Transformers: Dark of the Moon <= 15 Words

Breathtaking, balletic action... but everything else is utter gibberish, seemingly treating you with contempt.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping...

...would make significantly more noise than I have on this blog, as of late.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that I don't actually have the internet in my new flat yet, and won't for another 9 days. Bloody Virgin Media. Serves me right for not going with media which has a bit more experience, I suppose. I'm writing this at work, which is something I really don't like to do, but it's very much the end of the day and I'm in late because I started late. I figure: a quick post can't hurt.

Another reason is that my life has been incredibly complicated for the last couple of weeks. I have been bounced around all over the place. I also missed a flight, an expensive mistake I may devote a blog entry to at some point, now that my (partially self directed) rage has subsided, since it has some comedy value.

More importantly: my paternal grandmother died. There's really no way to sugar coat that fact. To head off inevitable questions:

Yes, we were close. In point of fact she basically raised me. I probably loved her more than anyone else in the entire world. I was also her only grandchild.

Yes, I am okay. I will be okay. I knew that day was coming. She had been ill in one form or another for basically my entire life and the years were being increasingly unkind.

No, that did not make it any easier. I cried for more or less the entire funeral, and I have no qualms (zero!) about broadcasting that fact over the internet. I was very glad to have my family and some close friends who knew my Nan there with me.

It is not my intention for this post to be macabre, though. For one thing my grandmother would not have wanted that. I mainly wanted to just check-in and indicate that this blog is still around, and more posts will be forthcoming. Especially now that: a) I have my computer back, and b) Shamus Young and Michael Goodfellow are making significantly more progress than I on their procedural generation projects. I am jealous of this.

I'll be back with more to say soon. Future topics of conversation will include: why I hate RyanAir, donuts, and dog food. Yes, dog food.

RIP Cath / Kath Johnson*

* Funny story about my Nan: no one is 100% sure of what her first name actually was.

Tekken <= 15 Words

I swear Luke Goss was never this awesome back in the day. Tekken? It's okay.

The Green Hornet <= 15 Words

Some films are exactly the sum of their parts. This is one of those times.

For Boobs, Mikael?

Warning: this post contains a picture which includes boobs. Be prepared for that. If your manager is looking over your shoulder, don't click; or at least have an excuse ready. If you're offended by the sight of boobs... well... I'm sorry. But I probably don't know how to talk to you in that case, anyway. Lastly: if you're American, you're not supposed to see this, for some reason.

Please, use your desecration. Oh yes, and think of the children. But not while looking at the boobs. That would be strange.

Anyway.

Ready?

It's the new teaser poster for David Fincher's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's fantastic The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

Note: I've nabbed this picture from WikiPedia. It's small so that it counts as fair use (apparently). If you click it, you'll be taken to the films official website, where you can see a bigger version, though you might have to pinky swear that you're old enough to see it. The site also has the teaser trailer, but I'll get to that.

Update: It seems they've taken it off the official site. You can find it at the Total Film website here.

I like this poster quite a bit, though I am slightly confused as to whether the tag line is supposed to be:

Evil shall with evil be expelled.

Which kind of feels as though it needs a comma to me (though I'm not 100% certain where), or:

Evil shall be expelled with evil.

Which perhaps scans slightly better, but is definitely not how you would normally reads words written in that arrangement. In some ways I think I prefer the slightly more archaic feel of the first one.

Update 2: The version of the trailer on the official site has been updated. It's definitely the first one.

I outright love the book this is based on (and was confused as all hell when Dougal didn't). I did really enjoyed the original Swedish adaptation, but I have high hopes for any David Fincher film and this is no exception. I'm not thinking of it as a remake, more a reinterpretation.

I think Daniel Craig is really good casting for Mikael Blomkvist, and I'm pretty impressed with the way Rooney Mara is looking as Lisbeth Salander. In the books, at least, the point is made that Lisbeth would be incredibly attractive if she wasn't far, far too thin. Mission accomplished. I can't wait to hear them speaking, though it is going to be strange without the Swedish accent. Craig is uniformly fantastic, and Mara definitely held her own, and even stood out, in The Social Network.

What was also released recently was the teaser trailer, which looks a little bit like this:

This is definitely a trailer for people who've read the book, I think. I saw it in the cinema with X-Men First Class, and the guy sat next to me had a fairly strong negative reaction of the "what the hell was that?" variety. To me, though, it looks great. Fincher's artistry is legendary and I think this film is going to have a lot of impact. It's going to be dark, and very difficult to watch in places. This is a story about incredibly complex and compelling characters. This does not mean that they are nice people, and their story is a difficult one. If I had to pick a word to describe what I think this film will be like, it would be: uncompromising.

I look forward to taking my double espresso with a teaspoon of milk this Christmas, even if I do feel as though I need to take a bath afterwards.

Full Nerd II: Nerd Harder

It seems that people really enjoyed my post about the computer history museum. At the time I wrote it, I was worried that it might constitute just a little bit too much nerd, so I held back on my initial impulse to put in more pictures and gush enthusiastically about how awesome it all was.

With hindsight, perhaps I can afford to ignore that particular mental stopcock, at least for a little while. I do not, I regret to tell you, have anymore pictures of the teapot. I do intend to buy myself a Melitta teapot at some point quite soon, however, so that it may sit in my flat and act as a most nerdy in-joke.

"Tea, anyone?"

"Yes, please."

Pause.

"Why are you grinning like that?"

I do, however, have pictures of many other fun things. Let's start with a reference to my current employer:

This is one of the original Google server racks. At one point, if you typed a query into the Google homepage, this is where the magic happened. If you have any familiarity at all with how servers usually look, you might be scratching your heading and thinking that this one does not look entirely right. Let me help you with that:

Yes, you can see all of the components. No, that is not normal. Yes, each individual server would normally have its own case. No, under normal circumstances sheets of cardboard would not be used as the insulation between motherboard and shelf. Yes, that is an awful lot of servers to fit into a single rack. Yes again, that would require very good air circulation, but you'll have a bloody difficult time finding a case that gives better circulation than no case at all. No, you would not expect a server to bow in the middle like that...

Two things the early Google was known for: providing the best search results; and being very, very frugal when it came to equipment purchasing.

