Apple iPad

Damn, I'm excited about the iPad.
A while ago, my son said to me that he wanted to live in the future, and I told him I always thought that as well, and then I told him that for me, 2010 was always the future when I was growing up. He was kind of awe-struck by that, because he figured I was living my dream. Well, ok, we know it doesn't work like that, but then, this morning seeing the iPad, I kind of feel a bit like that. This is an amazing device.
I really enjoy my Nokia E61i. It can do a lot of the things an iPhone can, but just not as well, and without a touch interface. It's a pre-iPhone device, and hence is practically irrelevant. The iPhone really started the touch computing revolution, and showed us how much better interfaces can be.
The iPad goes further. It's not just that it's bigger, because really, that's all it is; it's big enough to enable a much wider, richer experience through a more capable interface. Suddenly it's possible to type reasonably, see entire web pages, get decent video, comfortably read a book, as well as all the amazing accelerometer features, like games and interface enhancements.
See some photos here, and here.
Here's a really interesting article about how it will change things.
I'd hate to be selling an eBook reader that cost more than $200, when you can buy this for $500. I think the iPad will really bring out eBooks and cement the ePub format for a long time. eBooks are going to be the big change this year outside of this awesome piece of mobile computing.
I'll be lining up for the Wi-Fi only version because I really wouldn't use a 3G connection much, and I don't want to wait the extra time for it. Start the 60 day counter now.

Dragon Coast: Book VI

My D&D campaign adventure is coming along. I've been filling the geography with nasties from Pathfinder Bestiary, Monster Manuals I-IV, and other tomes like Fiend Folio and Libris Mortis. It is set in the Forgotten Realms, specifically Cormyr as far as the characters know, but of course can lead them anywhere. I've just set up a campaign page at Obsidian Portal, so when the adventure starts, it can be tracked there.
Hopefully I can keep the players' disbelief suspended during the game, enough anyway to enjoy some hack, slash, burn, loot, and pillage action. The adventure is all newly created, so it's been a big challenge so far, and will continue to be until the PCs either finish, or die trying.
Andrew is still running us through Horror on the Orient Express, and we probably have 4 or more sessions left, sounds like. Last session was particularly gruesome. I can't even tell you. Nightmares.

Still waiting for the iSlate

The comics are getting on to it now. Here. Here.
5 days.
And this. Ha!
More rumours.

Dollhouse S2E6: Not Lame

That was a really cool episode. It features a new character, Bennet (who was also in the previous episode, also good) played by Summer Glau. Summer plays her usual style character, psychologically unstable, plain weird and a geek. Brilliant. The play between the two alpha geeks, Tophur and Bennet is really good. Also brilliant is that the doll Victor is imprinted with Topher, and he interacts with the real Topher all through the episode. Hilarious!

V: The Series: Lame

*sigh*
I really wanted it to be as good as I remembered the original V: The Series. But it isn't. It's just lame. It's all really very pretty, nice effects, and everyone is gorgeous, but it's shallow, and unimaginative. It's just boring.
I had a good feeling about it too, after BSG was such a great series, doing things differently from it's original series, yet keeping its flavour. But they're completely different, obviously.
*sigh*

The Earth is plunging toward the Sun!

At least this theory suggests it might be.
In short, the Sun is collecting dark matter on its journey through space, increasing its apparent mass, thus slowly shrinking Earth's orbit. Apparently, this should cause the semi-major axis of Earth's orbit to increase, which we can measure, and is only out by a factor of 2 or so from the observed.
Hmmm.

Apple iSlate

12 days to go. Can you feel it?
News.
Recent.
Wrong.
Feel the buzz.

It's good to be a software engineer

It's officially good to be a software engineer. Low physical activity and stress levels. Mostly, I personally think it's interesting because everything keeps changing. Boredom is the worst.

