Sunday Games Club - Sheepie Sleepy and Louis' Cards

Back at the Jugged Hare for another Playtest meeting. First was a game from a professional games company, Andrew Sage, called Sheepie Sleepy.

The product manager for the game, Jazz (a woman), was there to field test it. It's quite a nice little game, charming, with little sheep on the dice. The idea is that you try to get a good night's sleep by counting sheep, but there are things to keep you awake, such as coffee and other people snoring. I liked it.

Next was Louis' Cards:

A sort of multi-rule card game (same cards but different rules depending on what kind of game you play). Coraline's a graphic arts student and she was testing her design. The memory game was the best for me, but the other two, a counting game and a reaction-style game, were more popular with the others. The design intrigued one of the players, Andrew, who showed us some of the ones he's had made by a print firm over in the States called Printer Studio. Very professionally done.

The Bourne Legacy - Thriller in Manila

Another from my LoveFilm subscription, in the wake of the exposure of the CIA assassin programs Treadstone and Blackbriar through Jason Bourne, another program is being shut down...

A sort-of remake of the original movie, with Jeremy Renner as the genetically enhanced assassin and Rachel Weisz as the doctor caught up in the fallout. It's got some really good action sequences, and such a good car/motorbike chase it ought to have been called Drive. The supporting cast is good, lead by Edward Norton, but despite being a reasonable pizza movie, there's always a comparison with the original, so much so that there are references to events from the Bourne Ultimatum going on in the background. It's as if to say, "you're watching this, but there's a much better movie going on over there."

Everybody Get Their Hands in the Air. This is a Mashup!

(Sorry about that).

I read a book, recommended via Boing Boing, a while back called "Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling" by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola.

It was a bit long winded, but the gist of the book is that, essentially, it's become almost impossible to use sampling as a way of creating music commercially without breaking copyright in some way shape or form. An example given was that "Paul's Boutique", a Bestie Boys album, has so many samples in it that, because of restrictions in copyright law, it would now cost far too much to make. So artists have three options:

1. Make the music and wear a pair of brown trousers, hoping that you, your lawyers, the sampled artists lawyers and whoever else is interested can come to some agreement;
2. Restrict the music to only a few samples and pay the fee for those;
3. Make it for free. This way, although you don't make any money (and might be able to avoid paying for the copyright, under fair use), you can increase your reputation and get some practice at the same time.

The Kleptones do this quite well, with their Queen mashup, "Night at the Hip-Hopera", as have Girl Talk, and now djBC has mixed the Beasties with The Beatles (The Beastles) and produced "Ill Submarine".

I don't pretend that mashups are particularly creative or have much artistic merit, although it does take a lot of skill to make them, but they are fun.

New Lego - First of the Mohicans

I got some new Lego Minifigs the other day:

There's been a study going round from some University in New Zealand saying that the faces of the figures are getting angrier. The Mohican doesn't look exactly happy.

Total Recall

This is the remake of the 1990 Arnie film through my LoveFilm subscription. In a world devastated by chemical warfare, Doug Quaid finds his life torn apart when he goes to Rekall to have new memories implanted.

Despite the fantastic special effects (lots of car chases through the sky and an amazing shootout in a labyrinthine lift shaft), and the hints at Bladerunner, I don't think it compares too well to the original movie. Mainly this is because the supporting actors in the original were so strong: Beckinsdale is no Sharon Stone, and the Michael Ironside character isn't there to chew the scenery. Bryan Cranston is good as the villain, but Bill Nighy looks as if he's just got out of bed (and why does he have an American accent if it's supposed to be Britain?). There doesn't seem to be any real energy in the film, which is a shame.

The Eagle (of the Ninth (Legion))

When I was a kid, there was a book by Rosemary Suttcliffe called "The Eagle of the Ninth", about a Roman centurion who went into the wilds north of Hadrian's wall to determine the fate of his father's legion and retrieve it's Eagle. It was made into a film a while ago and I saw it in the shop the other day and bought it:

It's not a bad film, if a little slow in places, and not as grizzly as Centurion nor as silly as King Arthur or The Last Legion. A decent pizza movie, even if you've not read the book.