Let's talk about something a bit more fundamental, though. Hard disks, for example. The one in the computer I'm writing this on has a capacity of around 120 GB (depending on how you measure a giga byte, but that's a different story). Wikipedia tells me that is measures around 69.85 mm × 15 mm × 100 mm, so quite small. This is also a hard drive:

Assuming I haven't gotten mixed up here somewhere, this is the worlds first hard disk, and is made up of 50 24" disks, holding a grand total of 5 million characters. Now, if  each of those characters is a one byte ASCII character (or similar) that's approximately 5 MB, or 0.005 GB. Quite the difference in storage density, no?

Here's a (slightly) more recent example of a hard disk, one which I'm told is actually still in use to some extent:

Now, if my understanding is correct, this next piece looks like a hard drive, but is much closer in function to RAM:

What's particularly neat is that it's based on an original design by the regrettably late, extremely great, and utterly brilliant Alan Turing.

The museum has an entire section devoted to the evolution of storage, and it's quite fascinating. Another of the forebears of modern RAM is magnetic core memory, which looks like this:

Now that's quite cool, but I'd say that it's also quite pleasing to the eye. I think I'd happily frame that, mount it, and have it hanging from the wall in my flat (somewhere close to the teapot). People walk through castles and talk in hushed tones of all the many things "these stones" have seen. All of the stories they might tell, if they could only speak. But this... unlike your average rock, this is unquestionably memory, and memory which lived through very exciting times in the development of our society. Here's something I look at and wonder what stories it might be able to tell, and what stories it has been forced to forget.

There are many things at the Computer History Museum which are very cool and certainly raise a smile (as well as an appreciative thought as to how far things have come). There are also things which just plain stop you in your tracks; the Difference Engine, for example. Well, at the risk of repeating myself, I'm going to post another picture of it, this time from the other side, so you can see a little bit more of the mechanism:

Now there's a thing I would really and truly love to have in my flat. Ideally in a more coffee table friendly size, of course.

A Different Kind of Tourism

If a person were to walk from downtown Mountain View (in so far as Mountain View has a town to be down of) to the Computer History Museum, and then kept going, they might find themselves wandering into Shoreline Business Park. This is where you would find the silicon in this part of the valley.

Of course, there isn't actually a lot of touristing to do in your average industrial park. We're in Silicon Valley here, though, surely there must be something to see? Well... there are signs for reasonably exciting tech companies, with logos and everything... for example:



Here's a fun one. 23 and Me is either a very cool company, or an utterly terrifying one, depending on your point of view. The basic idea is that you send them some of your spit (and some money). They use this to do some basic DNA profiling and tell you about your genetic predisposition towards certain diseases, your genetic predisposition to certain drugs, and a limited amount regarding your actual genetic ancestry. This all comes wrapped up in a neat web interface which updates as new discoveries are made. I'm generally of the the view that this is pretty cool.

Further in we find even more companies, at least one of which you might have even heard of:

LinkedIn is basically a professional version Facebook. Sort of a fancy online business card holder, networking centre, recruitment system and industry conference all rolled into one. As such, it allows you to show your respectable side to your business contacts, whilst still being able to display that photo set proving that you can get your entire fist in your mouth to your friends. It can be quite useful, but more on that in a moment. I had no idea who the other companies on the sign are, and have not, as yet, felt too much of a need to enlighten myself.

There is, of course, another tech company with a fairly large presence in this business park, but I can't for the life of me remember their name. Oh, wait, yes. I remember:

When in doubt, follow the street signs. While I'm sure it is helpful to have signs pointing to stuff (other examples in this estate include "movies" and "amphitheatre") hanging above the road, making them indistinguishable from street signs is bloody confusing, in my opinion.

Google is, of course, the whole reason I'm in this town, and in fact in this country for these two weeks. For the record, I was recruited via LinkedIn, so it definitely does have it's uses. One of the reasons for this wander was to get a general idea of the lay of the land surrounding the Googleplex. My overall opinion: it's big. Luckily, the Google bikes were very much in evidence:

Often being found looking slightly forlorn in the strangest places. I'm fairly sure the local teens play a bit of cat and mouse with security guards and joyride around the park on them at weekends. This one was close to one of the volleyball courts:



There actually is a reasonable amount to see, wandering around the campus. Google really does live up to a lot of its hype. One of the more famous landmarks of the campus was actually bloody difficult to find, though. It took a serious amount of detective work, comparing photos from the web to views from Google Maps, but I finally tracked down the "Android Lawn":









As it turned out, if I'd just stood up and looked over my right shoulder from the place I was performing all of this furious Googling, I probably would have just spotted the damn thing. Such is life. Strangely enough, I was feeling a little hungry at this point, so I headed home.

Finally, it is important to note that while all of this touristing around is fun, and Google is a fuzzy and well meaning company, you should never forget that these are serious guys, doing a serious job. One most always strive to live up to the standard set by those who come before you, and always act in a professional and responsible manner when surrounded by such a high caliber of people.

Seriousness. Responsibility. Decorum.



That is all.

X-Men First Class <= 15 Words

A decent story, but lacks coherence and subtlety, plus is kind of a B movie.

The Process and the Platform

The effort required to actually publish that last post was... considerable. Several factors contributed to this:

• I have slow internet access at my hotel;


• Currently, my only (full) computer is my work laptop;


• This doesn't have iPhoto installed (this is mostly for reasons of simplicity, I'd probably get it if I asked).

In the end, I wrote the text of the post in Evernote on my iPad (using an external keyboard), since I'm supposed to install an absolute minimum of third party software on the laptop. Next, I did a copy paste into BlogPress, a blogging app which lets you insert images inline. In theory the official WordPress app also does this, except that the upload always fails for me. As you may have gathered, I inserted the images here. This also rescales them, so you don't need to upload all 12 megapixels. Next, I uploaded it to my actual blog as a draft, and used the web interface to fix any formatting errors and add any extra formatting, since BlogPress doesn't allow bold or italic text (that I've found). That done, I hit the publish button, and: presto!

Needless to say, this is not an ideal workflow. I like using Evernote for writing the actual text (on both iPad and Mac) because it has about the right amount of functionality and it backs everything up and synchronises it between all of my devices. I like having that always available record which I can look back over and search as I see fit. I also like being able to drop one device, pick up another and keep working on the same document more or less seamlessly.

Digression: I also like that I can use it as a permanent record of my notes. Before I moved down to London I was part way through scanning my notebooks from my PhD into Evernote. Evernote runs OCR on the images, finds the text (when my handwriting makes this feasible) and make it searchable. Brilliant. It's like being able to carry all of my old note books around with me, all of the time.

What Evernote doesn't allow you to do is freely mix text and images, however. The WordPress interface does (obviously), but that leaves me with the problem of uploading the images. This is where the low bandwidth and lack of iPhoto were became problems. I suspect the cleanest workflow would be to immediately upload an album to Flickr (or other photo sharing site) and then use the appropriate URL to include the image in the blog post. Searching through the iPhoto library manually sure as hell isn't ideal, and that's the only real option for doing it image by image in the web interface.

The most pleasant experience I've had for putting together blog posts with both text and pictures was actually iWeb, and by a metric mile. iWeb uses the built in OSX controls and lets you select images according to meta-data and what they look like, rather than their file name, as though you were working with a file system specifically designed for serving you images. The iPad does more or less the same thing, in fact, so that part wasn't actually too bad. Using iWeb leaves you with very limited options for your blog, however. It's made me think I should look at using a dedicated program, such as MarsEdit, for writing my posts, or at least for the final stages.

Ideally, I need to find a decent workflow, which doesn't break down when I'm away from home and likely to actually have semi interesting things to blog about, but doesn't restrict me when I am at home. Ideally, it should allow me to jump between different machines with a minimum of effort, and not require me  to always add the final touches from the same machine. The workflow should also not break down when no internet connection is available. Text is fairly easy. Images make things more difficult, especially if the images were recorded using my own camera.

Lastly, I'm giving some consideration to porting this blog over to Blogger (only if I can transfer all of my posts and comments, however). It's not a coincidence that I now work for the company responsible for Blogger's infrastructure. Becoming more familiar with that platform can only really be a good thing for me here. Blogger also gives me a couple of options which WordPress doesn't, though. Thoughts?

...In Which I Go Full Nerd

Jet lag is a funny thing. Right now it actually seems to be working in my favour; it's managed to knock a couple of bad habits out of me. Specifically, these happen to be the not entirely unrelated habits of going to bed too late (then making it later by reading for a good long while) and getting up too late. Right now I seem to be fighting to keep my eyes open by around nine, and then being wide awake by seven. Which is more or less the position I found myself in on Sunday. Since day one at Google camp was a couple of days away I thought I'd check out my immediate surroundings.

This may come as a bit of a surprise to you, but there isn't actually a lot to do in Mountain View. One of the things there is to do, however, is the computer history museum, which I'd been told is exactly as awesome as it sounds. In case my meaning isn't clear: really awesome. There is no sarcasm here. Look at my face. Awesome. This is not my sarcastic face. Awesome. Face. Awesome.

I have a rental car, but the brakes scare the shit out of me, and the place didn't look too far away, so I decided to walk. Now, I'd been warned that no one walks in America, but I wasn't quite prepared for it to be true. I must have walked 5 miles on Sunday and saw a grand total of perhaps 3 other pedestrians, and found that drivers looked at me as though I was a crazy person. I think perhaps one reason for this might be that the pavements (or sidewalks, if you like) are... well... shit. Anytime you have a height difference of more than an inch between two slabs... that's bad.

Slightly thankful that there were no other pedestrians to see me trip, I arrived at the building in question. Externally, it's kind of neat. You might mistake it for the headquarters of some hip new tech startup. If it wasn't for the big sign saying "Computer history Museum" outside, obviously. Inside, though, it reminded me quite of bit of the Science Museum ("which science museum?" "The Science Museum"). It's nowhere near as grandiose, and has a much narrower focus, but the comparison feels apt.

The scope of the exhibits is quite impressive, starting with slide rules and abaci, moving though Babbage (oh, I'll come back to Babbage), on to Turing and right up to the present day. Here are a couple of examples of things which made me smile:

The Altair 8800, quite an important machine in the history of Microsoft, of which the fictionalised version of Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley says "I never had any problem with the Altair... until I tried to use it."

You know what's better than that, though? A computer made out of wood. If you bought an Apple I you received a box of parts and some schematics. You hade to supply the case yourself. You know what else is awesome? UNIX is awesome:

You see? There's a badge and everything. What says awesome more than a badge? Oh wait, I know:

Oh yeah. That's right. I bet you wish you were cool enough to have that licence plate. As a side note: I wonder if anyone does have that licence plate, since I assume this one isn't real. Furthermore: what kind of car would you put that on? This is fodder for Pimp My Ride right here. They should get on that ("Yo, we heard you like UNIX...").

There was a lot more at the museum. Too much, in fact. I arrived about an hour after it opened and literally left as they locked the door behind me. I probably skipped about half of the section on the internet, and only had time for a brief look at the exhibit on the history of computer chess. Did I mention that they have half of Deep Blue? They also have something else very, very cool, and that's one of the two Babbage Difference Engines which we only very recently developed the capability to actually build:

You really can't do justice to this thing in a photograph. It's beautiful. A marvel of engineering, it actually works exactly as Babbage said it would, and he built it entirely on paper. In 1849. Somebody should build an Analytical Engine. That, my friends, would truly be something.

One last thing:

I think this might be THE teapot.

Update: Someone is building an analytical engine!

Another update: there is a follow up post here.

This Morning.

You're going to have to wait a little while longer for the Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley Wandering and San Francisco based updates I had in mind, since I still haven't found a good way of adding the images I wanted to. In the meantime, I thought I'd tell you about my morning, in a similar (if significantly smaller in scope) fashion to Tim Bray's semi-famous post.

Now, Google is very transparent internally, but also has fairly strict rules about what you can and can't talk to people about, regardless of whether you're talking to your friends, your family, random people on the street, or potentially random people on the information super highway (that's you). I haven't entirely gotten my head around them yet, so I'm limiting myself to things you could find out by yourself, either via the internet, by wandering around in the general vicinity of a Google office, or being invited in as a lunch guest. This latter option is not too uncommon; it's actually something we're encouraged to do (up to a point).

Be that as it may, this morning I drove in to the campus*, and parked in a nice easy space a reasonable distance from the building. I'm not entirely used to driving on the right wrong side of the road and I'm not going to take any chances, so I was looking for a space with no other cars around. Someone had left one of the Google bikes next to where I parked, so I jumped on, rode straight past the the building my class was due to be in (I'm here for training) and headed over to one I knew had a cafe which served a decent breakfast.

Side note: the Google bikes are distinctive in many fashions, one of which is that they lack brakes. This is good knowledge to have, and personally I would have liked to have found out when I was a little further away from the speed bump. Now you know. You're welcome.

I stood the bike up near the door, next to a pack of its siblings, and badged my way into the building. The breakfast did not dispoint, and I actually broke down and grabbed a smallish portion of the french toast /crispy bacon / maple syrup combo which always tests my willpower (but thankfully doesn't seem to be an option at the London office). It was, on the whole, a very good breakfast. It does, however, leave me with a bit of a dilema: do I return to this cafe tomorrow, or try a different one?

As I was leaving, a girl walked her bike into the cafe and propped it up while she filled a takeaway container with yummy, yummy breakfast food. Then, as I was gabbing a coffee before my class, a guy wandered past with his St. Bernard. Google is a very different kind of a workplace, that's for sure. Did I mention the building my classes were in yesterday has a four lane bowling allay and a dance studio?

After that, I...

REDACTED

...all of which was very interesting. In all seriousness, though: I'm getting a lot out of this trip.

A brief update

Most people can definitively trace at least one or two traits directly back to one of their parents. In my case I can definitely lay the blame for two at the feet of my father:

1. I know the rules of cricket inside out;


2. Walking right across town doesn't faze me in the slightest.

The first isn't really important right now (unless you need to know the specifics of the leg before wicket rule STAT), while the second is the result of a father who likes to walk. A lot. In fact many of my childhood holidays consisted of a series of walks across various British cities, often culled from the pages of an impressively large (and impressively modular) Reader's Digest walkers guide... to British cities.

Thus, for the past two days I eschewed the use of my rental car and went wandering. Yesterday (that's Sunday) I wandered around Mountain View itself and today I took a train to San Francisco and did the same thing there. I want to tell you about it. I plan to tell you about it. SOme of it is actually worth telling you about. But I want to throw some of the pictures I took into the mix, and right now I don't have a good way of doing that. The Google provided free WiFi which covers the entire of Mountain View is very useful indeed, but it's not super fast and thus not ideal for uploading a bunch of pictures.

Tomorrow I'm heading into the office for day one of my Google training (I'm told there's some awesome Kool-Aid, so I'm looking forward to trying that) and I think I may have access to a slightly better connection there (just a hunch), so I'll see what I can do.

Fourteen Days in the Valley

I can see the mountains, but I suppose that's only to be expected. I am in Mountain View, after all.

As of today, I'm in Silicon Valley for my "noogler training," something which most companies would just refer to as an induction. At Google, though, there's a bit more too it than that. There are a lot of tools and technologies to to learn, because so much of what we use is built in house, and there is a lot of culture to adapt to, because most companies don't function the way google functions. Hence, all new hires get shipped over to the mothership, partly to centralise all of this learning, and partly (I suspect) because the Googleplex is really, really cool. I've been told I must try all of the cafes and slides.

The flight over was truly awful. It felt like crossing the Atlantic in the jet plane equivalent of a council tower block. My entertainment system was broken, so I had to relay on what I had with me. Fortunately, I had prepared for this eventuality and loaded my iPad up with some films and TV shows, and the iPad has a much nicer screen, anyway. What I wasn't prepared for, though, was how shit the cabin crew were going to be. I must have pushed the call button thirty times during the flight and they did not respond once. I always had to flag someone down or walk to the galley. Before you ask: it did occur to me that maybe my call button was malfunctioning, but no the crew confirmed that it was working. Perhaps, then, they were busy? Some of the time yes, I'm sure, but I also watched them standing around chatting as I pushed the button. Not cool, British Airways, not cool.

Speaking of happier things, I arrived in San Francisco and proceeded to the hire car stan to be greeted with a huge queue. I don't want to oversell how long the queue was, but some of these people had tents. A moment realisation dawned, though: since I work for Google I automatically have Hertz #1 Gold status, so I walked straight passed that queue to the garage... and proceeded to wait in a shorter queue. Still, I call that a win.

As of right now I'm sitting in my very pleasant hotel room trying to decide what to do for a couple of hours before I can legitimately go to sleep. Aside from getting dinner, of course. That's the next problem. I'm probably a little strung out right now, so if this post reads a little incoherent, let's just go ahead and assume that's the reason why, m'kay?

Tomorrow I'm going to go for a bit of an explore. I'll let you know if I find anything exciting. Stay classy.

What's the Downside?

I'm reading a Peter F Hamilton book right now. His work isn't perfect, but I like it. He achieves a fairly staggering level of scale, whilst corralling a considerable number of characters who are worth your time* and develop naturally, if exceptionally. His books are, however, frikkin' gigantic. This one is 725 pages long, and is shorter than a lot of his other work. It's not ideal for reading on journeys, and you wouldn't want to pack more than one of them for a long trip. It's also not like PFH is the only long winded author I read. See also Robyn Hobb, Neal Stephenson and Brandon Sanderson. I don't only read huge Sci-Fi/Fantasy epics, but I do often read them.

Additionally, I have stacks and stacks of books, even taking into account that I divested myself of a lot before leaving Edinburgh. When I move into my new flat**, I'm not sure I'm going to have space for them. If I could stop that collection growing too much, that would be ideal, but I have no plans to stop reading or buying new reading material.

On the surface, to me at least, the ideal solution to this would be a kindle (or, I suppose, some other eBook reader). All of a sudden, Pandora's Star is now the same Size as Cat's Cradle. Crytonomicon is the same size as Memoirs of a Geisha. Plus, it doesn't matter how far I'm traveling or how little space I have, i can basically pack as many books as I'd like. Likewise, the book collections would not (physically) expand in size.

But what about the books I have already? Do I just keep them, rammed onto the shelf space I have? Do I instead charity shop*** them? Do I replace / duplicate some or all of them with the eBook version? There's no ideal solution here.

The publisher is never going to give you the eBook just because because you own the paper copy, and likewise I suspect the majority of people of aren't going to want to pay full price for an eBook they already own. Plus, books are not quite so easy to format shift as CDs.

So, here's what I propose: you take your book to a shop and pay them a nominal fee (say £1). They then give you the eBook version of your book, in the format of your choice. The book itself gets recycled. The shop and the publisher then split both the cash and the revenue from the recycling. You've format shifted your book, with only a small outlay. The publisher has benefited from this transaction. No new copies of the book have been magicked into existence (also good for the publisher). Lastly, raw material for recycled paper has been obtained. What's the downside?

* Well, he  does now, anyway. Much as I loved the Night's Dawn trilogy, Joshua was way more interesting than either the sum or the product of the rest of the characters.

** Which is in Clapham, for those of you who are playing at home. The Richmond flat was gorgeous, but size / price ratio was just too small.

*** I see no reason not to use that as a verb.

Relocation Relocation Relocation

As part of my pretty sweet relocation package from Google, I have the help of a "flat search consultant". If you've ever watched Location Location Location or A Place in the Sun, you'll more or less know what this is. If not: why not?

I have a couple of friends in the Kingston area (and several others in South London as a whole), and now work in Victoria, so my plan was quite scientific: throw darts at a map.

Not really. I basically drew a line between between these two areas and declared that I wanted to live somewhere along it. Furthermore, this place should neither be shit, not overlay expensive. In particular I thought Richmond looked like a very cool place to live, and seemed to be in reach of many of the places I wanted to go. That said, it has the potential to be a bit of a slog into the centre, and unfortunately it's quite expensive. Thus, my flat search consultant wanted me to look at a couple of other places.

We started in Richmond and straight away viewed a really nice flat, which set the bar a little high. It already had offers, and thus I would have make a decision fast if I was interested. This is generally the case with rentals in London at the moment, though this one had a particularly short fuse. I came very close to putting in an offer, but n the end came to the conclusion that it was too small.

Next we went and had a look at the outside of a flat the agent wasn't able to show us, to get an idea of the area. I'll come back to this one. We also viewed a flat in a quite cool art deco development, which was a bit crap on the inside. Single glazing and on a main road? I think not...

After this we checked out a slightly dingy  flat which was essentially in the landlord's basement. I don't, quite frankly, want to feel quite that much like a tenant. This was the last spot in Richmond, so it was on to Clapham, via a fairly spectacular drive through Richmond Park.

The first flat in Clapham was amazing. Really big, nicely finished and in a decent area, if a little ways off the main drag. This was probably my favourite from the entire day. I'm not sure how I feel about the location. Transport wise it's very cool, and you can get just about anywhere from it, but... I don't know. You know?

Next we viewed a couple of really nice new builds in an utterly unspectacular area of Battersea. Nice price (for London!), nice size, nice big garden (in one case), nice finish (aside from the one wonky switch in one of the kitchens, so that flat was out). But... right on a busy main road, in part of Battersea which seems to mostly be a place people pass through when going to other places? No. Well... probably not.

Lastly was had a look at a mansion flat in a gorgeous building... but that's about all it had going for it. If you gutted it, it could become something spectacular, but work would be required.

On the whole, non of the flats I saw were utterly terrible, and all of them will get rented. This is definitely a seller's market. We're going to go back to the Richmond flat we couldn't see today, because the pictures look great, then it'll be a straight choice between it and the Clapham flat. Perhaps there'll also be a couple more viewings. We'll see. Tomorrow, a choice must be made, otherwise I have nowhere to live after I get back from Mountain View. No pressure!

In other news, I stopped by the office to finish of a last bit of admin, and then attend my first ever Google meeting, which also included participants from Mountain View and Dublin. I'm starting to understanding things more, which is good, because I have an absolute ton of stuff to learn. I also briefly petted a very cute West Island terrier, which either belongs to one of my colleagues, or IS one of my colleagues.

Day One

This is going to be short. Suffice to say: almost everything you've heard about working for Google is true. That being the case, there is no slide in my office. I'm told they have them in Mountain View and Zurich, however, and I'll apparently be visiting both this year (Mountain View next week!).

The food / restaurants / kitchens are awesome in a "we've thought of everything you need" kind of way. The people are really nice, but also intimidatingly smart. For a tech firm, a lot of them are girls as well, which makes for a more balanced working environment.

On the whole it was a good first day, though mostly consisting of administration. I'm itching to get into the code!

s/@seebyte\.com/@google\.com/g

Yes. That's right. I did it. I used a sed expression as post title.

I've been very quiet as of late, though in my defence I've been very busy for a few months. In the middle of that I had a potentially life changing decision to make, and then I was dealing with the ramifications of the choice I made.

As you may have gathered from the post title (even if it mostly looks like crazy speak to you), the choice was whether I should accept a job at Google or not. Believe it or not, it was a choice, and a fairly hard one. There are various reasons for this. I'm not going to go into all of them, though I will go into some, but let's start with a little bit of background.

It started with the receipt of a LinkedIn message with the subject "Hello from Google." and ended with me standing in a car park being offered a very good job. Regarding what happened in between: the Google interview process is lengthy and pretty hardcore. Reputedly the most hardcore in the entire of the tech industry. But having a gruelling four and a half hour viva a little over a week before your main interview can make it seem like a walk in the park, albeit a mentally tiring one.

So then I was left with a choice. I could stay at my good job at a small but growing company with a lot of potential, at which I knew I had some prospects. I'd still be working in an industry which I know, and which to some extent knows me. I'd stay in a city I love (and have loved since the moment I set eyes upon it ten years ago), surrounded by a wonderful group of friends.

Alternatively I could accept an incredible opportunity to work at one of the most exciting companies in the world, which is famous for treating it's employees incredibly well, and has projects which excite me more than I can adequately express in words. But I'd be changing industries and I good portion of my existing knowledge might be useless (or more useless, as the case may be). I'd have to move to London, a city I like but don't know that well, and feel slightly intimidated by. As luck would have it, though, I do have a group of close friends living in London, who are also awesome.

