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Thursday 30th December 2004

Software Versioning

: There has been a trend amoungst the free software community and in some companies to stop marking software releases with Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Production Release and Patched. These are now concelled in there build or version number. I think that this is both confusing to developers, management, support staff and users. There has been two reasons for this radical number changes, the first is the push from the freeware quick untested releases, which allow users to test it, this is a prefered stratery from the freeware community. The second is from marketing and sales people wanted to get releases to customers quickly and some times to hide the fact that it is not a fully tested version.

Wednesday 29th December 2004

The Office

: Back to work today, as most people have taken the three days off between Chrismas and New Year it is almost completely empty, there is only the non festive hum of countless computers. Even with the excessive number of them in this open plan office it is still cold enough that my feet are freezing. I got the train into work today and apart from the frosty weather it was a pleasant effort journey but tomorrow I will work at home. When I arrived this morning the gateman had not open the pedestran gate from the railway to the business park. He had only open the gate for car which is a 15 minute walk away. That is typically car driver thinking, I will have to set off even earlier when I leave as I will have to walk all the way around.

Hindsight

: A friend found a possision paper I wrote some 7 years ago about a new product and market. As you would expect it was completely ignored. Strangely enough the market is moving that way and we have no product for that market. Sometime you have to wonder why you bother attempting to predict the future it is afterall part of our job as technologies to lead companies in the direct that the customers what to go. In my experience those that run companies in the UK are fincance people with no understanding of there products or customers only accounts and legal neccessities. They reject change as some for of mantra, it is as if they want to ignore the very fact that the technology intustry exists in the very small time between an inovation being to expensive to make and too cheap to be worth doing. You have to be on the product developement cycle in this magic short period, you need to jump on just when the costs of implementation are just within your companyies ability and drain the money you can from your customers before everyone can provide the same product.

Thursday 23rd December 2004

Christmas

: Only 2 days to Christmas and all is carm it does not feel like Christmas at all. May be if we get some snow at my Mum's it will. There is a nice blue sky outside and it is realtively warm today for the time of year. The office is almost empty as most of the other employee have taken the day off for last minute shopping.

Curry

: Tim and myself had a very fine curry last night, why is it that some restrant staff are unable to understand simple instructions? You ask for something and they are incabible of listening to what you ask for. One of the things that we talked about last night was the fact that school leavers today appear to be less well educated that they where when we left. I am a bit dubious about this I thing that is is all relative, what I mean by that its that every generation thinks that when they left school they where brighte r than they where, they forget that they are not the people they where when they where 16, they now have more years and experiences since that time and are projecting what they think they remember of themselves backwards in time. It is doubtfully that school children of today are anyless smarter than they were 30 years ago. What has changed is the set of skills that there are taught, it is true that each generation comes away from there education with a different composit of knowledges than their predicessiors. With the way that environment changes generation on generation this is probly a good thing. Why would anyone want to know how to use a slide rule or log tables now, the hours we spent learning them are redundant and useless knowledge now.

Business Growth

: The current state of the Western Worlds enconimy is a worry. We are trapped in a local minima on a multi-dimensional economic domain. Part of the problem is that too many finanal people are tied into the sterile attempt to climb the greasy pole of money aqusition of there own gain. On the face of it it is almost like that the christian (and others) phylisophical polemic against the averise of wealth may hold water for our times. As the chinese used to say, the great wheel of history turns, may be it is time for the unfettered free markets to be put back under corprate governance. The great experiment of the Monetrist to come to an end, they have returned us to stability but it is a prisoners dilemer where more and more people are at the lossing quadrent of the 2x2 matrix.

Skill Learning etc

: Benn on RPGCreateMaillist writes an intresting artical about [learning, maintaining and atrophy of skills]. I wonder if there is a simple way to intergrate this into an RPG? I think that it would not be that hard to allocate an amount of training or excersising points per week for each character.

Wednesday 22nd December 2004

Hellboy

: I watched this tounge in cheek superhero film, based on the comic book, last night. It was supprisingly good I felt, the supernatial bad guys remined me of The Return to Wolfingstein FPS game. The super assasin that is a wind up automiton was quite intrestingly done. Over all I would give it Eight out of Ten as a superhero movie.

This Morning

: Over slept this morning and was just wondering that time can't be right as the postman had only just delivered mail when I was rang to say I was late for my lift into work. Twenty muinutes later I was out of the door and on the way to the bus. The Newsagent was out of the saver bus tickets today so it looks like I will be paying full price until next year when the cost goes up again.

Games

: We are not playing tonight but TimE and myself will be going for a curry - Yummy.