The Expendables 2

I'm afraid so. The Expandables are back. Think of it as me performing a public service: I watch it so you don't have to.

How bad is it? Chuck Norris tells jokes; Jeanclaudevandamme tries desperately to be really mean, and not to laugh at the same time; Bruce Willis and Arnold try to out-badly-act each other and get beaten by Sly; everyone looks either embarrassed or bored (Jet Li was so embarrassed, he left after ten minutes). Unlike the last movie, even being teeth-grindingly awful can't save it, and it didn't work then.

I'm not saying "Don't watch it", but if you do, I did warn you.

Oxfam Tuesday - Motown and U2

I did a second shift upstairs at the shop this afternoon. I saw Lee on the way out and had a bit of a chinwag about the music. A young lady was looking for a present for her father the other day and didn't know what was appropriate other than "old school". When she looked over at a stack of records she said "Oh, Stevie Wonder! I've heard of him!" It just felt sort of sad, but Lee pointed out that he sees kids coming in who really know their vinyl, "Labels and everything".

Luckily, I found a Motown sampler from Uncut:

The first track was a Martha & the Vandella's classic:

Oh, I sold the young lady "Songs in the Key of Life" and a classic Diana Ross:

I also found a U2 album to play, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb", which is OK.

Not to everyone's taste, I know, but I've always got a soft spot for them.

Untangling the Web

After an afternoon shift at the shop, I popped into town to attend the June meeting of the Untangle the Web meetup group at the Google campus.

The first presentation was by David Little regarding the techniques used in user-centred web design. In particular, he emphasised the research and testing by users.

The second presentation was by Laura Kalbag and was about web design theory:

Actually, it was mostly about typography, a subject close to my heart, and was really informative. I'd never really thought too much about the differences within the different types (serif/sans/script) before, but Laura demonstrated her points very well, in particular that font cannot be separated from page content and that Lorem Ipsum is best not used at all for this reason.

Hanna

This is available through LoveFilm Instant, although I have seen it in the shop. Hanna has been brought up by her father, an ex-CIA agent, in the wilds of Finland to exact revenge for her mother's death.

Not a bad film, if a little creepy for some vague reason. I think this may be because the title role is played by Saoirse Ronan (who played the younger Briony in Atonement) as a kind of lethal innocent. It's got a good supporting cast, with Cate Blanchett as her nemesis and and Eric Bana as her father. I just kept getting the feeling that Social Services ought be have been involved at some point.

PGP, etc.

Thanks to revelations about the American National Security Agency (their GCHQ) and assurances from William Hague (about our GCHQ), there seems to be a lot of paranoia going around.

If you want to secure your emails, there's a system called PGP, Pretty Good Privacy. It's an encryption system that's been aroung for the last fifteen years or so, but it's still fairly solid and has gone through numerous upgrades. It's available in open source form from GNU Privacy Guard.

I've created a public key and placed it at the bottom of the blog if you want to use it to secure any emails to me.

The Harder They Come

After listening to the title track in the shop the other day, I thought I'd get the original film through my LoveFilm subscription.

Ivan Martin (Jimmy Cliff) comes to Kingston from the countryside to try and make his fortune singing, but ends up being exploited by a corrupt society and turns to crime.

It's an incredibly difficult film to follow without sub-titles, but that does give it an authentic feel. It's based on a true story.

MagLev in Japan - The 300mph Train!

Yup, them there Japanese have got themselves a 300mph train and have used MagLev to do it:

That's London to Manchester in about 40 minutes. Yumm!!

Super 8

A rather nice little film, courtesy of my LoveFilm subscription, written and directed by J.J. Abrams. Five kids in the 1980's try to make their own horror film (thus the title), but end up in a horror film of their own.

Obviously an homage to his own adolescence, this is a really good pizza movie, with nice nostalgic touches. Very recommended.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Taking advantage of Cheap Tuesday at Empire, I went to see the latest Star Trek. All together now: Kkhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnn!!!

Yup, the second movie in the reboot has lots of knowing nods to the second Star Trek movie, it's tongue firmly in cheek. Cumberbatch is just right as Kirks' adversary, not too over the top. Shame the Klingons didn't get much of a look in, though. I thoughly enjoyed it and it looked good in 3D, the special effects being utilised to the max. Firmly recommended.

