Introducing... virtual vampire !

Recently I have been unsettled in my work and much of this was due to not having indulged in some good quality coding for quite a while. So I am intending to join the open source on line community with my own application - virtual vampire !

This tool will be primarily an exercise in building a complete system, with a decent front end and expandable modules, for running one of the sides in a board game - Fury of Dracula. The idea stemmed for another effort by someone where he had written an AI to randomly move for the hidden moves of Dracula in the game, and the player could then ask the system if Dracula was in the areas he was exploring or not.

It almost might be harder to play against a random opponent than a human who you can second guess. However, I intend to initially write a random movement AI for the game, then expand it into a more logical style opponent, looking 2-3 moves ahead like a rudimentary chess computer might. In this case, assigning probabilities to various choices and acting on that information, but still slightly randomly, to prevent an opponent second guessing the computers reactions. It may be possible to take this one step further and assign the AI various attributes (such as cowardly, aggressive or overly bold) to create a different flavour of play style each game - allowing a human player to pick up on this play style and counter play accordingly.

In any case, it's a work in (slow) progress, and all current hosted on the google code website

Mad cults and the Englishman

Given my usual boredom with much of TV today, I was surprised to find something on tonight that made my blood boil. It was the 30 minute Panorama episode on Scientology, which attempts to offer an insight into this "secretive" religion, but instead can only showcase summaries of interviews that have been withdrawn due to legal pressure and hostile verbal assaults from leading figures of the cult. This culminated after seven days with John Sweeney losing his temper and shouting at the interviewer, arming the church for a publicity campaign against the show. By airing this clip on YouTube, I think they underestimated the effect of there media campaign, which instead created more interest for a show exposing them as a creepy and sinister cult which destroys and threatens lives.

The show can be viewed on-line now here and there is also a BBC news article about the show and the shouting incident.

Alongside the footage shown in the show of some scary Scientology practices, there is also a large amount of effort going into there on-line spin campaign to discredit the reporter. For instance, compare the above you tube clip, which accepts comments without moderation and has been rated highly, with another posting of the clip which moderates all comments and has therefore been voted quite low by general users of the internet. At least the population of the internet has been hardened by advertisers efforts in viral marketing already, and can see through this poor attempt by the CoS to discredit the work of John Sweeney and the BBC.

Below is a copy of a comment I sent the BBC Panorama team. Given the strength of my reaction to this show, I thought it would be good to share these comments with any interested audience.

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"After the recent showing of the Panorama special on Scientology, I found myself outraged and annoyed. Not at the presentation by John Sweeney which was an impressive attempt to gain a measured impression of Scientology, but by the verbal diarrhoea offered by the top member of the church in place of any discussion.

Praise to the BBC for managing to attempt to show all sides of this organisation both good and bad in the face of such hostility to any form of dialogue. And whilst it was disappointing that the verbal assaults of Tommy Davis finally broke down John's professional front, it was incredible that he had endured the intimidation and abuse for so long with such recourse.

Given this is a cult who appear to be able to break down people's minds within days of first contact with them, credit must go to John for his patient attempts to have what could be regarded as an effective interview for this documentary, and it was greatly disappointing he could not manage to achieve the cooperation from the senior members of this church to accomplish this.

I am now much more concerned about the spread of Scientology into the UK, and appreciate the BBC's report on this organisation and furthermore would value more programming on aspects of it's work and activity.

My thanks to Panorama and John Sweeney."

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Time to calm down and get some sleep - it's times like this that a classic episode of South Park can ease a troubled mind :)

You get what you pay for

Today heralded a trip to the dentist, but not for any old routine check up. I had a check up just over 6 months ago back when I was living in West Hampstead where I was told I was fine and did not need to come back for a couple of years. However the other night I broke a little bit of my molar tooth biting down on some shell in a seafood mix from Tesco, and whilst it was in little pain, it seem prudent to get it checked out as it felt jagged.

The surgery I visited seemed awfully overblown in attitude - more of a "cosmetic enhancement parlour" than a simple dentist. However the interior of the building, like the dentist himself, was a little small and "pokey". I felt at ease until I saw the price list - over 50 quid just for a checkup, with filling hitting around the 100 quid mark each. This was more than the 20 quid I throw down for a check-up in West Hampstead, but I guess you truly get what you pay for, as this dentist showed me x-rays of two fillings I required on opposite sides of my mouth.

Long story cut short, I was 250 quid down and feeling is just coming back to my mouth now. The check up and fillings took two hours, but was essentially painless due to large quantities of anaesthetic in my gums. How it that got there was a little painful, but feeling better for having a healthier mouth. Feeling a little lighter of wallet too :(

Next year I might take up work's dental insurance (only 120 quid a year...) although a gambler might say not to bother - after all I just had the fillings I needed, so the odds of needing more in the next year are lower than they've been for a while...

