Saw Stealth tonight. Man, that was a terrible film. In a great way, natch. It’s like the director had a bet on to squeeze more cliches, terrible lines and totally predictable “twists” in per minute than any other film ever made. You can’t make a film that bad by accident – there has to be some measure of intent in there.

Anyway, it’s totally worth seeing, just so you can laugh at the sheer awfulness of the whole thing. Look, it’s about an AI plane that gets struck by lightning, goes rogue and nearly starts a nuclear war – how can you not love a film that has that plot, and that plays it without any apparent irony whatsoever? Genius.

The future is now!

(actually, quite an interesting read; some of the stuff is spot on, some of it a bit off, and obviously they couldn’t have anticipated the digital revolution, but some of the predictions are really quite accurate)

Some of my black and white shots from Antony Gormley‘s Another Place in Crosby are up in the gallery.

In other news, I’ve changed the look and feel of the gallery back to a much more simple one. The theme I was using was frankly horrible so until I can give the whole thing the overhaul I’ve been promising to do for ages, it’s back to using the old style.

So, I bring my laptop out of hibernation and it reinstalls the drivers for my sound card again, for no clear reason. I’m getting quite upset about all this.

So, it seems that if I connect my Edirol UA-5 audio thingummy to a different USB port, the computer detects it as a new device and installs it all over again. Also, if I connect it whilst the “advance” switch is turned off, it doesn’t install the ASIO drivers. Indeed, to get it to install the ASIO drivers, I have to turn it off, turn the “advance” switch on, turn it back on again and wait for it to be re-detected and installed as yet another new piece of hardware.

On top of this, my USB hub sucks, because even though it will do USB2, the moment you plug a USB1.1 device into it, it drops all the connections down to USB1.1 – and the Edirol UA-5 simply does not work over USB1.1, so it just disconnects itself, without warning.

In conclusion, I don’t think I’m going to be able to plug all my devices in simultaneously without buying another USB hub to plug the 1.1 devices into. I thought USB was supposed to make all this sort of stuff easier. Bah.

Programmers are machines that convert caffeine and sugar into code. All good software companies know this, and provide copious quantities of coffee and soft drinks to turn into code – and, of course, the higher quality the coffee and soft drinks, the better the code. So, if you offer instant coffee, you’re going to get code that looks a little bit like the real thing, is better than nothing and can pass for real coffee on a good day, but really isn’t all that great when you get down to it. On the other hand if you’ve got a grand’s worth of Gaggia espresso machine that grinds the beans on demand and turns out glorious shots of hot, dark liquid gold, then your code is going to be correspondingly well crafted and artisanal. Well, that’s the theory, anyway.

So, anyway. It was obviously a great problem to our company when, two weeks ago, the aforementioned Gaggia Coffee Robot went tits up and died. Productivity slumped. Caffeine withdrawal kicked in. There was very nearly a protest in the R+R room, except nobody could summon the energy or willpower to do it. In response to this, a coffee grinder and filter coffee machine was produced whilst the Gaggia was sent away for repairs. Now, normally when you make filter coffee, you stick a spoonful or two of coffee in the filter and drip the water through. If you’re a normal person, anyway. If you’re a Transitive employee, what you do is fill the filter up to the top with ground coffee, and pack it down, so that what drips out the bottom is the most viciously strong, bitter assault on your senses you’ve ever experienced. The taste isn’t as good as the espresso machine, and it gets through coffee beans like you wouldn’t believe, but it’s a damned sight better than instant.

Today, the coffee robot returned, to much applause; and with it came some statistics from the nice people at Gaggia. Since buying the machine, it has made over 25,000 cups of coffee. An average shot of espresso contains about 100mg of caffeine, so that’s 2.5kg of pure caffeine. The lethal dose of caffeine for an average, healthy adult is between 13 and 19 grams. So, in our office, we’ve made enough caffeine to kill somewhere between 131 and 192 people.

Sod software, we should go into the chemical warfare business.

• printf goes really spazzy if you pass in uint64_t parameters but don’t prefix the d in the format string with ll.
• gcc inline assembler actually has some sensible parts – like the “A” constraint, which feeds in (or out) a 64-bit value split between eax and edx for use in 64-bit instructions, so you don’t have to faff around with bitmasks and stuff.
• It is actually impossible to find the particular variation of mov you need for your specific circumstance. Oh, sure, it exists alright – hell, x86 has an instruction that I’m pretty sure calculates phases of the moon, as seen from any point in the solar system – but the instruction set documentation is shrouded in deep magic that prevents you from finding the right one for your needs.
• Nobody other than me is really all that interested in x86 assembler.

12 hours, over 400 photos and one minor heart attack when I thought I’d lost a roll, and it’s all over. It only remains to see how the pictures have turned out now…

Today, I’m a wedding photographer. This, in itself, is scary enough, because you have the potential, should you fuck it up, to ruin someone’s wedding and make yourself an enemy for life.

It’s particularly scary today, though, because the bride is, herself, a photographer. A photographer who studied at the New York School of Arts, who worked as the photo-editor on the Moscow Times and has had her photographs published in the Moscow Times, St Petersburg Times and the New York Times.

Scared? I’m bloody bricking it.

I have, in the last two days, succesfully burnt (or at least, rendered dark brown and crispy) two meals. This is something of an embarassing result for someone who likes to pride himself as being pretty good in the kitchen (my paella has been known to make grown men weep). The reason? Goddamned Lumines (pronounced, because it’s Japanese, Luminous).

It’s kind of impossible to describe Lumines without making it sound like Yet Another Falling Block Game, because that’s exactly what it is. But then, so is Tetris, and so is Puyo Puyo, and so is Meteos (which is still better than Lumines but hasn’t caused me to burn food for reasons I’ll get to shortly) and they’re all like digital crack, except less prone to leaving suspicious white dust around your nose. The trouble with Lumines is that a single game can, literally, last for several hours. After the first couple of levels you enter this sort of zen-like trance state where slotting the blocks together is an almost unconscious process, and the outside world becomes an unnecessary distraction, hence the whole pizza-burning thing.

(Meteos, on the other hand, is almost exactly the opposite – if you can make a single round of Meteos last more than two or three minutes then you’re either some kind of godlike gaming legend, or you’re not playing the game properly. You should buy Meteos, though; it’s the best game this year. Really. It’s better than Lumines.)

Anyway, Lumines is great, but it really needs some kind of mode that’s as satisfying as challenge mode but doesn’t cause you to forget you’ve got a saucepan full of chillis boiling in vinegar and sugar on the stove and thus render your kitchen full of an acrid sugary tear-gas-like smoke when you return to the kitchen an hour later.

In other news, this made me very, very angry for not including Puyo Puyo, Final Fantasy Tactics (Advance or original), Disgaea, Chuckie Egg, Meteos or any 2D vertically scrolling shooters at all, and also for having some sort of retarded obsession with old Nintendo games that – trust me – aren’t as good as you remember. Really.