It was a very hard choice, and it came down to a couple of things:

• A former colleague put it to me that if I turned this offer down I'd hate myself for it every time I had a bad day (or spent a year putting my life on hold for a field trip which was consistently two weeks away from happening);


• Another colleague suggested that I would be swallowed up by Google. A tiny cog in a huge machine. Which is potentially true... and a little scary. But... the other analogy people use here is "small fish in a big pond." There's a distinction to be made: fish grow, cogs don't. Unless you put yourself in a bigger pond, you'll never find out if you have the potential to get any bigger.


• It would be nice to not work for the oil companies and the military. Not necessarily because either party is evil, but because of the shear amount of red tape involved.


• I'd been feeling as though I'd been stuck in a rut for a while, and really wanted to shake things up somehow.


• It's frickin' GOOGLE!

So. Here I am. In London. Staying in wicked temporary accommodation. Tomorrow is my first day at my shiny new Google job, and right now I should really go to bed!

PS More updates coming soon I swear, though it may be a month before I can get back to my Clockwork Aphid project, for logistical reasons.

Fast Five <= 15 Words

The Fast and the Furious + Ocean's Eleven + Predator (* The Rock!) = Fast Five

Thor <= 15 Words

Awesome film. Probably a good idea to keep hammers away from me for a while...

Sucker Punch <= 15 Words

Doesn't hide the seems so well... and it's very style over substance... but what style!

The Future

I'm not going to talk about this too much, really. Suffice to say: I think this is the future, in a very good way, and I'm very excited by the idea of it.

[ted id=1109]

PS I am addicted to the TED website. Addicted!

But When?!

Coming soon is all well and good, but I want to know when God damn it!

I loved (LOVED!) the last series of Doctor Who, and utterly adored the Christmas special. This is a first. Previous to Stephan Moffat taking over as show runner I enjoyed it sporadically (generally when the man Steve was the writer) and uniformly hated all of the Christmas Specials. Last season was different, though, and hit just about every nail square on the head. David Tennant was a tough act to follow, but Matt Smith rose to the challenge, and sold one thing in particular very, very well: The Doctor is not human. The companions were great, as well, and I'm not just saying that because I find Karen Gillen to be almost supernaturally attractive. Honest.

Final note: River Song FTW.

Features

So, in my last post I remarked that for procedurally generated landscapes to be interesting, they would need features. But what sort of features was I talking about? Population centres, in particular, tend to to be found close to certain kinds of... things. The first of these which always comes to my mind is the "defensible position." Something like, say, this:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="518" caption="Edinburgh Castle"][/caption]

A lot of the truly great cities in Europe tend to centre around castles, but you don't tend to find castles just plonked anywhere on the landscape. Edinburgh Castle is a good example because:

1. I think it looks awesome. Look at the way it seems to just grow out of the rock of those cliffs!


2. It's pretty much unassailable from every direction but one (I think I mentioned the cliffs);


3. It's on a raised vantage point with a decent line of sight to just about every direction of approach.

It's not the most castle-ey looking castle and it lacks, for instance:

1. A moat;


2. The sort of tower Rapunzel might hang out in.

But I think it makes a reasonable example here. I think this is a good rule of thumb: a castle should look good and be well situated (defensibly speaking).

Another feature which population centres tend to spring up around are harbors. They're very important for trade, thus they attract people. Wikipedia served up a reasonable example:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="527" caption="Capri harbour, Italy"][/caption]

Rule of thumb number one for a harbor: it should be at the intersection of the land and the sea, ideally. If we're playing in a fantasy sand pit this isn't actually the only option, but that's a story for another day. The nature of the coast is important as well, though. You need reasonably deep water right next to the land, but not too deep. Lastly, and just as importantly: it should provide shelter. The boats in the harbor need to be able to survive the harsh weather the sea sometimes serves up. A sheltered cove with high cliffs to each side sounds about right, no?

The last kind of feature I'm thinking of here is again something quite important to trade: the bridging point. You need to get your trade caravan across the river (or gorge) which separates the harbor and the castle (for example), thus you need to cross the bridge. The bride spans the river at a conveniently narrow point and it's the only one for miles. Thus, the bridge becomes a nexus of activity and a town springs up there. Over time the town increases in size and more bridges get built. Before you know it... BOOM, Florence!

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="535" caption="Ponte Veccio"][/caption]

This is, of course, just the tip of the ice berg. We've not even talked about churches, cathedrals, monasteries, oases, and any number of geological features.

Another question, of course is how to go about actual generating the population centres themselves. Well, I'm going to talk more about this later, when I actually get around to talking some other people doing some procedural content related stuff, but here's a little something to wet your appetite:

Cool, no? More about procedural city generation from me later (I don't want to get too far ahead of myself), but you can read more about this project at this excellent series of blogs. Start at the beginning, and be ready to loose a good hour of your time.

Brave New Worlds

If you were writing a taxonomy of stories you might choose books as a good place to start. Flicking your way through the world's libraries, time and the Dewey Decimal System would eventually bring you to the fantasy genre. There is a lot of fantasy writing out there, and you might choose to subdivide it further. A one potential way of cutting it neatly in twain is like so:

1. Stories set in our world;


2. Stories not set in our world.

Simple. Harry Potter, for instance is set in our world. That's a big part of the appeal. Likewise so are Neverwhere, Kracken (if you like'd Neverwhere, you'll want to read this), and most of Stephen King's work. Lord of the Rings is not set in our world. Simple. There are other options, of course. What about the  Chronicles of Narnia, for example (which is set in a world beyond our own)? Or Magic Bites* (which is set in an alternate version of our world)? Clearly we're looking at some shades of grey here as well, but I'm sticking the with the original idea while it still serves my purpose.

What is my purpose here, though? Why the ramblings on this most nerdy or genres? Well, I'm thinking about procedurally generated landscapes again, you see. Clearly, if you're generating your landscape procedurally, it's going to be entirely of this world. Existing fantasy landscapes are a good place to look for ideas, then, particularly because they were designed specifically for the purpose of telling stories in.

The quintessential fantasy landscape is, of course, Tolkien's Middle Earth, which looks a lot like this:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="502" caption="Middle Earth"][/caption]

That should look vaguely familiar to anyone who's read the films or seen the books (or words to that effect). There's a definite feeling of size there. Clearly we're looking at a chunk of a continent, split into something not unlike countries. It always bothers me on maps like this, though: what about the rest of it?

