Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in RavenBlack's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
9:14 pm	I was just looking at some legal cases for some uninteresting reason, and was amused by the names of some of them; particularly "Equity and Law vs (someone)". Equity and Law is a building society or something, but its name gets reduced to that for case-naming purposes. Also "(someone) vs Pears". So I was thinking how enjoyably foregone-conclusion it sounds if you have a case like "Equity and Law vs Pears", and thus, that if you expect your company to ever have a legal problem, you should name it something dramatically favourable at its inception. "The Forces of Good vs McDonalds." "Justice and Freedom vs Jones." "All That Is Good And Holy vs Does It Matter?" Though "The Forces of Darkness versus Pears" might work too. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
6:45 am	Also, amusing things from TV ads: "There's only one reason you'll be watching Dark Angel, and her name is Jessica Alba." Unexpectedly honest. If they said "one main reason" that would be one thing, but "the show has no other redeeming features" is great. "Sponsored by Doomsday." At last, someone using this always available resource! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
6:39 am	Mysterious - recently I've been getting about 20 spams a day of the "hello, I am tired today" format, with an attached image whose filename is just "me" (not even a file format extension). The files are gifs. They are all the same picture, but they are not all the same image. The cropping varies, and there is noise in the image which also varies. Is there perhaps some sort of steganographic message concealed? A couple of images to show what I mean; one and two. I recommend loading them one after the other in the same window, so you can click 'back' and 'forward' to see the difference. The other possibility, of course, is that they just have added noise and cropping to make it so spam-filters can't just identify and reject the specific file. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
6:04 pm	I recommend the PC indie-developer game Mount & Blade. I recommended it just over three years ago as a work in progress, and it's still a work in progress, but the progress, though slow, is pleasing. Graphically it used to be "good for an indie game" and is now "mediocre for a full-price game". At the core mechanics level not much has changed, but it now has quests and something vaguely plot-like (generated plot, so not really story-telling sort of plot). Things are a lot more polished and balanced. The player-character face (generated to your own preferences with slider-bars) looks pretty human unless you do something deliberately daft with the bars. Unlike, say, Oblivion's, which looked like crap unless you worked the bars for about ten minutes trying to make a face, any face, that doesn't look more like a sausage. The price change is about right too - back in 2005 it was $11 for essentially "all beta versions and early purchase of the full version". Now it is $25. The price when finished is expected to be $39, so, er, if the price is increasing parallel to development then the final version can be expected in May 2011. But I imagine that's not the case, it feels pretty close to a full version now, to me. And there's a free trial version, which is limited in a lovely unobtrusive way - you can play as much as you like until you reach level 7. There's plenty there to give you a taste of the game, and if you like it enough to buy it, you can carry on from your trial save file. However! The current trial version at the website is of version 0.903, whereas the version I got a couple of days ago is 0.950, and the save files aren't compatible across versions, so that may not actually be true. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
8:06 pm	And now, a stimulating post on the subject of flour! Today I used white spelt flour for a pizza dough (full recipe; 180ml water, teaspoon salt, teaspoon sugar, tablespoon olive oil, teaspoon yeast, flour kneaded in until it's not tacky to the touch). It made a pizza dough better than I've ever had before. It wasn't a matter of working it differently - I put the ingredients in a bread-machine, so they got the same treatment they always would. So it must be the flour. If you've ever tried to make proper pizza dough, you may have been tempted to try spinning it like you see pizza chefs do on TV. If you tried it, or even thought about it while poking the dough, you'll have decided it won't work and probably written it off as you aren't skilful enough. You may be right, but that's not what's wrong. You may know how the second-choice dough-shaping method is "stretch the dough, don't squash it into shape or you'll push the air out". And if you've tried to do that, there's a good chance that didn't work either. It's not your fault! It's the dough. This dough, from white spelt flour, I picked it up out of the machine and it stretched. I held it by its upper corners, and it stretched. I got it most of