The Happy Finite State Machine

This cheerful little machine takes a binary number and tells you if it has an even or odd number of zeros. I’m starting a programming degree this year, this is the type of thing I should be reading up on instead of doing a maths bridging course.

Here’s the problem, programming is maths reimplemented, in order to be good at it you need to understand maths. Unfortunately academic maths doesn’t appear to have anything to do with understanding, it’s about learning the tricks to doing maths your mind hasn’t comprehended yet. I’ll stop now, while the new information over rant ratio is still about 1 to 1.

Democracy

I was thinking about how democracy, while giving everybody a say, seems rather slow and often doesn’t supply what people really need when this analogy came to me.

You, as a member of the national community are like a patient at a doctor’s surgery. You are one among many, with specific needs, concerns and attributes. When your name is called you enter the doctor’s office to find not one but two doctor’s sitting behind the desk. They are both in their fifties and their hair and clothes are ruffled and creased, one is wearing a business shirt and black tie, while the other is wearing a red Hawaiian shirt. They seem to be in a strained civil state although you get the impression they don’t like each other very much. You tell them your symptoms, they ignore the ones that are new to them and focus on the few that most of their other patients are also experiencing. After informing you of your aliment they both glare at each other for a few moments as if they know what each other are about to say. Suddenly black tie begins to talk,
“My union prescribes antibiotics to be taken once a day, I recommend you come back for a checkup in-”
“Immediate surgery is the only option according to my union!” interrupts red shirt seeming more concerned at the opposing stance of his college than the problem you’re facing.
“There is no evidence of any of your union’s methods ever working!” shouts black tie enraged at being cut off.
“Excuse me” you interject politely, “but what’s all this talk about unions? Can’t you just tell me what you think I should do?”
Red shirt rolls his eyes and says, “It doesn’t matter what we think.”
“All that matters is what the union believes” continues black tie, “Those are your options, antibiotics or surgery”
“Well just give me a minute to decide” you say defensibly.
“Decide!” laughs red shirt, turning to share the joke with his colleague, “He thinks he gets to decide!”
After chuckling for a few moments black tie says “You don’t get to decide, we poll the waiting room, whoever gets the most votes, wins! I mean er… that’s the treatment you get.”
“What!” you shout, “But those people don’t care about me, they don’t know anything about me! Most of them learned everything they know about medicine from television shows!”
Black tie shrugs, “It’s the only fair way”.

I have mixed feelings about the democratic system; at times I’m thankful for it, I’m certainly thankful for where it’s got us so far; but other times I think there has to be a better way. What it comes down to is this, the system has the potential to work really well, the only thing in the way of that is the people using it. In short, blame the politicians.

Imagine if parliament was a group of people coming together all wanting what’s best for Australia, capable of admitting mistakes and seeing each others point of view. Picture a public that was aware of the big issues and capable of making informed decisions based on the facts, which were made freely available to them.

If people were ever to change into a society capable of this vision, democracy could work really well, the only problem is I don’t think they ever will.

Road Trip Part II: Back Again

0937|10.01.10
The week staying in Perth went quite quickly, we have just departed the apartment. It’s a bit sad to be crammed into the car again but I’m somewhat glad to be in adventure mode again.

1631|10.01.10
We stopped for lunch and then again at wave rock which was interesting and got us pumped to see Uluru. We have been driving on dirt for a while now which isn’t too bad.

1723|10.01.10
We’re about to setup camp and it’s still 36°C, no clouds though so hopefully the heat will dissipate. We are back on tarmac.

1922|10.01.10
We’ve just had dinner which was good. I’m now in the tent and it’s starting to cool down a bit.

0924|11.01.10
It’s Monday, the flies and the sun are out in force. We’re heading to Kalgoorlie to see the Super Pit.

1740|11.01.10
We saw the Super Pit earlier today, waited for an explosion that never came. We ate lunch at the KFC in Kalgoorlie which was nice. Now we’re headed to a campsite passing all manner of animals on the way, well lizards and kangaroos anyway. I miss Pluto.

0447|12.01.10
We’re up very early this morning, we’re left camp for a day of driving. We’re pushing for Uluru today.

0640|12.01.10
Been on the road for a while now. We’re almost hit two kangaroos and a camel so far.

1120|12.01.10
We’ve hit a bit of a snag, the road into the Northern Territory is closed. After driving 500kms or so we have had to turn back, I doubt we’ll be seeing Uluru.

1214|12.01.10
We stopped outside of the town where the open road ends for lunch and then had a vote. Our options were turn back or stay until 1600 to see if the road would open up. Votes were 3 to 2 in favor of turning back. So here we are headed back to Kalgoorlie on road we have already traversed. This closed road has been quite a blow, I fear for the integrity of the whole.

1631|12.01.10
We’re almost back to where we started today at 0430 in the morning! I feel like that guy who was 200m form the summit of everest but had to turn back because his partner was injured. He did the right thing.

