Flow

For the past couple of years I've survived without having a computer on a desk at home.  Or even a decently-sized rectangular desk at a reasonable height.  Now with the rise of laptops and popularity of reclining on a sofa one may think this not really a problem, at least, when I took on the shoebox-in-shepherds bush that was to be my abode I rationalized away that the provided sofa looked comfy, and my netbook was cute.  Besides, if the worst came to the worst (and it did) my computer is small, that the chest of drawers can fit a monitor keyboard and mouse on top, and that standing up to code/browse/spotify would have a side benefit of keeping me fit, or something.  What I had forgotten to take into account is that desk space is useful to keep other transient items on when using the keyboard.  A glass of water, a snack (currently soya-coated savoury seed mix), a pad of paper, a pen, etc.  A chest of drawers doesn't really provide the space to hold all these things, and allow you much room to use a mouse!

A new setup

Lesson learned.  I've just spent the last bank-holiday weekend, and most of the weekend preceding it setting up my new room in my new flat.  A desk, a chair (oh how I've missed these) at the correct height to use (that only took two attempts walks to argos to get right), a keyboard.  What more could you want?  Oh - a mouse?  Ah, not really enough horizontal space on this desk for that and the keyboard and for you to sit towards the edge of the desk that feels right.  A journey to PC World and a trackball is acquired. Ok, great, everything's ready to go.  What else, oh, yeah, internet?

Now at this point, everything that could go wrong, went wrong.  Forgive me for venting some frustration, but arghghg!  First - on the (completely reasonable and fairly prompt) day that BT were supposed to activate our internet connection they instead decided to disconnect our phone line. Second - three days later, the engineer that was supposed to come out and look at the problem was cancelled.  Why? - The fault was mistakenly reported as fixed in the meantime.  Third - three days later (again) the engineer comes and fixes the line and broadband is established! Huzzah!  So I connect and upgrade my machine.  Only now my computer's wireless card stops working!  Fourth - a trip to PC world to get a piece of kit that will absolutely definitely work with our setup yields a piece of hardware that half works.  And by that I mean it will give me an internet connection for  five minutes and then resets for literally a second, and the works fine for five minutes.

Now in reality, this isn't a problem - iPlayer still works (it just pauses occasionally), and the odd webpage needs refreshing.  There were (well, there still are) about a million things I wanted to do this weekend that didn't even involve the internet.  But the knowledge of an incomplete set-up, that was waiting to distract me with an unnecessary buffering ring or missing web-page alert at any second, really broke any flow I could get into.  Similarly, the stress of worrying whether my mouse would hit the windowsill was probably more problematic than the restriction in movement by the adjacent windowsill.  I've found this hindering worry-of-distraction in several other places as-well, notifications (email, IM, SMS, facebook, twitter, etc) are like poison to me. Not only do I catch myself checking these systems in-case I've missed something, I'm also checking my phone hasn't gone away so I don't miss things as they happen.  Heck, even the incessant on-the-minute-every-minute beeping of the microwave after my porridge has finished, but deliberately ignored so it may cool down, keeps me from leaving the kitchen so I can open the microwave door to shut it up before it even has a chance to complain.

All these problems have solutions - for every mouse, there's a trackball; for every broken internet device, there's a lovely walk in the sun back to PCWorld, followed by exchanges with three sales reps to replace the device; and for every notification there's a silence button and an attempt to realise that if anything urgent happens that needs me, I'll get a phone call.  Hmm. Unfortunately I've not yet found a way to silence the microwave.

On a lighter note, in amongst all the to and fro to PC World, a graphics tablet caught my eye.  After trawling through the collected works of Tufte, my ideas for projects have been gaining a slightly more graphicsy angle so I could just about rationalize the decision to get one.  They are devices I like having around, even though I know I don't use them anywhere like as often, or as well, as I should - text editors really should find some way to integrate pressure sensitivity into their interfaces somehow!  Anyway, with the sun pouring through the window, and a spare 30 minutes set aside to playing with it and a paint program, I managed to draw something abstract (I don't claim that it's any good).

"The Journey" or "Green Cat".

Soldiers Pay

A scale model of what Fishbourne Roman Palace may have looked like

During a sunny weekend away for my mum's birthday I found myself in Fishbourne Roman Palace.  A large estate, with many mosaic floors, a few graves, some plaster, a replica garden, but, due to the value of stone after the palace burned down, no walls.  This ancient act of theft turned out quite lucky for our tour guide, as the spaces where the walls where have been filled in with modern concrete and turned into special walkways for him to traverse the site on, while the rest of us untrusted public had to remain behind little barriers and look at small informational plaques.