Oxfam Monday - Paintballing in Black and White

Yesterday, I did a morning shift on the bottom deck as June was having a long weekend. Uneventful, although I met Hugh, our arts expert, who I hadn't seen in a while.

I did get some new Lego from W.H. Smiths:

Reminds me of this:

It seemed to be permanently on the jukebox at Liverpool Uni. Student Union during the 1980's.

Africar

No, not a misspelling.

I'm a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and, as part of the membership, I get the E&T magazine. This months issue is a special on technology in Africa and one of the articles concerns the Africar, a concerted effort in the 1980's to build a car suitable for Africa's road system.

The article, by Nick Smith, is an interview with it's original designer Tony Howarth. Calling him "a bit of a character" is an understatement, but the idea and implementation cries out to taken up by serious money.

Atonement

As part of my LoveFilm subscription, this has been gathering dust for the best part of a year, so I finally got round to watching it. An adaption of the book by Ian McEwan, it's a fiction story about a fiction story; about authors and their works; about an act of childish, jealous cruelty and it's consequences.

I can't say I really warm to it. It's well acted, the casting of the protagonist Briony Tallis is very good, and the set pieces of the Dunkirk beaches very evocative but, like a lot of adaptions, the literary devices don't work very well on the screen. Also the leads don't seem to spark passionately as you think they might. It's a film with a hollow center.

Oxdam Friday - The Outward Urge

Down on the bottom deck this morning, and fairly uneventful. I bought a book from one of John's stock that I had a long time ago, but has since disappeared. This isn't the original Penguin cover, nor the one I had from  1980, but from 1973:

1962	1970	1980

It's about the Troon family, space explorers in the 21^st and 22^nd centuries.

Thursday - Radical Abundance with Eric Drexler

Yesterday evening I went to a presentation by Eric Drexler, hosted by The London Futurists.

About twenty years ago, I read the first book by Drexler, called "The Engines of Creation", setting the scene for nanotechnology. A lot has happened in the years since then, and I was looking forward to what he had to say.

Unfortunately, he was a little ill-prepared for the presentation and seemed to hedge around the subject, preferring to read from the book he's just written. Fortunately, when the Q&A session came around he was asked specific questions and was a little more forthcoming. Even so, it was disappointing.

Tuesday - Erlang User Group

A while ago, I started reading a book by Bruce Tate called "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks", covering some fairly esoteric computer programming languages like Haskell and Io.

One of these was Erlang and it's about as far removed from mainstream languages as you can get. It was designed by Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms company, solely for their needs at the time, about twenty years ago. It's designed for raw information processing; taking an information stream, doing something with it, and sending it somewhere else. What's unique is that it does all this at light speed and, which is becoming more important, concurrently.

All this is well and good and sort of stuck in a small niche part of IT were it not for two things: Erlang went open source a few years ago and hardware is starting to support concurrency, which is causing some headaches with conventional languages.

I went a bit further with it, the point at which my head started to hurt, but I signed on with the Erlang User Group and went to one of their meetings yesterday evening. It was hosted by Erlang Solutions and concerned the use of Erlang at EE (or T-Mobile).

The presenter was Chandru Mullaparthi, Head of Service Development at EE, and was a very down-to-earth speaker. He's been using Erlang for about twelve years and went through the system at EE, highlighting the areas of interest, in particular the anti-fraud features (without giving away anything proprietary). Erlang has allowed him and his team to react very quickly (less than a few days) to any new threats that happen on the EE network, giving them quite a good competitive advantage.

Erlang still looks very niche and so different from conventional languages as to be difficult to justify learning (much less teaching) for the average programmer, but I can imagine it's use spreading, perhaps through the use of Elixir.

Bank Holiday Monday - Kite Flying in Shoeburyness

I thought I'd blow the cobwebs away by taking the camera to Shoeburyness to take advantage of the good light we've been having. There's always some kite-surfers off the shore, and a school practices there, but today there were loads. I walked around and took some quite good snaps:

3D Despicable Me 2

Out on the 22nd June. I can't wait!

