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Two updates in one day shocker!

The last one was a little downcast, though, and I felt a need to pass on something awesome by way of balance. Here it is:



Perhaps you're thinking "Huh? Who's this guy?" or "What's with the cake?". You've been missing out if that's the case. Jonathan Coulton (for that is the man's name) is a computer programmer turned unlikely rock star (You scoff? He has a song in Rock Band. I'm having trouble thinking of a better benchmark), who's become something of a geek standard thanks to the somewhat unlikely nature of his subject matter (one song has Pluto's moon singing its condolences regarding its loss of planet status).

The song itself is the song over the closing credits of the game Portal, which is, quite frankly, an absolute fucking work of art. You probably know that I'm several different flavours of nerd and so JC's* stuff appeals to me on a fairly base level , but I'm not a hardcore gamer. I have above average social skills, leave the house regularly and I prefer making love to playing computer games. There. I said it, and with a completely straight face. But that game is complete genius, through and through. I think Valve do amazing work in everything they do, and the fact they got JC* to write the song for the closing credits of one of their games makes me grin from ear to ear.

Check out some more of his stuff, it might make you smile. If you do and it does, leave a comment telling me about it, because that would make me smile**.

Update: His website is here http://www.jonathancoulton.com/ And you can buy (and download for free) all his music there.

That is all.

* No, not that JC

** At the risk of me smiling so widely that the top of my head falls off.

Ferðalangur

I've been traveling around for work for the vast majority of the last month, so generally speaking I've been anything but at a loose end. Evenings were full of work or spent with the colleagues / friends I was traveling with. But now I'm back and finding that I don't know what to do with myself a lot of the time. It's giving me time to think about things, and that never ends well.

I think my PhD is in better shape than I had been supposing. I found a couple of stupid mistakes in my code today and now it actually seems to be working quite well. With a bit of tweaking of settings it might produce valid, or even impressive, output. This is good. It means I can stick to my plan to only put in eight hour days at the lab (though I might do a bit of writing up at home). An eight hour days feels pretty short just now. Thus the stress levels may reduce. I've more or less been running on stress and adrenaline/caffeine for the last few months though, so once again: time and head space to think about things.

It's making me very uncertain about a lot of things. The financial market is clearly well up shit creak, and it ate its paddle some miles back. This also coincides with a financial meltdown of my own, precipited by my funding running out and exaserbated by my purchase of a car. Yep, I reckon I'll look back on that one as a particularly retarded mistake in years to come. I've got things on a more or less stable footing now, but my long term security is... clouded... not what I'd like it to be... in a lot of respects.

I also find myself thinking about sex, love, friendship, their relationship to each other, and my relationship to each. Things I had, things I've lost, and things I want in the future. I'm not feeling quite introspective enough to textualise any of that just now, but you should probably be thankful for that.

These are indeed uncertain times.

I've also decided to try and get back into going to the gym. I've had no time for excersise in the last month and have probably been eating a little too well and it's stating to show. I went for the first time in what feels like an age last night, and, you know what, it felt pretty good. I've missed that post gym sensation of having actually done something and made my muscles (such as they are) work for a living.

I just looked out of the window. The sun is shining! Time to go out into it, I suspect!

Being Yvan Petillot

So.

There I was, sitting across from a senior manager from Thales and two Professors, one each from Cambridge and Robert Gordon's Universities, discussing the precise definition of the term “emergent behaviour”...

Wait.

No.

Rewind.

Thanks to my current uncharacteristically basy schedule, I arrived late to the Forum on Unmanned Systems and Artificial Intelligence, an event designed to facilitate a high level discussion of these areas, and create the beginnings of a coherent plan for their future. In order to do this it brought together the foremost expects in the relevant fields, from both industry and academia.

And me.

Ah. No. See, there's a serious failure in continuity and a complete lack of explanation here. I am a terrible narrator (and worse still, I'm stealing Shane Black's material). Rewind again.

Actually invited to this forum were exhibits A, B and C. Namely: Doctors Yvan Petillot (Head of the Vision and Robotics course at Heriot-Watt University and SeeByte Chief Technical Officer) and Jonathon Evans (Former Head of Research a the Ocean Systems Laboratory and SeeByte Head of Engineering), and Professor David Lane (Head of Ocean Systems Laboratory and SeeByte Chief Executive Officer and Board Chairman).