Like many of these places where the remains of places of historic interest[1] are found, along with the historic find, a load of ancillary stuff has sprung up to make a visit a fun trip for all the family - a research facility with separate tour, a scale replica model of what the original site might have looked like (along with a ship placed in a now-known-to-be impossible shoreline), a museum, and (everyone's favourite!) a little shop!

A small self-indulgent digression, if I may.  I, like so many others, have a bad habit of collecting things.  Over time what I collect varies, but there is usually some class of thing (or sometimes, to the detriment of my bank balance, things) that I will irrationally want to acquire more of.  Also, interestingly, most of these collections can be fuelled by tat that is offered up in the little shops that support historically interesting sites.  Growing up it was glass marbles.  When they were lost I built up a massive collection of keyrings and keyfobs.  Much later, after finishing my degree, it was decks of playing cards.  Now, my fetish-de-jour seems to be acquiring dice games.  The collection is currently small, comprising Zombie Dice (plus expansion) and three sets of Rory's Story Cubes, but the Fishbourne shop presented the opportunity to buy "Tabvla" -- a Roman predecessor to backgammon played with three dice -- and I could hardly refuse such a generous offer for five quid.

An arch kit to keep kids (of all ages) amused :)

The museum at Fishbourne was well worth a look round.  For kids (henceforth classified as those under 30 years of age) there were practical things to do, such as building a Roman arch from lurid pink blocks and weaving bits of ribbon on some dodgy wooden contraption held together with string.  However one thing that really urked me was an informational board adorned with the title "Soldiers Pay".  It described how much a Roman soldier would earn, what they could or would likely spend it on, and their career prospects.  However I couldn't quite shake the feeling that something was wrong with this title.  Now I'm not about to turn into Lynne Truss on apostrophes -- my command of the little blighters is not one to be envied[2] -- but in my gut I feel like there should be one somewhere as there is some notion of ownership going on.  "A solider's pay", or "Soliders' pay", or somesuch.  "Soldiers pay" reads to me as though the soldiers in the Roman army had to pay for something.  I'm pretty sure I'm right in claiming this is at least ambiguous?

Anyway, I have a hard time letting irritating little things like this go, and over a burger at Byrons with a friend, I started to relate this tale of possible ambiguous apostrophe abuse.  However my diatribe was distracted when I noticed our waitresses' T-Shirt. "Today's special".  'You are or it is?' I thought better of asking when she asked us if everything was all right.  Looking round, the male waiters were instead decorated with the singular "medium".  The possible ambiguities here are great - cooked meat preference?  t-shirt size? or perhaps a secondary job skill that could provide hours of out-of-this-world tableside amusement during dessert?  I ordered a mint tea instead of finding out, shame on me.

[1] The importance of Fishbourne in Roman times is actually pretty unknown.  A rather interesting question posed by my father revealed that there no known written references to Fishbourne (as in, the Roman name for the location is unknown), despite it being (currently) unique in terms of size and scale in Britain.

[2] The number of its v.s. it's mistakes in my Ph.D. thesis was almost legendary.

London Design Museum

The London Design Museum. From [1].

A friend's birthday drinks near Tower Bridge provided me a nice excuse to tick off the London Design Museum from my list of unvisited London attractions (despite having studied, lived and now worked London for what feels like forever, that list is a fair bit longer than it should be - for example The London Eye is one really rather shameful entry...).  Located on the corner of Shad Thames and Butler's Wharf, the LDM is an unassuming white building, with two floors of exhibitions, a cafe, and a rather lovely (if not teeny tiny) shop.

On the top floor the Collection of Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things was a fun exercise in looking at the interesting side of really boring items.  The history of the design and uptake of chairs (wooden, tubular, plastic, vanity, useful), biros (with both transparent and opaque cases) and anglepoise lamps (with two or four springs!) was a bit random.  However, having only relatively-recently passed my driving test, I did find the section on British road signs really quite interesting.  A 1963 review of road signs (The Worboys Committee) had made several contraversial changes, for example the move to mixed (instead of all caps) type, and that the size of the informational signs is determined by content and fixed spacing rules - and is not a set of fixed sizes that the content is made to match.

On the first floor, one of the first things that hits you is this really irritating electronic chirping sound every minute or so.  Only after walking round for a bit do you discover it's an installation of a mobile (ahem, iOS) app called Chirp, which allows iOS devices to share content using sound.  Yup, that's the future - not content with bumping phones to share content, iOS people can deafen their neighbours and make their devices literally tweet!