I've also found this clip of weapons testing:

New Lego - Bad Hair Day

I got some new series 10 today and looks very bad for someone:

An Amazon and a Gorgon (but it's all Greek to me!). I also found a shop which still sells previous series:

The Black Knight looks like he could start a fight in an empty room, and as the old proverb goes: give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he becomes an Eskimo.

Oxfam Tuesday - Mobile Phones and Jimmy Cliff

I've finished my exams for the year yesterday, so I was more than glad when Mark asked me to do an afternoon shift at the shop.

It was upstairs, so I got to see Lee on my way out. He was serving a customer who I'd had some problems with a few weeks ago. One of the records he'd bought was scratched and he wanted to have it replaced. Fine. Normally I just either do a refund, find a replacement or have them pick out something of equivalent value. A happy customer is a returning customer. He was a bit funny with me, though, and wanted to listen to the record to see if it was scratched. I didn't know much about the hi-fi in the back and told him as much. He'd obviously told Lee the same story and got his way, playing some C&W stuff. Lee wasn't exactly happy with him either, but he was more philosophical than I.

Other than that, the shift was uneventful. I did get to play some old ska and reggae tunes on the player including this Jimmy Cliff classic:

When the shift ended, we were all setting off to leave when Cherie said that her mobile phone had just started ringing before she had taken her bag out of the locker. It was from someone who was telling her that they'd forgotten their sweater this morning. At one time, I said, people only used the phone when someone had died, or had accepted a proposal of marriage. Now it's whether they've got a headache. Or not, sometimes.

Source Code

Although it's been available through my subscription to LoveFilm for a while now, I ended up watching it on Film4 the other day.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who repeatedly lives the last eight minutes of another man's life in an effort to identify the bomber of a train before another, larger, bomb is detonated.

It's a romantic sci-fi/time-travel thriller about having second chances. The plot is a good one (a kind of techno-thriller version of Groundhog Day) and Gyllenhaal handles the role competently, but the support is good too, especially his "handler", played by Vera Farmiga. A superior pizza movie.

Oxfam Friday - "I thought this was the music shop?"

Another Friday morning at the shop, but this time on the bottom deck as June was in Linconshire, visiting.

Georgina was upstair playing a 1980's hits collection (she has a thing for Rick Astley). Most of it was trash, but there was the odd gem:

Weird hearing it IN German.

You do get the odd customer as well, and today was no exception. A chap came in, confused somewhat, and asked for "Dave or Ryan". Dave's our music expert, and Mark seemed to know who Ryan was, but this chap was after a guitar strap as his had broke the previous night at a gig. We couldn't help him, but "There's always the  the music shop next door (Allegro Music)". "I thought this was the music shop!!", he said. "No, mate. This is a book shop. It's the books on the walls that give it away", and he departed, perplexed. Seriously.

Being downstairs amongst the hoi polloi, I got to witness the low intensity conflict between Michelle and John "I don't look for trouble, it finds me" McCarthy. They were arguing over shelf space again when Mark waded in and sided, as much as he could, with John. After it had died down, John remarked to Michelle, "Look, there's a bit of space on this shelf.", to which I warned him that if he didn't watch himself he'd end up going through the front window, "lying sprawled on the pavement outside surrounded by broken glass and copies of Ulysses!"

Tuesday - Iron Man 3 in 3D

Being cheap Tuesday at Empire cinemas, I thought I'd take a rest from my studies and go and see Iron Man 3 in 3D.

Dunno. I thought the plot was a little all over the place, trying to be complicated and instead just being long winded. I also don't think that references to The Avengers helped either, because the assumption is that you saw that film (Is this Avengers 1.5 or was that Iron Man 2.5?). Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) was as cute as ever, even more so when she's annoyed, but it felt as if they were trying too hard. Ben Kingsley was really funny as The Mandarins' alter ego, and he stole the scenes right out from under Robert Downey Jr. Guy Pierce was also enjoying himself as Stark's nemesis, Aldrich Killian.

The problem I had with all the suits was probably the engineer in me: I wanted to know what they were all for and how they worked. Maybe more is less in this case. As for it being in 3D, well, that was a treat, but it didn't seem to add to the occasion much.

