Rhea Myers

Blog

  • draw-something CVS

    The latest draw-something code is debugged and checked in to the rheart CVS at sourceforge.

    It seems a little faster. And it’s certainly easier to work with.

  • How Postmodernists “Think”

    There is no such thing as toxicity. A toxic substance is only toxic to a given system. Therefore we are mistaken if we identify the system-given property of “toxicity” with a particular substance, or example of such a substance.

    If we are to accept that the property of toxicity can therefore be culturally conferred on particular substances (or examples of such substances), then obviously the property of toxicity can be conferred on any substance. Therefore any substance can be regarded as toxic.

    This being the case it is perfectly OK to drink poison, as everything is toxic anyway and most things we drink have no harmful effects, thus disproving the entire idea of toxicity.

    Of course even if we accepted the ridiculous idea of toxicity, we’d have to work out what the word “poison” refers to in order to actually find some to drink, assuming that words can actually refer to anything, which obviously they can’t, except in essays by postmodern “thinkers”.

  • BLT

    Home-made BLT sandwiches. Yum. Thank you, Marks & Spencer, for your sub rolls.

  • Airport Extreme

    I got an Airport Extreme brick. It’s very good. “Regret” by New Order is playing over my old speakers plugged into it at the moment. And I’m posting this from my iBook over the other side of the room.

    As always, the network didn’t “just work”. It pretended to, but I had to tweak the settings. This would be beyond many users, and isn’t what I expect from Apple.

    “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before” – The Smiths.

    I think Apple should invest in some pretty major AI. I just want to turn on Airport and have a daemon exhaustively try to make the network work. Surely that’s doable?

  • draw-something

    I refactored draw-something to be an ASDF package. Which means it’s easier to load and debug in slime.

    If that last line meant nothing to you, nor will the next few. 🙂

    I used OpenMCL’s profiling to find the bottlenecks in the code that are slowing down execution when drawing around more than a few lines. No surprises: (nearest-point-on-line) and (distance) cons heavily. So I’ve changed polyline to use arrays rather than lists and moved any object creation and moved any accessor calls as far out as possible. Hopefully this will get things moving faster when I finish debugging it (Lisp’s “do” loop is horrible).

    I can optimise the distance search by storing some working out each time, or I can move to a mixed vector/bitmap implementation. I wonder if AARON still uses bitmaps and cells?

  • Minara

    I updated minara’s C code to be closer to the GNU coding standards.

    I think I’m going to mothball minara. Unless I can find anyone to help on it, but I’m not even sure I have the time to look.

    Good idea, too far from what I want to be doing right now.

    Update: This week I have been mostly hacking Minara. It’s not mothballed, just something I’m working on as-and-when, the same as everything else. Currently I’m working on picking. Next is probably some basic UI work and then transformations.

  • Two Worlds And Inbetween (Still Not There Yet)

  • Perfect Day

    I slept in until midday, then went for a ride out through Peterborough on my bike. Heading back into town I picked up the new New Order CD, had a hot chocolate at Cafe Nero, then went for a walk by the river. After wandering through fields and trees for a while stumbled across a sculpture garden with a Caro and some Gormleys in. This set me thinking, and I scribbled away feverishly on various artistic ideas.
    The napkin my notes were on disappeared on the way home but I reconstituted the notes in my notebook. Hopefully I didn’t lose any ideas. Then I put a stew in the oven for later, and blogged for a while.
    All in all a perfect day. Life, nature, music, art, food, and no hassle.
    Bliss. 🙂

  • Randomness

    One definition of a random system is one that cannot be more concisely described than giving a complete account of it.
    Aesthetics may require a complete account of (human) consciousness to account for it. Aesthetics would therefore be random in this sense. But randomness would not, of itself, be aesthetic…

  • New Order: Waiting For The Sirens’ Call

    Very, very good.

    Some guitar, some synth, some nods to classic New Order songs, some side-project riffs, some awkward lyrics, and some songs that you’ll be haunted by before they hit their first chorus.

    Much, much better than “Get Ready”, and much better than the more anally retentive reviewers have hinted. This will be your summer and your autumn, too.

    Highly recommended.

    Try http://www.neworderonline.com/ for a fan site with lots of listening and reading resources.