Walking around, the first floor was a bit of a mad mix of really interesting things.  For example, products that took liquid plastic, mixed it with iron fillings, and applied magnets, moulds and movement in the right way to produce crazy looking stools.  Or, remember lego? k'nex? sticklebricks?  Wish there was a way to mix them together, so you can build super mega things?  Well thanks to 3D printers, it's now possible to home-print converter pieces for any combination of the above and about half a dozen other toys.

One other tid-bit I picked up was an insight into the redesign of Exhibition Road.  This is the main road that runs through South Kensington's museum district (and happens to be directly adjacent to where I work!).  Next to a rather lovely wooden model of Exhibition Road and the surrounding buildings the text description describes how the designer chose to remove all standard road signs to make an unfamiliar environment for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.  The intent of the unfamiliarity is to cause all shared-road users to pay more attention and take more care, while mingling together on a large pavement-road.  I'm not entirely convinced, but, to be fair, as a pedestrian I'm sure to be bloody careful when meandering down that stretch of concrete!

The final notable piece from the LDM was a superstitious fund -- an automated trading algorithim that buys and sells based on superstition.  It won't trade if the day is the 13th, or a full moon.  It also has "lucky" and "unlucky" beliefs that affect it's choices.  Ignoring the obvious statements about the randomness of markets and the place of "luck" on a trading floor, there was something that really struck me about the presentation of this piece.  There was a piece of explanatory paper on the desk that tried to explain the algorithms running this experiment.  On that paper was printed code - from what I could tell, it was a variant of C that actually was incredibly clear, mostly because the logic was reasonably straightforward set of "if condition then action" statements.  Unfortunately the code had been wrapped, as the lines were slightly too long for the columns that it had been forced into, making it (and the lovely comments it contained) appear really ugly and unreadable.

The code was also quite obviously assumed to be inaccessible to the exhibition goer, and was deliberately faded out and overlaid with some very simplistic boxes that crudely outlined some parts of the logic of the algorithm (e.g. do not buy if the date is the 13th, etc).  However there was no rhyme or reason to the boxes, their arrangement, and they didn't really clarify anything.  If only the code could have been made clearer, then everything would have been explained perfectly!  Sigh.

Actually, what really, really struck gets me while walking around the LDM was that many exhibits invoked computers as if they were "magic".  I came away with the feeling that "algorithms" are perceived to be like Dragons, with mystical abilities to do things that normal people couldn't - and must only be handled by skilled warriors lest the simple villager gets burned.  Maybe I took that too far, but the point remains. I know I've spent a long time immersed in code, computers and well formatted comments, but surely the ability to understand an algorithm can't be beyond the reach of, well, anyone?

[1] By Oxyman (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Doctor Who, The Voice, Labyrinth and Jonathan Creek

Easter break - and I find myself at my parents, indulging in an unhealthy amount of TV and videogames.  After a full day of Tomb Raider (100% single player completion), two half days of the original Paper Mario (which, as far as I can tell, is basically Pokemon with mushrooms) and Uncharted (which is not being used as a Tomb Raider surrogate, honest), my attention turned to non-interactive media.

There was also some football on - I didn't really understand it...

I don't generally watch a lot of TV - certainly nothing live any more.   I think I'm only regularly tracking Big Bang Theory, Doctor Who, Nikita, and Castle via the interwebs, but since there's a large flat screen TV here, it seems a shame not to take advantage...

So:

Doctor Who (Series 7, Part 2, Episode 1 - The Bells of St. John)
The Doctor Hacking
Great joke at Twitter's expense
I love JLC

The Voice (Series 2, Episode 1)
Never seen before
Interesting twist, judges begging
I love Jessie J

Labyrinth (Special, ep 1 & 2)
Carcassonne!
French grail quest, past and present
I love Katie McGrath

Jonathan Creek (Special, The Clue of the Savant's Thumb)
Danse macabre
Mystery with nuns and chainsaws
I love Sarah Alexander

Jurassic Park

I can hear the theme starting up...

Give or take a month, the film is twenty years old.  A re-release (in 3D!) is being planned for later this year, and a fourth movie is slated for next year.  I remember seeing the film in the cinema when I was little, the excitement for a giant t-rex and science and computers and pack hunting velociraptors and hissing dilophosaurs stayed with me for a long time, and no doubt influenced some of my future life choices.  I still hear John William's theme tune play when walking through the dinosaur section of the Natural History Museum, and, like many of my generation, I have an irrational fear of tip-toeing around a shiny metal kitchen in the dark -- luckily not something that interferes too much with daily life!

