I'm sure of it. Today's (16th June) OCR A level physics paper, the Field and Particle physics one, question 11b. Very much a schoolboy error - the question setter had used nanograms and then assumed that meant *10^-9 in formulae. Unfortunately, thanks to a historical quirk related to the french revolution, the kilogram is actually the base unit, so nanograms are *10^-12. Anyone else notice this? More to the point, anyone know what happens about it? Should I complain to the exam board? How are such things marked? Or did I do something stupid and there's another explanation.

That is all

Went to see it yesterday. Like AOTC, I feel it's worth watching once but doesn't stand up compared to the originals. Whilst I have attempted to avoid spoilers I make no guarantees.

The Good

Hurrah! Hayden has - just about - learned to talk! He still sounds flat and wooden, but at least it's a human degree of flat and wooden, not the previous computer-beating monotone. He's not up to love scenes but some of the conversations with Obi-Wan manage to sound almost genuine. There's a person underneath there, at least, and he seeps through occasionally.

The spaceships. At the start of the film we see a genuine fleet engagement, although mostly from the perspective of a few fighters one gets a sense of two full lines of battle, with ponderous cruisers exchanging tremendous firepower.

The Bad

"General Grievous". I mean, really. That sounds like the villian out of a kiddie cartoon. No, it's worse than that. It sounds like the villan from a set of action figures. Would it really have cost too much to get someone to find him a proper name?

Kenobi. He's now much nicer to Anakin, far friendlier. This is good, but it's happened at the wrong time. In the last movie he was patronising and didn't seem very close to Anakin, who nevertheless stuck by him. This time he really loves him, and yet he turns from him.

Portman's voice. Somehow she's gone from queen to council estate. Maybe it's just too much time around Christiansen.

The Ugly

The dialog. We know what to expect by now. Urgh.

The plot. The macro-plot is actually fairly good, with the collapse of the republic making simplistic but striking points about society. But anakin is just not believeable or human enough.

Fate told me something today. I'm not quite sure what, yet, but I know there was something important.

I forgot my violin, and my music. This used to be something that happened fairly frequently. But this morning I was making a special effort to remember it. This wasn't a random event, it was important.

I was expecting to play the violin with a particular girl for the last time. And I was expecting to play the music to another. Now I have done neither. I feel there must be a reason for this. Things don't happen to me without a good reason for them, especially when they are things which are important to me.

Gosh, that sounds awful.

Amarok has now learned what I like - well, fairly well anyway - and I must say I'm really appreciating it. All the integrated things like lyrics and cover management really add to the experience. It seems a very good player. I wonder when this, K3b and Kaffeine will make it into the main KDE tree. I think they all should. Amarok is a superior replacement for JuK in almost every way, it seems a shame to lose a program so quickly after it was introduced but that's the way things are. K3b there is no excuse for leaving out, it's one of the best showcases for K3b, being the best cd burning program on linux. Kaffeine makes a good competitor to Gnome's totem, using a lot of KDE technology with kparts, the universal sidebar, system tray interface etc. With Kaffeine installed viewing web videos in konqueror becomes painless, having it part of the main KDE tree would finally make out of the box video playback on linux a reality.

Looked at Amarok again today, and I was distinctly underwhelmed. The global shortcuts are a nice touch, but for everything else it seems to be just another media player. Why is everyone so excited about this? Heck, it was featured here a few weeks ago.

I use and write plugins for noatun, so I'm more than a little biased, but I really don't see what Amarok offers above it, and the absence of a plugin system seems very shortsighted. Its database features may be slightly useful, but they don't update automatically as far as I can tell, making it far less useful in that respect than juk. I'm not certain this is the case, because amarok frequently crashes when attempting to add a folder to the database. The UI is to my eyes horribly nonintuitive, and less well integrated with kde than either of the other programs I've mentioned, though arguably better looking because of it. It may have more features initially, although most of them seem gimmicky to me, but the lack of plugins means it has less overall and including everything anyone wants will make it horribly bloated, while leaving things out will mean most users will feel there is at least one thing it is missing.

So, can some of its fans explain the big attraction?

As I write this I have finally got a dual-headed system up and running. My sig's semi-ironic begging for a geforce2 unexpectedly paid off; props to cannon fodder 0109 who sent me one. As this was a PCI card, I decided to get down a monitor from my attic and set up a dual-head system.

My first troubles appear to be due to two of my PCI slots not working. Is this normal, perhaps a result of me firmly shoving a pci card just beside the slot I was aiming for? Or is it a cause for concern.

Anyway, after removing my winmodem and rearranging my other cards (the fan on this card makes the two pci slots next to it unuseable) I was able to delve into the fun that is X configuration. My initial manual efforts proved futile, while running xorgcfg yielded a working dual-head system, but with my AGP card only running at 640x480. With a little investigation I determined this to be because of the monitor, however no amount of fiddling would persuade it to run at higher resolution. I eventually hit on the bright idea of searching for the model (taxan multi vision 875) to find out what the settings could be. No luck; all I could find was specs and config for the later + and + LR versions. However, I copied the xf86config for a +LR and discovered that although the default mode was too high for this monitor, other modes worked. Some of them looked pretty good. So then it was time to binary search for the maximum HSync. I'm not sure if there is a proper way to do this, but by reducing the max hsync by 8kHz I got a monitor that worked immediately in 1024x768. I turned down my primary monitor (on the new pci card) from 1152x864 to match this and enabled xinerama, which is very nice. (As a linux user, I can choose whether to have independent desktops or a single stretched one). As a Gentoo user I was expecting to have to recompile kde with USE=xinerama, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it already had support. The extra space comes in really handy and kde is set up to take advantage of it nicely, although noatun keeps displaying the track in the bottom-right corner of the left screen rather than the right one, even though kopete puts notifications there with no difficulty. Hmm.

So there I was, feeling all smug, and I rebooted only to find my second screen horribly positioned up and to the left on the monitor. It had been like that at first, but I'd just adjusted it, but it seems to snap back whenever I change video modes. Hopefully it will acquire a "memory" for the right position, I've had monitors that do this for a little while after being brought out of storage, but in the meantime it's rather a pain to have to keep readjusting the thing for 3 minutes each boot. Anyone got any suggestions?

I had a slightly odd experience today. I was listening to my mp3 cd player (it plays ordinary data cds with mp3 files on them) in shuffle mode, with a CD containing around 100 songs on it. I began idly wondering which song would be next - and got it right every time. 4 songs in a row and I guessed each right. I've once had the same experience when seeing a live band with a friend, but looking back on it that one can be explained by the fact we'd seen the same band a year before; perhaps they played the same songs in the same order. This time is harder to make sense of. I know from experimenting (No, I don't have too much time on my hands, I just like to know how my gadgets work) that the shuffle order is not determined purely by the cd, the same cd played five times on shuffle gives five different shuffle orders. (I haven't listened to this particular cd more times than that). The cd player has no (accessible) clock, so I don't think that is likely to be a random seed element, although it's possible. Frankly I'm stumped.

Anyone else had such an experience? Is it normal to have something like this happen to you because there are so many things that could happen with probability around 1e-8 that one of them will? Or should I start to worry?

Hello. You've just met Suffolk's under 17 chess champion. And under 16 last year, and under 15 the year before that. And since the title wasn't competed for this year, I can probably claim the under 18 championship as well. But rather than being happy for winning, I'm saddened by the fact that I've had no competition for the past 2 years. The once proud Suffolk Junior Open is now just a shadow of itself, having shrunk to a twelfth of its former size. What went wrong? I've seen many people blame computers for the demise of chess, citing Kasparov's defeat as the reason for a loss of interest - why would I want to learn something computers can do better than people? I hope this isn't the cause, though, as I fear if so, other games will inevitably follow. Pure mental games will be first, I know a lot of companies have their sights set on Go, and although so far the best computers are not that much better than you or me, and certainly no rivals to the masters, the problem is parallelizeable and merely a question of scale. Apologies for any inadvertent misrepresentations, but AIUI Deep Blue etc. win by combining the rudiments of what humans would call a feel for a position with the ability to brute force forward about eight moves. The brute force will be no help with Go, but we know computers can do the other part. Not as well as humans, yet, but it's merely a matter of time. I remember reading about when Deep Blue sacrificed a bishop for the attack. Once that happened, I think humans were pretty much done for.

The conquest of compuers will not be limited to such pure mind games though. Computers can already do pretty well at Poker, not champion level yet but getting there. I predict we'll see a Settlers of Catan playing computer before long which can hold its own against human opponents - or at least those who aren't prejudiced against it. And then we'll see one which can beat them. And once they have mastered diplomacy, although robotics is still in its infancy, I think we will inevitably see computers moving to compete in the physical arena. And they will eventually win. Will we see all games reduced to cock-fights where it's not the competitors anyone cares about, but the people behind them? I hope not. I enjoy competing as a human, against humans. I hope the troubles chess is facing now are simply due to its bad "marketing", the poor image it has, and perhaps greater use of internet chess rather than physical tournaments. And I hope it will recover. But I fear it won't. Mikey

Looks like I'm making some progress with my linear magnetic accelerator. First off I've discovered that you can put some little caps in series to pretend they're a higher voltage one. So I'm going to have 3 banks of 25 capacitors each, in series, for a total operational voltage of about 300v, capacitance just over 8mf. Which is pretty much as good as I'd been hoping for. I have some thick copper sheets to make the connections. I'm still waiting on the copper pipes to make the rails and the liquid nitrogen to cool them, but I'm getting there. I now need to accquire some compensating resistors so that I don't blow all my caps up when one goes, but other than that things are looking good.

Python is, imo, the cleanest and nicest programming language around. With its good layout, near-total lack of unnecessary syntax, understandable keywords and operators, and unobtusive but powerful object system, there's nothing I'd rather code in. But I recently discovered that someone had managed to do what I'd thought impossible: obfustucating python.

