Dad & Janet visited

Dad and Janet visited today. One of the highlights was when Cian sat us all down to play the board game he just created. Cian is six. Here's a picture of the board.

There were many rules:

• Each player takes turns to roll a d6 to proceed. Note the game tokens are lego pieces.
• If you land on a black dot, you got a card, which could have said "go back 3" or "hold this money for 10 seconds"
• To cross a bridge with a number on it, you needed to roll the exact number to cross it, that or you could add the numbers from your last two rolls.
  
• There was a complex rule about branch decisions being decided about whether or not you landed on a particular previous spot or not.

It was awesome. Janet won. Oh, yeh, Janet also rolled the following during her subsequent turns: 6,6,6,5,6,5. That is like rolling up a character in D&D with an 18 and a 16. Damn!

+3 Post of Unveiling

Hi,
You've received this blog intro over email because I think that there may even yet, be the most desperate, most remote hope that you could be at all, even slightly, interested in some of the minutiae of my life and opinions. I have joined the great unwashed, and created a blog. Blogging perhaps represents one of the greatest social changes of this decade, or, perhaps, it simply represents the fact that never before have so many been able to tell us so little in so many words. "Teh Interweb" gives us such power, the power for example, to click on the link below and continue reading my "+3 Post of Unveiling" ...
http://unwritable.blogspot.com/
... where you will transported to the Blogosphere. Here I am, writing what I thought a short while ago was the unwritable. "It's just an online diary", I scoffed. "It'll never catch on" I asserted. "Who will give a shit?", I queried. OK, one out of three ain't bad. But seriously, after reading a lot of science fiction over the last 5 years, I've come to realise that this isn't going away. The time to get used to this is now. For now we'll just call this an official invite to come back as often or as little as you like. Check out the archive or sort by topic using the links on the left right. Send me a link to your blog and we'll cross-link. Laugh at my uber-nerdiness. Post comments to that effect.

Quotes

It's been bugging me for a while now. I know I've been doing it incorrectly. My use of quotes that is. After some targeted googling, I think I have it now...

• only use single quotes for quotes within double quotes
• (obviously) use double quotes when quoting things others have said
• don't put double quotes around titles of movies, books, CDs and plays that contain more than three acts (WTF?), use underlining or italics
  
• use double quotes for titles of articles, chapters of books, songs, short stories and One-act plays (okaaay).

There's a lot more detail on how to do this absolutely correctly, but I'm really not going to worry too much if I can just get the above right.

Halting State

I just finished reading Halting State during the week. Awesome read. But then I love technology, D&D and online gaming. Written in second person, it feels like you are playing the game, in the action, just like a D&D game - a brilliant extra layer. OK, a couple of times I had to check the chapter start to see who 'I' was again, but that was OK. You wouldn't want all novels like that though.
Favourite quote - "it's TCP/IP tunnelled over D&D". Excellent.
Technology used - I'm still sceptical of quantum computing, but I loved the glasses characters were reading which gave them an HUD of information networks. I want that, and can't see why it won't be here relatively soon.

Fishtank

Thought I'd post a photo of the fish tank. I have a minor issue with some black flowering algae at the moment, and a population problem with the Neon Tetras. There are only three of them left. Having started from eleven, it may be time to go get some more. That'll keep the Angels happy. You can see them up front of course. Show-offs.

Speaking of drinking...

For teh win! Woolies Liquor are selling Glenlivet 12 year old single malt for $43 a bottle. I went in with two empty hands, but didn't come out that way. They usually sell it for $60+, and I was running out of Jameson, so today I'm a happy man today.

