Blog Days - A Shot In The Arm

I thought it was high time I broke the months-long silence hanging over our little blogosphere, so here I am with a new post. There hasn't been a longer period of inactivity on this blog since its inception, which hopefully says a little bit about how busy I've been of late.

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Nina and I found a new place and moved in together officially back in June. I say 'officially' because for the last year and a half, I was spending about four nights a week with her anyway. We've moved into a lovely house in Greenisland, north of the city with amazing hillside and sea views. We've got plenty of space - I've got my own full studio room set up, and Nina has a room of her own for reading, writing and practicing her therapies. There's a vast, secluded back garden and brand-new everything inside. We even get to ride the train to work and back together each day. I've never been happier. My 'leaving' the city signifies the end of an era in some ways - I'd been renting and living in Belfast with McGrathy for about seven years, though fortunately he and my other friends in the city are only fifteen minutes away. He and I will be joining Nina alongside Linda and Dan The Man in a couple of weeks for another patented Alcohol Fuelled Geek Fest(TM), which I hope to enjoy as a celebration of Steve and I's shenanigans-filled time as co-habitants. Lest we forget: We Can't Be Fucking Killed.

Riding this wave of nostalgia - no doubt heightened by my slow march towards the big Three-Oh in 2011 - I've been seeking out yet more memories from my childhood and teenage years, centered mostly around my audiovisual experiences at the time. I recently re-watched RoboCop, which remains a brutal affair both in its gory violence and its satire of 80s corporate avarice. My always-simmering obssession with Knightmare has peaked again, as I'm re-watching episodes here and there and re-reading some of the old roleplaying board; I'm even working on my DNF-esque Knightmare game engine (again). I'm enjoying seeking out artsy/big-haired 80s music videos from Bon Jovi, a-Ha, Guns N' Roses and more. Moving into my late teens and early twenties, I've been re-living the pro wrestling 'Attitude Era' dominated by Stone Cold and The Rock, and continue to enjoy the incredible Botchamania series on YouTube - recommended viewing regardless of your attitude to what they now call 'sports-entertainment'. Even my current listening habits skew towards the middle of the last decade, when I was immersed in all kinds of extreme music, from when I'd be sat up til 3am on a work day drinking Erdinger and listening to early Emperor while the rain poured outside my bedroom window by the train line in Great Northern Street. Those close to me know that some of those times were grim, but serve now as a reminder of all I have to be thankful for - love, friends, family and health. (Despite my death/black metal leanings, I'm still a total sap at heart.)

If it sounds like I've got a lot of spare time on my hands, the reality is sadly different. My current work schedule is pretty brutal, as I'm trying to meet a go-live date three weeks from now. I've been doing late nights at home for several weeks, and probably look like a zombie as a result, but I'm more motivated than I have been in some time and am determined to capitalize on this. I've even managed to squeeze in some freelance work on the side, which has been a valuable extra source of income. That said, I'm still looking for a new job, and hope to be in a new position by wintertime (fingers crossed). If I get some XBox360 time, I currently enjoy my second run through the epoch-defining Half-Life 2, along with new offerings such as the beautiful and disturbing Limbo. Hopefully Steve and I can squeeze in some online Far Cry 2 or Left 4 Dead in the very near future.

Creatively, things are on the up. I finally bit the bullet and invested in enough new PC components to put a new one together, replete with 3Gb of RAM, a 1.5 terabyte main HD and an Intel Core Duo II processor. It's a reasonably modest setup compared to modern gaming rigs, but I'm looking to be creative with it, not play Crysis 2. I was able to lop a fair chunk off the total price by not purchasing an operating system, as the Linux enthusiast in me would have baulked at installing a brand-new copy of Windows 7 when there's innumerable desktop distros out there for free. I've installed ArtistX, which contains an insane amount of multimedia software - DAWs, raster and vector graphic editors, 3D modelling tools, softsynths, MIDI sequencers, and loads more. The new gear has already inspired me into becoming creative once more, in t-shirt design, web development and of course music. I'm itching to get going again, having removed the excuse of my gear not being up to scratch. Though I'm in desperate need of a new guitar... just saying.

