As for the novel, it was OK but I didn’t think it was great. The story line seemed conflicted. It tried to be both suspense novel and a more literary study of youthful aspirations and expectations. If they had just stuck with the suspense novel theme and pacing and saved the details and emotions of leaving school and growing up to another book I think it would have been better.

"When compared to the earth the moon has a tremendous amount of helium 3," said Lawrence Taylor, a director of the US Planetary Geosciences Institute, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

"When helium 3 combines with deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) the fusion reaction proceeds at a very high temperature and it can produce awesome amounts of energy," Taylor told AFP.

"Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the US for one full year," said Taylor....

Ok, so the article doesn't deal with the real technical problems or saftey issues of shipping all that ore or energy back to earth, but it's interesting in theory. I can see this being used as a premise for some future science fiction movie.

NEAR THIS SPOT
JACOB AMES WAS KILLED
IN 1744 HE WAS THE LAST
WHITE MAN MURDERED BY
THE INDIANS IN THIS
VICINITY.

When I read it I figured it must be related to King Philips War, the only Indian war I know much about. It wasn't. King Philips War occurred some 70 years earlier. This account from the Groton historical society tells a tale that sounds like something from a bad movie.

The three year's (or Lovewell') War, closed in the winter or spring of 1726. From this time there was a general peace till 1744 when hostilities between England and France and the frontier towns of New England were once more in jeopardy from savage incursions. But the settlements at this period had extended further northward and westward; Groton was no longer a frontier town, and it is not supposed to have suffered to any considerable extent, during this war. One man, however by the name of Jacob Ames is said to have been killed about this time, in the following manner.

An Indian had been seen for several days, lurking about the town, it was conjectured, upon some ill design. Jacob Adams who lived on the intervals on the west side of Nashua River, now owned (1848) by John Boynton, Esq., went into his pasture to catch his horse. Discovering the Indian he ran for his house; the Indian pursued and shot him as he entered his gate. The dead body prevented the gate's closing as it would otherwise have done (closed) of itself and the Indian pressed it to enter the house where Ames had a son and daughter. The son seized his gun, and shot at him as he entered the gate. The ball, striking the latch of the door, split and one part of it wounded the Indian but not severely. As the son attempted to close the door against the enemy, afther the shot, the Indian thrust his foot in and prevented. The son called to his sister to bring his father's gun from the bed- side and at the same time striking the Indian's foot with the breach of his gun, compelled him to withdraw it and closed the door. While the Indian was in the act of reloading his gun, the young man found means to shoot through a crevice and killed him. Two men, at work about a mile distant in a mill, Ezra and Benjamin Farnsworth, hearing the reports of the guns and suspecting the cause thereof, were soon at the place and found the bodies of Jacob Ames and the Indian both weltering in their blood. This is the last man killed by an Indian within the bounds of Groton.

Other historians debate the validity of this account. Dr. Samual Green writing in 1893 claims There is now no evidence to show that after this date (1724) any white person was ever killed by the Indians in the neigh- borhood of Groton. Certainly there was none killed in the year 1744*.

Regardless, it's an interesting piece of New England history.

If you want to see the marker, it's in Pepperell MA on River Rd. From 495 in Littleton MA, take Route 119 West through Groton MA until you cross over the Nashua River into Pepperell MA. At the next blinking light take a right onto River Rd. The marker is less than a mile down on the right hand side.

Note: my source for the historical information was this entry from rootsweb.com

Once I got VE running I was disappointed I had bothered. All I wanted to do was a simple About dialog: a couple of text labels, maybe a picture and an OK button. After twenty minutes of fumbling around I gave up. It's laudable that they want to support layouts instead of direct positioning but there was very little visual support for working with the layouts and the default choice of a BorderLayout for the dialog box just seems stupid. Granted I've yet to meet a visual editor for Java that I do like, but this wasn't even as slick as the last version of Visual Cafe I used two or three years ago. Someday it may be cool but it has a long way to go.

