Software wants to be FREE

Just found out about an amazing site GiveAwayoftheDay. They give away one commerical software program each day, the download is available for 24 hours. The idea is software companies get a bit of advertising for the rest of their products by making one of their products available for free for 24 hours.

They have already provided some great software. I nabbed a Christmas-themed 3D screensaver (will be fun for the “holiday season”) and will be looking each day at their site. On the fun side they have published a large number of interesting looking puzzle games, and more seriously they’ve put a number of DVD and HD checking utilites, image and animiation converters, paint packages, DVD rippers, utilities for iPOD audiobooks and the like.

The software is high quality, legal, and free. What more can you want?

Cold Comforts

This BBC News is about me. No, I haven’t been caught (yet), it concerns a fire alarm turned impromptu drill at my student accommodation block.

Eight fire-fighters have been suspended over an incident in which hundreds of students were left to spend almost three hours outside Glasgow flats. … The FBU’s Scottish spokesman Kenny Ross would not give exact details of the incident but confirmed the eight crew had been suspended as a precaution while several complaints from members of the public were examined.

What happened was some stupid bloody idiot deliberately set-off the fire alarm, smashing one of the fire points. The firemen who attended the incident found out the reason for the fire alarm very quickly, they went straight to the section the button had been pressed and realised there was no fire. Incensed by a deliberate false-alarm they decided to hold the entire student block of a few thousand people responsible and held an impromptu fire-drill, evacuating the entire block. People were ejected into freezing rain and kept there for hours as the firemen searched ever single room in every single flat searching for any students who hadn’t evacuated. One issue is they are not permitted to carry out random acts of fire drills as vengeance. They also threatened to call the police against anyone attempting to shelter in the lobby of the building, this included people wearing only a nightclothes or t-shirts who had been standing in freezing rain for a number of hours. The firemen also denied for being in any way legally, morally, or professionally, responsible for the safety of people they were keeping in the rain.

The Dog Delusion

“The God of the Bible is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

So starts Richard Dawkins in his magnificent The God Delusion. Noted for his works on evolutionary biology Dawkins has long been an advocate for atheism and against creationism. This is the work in which he spells it all out, from evolutionary morality (why we don’t require religion to get a moral framework, that our moral framework predates religion, and anyway religion is easily used to deter us from our inherent moral framework) to irreducible complexity (evolution is natural selection, not chance); this is the book i which he sets out to convert people to atheism, unlike previous ones which converted people as an incidental by-product (notably Douglas Adams). The book is full of fire, almost like an Old Testament preacher from the pulpit, but always replacing the preacher’s threats with scientific rationality. Well worth a go.

Primate Cream

My duties as part-time door man (”Your name’s not on the list so you’re not coming in, mate. A tenner you say? That’ll do nicely, sir.”) has led, at last, to my first call-up to help steward a concert – Primal Scream, one of my favorite bands. The venue itself has many opportunities to be put on-duty without being within a whisker of viewing the band (or being able to listen) but I was lucky: helping people in the seating area. Nice and central, bit far back, but on a raised platform. Sweet! A tad busy but a small price to pay for a great view.

Twenty minutes before the band go on stage I get tapped on the should by my supervisor and get led off. I’m wondering if I’m in trouble for some slight real or imagined. No, someone needs a steward somewhere else and I’m available. I get to look after the Fire Escape for the catering staff. No view of the stage, no sound either – they had the telly on. Ten minutes before the gig starts I get tapped again, I’m wondering “what next – cleaning the toilets?” and I get taken backstage, put on the stairs to the stage. My job is to prevent anyone getting on-stage during the performance, with a few exceptions such as their road crew, their manager, etc. And that’s me. I get within sniffing distance of the band as they go on, go off, go on for an encore, come off again, go on for another encore, and finally depart. Sniffing distance wasn’t difficult, after a couple of hours hard gigging, sweating under professional lighting, I suspect half the audience could smell the guitarist. I even managed to sneak on-stage during the gig to have a wee rave, and had fun telling their manager he wasn’t allowed on-stage – at least until he told me who he was. Not only can you not buy experiences like that – I get paid for them. And the moment they were off stage I head to my new supervisor “sorry mate, my train’s about to leave”, and I’m offski.

Trongate

The TRON game underwent some serious improvements, not least the adding of AI, but though I got the game working well the source code is lost. It turns out merely compiling and running projects in the Dark Basic IDE doesn’t mean they’re saved. An agonising mistake, and one I’m not going to repeat. There isn’t even an option to turn on automated saving, you just gotta remember. However I’ve re-coded the AI and it’s almost working. Its way more optimised than the previous version, but somewhat erratic – not least because I’m trying to add randomised “personalities” to the various AI riders. I’ll put a notice up when it’s finished (this week almost certainly) and will send it out to anyone wishing a game.

TRON: Only Twenty Years Late

A long time since my last update, appologies to my few and irregular readers. My life has slipped somewhat into a deja-vu of college, work, and study projects at home.

A pet project I’ve just finished, to the point it works, is a TRON style lightcycle game, the one where you try to get your opponent to crash into your trail. It’s simple enough, but plenty of options, different frame rates for faster computers, a range of screen sizes, the option to make you able to survive your own trails, and a range of ‘borders’ – you have the option to race to the edge of the screen and appear the other side, or put a border that will kill anyone, a border that changes randomly to a player colour (letting only them through) to a championship mode where the winner of the last game has the advantage and only they can travel through the border. All very silly, fun, and twenty years too late.

Unfortunately I can’t upload the EXE to WORDPRESS, but when I have found someone online to store it you can have it. If you can’t wait, email me and I’ll send you a copy of the 1-meg exe.