Routes

A little while ago, Oil Productions came to my school and gave a talk about an upcoming game being produced under Channel 4 and the Wellcome Trust, Routes.  According to oil’s website, Routes is:

An innovative blend of fact and fiction, drama and documentary, Routes is a groundbreaking exploration of genetics and bio-ethics that uses a variety of platforms to engage a young audience.  Whilst being underpinned by credible, cutting edge science, Routes is an exciting, entertaining experience that pulls you into its own mysterious universe.

The ‘front door’ of the format is an eight-part mini-series in which outspoken comedienne Katherine Ryan submits herself to a series of genetic tests. Is there such a thing as a gay gene? How much do genes affect personality? What can my genes tell me about my risk of disease? On this personal journey, Katherine will have to make some difficult decisions about how much she really wants to know about what’s hidden inside her DNA. But her journey is just the beginning of yours…

The site will also host a whole range of fun, engaging supporting material that will help our young audience engage further with the issues raised by the documentary. Each episode will be accompanied by a compelling flash game or ‘community challenge’ based on some aspect of genetics. Taking part in these games and challenges allows users to amass points. The highest scorers each week will be entered into a prize draw to win a games console. A grand prize is also up for grabs for the best players over the whole season.

The talk (which contained some plot spoilers which I cannot divulge) got me extremely interested, and so when routes came out I jumped in as soon as I could.  The first game available (and only game available at time of writing) is called “Breeder”, and entails you trying to breed your creature with others in order to achieve a certain permutation of traits – points are scored based on how many times your creature breeds/is bred with, and bonus points are awarded if you can achieve certain target creatures (1 achievement for completing one breeder target, 1 for completing 4, and 1 for completing 8).  As of writing, my score is 175 190 (however puny compared with the admin account (user #1)’s mighty 1724. 

My current breeder creature *should* appear in the flash widget at the top of this post (RSS viewers, view this post on my blog) WordPress doesn’t want to let me embed a .swf, so here’s the link to my creature (page has same functionality as widget) – in the interests of science (and points for both breeder and breedee – is that a word?), do breed with my creature if you have a Routes account.  If you don’t, GET ONE HERE.

I look forward to what the Routes team will throw up in the next 8 weeks – watch this space!

Windows 7 – my born-again laptop

 

It could sadly not be argued that my laptop is state of the art technology; with a 1.6Ghz CPU, 1 gig of ram and an integrated graphics chip, it’s not exactly cutting edge.  It came with XP, still the world’s most popular OS – not a problem for most, but I needed a little more.  XP just didn’t cut it for me.  I experimented with several different operating systems at one point (during the holidays – I reverted to XP during term time) – Ubuntu, Suse, DSL, even 98 and OSX.  I gave up and went back to XP. 

Don’t get me wrong, XP is a solid system (contrary to what my Mac-touting friends would have you believe) and more than fulfils the needs of most users, yet I reasoned that since Microsoft had been working on Vista for the larger side of five years, they must’ve made some advances.  I burnt a Vista disk, and left my laptop to install the OS overnight. 

 

The next day at school, I opened my laptop for the first time and was greeted by a pretty new logon screen – Vista had arrived.  I spent the next month or so going through the ins and outs of it, finding out what worked well (aero) and what didn’t work so well (pretty much everything else); suffice to say that I was not pleased – to give you an idea of just how badly vista was running, my laptop used an average of 88% ram over a week constantly, with roughly 80% constant CPU usage.  While looking at Vista’s wiki page I saw a curious little box of all of the different versions of windows.  At the bottom, in the “upcoming” section, there was a little link: “Vienna”. 

I was intrigued; I clicked to find out more.  After following the trail of crumbs, it turned out that way back Microsoft set out a development plan sometime after 98 – its next 2 OSs were codenamed “Whistler” and “Blackcomb”, to be released one after the other, each not separated by more than 2 years or so.  The way the cookie crumbled was that major features were planned for Blackcomb, including an emphasis on searching and querying data and an advanced storage system named WinFS to enable such scenarios. Later, Blackcomb was delayed and an interim, minor release, codenamed "Longhorn" was announced for 2003.  By the middle of 2003, however, Longhorn had acquired some of the features originally intended for Blackcomb. After three major viruses exploited flaws in Windows operating systems within a short time period in 2003, Microsoft changed its development priorities, putting some of Longhorn’s major development work on hold in order to develop new service packs for Windows XP and windows server 2003.  Development of Longhorn was also "reset" in September 2004.  Blackcomb was renamed Vienna in early 2006.

I knew someone inside the big M, so grilled them about Vienna, but they couldn’t tell me anything.  After some extensive bargaining, he let me be in on some of the preliminary testing.  The next I heard was that a speaker from Microsoft had given a presentation demonstrating a working “MinWin” – the basic windows kernel.  After this, Vienna went through some internal milestone clients to turn MinWin into an OS.  The first build I got my hands on was 6534 which seemed to be pretty much identical to Vista; I was nonplussed.  Slowly though, as more builds were pushed through, I saw more and more features creeping in and more fundamental changes being made (Also a rename from Vienna to simply 7 – it seemed Microsoft wanted things simple again).  By build 6628, I thought 7 was better than OSX.  By build 6780, I would have said that Windows 7 was better than Vista.  By build 6801, the first build others saw me using (I used all builds from 6780 upwards as my primary OS, owing to the strong improvements), I would have happily vouched that Windows 7 was now a better OS than XP as well.  I had finally found an XP replacement.  Certain features (like the super taskbar and the ridiculously short boot times) made 7 even more of a joy to use.  Around Christmas 08, the 32 and 64 bit versions of the official beta (build 7000) were leaked to the tubes. 