Enter stage left: Exhibit D, yon plucky PhD student and sometime SeeByte “Development Engineer”, myself. Exhibits A, B and C were unable to attend for various reasons, and so Exhibit A (that's Dr Petillot for those of you not keeping track) asked me to attend in his stead, get a feel for what was going on, and fly the respective SeeByte and OSL flags. This suggestion was redoubled by Exhibit B, but never actually discussed with Exhibit C, who's inclusion in the program suggests the organisers were in some doubt regarding his attendance, or the lack thereof. This is not unusual.

And so, a mere 12 hours after arriving back in my beloved Edinburgh, fresh from my jaunt to Iceland (which I will write about in due course, once I can trust myself not to gush too unabashedly), I caught a plane to Bristol (it has a very impressive bridge, you know) and subsequently found myself in a room surrounded by people considerably more qualified and important than I. I'll leave it to you to make a judgement as to where on the scale between “high opinion of me” and “low opinion of this forum” the exact mark which led to this eventuality lies.

But what of it? I strongly suspect that I shouldn't go into much (or indeed any) detail yet, and the detail might in fact be supremely boring to the vast majority of readers. Suffice to say that it was an interesting experience, if frustrating reminiscent of the episode of The Simpsons in which the MENSA members take control of Springfield for much of its second day.

I found Bristol quite depressing, but for the reasoning behind that you'll have to wait until I've talked about Iceland some. For context, you see.

Well... Here I am...

...In Iceland!

I wanted to come here for a long time (this is no secret), and as the result of a highly unsubtle campaign of strategic hint dropping, here I find myself. It's not under ideal circumstances, though. I'm here for work and so I'll be spending most of my time working 12 hour days, doing fiddly embedded computer programming and ridding about in boats waiting for robots to do their thing. I'm also here with my boss (or someone far higher up the chain of command than myself, at least), and though he's a really nice guy there's always going to be a significant disconnect. He's not my first choice(s)* to share this experience with. I'd rather be here with my friends. My friends are awesome, you see.

A particular subset of my awesome friends, appropriately: the Icelandic ones, have furnished me with a list of things I might like to see, do and eat while I'm here. It's not a challenge on the scale of "cook every single recipe in a recipe book", but it's a fun list all the same and one I plan on making an impression on. I've found a guide to Icelandic punctuation online and am even working up to actually asking for some of the foodstuffs on the list, rather than simply writing them down, pointing at them and smiling hopefully. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully it won't be a repeat of the Turkish "thank you" debacle**.

So far I like it here. It's pleasantly calm and quiet (except for the boy racers who just went screaming past the office). We went for Italian food last night (not my choice), but I'm hoping for something a little more geographically appropriate tonight. Perhaps I'll try puffin, it's always good to try new things. More news as I get it.

It might amuse some of you to know that I've typed this while my boss was out of the room, launching into a long explanation of... something.

More news as I get it.

* Why is there no legitimate plural for "first choice"? That's a linguistic deficiency, right there...

** It's about 20 syllables long and never elicited anything more than a blank stare from anyone we said it to.

...beside the seaside, beside the sea.

Preamble: This was actually written yesterday afternoon.

This is nice.

Today is nominally the SeeByte outing, to the watersports centre at Elie, east of Fife. Most of the crew are wetsuited up and out on the water in one way or another, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to have a bit of a wander around. The sight of a light house on a small peninsula drew me in and so here I am: sitting in the shade* of what from a distance appeared to be a derelict lookout and taking a bit of time to record my thoughts. These cheifly revolve around:

The sounds of the sea really is very calming. On another day I might have jumped at the chance to have another go at windsurfing (the last time I tried it did not end well) or get hurled into the sea at high speed from the back of a banana boat. Today I am content to wander around, look and listen. Of course it helps that this might be the most gorgeous day we've had all year. It's also very nice to be surrounded by space and alone with my thoughts for a while. Living in the city I often forget how enjoyable this can be.

I'm thinking more and more that I might find myself in America somewhere down the line.

Random aside: two extremely posh ladies of a certain age just entered the lookout. Listening to their conversation is quite enjoyable. Apparently this is a castle, not a lookout. Silly me. I should also point out that on closer inspection it turned out to be not that derelict at all, really.

Back on point: It seems I'm not geared to the dating culture here. I keep asking girls if they'd like to get a cup of coffee. Apparently this is the American way and not the British. The British way amounts more to asking “Would you like to get completely wasted, shag, get together out of shear politeness and embarrassment, and then hope for the best?” and I hate this. Really not my style. I'd prefer to start with the coffee and conversation. Perhaps I'll go to California, or Phoenix, Arizona and some other such place. 

I want my PhD done and out of the way (I have been saying this for some time now). It's crippled my chat, because I always feel that I should be thinking about it and nothing else, and especially not that my grant has stopped I'm starting to tangibly feel the stress.

But hey, the sea is so damn pretty today. I think perhaps I'll walk around the bay to the other side.

*Nope, the screen on the AA1 does not cope well with sunlight.

Epilogue: I went on the speedboat for a while.

Celtx on the Acer Aspire One

So I managed to get the Celtx screenwriting (and general preproduction) software up and running on my shiny new AA1, and in the interests of sharing the knowledge I thought I'd post how I did it. Please note, this should also work as general recipe for installing any software not available under the package manager in Linpus Light Linux (provided there are no additional dependencies).

First of all you need to download the software from the downloads page of the Celtx website, here. I'd recomend getting the straight up Linux version in your choice of language (frustratingly there is no option for British English, though). There is an Asus eee specific version, but that just clears up some dependencies and doesn't really provide you with anything extra.

First of all you'll need a terminal, so hit Alt+F2, type "terminal" (without the quotes) and hit enter. A terminal should have popped up. If you're a Linux novice, don't worry, you should just be able to copy and paste everything from this page.

Now you need to unpackage the software. I put it in /opt, because it generally seems to be a dumping ground for user installed applications (as far as I can tell). Type these in the terminal one at a time:

cd /opt

sudo tar -xf /home/user/Downloads/Celtx.tar.gz

Now, if you type "ls" you should see a directory named celtx. So far so good. Next you need to add a link so Celtx can be run from the command line, like this:

sudo ln -s /opt/celtx/celtx /usr/bin/celtx

In theory that's all you need to do. Now if you type "celtx" on the command line (or after hitting Alt+F2) the program will run. We can make it a lot easier than that, though. Next we need an icon to represent it on the desktop. There are two options here. First of all you could use an existing one. Type this:

sudo thunar /usr/share/pixmaps

A file manager window should pop up and if you scroll down you'll find all the system icons. If you find one you want to use for Celtx: cool, if you don't then you're other option is to make one. I'm not going to get into that, but if you want to do it please bare in mind that is has to be a png, it has to be 90px x 90px in size and it has to be placed in that directory. I found on on the web and resized it myself. Assuming you have the icon you want in the downloads directory and it's called "celtx.png", you would type this to get it in the right place:

sudo mv /home/user/Downloads/celtx.png /usr/share/pixmaps/celtx.png

That done we need to create a desktop entry for it. You need to use a text editor for this. I used "vim", so that's what the directions here will say. "vim" can be pretty hard to use at first, though, so if you're not linux minded you might want to find a tutorial on the web, or replace the "vim" command with something else (mousepad is one option that might be easier to use and more familiar). We start by (basically) creating the file:

sudo vim /usr/share/applications/Celtx.desktop

If you're using vim, hit "i" (the word insert should appear at the bottom) and then paste the following into the file:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Celtx
Name[zh_TW]=Celtx
Name[zh_TW]=Celtx
Name[zh_CN]=Celtx
Name[de]=Celtx
Name[it]=Celtx
Name[fr]=Celtx
Name[es]=Celtx
Name[pt]=Celtx
Name[nl]=Celtx
Name[ja]=Celtx
Name[ru]=Celtx
GenericName=Celtx
GenericName[zh_TW]=Celtx
GenericName[zh_CN]=Celtx
GenericName[de]=Celtx
GenericName[it]=Celtx
GenericName[fr]=Celtx
GenericName[es]=Celtx
GenericName[pt]=Celtx
GenericName[nl]=Celtx
GenericName[ja]=Celtx
GenericName[ru]=Celtx
Comment=Write and edit media scripts
Exec=celtx
Icon=Celtx.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupWMClass=celtx-bin
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;text/mml;application/x-shockwave-flash;
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.10
Categories=Work;
StartupNotify=true

Be sure to replace "Celtx.png" with whatever the icon you want to use is called. Also, all those language options are possibly not strictly necessary, but I copied most of this from another file and left them in to be on the safe side. Likewise, I could probably have done something a bit more clever with the "MimeType" bit, but decided not to bother. Next, save and exit the file. In "vim", you hit escape, then type:

:wq

and hit enter. Lastly, we just need to tell Linpus to display Celtx on the desktop:

vim /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml

You should now be looking at an XML file. You need to find this:

<id>6</id>

And insert this underneath it:

<app sequence="2">/usr/share/applications/Celtx.desktop</app>

Be sure to increase the "sequence" numbers on the other "<app>" entries as well, to make sure there are no duplicates.

