The format worked well and was a lively cross between lecture and stand-up routine. Most of the comedy was handled my Mr Ince but the others more than held their own keeping the audience engaged. The topics covered included Simon Singh with a quick overview of cryptography which included a live demonstration with a real Engima Machine. Foxy Coxy waxed on about the LHC’s search for the Higgs Boson and the evolution of the Cosmos. Being so enthusiastic about the subject he also overran making the first half of the show quite long.

There was a musical interlude by the rather charming geek songstress Helen Arney who played a few songs on her ukulele.

Due to the over-run of the first half the second half started with a very brief question and answer session with Cox and Singh. It’s a shame they didn’t get to do more but I did find the answer to the question “What’s the biggest small thing in the universe?” fascinating. After the Q&A there was a little section on mapping the genetic history of humans were I learnt some interesting facts about earwax. The presenter Professor Steve Jones painted himself as a Dawkins lite but was funny and engaging nevertheless. Finally the energetic Ben Goldacre ran through the placebo effect and how to design drug trials. The data he presented about trail bias was was slightly concerning. Although he had no qualms about rubbishing the quack pill pushers it seems even the proper scientific approach of the big pharmacology companies is not averse to being gamed to show one treatment is better than another. Finally Cox brought the evening to a close introducing an audio clip of Carl Sagan musing on the Pale Blue Dot.

Although I was familiar with some of the material from Ince’s previous show Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People I still learnt new things at this one. I hope the trend for taking science out to the people continues and I look forward to going to more like it.

The book itself is relatively short and is easy to read. It combines historical sections describing Stallman’s intellectual journey with alternating chapters describing experiences Sam Williams had while interviewing this famously prickly character. As a long time follower of the FLOSS movement I was fairly familiar with the well documented early stories of the MIT AI Lab and it’s demise following the rush to commercialise LISP machines. However Williams adds a lot more emotional colour to the story that left me feeling I had a greater understanding of Stallman’s personality. I found it hard not to sympathise with the situation Stallman found himself in and the logic of his actions that ultimately led to the GNU Manifesto.

Stallman is often portrayed as a character who divides the disparate FLOSS community. People criticise him for his stubborn intransigence while missing the fact he holds his positions as a result of the logical extrapolation on sincerely held principles. It would be hard to argue that Linux would have taken off as a poster-child for Open Source had the ground work not been laid by Stallman’s GNU project. In this light the call to refer to it as GNU/Linux and the importance of understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the movement seems fairly reasonable. After reading Free as in Freedom I do feel as though I have a better understanding of why things turned out like they did. It left me feeling how lucky we are that Stallman was born into this time and wondering how different things would have been otherwise.

The CoD series have traditionally alternated developers between Treyarch and Infinity Ward. While Infinity Ward’s original Modern Warfare was fairly ground breaking for a FPS their engine is now used for both streams of development. Some people claim to prefer IW’s games but I can say since the original MW I’ve been happy with both development houses which is just as well as most of the MW developers at IW have left Activision following disputes over bonuses.

The game itself is set in the cold war period following World War II. The plot is driven by the interrogation of the main protagonist and flash-backs to earlier events in which he or other members of the team were involved with. The story is a classic cold war conspiracy thriller set to a large over the top action movie. Considering the game format I think the story worked well and gave me some degree of sympathy for the main character.

The combat is as sharp as you’d expect from this successful franchise with a decent range of weapons to choose from. There are a number of quick time events sprinkled throughout which keep you immersed in the game during cut-scenes although are occasionally frustrating when you want to shoot something. I quite enjoyed the Mi-24 Hind section which allowed a not quite on rails degree of position control as well as full control of the weapons systems. It’s still not quite as satisfying and MW2′s AC-130 section though.

There are one or two niggles I have with the game though. There were one or two places where I ran into invisible walls at the edge of the game area. Admittedly this was mainly due to me getting confused in a fire-fight and running in the wrong direction. The other thing that annoyed me was occasional infinite enemy re-spawn sections. While the game rewards using cover and not being a damn fool this can mean you are occasionally in a nice comfortable shooting position wondering why the same soldiers just keep running into your kill-zone. Eventually you just have to charge forward and kill anything that spawns behind you and hope the spawning stops at that point. These niggles didn’t massively detract from the game but it was slightly disappointing. I suspect some of that is just due to my dislike of re-spawn mechanics.

All in all I enjoyed the single player campaign although it seemed a little short to me. Having said that I’m not a completionist so I may well have missed some chunks of content in my head-long rush through the game.

