I found this story in my journey, and it’s a familiar thing, so I thought I’d repost the guts of it here. The original article is at Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.

“It’s a black triangle,” she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?”

What she later came to realize (and explain to others) was that the black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete – the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it to work doing cool stuff. By the end of the day, we had complete models on the screen, manipulating them with the controllers. Within a week, we had an environment to move the model through.

They apparently referred to these kinds of advancements as a Black Triangle, a metaphor indicating possibly massive progress, but in a framework or engine or supporting code, such that the current results give you (or rather, people looking at it) no sense of progress. For me, it was usually a white triangle (on a black background) when dealing with 3d graphics, but similar events have occurred, like when I got a tile displaying in one of my 2D games, or when working on an automated script for work creating many large templates and supporting code when the test itself is actually not that long or complex, or Curtis’ graphics project, that had all sorts of physical simulations going on with real-world formulas being applied… but for a long time all he had was a text console spitting out numbers.

I like the Black Triangle metaphor, I will try to remember to use it in future, even if no one knows what the hell I’m talking about.

Sorry, I just had to put this here. I threw on Tron to fall asleep to (as I’m sure Alicia and Curtis would say, because it’s soooo boring that it’s suuure to put me asleep…. *coughbastardscough*)

Anyway, I hit this bit, and It’s just painful.

LORA
Here goes nothing

GIBBS
Heh. Interesting, interesting. You
hear what you said? “Here goes nothing.”

LORA
Well, I –

GIBBS
Whereas actually, what we propose to
do is to turn something into nothing
and back again. So you might just as
well have said, “Here goes something
and here comes nothing.” Heh?

LORA
…. Right….

This is in reference to their molecular disintegration and reintegration laser wotsit.

It’s just… awful.

Sorry again.

Looking over some old code for various classes at waterloo, stumbled upon this, which if I recall correctly, was one of two songs we came up with during cs342 during long lab sessions only interrupted by massive hand trauma. We actually put an .cpp extension on this so it would be submitted along with the code, but not being in the make file, wouldn’t screw anything up. Anyway, here it is… and boy, is it geeky. How I miss concurrency…. “You… shall…. not….. pass!!’

I Will Debug
(sung to the tune of I Will Survive)

First I was naive
Life was so sublime
Just a casual geek
Coding from time to time
But I spent so many nights
Trapped infront of my screen
Hooked on Caffine
Because these assignments are all mean
and so you’re back
from dinner break
You just walked in to find me here
with that stunned look upon my face
I should have released my stupid lock
I shouldn’t have blocked in your queue
If I had known for just one second
that this deadlock would ensue

Go on now debug that code
just typed in gmake
damn stupid server load
wasn’t that your class that was compiling when it died
you think I’d not compile
you think I’d deadlock and die
Oh no, not I
I will debug
as long as I make mistakes
I’ll have coffee in my mug
I’ve got all my code to write
I’ve got to stay up all night
and I will debug
I will debug

It took all the Coke I had
not to fall asleep
kept trying hard to make
myself stop counting sheep
and I spent oh so many nights
just thinking to myself
I used to try
Now I just give up and cry
and you see me
somebody old
I’m not that happy little person
just bitter and cold
and so you asked me if I passed
and just expect to say yes
but I just say kiss my ass
’cause my life is such a mess!

hey hey

I just watched this again, I caught it years ago. I’m referring to the 80’s movie version of it. It’s a story of rabbits and their adventures through what I’m told is analogies to various political systems. Regardless, it’s a decent movie, that is also pretty graphic. It’s also kind of sad as you see how bad humans are in it, from the rabbit’s point of view. But a few times a human stopped a cat, so it’s all good.

I think the part I liked the most was the concept of the rabbit having their own creation fable, and the style in which it was done is really nice.

As usual, Youtube has it.

I suggest watching the movie if you can.

My first embedded movie, joy.

My friends and I finally exchanged christmas gifts. It was delayed by going home for christmas and not having a chance to meet up beforehand, and then by the plague I contracted and other general delays. But the exchange was made, and I got some very nostalgic gifts. I also got a watch, which is very nice, too nice for me, heh, but I need to take it to a jeweler to shrink the band a bit. But that’s not the nostalgic bit.