Most of this is standard stuff like odd functions, funny variable names and abuse of global variables (which is less useful in python because of the need to explicitly declare any globals). But one thing which stuck out as a truly powerful technique (so much so that there's a page on obfustucating programs with this) is abuse of the lambda statement.

Python lambdas are odd creatures. The thing is they can only contain expressions, not statements. This means they are less powerful than lambdas most functional programmers are used to, and also that you have to use the incredibly ugly hacks seen here if you want to make them do things. The intent may have been to stop overuse of the lambda statement, but if so that's a very dangerous thing to do, and it's backfired here. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

However, this highlighted for me the state of the general Python functional section. A lot of functional things are being added to Python; one commentator claimed that like all languages, it was tending asymtopically towards lisp. But far too many of these features feel rushed and bolted-on, like the Perl object system. Making python obfustucatable via an unpythoninc functional system can and will ruin for me the language I love. I think this needs to be taken a bit slower and more carefully.

Finally got to see The Incredibles today. I'm very disappointed. I was hoping to see computer animation mature to the point where a computer animated movie is no longer just about the computer animation, but also about being another movie. That sort of happened with Final Fantasy, and with luck will happen completely with Advent's Children. It sort of happened with The Incredibles, in that it was just another action movie. Unfortunately it was one that sucked. It reminded me in a bad way of Spy Kids, in that the villan used every cliche in the book. Although there was some awareness of this ("You've got me monologing"), it wasn't enough to offset the complete lack of innovation. The whole "we're a team as a family" thing was very Thunderbirds (the movie, not the series which absolutely RULED), and made it seem like a naff kids' movie. The plot, although mildly amusing, was even more nonsense than usual action-movie fare, and utterly predictable, and the characters, with the possible exception of violet (although why wasn't she hotter?) were just unlikeable. All in all I'm very let down.

I think I'm turning into a goth. I realised this a couple of days ago, looking for some t-shirts. I found the only shops with t-shirts I remotely liked were being run and patronised entirely by goths. I'm also finding this increasingly with music I listen to, people I like, and generally things I do.

I never made any conscious decision to do this. I've always been fiercely individual. But I've also always written bad poetry, been fairly but not completely non-mainstream, and moaned about how awful life is. I think I'm really at the age where most people actually stop being goths, but I've always been late developing socially (and early academically).

I've always aimed to avoid being part of any groups when I've thought of them at all (Whenever anyone asks me what I am, I say I'm just a simple country boy), except possibly "hackers". However, from what I read a lot of the goth stuff is about being individual. And I do like their music, and black suits me, at least better than anything else. And I've already convinced more than one person I'm a vampire.

So, time to get some black nail polish then? Comments anyone?

Mikey

Message to Azalemeth at 12:00:17
    /me had very fun christmas party last night
Message to Azalemeth at 12:00:24
    has headache now, but it's worth it
Message from Azalemeth at 12:00:24
    OOgh
Message from Azalemeth at 12:00:24
    Lucky
Message from Azalemeth at 12:00:35
    Oooh, lol
Message to Azalemeth at 12:00:38
    I kissed more people than in the entire rest of my life
Message from Azalemeth at 12:00:46
    XD
Message to Azalemeth at 12:01:01
    of course, not so hard for me, but still...
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:09
    /me REALLY wishes that his school had christmas parties
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:15
    Or that he was invited to normal ones.
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:16
    Actually.
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:20
    Wait, I am, I just can't go
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:21
    Blast
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:23
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;<_<
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:26
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;How much did you drink?
Message to Azalemeth at 12:01:29
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;lol, ouch
Message to Azalemeth at 12:01:32
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;erm, 3-5
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:44
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Bottles of whiskey?
Message from Azalemeth at 12:01:46
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Units?
Message to Azalemeth at 12:01:48
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;3 or 4 and then a friend poured half of his into my mouth
Message to Azalemeth at 12:01:49
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;pints
Message to Azalemeth at 12:02:20
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;/me thinks the last may have been a mistake
Message from Azalemeth at 12:02:28
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;And you were sick from that?
Message to Azalemeth at 12:02:34
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;as I couldn't hear anyone and was being told to leave people alone
Message to Azalemeth at 12:02:34
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;no
Message from Azalemeth at 12:02:52
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;lol
Message to Azalemeth at 12:03:14
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;well, was being told to leave the particularly nice girl alone anyway
Message to Azalemeth at 12:03:36
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;only hot teacher left before I'd had my fourth, which was probably a good thing
Message from Azalemeth at 12:03:46
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;XD

I'm once again looking for good "big" open source games. And once again it seems that only formerly propriety ones fit the bill. I've just been playing Pingus. It's a good game, but far far too short to be any good. I've also just downloaded cube, where the same problem seems to apply. Open source game engines seem to be good, but open source data not so much. Like the common complaint that open source doesn't have good user interfaces, or graphics, or documentation, it seems that anything other than the actual code is looked down upon, and so doesn't get done. We need either a shift in ways of thinking, or more propriety games for linux.