So, 2010 so far has been a hell of a year. I can't believe its August already. Hopefully I'll get a bit of a holiday in the next month or so, during which I hope to... actually, I'm not going to set those goals for myself just yet. With so much on my plate and so much on the horizon, the best thing for me is to just enjoy it one day at a time.

NJM

Current Geek (And Other) Activity

Nina and I took a week off at the start of the month to get out of the city and relax for a bit. As with last year, we went to the Slieve Donard hotel, and spent the time in and out of the gym, pool, jaccuzi, sauna and steam room. It was amazing - I haven't felt so relaxed in recent memory. I had intended to spend the remainder of my time off recording, but my 8-year-old PC has become useless for pretty much anything other than browsing, media playing and basic coding. It now boots and runs off a highly-customized Puppy Linux USB stick, which is great fun and lightning-fast, but leaves me with no viable way of working on my music.

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Without an audio workstation, my creative endeavours have stagnated badly. I've enlisted the help of Happi in sourcing parts for a new rig, which I sincerely hope to have picked and purchased by the end of this week. I really can't wait. Following my little spa retreat, I've really found my inspiration coming back, and if I can get my equipment in order, there really won't be any more excuses (apart from time, of course).

Away from music, I'm currently learning a new programming language: Python. I've been hearing about it for years as an excellent tool for everything from general-purpose tools to automation, game development and even PHP extensions. Many of the job apps I've looked at over the past month or so list experience with Python as one of their desired (though not essential) criteria,. It's cross-platform, which is important for me at a time when I'm running Linux and Windows alongside each other. In order to learn it I'm trying to replicate one of my old DIV-Basic efforts, Detonator, in Python. Once I've got that down, I have to choose between McGrathi Apocalypse, 14 Days and some sort of Knightmare engine as my first original Python project. All are in the advanced stages design-wise, so it's really just a case of picking one and sticking to it. Again, time will be the major obstacle.

So in the next few weeks I'll hopefully have yet another string on my big geek bow. I also hope to have a new audio solution in place and maybe, just maybe, a finished track or two. Though I've said that so many fucking times over the past five years that I'm actually scoffing at myself. I've got other plans and projects in the works too, so here's to finding the time and patience to tackle them in 2010. (What do you mean, it's nearly April? Shit.)

NJM

Past Travesties In Web Design 1999-2007

The decade that was the 00's stands as a turbulent time in the life of your host. Were it to be plotted on a graph, it might look like a mountain range. Nowhere is this better reflected than in the vestiges of my decade-long presence on the Web - a pathetic tale of narcissism, spite and baseless self-importance.

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Between 1999 and 2007 I engineered around 15 different personal websites. The brave new world of the internet, discovered during my university studies, was an inferno to the blue touchpaper of my own ego; the urge to pollute the global network with my own ramblings was impossible to resist. Along the way, I committed every web design atrocity possible in pursuit of my subconscious goal: make everyone in the world think I was awesome. Looking back, it was even more ridiculous than it sounds.

And so - from early Word-based opinion pages to Geocities/Tripod 'site-builder' efforts, through ad-strewn free domain hosting, IE6-only pages, message boards only I ever wrote on, Flash masturbation par excellence, and all kinds of plugin and script abuse - the detritus of my digital ego trip lay strewn about the Net for years, fading away as sites expired and hosts deleted it to make way for other, hopefully worthier, content. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I've recently been able to unearth some of it, conjouring a strange mix of nostalgia, humour and shame in the process.

As a present-day 'professional' web developer, almost everything I did in those days is an utter travesty from a technical standpoint, even considering the 'standards' at the time. It was definitely a case of my vision outstripping my skills, and even my common sense (today, the opposite is much more common). I used to make sites work in Internet Explorer and if they didn't work in any other browsers... well, fuck those people, they should be using IE. I even went so far as to block people with scripting if they were using a 'wrong' browser. People have been fired for doing this sort of thing. Elsewhere there are preload bars that don't load anything, nested tables and framesets, mouseover effects for every element on screen, background music loops, unskippable Flash intros, site navigation disguised as an x-ray of my head, pointless splash pages, animated repeating backgrounds, and pretty much everything else you would imagine seeing on Web Pages That Suck. It was an experimental time, sure, but I often wonder how much quicker I could have got into my current career path if I had just stopped, looked and listened in the face of my earlier web design abominations.

