Blog Post: Derek K. Miller

This post is my thanks to Derek K. Miller. Derek was an amazing blogger, podcaster, musician, photographer, citizen of the web, husband, father and most of all human being.

Derek K. Miller

Many years ago, when I was just starting my Masters, I decided that while I seemed to be spending a lot of time on the internet, I certainly wasn't experiencing the best parts of it. Conveniently around that time Tod Maffin (CBC's then resident expert on the internet) was talking about good blogs that people should be following, and amongst the ones he mentioned I started following Derek's penmachine.com.

In early May 2011, Derek died. It wasn't a surprise, he'd been battling, and later living with cancer for more than four years. I followed his blog from his wait for his first biopsy results, though to his last post. I was immersed in his many informative posts, elated when good news came and saddened when the bad news came.

Derek's death was heart breaking, far too soon, with his family too young and with too many awesome things that will never be done. I am glad, that at least he and his family had some time together, to take off and do the important things, like go to Disney world, and to plan for what comes next.

This post, as you may have noticed, is late. It has been many months since Derek died and while I should have got off my ass and written something right away, but I didn't and since then I've wondered a lot about what I should write. After all, I didn't know Derek in real life, he didn't know me from Adam and his death is really the business of his family and friends. I can extend my sympathy, but really what does that do for their grief and their pain.

What I've come to is this: I am inspired by Derek. He lived his life well, did things he was interested in and excited and passionate about. He loved his family and was good to them. He made decisions that made his family's lives better. He never bogged down, even when his pain was at its worst, when the cancer or the chemo was ravaging him he kept going and when he reached the end of the road he took his rest.

I am inspired by Derek and can only say in his death that I will try to follow in his footsteps. I will try to be a good person and a good citizen of the web. I will try to produce creative things that I enjoy making. I make no guarantees beyond that, but looking at the happiness he had in his too-short life, I don't know what else someone could wish for.

Derek and his wife Air. Stylin'. That's most of what you need to know.

Project 3 : 25 books in 52 weeks

As I think I've mentioned one of the reason why I'm doing this blog is to try to stop the powerful force of my own procrastination. One of the things I've procrastinated the most about is reading, and while I mean the reading I need to do for my PhD to some extent, the reading I've really been missing out on is reading for pleasure.

So I'm starting a project to try to increase the amount of reading I get done. Over the next 52 weeks, I'd like to read 25 books. Hopefully it will take less that 52 weeks as this isn't a very ambitious goal, but I want to give myself a chance.

I've started by taking a look at the huge pile of books I have sitting around that I haven't read yet, and a few that I've been thinking of reading again. I've listed these books out below. I don't guarantee that these will actually be the 25 books I read, but at the moment they're what I'm planning to read.

Title	Author	Notes
A Short History of Nearly Everything	Bill Bryson
Agent of Change	Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
The Atrocity Archives	Charles Stross
Camelot 30K	Robert L. Forward	Re-Read
The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh	C.J. Cherryh
The Complaints	Ian Rankin
Cryoburn	Lois McMaster Bujold
The Dragon Book
Essex County	Jeff Lemire	Canada Reads
The Fionavar Tapestry	Guy Gavriel Kay	2nd Try
Fluke	Christopher Moore
Fortress in the Eye of Time	C.J. Cherryh
Fool	Christopher Moore
Good to Great	Jim Collins	Re-read
Local Custom	Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Matter	Iain M. Banks	Hopefully no extracted eye balls or unnecessary surgery
New Sprint	Robert Jordan
Nebula Awards Showcase 2009
Regenesis	C. J. Cherryh
Spirit Gate	Kate Elliott
The Sword of Shannara	Terry Brooks
This Alien Shore	C. S. Friedman	Re-Read
Unless	Carol Shields	Canada Reads
Will Grayson, Will Grayson	John Green & David Levithan
The Years of Rice and Salt	Kim Stanley Robinson

Blog Post: 6 Guitars

I recently went to see "6 Guitars" at the Calgary Fringe Fest. It jumped out at me from the listing because it reminded me of the film "It Might Get Loud" and it's always interesting to explore people's passions.

"6 Guitars" is  a one man show staring Chase Padgett. In it he plays 6 different guitar players, from different styles and backgrounds, including an 80-something year old blues musician, a 20-something rocker, a good 'ol boy country music guitarist, a (slightly neurotic) classical guitarist, a self satisfied jazz guitarist and a folkie. The evening unfolds as a talk given by the six of them explaining their love of guitar and their view of music.

The first thing I noticed about the show was how uncomfortable I still feel interacting in plays. In addition to being uncomfortable with Padgett's various personas interactions with audience (rock on Albert Einstein looking guy) I found the proximity to the actor surprisingly overwhelming. I spent the majority of the show watching the back of the chair of the person sitting in front of me.* While I suppose this reduced my total exposure to the show, it also helped the characters in the show cement themselves in my brain, since it allowed them to not look like the actor.

Over all the show was very enjoyable, well acted, funny and engaging. Its easy to see how it sold out all it's Calgary showings and if it's ever somewhere you get a chance to see it I recommend you to go. Despite all that, I did leave the show feeling somewhat unsatisfied, and it took me a little while to figure out why, but I think I have it more or less nailed down now.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I was attracted to "6 Guitars" because it reminded me of "It Might get Loud." If you haven't seen it, I recommend you do, (with the best available sound system you can find). It details the lives in music of The Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White and their history and their love of music and ends with what must be one of the most epic jam sessions of all time.

The issue I had with "6 Guitars" (and I realize that it isn't fair to critique a piece for not being something else) was that while each of the six characters were passionate and their love of music was clear, they were only characters and somehow, even if the show was supposed to show us Chase Padgett's passion for music, the message gets muddled. I admit that may not actually be the point of the show, but the other "moral" to take away from it seems to be that "music is good," which I'm certainly not going to argue against.

So in conclusion, "6 Guitars" is a great show, that isn't quite as epic as 3 amazing guitar players jamming in an empty warehouse, but still stands very well

* fortunately the show was put on in the DaDe Lab so the chair was actually really cool. If i ever have a project making enumerated chairs, you'll know what spawned it.

Project 2 : The Ogre Manager

One of my fondest memories is receiving Ogre Battle 64 for my birthday (a long, long time ago). It's gone on to be both one of my favorite games of all time, and also one of the games I have the strongest associations with. Every year when the days get short and the weather gets cold and snowy, my first thought is to put Ogre Battle in the N64* and spend the afternoon pitting my army against the morally ambiguous other guys.

From GameFAQs - user Count Dackula

One of the things that's a little unusual about Ogre Battle, is that while it may look like your usual 90s RPG with swords and magic, you don't actually get to control anything. You take the role of the organizing general, setting up units out of your soldiers and then deploying them to the battle field with orders to take over a strong point or defend a town. Once the game starts they march where you tell them and fight the enemies according to their own internal mechanics and you just get to sit back and watch.**

Your units (in Blue) fight the "Bad" Guys (in Red). You sit and watch.

From GameFAQs - user Storm Shadow

The fun of Ogre Battle comes in putting together all the different character's available to you (some you train up from recruit soldiers, some are given to you by the story and some you pick up from the wild) into units that fight well together, then level them up. Like many strategic rpgs (and as I understand Ogre Battle shares developers with it's cousin series Tactics Ogre which basically spawned the tactical/strategic rpg) the challenge in the game comes from leveling the right units up at the right time. In particular, you have to be careful that a unit has the correct alignment (lawful, neutral or chaotic) and that your units don't become over leveled.

The game tells you what each character's level is, but doesn't give you the total for the unit. As a result I started to keep track for myself, using a sketch book a pencil and my high school Casio not-quite-graphing calculator.

The stats for a character. Sadly I can't find a screen cap of the unit info.

From GameFAQs - user Storm Shadow

After a while I started to realize that the unit I left to defend my base sometimes wasn't strong enough to hold its ground.*** Realizing that I also needed to keep track how much damage each unit was dealing, so that I could always leave the unit most likely to win its fights at home, I started to keep track of that too.

Around this time the Computer Scientist in me started to think that keeping track of this on paper was maybe not the most efficient way to do things. In addition to my mitigating my ability to add calculation errors and screw up putting the numbers down in the right places, I thought it would be nice to be able to graph my progress and maybe keep track of a bit more information. So I started bringing my laptop to game time and keeping track of the statistics in Excel.

One set of unit data for one of my play-throughs.

So, having upgraded myself technologically, I kept on playing. In addition to being able to keep track of each of the characters in a unit, both their level and their attacking strength, I was able to keep track of their alignment (which I could have done before, but now we have a whole spreadsheet to play with right?). However, I wasn't exactly happy with this set up for two different reasons.

The first reason was technical. While the spread sheet kept track of the unit at any point in time (before each mission) it didn't keep the history of the changes. I started to keep a new spread sheet for each mission, but without doing more work than I was really willing to do it meant that I couldn't really graph my progress. Doing this isn't essential to the game or anything very important, but it's still something that would be fun to track.

The other reason was more artistic. As you can see in the screen-shots I've included, there's a very strong esthetic to the game. Everything is very medieval in style and switching from that to the ... polish ... of excel is rather jarring (as you may have noticed) in a way that keeping my information on paper wasn't.

Enter: Ogre Manager, a program I'm creating to solve these two problems. It's not an essential thing, in fact I'd be nearly as happy to go back to tracking all this on paper, but it also struck me as a good chance to practice a whole bunch of things that I've let languish far too much.

The Notes panel from Ogre Manager. It shows who should defend the base, who needs leveling and which units should be grouped together. (But not into in game Legions, those are a terrible idea.)

In short, the vast majority of the programming I do is command-line style stuff and as such I don't get much practice working on GUIs. Ogre Manager seems like a good chance to practice that, in a situation where there's not a huge penalty for not getting everything right. Secondly it would be nice to be able to make a program with a graphical look and feel that matches the game. Whether this is in the form of a look and feel for Java Swing, or Java FX, or custom environment, it will be an adventure trying to put this together. Thirdly this seems like the kind of program that would make an excellent Android app, which is another area in which I'd like to have more experience.

Right now I have development mapped out into 4 phases. The first phase is to finish a Java-standard look and feel program that keeps track of all the information I want to track, which as the screen shots show, has been started. The second phase is to implement graphs and other visualizations of the data. The third phase is to create the Ogre Battlely look and feel and finally the fourth phase is to create the Android app.

Time to go make something.



* In fact, Ogre Battle doesn't really come out of my N64.

** Or clutch the controller in impotent panic as your unit gets wiped off the face of the earth.

*** One of the mechanics of the game is that after a battle is resolved, the losing unit (the one who dealt the least damage) is pushed back on the battle map. The distance it goes is based on how much damage it received. When your base defense unit gets pushed then the enemy can beat you by just walking right into your base.