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment

Yesterday I attended the presentation given by Amnon Eden and David Pearce at Birbeck hosted by The London Futurists.

The initial part of the presentation, given by Amnon, a lecturer in Computer Studies at The University of Essex, was a review of the book, a collection of academic essays regarding what the singularity is and the current state of research into the subject. It was an interesting talk, especially one of the criticisms written by Eric Chaisson from Harvard. The talk was mostly regarding the machine aspect of the singularity, and he showed this video of a DARPA experiment:

The second part of the talk, by David Pearce, was about the consequences of enhancing human intelligence and that trying to enhance machine intelligence may be flawed by the inability to overcome the binding problem. This is where our brains take sensory input, shapes, textures, colour, etc., and create an inner representation of the outside world, something that is a fundamental part of consciousness but is difficult to program into a machine.

The presentation was very good and the Q&A lively, as usual, but marred somewhat by the heating in the basement, which was oppressive.

Oxfam Friday - Barn Owl, Charlie Parr and The Duritti Column

Doing a Friday morning shift at the shop, which was a welcome tonic after another week of college work, I was upstairs and played a few freebee's I had lying around Chez Lemon.

Although the best was the old blues album, with the usual haunting track by Robert Johnson, the most interesting was Strange Brew, with tracks by Barn Owl (The Long Shadow) and Charlie Parr. I couldn't find a decent video of the track I listened to (Jesus is a Hobo) on Youtube, but I found this instead which is pretty good.

I also listened to The Durutti Column, a Manchester post-punk band that never got the same recognition as New Order or The Smiths. This has got Johnny Marr in there somewhere:

New Lego - Revolution

I've got some new lego from series 10, and it's revolutionary!

He doesn't look happy. Maybe he needs a cup of tea?

As you can see, I also got a grandad and a baseball player.

New Lego - New Series

Series 10 of the current run of Lego Minifigs has been issued and I've got two new ones, a Centurion and a Skydiver:

The Roman looks like he's about to poke someone's eye out with his Gladius.

As well as the usual type of figures there is a remote chance of finding a unique figure, Mr Gold, one of only 5000!

Oxfam Friday - New Bands and Old

I did a morning shift today up on the top deck and, after a week of frentic college activity, it was a fine tonic. I played one of the freebee albums off Mojo magazine from August 2009 called New Harvest:

And a jolly fine selection it is. One of the best tracks is also the first, Fools from The Dodos:

There was also fine tracks by Ventiver, D.M. Stith (Thanksgiving Moon, which is delightful), Iron and Wine, and this one from Akron/Family:

They did Gone Beyond a while back which was was a joyously riotous.

Dave, our music expert, has put some collectable 7" vinyl in a box to one side and I was leafing through them when I spotted some old Smiths singles, including this classic:

And it's the original issue, with "Jeane" on the B-side. There's been a few covers over the years, but I rather like this one from The Skints.

Camden - The Game

DriveThru RPG are promoting their new card games site called DriveThru Cards. You can either download the cards, and print them yourself, or order them printed from the 'States, for a rather hefty postage. One of the free one's available is Camden, based on the market. Yeah, that Camden.

It's a tile-laying game from Gamesmith. Seems okay, and any game based on a place I've actually worked in must be worth a look.

Talking 'bout the End of the World - Assessing Major Risks, with Anders Sandberg

Today, I've been up to Birbeck to see the lecture by the affable Anders Sandberg regarding existential risks to the human race i.e. what's going to be the most likely thing to make us go the way of the dinosaurs, and how can we prevent it.

Anders works for the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and the presentation was a very wide ranging talk on risk assessment for the human race.

In particular, he showed that most of the risks in the past have been self inflicted, or intrinsic, notably disease, war and totalitarian regimes. The best way of combating the last two is good, transparent and accountable government. Easy.

He also showed that when measuring the occurrence of disasters, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, there's something he called a "Large, Long Tail". If you look at a graph of the incidences of, say, meteorite impacts, there's a large number of small ones, and a small number of large ones, but that this "tailing off" of numbers is a lot larger and longer that people suppose.