Of Blackouts and Drinking

Smiles all round (mostly) at work yesterday as the power went down at 2pm, and by 3pm it was clear it would be down for much longer. The boss said we could go, so most of our team took ourselves across the road to the Greenwood Hotel.
We had a blast over the next 7 hours drinking beer and more importantly whiskey! As was pointed out today, we spent nearly a whole working day's worth in the pub. It turned out to be a really great night, as many ad-hoc unplanned sessions do. Since I've only been at Wensense now for about 6 months it was a great opportunity to talk some shite with my co-workers and get to know them better. Tops!
Mind you, it was a very slow and difficult day today at work. Slooooow. Brain just wouldn't. work. stuff. ow. sql. hard.

Future Blogging

I used to think that blogging was just keeping a glorified online diary. I was wrong. OK, I was a little bit right, and I still am, but I think it is becoming clear that blogging is a lot more than this. It is a personal content delivery mechanism. "But that's the same thing!" I hear you cry with a derisive snort. I think the online diary aspect is still there, and many blogs are little more than this, and that is fine, but blogging enables people to deliver content useful to others, but more importantly that that content is searchable.
My friend and long time co-worker Tom and I recently set up internal work blogs. At first the search mechanism wasn't working, (i.e. searches on content in your blog returned no matches) and Tom said he wouldn't bother if that was the case. A work blog is more on the content delivery, and less on the diary side, and this is where searching makes it a Really Useful Technology. So when Tom blats out some really useful technical tips he just spent the morning discovering, I can come back in six months, search for said tips and have that content available, saving me a morning's (re)work.
At the moment we have discrete text and video blogging, where each individual post takes time and effort to produce. But blogging will go far beyond this. Most people are aware of the lifelog concept where your constant experience is recorded. Many people find this pretty abhorrent, but it doesn't have to be all public all the time, and of course there are things you don't want recorded at all. As technology improves, and the wearing of a video camera and mike is as easy as wearing the rest of your clothes, why wouldn't you just by default record everything? If it doesn't cost much, it just accumulates in the background, and when all that life content is easily searchable, imagine how easy a lot of tasks become. You won't have to jot notes about meetings, appointments, or any details your wet memory can't deal with. Resolving arguments about who said what becomes a thing of the past. You could prove your innocence in a flash as the raw feed would be all securely timestamped and tamper-evident of course.
From this raw feed you could pick and choose the interesting things to make public, or produce eloquent text out of subvocalised ramblings from that recent bus journey.
Of course all this requires technology to improve, and while it won't happen next year, or the year after, it isn't decades away.

DLLMain() Don'ts

{if not programmer, escape}

I never knew this, but it makes Oh, So Much Sense Now.
You can define a special function in a Windows DLL called DLLMain(). It's a piece of code that gets executed when your DLL is first loaded into the address space of your process. (It also gets called at other times, like thread attachment and shutdown). But that's not the bit I didn't know. I was recently debugging a problem where loading a DLL was causing a system crash. It looked as though the static variables in a dependent dll (loaded as a result) were not initialised, and thus any attempt to use them was causing massive, sudden and irrevocable system carnage. Now, the DLLMain of one of the dependant DLLs was calling a fairly innocuous trace function, however, the tracing platform was doing some funky dynamic loading of implementation DLLs to get around some tracing dependency issues. The problem with this is that when the CRT calls your dll's DLLMain() function, it takes out a lock (called the loader lock) on DLL loading (actually initialising loaded DLLs). This means that dynamically loading DLLs during a DLLMain is a Really Bad Thing. IMHO, this really should have completely deadlocked rather than trying to do what it did. Perhaps it would have deadlocked if any of the dependent DLLs defined their own DLLMain() functions. What it actually did was to load the DLL as asked, but not initialise any of the static data for it. Nasty.
More info.

Back to work

Right, now I've finished back filling some blog I can get back to what I am supposed to be doing. Writing a D&D 3.5 campaign. I've been kinda putting this off for a while now, it is a lot of effort, written from scratch as it is.
It will be for 5 characters of level 14+, set in Faerun, starting in Cormyr. Last adventure (more than a year ago or was it two?) saw the heroes delving into the mystery of Tilverton. You can go find all the detail you could ever dream of over at dragoncoast.info.
Where to go next? Well, the characters were given a bunch of quests to choose from by the gorgeous Caladnei of Suzail, so I guess they'll go back to ask her what's next. Hmmm.