That's about all there is to it. If you reboot the machine you should now find that you have an icon for Celtx on the desktop. After you put some .celtx files on the machine, you might want to right click on one and select "properties", then tell Limpus to open the file type with Celtx (otherwise it'll just treat it like a zip file).

This is quite a long post and I have work to do, but I might return in the next couple of days with some things to say about Celtx itself. Happy hunting!

PS Thanks to the users of the forums on aspireoneuser.com for the knowledge which was needed to work this out.

I'll see your eee and raise you One

My good friend Dougal got himself an Asus eee pc (relatively) recently. He likes it a lot. I like the idea of it, but not so much the implementation. On his version at least, the screen is too small for me, and the later versions are a bit too pricey. I love the idea of a small, light and eminently carriable laptop though. It's the premise I originally bought my MacBook under, but I found even that machine to be too bulky and heavy to carry around constantly. The MacBook Air might work, but it's very expensive (from the direction I'm looking at it from, anyway) and not really something I'd be prepared to pull out of my bag and start working on while sitting on the Meadows.

So I bought myself an Acer Aspire One. I like it quite a bit. I was worried about the size of the keyboard, but it's fine; I'm typing this on it right now. The fact that I don't (deliberately) touch type is probably an advantage in this case. I comes with 8 GB of SSD (hard drive, basically) which doesn't sound like a lot these days, but I've already bought an extension to this (just waiting for it to arrive). The RAM is also a little low, so I'm thinking of upgrading that. It's not expensive at all, but it is very fiddly, so I guess we'll see. I don't like laptop touchpads in general, and the one on the one is particularly lame, so I have a two part plan to help with this. The first part is software based and I'll come to that later. The second though is yet another fiddly hardware upgrade (how exciting!), namely the installation of a touchscreen. Battery life isn't great, so I might get a spare, or an external backup.

The next concern is software. This machine is basically intended to be a glorified word processor, so most of what I want it to run is writing software. Writing in this case means:

Blogging (like this)

Work (Thesis, papers etc)

Screen Writing (be nice to get back into this)

General Purpose Writing (of course)

and also:

Keyboard Control

Synchronisation with my real computer

The first obstacle here is the operating system. It currently runs Limpus Light Linux, which I recently heard referred to as “Linux for Pussies”. Unfortunate turn of phrase aside, this description isn't too far off the mark. It's very simple, very easy too use and boots in about ten seconds. But it's also not as easy to customise. It seems that it is possible to install OSX on the One (always my first choice of operating system these days), but due to the lack of Apple hardware it would be crippled to some extent. Even so, it would make finding the other software I need a lot easier, because Open Source and Graphical User Interfaces DO NOT MIX. It's one of those instances where to get what you pay for. Open source command line applications are almost uniformly fantastic, but anything with a GUI will probably look like the developer just shat on the floor when asked and then got his dog to do it while he cleaned up the mess. The two serious open source advocates I know both confess to a dislike of doing anything graphical, so maybe it's symptomatic. I dunno. There are exceptions, of course. Eclipse is one, to a lesser extent so is Firefox. Also an exception is the currently gestating Netbook Remix of Ubuntu Linux, which might just be exactly what the doctor ordered, operating system wise. As far as I can tell it's not quite ready for public consumption yet, though. As soon as it is I'll probably switch, but for the time being I'll hack away at the Limpus until I get something workable.

I'll probably use Open Office (with actually runs quite quickly on this machine) for most of the writing, with Celtx (surprisingly good and free) for the screen writing and maybe Kyle for Latex formatting.

Gnome Do should take care of the keyboard control. It's a clone of Quicksilver on OSX which works pretty well. It'll never work as well, since the architecture of OSX supports this sort of thing better, but it comes close enough. For the synchronisation I'll try and set up a custom rsync script to move things back and forward between this machine and my Mac, and then I'll do most of the heavy formatting and posting and such from there when possible.

Speaking of which...