the way into the rectangular shape I wanted by just holding it up and waiting for it to stretch itself. Just a little squishing required to get the corners shaped. It behaved in every way perfectly for the making of pizza, right up to "not sticking to the tray at all", and as an added bonus was relatively delicious. Not as tasty as wholemeal spelt, but the texture was definitely a win. Apparently the gluten in spelt flour is not the same as normal wheat gluten, so that perhaps explains the difference in behaviour there. (Also, some coeliacs are not harmed by spelt, though some are.) In other flour-related things, did you know that buckwheat is not in fact a wheat, nor even closely related? It's not even a grass. It's apparently more like sunflower seeds. Buckwheat flour is also very good; it makes a lovely nutty-flavoured pastry or crumble or pancakes or gingerbread or unleavened biscuits. It doesn't have any gluten though, so won't work for bread or dough (though mixing a bit in for the flavour can work). Both of these flours are supposedly (and I believe it) nutritionally superior to wheat. I certainly prefer them. The downside is they're also more expensive and harder to get hold of. I recommend making the effort. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
12:20 pm	My mailserver exploded at some point recently, and I had to delete the undelivered queue of more than 220000 messages. If you've sent me email in the last few days, there's a good chance I didn't get it. It is now working. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
4:31 pm	Today, asked about the new Bionic Woman of which I have recently seen the first episode, I realised what it is that all these new sci-fi shows are doing that annoys me, which I have up until now been mentally referring to as "Battlestar Galacticking". It's the plot model in which there is just one plot being dragged out slowly (in the same way as a lot of anime, actually) - every episode promises that something interesting is about to happen as soon as the next episode starts, and then doesn't pay out. I'm quite happy for shows to have an underlying plot that does that, but I like there to be a single episode plot as well. The A-Team did it that better way, Xena, Hercules, Jake 2.0, Eureka, Buffy, Angel (mostly), Firefly after the first couple of episodes, the original Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, they all did it this way. And in non-sci-fi, House is the same way. But primarily in new things, the episode plots have been removed and we're left with just the perpetual foiled promise of jam tomorrow. New BSG, Lost, some amount of Heroes, probably Bionic Woman judging by the first episode, Alias. And all soap operas ever. Not saying there's something intrinsically wrong with this model, it's evidently quite popular which is why it's being adopted so much recently, but I find it annoying and don't like to watch any of the shows that use it. I suspect what's happening is that these are really the soap-operas for a new generation, the people who don't actually have anything to empathise with in soap-operas with a real-world setting. And I've always disliked soap-operas. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
11:48 am	It's recipe time again! Today's incredibly short recipe is "what needs eating before it goes manky?" soup. Ingredients: a large cooking apple, a low-end-normal-sized broccoli, two cloves of garlic, a vegetable stock cube, a generous handful of coriander, water. If you don't have a cooking apple, use two ordinary apples and some lemon juice. Instructions: peel the garlic, core the apple, chop the scummy end bit off the broccoli, discard these discardables, throw everything else in the water. Boil for about fifteen minutes. Attack thoroughly with a blender. Boil for another five minutes. It's ready to eat. Serves me, or two ordinary people, or four people if you're using it as a starter rather than a whole meal. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 7th, 2008
7:14 pm	A documentary on TV said "only then did we discover the true scale of Ted Bundy's atrocities." That's right, he was actually only murdering very very tiny women, and the viewpoint was a lot closer than had previously been thought. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
9:55 am	I've been failing to get around to posting this (or something like it) for several days now, and a vocabulary error in a spam subject line has just made it more compelling: subject: Want an Escape from the Dismal US Reality Market? While I may not be in the US, I do still want an escape from the US Reality Market, actually. My discomfort with the UK is largely due to it become more US-ish. Australia wasn't doing a lot better. It's getting to the point where there's nowhere left that isn't part of the US Reality Market. Canada seems like the best bet that doesn't require learning a language, but it's so adjacent, and the immigration requirements make it a difficult task for such an uncertain result. In the shorter term, I'm not enjoying owning a house after all. It's annoying and I feel trapped by it. I moved here because I'd be able to do things I want to do here, like archery, fencing, tai-chi and (added since) bouldering, but by getting a house in the sub-area I can afford, I can't actually do any of those things without either driving, or walking about an hour each way. Which restriction means I don't end up actually doing the things very often at all. The house is spacious, and I essentially end up not using most of it. I use the kitchen and the small bedroom, and the rest is just a waste of heating space and unnecessary distance I have to walk to get a drink. And in this dismay, the idea occurs to me that a change is in order. A change that reflects this discontent and dismisses it. In which role has been placed the idea of getting a camper-van, and living in it. Fit with solar panels I should be able to get a hundred watts in the daytime even in the UK, and I can easily run everything I need on less than a fifty watt average. Internet access based on the mobile phone networks is finally just about up to the point of being adequate. Any half-decent camper-van has a cooker and fridge that can be run on gas. Showers are available by the simple expedient of going swimming. With a plain enough looking van, randomly selected road-parking ought to be adequate - so long as I don't stay in the same place too long, nobody would complain (or even know). I couldn't so much have people round, but it seems most often I end up going to other people's places anyway so that's hardly important. I don't think my dad would mind if I use his place as an 'official' address and for deliveries. Running costs would probably be less than a house even without mortgage payments - tax is less, no utilities except mobile, heating such a small space could probably be done just with me and my computer. What aspect have I failed to consider in this tentative plan? (25 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
4:59 am	I got another crazy drink from the African/Caribbean shop that's between my house and town. Today's crazy drink was some sort of "roots" drink, prominently featuring words such as "strong" and "muscle" on the bottle's blurb. It contained, if I recall correctly, both molasses and malt, in addition to "roots". The resulting flavour was "mmm, this is like sasparilla, but yuck now it tastes like cheap red wine" with an aftertaste of "I have just eaten a tablespoon of black strap molasses". Vile but compelling, like a Pot Noodle. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
7:29 am	Today I discovered that there is a market which is nearer to my house than any supermarket, and that, ironically, it is super. Also, I saw police on horses. Then a couple of minutes later, I saw a huge pile of shit in the middle of the town square. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure if a non-police-person with a dog had left that there, there'd be a hefty fine. Hypocrites. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
6:00 pm	Bit of a pointless thing for most readers I imagine, but I'm putting it here for Googlers (and one or two of you people I expect would be interested) to find; I've updated someone else's outdated greasemonkey script for a Kingdom of Loathing (KoL) pulverize helper. The updated script is here. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
6:12 pm	It's so exciting! Finally I can order a pizza delivered via the internet, and get it without cheese. Every time I've felt like delivery pizza for five years, I've poked at the internet and found either no online ordering or online ordering with no "additional instructions" box. Now there is, and it works, and the pizza is even relatively reasonably priced at under £10 for a 16-inch vegetarian. And it was quite nice. Now that I can, and I've done it once, I'll probably never do it again. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 8th, 2008
1:42 pm	I went out to buy some printer paper, and on the way home passed a shop I have passed many times. It invariably has a sign outside advertising 25kg of potatoes for about 5 quid - I don't even know if that's a good price, but I'm always a bit tempted to buy them anyway, until I remember how far uphill it is to my house, and I walk past. Today, however, the door was open, so I peered in to see what else was in the shop. It was full of strange wonders, so I went in and purchased some. One I purchased was a bottle of "MIGHTY MALT", whose ingredients appeared to be an approximation of "beer that didn't get fermented". It turns out unexpectedly that this drink was pretty nice. Another purchased one is "Jamaican IRISH MOSS (Carageenan) vanilla flavoured drink", a strange can of nominal drink. To give you an idea of how 'drink' it was, it took about twenty minutes to pour into a glass. I suspect it's supposed to be like a protein shake or something, because it was utterly vile in that sort of way. There were also several sorts of ginger-based cake that I could eat, one of which I bought but have not yet tried, the big bags of spices that I love this sort of shop for (twenty times a supermarket refill's size for close to the same price), a jar of unrefined palm oil which is a horrific glowing orange colour, a tin of some sort of leaves in brine that sounded like it'll taste like chili leaves (which are nice, like peppery spinach), "fufu flour" which I think is plantains, and a huge bag of cassava flour (unless that one's plantains and fufu is cassava). I didn't buy the huge bag because, like the potatoes, 15kg uphill made it less tempting than it would otherwise have been, but really, crazy flours that I've not seen before! Horrible things in tins and jars! I can never resist these temptations. Also, Lunix drivers suck. Two possible drivers to pick from for my wireless card; the default one works for about 5 minutes then dies and requires a full reboot, the other option, after being a pain in the arse to install, also doesn't work at all. Working solution - installing the Windows driver inside ndiswrapper so Lunix can understand it. Apparently the drivers that don't work have been works in progress for about three years. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
7:42 am	A post for programmers who are being frustrated with bad documentation - Google didn't help me, but once it indexes this it might help someone else. In programming audio in the latest DirectX "hey it's Monday again, let's make everything work another new totally different way" upgrade to audio functionality, there is a function HRESULT IXACTWave::SetPitch(XACTPITCH pitch) About which the documentation says "The value of pitch may be between XACTPITCH_MIN (-1200) and XACTPITCH_MAX (1200), which is approximately one semitone." Now the astute amongst you might realise that already this is annoying and ambiguous - what is approximately one semitone? The distance between -1200 and 1200, which is 2400, or a distance of 1200? Also, what the hell, when you're changing pitch by playing the sample at a different frequency you can easily go up and down by a whole octave by doubling or halving the frequency, why are you limiting me to a semitone? Well, thankfully, the answer to "which of these" is "no, it is neither of those things that could possibly be meant by that sentence." Instead, a pitch of 1200 is approximately one octave above 0, and each 100 pitch is a semitone. So you can in fact go up and down by an octave, like you should be able to (though really there's no reason for it to disallow going two octaves if you want to, even though it'd sound crap) as well as pitching to nearby notes easily. It's a bit strange to have SetPitch operating on a linear scale like this since the change of frequency is an exponential scale, which conversion must presumably be going on behind the scenes in a manner that would be entirely unnecessary for my purposes since I could precalculate the desired frequencies, but oh well, at least it works and does what I need it to do. Another malfunctioning function is HRESULT IXACTWave::Stop(DWORD flags) which "returns S_OK if successful, otherwise an error code." Except no it doesn't - if you use IXACTWaveBank::Play to start a sound, and then call Stop on the output IXACTWave pointer immediately afterwards, it returns S_OK but the wave does not in fact stop, which is horrible if the wave was set to loop indefinitely. However, you can call Destroy on the output wave object which will reliably stop it. I have no idea what's going on behind the scenes there, or whether one needs to call Destroy on every output wave pointer out of a wavebank.Play call to avoid memory leaks, because the documentation is fucking awful. Hooray. In other good design news, installing Linux Ubuntu, the "user-friendly" desktop Linux. Step 1: graphical installer. Very posh and Windows-like. Here's a dialog box, fill it in. Here's another one to select your timezone. Oh you don't want to be able to click 'next' do you? Well good luck with that, Mr "only 800x600 screen" (or less, as, say, on an Eee machine), because that button is way off the bottom of the screen where you can't get it unless you know some arcane key-mouse combinations to work around it. This has been a known and potentially-easily-fixed issue for about two years. Oh Lunix nerds, you are so good at user interfaces. And further on the audio front, is there really no preexisting function to make a segment of a wave file loop smoothly? It's getting to the point that I'm considering writing my own command-line wave file editor to perform the following operations: Find the zero-crossings in the same direction nearest to the given boundaries. (Existing software does this one.) Find the volume 'cone' in the selection and normalise it to a volume 'cylinder'. Also normalise into the same volume cylinder a small section out of the wave before the selected block, into a spare area. Cross-fade the spare block onto the end of the target block. Set loop point markers in the wav file at the ends of the target block. (One of the two pieces of software I tried can do this step.) Hopefully this way I can make instrument notes where I can control the duration and volume of the note and it doesn't sound like a midi file. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 1st, 2008