Of course in terms of gameplay the single player campaign is more about setting. Most of the time a player will spend with the game is in multi-player mode. I’ve only played a few games so far so haven’t had a chance to explore the range of multi-player yet. I did have a quick play with the Zombie modes which are fun although I suspect better in a party setting. Playing it on your own is ultimately frustrating as there is no win condition, eventually they will eat your brains…

Professionally I’ve been doing really well. The company I work for has had yet another record breaking year which has triggered my bonus again (although I don’t find out how much until I get back). It continues to grow in both revenue and size. I finally feel comfortable with the code base I’m working with. At the same time the ever growing feature list means I’ve still got plenty of interesting things to do with it. Although the internal code is proprietary to the company I’ve got a fairly wide latitude to work with FLOSS code and it makes a significant portion of the NMS product. Pretty much anything that I hack on that is useful to the wider community outside the application specific task is fed upstream which is good for both the company and the wider world.

Aside from my work based hacking 2010 was also the year I became a real open source project maintainer. I’ve been publishing code I write and use for a long time and have done maintenance work on some niche projects as well as contributing to other projects as normal. However at the start of 2010 I released Edit with Emacs to an unsuspecting world. It started as a simple exercise in learning some Chrome Javascript and kicking me to delve deeper into elisp coding. However since then it has grown to something that gets regular contributions and is used by over a thousand people. To quote Blur it gives me an enormous sense of well being

This year has also been an interesting year politically. While there is plenty of debate about the economics of some of the choices made by the coalition I’m personally fairly happy with the approach being taken given the fairly dire conditions they inherited. From my geek point of view it’s heartening to see the pre-election commitment that was made to open data seems to be being lived up to. I’m hoping the changes to openness will get embedded into the way government does business permanently.

The big thing that dwarfed all other things this year of course was getting married to the wonderful Fliss. Saving up all my holidays for the honeymoon meant we didn’t have many extended breaks and of course as the logistical tasks approached there was much running around and controlled panics. In the end everything went like a dream and the wedding itself was a blur of happy memories. It was a fantastic day and made all the better for all the friends and family that came along to share in the celebration. Getting married to Fliss is quite possibly the best thing I’ve ever done.

I do occasionally have pangs of guilt considering how lucky we have been especially when so many are struggling with the uncertainty of the economic situation and the stress that causes. All I can do is wish the best of lucky to everyone for the next year. I hope it exceeds the positive expectations and under-performs on the negative ones!

The Ballad of Gay Tony has finally finished it’s exclusive stint on the Xbox360 and is now available on the PS3. Being a long time fan of the GTA series I forked over my hard earned cash for the ~2gb download. When you first start GTAIV again it detects the presence and offers you a chance to start a new TBGT based game complete with a new disco friendly loading sequence.

Although the game takes part in the same expansive world of Liberty City it involves a brand new set of characters and a new protagonist in the form of Luis Fernando Lopez who is the titular “Gay Tony” Prince’s right hand man. The story line is what you expect from GTA although being DLC skips a lot of the build up from the main game dumping you almost immediately into the sort over the top gun battles and movie inspired chase scenes that are the GTA’s forte. Refreshingly your character starts tooled up for the job without having to start at the bottom of the equipment tree like Nico does. A couple of other gameplay tweaks are also evident including the ability to restart sections of the mission (although you lose trophy bragging rights if you do) as well as rudimentary targets to aim for in each mission. A few new mini-games are also introduced including golf and the ability to take a more proactive role in managing Tony’s night clubs.

The game benefits a lot from the solid foundation created by the GTAIV rendition of the living detailed Liberty City. Even after finishing the original game I found there is still a lot of discovery possible. Given the amount of effort invested in building the city simulation the DLC model should prove lucrative for Rockstar providing the story, characters and acting keep up to the high standards expected of the series. So far for me TBGT has done exactly that, it’s just a shame I had to wait so long for it to turn up on my platform of choice.

* Brief aside: Yes I’m pissed off at Sony for removing OtherOS but realistically I never really used the functionality as the core operating system support for media and streaming is already very good. It does provide yet another salutatory lesson on how we don’t really control our modern consumer hardware anymore though.

There is not much I can say about the plot as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. However it is a laugh out loud comedy that had been literally crying with laughter throughout. I’d quite like to see a proper staged version of it some time. Highly recommended.

The concept is fairly simple. When you go to bed you place your phone on your bed. It uses the built in accelerometers to monitor your movements as you move about in the bed. By analysing the magnitude of your movements it attempts to deduce what part of the sleep cycle you are in. Once your within range of when you want to wake up it and it detects you exiting the REM cycle of your sleep it will gently wake you up.

