Voder-Vocoder

Here’s an image of Mark’s new projector in action. Why spend $500 on a 27″ TV wheyou can spend $1000 on a 140″ TV?

“Why does technology make me so excited?”

“It doesn’t make any sene me. Technology is just a tool. Is a paintbrush cool?”

“If it’s a really nice painbrush, yes. Do you think only ideas are interesting, not things? I see computers as instantiations of really neat Platonic forms. Everything is an idea.”

I’ve been playing SubSpace/Continuum (it’s like a massively multiplayer Maelstrom) and it’s gotten me thinking. I’d like to see a cross between subspace and an rpg. For lack of a better name, I’m calling it rocket science.

You start by building a 2-d model of the solar system. It would consist of objects and artifacts. Objects are things like stars, planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. Artifacts are things like communication satelites, telescopes, spaceships, missiles, space stations, and asteroid settlements. The position and velocity of each object are well known to all players. There may be thousands of objects in the game.

object atributes:

1. position
2. velocity
3. mass: if the mass is too small to create an aprecible g-field, ignore it
4. radius. If the radius is very small ( < 10^3 m) ignore collisions.
5. an image: what it looks like (asteroids can look alike.)

artifact atributes:

1. position
2. velocity
3. mass: in case you want to accelerate it.
4. visibility. Obviously a ship with fusion engine on will be more visible than a dead ship.
5. an image: what it looks like
6. Orientation and acceleration (or thrust)

It may be acceptible to treat small asteroids as artifacts.

professions/factions:

There is an economy to this game. You can use this to your advantage if you become a merchant. You can buy He₃ cheaply at Jupiter, and sell it for more money at Earth orbit. Or buy metals in the Belt and sell them somewhere else.

The next profession is pirate. Why buy goods when it is so much cheaper to gust take what you want?

To deal with the piracy problem, there is the bounty-hunter’s guild. They recieve money for killing pirates.

To pay for the bounty hunters, there is a tax on merchants. Some avoid paying taxes by becoming smugglers.

There are IRS agents running around trying to kill smugglers.

There could be other professions: construction, mining, etc.

user interface

If course, if the ui is no good, this boat won’t fly. First of all, you need to be able to zoom from 1 meter resolution to 10^12 meter resolution. Second, you need an autopilot that is capable of plotting a course to anywhere. Otherwise, players would always be crashing into the sun, or unable to find neptune.

And fuel should not be free.

Here’s little script that check to see if the ssh-agent knows any keys. If not, it asks for your passphrase. Then it executes ssh.

#!/bin/sh
#DTPD#
## $HOME/bin/ssh ##
if ! (ssh-add -l > /dev/null); then
  ssh-add;
fi
echo ssh "$@";
exec /usr/bin/ssh "$@";

Of course you have to have the ssh-agent working correctly in the first place.

The third part of Marshall Brain’s essay on robots is out. Also check out Manna, a work of fiction.

Brain gives two possibilities. Utopia and distopia. I have the feeling that the future, a usual, lies between.

Here’s the final version of the modern piece I started last night.

And on the right is a work in progress. All I can say is that it is less ugly now than it was last night.

I did some painting today. This one’s not done yet. You can still see that some of the paint is still wet. And all of the white squares need to be painted. I’ll finish it tomorow. The most important thing about this piece is mixing good looking colors. That blue needs work.

I bought a new used bike last month. It’s nice, but it’s a bit too hot during the month of August to want to ride it long distances. I plan on making it my primary mode of transportation as soon as September brings cooler weather.

I picked up a headlamp for my bike today. My old lamp, which I lost, was 15 years old, used C batteries (who has those?), and tended to slide off the handle. The new one uses AA’s, and can be unclipped from the (very secure) mounting to serve as a flashlight.

I’m reading Komarr by Lois Bujold. It’s another one of her space operas, but this one is seriously lacking in spaceships so far.

