Barbalet's Log

I don’t watch any television apart from America’s Most Wanted and Cops on a Saturday night. As we are going to my wife’s sister’s boyfriend’s birthday briefly tonight I thought I would check out the AMW website.

I must confess I was pretty unimpressed. Numerous typographical errors and also fields mis-filled.

Some stinkers include…

And the even more stunning…

I guess the greatest victim is the English language language. Very disappointing for a top rated national network show. Then again who I am kidding. Maybe I should turn the TV off altogether…

Some light reading for my computer shelf layout… more photos to follow…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%26YR_Class_21

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMS_diesel_shunters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMS_diesel_shunter_1831

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_D3/7

http://www.rail-online.co.uk/ImageView.aspx?id=4f571dd7-58a9-4c67-9751-5f8a0bb43bfd

Also Model Rail Radio #13: Burnt Fingers.

558 views in the past week… Insane… he’ll want his own feeding dish soon…

I must confess I like having a blog again. There is something very old tech about blogs. I remember the first blog I saw was in the late 1990s and I really didn’t understand the point in the context of the technology of the time but it was somewhat voyeuristic and episodic. But now we live in the era of the micro update – so very impersonal – and I enjoy having some verbosity back in my life.

Now you may wonder why I am combining a number of aspects of my life and not just concentrating on artificial life for example. Well, the history of my blogs has always included more of me as a human and thus I would like to return to this style of blogging.

If you only want to read about my musings on Noble Ape, then you have the option of selecting that tab.

My evening was spent watching an episode of the Sopranos followed by some basic black undercoating of my WWI German Stormtroopers. I think I’m going to focus on painting small groups well rather than rush through them. Slow work these real word hobbies. For the rest of the night, I want to update the Noble Warfare source code within the Noble Ape Simulation and perhaps do some slowed movement testing to fix the lingering movement bugs in the transition between 64 quanta turns to 256 quanta turns.

In the blogs of old, I used to end with good night. Not much has changed. Good night.

I’ll be recording two podcasts this “weekend”:

Friday evening, Biota Live with Bruce Damer

Saturday afternoon, ModelRailRadio with Chris Abbott

After the Biota Live recording, I will be tuning in to WEFUNK 600 which is a fantastic milestone for Nick and Mike (aka Groove and Static). Hats off to the both of them. I have assisted with WEFUNK Radio infrastructure for a number of years as a true believer in the medicinal qualities of funk.

I attempted to copy Beasts of War with my introduction to a non-computer based hobby I hope to kick off this year.

Although I will be posting the results on YouTube. I promise things will look more interesting when the figures have some color on them other than black.

I posted an Ape Reality tonight. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I can actually deep link to the audio (although I normally frown on such practices).

Aside from the news of the death of my old blog and the starting of this new/old blog, I also talk a little about the new integration of Noble Warfare in the Noble Ape Simulation. This development has really been a long time coming and is the basis of this new blog in many ways. I want to catalogue the minute integration of these two projects with the view that the hybridized simulation will have strengths from both.

If you are interested in seeing the work-in-progress, you can currently get the source from the Noble Ape development page on SourceForge. There are a number of initial to-dos:

* update the Noble Ape Simulation build information to include Noble Warfare,

* update the Noble Ape Simulation manual information to include Noble Warfare,

* fix any outstanding movement bugs due to the change from 64 to 256 quantized turning points, and,

* remove the Generic Platform Interface code (aka the GPI).

There is a good group of historical information relating to the GPI from the old Noble Ape Source Log but I would have to go back on the Internet Archive to find the meaningful information. Rather than doing this, my aim is just to remove the GPI directory and use the Noble Ape Simulation’s multi-platform drawing into two windows. For Noble Warfare, one window will contain the top down battle and the other window will contain statistics information.

Sometime in 2007 I floated Hermit the blog on the Noble Ape site. Prior to Hermit the blog there had been Barbalet’s Log hosted on  and also the Noble Ape Source Log which started in 2003 from memory. In short, a pretty long history of blogging on Noble Ape and general topics.

For a couple of years I have written on another blog that was removed unexpected at the start of this year. I might write more on that given time. I felt the need to maintain some kind of online presence in text form too.

Although I podcast on both artificial life and model rail topics and maintain communities associated with artificial life and video game intellectual property, I have a number of divergent interests some which I will feature through this blog and some I probably won’t.

I’m pretty fiercely political which may make for some interesting blog posts in the long run. But for now I wanted to offer a placeholder post as I have announced the existence of this blog on Ape Reality.

I look forward to utilizing this space as a means of outlining more of my existence in a virtual form.

Enjoy!