1733|12.01.10
On second thought perhaps we should have pushed on, we’ve just hit a kangaroo which has knocked out our AC and possibly damaged the radiator. It was so sudden, such good timing, right in the middle of the bonnet. The roo couldn’t have done better if it wanted to get hit.

1845|12.01.10
This setback is quite depressing, I just ate the same ice block I ate yesterday, outside the same service station, bought from the same eftpos machine. Then I put the receipt in the same bin. We woke up at 0430 this morning, we drove all day and only to end up back where we started.

0809|14.01.10
We have spent the last two nights at a caravan park in Kalgoorlie and we plan to stay a third. We have a little more time on our hands since we’re not going through the center. It’s nice to stop and relax for a bit.

2046|14.01.10
Today was quite laid back. We ate out for dinner which was nice, although it took a while to find a good place. We passed up chicken treat and the restaurant with sprinklers before finding a nice one. Tomorrow we ride! A Tarago …east.

0821|15.01.10
Today we leave Kalgoorlie, it’s already 32°C. We have a long drive ahead of us today.

1658|15.01.10
We’ve been driving quite steadily all day, we stopped on the Nullarbor for lunch and now we’re traversing the great Australian Bight.

1913|15.01.10
We have passed back into South Australia, we’re driving quite a bit closer to the coast now.

0837|16.01.10
We got into camp at 0430 this morning. I was feeling like a dwarf who’s left building beds for the barracks too late. We barely had enough energy to setup the tent. But that was four hours of sleep ago, feeling much better now.

1213|16.01.10
We’ve been driving all morning and have just stopped for lunch. On the way out we passed a salt lake filled with about an inch of water which looked really cool.

1715|16.01.10
We have crossed into Victoria, which makes 3 states in 2 days. We plan to eat at Mildura, and perhaps get a little more sleep than last night.

1207|17.01.10
We stopped at a caravan park in Hay for the night, we’re now back in New South Wales, it won’t be long now.

2244|17.01.10
We are now back in Canberra. A journey of 7000kms, 22 days, 5 men, 8 border crossings, 5 timezones, 4 Camels and 2 hire cars comes to an end. I end the log here because though we are not back home in Sydney, under the care of our wonderful hosts we may as well be.

Road Trip Part I: Sydney to Perth

Below is the log of the first half of the trip, no photos yet, but I may add some when I get back.

1630|27.12.09
Left my house in Andy’s car to pick up Abel from Canberra airport. With myself, Andy and our luggage the Subaru Liberty is already pretty packed, I’m not sure how we’re going to fit Abel in.

1915|27.12.09
We’ve made good time, we’re almost into Canberra. We stopped to find a toilet and had a look at some airforce memorial.

2318|27.12.09
We picked up Abel from the airport and met up with Jye and Dave at a McDonald’s. Rain is and has been pouring down for hours. We are now at the house we’ll be spending the night at, amazing couple that are hosting us, perfect balance between caring for us and just being casual. We pickup our Toyota Tarago at 0800 tomorrow then the real journey begins.

1018|28.12.09
We have just left the house in the Tarago, it’s really new, only has 3 598kms. I’m quite surprised we fit everything in. Doesn’t feel like were really going yet.

1538|28.12.09
We stopped for lunch at Wagga Wagga. I had tuna out of a tin on bread, upon consumption I made a note to buy chicken next time. I think we’ve reached the desert although there is still some cattle here and there.

1929|28.12.09
We have just entered Victoria, it’s Jye’s first time in another state (ACT obviously doesn’t count). We stopped to take a picture of the sign. We’re not too hungry just yet so we’re going to press on for the moment. Abel has requested 116.

2258|28.12.09
We have just crossed into South Australia, had dinner and set up the tent in a national park for the night. The ground here is like some alien planet it’s covered in small lumpy undergrowth which squirts sap if you step on it.

1118|29.12.09
We left the campsite at 0930, I slept fairly well. We are now heading into Adelaide; after a lot of straight and flat the road has become hilly again.

1747|29.12.09
We stopped for lunch in Adelaide which was busy, loud and crowded. Right now we’re about to have a break, I’ve been sitting in this car for far too long.

2020|29.12.09
We have just had dinner at Port Augusta. I cooked canned beef stockpot which was a bother but tasted good. We’re now headed to Iron Knob *snicker* where we’ll turn off to see a salt lake.

0937|30.12.09
We turned off into Iron Knob last night hoping to find some petrol but the station was closed. We took some advice from a resident and headed to the next town. I really like how the NPC’s will actually talk to you out in the country. If I could just get them to give me some quests I’d be able to play life as an rpg out here.
We ran out of petrol on the way to the next town and had to fill the car up with the jerry can. We spent the night on the side of the road and got some petrol this morning. Now we’re headed to the lake.

1112|30.12.09
We’ve been on a dirt road headed to the lake for some time. It’s very bumpy and 38°C outside but there is little humidity so it’s not too bad.

1306|30.12.09
We are now heading back from the salt lake. It was hot, bright, vast, serene and deadly.

1512|30.12.09
After stopping for lunch we’re back on the road and headed for Ceduna. Hopefully we’ll get there soon and have time to setup before dark. I’m looking forward to a shower.

1810|30.12.09
We have arrived at Ceduna and set up the tent in a caravan park. It’s nice to just sit around doing nothing for once. We plan to have dinner, swim and shower when it’s cool enough to move.

2230|30.12.09
We went out to get dinner and then to the pier. Back at the tent we have a lamp on so the moths are going harry on the roof, they sound like rain which would be a nice change, except we’d get wet because we don’t have the tent’s outer fly on.

1219|31.12.09
It was way too hot in the tent this morning so we all got up pretty quickly. We stopped off at food land to buy supplies as we will probably not see another store for a while. We’re now on the Nullarbor which is flat and big.

1349|31.12.09
We stopped to see the Great Australian Bight which was quite amazing. Then we stopped off and paid $1.61/L for petrol!

1825|31.12.09
We have been on the 90 mile straight for sometime now. Somewhere along here we’ll be stopping to setup camp.

sometime|in the next decade
We stopped to setup and eat dinner. Jye and I made pasta which was an exercise in efficiency as we were running out of gas. Last night we were all pretty tired and confused about which timezone’s new year we would be celebrating so we went to bed early. It was actually cold last night which was awesome.

1217|01.01.10
Back in the car I learned the time. We played an alphabet game which I sucked at. It’s only 27°C so far today which is a nice change. Petrol was $1.68/L, up from last time.

2142|01.01.10
We have now setup at the most expensive camping ground of any national park. Although to be fair it is quite nice, we have a communal pit toilet and our very own driveway. The campsites are individually set out among shrubs it reminds me of the bedrooms I tunnel out in Dwarf Fortress.

0847|02.01.10
The Sun came up at 0430 this morning but that was okay because we went to bed at 2130 last night, timezones are weird. Only one more sleep until Perth.

1606|02.01.10
We stopped to see a toffee “factory” but it was a fail. We had fast food for lunch and are now headed to the valley of the giants, which is actually just a whole lot of tall trees.

0833|03.01.10
We had a bit of trouble finding a spot to camp last night so we ended up just off the road in a clearing at a T intersection. It was quite buggy outside so I made dinner on my mattress in the tent which worked surprisingly well. We plan to arrive in Perth today, odometer reads 8 016kms which means we personally are responsible for the majority of kilometres done by this car.

1142|03.01.10
We have been on the highway into Perth for a while now but we can finally see the buildings of the CBD in the distance. This highway is really new, it has three lanes going each way and a train line running in between which is a really interesting idea.

1327|03.01.10
We have just arrived, unpacked and I’ve had a shower. The apartment is amazing! It’s all the little things like stove tops, cutlery draws and power points that you miss. So concludes the first chapter.

Stay tuned for part II, where we will be visiting Uluru!

Better to Wait

You may recall that a while ago I announced I would be getting a portable media player. The plan was to get a Cowon iAudio 7 along with Sennheiser PMX 100 headphones, however after learning that the neckband on the headphones would prevent me from lying down while listening I decided to keep looking, the PX 100’s looked good but the didn’t have the single cable design that I really liked on the other ones. So I waited and soon enough Sennheiser brought out the PX 100-II, which gave me the best of both world’s. Ready to purchase, I had a second look at the iAudio 7 and found that the iAudio 9 had just been brought out (apparently Korean’s have something against 8, so it was skipped). This was just one of those times when it was better to wait. Sound quality is excellent, the combination of flac, Jet effect 3.0 and high quality open headphones is amazing.

On another note, merry Christmas! I hope you had a great day and took time to reflect on the greatest gift of all, God’s son, as payment for our sin’s he lived the perfect life we could not live and died the death we should have died.

Tomorrow I’m off to Perth, so I won’t be around for three weeks, expect the full log when I get back.

The Ferris Wheel

It all began in a lonely little Counter Strike: Source server running on the home network. A friend of mine, Roman; my brother, Oliver and I were playing on CT against a mass of bots. It had been hot all day but suddenly a storm hit, we peered out the window for a while watching the driving rain, huge winds and hail. When we turned back to our computers we found the power had gone out. Roman had a laptop so he was fine but Oliver and I were offline.

The power came back on about 20 seconds later but it was fluctuating, the fan near my desk would get slower and faster depending on what the power was like. It was too unstable for our desktops, so I pulled out the Meccano and Oliver started building a Ferris wheel with the K’nex. Roman, frustrated by how long my brother was taking issued a challenge: “I could code a ferris wheel in flash before you’re finished”, and so the race was on.