7:31 am	Like DNA but bored of the same old quaternary structures? Irked that the only things you can spell are GATTACA, ACT, TACT, CAT, GAG, TAG, TAT, AT and TA? Science to the rescue! Add M and S to your genetic codes! Spell real 5-letter words such as MAGMA and AMASS! Experience the confusion that results from trying to decide which of "hexal", "hexernary", "sexernary" or "sexal" should be used to describe the new base! But it's a New Scientist article so they probably really just made alphabet soup or something and it got all hyped up. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
6:54 pm	Things that have been amusing me recently: An alternate ending for a recent xkcd comic. A video of Tom Cruise blathering about Scientology, with superimposed user comments, largely consisting of crude drawings of penises. Crispin Glover singing a song 'Ben' that I don't think was originally about rats, and Clowny Clown Clown. Sweeney Todd being more a Johnny Depp movie than a Tim Burton movie, which is to say I quite enjoyed it. Helena Bonham Carter was also excellent. Neither spectacular singers, but both very good actors for the roles. The inevitable Burtonisation (whee, I can fly a camera!) only irked me two or three times, and not too much, and when he's not aggressively wasting my time I do appreciate his flair for black-and-white-and-red photography. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
7:48 am	I have decided to buy some shares. I was grumbling that I didn't have any money free to do so, and that the last time this happened (I wanted to buy shares but was not in a position to do so) it was Google when they just went tradeable, on which I'd have made a silly profit. And I did the same with something else that I forget what it was. So, anyway, this time I have decided to take some of my not-really-free money, out of a cash ISA, and invest it via the other sort of ISA, in Torotrak. Torotrak have made a smoothly variable transmission; they have a partnership with Flybrid and Xtrac, all of whose products are necessary in producing a kinetic energy recovery system using flywheels. It's basically a hybrid vehicle, only without gearshifts, without the energy losses due to conversion from kinetic to electrical and back, and with a couple of tricky engineering issues that they've mostly sorted (a fast-spinning flywheel produces confusing torque, a-la science museum "spinning chair and bicycle wheel" experiment). They seem like a good investment prospect to me because: their product is neat. It's an energy efficiency thing that doesn't seem to have a downside other than "new and thus scary". they've been losing money for years and have seemingly just reached the point where it will start to pay off - which is to say, the shares have been falling, and may be about to reverse. Which would be a good time to buy. they've got actual contracts and licensees signed up which should make their profit not negative for the first time in years. Some licenses look really promising - big manufacturer of small cars in India, unknown European car manufacturer, several Formula One groups. Promise of 3.5M paid from the European one by March, which would cover most of a year's expenses of previous years. they've also got a new director, imported from Jaguar, providing them with contacts in the automotive industry which they previously lacked. Step 1: nepotism. Step 2: profit. the transmission has uses other than KERS - it is lightweight and efficient, making it good for all sorts of small utility vehicles. Look at this man's tie! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
9:28 am	Apparently, according to a billboard, "every 49 seconds, someone applies for a Virgin credit card." That must get really annoying. "Oh for god's sake, fuck off, we told you seven hundred and thirty four times yesterday NO!" Do they hang up between askings, or do they just stay on the line all day, "can I have a credit card?" "No." "(40 second pause) How about now?" In similar things that I don't expect most people to find amusing, the other day I was walking on the beach and I saw this guy with a huge round orange head. "What's up with the huge round orange head?" I asked him. "Oh, it's a long story," he said, "but I'll tell you. You see, a couple of years ago I was walking on this very beach and I found a strange glass bottle. I was rubbing the dust off it and a genie popped out and granted me three wishes. Straight away I wished to be independently wealthy, and next time I checked my bank balance I found I had plenty of money. I bought a nice big house and for a time I was happy as anything, but after a while I got lonely, so I wished for the love of my life. Minutes later, the most beautiful woman I've ever seen walked up, and we've been together ever since, it's been fantastic. But then, a couple of years later - and this is where I think I made my mistake - I wished I had a huge round orange head." (4 Comments |Comment on this)