The film, of course, is based on a book.  And, of course, the book is well worth reading.  The story is slightly different, in particular the ending is less 1990's Hollywood.  In addition many of the memorable scenes from the sequel movies can be found in the book (the aviary from JP III in particular struck me as being ripped straight from the novel).

The book was also interesting for non-dinosaur related reasons.  Each chapter title page featured an evolving line drawing, with a slightly abstract title ("First Iteration", "Second Iteration", etc), and some text underneath that was always a bit ominous and technical sounding to my young mind.  Now I recognise the evolving pattern as a dragon curve fractal (Wikipedia claims the specific instance is the Heighway dragon, or Jurassic Park dragon).  I do have some feint recollection that deliberate errors were introduced - meaning to foreshadow and reinforce the regular patterns of man being disrupted by nature trying to find a way - but I could just be making that up.

However, the things that have really stuck with me from Jurassic Park are its theme of science, curiosity, and responsibility.  Dr. Ian Malcolm's haunting line:

Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

is something to reflect upon.  Even in the little sub-section of computer science that I'm involved in, it's very easy to dream up seemingly good ideas, without necessarily thinking through all the consequences.  The idea that sparked this post's self-indulgent nostalgia was an early morning reverie on how awesome Google Glass is going to be - and the crazy things that could be done with it while (say) teaching.  For example, lecturing with an autocue in your eye.  Or in a tutorial you could face recognise the students, work out automatically who was missing, and get the display to provide small little graphs to indicate progress.  It would be amazing, you could work out who needed help - even before they knew to ask.  But then Malcom's quote reminds you to think.  Would students react well to being so obviously tracked, logged and monitored?  What are the privacy concerns?    I'm sure I could work out ways of doing all of the above if I wanted to,and the challenge of making it all work is something I'd find ridiculously enjoyable (it's like a game or a puzzle to glue such technologies together and work around current limitations).  But, like breeding velociraptors, can it be made safe?  Is it a good idea at all?

Away from such moral ambiguities, let me end on a lighter note.  Any reasonable discussion of Jurassic Park has to include a nod to Lex Murphy's cry of delight at:

It's a UNIX system, I know this!

The graphical viewer she uses in the film was a real program, fsn (3D File System Navigator, developed by Silicon Graphics).  There's a linux reimplementation, fsv, which is great fun to play with.

And I think I'm all dinosaured out.

Exam Timetable

A couple of months ago I spent a fair amount of time reading Bret Victor's essays.  If you haven't watched Inventing On Principle, or read Magic Ink I suggest you stop looking here and go there instead (it'll be a much better use of your time!).  One point that really struck me is the incredible bandwidth our eyes afford our brains to receive information.  By comparison, our means of sending data back to the world is incredibly limited.  When put in the context of how we interact with a computer (e.g. my work machine has 4147200 pixels to display information, my hands only have 10 fingers & thumbs) this has really shifted my attention to thinking much more carefully about what I and others get to see.

It's been a fun day, I've spent it thinking about exams I don't have to take...

Not really having much experience with visualisation and graphics, I've been working my way through Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations (with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information currently on order).  There are many take-home lessons from that I wish I'd known years ago, most interestingly they have given me an appreciation for paper as a reasonable output medium - the "resolution" (at 600dpi) for a tiny piece of A4 paper is 4960 x 7016 pixels (of course there are considerations for what you can distinguish by eye).  Other lessons about side-by-side static content not requiring memory across time (as opposed to rollovers or other means of dynamically showing/hiding information you may want to compare) have also been small insights.  There is a danger with technology that the programmer "doing something cool/interesting/difficult to program" outweighs doing something simple, but well.

Anyways...having read all of this stuff, I thought it'd be fun to pick a little side project to put it into practice.   As it happens, this Friday the 2013 Summer Exam Timetable for the computing department (where I work) was released.  This takes the form of a static HTML table, with rows sorted by time, with one row for each exam.  Each exam has a code, title, date, time, duration, room and size.  Now for the students (for whom this timetable is primarily designed), its be straightforward to search through the list for their exams, and add them to whatever calendar system they're using.  

However as staff, it's always useful to have a more global view of what's going on where.  Eventually there will be an allocation of primary and secondary invigilators to these exams (of which I'll be involved in several), and it's always useful to be answer the question of who is supposed to be where.

