The old Left, and the new Scotland
Unity and discussion: need for friendly criticism
One of the themes we heard repeatedly at the Radical Independence Conference this weekend was calls for nationalisation: nationalisation of the banks, of Grangemouth, of the oil industry. This makes me very cautious. Of course, conference speeches are not places for nuance, for detail. It's possible that those who urged nationalisation did not mean the statist, centralising nationalisation of 1945. So I'm cautious rather than hostile.
My intention in this essay is to set out the reasons that I'm cautious. This isn't to criticise anyone; it isn't to be hostile to anyone. As Dennis Canavan said, we must keep our eye on the ball; we must achieve independence, and to do that we must work together as a broad front. We don't need schisms, splits. I'm not seeking to promote those. I'm seeking to start a discussion.
Implementing Milkwood in Java and Clojure
I was recently given, as a coding exercise by a potential employer, this problem.
It's an interesting problem, because the set of N-grams (the problem specification suggests N=3, so trigrams, but I'm sufficiently arrogant that I thought it would be more interesting to generalise it) forms, in effect, a two dimensional problem space. We have to extend the growing tip of the generated text, the meristem, as it were; but to do so we have to search sideways among the options available at each point. Finally, if we fail to find a way forward, we need to back up and try again. The problem seemed to me to indicate a depth-first search. What we're searching is not an 'optimal' solution; there is no 'best' solutions. All possible solutions are equally good, so once one solution is found, that's fine.
A paen in praise of my stove
A stove is the heart of any home, particularly so at this time of year. A stove transmutes wood into heat. But heat comes in a number of forms, and we appreciate it in a number of ways. My stove provides me with toasty warm towels from my heated towel rail, when I step out of the bath. It provides me with the hot water for my bath. It provides me with my hot meals, my well cooked food. It heats my oven and bakes my cakes. And, most important of all, it keeps the whole of my house warm and comfortable. And all this for no fuel bills, save the labour of cutting the wood.
So what is this paragon, I hear you ask; how much, I hear you ask, does such a thing of wonder cost?
Getting Jenkins CI running on Debian 6 under Tomcat
So... on to install, and there the fun began.
Installing Jenkins
Extraordinary renderings of Stuart London
OK, I know when I blog about game worlds it's usually procedural ones, and it's probably no secret that I'm trying to put together a toolkit which will render believable (largely) procedurally generated worlds. But to put together a believable world you have to understand how real world environments work, and these extraordinary models of London from just before the Great Fire strike me as extraordinary and inspirational.
These have been produced by teams from De Monfort University — formerly Leicester School of Art and then Leicester Polytechnic — for a British Library competition called 'Off the Map'; and they are built, literally, from contemporary maps. First, here's the entry by a team calling themselves Pudding Lane Productions: This has a very grungy feel, similar to CD Projekt Red's beautiful Vizima from the original Witcher game; but (obviously) it's a much bigger and more complex environment than that.
Next, this one from the Optimistic Pessimists: