Alden Bates' Weblog

I've been following with interest Shamus Young's project to create a Procedural City. He's posted a video to his blog, which you can watch below and read a bit about the creation of in his latest post.

I was surprised at how well the effect works!

I have two links!

Back in the Village - an ongoing comic based on cult series The Prisoner

and

The last couple of weeks of Player Versus Player - have been full of Doctor Who goodness.

From NewScientist: Our world may be a giant hologram

Scientists have found that space time may not, in fact, be continuous, but composed of pixels 10^-35 metres in size, some hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton.

It occurs that if we can determine the exact size of the universe, we can then calculate its resolution.

I likes me some mini-golf.

Miniclip Mini-Golf
Psychogoldfish Mini-Putt
Miniclip Tropi-golf
Gamblingfactory Mini-golf
Pitch'n Put Golf [French]
TBS Office Mini-golf

Where possible, I've attempted to link to the game on the originating site.

When Doctor Who author Craig Hinton sadly died in 2006, he was in the middle of writing a book. That book has been completed by Chris McKeon and will be published with proceeds going to the British Heart Foundation. You can read about Time's Champion here. From the sketch published on there, the Alister Pearson artwork on the cover looks like it's going to be really nice.

Via indefatigable42:

Dr Who Tardis on sale on eBay

"A TROWBRIDGE Christian who renounced the evil of Dr Who in favour of his religion is selling his collection on internet auction website eBay."

Portal is a 3D game created by Valve based on the same engine as Half Life but based towards logic puzzles rather than shooting enemies. Before I even knew that version of the game existed, I stumbled on a 2D flash version of Portal, as pictured. I don't know how it compares to Valve's 3D game, but it's a fun little game in its own right.

The idea is you have a portal gun with which you can create portals on flat surfaces, then move yourself or objects from one end of the portal to the other. You use this ability to solve logic puzzles in order to get from the entrance of a room to the exit. Most of the early levels are easy - they start to get fiendishly hard somewhere around level 30...

The nastier levels involve small gun turrets which shoot you with lasers if you stand in front of them too long. I think the worst was level 35, which has a wee warning that it "may cause frustration"...

Back in 1993, I did a cartoon for TSV titled What's Really inside a Dalek. Today, I happened upon the fact that someone's created an embroidered patch from it. That was unexpected and also totally brightened up my day! Thank you, Trifarina!

Via Boing Boing:
Steampunk Dalek, which also comes in CGI video flavour:

I'd been thinking of doing something like that but hadn't gotten around to it. I'm still thinking of having a go at designing an Art Deco Dalek to make up for the design we didn't get in Daleks in Manhattan. :)

Spotted on alt.toys.transformers:
JAG Animation: meet Chronobot, Saucer, and Stardrive
Chronobot costume

Regarding the Saucer design on the second page, I'm not entirely sure they've accounted for the entire bulk of the saucer section of the Enterprise-D in that design. Larger scans of the artwork would be nice...

Via blinovitch it's... Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day! Mark your calendar - December 8th!

I would be from the Global Warming future, and be wearing water-wings and a flutterboard strapped to my back. Constantly falling over because I never learned to walk, and periodically splashing myself with water to keep my skin moist. Fake gills also a possibility. Yes.

I'm going to slack off tonight and link to one of Allyn's posts on a dissertation on the "Theology of Doctor Who.". This goes into quite a bit more depth than The Bible According to Doctor Who which appeared in TSV 33 and also covers the new series (though unfortunately not series 3, which has some religious themes most notably in the last three-parter...)

The latest casting announcement from the Doctor Who production team has a lot of fandom in an uproar, with many of them comparing the casting to that of Bonnie Langford some 20 years ago with Lawrence Miles taking this to extremes.

OTOH gordon_r_d's cartoon on this matter is full of win.

I'm not going to mention who's been cast at this point, as it may be regarded as a spoiler, but for the score I think this is a great casting decision. Also, I like Bonnie Langford but you probably knew that already.

You know, I swear back in the early days of the internet if you wanted something like, oh, a program to convert a midi file into a wav file, you could just go look on your favourite FTP site and download a tiny DOS program which would do it. Does anyone else remember those days? Now it seems like all the programs on offer for doing this require you to fork out $25. WTF?

I wanted to convert a midi file to a wav file, so I took the following steps:

1. Downloaded one of the many shareware midi2wav converters.
2. Ran the installer.
3. Ran up the software.
4. Discovered that pressing ENTER in the software would quit out of it without prompting "Are you sure you want to quit?"
5. Restarted the software, attempted the conversion, got a cryptic error.
6. Figuring the previous attempt had locked some audio drivers, rebooted the PC.
7. Reran the program - discovered that the cryptic error actually meant the target directory I'd specified didn't exist. Converted the file.
8. Played the resulting output file, to discover that the shareware software had produced a 1 minute long, completely silent wav file.
9. Uninstalled the software.

Is this is how software works these days? You download it, install it, and hope it works and doesn't deposit any spyware on your PC? Man.

I got the midi file converted in the end, thanks to a page which gave instructions on converting midi files to wav files using Winamp.