The idea then of a two-phase project struck me.  First (today), rework the existing timetable into something a bit more visual - using graphics to localise the exams in time (length, day, week), and also in physical location.  Second (to do later, once the information is known) - extend the visualisation to show the assignments of staff, and allow quick finding of particular people (in particular, the exams I'll be involved in!).

A plan.  The red stuff on the right is what I settled on actually trying to implement.

I started the day away from the computer, building a sketch/plan/storm of this mini-project, and working out some rough ideas.  I'm no artist - so my sketches are incredibly abstract, and I favour some textual notes.   From the outset, I quite liked the idea of localising the exams in space, by having a depiction of the rooms they can take part in, as-well as in time.  The A3 page right was my plan.

Then an afternoon of fun ensued.  Tech wise, I thought I'd make this a (large) web-page (so it's easy to share/show others), but with the eventual aim of making something that can be printed and stuck on a wall. -- I believe web-pages are fairly straightforward to convert to print medium.

Deciding to use this as an excuse to learn enough angular.js and javascript svg manipulation turned out to be frustrating at times (just how are you supposed to embed an svg that you want to dynamically restyle in a HTML5/angular document, - oh wait chrome needs svgs to be served from a server to allow you to alter their contents, and don't forget to hack around inkscape to add a viewport to your svg if you're wanting to resize it in a browser! ...sigh).  However, I got about 2/3rds of the way through my idea before running out of Sunday.

At top is a screenshot of the result (larger version below, the online version is likely to change or go away), there's a lot wrong and yet to be fixed, though I am quite pleased with the current state of it.  Hopefully (before the exams!) I'll get something I'm happy enough to turn into a (framed?) poster.

Girls who came back...

Two of my favourite women had new outings this week.  The very real Dido finally released her latest album, and the I wish she was real Lara Croft has rebooted herself as a young, briefly innocent young woman ready for us to make a survivor out of.

Amazon deliveries don't get better than this...

For an impartial review of these two offerings I would suggest looking elsewhere, I was doomed to like whatever was put out by either of these ladies. Both were a very large and fond part of my late teens and early twenties, and I have been eagerly anticipating the return of both.

Dido's No Angel and Life For Rent were a soundtrack to my A-level and university education.  Seeing her perform live at Brixton was absolutely unforgettable, and I still use the DVD recording of that event to chill out / fall asleep to during life's more stressful moments.  Don't Believe in Love from Safe Trip Home has also been played on repeat for periods of time that some would consider close to torturous, but there's something about it that I can't get enough of.  It has also been a long five years since Safe Trip Home, with only the odd Faithless cameo and Sex in the City soundtrack single (Everything To Lose) to keep my Dido cravings at bay.

So with that backdrop, I was looking forward very much to the new album - and Girl Who Got Away is wonderful.  After a week's worth of being my looped background sound, it has established itself as something I will be coming back to again and again.  With Dido the lyrics and the story get just as much attention as the composition of the music.  There are is something very familiar and comforting about this album, while at the same time some lovely experiments and new directions.  The more dancy Blackbird (featuring a beautifully executed counterpoint intro story) and End Of Night in particular stand out.  However it's the little touches, such as the birdsong that can be heard at the end of Day Before We Went To War that really make this complete.

Familiar, but new, can also be used to describe the young Miss Croft's first/new/latest outing.  I have vivid memories playing an original Tomb Raider demo (which would have come on a *CD attached to a physical games magazine) during my teenage years.  One level of the village, with a few wolves, a bear and lots of ruins to jump around.  Fast forward and since then I've spent hours with Lara in her different incarnations - Tomb Raider II, then I, then III followed (yes, I did play them out of order), before Angel of Darkness,  Revelations, Anniversary, Underworld, and Guardian of Light and probably some others I've merged into a seamless memory of run, jump, spin, shoot, scream, reload, retry...

The new reboot still offers some of the puzzles and platforming (which has been executed brilliantly) but has traded some of the exploration and isolation for a very slick (but possibly incongruous) combat scheme.  On the flip side experience and skills are no longer learned by the player as the game progresses, but awarded by the game as points, unlocked moves and levels - a change that moves towards explicit rather than intrinsic rewarding of the player.  I do miss the days when nailing a tricky jump or surviving a trap in a world before quick time events brought a sense of achievement that hit green triangle now to not die just fails to deliver.  However the story (for at least the first hour or two) is pretty gripping, the graphics stunning.  However the world has changed, and my having a job means less free time, and at the moment Lara's still milling around a tomb despite being in my PS3 for several days.  Something I hope to go remedy right now...