technique which seems to have been never further interpolated in hip-hop.

Even the heaviest beat section becomes a perfectly usable sample. Fascinating.

Three weeks of solid eBaying has come to a close. I'm debating a brief pause before listing more stuff. The adrenaline of waking every morning to see the new total has lost some of its glow. But I still have a lot of clutter to move.

I received emails about When the Flowers Died. The previous record was the announcement of the move to the US which netted three emails. The Flowers netted four emails. I have found the concise version of the original text - about 38k of text or four-thousand words. It printed at twelve point out to twenty pages. A short story more than anything. I edited this down to about three thousand words which I may put online in the next week or so. It was good to read it again because it reminded me of what life was like in Australia.

Reading it again, I forgot a lot of my emotions about living in Australia. There are some quotes from the book Anna's Story, which came out in the mid-1990s in Australia about the death of a girl who had taken ecstasy at a rave. Whilst the book was about drug use, it had a strong anti popular sixties narrative. I don't have the book with me in the US, but these are the quotes from the Flowers...

Anna Victoria Wood was born on 27 May 1980 in Southport, Queensland, the Gold Coast's only truly serious suburb. It was an easy birth; she suckled happily at her mother's breast and slept peacefully a few minutes after having arrived in the world.'

...

Since the sixties, when in their ignorance a generation of hippies took it [cannabis smoking] up and made it their own, men and women of all ages, sometimes working in the loftiest of professions have used cannabis.

Since the sixties when marijuana first became very popular in Western countries, certain sections of society have spread the mistaken belief that adolescents have always used so-called 'soft' drugs (that is, drugs which are likely to kill or damage fewer rather than many people) in order to expand their view on life.

They haven't.

I recall there was a section of the book that detailed she was untouched when she died too although I didn't provide quotes for When The Flowers Died as it did not have any vitriol towards the popular sixties.

The drug pamphlet element of the book was not lost on me. I appreciate the need for an anti-drugs message. My concern was that the popular sixties had nothing to do with Anna's death. In fact she died from a drug which had gained popularity in the late 1980s. Perhaps the 1980s were more to blame. Those me generation folk?

I like to think sometimes that perhaps my leaving Australia and the emotions surrounding that time were just a little overstated. That perhaps Australia wasn't quite as nasty and closed minded as I remember it. Reading quotes from Anna's Story, I am reminded that the things that made me leave Australia were very real.

ApeScripting Freedom

I have been thinking quite radically about using ApeScript to change the Simulation recently. Thinking about the Simulation as an interpreter and a particular implementation of ApeScript changes some of the problems of the Simulation. For example, suppose most of the variables defined as linking points in the Simulation and ApeScript were actually defined in some higher ApeScript code.

If the Simulation exists as a graphical interpreter that takes specific information allocated and manipulated through ApeScript, it becomes a very different tool. Reworking the Simulation accordingly is the current challenge.

Good afternoon.