There are a couple of well known knock offs of Tolkien's work out there, so why don't we consider a few of those as well? One which used to be close to my heart in my adolescent years is Games Workshop's Warhammer:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="502" caption="The Warhammer World"][/caption]

Now, it should be quite obvious that the good chaps at GW are knocking off more than just Tolkien here. The Big G / the anthropic principle (depending on your world view) could probably claim some royalties here, because the shape of some of those continents looks very familiar. Grand Cathay, indeed. Now we appear to be looking at close to an entire planet, though, unwrapped using something not unlike the good old Mercator projection (or possibly something more politically correct). I assume so, anyway. It's entirely possible that the Warhammer world is flat.

Another world with more than a bit of Tolkien about it it the World of Warcraft:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="512" caption="The World of Warcraft"][/caption]

Blizzard have taken no chances, though. This is a world you can actually go wandering about on, virtually speaking. They've made sure there aren't any inviting edges for you to go wandering off. If this isn't the entire of the world, it is at least self contained. That doesn't stop Blizzard causing new continents to pop to surface whenever they need to make new content, of course.

Okay, I'm only going to show one more, then I'll get to the actual point. This is a big one, though, so take a deep breath:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="502" caption="Westeros"][/caption]

This is also one you might be less familiar with. If you haven't already, I heartily suggest you take a look at George R R Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice" series, which starts with "A Game of Thrones," which is not coincidentally the name of the TV adaption of the books which starts on HBO quite soon. This is probably the best of the four maps I've posted here, thanks to a fairly stupid amount of detail (click on it, I dare you). This detail is evident in the books themselves (which I have to confess are not for the faint of heart) as well. This giant map actually represents only a smallish portion of the world these books are set in. It makes a good illustration though. We have mountain ranges, plains, rivers, cities, castles and so on.

If I'm going to procedurally generate a landscapes to tell stories in, they need to have at least a percentage of this amount of detail. Take "The Neck," the narrow portion of land around halfway up, for example. The fact that the land perceptively narrows here feeds heavily into the plot at several points in the books. This is a choke point which cuts the continent in half. Likewise, "The Eyrie" (*shudder*) is a fort sitting at the peak of a mountain range. Towns are in places that towns would be placed: bridging point on rivers, sheltered harbors, and so on.

The point is this: my procedurally generated landscapes will need variety, but the right kind of variety. They will need "features." That's the first major problem I'm going to need to work on once the basic engine is in place, but first I need to make a decision: should this be done top down, or bottom up? Or some combination of the two?

First, though, I need some terrain simplification and some unit tests. The unit tests I'm actually quite looking forward to doing (oddly), since I'm going to try doing them in Groovy.

PS I wanted to include the world from Brandon Sanderson's utterly spectacular "Mistborn" series here as well, but I couldn't find a good map online. These books are truly awesome, though. As well as been part of a series, each actually stands alone and completes it's own story, unlike the fast majority series in the fantasy genre. Seriously. Read them.

* Confession: I enjoyed this book, even if there is a gramatical error in the first sentence. The very first sentence.

Spicy!

What, in your opinion, qualifies something as a good advert? Answers on postcard, or alternatively in the comments section below, if you find that easier.

In the technical sense the main thing is surely that you actually end up buying the product in question. In terms of absolute results, I suspect that subtlety is probably key. If an advert manages to plant the suggestion that you want to buy something without ever making you feel advertised to, then it's likely to achieve its goals. The problem is that if a person realises this is happening then a fairly strong negative reaction might result, and they might not buy your product out of spite. For example, I'll probably never buy anything I see Derron Brown holding, just in case.

Personally, I've always liked adverts which abandon all subtlety and turn the whole thing into a joke. If your advert shows up next to my wall in Facebook then I'll probably ignore it (unless it actually looks interesting), but if makes me laugh then there's a good chance I'll try your product just for the hell of it. Boddingtons used to be one of my favourite beers (it probably still would be if I could find the stuff), but there's a good chance I'd never had tried it if it wasn't for frankly magnificent adverts like this:



There are a host of other great adverts from the Boddingtons people, but that one has always been my favourite. Years later it still makes me giggle. It's a fantastic set up, followed by at least four quality punch lines one after the other. It seems clear to me, on reflection, that I'm vulnerable to the appeal of surreal adverts. Very, very obvious and over the top seems to work as well, though, because I think the (fairly) recent run of Old Spice adverts are solid gold genius too. It all started with this one:



There really is nothing like a bit of comically over the top hard sell, is there? Happily they followed it up with more of the same:



Aside from the fact that that wasn't actually a swan dive, I think I prefer the sequel to the original. But it gets better. For a while, the "Old Spice Guy" would answer questions adressed to him via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other online sources. There are literally hundreds of these thirty second clips, but I think this particular dialogue with Alyssa Milano might be my favourite:









Now, of all the words I might have associtated with Alyssa Milano, "comedy" and "timing" probably aren't that close to the top of the list, but colour me impressed with her reply:



This is about as close to being entertainment as advertising can get, in my opinion. I would likely give Old Spice a try if I could find any near me in Edinburgh. But I can't, so 10 out of 10 for effort and creativity, Old Spice, but you kinda dropped the ball on the follow through. Unless you're reading this, of course, and you want to send me some in the post. That would be acceptable.

I'll leave you with one last highly entertaining, but also functional, clip:

The Day Job Part 2: Let's get SAUC-E!

If you know when I started my PhD you'll be aware that it took quite some time for me to finish it. There are various reasons for this. One is that I spent quite a bit of time working and getting industrial experience during it. The other is that it took me something in the region of 18 months to figure out what it was I was actually going to do. This happens quite a bit at the Ocean Systems Laboratory, you don't actually start working on a particular project or problem, you just sort of find something which seems to need doing. It also didn't help that it talk me 9 months to get any feedback on the first draft of my thesis. One of the major things which took up my time, though, was the Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge - Europe, or SAUC-E for short.

This post is going to focus on my own part in the proceedings, but you should assume that everyone else on the teams worked at least as hard as I did, and their contribution was at least as important as my own. This is my blog, though, so I'll mainly be talking about me.

