Barbalet's Log

Continuing on this blog’s theme of to-dos and updates.

Breaking the Paradigm : roughly 5,000 word chapter for the new Gordon/Sechbach collaboration due June 15th.

Submitted in mid-July. The final deadline for response has been shifted to September 15th. Waiting for feedback from that.

1993 project: additional 4-5k words taking it to 60k either self published or with a to-be-determined yet-to-respond agent (perhaps). No deadline but assumed completed early July.

This has been with two readers for a month or so and sent to another reader recently.

WWII wargames rules ideally in an article for Battlegames magazine based on the Close Combat (I & II) video games. No deadline but assumed submitted sometime in July.

I’ve decided to look at the Flames of War rules.

Chapter on design in nature due in mid-September.

Ongoing work in progress. Now due end of September. Phew!

New release of the Noble Ape Original Manuals: completed sometime between now and end of September.

Another podcast project this time with Heron Stone.

Semi launched. Still working on updating the episodes. The current feed and soon to be updated page can be found here.

About six weeks ago, I posted my to-do list. Here’s where I am since then…

Breaking the Paradigm : roughly 5,000 word chapter for the new Gordon/Sechbach collaboration due June 15th.

Submitted some time ago. Waiting for feedback.

1993 project: additional 4-5k words taking it to 60k either self published or with a to-be-determined yet-to-respond agent (perhaps). No deadline but assumed completed early July.

Ready for a slight reformat to cut down on pages for a round of draft reading and then possibly self-publication or another set of agent approaches. Will probably self publish.

WWII wargames rules ideally in an article for Battlegames magazine based on the Close Combat (I & II) video games. No deadline but assumed submitted sometime in July.

Still on the to-do list. Pushed for Q4 2010.

Two talks in the San Francisco Bay Area – one at SRI and one at Intel in mid-July.

Done. Available via Ape Reality and the Biota Podcast page respectively. Actually the other way around but close enough.

These two are still outstanding:

In addition to this I hope to be working on another podcast project with Heron Stone.

Aside from the usual internet radio recordings, I have the following writing and speaking projects…

Breaking the Paradigm : roughly 5,000 word chapter for the new Gordon/Sechbach collaboration due June 15th.

1993 project: additional 4-5k words taking it to 60k either self published or with a to-be-determined yet-to-respond agent (perhaps). No deadline but assumed completed early July.

WWII wargames rules ideally in an article for Battlegames magazine based on the Close Combat (I & II) video games. No deadline but assumed submitted sometime in July.

Two talks in the San Francisco Bay Area – one at SRI and one at Intel in mid-July.

Chapter on design in nature due in mid-September.

New release of the Noble Ape Original Manuals: completed sometime between now and end of September.

Now for some serious sleep. Good night.

For twenty minutes, I accidentally updated the Noble Ape Simulation to the flatlands version per… (a different vid than below)

Perhaps that could be a future feature. Random seeded, bugged versions on the first day of download…

I must spend a line arbitrarily apologizing as all failed social media mavens do for the lack of posts particularly as there have been two entries already today and possibly a third or fourth before I head to bed.

I have recovered from a heavy cold which wiped me out for most of the week. I woke up this morning with a long to-do list including updating the Noble Ape Simulation. It has been almost a year since the last versioned update and the main reason for this is because I have been doing incremental source updates via SubVersion and there have been a lot of changes going in. That being said, it was time for a release and I decided to finalize the last couple of remaining bugs and release versions for Mac and Windows. It turns out that clock() on Windows isn’t as reliable as one might want for a random seed. I had to replace it with;

FILETIME ft;

unsigned long tmpres = 0;

GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(&ft);

tmpres = ft.dwHighDateTime;

tmpres ^= ft.dwLowDateTime;

Which is actually random-ish enough for a seed. This took about half an hour to track down. Through this period, I implemented a no land feature to debug the Apes’ movements. Which produced this wonderful singing conga lines…

I opted against the conga line backing music. But I did find this… [Don't bother watching the video... here's the summary... dude hasn't read Bostrom... he's read a book about the Matrix and watched some movies and he gets Bostrom's argument backwards...]

It would appear no one has actually reads Bostrom on YouTube… they just post videos about what everyone else thinks Nick Bostrom is saying… This fellow’s even more a-backwards…

So I think I need to hire some people to misrepresent what I say, perhaps in this format…

Yeah. I don’t think Bostrom really cares if people invert his argument. At least he’s getting air time rather than people who actually write simulations and release them at least once a year.

Taking a precursory look at Wikipedia, you might expect every nerd with a podcast and an open source project would have a Wikipedia entry. There’s a dirty little secret that you wouldn’t know unless you had fought in the trenches of Wikipedia – there is a secret review committee that appears to rate pages.

Take for example, Kersal Massive, here represented in the following remixes…

I personally think Kersal Massive is the best thing to hit the internet in living memory. I also represented Kersal Massive as their entry was deleted from Wikipedia. Sadly even with thousands of fans their entry was deleted in one of the great travesties on Wikipedia next to the self-requested deletion of Lynette Nusbacher’s entry. Unquestionably one of the most interesting military historians of our time AND an expert on Time Commanders.

But I digress…

So as I did the update for the Noble Ape Simulation (more on that in a future post), I hit upon the entry for ApeScript was assessed for deletion review and appears to have survived for quite legitimate reasons. So the small group of ApeScript users can continue to count on the Wikipedia entry. Hopefully for long enough until it is used in Noble Warfare and the new project discussed with Jeffrey Ventrella on the last Biota Live.

And to the Kersal fans, I remain hopefully that a future remix will merit enough attention to get the third review of Kersal Massive on Wikipedia. Hang in there.

It seems like I have been writing everywhere but here… More soon.

http://twitter.com/wig_z

As part of the Objective C group(s) prep, I am looking through the Stanford iPhone Application course (Winter 2010) videos to delete from my HD so I can install the latest XCode iPhone/Pod/Pad developer suite.

I’ve just sat through the student presentations through the course and one is a stand out hands-down favorite for me.

It’s quite a curious thing looking at student assignments for this class. Three themes seem relatively universal – learning a language, networking and how much money you have at any given time. Minor interests including fantasy sports.

Through the early ones, I couldn’t understand why no-one was using OpenGLES. Actual graphics in a real-time game environment.

Then came the application of the Spanish Guitar Playing Ninja (Bird) in a Bubble. Hand down best app of the lot. If only I could find this application. The student at the end credits Kate Swanson (you will have to search for her and her prior work at Stanford) for the graphics and programming.