He made a comment on one of his Oxford colleagues, a quantum physicist, who believes so strongly in parallel worlds that he always buys a lottery ticket because, even if he loses in this universe, in another he's won!

Overall, it was a fine and entertaining lecture on the fifth floor again, with a lively Q&A afterwards.

Wrath of the Titans

A sequel to Clash of the Titans, this has an actual Titan in it, Chronos.

Perseus is forced out of retirement to rescue his father, Zeus, after he has been imprisoned by Hades, Lord of the Underworld, and Ares, God of War.

Although a good pizza film, it is inferior to the last one. Neeson and Fiennes seem to enjoy themselves as brothers Zeus and Hades (good casting getting Ralph Fiennes to play the morose God of the Dead), and the special effects are up to scratch, especially the Cyclops's and the amazing labyrinth. However, the film seems to be shorter and have less effort put in to it.

Oxfam Tuesday - All Conquering Literature

I did a morning shift at the shop and Anne had left John in charge, so much giggling ensued. I'd no sooner took my coat off than he was pointing out to me that last week his section, Literature, pulled in more money that Michelle's Fiction! "You're in trouble already", I said. "It's only by £3.50", he pointed out, to which I rejoinered, "About the price of a Booker Prize winner!" (the agreement he had with Michelle was to give her some Booker Prize winners that were popular, noteably Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel).

He'd also sold me a couple of Penguin Specials:

Not wartime, but not bad.

Emmet

While in discussion with a fellow student, he pointed me in the direction of something called "Emmet". It's a plug-in for, well in my case Notepad++ (at college) and Brackets (at home). What it does is, at the touch of a shortcut key, transform something like this:

div#main>ul>li*3>a.link

into this:

 <div id="main">
  <ul>
   <li><a href="" class="link"></a></li>
   <li><a href="" class="link"></a></li>
   <li><a href="" class="link"></a></li>
  </ul>
 </div>

Very handy, and the syntax is similar enough to CSS to be able to remember.

Sunday Games Club - Orbiter, Fiefdoms and The Last Council

For a change, I went along to the London Playtest meet-up at the Jugged Hare pub near Victoria Station:

It's a nice pub! The group was upstairs and is unusual in that the games played have not yet been published.

Fiefdoms

This is the first of two games by Adam Taylor.

It's a little board game with dice dictating which row and column you can place either workers or armies (the little man figures borrowed from Carcassonne, called "meeples"). Armies can attack one-another and the game ends when someone runs out of armies to place. You win by the points you've scored placing your pieces on certain tiles. A nice little game and easy to play.

Orbiter

Another game from Adam, this was a card game with robots. The robot cards are arranged in a grid, with a planet card in the centre. An indicator circles the planet controlled by a 4-sided dice:

It was a really fast game, over in a few minutes, and fun to play. The point scoring was a little complicated, however (maybe a problem if it's aimed at kids), and one of the players couldn't make a move on his first turn, which seemed a little dissonant. These were minor quibbles, though, and it has real promise. Adam runs a small web site which publishes games for download.

The Last Council

After a small break, and a shuffle around, I played The Last Council designed by J.P. Treen.

It's based on a post-apocalyptic local council meeting (a certain amount of black humour is involved) with the players battling dwindling resources as well as each other.

J.P. said that each time he'd had it play tested he'd had to alter it and it is quite a complex game. It's quite a good game when you get going, but play was cut short by discussions about the game itself. Shame.

Rectify

A while ago, there was a TV series called Life, starring Damien Lewis, who has gone on to do Homeland with more success. It was about a man who'd been jailed for a multiple murder and released on DNA evidence. In a similar vein is Rectify from the Sundance Channel.

Now, I'd never even heard of the Sundance Channel, but this looks quite good. A slow burner.

Insurance

Amongst the post this morning was the house insurance details, renewed every year. Normally, I pay it no heed, but I just happened to glance at the booklet enclosed with it that details changes to the policy.

...the exclusion relating to War has been amended to add mutiny and military rising...

Mmmm... bit odd, but nice to know.

Thursday - Python User Group Meeting

I haven't been to any of the Skills Matter meetings for a while, not since last year at least, so I thought I'd go along to a user group meeting that I'd not attended before. I've used Python a bit for automating tasks, but nothing too heavy duty.