Most facepalm-inducing of all, though, is the actual content. Pages and pages of egomaniacal text, journal entries that read like some kind of psyche profile, thinly-veiled accusations and slurs, utterly self-centered ranting and raving over perceived injuries (largely imaginary), emotionally-retarded whining and indecision, baseless ad hominem attacks on innocent bystanders... on and on it goes. The really sad thing is that, despite later obvious technical advances, this sort of content remained a spectre hanging over my web efforts for a long time. Even the first year-and-a-half of this blog is a nightmare of neurotic bleating and moaning. I almost don't recognise the author when I read over it today. Not exactly the globe-straddling wit I probably envisioned when I took my first bumbling steps in HTML editing in MS Word back in 1999.

Yet in spite of it all, I still enjoy going back over my earlier misadventures in the Web, if only to realise how far I've come professionally and personally. The year 2010 is already shaping up to be a transitional one, and I'm moving into a whole new chapter in my life. In revisting the earlier chapters, I hope to learn the lessons and avoid the mistakes of the past, and in doing so carve out a much smoother, fulfiling path through the next ten years - and beyond.

NJM

The Ghosts Of Hacking Past

'Bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague their inventor...'

(Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7)

Recent developments in work have moved me to start seeking my fortunes elsewhere. I've been browsing the job listings and polishing my CV as the first stage in my eventual departure. In an effort to make my resumé as comprehensive as possible I've been going back over some of my old work and cleaning it up, and am astounded at how amateurish and downright impenetrable some of it is.

Back when I started in this job I had been coding PHP for less than a year and had definitely fallen on the 'script-kiddie' side of the developer divide: no real procedure or process, just a burning desire to Get It Done by any means necessary. My old code bears the ugly scars of this attitude. Just looking over one of the 'simple' internal tools I wrote in early 2008 reveals a nightmare of spaghetti procedural code, meaningless function and variable names, embedded HTML and JavaScript, performance bottlenecks, and several sections that would be shoo-in candidates for The Daily WTF. It says a lot when the developer himself can barely make sense of what he's written.

Fast-forward to 2010 and it's obvious I've moved on in leaps and bounds. My work is better structured and organized, more efficient, clean and maintainable, and generally devoid of WTF moments. No doubt I'll look back on it this time next year and roll my eyes in disgust. I guess that's the lot of the humble developer: you never win, you just do a little better each time (with thanks to Cleveland from Family Guy). Sometimes I wonder if I'm cut out for this whole programming business. I often doubt if I'm applied, patient, logical or simply intelligent enough. I guess time will tell. So, at the risk of closing this little blog post on a note of uncertainty, I'll leave you with another well-known definition of programming: 'A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.'

NJM

Zombies, Board Games And The Joy Of Rapid Prototyping

In an effort to jettison some of the creative baggage I've been lugging around - and by way of a break from programming - I sat down at the computer last month and fired out a basic boardgame prototype for the perpetually-stalled McGrathi Apocalypse. I put a grid together, a few counters, took some dice and tried it out. Things got out of hand. A few days later I had a full-colour board layout, several different types of marker, character profiles, an action point-based combat and turn system, derived statistics and inventory management rules. It's been a long time since I've been inspired in such a freewheeling fashion.