Microsoft

: Lots of news sites have the news that [Brussels blow to Microsoft upheld]. From most computer professional's PoV? it has been weird that MS have got away with this for so long. I am sure that if Ford had done the same sort of pratices to GM in the states that MS have done then the Lay people would have been up in arms and the political master would have fixed the problem. There has always been this concept in the US that what is good for X Corp is good for the USA. Summed up in the saying "The Business of America is Business", the problem with this is that they are growing a new set of Merchant Princes that have less and less reguard for the Law and People. At some point there will be a great level of internal stress and either the US will tumble into a defacto Mercantile Ologarchy or a second round to the New Deal style legistlation to constrain them. It will be intresting as an external observer to see which way this plays out over the long term.

Linus thoughts on Solaris

: Linus is a smart guy and sometimes he has intresting stuff to say. In the latest interview with him [Torvalds: A Solaris skeptic] one one hand he says that his favort historial person is Newton and quotes "If I have been able to see farther, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants." which obvious he does not know is infact Newton quoting some one else possibly [John of Salisbury] and then says dismisses Solaris and unintresting and something he himself can't learn from. Shame that he sees it this way, I displike Windows because it is unreliable but I would never for one moment claim that there is nothing to learn from it.

Tuesday 21st December 2004

Puzzled

: I was asked what happened on 20th January 1899? I have searched Google and can't find anything. It's nothing obvious and there are very few things on the web for that date. Still puzzled. The Boar War happened later in the year, the best idea some one has was the Churchill was in South Africa at that time, may be the is an important date there.

WotC's Dragon

: The lastest one arrived, full of the normal rubhish. There is a small artical on Archers, which in DnD35e is a pet pieve of my mine. The DnD35e systems is IMO biases against missile weapons, it is almost impossible to do a one shot kill that was and is possible with an arrow. Intrestingly in the lastest Dungeon there is a section at the back about the types of referee, Referee Style and Game Style (IIRC). In Referee Style you set up the world and the party encounters events as they would if the world was realisic, monsters could be under or over powering ie not related to the parties strength; it is the world concistancy the matters highest. In Game Style the level of evcounter changes with the party and the types of challenges with the player types; ie it is game or story concistancy that matters the most. Although this is a nice simplification it does not really work as a dividing line amoungst referees but is a continium not only of games masters but of stages in games. I can think of situation in the same evening where I have referee in both styles.

Network Weirdness

: We have been experiences a kind of transitory network slow down on our developement network. It is mostly a problem with the slowest machine on the LAN. It reminds me of when we had the first lot of 100BaseT? machines on the network with 10BaseT?. I think that it is cause by the lastest hardware being so fast that they are swamping the LAN. Test using FTP and SPRAY have been so far inconculsive.

Xmas Shopping

: Yesterday I said that the shops where less busy than is normal at this time of the year, it appears that this is only my perception as the UK retailers asssossation is saying that this Saturday was the busyiest on record IIRC and they have taken more money than last year now. Even year the shops complain that people are not spending as much as previous year, and low and behold they end up spending more that.

UK Defeatism

: I have notice a common trait amongst UK people and reading some quotes from Churchill has made it crystalise. He said:

: "The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst." Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, June 10, 1941.

: This is something as a Brit I can realy understand, I look around me and have to wonder how many people are looking for the storm clouds on a sunny day. There is a general assumption that nothing good will last and there is not much you can do about it. There is also a general oversion to failure, as if failure was the worsed think that can happen to you. IMO the only thing worse than failure is to not have tried, we learn from failure not success, success only reinforces what we know how to do. Success is infact a self fullfilling vice. On that has a limited time span and in then end leads you down a road to eventually you have no options but to fail with no way to solve the next problem as they are outside your experience base.

: "The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything." by Edward Phelps

Monday 20th December 2004

The Morning

: My it has got cold here in the UK. Today was the first morning that there was frost on car windows, and when we got into work this morning it seems that the heating system's pilot light was out and the heating was not working. About the only thing that could have made it worse was a power cut, but it seems for once there is none.

Xmas Shopping

: Over the weekend Jessie and myself joined the xmas push and shove to buy the last of the pressies we need. Strangely it was not as busy as last year many the news is right and people are not buying as much as they have in the past. There does seem to be a doom around that the moment as if people are hoping it will not get worse.