The first talk was just a warm up. Paul Brian tried to talk about... well, nothing in particular, really. "Relying on frameworks too much is a bad thing", "Learn to be better coders"... Platitudes, essentially. He threw in some comparisons with the advent of the printing press, which was poorly thought out and seemed meaningless. It put me in mind of an old expression: better to stay silent and let people think you are a fool that open your mouth and remove all doubt.

The next was a bit more entertaining. Kris Saxton talked about using the Salt framework to manage automation across multiple servers. He demonstrated simple tasks and, in particular, rollout of code automatically across multiple servers. Nice.

I departed towards the end of his talk as I had a long way back home and it was a pretty full day, anyway, so I missed the talk by Emil Vaughn on Cython, an enhanced version of standard Python.

Tuesday - At The Pictures To See Oblivion

With no shift at the shop, and trying to take a break from college work, I went to see the new Tom Cruise movie, Oblivion, at the Empire on the Bas-Vegas Strip i.e. Festival Park.

After an alien invasion of Earth, and war, two people monitor and maintain drones in preparation for leaving the planet, but all is not as it seems.

Kind of a disaster aftermath movie, the special effects are very good and I especially liked the design, which was all minimalist: the "bubble" aircraft and the drones impressed, but the cool house in the clouds appealed the most. Cruise does a good enough job, but Morgan Freeman acts him off the set easily enough and it's the ladies, especially Andrea Riseborough as his partner (although Olga Kurylenko is pretty good as well), who really shine, as well as being good eye-candy.

The plot is serviceable enough, although a machine intelligence who can't do basic airport security seems a bit implausible, and the depiction of a devastated Earth sends the odd shiver. That's the thing I came away with: the coldness of the movie. From the minimalist architecture and design to the barren wastes of the planet. Worth seeing, though.

Iron Man 3

Delayed due to a funeral, it should be out next week:

It's in 3D, for the first time, and quite right too. Yummy!

Nice to see Gwyneth wearing a suit.

Prometheus

Sort-of a prequel to Alien, an expedition ship, The Prometheus, lands on a alien planet looking for the origins of life.

It's been so long since there was an Aliens film (I don't count the AVP films as they were crap), that just the existence of the film, and that it's Ridley Scott directing it, is enough to get my attention. It's all a bit grisly, as you'd expect, but it does have great special effects, with all the Giger touches, and a few answers as to who the big aliens were in the original film. You won't want to eat any calamari for a while, though.

Internet of Things

This evening, I went along to a meeting of the Internet of Things (IoT), London. This took the form of a show case of technological innovations as part of Imperial College's Urban Prototyping Festival.

There were drinks and dim-sum (nice) and it was generally urbane and hi-tech. One firm, Quick2Wire, had a set of small boards that they used to daisy-chain sensor boards together:

The board at the top, an interface board, is attached to a Raspberry Pi (very popular at the moment). Off this is a kind of "booster" board called a Port Extender, which also does some signal processing, then the next board (an A-D converter) has a light sensor. When you covered the sensor, the light bar on the interface board at the top decreased. The second extender at the bottom interfaces directly with another display, worked from the PC attached to the Pi. The advantage of using the Raspberry Pi, as the chap doing the demonstration told me, was that it could multi-thread these two tasks as it was running Linux.

Another display was from the Open University. This showed the contents of their My Digital Life course, which looks pretty cool.

Students are provided the hardware and download a version of MIT's Scratch, which I mentioned in a previous entry, to program. All-in-all, quite impressive.

I had a quick walk around and had a brief look at the other displays, but they were very much of a muchness. It was all a little bit mundane; middle class and domestic, I thought (more than a few projects were for energy saving). I had thought that the future would be a little grander than this. Maybe when the technology got smaller, the ideas did too?

As for whether these things will result in a resurgent U.K. economy, it's worth remembering that the bulk of these (all the above, for example) are made in China. Only Arduino boards are made elsewhere (Italy). Again, as so often in our history, we may have the ideas, but others will take them and build on them. In the past that was America, now it's the Far East.