Building a Workstation

From 20/5/2003.

So, after moving into our new house, I decided that I'd had enough of working off a stupid, tiny desk that you self build with self locking pieces, and build myself a workstation desktop right across the length of the room.

Actually, lets talk about this pissy little desk I've been using for four years. It has four pieces, the top, sides and another piece that connects the others together. It sucks like a jet engine sucks a careless engineer to his splattered death. It sucks hard in a non-reversible way.

read the rest ...

Little Plastic Nuts

From 16/4/2003 ...

OK, so you are probably wondering how I can possibly rant about little plastic nuts. Surely you get exactly what you see, and you can be prepared for the consequences of dealing with them? Oh, no. Not these nuts. These ones cost me hundreds of dollars. OK, so it was 1.8 hundreds of dollars, but hundreds of dollars nonetheless. And more annoying than the dollars was the stress and the days of work to recover from the situation they placed me in. *sigh* But I get ahead of myself.

read the rest...

Other Interests

To complete the background info I'll round out with some other interests.
I like whiskey. My favourite affordable whiskey is Jameson, but I'll buy 12 year old Glenlivet if its on special. I quite like an Islay malt occasionally too.
DIY home renovation. You know, I started off really not liking this, but it's so different from everything else that I do, that I'm really quite enjoying it. I've built a deck surround, a built in office-desk, and most fun, destroyed and removed an entire kitchen!
I enjoy riding my Razor scooter in and out of work. Mostly I take public transport, but the last leg home is all downhill on a 3 kg aluminium board. Yah!
Parties. OK, I don't party like it's 1999 anymore, but I enjoy many drinks with friends. Many.
I keep tropical fish. I have two Angels, two Clown Loaches, a bunch of Neon Tetras, some catfish in a 250L tank. They're purty.
I try to keep up with current science advances, although I don't understand as much as I'd like to. This kind of ties into my love of tech in general. I wanted to do a combined degree (Comp Eng) with Physics, but the schedule wouldn't pan out. I'm a LHC fanboy!

Core Interest: Science Fiction

I love good SF. I read a lot of SF books, but I also enjoy SF movies and TV series.
Brilliant SF authors recently are: Iain M Banks, Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Neal Asher, Neal Stephenson, Alistair Reynolds, Peter F Hamilton, Sean Williams, David Brin and Richard Morgan. In previous years I have enjoyed Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Greg Bear, William Gibson, Larry Niven, Jerry Purnelle.
SF Movies I have enjoyed, obviously Matrix, Aliens, I am Legend, Star Wars, Solaris, Barbarella, Blade Runner, Fifth Element, Mad Max, Terminator, Serenity.
TV Series I have enjoyed are Battle Star Galactica, Firefly, Dr Who, Star Trek.

Core Interest: Technology

I love technology in general. I have been programming computers since I was 10, including such beasts as the AppleII, Amiga 500, and PCs since a '386. I have had an email address since 1991 and have never bought a complete PC as I prefer to build them from the parts I want. I run a home network with the latest Ubuntu server, a Vista desktop, a laptop and an old PC under the telly as my media centre. There's a wireless network, primarily for my Nokia N61i PDA so I get websurfing on the couch for free.

I also have a restricted cabling licence so I can legally run CAT5 cables around the house myself.
I've just read a really interesting book on how technology is really just the next evolutionary step of the human species and how we must ultimately merge with that technology. Thankfully Kurzweil suggests that this merging will happen over a long period of time (decades) and that each stage of the merging won't be as confrontational or sensationalist as the phrase 'merge with technology'. He suggests it will be more of a slippery slope, such as an ear implant here, an eye implant there, memory implants, nanobot medichines and so on...
This leads me into a post on...