After straining my wrist quite badly on a London bus, I am on the road to recovery, having taken full advantage of my private-health care through work. God bless free Health and the NHS, but if your a neurotic accident-prone giant then I can heartily recommend Private Cover for getting your bits and pieces fixed up :) How quickly the city can turn a boy away from his hippy communist roots...

Speaking of capitalist joys, with my wrist back in action, it's been time to re-engage myself with the Wii. The game I'm mostly playing at the moment is Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess. It's a slow bloomer, with a little too much dialogue in the first hour and quite linear play for the first twenty hours as you discover new areas and powers. But those twenty hours of play are all good fun and the linear style introduces parts of the overall land to you in bite-sized chunks whilst teaches you dozens of tactics and tricks to get round obstacles and enemies. What this means as you get to the "now I have most of my basic powers" point, and the whole map is opened up for free exploration, is you can really get immersed into being part of the larger world, which is why Zelda games are great. Good, logical and immersive worlds to discover new things in. Only problem is all of this free exploration has left me somewhat lost of to what my overall mission was...

Some more quirky titles for the Wii seem to be set for release soon. A Greek software house has spoken (in Greek) about an upcoming game where you can use the Wii remote as a baton to conduct an on-screen orchestra ! Another title seems sets to take biometric readings as you exercise, and then upload them to a hospital for a fitness test. A little over-ambitious in my mind, but I applaud the idea ! Can't see it working in the UK really, unless you have some form of well paid medical service in the country you live in... hmmm...

Tonight sees a rest for the Wii (and my wrist) as we go old school gaming and pull out "Fury of Dracula" (see previous post). We shall see if the game mesmerises anyone into being bitten by the board gaming bug - it's getting hard travelling 30 miles West every time I fancy a quick game of something :)

Stepping up to the web 2.0 challenge

Whilst I regard myself as quite technical and internet focused, I have allowed myself to "slip behind" the curve a little recently. I think GMail was the last thing I was up to speed with, after that it all went a little soft. Certainly in recent times I forced myself into using RSS, which I now cannot live without - imagine having to revisit news pages and rescan them looking for any new articles ?!! And then moved onto "semantic tagging" over bookmarking - principally as I had too many (700+) bookmarks to not put them in folders, and I couldn't come up with a hirarchy of folders that consistantly worked for me.

So with my webmail(via Gmail), RSS (via Bloglines) and tagged bookmarks (via del.icio.us) setup, as well as a host of other new "web 2.0" services such as a todo list (via Remember the Milk) and a more general simple list service (via tada lists) I was truely setup to get more of what I wanted out the internet.

But the final piece of the puzzle that clicked into place recently was a site called netvibes. This is now my homepage, and is a customizable page with various panels sorted into columns (bit like portlets, for those who know what they are). Each panel contains one of my web 2.0 services so the overall effect is that of a dashboard or command console, where I can in one look see what unread mail I have, which RSS feeds have updated, what my upcoming week's todo list is and a host of other stuff.

If you are scratching your head here, then I might put up a laymans description of all this techno-babble soon ! If you are thinking - hold on, Outlook does all of this, what is so great about your setup - then you havn't been bitten by the web 2.0 bug. Everything is much more easily accessable, updateable and useable as rigid Outlook components, and I can mix these services together in different ways as I need, as well as change services should a better one come along. The mark of a great web2.0 application is one that will help you migrate to a competing one, but you simply don't want to :)

These are a few of my favorite things... well, just one of them in fact

Recently I have been trying to scratch a recurring itch of mine, board gaming. I flippin' love boardgaming. And we're not talking Cluedo, Trivial Pursuits or, dear god help me, Monopoly (gawd, Monopoly sucks). We are talking real tactical thinking boardgames, each seasoned with enough luck to suit the occasion.

They are a happy compromise between mindless dice-roller family games and chess to me. Backgammon would be a good example of this, although more modern classics like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride would be a better example of what great board gaming is these days. I think the German's are more into this, indeed the hobby seems kept alive over here mainly by European publishing houses.

But my newest game, sitting next to my desk, is Fury of Dracula - a storming 2-5 player action / detective work game where 1-4 players as characters from Bram Stoker's classic hunt down Count Dracula, who moves around the board in secret laying down traps to hinder the hunters whilst trying to create a network of vampires around Europe.

However, as with many of my geek like hobbies, it's kind of hard to get something like this going. It needs semi-regular interest from people, like sporting hobbies, but is more of a leisure pursuit, so rarely something you plan too far in advance. But this is where the London effect comes in - so many events and socials DO require advance booking to secure facilities, tickets or numbers in this big city, so most of us book ourselves up regularly and in advance. It feels quite contrived to book a gaming session 2-3 weeks in advance, but that's the option here.

So if anyone is a keen board gamer in London, feel free to drop me a mail ! Otherwise I'll keep on trying to find enough vampire hunters / island settlers / city builders and railway travellers to keep my hobby going in the big smoke. Living in a big, bustling city, sometimes I can do with as much escapism as I can get :)