Matter

I just finished reading Matter. No reading-matter jokes please.
There was quite a large fantasy element to this, as much of the plot revolves around a civilisation barely into gunpowder and steam engine technology, and then only because they've been fed it by a more advanced race. I don't mind that, fantasy-in-SF was used to great effect in Implied Spaces, but I felt it made much of this novel a little on the slow side. On the upside, this also forced the fleshing out of the different levels of Involved civilisations in the Culture universe, in fact showcasing one of each of four distinct levels of races of sentients, each one a mentor for the race below, with the Culture obviously on top.
This book introduced the shell-world concept, which is essentially a constructed planet formed of many concentric shells, although existing in more spacial dimensions than normal space. Each shell level can hold a whole different race and environment tailored for them. A very cool and brilliantly detailed technology.
The ending was a little rushed, I felt. I think it would have been good to have focussed more on events in the second half of the novel than the low-tech political shenanigans in the first half.
Still, a good read. Iain M. Banks rarely disappoints.

Avatar

I've just been see Avatar. This is an unbelievably awesome film. Intensely immersive. It's all filmed in 3D which adds to the immersion, and most of it is computer generated, although the  actors' performances are mapped directly to their digital avatars, so it is entirely believable. The filming technology has been described as a huge directable game engine. It's completely amazing and engrossing.
The film is essentially humans taking resources from aliens. The alien world is a beautiful, holistic, sensual place full of wonder, and nasty creatures on an almost Asher level. The humans are stereo-typically corporate driven and military supported, but their environment is in its own way awesome, with fantastic hover ships, and exo-skeleton infantry. The conflict is epic, and I found, deeply moving.
Again, the effects and sound are amazing, produced by the likes of Weta Workshop, Skywalker Sound, Industrial Light and Magic, a group called The Pixel Liberation Front, and many others.
The acting was generally pretty good I thought. Sigourney Weaver really likes her SF. James Cameron wrote and directed the film, and has been waiting for a long time for the tech to complete his vision. Brilliant work.
The avatar concept in the film, where humans can tele-operate a vat-grown alien body isn't entirely new, (usually done with a synthetic host), but works really well as a device for connecting both the viewer and the film humans with the aliens. It is beautifully done.
Go see this film. See it in 3D too. It's completely amazing.

Virtual Inheritance.

I found a bug recently that was causing a crash only on a Solaris 10 build, but the same code was fine on Win32. I eventually tracked it down to the Sun compiler not generating the correct code for a virtual inheritance situation. It was a multiple inheritance situation, and one of the parents was a pure abstract interface class, so it's not like the design was really ugly, or the situation was particularly complex. There was only one implementation of the virtual method for the class, and the abstract interface was derived virtually. Calling the method on the class worked fine, but calling the method on a const abstract base class reference (where the method was declared) returned fine, but the returned object caused a crash as soon as it was used. The method was there, but the compiler didn't hook it up in the virtual method table. It hooked something up though. Bizarre. I removed the virtual keyword, and everything worked fine.
The Sun compiler is Flakey.

Misspelling: jewlery

This one annoys me. Not only do people often say jewlery (say with a course aussie accent), but they spell it like this as well.
Lets have a look around for this. Here, here, here, here, here.

Idiots!

Climategate

I sure hope we're not overly reliant on the models or data from CRU for our picture of global warming. Because it seems they are both complete crap. See here, here.

[update Dec 2]  While this looks very very bad, it's possible the science coming out of CRU isn't all crap, but there should definitely be some sort of review of their results.
Also there are other sources of good science on this, so lets not lose the plot on climate change altogether.

Crunchpad dies!

So close to going retail. the CrunchPad is dead. It looked exactly like what I'm after.
*sigh*

[update Dec 8] Its back, under the name JooJoo. Pricing set at US$500. That's probably over my threshold. I'm not getting into the politics of who owns what, let the legal action settle first.

[update Dec 14] And the legal action starts.

CERN geeks play D&D

Of course they do. Some interesting tid-bits in this interview with a CERN geek.