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Sadly, the resultant 'game' - think Space Hulk meets Left 4 Dead - is no fun at all to play. This is largely due to my shoehorning complex statistics management into it - most of the mechanics were lifted verbatim from the underlying logic of the McGrathi Apocalypse videogame, and bog the flow down accordingly. Each actor on the board has a field of vision, hit points, seven or eight metrics and a number of skills and drawbacks, all of which impact their ability to move, perform actions and engage in combat. One character firing a gun at another takes at least two dice rolls, modified by a number of stats and circumstantial factors. In a test game pitting a single player character against just 3 infected enemies, it took a good 45 mins to resolve the game to completion (the player was overwhelmed and killed in 12 turns). It's nigh-on impossible to keep track of everything. With that in mind, it could maybe work as a computer-assisted boardgame: players would move around and make decisions, with a nearby laptop performing number-crunching duites, resolving combat, tracking statistics and generating random variance. That would actually be quite cool, freeing up the player to focus on tactics and decision-making without worrying about the almost AD&D-level skill checking.

I might develop the boardgame in more detail as a little pet project. For a very quickly knocked-up effort, it already looks pretty damn cool, with nice use of colour, icons and type (I must get some images up later). It could eventually be released to the world as a PDF that could be downloaded, printed and cut for your very own home version. All that said, it's really only a means to test gameplay mechanics, and as such will probably always be a fairly joyless affair for anyone other than d20-worshipping RPG junkies (and even then, it probably isn't anywhere near hardcore enough). The real pleasure, for me at least, lies in the rapid prototyping of a creative idea, from gestation to development to production to testing. If only I could be so progressive with my other projects!

NJM

Geek Part IV: Welcome To 2010

Okay, Happy New Year and all that.

2009 was a relatively quiet year of blogging, with only 50 entries in 12 months, and I imagine the paucity of posts will continue in the first quarter of the new year. I've been wondering if the whole blogging thing is worth it any more. It's not that I don't have anything to talk about; it's just that I really don't have time at the moment. Besides, practically no-one is listening, and I've always disliked people who mumble to themselves. More on that later though. For now, here's hoping that 2010 is as great a year as the last one was - and hopefully much more productive from a career and creative standpoint.

NJM

Puppy Linux: New Tricks For Old Dogs

This post concerns custom operating systems; any non-geeks might want to go away now. Though you might learn a thing or two about speeding up your machine if you choose to stay. Okay then.

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For as long as I've known Nina, she's had real issues with her laptop. A Vista machine that's just not spec'd enough for such a demanding OS (even after major tweaking), the thing takes up to ten minutes to become useable once booted; after that, intermittent freezes, lockups and general sloth-like response times are the norm. Even something as simple as browsing the Web becomes a teeth-gnashing experience. It's little wonder that she barely uses it. With her email inbox overflowing, her foreign friends neglected and her creativity stifled (she's a skilled writer and relies on Word to store and edit her material), it was a matter of days before the thing would be flung out of her apartment window to a meaningless end on the concrete below.

I managed to solve the issue by introducting Nina to Puppy Linux, an incredibly lightweight operating system that can run from a LiveDVD. Put the disc in the drive and turn the machine on, and in twenty seconds you have a fully-usable desktop with web browser, word processor, spreadsheet and other utilities. The system can read and write to Windows folders on the hard drive like Documents and Downloads, so Nina can get at her existing work and share it between Puppy and Vista. If she makes changes to Puppy itself (e.g. changes her wallpaper or other desktop settings), the system overwrites the DVD with the latest version of itself - leaving everything on the computer itself completely unchanged. And if Nina wants to use Vista for some reason, she simply takes the DVD out of the drive and reboots. Oh, and it's free, in every sense of the word.

In practice the whole thing works amazingly. Web browsing is blindingly fast, even on high-footprint sites like Facebook and YouTube, and the general responsiveness and usage of the system is incredible; it's like having a brand new computer. Obviously there's slightly less in the way of eye candy, and there's a small learning curve when switching to a Linux-style interface, but thanks to custom themes and skins the transition is much less painful than you'd imagine. Nina is incredibly happy with it and says she's much more motivated to use her machine now. I was so impressed that I'm going to set up my own version for general PC use; given that nothing loads from the hard disk, it should prove a boon for my slowly dying home machine. Those of you with old kit out there could do a lot worse than to give it a crack yourselves; it might just give you a whole new daily computer experience.

NJM