A14 and The Living Dead

I was heading back from Wales after visiting relatives and to get back to Bas-Vegas I travel down the A14/M11. Someone has put some graffiti on an old disused building which epitomised the news awaiting me when I landed:

I have often wondered when Mrs Thatcher would finally shuffle off and join her husband in that great golf club in the sky, assuming there is one and that's where she's gone. Although I'm not quite as acerbic as Pete Wylie, as an old socialist, I couldn't abide the woman. She tried to make this country live in the past, and that's always a mistake. The future may be a frightening and uncertain place, but you have to face it and either shape it or be prepared to be shaped by it.

There was a documentary by Adam Curtis about the subject called The Attic, part of the Living Dead series.

I quite like the bit at the end where she falls asleep half-way through one her own speeches.

As for her legacy, well I think we have a more self-centred, venal society. As Oscar Wilde once put it, we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing". Whether that would have happened anyway is debatable, and maybe she just happened to be in charge at the time, but she didn't do anything to prevent it. She divided this country, or reinforced the divisions that were already there, rather than trying to overcome them. The graph below, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies via The New Statesman website, shows inequality of incomes on year between 1979 and 2008.

As for her much vaunted popularity, you've got to remember that Churchill lost more elections than he won and was a terrible peacetime politician (one of the worst Chancellors of the Exchequer of the 20^th Century). My grandmother, of that between-the-wars generation, said he was a war-monger (he was in charge of the Galippoli campaign, in which many men from my home town died). Tony Blair won three elections and look how he turned out.

Another thing that has occurred to me is that previously Prime Ministers and other politicians had looked upon their role as a duty that came with being one of an elite, either socially (with the Conservatives and Liberals) or intellectually (Labour). Mrs Thatcher was neither (a grocer's daughter with a Chemistry degree). She seemed to have one eye on her place in history, and this seems to have infected subsequent leaders, especially Tony Blair. This falls in with Churchill's view of history, that it is a history of Great Men (or Women), a simplistic, cardboard-cutout view. This is only one view of history and misses out, or minimises, the others which are just as valid if not more so. Plus when politicians do this they seem to forget why they are there: just run the damn country without screwing it up. That would be enough of an achievement.

Oh, go on then, Pete, if you MUST... (sorry for the language, but he's a scouser).

Coda: amidst all the comments from both right, left and middle is this fitting piece from Russell Brand, via Boing Boing, in the Guardian.

New Lego - An Oscar!

I got some new Lego the other day.

This is still series 9, so the odds have increased to 16 - 3 (just over 5 - 1) against me finding another one I haven't got. Not as good odds as the Grand National winner this year (66-1!). I also got some from series 8 as well the other day:

The one on the right looks a little ruff!

GUTS

Many moons ago, I used to play Quake, one of the oldest FPS's. I wasn't particularly good at it, poor reflexes, but it was one of the first games which allowed "modding" (modifying). Mods are custom patches to the game which allow you to change it. Typically, these are extra maps to roam around in or "skins" allowing you to change the look of your character in the game, but there were some very clever mods, such as 'bots that created artifical opponents for you to play against, that were good enough to be included into the main game by the developers. I did one or two maps for Quake that were so-so before I gave up, as I'm prone to do.

Fast forward to today and I got a little message through Steam that there was a modding editor for Torchlight II available, called GUTS.

So if you've got the game and you fancy having a go, why not try to change it!

Oxfam Monday - Socialism! (and Reindeer)

Open again on the Bank Holiday, I did a "full" double-shift (10:30AM - 3:30PM). I was upstairs to start with (yay!) and I hunted around for something different to play, or at least reliable. In doing so, I found one of those rare jewels of an album called "Son of Evil Reindeer", by The Reindeer Section, a kind of Scottish Indie supergroup formed from other bands around at the time as a kind of one-off. They did two albums, but this is the one I liked the best.

I also got to play some early Louis Armstrong. Obviously, I couldn't find film of any of the tracks, but I found this one which is rather good.

I ended the shift downstairs amongst the books and got engaged with two regulars who were talking about a debate one of them attended regarding socialism and the Labour Party. It was fascinating stuff, but the attendee said he felt that the debate had descended into a kind of "theological" discussion. He also told us of a debate he attended by C.L.R. James.