I got the Space Quest Collection (the latest one, I read there was another created by that name years ago), containing the 6 games, for the PC. And I also got the Activision Anthology, 45 Atari 2600 games, for the PS2. Lots of nostalgia. Oh, also, the title is just a joke, in and of itself, but it’s not meant to imply I don’t like the nostalgia I go into detail here.

I played Space Quest I today, I was a little dissapointed to see that the version provided was the VGA version. See, Space Quest I was originally an EGA game, and that was the version I knew and loved. They remade it a few years later, redoing all the graphics and changing it from a text parser game to a mouse-action game like some of the later creations. Still, I had never played that version, and I managed to beat it today, being a relatively short game when you know what to do (and I still know most of the puzzle elements by heart). But it was funny to be stuck on the little differences made to the VGA version, most frustratingly being the copy-protection they introduced. Most of their games have that kind of crap, and you have to refer to the manual, which they provided… as a PDF. They also recommend printing out the PDF as well. Heh, no thanks. But as all the games run in a licensed version of DOSBox, it’s easy to ALT-Tab out. I already had a version of the original EGA version of the game as well from a couple years back, so no matter.

Space Quest I, the EGA version

Space Quest I, the VGA version

I had played Space Quest 2 and I think 3 in the past, so I’ll play them again here, plus I’ll have 4, 5 and 6 from this collection, so it’s pretty kickass. The real selling point is that it’s all supposed to work flawlessly in Windows XP. Well, they cheated and used DOSBox, but still, presumably they tested it. I did discover a weird bug in Space Quest 2 during the save screen, it sort of screws up and leaves a bit of the screen on the game screen, which gets refreshed as you change it (like walk over the corrupted area, or just leave the screen and reenter). I hope in the damn police guys in the arcade (vaguely remember it from one of the Space Quests) are managable, as running it directly on a fast computer tended to make it impossible.

The Activision Anthology is actually kind of interesting. You pick from the 45 games from a rack, and play them on a TV (by which time it goes fullscreen). There are a lot of good classics on there which work as well as I remember them, like Plaque Attack, Crackpots, Dolphin, Oink, and my personal favorite, StarMaster. Those are some of the ones I used to have way back as cartridges. They also included some decent ones like Kabobbler and Pitfall, and some trash as well, heh.

StarMaster – The Great

Plaque Attack – The Good

Demon Attack – The WTF

It includes a set of 80’s songs that play in the background of everything, which repeat just a little too often, but still add a lot to the nostalgia factor (though ironically most of them are songs I liked much later in life, not in the 80’s). They also offer some interesting things to unlock, like commercials for some of the games, and patches (which I assume are graphical renderings of the real patches you could win by submitting proof of score to activision for certain games). The lamest attempt of value added crap to the collection are different viewing modes, like playing games where the game screen is textured on a rotating cube, or rotates slowly or zooms in and out. These games are meant to be pretty damn hard because there’s no ending for most of them.. you play until you die. I can’t imagine why you’d want clouds or stars interfering with your Dolphin run. But fine, they are there.. and they are turned off, heh.

The thing is with most of the early Space Quest games, and with all of the atari games, I doubt most people could just sit and play them and enjoy them. They are archaic, the atari games especially, playing for points, most of the time no ending, graphics quite startling at times… even I look at some of them and go “wow” because I remember them being so much better, but I’m sure that’s just because back when they were new, anything was amazing. The nostalgia power is high, I can still enjoy such games. Can you?

-OR-
Does Anyone Else Remember This Show?

The opening titles

I’ve recently rediscovered a show I once watched as a young lad something like 10 year ago. It’s actually available on Youtube of all things, the entire series.. see far below for links. I’ve also, er, acquired it, through other means. This site that lists several shows, classic kids tv gives some info, and a link to Shock which actually released the first series in it’s entirety very recently (before it and it’s sequel were chopped down to telemovie length). In any case, the show is Region 4, or Region 0 in Pal, depending on which bit you read, either way I can’t play it. If ever it’s released here, I’ll buy it.