If Half-Life 2 actually makes some people sick, I wouldn't be surprised. Many years ago when I played the demo of the game Descent, in which you navigate a spaceship through a web of tunnels, it totally made me queasy.

• The Red Sox: A great season, an ALCS series against the Yankees that will go down in history and the World Series. What more could a fan ask for.
• Dr. Atkins: Anyone who comes up with a diet that lets you eat steak, cheese and bacon and still loose weight is a genius.
• My iPod: Still loving my iPod.
• Dan Brown, Alastair Reynolds, John Gardner, Yann Martel and the other authors who have entertained me this year.
• Westford 6: Without it I would have lost my sanity.

I know Dilbert's an old joke in most hi-tech firms but this one really struck home. If you can't laugh at yourself....

In the timbers of Fennario the wolves are running round
The winter was so hard and cold, froze ten feet 'neath the ground

I came across the name again while listening to Gov't Mule's Lay Of The Sunflower:

I must leave you for a season
Go out logging that hardwood timber
Hardwood timber that grows so low
In the forest of Fennario.

It turns out Robert Hunter, the famous Grateful Dead lyricist wrote both these songs.

This got me curious where Fennario actually is. After a lot of searching and false hits on David Fennario, the famous Canadian author that I had never heard of before, I came across this Grateful Dead Hour interview with author Alan Trist. According to Trist:

Gans: Maybe you can tell us if there's a place called Fennario - and if so, where and what?

Trist: Well, David, I was able to find the answer the question to that ques- tion. If you're a songwriter and you need a word, you might refer to Alan Lomax's Song Archivist, and there he suggests that "Fennario" is a perfect place name, if you need a generic name for an indeterminate place, because it has four syllables: Fen-na-ri-o. If you a need a three-syllable place name, you might use "Fidio." So Fennario is a place in the imagination. The syl- labic imagination, perhaps.

Gans: I was hoping there was some history to it....

Trist: [Laughs] You were hoping it was a real place that had a lot attached to it. Well, I think you can attach those things to it yourself. It's a very evocative name.

If you've ever describe something via XML: RSS, FOAF, etc..., it's just like that. There's probably some more richness and complexiy in the spec that I don't know about, but that's OK, whatever it is I currently don't need it. This is the entire file I needed to get my game working via Web Start.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 
<!--
####################################################
#
# @(#)sad.jnlp	0.1 11/15/04
#
# JNLP File for Search and Destory
#
####################################################
 -->
<jnlp spec="0.2 1.0"
      codebase="http://www.developingstorm.com/sad"
      href="sad.jnlp" >
   <information> 
      <title>Search And Destroy</title>
      <vendor>Pete Lyons, www.developingstorm.com</vendor>
      <homepage href="http://www.developingstorm.com/sad/sad.html"/>
      <description>A strategic game of exploration and conquest. 
       The player who  controls all of the cities wins</description>
      <description kind="short">A game of exploration 
         and conquest</description>
      <icon href="http://www.developingstorm.com/sad/sad.gif"/>
      <offline-allowed/> 
   </information> 
   <resources>
      <j2se version="1.3+" href="http://java.sun.com/products/autodl/j2se"/>
      <j2se version="1.3+"/>
      <jar href="sad.jar" main="true" download="eager"/>
   </resources>
   <application-desc main-class="SAD"/>
</jnlp>

The game is not close to being done, but you can now load it and move the units around some; enough to see where it's heading. If you want to see the JNLP file in action look here and click on the ship icon on the bottom of the page.

Most of the vignettes are quite funny, some are touching, but not all are uniformly great. I was disappointed with Bill Murrey's appearance. I don't think his performance fit the film. If he had toned it down some and showed us some of the same understated emotion he displayed in Lost in Translation, his scene would have been a lot better.

I started out building my game using square tiles because the game that inspired me, Walter Bright's Empire, used them and frankly because they are simpler to work with. But about a week ago, after getting a chance to see how the game felt with squares, I've decided to switch over to hexes.