Roleplaying and Rail Roading

: In Roleplaying there is a weird dycotemy between the referees need to RailRoad the party so as to reduce the game space and the need for the players to believe that there character have free will and infinite freedom of movement in the game world. Part of the solution that some games use to help with this is the experience or character growth system. In most famous system [DnD] the XPs system encourages the players to act as immoral and unfeeling monsters themselves in the continues and never ending hunt of more XPs so that character progression continues. Little thought was placed into it's design to model the fact that in reality people with the weaponsin the end are not the most powerful member of society, the can seem like in a childish way but it is always those with charm and deep strategic planing that win out in the end. It is as if the designers and may be the lovers of these games wish it to be otherwise, may be to step outside the real world constrants that we live in. The really strange thing is that if you bring up this point most lovers of these games parrot the mantra "That the referee can give XPs for other things", but in reality this never happends because referees that like these games do not give out XPs for other actions. So in fact the system RailRoad the players into always winning a encounter using there combat skills as this is the most efficent use of the character.

: Back to RailRoading one of the secrets is for the characters to have a share goal one that they willing partisipate in, if they are not willingly involved in it them they are like the dog that want to go another way on a walk, continuesly draging the owner away from the direction the owner wants to go. You have to ask if it is the dog or the owner that want to go in the wrong direction. The players unlike the dog and decide not to play. This is one of the things that is missed, if you do not entertain your players they don't have to walk in the direction that you are going, and at some stage they just might not play at all.

Software Costing

: [Joel on Software] is aways an intresting read but sometime his articals are wonderful. His latest on how much to charge form your software sums it up nicely: [Camels and Rubber Duckies]. Well worth the read.

DnD35e without Classes and Levels

: It seams that some one has written a d20 compatable system for use without all that level stuff: [Buy The Number], after a quick look though it is not bad. I though of doing something similiar a while ago, probly everyone does, but borked at the effort need to do it. I am think that I could easly allow StandardAdventures to us it if the players wanted to.

Friday 17th December 2004

: The record of [last nights] game session. I was worried that it was a bit slow but the players had fun. Thinking about it today it strikes me how much more I like refereeing than playing. I needed a rest from it for a while but some how it seams more intresting to me to run the game. I am not sure about how much longer I can stand the [DnD] system for, may be I should have used JanusRPG?

: On RPGCreateMaillist there has been a discussion of ther last few days about XP systems. I have tried several in the last few years and I have to say that the one that I think works the best is to reward players with points for attually playing. IE for each hour of gaming that moves the plot forward they get a point. If they don't turn up or interact then they get no points. I have given bonus points if a player has not been there and there character has had to be used in a session but only one for the session and I do give them out when a major goal is acheived. It seams to me that the whole point of a game is the reward that it gives to a player, if the player want to spend this rewards on his character he can. They are a kind of Meta Game reward. It then follows that these rewards could be transfered from game to game. What is intresting is that a lot of gamers are tied to the [DnD] method of giving XPs for defeating a monster. I have heard many say "but the system does not force you to, you can give them out for other encounters" but raily have I seen this done in practice. In the NewGallo campaign we has Referee XPs which a referee could spend on the PCs so that there character did not become too far behind the other characters. I think that this idea should be extended, why not let any player spend there meta game points on anything that they system allows, on other characters of theres, as hero point (ie I want this to work type skill rolls). What about starting a new character with a better level etc.

: We are off to the pub for our dept meeting today, it was a bit quiet today. I wonder if the new landlord has it in him to last in the business long.

: I have been thinking about NeuralNets in the last few days and I am wondering if I can create a Internet Distrubuted application to do a simulations of a large network. It might be fund to see how big a network we could build and how quickly it could learn to do something intresting. Most real life networks are split up into losely interconnected processing modules. It seams that this is a good match for how an inter-network of neural network nodes could be built. Building the network module would not be complex, coming up with an idea that would get people motivated to join in is the hard bit I think.

: I noticed that LKCL has released his Samba Code to the public domain. I wondered under what open source licence he has used, I hope not GPL as that does limitied it abit. Not that I have anything against GPL but it is abit weird that a licence that is meant to increase open source as a side effect tends to built its own world which your code becomes locked into.

Tuesday 6th July 2004

Page Oragami at IPA

: I am attempting to create a new N'up Imposition system for IPA and have been folding paper and looking at the results for the last few days. It has cross my mind, 'Is there an algorithm to work out the pages, for any sequence of folds or cuts'?

New OS?

: I have been thinking about a hobby OS for the last few months. There are several problems with current designs that have iritated me to say enough is enough. More when I have got something to show.

Aeonworx GPL

: One of the companies that I was working on before we gave it all up, has released it's code which Jeff wrote, see: Aeonworx's Unity. Unity is a COM+ based e-commerce package designed for creating enterprise level ecommerce websites.