The show was created in 1991 and starred a group of people that, if you were to find some commonality between them other than being alive and human, would probably be the desire never to leave Australia, as it seems none of them really appeared in anything readily available outside Australia again. Looking up some of the bio’s from people who were in this show, if they even have a bio online, indicates many of them were stage actors in australia, and have remained so since, or perhaps dropped out of spotlights altogether. Which is annoying, since the star of the show I thought was strikingly attractive. I had nearly forgotten about that since I first saw it, since I couldn’t remember the show too well, but I now remember that I thought the lead was quite stunning. Now, of course, I’ve aged 10 years and she hasn’t on the screen, so it’s weirder, but I think only 5 lashes is sufficient punishment. The show was created in two series, each with 12 episodes, and the 24 episodes in total follow pretty well a huge story arch, with perhaps a dip in the middle where the two series are separated, but still the story wasn’t effectively resolved at that point.

The main protagonist of the show, Alana from the future, was played by Katharine Cullen, and just like the other people in the show, it’s pretty well impossible to find anything about her, in fact, wikipedia and imdb don’t even have a birthdate, but I reckon that if her age on the show in 1990 was supposed to be 14, that it’s likely that she was. As I said, I always thought she was quite attractive, and now that I’ve rediscovered the series and have remembered that fact, I’ve been trying to work out why. I think it’s the eyes and the broad nose, and the cheeks. Anyway, she hasn’t been in much else. IMDB claims she was one of the many Gatherers in The Tribe that Stayed in Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Hell if I can spot her, but I wouldn’t even know what she would look like at 8 or 9 or however old she would be. She was also in a play that had a picture in a paper with her name on it, so google found it. She’s probably late 20s in that picture. Anyway, I was unable to wring anything more from the internet, my stalking skills must be on the decline.

The Katharine that was young

The Katharine that grew (top left, obviously)

So here is a synopsis of the introduction of the show. Alana, said Girl from Tomorrow (several tomorrows, into the year 3000 of them) sneaks in to the science dome where her historian-guardian Tulista embarks on a 28 day trip to the evil year 2500. She returns moments later with bad man Silver-Thorn who took control of their new Time Capshul (intentional, since they all pronounce it like that, it’s cute). The people in the future use the power of thier minds to fight him, so he decides to rule the past instead, grabs Alana and together they plummet into the year 1990. Alana is separated from the time capshul, and having received no training in history, she is pretty much screwed. But she does meet up with Jenny, a comperably aged girl (who helps her evade a raging grocer), her brother Petey, who’s young and annoying, and their newly divorced mother Irene. Together, with their powers combined, don’t beleive Alana is from the future. And so the show continues.

The show is interesting for a couple of reasons. One of which is that it takes place in Australia, so it’s all accents all the time, but other than that the show could have really taken place anywhere, if you remove all references to Vegemite. The sci-fi elements are low-key, sort of like Star Trek TOS, the technology is there, but we don’t really have to know how it works. This constrasts with all the Star Trek’s since, which try to explain it in their own fantasy terms, and really, reversing the polarity is something the enemy should just expect by now. The show is also low-budget, at least, I have to figure it is given what it was, a children’s sci-fi on australian television. But they managed to use it pretty effectively, the scenes of the future aren’t particularly corny, just a little sparse. The special effects are decent, as are the props, for the most part. Some of the effects from the transducer scream Post-Production, but altogether it’s not so low budget that you see the set shake or shadows on backdrops. The ‘electricity’ effects are particularly nasty, but what are you gunna do.