As the net was down, Roman turned to that ancient institution, the book. The World Book entry showed the first wheel ever was built in 1890 and could hold 2160 people at a time. Inspired by this Roman and I set about creating a program capable of generating a wheel of any given size. The next day we found ourselves at Luna Park creating a replica of it’s wheel:

Coding the wheel

As you can see we already have some promising results, hopefully we’ll be able to perfect it.

Simple Motor

You’d be surprised what you can make with things just lying around.

As simple as this motor is, it represents quite a wealth of technology (copper wire, a battery and some rare earth magnets if you’re interested). I often wonder, if the human race where to be dumped into a new world with no technology whatsoever, but all of it’s existing knowledge, how long would it take to reach our current level of technology. There would be no factories or tools, just raw materials, two hands each and a mass of knowledge between us. I can’t imagine it taking a short or long amount of time. I wonder which existing technologies would spring up first?

A Fresh Adventure

I’ve been really craving a good role playing game lately, something with a fantasy setting that I can really get into. Usually I play Dota but recently I’ve grown tired of how polished my game plan feels, nothing new ever happens; I know exactly which item’s to buy and there’s no loot. When I feel like something more persistent I generally play Ragnarok Online but because I play in a private server the heightened experience rates mean all you do is look for better places to grind. There’s no use doing any of the quests as quicker rewards can be had by harvesting a high value item (turned regular loot by bloated drop rates), selling it to a non-player character and then going to the marketplace to pick up some donation items. The whole experience feels so stale, all the secrets of the world have been discovered; all the best class builds have been perfected and posted on the forums.

Single player rpg’s tend to have a good amount of depth and storyline but they always seem so lonely, there’s no-one to share your achievement with. What I really want is a fresh world not yet touched by human thought, where you can pick up a looted sword and just put it on and where leveling up is simply a byproduct of participating in a living community full of adventure. Let me know if you’ve found it.

Mind Reading is Just Not Cool

It seems that as technology progresses, more and more amazing ideas arrive on the horizon and we are continually promised that we’ll see all these things implemented in about 7 or 8 years. They’re probably right, they could turn most advancements into a product in that time, but they’ve forgotten one thing. People don’t buy things because they are the latest technology, instead items are bought based on how cool they are, and by that I mean, their attractiveness to the culture at hand.

At the moment the trend seems to be quick, easy and helpful, no effort and instant gratification, that’s why the iphone is so popular. The touch interface makes everything so easy, but we’ve been able to control computers with our minds for some time now and if you haven’t heard about it there’s a very good reason. You have to wear this weird head gear with contact points all over it and grease them up with a special gel so that it can penetrate your hair and feast on the thoughts within. The ordeal doesn’t end there though, you then have to train the software to understand the way your mind works by feeding it samples of your different thought patterns. They’ll have a tough time marketing anything that requires you to wash your hair after every use.

So mind reading is not cool, but more than that, most of those other ideas requiring you to put something on or do something slightly uncomfortable are also out. This means you’ll probably never see that metal ball that you hop inside and run around in to control a character in an first person shooter. In fact it rules out most virtual reality ideas altogether.

Not all new advancements are rendered useless though. If they ever figure out how to get wireless electricity to charge your laptop and phone that idea will fit right into the current culture favoring ease of use above everything else. As for the other ideas though, the only hope they have is that the culture will change, that people will start wanting to work and actually think to get what they want, and perhaps then Linux will have it’s day.

Another Dimension

Another LAN this weekend.

The Basement

Games which simulate the real world, especially first person shooters, are getting more and more realistic. People seem to like watching something which they feel is as close to reality as is possible without actually being reality. I think we’re approaching the limit though, so my question is; what will happen when every new game looks and feels just as good as the last?

At the moment the way I see it, there are two ways to get a game into the top ten. Option one, you make the latest fps hit, possibly part of an existing series, it must be full of cutting edge graphics, have some role-playing game elements and introduce a few innovations but nothing too hard to get the hang of. If you can pull this off and get it released without a hitch you’ll be fine, the producers know this that’s why there are so many games which follow this formula. However there is a second option, the road of the indie developer, creating new and innovative games which often defy scientific classification. Games like these carry a higher risk of failing or simply having mediocre sales however occasionally they really take off. For example, Audiosurf which sold more copies on steam in its first month than it’s million dollar budget counterpart Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. A simple rhythm game was capable of outselling the next installment in a huge fps franchise. If we were to reach the aforementioned point where the look and feel of all these shooters is pretty much the same, I think this gap will widen.

What it comes down to is this, beautiful little games which fall outside the staple genres show us another dimension, a place where the normal rules don’t apply; whereas the latest fps is praised for reminding us of what reality feels like, and I think that’s going to get old real fast.