Core Interest: Family

Now, these core interests aren't blogged in any particular order. Woe betide any fool of a took who puts software or D&D in front of family! I have a wonderful, amazing wife, Sinéad, and two high-energy, take-it-to-the-MAX kids, Cian(6) and Neise(4).
I met Sinéad through a friend at work - Hi Nuala! Sinéad is Irish of course, and we spent nearly four years living in Dublin to get married and spend some time with her family before moving back to Aus. We've been married for nine years now! Sinéad runs her own business ECOdirect, (with her partner Sionéd), and is a busy super-mum and super-wife!
Cian is a brilliant boy in Year 1 who likes to know how stuff works, loves reading, and inventing things, such as his very successful GPS Boots. (boots that tell you where you are).
Neise is a funny and beautiful princess-mermaid who will start Kindy next year. She loves pink. And Cinderella.
I love them all :_)

Core Interest: Software

Another core interest is software. When I say software, I really mean programming software. No one likes software for the sake of software because all software has problems. Whether it is slow, buggy, or just plain not useful enough, any piece of software has its problems.
Writing good software is a really interesting and challenging task, and when you can get some good results, it's also very fulfilling. Most of the software I write is in C++, but I've also written a fair amount of Java, and dabbled in stuff like PHP, Javascript, and other lesser abominations of languages.
The key to writing good software is in the modelling of the functionality or the abstraction of the functionality into well defined, er, clumps. You want to create little clumps of software that have well defined responsibilities, interfaces and relationships with other clumps.
Of course, writing commercial software requires a whole host of other activities, and the actual modelling and writing of software makes up about 5-10% of a software engineer's job. Unit and system testing, documentation writing, bug investigation and fixing, maintaining build systems, meetings and discussions groups, email flaming, etc etc.
In my spare time a while back I wrote a software package for the management of stock portfolios. Check out StockWhip!
I've worked for such companies as Baltimore Technologies, CyberTrust (now Verizon Business), RSA, and now, Websense. I work on the Email Filter product, fighting the good fight against email spam and other annoyances and threats.

Core Interest: D&D

This is the first of a series of posts introducing myself via my core interests. The term 'core interest' sounds like something out of an Internet RFC or a D&D rulebook, I know, but that's just how I am. Deal with it.
Yes, I play Dungeons and Dragons. It's one of the highlights of my week. It's just great fun. It's beer with the lads. It's constant geek/movie/pop culture/programming/book references jokes and some silly voices.
The character I currently play is Moag the half-orc. Obviously, he's dumb but strong, but not in the way that you think. Mostly, he's just underedumacated. 'Moag's mother always say Moag make bad decisions'. He favours the use of a terrifying flail.
We're playing with the 3.5 edition rules still, but are looking to start on the 4.0 ruleset. 4.0 is quite different from 3.x, so we won't be bringing our characters across, but that's OK with us. We tend to like a change every now and then. Playing low level characters can be just as much fun as the ultra powerful god like abominations you end up with. Before that, we need to find some closure to two compaigns, one a multiverse/planescape mind-fuck from Rich, and the other a Faerunian shadow-plagued knees-bent running-around power-fest from me.
I'm currently writing the latter and looking for inspiration. Reading the sourcebook 'Lost Empires of Faerun' is providing a good background. It won't be an easy adventure for the poor rich adventurers either. TPK is a viable end to the campaign. Heh.

It's late.

It's late. I'm tired. I'm late to the blog scene. I'm tired from trying to keep up. I used to be cutting edge. All the time. Now I wait. And wait. Until it's almost mainstream. I also need to go to sleep.

unwritable.blogspot.com
Do you know how hard it is to choose a decent domain here? I think I did reasonably well. It has both a writing reference and a technology reference. Since I'll be writing a bit about technology, it should be at least forgivable.

Right. Sleep(28800000)....