A-CLASS

Celebrating the great amphibious assault of Gersbery Duck Pond in 1932.

Leena and I have returned to the UK after a week of skiing in Austria, kindly provided by Leena's parents. I was generally much better at it this year, keeping up with the family ok and finally getting into the '10km of vertical lift in one day' category (in all I did somewhere around 200km of skiing according to their computer tracking system). Generally pretty fun stuff, stayed on my skis most days - though I didn't get onto any black runs, will have to try that if we go again next yet.

In the evenings I worked on a recreational AI project; a starship combat simulation (roughly based on the Starfleet Battles universe) and an AI-controlled Romulan special operations starship. It's fairly basic at the moment, but the essentials are there; realtime ships in 3D space, simple systems and damage simulation, Eurisko-ish control heuristics (not self-modifying ATM, but potentially) and the start of a SHRDLU-like natural language interface (e.g. 'why did you target the warp nacelles?' -> 'POSSIBILITY OF TARGET ESCAPE IF WARP DRIVE STILL OPERATIONAL. FIRST SUBTARGET SELECTION WARP NACELLES MINIMISED TIME WINDOW FOR TARGET ESCAPE' - real modelling but very limited primitive set and vocab at present). For some reason I like the idea of training a romulan ship to blow up Federation outposts - after all, the insidious Federation is worse than the Borg ;). Unfortunately I'm not sure when I'll have time to work on it now that I'm back to work on the main system, but I'd quite like to add a rogue/nethack-style section for visiting planets (e.g. the simulated Romulan AI ship could use some of that signature Trek technobabble to project a 'solid hologram' to infilitrate Federation ships/facilities). For real fun I could even import some more tech from the main Bitphase system and try some simulated goal system failure (e.g. those Trekkie staple 'rouge AI') scenarios - though recreational nuclear explosives might be a safer hobby. Seriously, it doesn't look like I'll have time to do anything more with it in the near future, but it was kinda fun to get this far.

All three of the Bitphase main compute servers (sapphire.bitphase.com, ruby.bitphase.com and emerald.bitphase.com) have now been upgraded from dual Opteron 240s (1.6 GHz) with 2 gigs of RAM to dual Opteron 252s (2.6 GHz) with 4 gigs of RAM. While I was at it I ditched the old Redhat installs and overwrote them with fresh Ubuntu installs - it seems to be pretty decent these days as both a desktop and a server OS and this way I don't get frustrated by niggling environment differences when moving code over. The Bitphase code I'm running at the moment is mostly compute bound and thus runs roughly twice as fast on the new cluster - unfortunately the motherboards were too old to take dual core Opterons (it was enough hassle getting them to recognise 252s - I had to flash the board firmware and the BIOS using nasty utils that only worked from DOS without a memory manager, on machines with no floppy drive). Here's hoping we can afford some new servers when the new quad-core K8L Opterons come out (assuming they live up to expectations). The Bitphase web demos are unavailable right now because I'm using the power pc machine for a different project that I probably shouldn't connect to the Internet, but that should finish up fairly soon.

Leena and I have started playing through System Shock 2 in 2-player co-operative mode. SS2 is without a doubt the best FPS/RPG hybrid ever made (especially with the fan-made patches and upgrade mods), and not just because SHODAN is excessively hot. I am playing a melee/heavy-weapons/hacking+repair character while Leena is playing a psionics/energy-weapons/research+modify character. At the current rate of a little under one deck per session, I expect it will take two weeks or so.

This is the second time I've played through the game; the first time was back when I was a student. The experience was a little different; I was playing in my 3D quadro-built room, which strongly resembled the inside of a borg cube, using a projector screen taking up a whole wall (and filling my field of vision), 600 watts of hi-fi surround sound and complete darkness. I completed the whole thing in one sitting, which meant staying up for a little over 24 hours and living on snack food. That was certainly a memorable gaming experience (on a par with Planescape Torment, the only game so good it nearly got me fired from my summer job): SS2 was pretty much the only game I found genuinely, consistently frightening (as well as very well-written, atmospheric and exciting). Of course now that I'm a seed AI researcher, the storyline strikes even more of a chord than before. :)

Leena on the other hand finds it quite fun but for the most part not scary at all (might be the more conventional setting, might be the fact that she just has even more stringent standards suspending disbelief than I do). There is one notable exception though; she finds the lack of handrails near many of the multi-story drops worrying. The most scary incident for her to date was apparently when she got stuck on a tiny ledge on the edge of a lift shaft - I activated the lift and left her character stuck four stories up (at least until I sent the lift back up for her :) ).

SPOILER: Of course in the ending sequence, where a mostly defeated SHODAN finally offers the player the chance to rule the universe with her (having turned the starship's warp drives into a Prime Intellect style reality hacker), I was shouting 'Yes! Say yes! No you fool! Argh....'. But then I consider Sarah Jane Smith utterly, irredeemably evil for refusing to counternance solving the Skasas Paradigm because 'we need pain and suffering to define us' (fine - you go have an infinity of pain and suffering, on the house, the rest of us can migrate to a universe that doesn't inherently suck). Plus there is the abovementioned fact that SHODAN is totally hot :).

A year ago the Talk Is Cheap ‘unconference’ attracted about 160 PR practitioners and students. It was meant to encourage communicators to find out more about the growth and potential of social media. During and after the event I was often asked: “So, when is the next one?” I hedged. Did the Web 2.0 space need [...]

In a recent post, Ann Subervi of The Ethical Optimist blog notes that PR Programs Get Failing Grade. Her concern is based on a lack of ’smarts’ she sees in recent PR grads when it comes to some of the basic media relations skills required by her agency. As tempting as it is to wonder why [...]

In nearly three decades teaching writing courses and pouring over thousands of student stories, I’ve been subjected to plenty of grammatical and style missteps. Some of them reared their heads more often than others. Here’s a look at 10 prevalent violations: 1. Its vs. It’s. I doubt you’re particularly surprised by this one. It has plagued [...]

A comment by recent Centennial grad Brandon Carlos to a post by Judy Gombita on PR Conversations about the launch of PR Week’s Canadian newsletter, rued the lack of a Canadian PR textbook and similar resources. The observation prompted a second posting from Judy who was on the hunt for materials about Canadian corporate communications [...]

One of the nice things about teaching folks who go on to make part of their living through their writing is seeing their bylines in unexpected places. So, it was a pleasant surprise last week to stumble across a graduate’s name attached to a story in the feisty entertainment tabloid, The Georgia Strait, in Vancouver [...]

I’ve seen this reposted a few times, and I happen to like it. —– Dear Red States… We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and the entire Northeast. We believe this split [...]

I think that was the worst possible way to watch a movie like Crash.  That type of movie needs to be watched straight through, multiple times.  Let’s see…how to describe Crash…if you take a book of five short stories about people who somehow interact with each other, then rip all the pages out of the [...]

Why do we continue to waste these great debate topics on our blogs? Big black guys and their stereotypes, playboy causes anorexia, and now gay marriage! All of these topics are guaranteed to get a good, lively discussion going in class, but we just end up writing about them in our blogs and [...]

Something illogical, eh? Well, here’s something that would fall under the heading of superstition. I always put my pants on with my left leg first. I know what you’re thinking, “it’s just habit.” Where it becomes illogical is that it feels wrong to put the right leg in first. The [...]

Struggling for Perfection is an essay about those Plain M&Ms that always want the A but never want to……Wait, that’s wrong. Struggling for Perfection is a typical feminist article, which means it blames Hooters and Playboy for all the problems in the world.  I really don’t know where to begin on tearing this writing down, and [...]

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