Basically, teams of students build an underwater robot which then has to complete an obstacle course. Let me stress: it is not in any way like Robot Wars, so you can abandon that notion right now. The crucial word here is autonomous, as in you have no contact with the vehicle after you push go; it all has to run on autopilot. The first competition was just ramping up when I joined the OSL and I offered to go along to the site and help out. The fact that it was held at Pinewood Studios (which is a movie studio, not a furniture store) was no small bonus (I've wandered about on the sets for Casino Royale and Stardust), but the competition itself was also very cool indeed. I leapt at the chance to be part of the team for the second year of the competition, and then stared in disbelief as a technical issue nuked our chances right before the final. Up until that point we'd been leading the field by quite a margin, so finishing second to last was no fun at all.

The next year myself and one of my colleagues decided this wasn't going to happen again, so we damn near killed ourselves working sixteen hour days for a couple of months, and then we took the robot to France for SAUC-E 2008. Each year there are a number of supplementary tasks which must be completed. One is to write a paper (or "report" if you're not down with the academic lingo) about your entry, another is to produce a video diary. Our video diary for the 2008 competition does a pretty good job of showing our frustration at the previous year's result and the amount of preparation we put into it this time round:



It was a hell of a lot of work, but we got there and we damn well kicked everyones' asses. In the final we cleared the entire course on our first try. Everyone else used their entire twenty minutes of time. We used about seven. It was a good feeling. This isn't a hugely fascinating video to watch and, but here's the official video of out final run:



What you don't say in that video is me standing on a table with a microphone in my hand narrating what I think the robot is doing, then the entire team practically leaping into the air when it completed the course. Still, here's a picture of us (minus one team member who had to leave a day early) from an article in an industry journal:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Team Nessie victorious at SAUC-E 2008. Click for the article this picture is taken from."][/caption]

The next year we reworked a lot of the electronics and moved to a much more hydrodynamic external design. This was a good thing, because previously Nessie had been slow, and now the competition area was a lot bigger. The 2009 video diary sums it up:



Most of the tasks were adaptations of those from previous years, but a fairly intense new one was also introduce: dock inside an elongated box placed on the floor of the pool. None of the other teams even attempted this last task, but I'd arrived a little late to the on site practice time thanks to other commitments. Everyone had their jobs and things were running pretty well. My responsibility was the mission controller (the captain, if you want to use a ship's crew as a metaphor) and we weren't quite ready to start doing any serious tests with this yet. So I started working on a strategy to do the docking. There was plenty of grunt work for me to help out with; I did some code review and put together some mission plans, but at this point I was essentially surplus to requirements. So I messed about with the docking thing.

[caption id="attachment_469" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Nessie IV in the practice pool."][/caption]

First of all, I built a detector which could find the box from above. I'm not really a computer vision guy, but after a lot of experimentation and playing I managed to put something quite stable together. There was no space in the practice pool to actually attempt the docking itself, though. I put a behaviour together which I was pretty sure would get the vehicle into the box, but I had no reliable way of testing it. I put it to one side and got on with the serious business of the competition itself. This was held at a different location, so needless to say every algorithm needed to be re-tuned to the new environment.

One of the other teams did very well in the qualifying stages and went into the final in second place by a very narrow margin. We new what we could do, and we know what they could do. They had a much better sonar, but no cameras, so some tasks were just plain out of their reach. Even so, it was going to be close. The day of the final we got a bit of extra practice time in the morning. At this point the docking had received about ten minutes worth of practice time, and it's performance had not been what you would call "successful," exactly. I was fairly sure the last night's late night coding session had found all the bugs, though. "Fine," said the team. Give it a shot, but we don't want to waste too much of the practice time on it.

It worked first time.

"Did anyone see that?" There was a judge at other side of the pool, but no one was looking at us. We wouldn't get any points, but still, we wanted the judges to SEE it. Someone from one of the other teams saw some of it though, it seems, because they took this video:



Out supervisor came running over. "Was that autonomous?!" He demanded. Apparently one of the other judges was standing at the monitors and there was a camera inside the box. There was a little bit of a buzz.

We tried it again. It worked again. This time someone had actually put a tape in the VCR, which is nice, but I don't have that video.

The organisers were smiling, but not in a 100% friendly way. No one was actually supposed to pull off the docking this time around. But we had. There was no time to add this behaviour into the plan for our main run in the final, but this year there was a new rule: you could demonstrate the tasks individually to pick up extra points. The final, as it turned out, was not quite as close as we were worried it might be, and Team Nessie picked up another first prize.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Team Nessie victorious at SAUC-E 2009. Click for the article this picture is taken from."][/caption]

As well as the industry journal from which the above picture has been taken, the BBC paid some attention to the competition this time around, as well (which you can find here). Yep, that's me at the end of the video. They interviewed me for the article they wrote on the competition and used a lot of my quotes. I learned an important lesson from this: assume anything you say to a journalist will be taken literally, and don't assume that they'll check their facts, even if you specifically tell them to because you're not certain of your numbers. For example, the figure of £10,000 mentioned in the article is actually closer to £100,000.

Spins a Webb, any size...

Okay, so there has been a shameful lack of posts here in recent weeks, and for that I apologise. I've had some stuff going on in both my personal and professional lives, and so this blog has really been put on the back burner. I swear to you that there is more coming, though, and soon. I have a fairly large and media laden post which is mostly written, but not yet bloggified, for instance. In the mean time, how about a small diversion?

Even if you know me in real life, you might not be aware of this small fact, for which I feel no shame whatsoever:

Spider-man is my favourite fictional character.

There are various reasons for this. I love the iconography, I love the visuals, I love the character and the supporting characters. Most of all, though: I love the story, and if I have a couple of drinks in me I may wax lyrical about this at length (that's starting to make sense now, isn't it?). The previous set of films got some things right, but an awful lot wrong. Casting, for instance. I have hope for the currently in production reboot though, and just about everything I read about it or see raises this hope a little higher. Today, for instance, I saw this and it made me very happy indeed:

 



It's been enhanced in software, which is why the background looks so weird (you can find the original here), but it just looks so right. That's a picture of Peter Parker in the Spidey suit, likely having just had his ass handed to him. He's not stupidly muscled, because Spider-Man is supposed to be wiry, and furthermore: he's played by someone who acts well, looks the part and is actually capable of cracking a joke. What joy. Insert smiley face here.

While we're on the subject, the recent casting for the next Batman film makes me quite happy, as well.