Why hexes? For me it's simply an aesthetic choice. The game doesn't really need the consistent multiple axes of movement offered by hexes, but that won’t hurt either. I grew up playing Avalon Hill games like Tobruk, Stallingrad and Squad Leader and just have a fondness for the hexes those boards had. I also think the jaggy edges of the hexes make more 'realistic' borders between terrain types; the square edges and straight lines of the square tile based board just look too artificial.

Never having worked on any code that used hex space before, I of course turned to the web for some guidance. The amount of information out there never ceases to amaze me. For getting jump started with hexes I relied on Clark Verbrugge’s sample code from his article: Computing Field of View on a Hexagonal Grid. I don’t need the field of view calculation but reading his code was a big help. For more general game programming information I’ve found Amit's Game Programming Information to be the best. Amit’s page has links to all sorts of topics.

Grammatical Note :
The plural of axis is axes. Some radical etymologists insist that the plural form of axis is axii, but that is only if there are three or more;

One axis, two axes, three axii.

If you do visit the above link to drafing company, can you answer me a question, what the heck are those diagrams depicting. It looks like some weird condom construction set.

Which File Extension are You?

(via Ted Neward)

At various times I've setup my own CVS or Subversion server to play with but I've never made them part of my routine. After reading Ned's post of Darcs I gave that a try and it's very simple to use but I don't like the idea of the repository being on the development machine and I'm not sure how I could take advantage of the peer-to-peer capabilities given the number of firewalls between the systems I'm likely to be doing development on.

The solution that seems most appealing to me (at this point in time anyway) is something like a CVS or Subversion account on cvsdude.org. This would give me the security of having the source be off site, and at the same time being ubiquitously accessible via the internet.

Cvsdude offers a free account that give you 2megs of space and access for one developer. If you need extra space or want to have multiple developer accounts the upgrade price for 20Megs and 3 users is only $57.00 for a full year or $15.00 a quarter. I think I'll give them a try. My biggest decision left is whether to go with the more familier CVS or the more modern Subversion.

A* is recursive and backtracking and as such it can be a bit tricky to debug. When I first implemented my version I made a small mistake that caused certain complex paths to be unresolved. The depth of the search and the number of backtracks made it very hard to analyze what was really going on. To help out I animated the search. As the search proceeded I drew the path being tested on the map (I added some sleep time to make it more watchable.) The results is that you can see the algorithm probing the nooks and crannies of the terrain trying to find a path from point A to B and from watching this behavior I was able to pinpoint the problem.

I'm certainly not the first to think of this, there are other examples of A* animation out there. But I like the effect so much I think I'll make it a configurable part of the game.

Actually I'm pretty psyched about the release of Half-Life 2 too, though I may be in a similar boat to Jason. I doubt my 2 year old 2Ghz machine with 512 MB will do it justice. I was reading a preview review of it in PC Gamer and they lauded it:

It’s not just a videogame, it's not just a shooter - Half-Life 2 is history in the making. It raises the bar for interactive entertainment, and then uses that bar to club all other games into submission....While some games have eye-dropping visuals, or amazing gameplay, or maybe a cinematic story with good voice-acting, not one has ever delivered the complete package. Half-Life 2 nails it.

So far learning what I need to know has been both fun and a bit annoying. I really want the game to paint very cleanly so I've been doing a lot of experimentation in order to see what helps and what doesn't. The Javadoc is pretty good but sometimes it only tells you things in very narrow terms and you need to really experiment with it to grasp the hidden deeper reality. I wont go so far as to say this is unique to GUI apis but it does seem to be characteristic of them. I remember doing a lot of the same experiments when I started developing for Windows.

I think some of this extra effort can be explained by the extra feedback loop a GUI has. With a GUI it's not just about getting it working, it's getting it working crisply. When working on backend code it's so much easier to live with good enough.