Some god of slashdot has decreed that i should get mod points all the time now. I've taken to modding posts +funny when they aren't even kind of funny, so I'll lose the points soon enough. But it makes sense to do, because I think the post should be better seen but that it isn't good enough for the user to get so much damn karma from, and funny gives none. Well, not that anyone reads this journal anyway.

My job contract has been extended for some (unknown right now) amount of time. I figure about another 3 months, hopefully. Honestly I'd like to work here permenantly because then I can move closer and cut down the long commute. Plus then I'd have a place of my own. Plus I'd be able to go out and about to pursue some women.

I'm unbanned, about 2 weeks after I was banned from this ip. I wrote slashdot but didn't get a reply, maybe the unbanning is a form of reply. Then again maybe it just ran out. I hope someone on my subnet isn't running around trolling, cuz that would be very upsetting.

For some reason I have been banned from posting on slashdot since at least Monday. I'm spending more time on wikipedia now. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.

Lets see if I can create a list of anime that I think is good and a list of what I think is bad. Maybe I'll explore the reasons sometime later -
Good:
Cowboy Bebop
Hellsing
Full Metal Alchemist
Naruto
Samurai Champloo

Not so good:
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Outlaw Star
Macross Zero (but great artwork)
Samurai 7
Inu Yasha

I'm gunna try out this /. journal thing. Look forward to entries about anime, chess, music, and my inane life. Right now I'm running 2 systems, a win2k box connected by wireless to a cablemodem, and a fedora box connected to the win2k box which has ICS running. Oh and I start working on 06/21/04. :-D Money.

Latest journal entries at hackorama microblog

Got my third story posted.

I just found something interesting. I had posted a cheapshot as an AC on a thread. Later, I got moderation points; and when I moderate, I browse at level 0. To my utter surprise, I saw that the comment I posted as AC did not have the moderation dropdown box; the other posts did. This leads me to believe that somewhere at /., they keep your ID attached to AC postings.

I wonder what would happen in case of a subpoena or other such judicial order?

So, word to the wise: please be careful when you post something as AC, because it is most definitely not anonymous.

Is the invasion force carrying out meaningful humanitarian operations?

Umm Qasr aid effort 'a shambles' (BBC News)

Quote: One young man angrily said to me: "You support us when the TV cameras and newspapers are here, to show the world you like us.

"When they have gone you change. You have changed Saddam for another kind of imperialism."

The last few days more and more articles are showing up in non-UK, non-US press about ordinary Iraqi's response to the war. Why aren't US and UK news sources interested in these stories?

Perhaps because the picture they paint of the US and UK is almost exclusively one of the imperialist occupation forces not wanted by the people.

I've kept from discussing the war for a long time because I simply (unfortunately) don't have the time to follow it up. But this lack of journalistic integrity shown by most of the UK and US press is simply too ugly to stay silent on.

Last week it was Iraqi's in Jordan that wanted to go back to fight for Saddam - according to Jordian authorities some 5000 are estimated to have gone back to Iraq, and a Jordanian border guard was apparently visibily happy that he could tell western media that Iraqi's are a proud people that will fight for their homeland.

It was also citizens in Baghdad, chanting anti US slogans and telling how, while they're against Saddam (most of them anyway), they saw the US and UK as just as bad - or even worse. One of the sentiments expressed was that Saddam has been working with the UN for the last 12 years, and despite that the US and UK rewarded them with 12 years of sanctions bringing the country to it's knees and follow up with a war.

Today it is this article, in the conservative, often hawkish, Norwegian newspaper "Aftenposten". They were also my source of the article on the Iraqi's returning from Jordan.

For those that dont read Norwegian, here's a few selected quotes. The occasion was the Kuwaiti Red Crescent handing out food parcels in Safwan. Foreign journalists were brought in in order to show the world how grateful the Iraqis would be... The title of the article is "Iraqis need water, got food".

"They smile and wave, but the words they greet us with are expletives so fould that our interpreter would prefer not to translate it. And the picture of Saddam that greeted the entrance to the city is gone. It's not the citizens, but the Americans who removed it."