The official beta, announced at the CES 2009, was made available to MSDN and Technet subscribers on Technet on 09/01/09 before being withdrawn and replaced with a ‘coming soon’ message. The servers were experiencing difficulty in dealing with the number of users who wished to download the beta. Microsoft had to add additional servers to cope with the large volume of interest from the public.  Due to the unexpectedly high demand, Microsoft also decided to remove its initial 2.5 million download limit and make it available to the public until January 24th 2009 (if you want to get the beta for yourself, head on over to the Windows 7 site, and go to the beta section). 

I had the beta up and running on my laptop on the 9th of jan, and brought my rejuvenated laptop into school when we came back on the 13th.  Since then I’ve been evangelising it to all who will lend an ear, and convincing people of its sheer awesomeness.  You may have heard of the Mojave Experiment, and this had a similar effect.  On the 14th alone, I’ve made it one guy (George)’s primary OS (he’s very pleased), another guy is now VMware-ing it, one wants it but has half the required RAM (he only has half a gig), and one wants it and will get it ASAP. 

There is far too much new and awesome stuff in 7 for me to list here (look here), so instead I’ll just tell you that it’s beyond excellent, even in its beta form, and implore:

GET IT, TRY IT, LOVE IT

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,beta,Vienna,Microsoft,WIN

Windows Live Writer and my blog’s revival

A while back now, I started this blog as a means of putting stuff that interested me out to the world wide web in general.  However, I succumbed to the beginner’s blogging mistake and broke the rule of always posting regularly.  Having upgraded to the latest version of windows 7 (more about that in another post) I decided to try out the windows live suite of software – for those of you who don’t know, Microsoft has decided to shift previously native programs over to being “live” programs (such as messenger, movie maker, etc) for better internet connectivity.  Coming across a tool at the bottom of the list simply identified as “Windows Live Writer”, I thought I’d give it a spin; see how it handled. 

As you can tell by me actually writing this, I like the interface enough that I am going to start regularly blogging (so much so that more

people might want to subscribe to my RSS feed) – watch this space!

Technorati Tags: windows live writer,windows 7,blog

Back to School (Actually)

our illustrious logo

As I write this, I’ve just sat down at school, awaiting the new school year.  Much anticipation and anxiety abounds.  I hope I don’t break anything this year lol.

Mini Planet

Mini planet rendered in photoshop, taken from pictures of my hotel in long beach, Los Angeles

I often dream of having my own personal planets where I wouldn’t have to deal with other people, but my spaceship isn’t quite ready. While I figure that out, you can do the next best thing: render small planets using Photoshop or GIMP with a few pictures, to make a scene like the one above (photos taken on my California holiday just a week ago). To do this, all you need to do is follow these few simple steps:

(Tutorial will go here – watch this space )

Back to School

Back to school tomorrow, so now I have a frantic rush to find all of my stuff (pencilcase, files, etc) from last year – the stores’ll already be out of stuff by now…

Dining in Hell 01/09/08

Tonight, we dined in hell (yet again). Normally, hell only does all you can eat (as we had) on tuesdays, but upon examining the website we found that they also do it any day of the week for groups of ten or more – so we dutifully rounded up 13 of us, booked, and stuffed our faces with delicious pizza, and all was good.

Guestlist:

Me, Vivan Jayant, James Ko, James Linehan, Laura (James’ gf), Guy Makepeace, Sophie (Guy’s sister), Fred Beardmore, Ben Dory, Haruka Chambers, Will Morland, Adam Dangoor (but he didn’t show) and Claudia Maw.

1100 Barrel Paintgun

Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters built a paintball gun with 1100 barrels as some graphics card marketing gimmick. It’s a formidable beast, but I’m sure it takes forever to prep

Macro photography with an iphone

iphone camera diagram

The camera lens on the iPhone is much like any other cameraphone lens in the fact that the lens has a fixed minimum and maximum focus length. If you want to get a little closer to your subject, you just might want to give eastrain’s macro camera mod a try.

According to eastrain both first and second generation iPhone cameras have a screw type focus ring that has been glued to infinity from the factory. This was probably set so that 99% of your photos were roughly in focus.

Gaining access to the camera lens requires the disassembly of your phone and will undoubtedly void any type of warranty you may have had. Once the lens is in view you will need to break the 2 glue points that hold the lens at its current position.

Using needle nose pliers you can then rotate the lens counter clockwise to increase the zoom or clockwise to decrease it. Enabling the built in camera app allows you to see in real time your changes. When you’re satisfied, just put everything back together. Of course the next step should be an externally mounted ring to allow manual zooming on the fly.

Ubiquity

During the last day the web has been abuzz about Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity (video demo). It’s an addon for Firefox that can help you streamline how you get things done on the web. In the example above, they show constructing an email with a map and reviews using mostly keyboard driven input. The addon is quick to install and I think you’ll find it saving you a lot of time on tasks you’d normally hit the search box for. In the popup, you can do quick Wikipedia lookups, define words, translate, perform calculations, and many other operations. You can email a page to someone by just typing three words. The best part is: anyone can write a command that will expand Ubiquity’s function. Greasemonkey helped fix broken websites and we think Ubiquity will help make interactions between sites much easier. We can’t wait to see what clever uses people come up with.