Coloured-light pianos and reflectors are more intuitive control interfaces

PJ basically shows Alana how to subvert security at every turn, nice graphics otherwise

Another curious element is that the show’s protagonists are almost entirely female, and even minor players in high positions are women. Alana, the protagonist, is female, as is her friend Jenny. Petey is male, but just a wee lad so he doesn’t have dominatory effects. Jenny and Petey’s mother is single after a divorce. Later on a male protagonist in the form of a new beau of the divorcee comes along, but as the main protagonists are Alana and Jenny, it doesn’t undermine them much. The world council head (in the year 3000) is asian, and also a woman. In fact, they did a reasonable job for the year 3000 casting, since lots of nations are represented there. The inventor of the time capshul is an indian man, but the historian making the dangerous leap back to 2500 is female. Unfortunately there is a bad womanism here, which the world council head remarks to the historian now in ugly 2500-era garb that she wouldn’t have the courage to wear those clothes. ha ha ha. Well, whatever, Still better than her being recast to Nurse Chapel.

Interestingly, the antagonists are both male. Well, I’m talking about the really evil people, not the ones who merely get in Alana’s way in the 1990’s, which are also, I see, mostly male. But at least in this series, the two main evil characters, Silverthorn from 2500, and his bribed young henchman Eddie from 1990, are both male. That never seems to change actually, I think perhaps in the second series there was a woman hench..person, in 2500 (but the costuming makes it hard to tell) and there was a woman who did bad things under orders, but the main enemies were all male. Oh well, the point of this wasn’t that the antagonists were male, but that the protagonists were female, which is refreshing.

Time Travel has inhrerent problems in philosophy and physics, and in storytelling for that matter. For stories, basically, if you can travel at will back and forth in time, like Back to the Future, then you have to decide whether you can change history, or not. Changing history is interesting, leads to paradoxes, or rather, just deferred madness. Like, in Back to the Future Part 2 where they go back to 1985 and see it all dystopic, that is because history was changed and on travelling forwards, the timeline they are in is that altered one. That is all well and good, though the bit in the first movie about people fading away is just crap.

The other system you can use, which makes things a lot easier is to just say that the past is immutable, any changes you think you are making to the timeline are already in it, meaning you were destined to make those changes. This is like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban, since they didn’t really “change” anything, it all occured as it did in the first “pass” of the timeline, they just didn’t realize the implications, but they were destined to do it, it was contractual.

The Girl From Tomorrow is weird in that it seems to think that the immutable past theory is true for the first series, then go, oh shit when they see it’s not true in the second series (which I will discuss in more detail later) go and employ the theory of a changed history, which story elements in THAT series show elements of the Harry Potter version, of a destiny and an immutable history. Say what? Oh well. I’m actually surprised that Alana, as a character in the first series, didn’t even consider the implications of changing the history, and going to security guards asking them if they’ve seen her Time Capshul. Still, kids show.

Also, a problem with time travel is the concept of space travel at the time. The Girl From Tomorrow claims to follow the rule that it doesn’t travel through space, and that fact is actively used as a plot element in the second series. But in the first series, it is totally violated in the last episode. Oh well. This is the same sort of system seen in Back to the Future, except I don’t see why movement relative to earth is special. On the very first experiment with the Delorian, that dog’s one minute leap into the future should have had it 1800 kilometers away, in space, perhaps in the earth itself, since the earth revolves around the sun at 30KM per second. And that’s just the earth’s movement, what about all other movement. It couldn’t be calculated since as far as I know there is no fixed point in space to which all otherwise relative movement can be measured, but in any case, the car wouldn’t be on the road. For safety’s sake people, the only time machines should be space ships, why won’t anyone listen!

The technology from the future is of the sort that’s indistinguishable from magic. The main future element Alana brings with her other than the capshul is the Transducer, a headband like thing with a cystal in the middle. It focusses the telepathic aspects of the pituitary gland apparently. It is the main tool from the year 3000, it can be used to levitate, heal, and if emotionally unstable, untrained or evil, can be used as a weapon to explode CG balls. The people in the future even have little dots tattoed on their faces representing the levels of mental control they have. Other bit of futuristic brikerbrack Alana has with her from the future is a large bracelet which is actually her PDA called P.J., which has the ability to break into government computers, synthesize voices, project holograms, and has absolutely no security regarding how it’s used or who uses it.