There are some problems with some models of phones that require the phone doesn’t go to sleep for the sampling of the accelerometer. However the workaround of leaving the phone on is fairly benign as it’s the time the phone is attached to the charging cable. Also there has been an update in the last few days which increases the accuracy of movement detection. You even get a nice graph of your movements over the night.

The app also has a number of other features including a useful muting of all ringtones while you are asleep as well a feature I haven’t tried that attempts to stop you snoring by giving you an acoustic nudge.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve often found myself waking before the alarm, however when I don’t the waking I’ve gotten from the gentle increasing alarm sound has been a lot less jaring than John Humphrys suddenly berating some politician. I have noticed I’m remembering my dreams more vividly the last few days but I suspect I need a few more data points to see if it is due to the app. Either way the trail version is free and I can heartily recommend giving it a try.

Silicon Snake Oil by Cliff Stoll

rating: 2 of 5 stars

I first came across Clifford Stoll while reading the excellent Cuckoo’s Egg. It’s a griping real life story about how he discovered and chased down one of the early Internet hackers. This is why when I was in a second hand bookstore I picked up a copy of Silicon Snake Oil. The subtitle, “Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” gives an indication about what it’s about.

The first thing to note is this is a book that really shows it age. Published in 1995 it was when the Internet was moving from a cosy academic network used by scientists to the first commercial ISPs and early influx of AOLers. This when the World Wide Web was still know by the browser Mosaic. As will soon become apparent 13 years ago counts as ancient history when it comes to the ‘net.

The books central thesis is one of scepticism of the promises that the advocates of the so called Information Superhighway where making. Stoll deals with the issues of information overload, signal to noise on Usenet and whether this technology will really turn people into infonauts or just passive consumers of the fire hose of information coming from another glowing box on our desks. He saves most of his reservations for the trend at the time to computerise education and worries the educational benefits of computers and ‘net access are being oversold. Time and again he worries we will turn into one dimensional beings denied the “authentic” experiences of actually seeing, touching, smelling and interacting with things in the real world. There may be some interesting ideas that are still relevant for discussion today however it’s hard to tell because of the numerous predictions that in hindsight completely wrong.

I don’t blame Stoll for this. Predicting the future is always a tricky business. The ‘net has grown up so fast and is consistently surprising the world with new inovations growing out of it. He’s also not a reactionary Luddite, he “looks forward to the time when our Internet reaches every town and trailer park”. However at the time he wrote this book he was clearly having a crisis of faith in what the futurists where promising.

A few illustrative predictions are worth quoting. When discussing shopping he asserts “no electronic shopping can compare with the variety, quality, and experimental richness of a visit to even the most mundane malls”. This is before Amazon gave the bricks and mortar book shops a serious run for their money. He talks of the frustration of searching for information by keywords in titles of documents through various gopher services. This is before the all powerful Google “solved” the problem of search by using links to information to rank the usefulness of a page.

One thing that becomes clear is many of the obstacles he mentions has either been solved or is in the process of improving. The ease of use of computers which is another bugbear of his, usability has been late in the game of software development but people like Apple take problems like getting Grandma on the ‘net very seriously. Humans have proved remarkably ingenious at solving seemingly insurmountable problems.

There are some areas he flags for concern that may still be relevant today. He wonders if the instant response of email is affecting our ability to write properly. If the ability to self publish will drown the ‘net is a sea of dross. If social interactions on the screen can ever replace physically meeting people. However so much of this is mixed in with problems I know are now solved it’s hard to not just write them off as excessive pessimism on Stoll’s part.

In summary I would recommend reading the book if you want to remind yourself of where the ‘net came from and what the early days looked like. However if your looking for a clear treatise on the potential downsides of the information world I suggest looking for a more recent book on the subject.

Having said that there where one or two places where the modern propensity for CGI grated slightly. I suspect the director had just issued the declaration “walk quickly up those stairs” while omitting the CGI wizards would have them collapsing right behind them while being ground up by giant rolling stone wheels.

Last weekend was the second weekend in a row I’ve spent in London. Hi-lights include seeing Jo O and her new physics bloke. Apparently I engaged in some willy waving although I like to feel my question about the practical use of the knowledge of the Standard Model was a conversational gambit.

We went to see All About My Mother at the Old Vic last night. It was a preview night but despite Spacey’s “Just in case” speech it all seemed to go quite well. It certainly wins a lot of technical points for the amount of scene changing involved. Diana Rigg was excellent playing Huma and plaudits should also go to Mark Gatiss for his portrayal of the transvestite prostitute Agrado.