I don’t know how I’m going to fix my sleep schedule so that I can attend 8:30 classes. I might have to resort to coffee. I wonder how old those coffee beans are? I bought them when I lived on Vilas. I really haven’t drunk much coffee since I was an undergrad. Do coffee beans get stale?

Today I wanted to play Civ III on my computer. It required booting into windows. Now don’t get me wrong, Windows XP is a fine operating system….for playing games on. I’d hate to have a job where I was required to do any work on such a machine. Or if I had such a job, I’d quit it after 18 months.

Windows has been unable to boot since I put in a new motherboard and processor. So I took this opportunity to reinstall windows and repartition /dev/hda. (You can’t fit windows XP on 2GB. Don’t even try.) Of course the istallation wrote over my master boot record. I had a little problem restoring it. I’ll let you know what I ended up doing in case it ever helps someone else. (Although I think my setup is probably unique.)

1. put in redhat install disk. Boot into rescue mode. It will mount your filesystmes under /mnt/sysimage.
2. If /boot is a seperate partition, unmount it first: “umount /mnt/sysimage/boot“.
3. chroot /mnt/sysimage
4. remount the /boot partition: “mount /dev/hdb1 /boot“.
5. grub-install '(hd0)'

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m putting together a media pc. I started with my old computer, dalek, and put it in a new case. Then I hooked the video card’s s-video output up to my television and the sound up to my stereo. When I tried to turn it on two days ago nothing happened. So I went to bed. Yesterday, I opened it up and found that the power supply was not plugged into the motherboard snugly. After fixing that, it booted.

It is running Knoppix off of a CD. Right now, XFree86 is not sending the TV a good signal, so I’m stuck in console mode. So no watching movies on dalek yet. But I did pop in a CD full of mp3′s and it could play them using mpg123.

To Do:

1. Get XFree86 working.
2. Play DVDs
3. Get my router working.
4. Get dalek onto the network.
5. Share music & video from lensman’s harddrive using samba.
6. Play video games with emulators.

That photo I just took is meant to show one thing. Since it’s a black case, it doesn’t stand out much. Which is exactly how things should be. It’s just another component in my A/V system. Eventually, the system should consist of (1) a media pc, (2) an amplifier & speakers and (3) a screen.

UPDATE 2004-12-02: A while back I broke down and threw a 8 GiB HDD into dalek and installed FC. This eventually got 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 working. I use scp instead of samba. I just don’t trust samba.

For a while, I’ve been upset at the sorry state of emacs. It is not HIG-compliant, and it doesn’t use anti-aliased fonts. It is really a pain to remap all of the keybindings for emacs. And when you have three or more buffers open, it’s a pain to switch between them.

So I’ve decided to abandon the one true editor.

First candidate for Hal’s new editor: vim. I quickly dropped that when I realized that I didn’t want to learn a whole new set of arcane keybindings.

Candidate 2: gedit. The default editor for my desktop of choice: Gnome. It has anti-aliased fonts and tabs, which I like, but lacks any other useful features.

Candidate 3: beaver. Beaver is a gtk+ editor that tries to be exactly what I want. It has tabs, syntax highlighting, gtk2 toolkit, and anti-aliased fonts. But it’s still rough around the edges. I think it really wants to be adopted by the Gnome project.

Candidate 4: kate. Kate is the advanced editor for KDE. I don’t really like KDE as much as Gnome, but ome of tha apps are okay. KDE has one great feature that is integreated into all of its apps: network transparency. At the command line, I can type

kate ftp://XXX@halcanary.org/public_html/index.cgi

or

kate sftp://ups.physics.wisc.edu/home/hal/note-.txt 

and it asks for a password and opens up the document in a local window. This is beautiful. It also has really good syntax highlighting. It does not have tabs, but it is easy to switch between buffers with alt-rightarrow and alt-leftarrow. It’s also easy to edit the keybindings. I just made ctrl-w an alternate for close, and ctrl-[shift]-tab for forward[backward].

Also note that KDE is the desktop on Knoppix. Anywhere I can stick in a Knoppix CD, I can use kate to edit files locally.