Any sufficiently advanced future is indestinguishable from magic

Here I’ll do a rundown of each of the shows, here be spoilers. I tend to focus on the more interesting or odd bits, these aren’t meant to be full reviews or synopsies. If I seem to be making fun of the show, that’s just my way, it’s still a good show in my opinion, but it may require having seen it when young.

(more…)

I find myself singing this often enough, so I thought I’d share. I dislike doing just link-based blogging, but I think I do it rarely enough that I can get away with it now.

Zelda Rap on Youtube

I like how previously impossible to find things (and I had looked for this before Youtube/googlevideo existed) turn up with such frequency now.

And the lyrics for those so inclined:

There was Zelda from the very start!
I got the hearts and smarts to play the part
D-d-down with Zelda!

C-c-creepin’ through with an overhead view,
‘Cuz a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

So I stay on track,
Collect the facts,
Never cut slack,
And I always watch my back for jacks.
D-d-down with Zelda,
Yeah!

S-s-strong I stand;
I’m the man with the plan,
‘Cuz the power’s in my head
And the power’s in my hand.
D-d-down with Zelda!

Werd

I haven’t had much going on lately, at least that I feel I should be blogging.. er, journalling…. er, not-journalling about. But recently I’ve made a couple little 3d animations for my brother for wedding video’s he’s been editing. I don’t know what some of these people expect, I mean, he’s like no time to do any real editing, basically take the sometimes massive amounts of footage, crop out the crap (5 minutes on either side of “I do”) and get it on DVD, that is, if he expects to make a positive dollar per hour amount on anything.

But he’ll get someone who says “Oh, I want butterflys flying past the screen during the ceremony” or something. Not usually much he could do about that, but he turned to me wondering if I could whip something up quick. Linked here is the result, which in it’s true form was large, but crappy, but intended to be scaled down and not promenant, so it worked out well for that. The other item is a matchbox using the actual textures scanned from the one they wanted included in their re-nuptuals (in some form or another, how that translated to 3d animations I’m not sure)

In any case, here are my half-efforts, which I put here since I’m running low on topics at late.
Butterfly (DivX)
Matchbox (DivX)

I don’t like weddings myself… *sigh*… always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

I just returned from an entirely too short a weekend up at a cottage near Georgian Bay. It belongs to a guy named John who I know through another friend. Spent Friday night, Saturday and Sunday until nightfall up there. It was really a nice area, got to do some fun things I had never done before, and as Curtis wasn’t there, somehow fate deemed me to be the recipient of all the injuries. I’ll likely blog about the cottage trip in a more positive way once Alicia sends me all the photo’s she took and I can put together a storyboard entry. However, right now, I’ll deal with the injuries.

So a pre-existing one that has been exacerbated is on my left foot. I have some painful blisters and open sores relating to something I haven’t quite worked out, but appears to be mild athletes foot (amusing since I am no athlete). Anyway, walking around in sandles really opened them up and caused some bleeding.

Another set of injuries happened on both feet, the top of my left foot, and the underside of the big toe on my right foot. Caused by sharp stones and zebra mussels while swimming after an inflated tube that had gotten away from Alicia. Very sharp cuts which are at least healing quickly since they were so cleanly sliced. However, more bleeding and pain occured.

Most painful was what happened to my big toe nail on my right foot. I had taken the SeaDoo out for a ride, got to 55mph on it, only the second time on it, and the first time I managed to go that fast. Never fell off, never had a close call… but on dismount I smashed my big toe on what I figure was a rock in the sand in the water. My toe bled profusely around the nail, and I beleive it turned black for a while. Right now it weeps fluid when I put pressure on it (like when walking), and it aching lightly. I don’t know if I’ll lose the nail. If I do, it will be the second time.

And the strangest injury I have is a bruise on my right arm on the underside. Not sure how I got it, and I think I first noticed it yesterday, so I figure whatever happened occured saturday morning or friday night. It’s looking quite evil. Laura suggested it could have been a spider bite, which did little to reassure me. Further, I looked up spider bite on google images, and I decided that I’d rather have it be a bruise.

The loathing part I think can be covered by my own feelings of myself when it comes to some things I noticed about me this weekend, but I’ll keep that to myself.