StuChat 32
Apologies for the delay in posting this one. Been busy. As it turns out, the last time
I posted a StuChat was about three months ago, so this one almost spans two seasons!

20th July - 7th Aug 98

This is probably going to be one of those completely unstructured rambles/gossip sessions 
over the last couple of weeks. 


Been round Robs a few times. The scariest moment was finding a trampled PentiSlug
motherboard on the pavement just outside his abode. Both Ian and I mentioned it, but we never
found out just why/where or who. A few weeks back, Rob phoned me and said "Why not
pop over at the weekend, there's someone you should meet", this of course being Ian.
As it was, we were in Wales for a few days over that weekend, so I agreed to travel up from
Wales on the Friday, then back again on the Sunday. Anyway, we all ended up down the pub,
chatted for a while and that was that. I vaguely remember wanting to know why anybody
would be so insane as to want to work on some of the stuff that we do -- and came to the 
conclusion that Ian is a classic case. What a normal person might incorrectly classify
as "sad" :) Believe me when I say that three people is more than three people compared
to what you get with just two (err, if you see what I mean?).

On a completely unrelated note, I was driving back from Leicester the other day when I 
noticed this polyethelyne bag on the road. Unlike some people I could mention, who have
no luck with cars at all :), I quite like driving. As you may know we have an old VW camper 
called Molly. It requires a fair amount of attention, but I don't mind that at all 
and it goes just fine. In fact this year it passed it's MOT (annual safety inspection) 
first time! Call it a hobby.


Anyway, back to this bag on the road. I look at it, think about it for a sec, then decide
it's not worth swerving (you don't swerve Molly without a bloody good reason!) and drove 
straight over it. Fine. Anyway, it made me think that maybe the Holy Grail of AI is driving.
Think about it. Rather than me, say a little black box was driving Molly. It spots something 
on the road. What does it do? I have no idea. It may work out something like this. 

See object on road ahead. Try to determine what it is. Assuming it has some very clever
software that decides it is just a plastic bag, it'd probably just drive over it. Fine. 

Where I grew up, one of the kids' favourite hobbies was concealing large concrete 
blocks in innocent looking objects, like plastic bags, and placing them on the road. 
Were I driving through where I grew up, it'd take a lot of convincing for me to drive 
over a plastic bag in the road. Hitting a concrete block in a bag can quite easily 
prevent you "retiring in style" at forty something. Anyway, how does a little black box 
figure all this out? 

Ok, so suppose it's configured to avoid everything on the road. What happens if you are
going around a sharp corner, there's a juggernaut coming towards you and a crisp packet on
your side of the road which isn't "seen" until it's too late to stop? An emergency stop?
The computer has a mental breakdown? It swerves into the juggernaut!?! 
Some unforseen other possibility? 

And could you sue the programmer assuming you lived?

Sufficed to say I don't think I'd ever let some AI drive me about thanks very much. Indeed,
it may even be an impossible problem to solve without some human intervention. Maybe the only
way would be to "download" a real drivers driving "savvyness" into said box, but that isn't really
solving the problem, more like cheating?

And what music have I been listening to whilst mangulating* over Lightsoft object file 
formats, AltiVec, and lots of other good stuff? Well, a few weeks back we were
in Wales. My brother and I had to visit Cardiff to get kitted out for his impending wedding,
and whilst there took the opportunity to visit, what is claimed to be the oldest record shop 
in Wales (and it is!). I had never seen anything like it!  And so cheap too, compared to your 
standard high street music retailers. 

I found a gem, something I'd been looking for on CD for what seems like hundreds of years; 
Emerson Lake and Palmer's "Brain Salad Surgery".

This album is very special to me, and sadly my old vinyl copy is unplayable these days,
mainly because we have CD players everywhere, but nothing that will spin vinyl very well.
Apparently this album was remastered in '97 AND I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT IT!? Anyway, it's
as good as it ever was and I would highly recommend it to anybody for two reasons.
Firstly, it's just outstanding music, but secondly, because of my long standing AI
interests I find it a fascinating "well before its time" piece of work. The last few
lines of the album (from the track Karn Evil 9 which is in three movements and spreads 
over a good half hour) still scare me, quote:

Frightening huh?

Anyway, moving on, another "almost coding classic" I've been hammering just of late is Bjorn
Lynne's "The Void"; it's just going round for what must be it's thirtieth repeat this week. 
This is a great working album simply because whenever you "come up for air", you hear 
something new. My hat off to Bjorn for this one.

I should actually be in Wales at this very moment. Cath's Mum is very ill,
so we were supposed to be there this week. Unfortunately somebody shot Patch last week (
one of our apprentice cat coders) with an airgun and shattered his hip, so I'm here and
Cath and Jess are in Wales. How on earth anybody can shoot a cat is beyond my comprehension,
he is seriously not well. Anyway, it lead to the problem of having to fend for myself (i.e. cook
etc.). The only answer was to hit Safeway's and buy up their stock of frozen pizzas. Pizza's are
great, just bung them in the oven, wait twenty minutes and "hey presto" - hot food. Easy with
microwave chips. Basically I have the downtime (i.e. not coding) down to about seven minutes;
I can't eat a pizza any faster than that.

Other essentials I've found are bottles of Coke, Snickers bars (100g bar = 500 calories, there's 
not too many calories in a pizza), Orange juice for those essential vitamins (two litres a day
should do it) and you can get ready prepared salad - just chuck it in the fridge and sprinkle 
liberally on pizza (after cooking it). I figure it's almost a balanced diet, and requires minimal 
messing about. If you keep the box the pizza comes in the only washing you have to do is the 
coffee cup. Sorted :) Probably the worst disaster was my curry sauce. I asked about, got all the info
and decided all you needed was curry powder and something to thicken it up with. It really didn't
want to come out of the saucepan and I don't know what happened to it, but it tasted really foul. 
Hmmm.

And here's a tip for the Summer. If it gets particularly hot (it's 85 in here at the moment and
I'm afearing for my monitors!), get some little cherry tomatoes and _almost_ freeze them. 
Lovely. I was talking to Rob on the phone this morning, and, you know when it's this hot all you 
want is, like, salad, or ice cream? Well, I'm on the phone and I can hear this "tinking" noise 
coming down the line. It's like 90 or 95 outside and Rob is there, eating hot tomato soup. Strange.

7 Aug - 6 Sept: Busy coding.

7 Sept 98
Right, MOD of the week is Celtic Romances. I had to write a review of this one, and it's pretty 
good. Runs 15 minutes, has lots of wailing axes and at only 4 channels consumes little CPU overhead.

Recently I've been sprucing up LXT (quite a bit actually) and completely rewriting most new tools 
(i.e. not the current ones, but the new ones, if you see what I mean) 'cause of a cock up here at 
Lightsoft Towers. A while back I sent out a paper to various people who shall remain anon, detailing 
the new tool class structure we'll be using in future.

It got the "nod" so I set about implementing it. Anyway, last week Rob phones me up and say's
"This class structure won't work 'cause basically it's bollocks." Grrrr. Had to modify many lines of
code and the software still hasn't fully recovered and I'm still finding bugs. The combined IQ that 
checked that document out is scary, and yet it didn't work. Lazy bastards <G>.

Still waiting on a new motherboard. UPS two day is a bit of a joke -- 50 bucks for two days from the 
States and what happens? Nadda. Nothing. No board. Poo. Rumour has it that many IMacs being delivered
by UPS are not arriving since they are sent in their standard Apple packaging advertising to the whole
world just what's in the box -- is that a good idea with what seems like the most desirable thing 
(to other people at least) since Felicity Kendall?

And now for something completely different. I know some users are getting frustrated by the 
lack of info. coming out of Lightsoft these days. It's partially our fault - we used to go on and 
on about what we were doing and what would be released and when. From a business point of view we 
eventually realized this to be a bad thing (far quicker than Apple did though <G>). What we're doing 
now is trying to keep as quiet as possible about what we're doing, whilst trying to sell what we have 
"now" - i.e.Fantasm 5.xx, which if I do say so myself is a bloody good assembler. (I'm allowed a plug on 
my own pages:)).

The thing is, we have software out which is reliable and doesn't need maintenance. It's also selling 
steadily and is flexible enough for us to provide new features in an easy manner - for example 
AltiVec which will be out in version 5.30 very shortly; just drop into your "Anvil tools" folder 
and you are at the cutting edge without having to "leave home" as it were. 

This pleases Stuey a lot 'cause he gets time to work on new stuff that takes a lot of time to
work on.

'Till the next time,
Code on! (tm :))
Stu.
*Don't worry, that's not a real word.

About Stu. Stu has been working at Lightsoft for about four years, and sometimes feels it necessary to let the world know what's on his mind. Stu welcomes your comments and feedback