"We don't need this food. We have food at home. But we need water. We had water, in a 40km long pipeline from Kor Al-Zunker. But last Friday, when the Amnerican helicopters came, the pipeline was bombed. Our electricity supply and phone exchange too. Now we stand here without water, says 50 year old Mohammed Jasem"

"Everyone we talk to among them says the same: We need water, not food. They are also united in another question: Their condemnation of the war. Of Americans and Brits, of bombs, dismemberment and abuse.

- Many here don't like Saddam Hussein, and would love to get rid of him. But this war isn't the answer. We don't trust Americans. We rose up against Saddam last time, in 1991, but the Americans betrayed us, Mohammed says."

"- Why should 25 million people suffer just because they want to get rid of one person, Mohammed asks" [on the question of it isn't a good thing that US and UK are now trying to get rid of Saddam]

"The situation in Safwan is tense. People are afraid of Saddams agents, and they fear Brits and Americans.

- They don't let us get out of here. All roads out of this area is closed. We can't contact our relatives, says 19 year old Kassim.

- We aren't allowed to bury the fallen Iraqi soliders out on the hillside their, either. Now they're getting eaten by dogs.

They defend Saddam here in Safwan:

- He's at least an Arab, and Iraqi. This is our country, we don't want the Americans here, says the people around Kassim."

"People are also angry about the good distribution, that it happens this way , on the side of a dusty road.

- We have a community building here. Why can't they distribute the food there? Why do it in this unworthy way? We're an old civilization, a people with a rich culture. Now they are killing our brothers. The people who fight against the USA are brave and noble. If they'd had as good weapons and planes as the Americans, it wouldn't be foreigners who controlled us.

- We don't like Saddam, Mohammed continues, but we're Iraqis, we're Arabs. And in this region, are there anyone that likes their government at all, he asks rhetorically.

- But don't you want democracy?

- Democracy is created by the people, not by the Americans. Now they only give Saddam an opportunity to destroy the country. Everyone here is against the war.

- USA says this is a war against Saddam, not against the Iraqi people?

- Whatever, but it is the Iraqi people who gets bombed."

I came back from the peace rally in London a few hours ago. I live right across the street from Hyde Park, so I didn't have long to go. Even though we didn't go until about 4pm, there were still thousands of people arriving by the minute. Some never got there, as the streets were so crowded it was next to impossible for all the people who followed the march to get there in time.

We did catch the speeches by Ken Livingston (mayor of London) and Rev. Jesse Jackson, though. Especially Jesse Jackson was incredible. I'm an atheist, so his more religious comments didn't exactly impress me much, but his drive and passion, and his ability to get the masses going was immense.

The latest figures from the police as I'm writing this indicate more than 750.000 demonstrators, some say up to 2 million. Regardless who you believe, it was the largest demonstration of any kind in UK history, dwarfing even the celebrations after the end of World War II apparently.

And it wasn't the only place in the UK where people demonstrated.

To put this in perspective: If you believe the police, almost 1.5% of the population of the UK was on the streets of London today, marking their disgust for Tony Blair and George Bush.

And Tony Blair dare to continue to fight for a war? How dare he argue for a war that the people who elected him, who he is supposed to serve, so strongly has shown they do not want?

It showns clearly that he needs a lesson in democracy.

When you can draw a crowd that large, and when you can draw loud cheers by calling for the overthrow of the government if he don't change his mind (as at least one speaker did), it is time for the government to think things over very carefully.

I've never demonstrated outside of a few May first demonstrations when I was younger, even when I was politically active for a few years. This drew me out. My fiancee has never demonstrated before. This drew her out. We saw thousands of pensioneers, kids, people of all races, people in expensive coats and suits and people in cheap clothes, people of all kinds. People you'd normally never see at a demonstration side by side Socialist Worker Party people and other "professional" radical demonstrators.

It's a serious wake up call when pensioners, students, working people go to the streets in such large numbers.

These are people that are hard to draw out. These are people that stay away from elections in droves because they don't see it as important. These are people who'd rather stay inside, in front of the TV than go out in the could February wheather.

Yet they came. And they chanted anti war slogans. And they carried slogans.

And Blair still ignore us. How dare he defy the will of the people he serve?

Haven't had much time to add to my journal lately. Work has been taking all my time. I was assigned to managing the development of a new registrar platform called Personal Names, for .name, and we just launched the other week :)

The goal is to be the first registrar targetted entirely at ordinary people as opposed to business customers. It's going to be a tough thing to do, since we're breaking new ground in marketing domains and e-mail forwarding.

Our previous project, Nameplanet, did prove though, that there's a market for "vanity addresses" or simpler addresses on the form "firstname@lastname.something" (in Nameplanet's case by registering lastnames on tons of TLDs, in Personal Names case all on ".name").

Anyway, it's been a though few months, and it will likely be lots of work ironing the kinds out of the system for a while... :)

Nooo! More stuff about pseudo random numbers and computer games! Stop it. Stop it I tell you!

Ok, so maybe I'll take a break from it for now, and try not to be a total geek today...

It's hard when you do software development for a living, and stick with it's because you think it's almost more fun than the stuff you do in your spare time :-)

I DO actually have other interests as well. Maybe I'll post some of my poems one of these days (allthough then I'll probably scare the few of you actually reading this away with overly soppy and/or depressive stuff - I rarely write when I'm not in the process of falling in love with someone or insanely depressed, usually because of rejection(1)).

London can be such a depressing city. It's been raining on again off again all day, the traffic is horrible, the air disgusting... Been thinking off moving out of the city for a while, but will probably wait until next May when our lease expires.

Property prices here are just horrible now. I'm used to Norwegian levels, and thought that was ridiculous, but come on, 200.000 pounds is now the average cost of flats and houses sold in London...

It never seizes to amaze me how far up the prices can go here withouth a significant increase in building projects (except for Docklands, which seems to be mostly luxury complexes anyway, due to its proximity to the City).

Ah well, guess we'll get something slightly outside town.

Vidar

(1) But don't feel sorry for me about the rejection bit, I'm engaged to a woman I met more than two years ago, so feel sorry about my lost career as a poet instead, as I'm now too happy about things to write anything truly good - my depressive poems were always my best ;)

Expanding on my last idea, I'd like to write some more on events and viewpoints.

When a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to listen, does it make a sound? In the the pseudo-random or algorithmicly generated world, the answer should be no, because the tree doesn't fall. It only falls if someone is there, or when someone arrives and "observes" the past.

The point is this: If your world is generated algorithmically in a way that allow you to "visit" any point in space and time, then why waste computing power calculating something that isn't observed? If you need the information later (say your game has a "history book" somewhere, you can calculate it then).

Notice that "observed" here is a fairly wide term. Someone "observe" an event if they are directly affected by it, for instance because they're there, and watching, but they also observe it if they see the effects indirectly: They get the news relayed etc.

So events are only generated if observed. How do you determine if they would be observed?

Thats where viewpoints come in. You generate events based on viewpoints. Viewpoints are points in space and time. To generate events, you would take a set of viewpoints and move them through time, calculating changes in the world according to the algorithms you want to use, and use a rule set to emit events according to those changes.

A rule might say that a government change from democracy to military dictatorship happens only with the use of military power, so such a change will emit a set of events corresponding to a military takeover.

What about details?

In the real world, think about what you know, and how it corresponds to level of detail. You can likely see the room around you, and describe objects in it in detail, and conversations in it as well. You may hear noises from outside. You may see news on TV, or in a local newspaper. News about your local area may include details about the shop around the corner, but from other countries you only get events of importance or interest to a larger audience: Major political events, like an election, disasters and so on.

In other words, the level of detail drops of dramatically with distance, and this is important, since otherwise you'd be swamped.

Translated to a game, that would mean that you use the viewpoints not only to decide what parts of the world to actually calculate, but also what level of details the events should have. There's no reason to simulate the full level of details about a military coup on a planet lightyears away. It might be noted in the news, if the planet is important, or the coup bloody enough, but thats it.

But an attack on the planet the viewpoint is on would be noteworthy, and the event generator would need to expand, both by increasing the resolution of advances in time - smaller changes to the timeline must be done, and more events emitted -, but also by splitting events into stream of events, and handling deviations if someone interfere. It might include simulating troop movements, or introducing AIs to simulate individual objects, as well as generating more meaningful news.

A viewpoint can essentially be there for anything from passively observing the world, to an AI player, to a human player, or anything else that require information about the world at a time period at a given point in space.

Vidar