At the moment, almost nothing is setup. Most of the posts have been copied, but that’s about it. Hell, the YouTube videos seem to be broken. Those might be fixed soon. But all of that is moot at this time, as the main point is that this blog will now have a new address. This address will still work, but no new posts will be made after today.

Soft sci-fi deals more with the “fiction” aspect, relegating science to a distant second, third or whatever place. The science here is probably not going to be as thoroughly researched, if at all, and similarly will not be explained, except with an off-hand phrase tossed in at the last moment.

Had sci-fi deals with, or has a special focus, on the science behind the story. The science is either pivotal to the plot or is thoroughly researched and is (or, at least attempting to be) accurate.

I am more a fan of hard sci-fi. I like my science to be consistent and logical. Nothing ruins a story quite like bad science, as Hollywood has been kind enough to demonstrate. That’s not to say that I don’t read or enjoy soft sci-fi. “Replay” is certainly soft, in the sense that no explanation at all is given for the underlying phenomenon. The same goes for S.M. Stirling’s “Conquistador” and “Island in the Sea of Time”. (Nevermind the fact that I didn’t really care for those books, which was unrelated to them being soft sci-fi, but was rather caused by them being identical, long and boring books.) “Jumper” and its related books are also particularly soft (especially “Reflex”, which begins with the absurd assumption that “jumping” is contagious!), yet I love them dearly.

Still, I prefer something more grounded in science, and usually something possible. Yes, I realize there’s a bit of a contradiction in claiming an affinity for possible science-fiction, but that’s what I have. Let me explain.

Consider Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”. The spaceship imagined in the novel is entirely possible, if not with our current state of technology then with some technology. Similarly, “2001: A Space Odyssey” presents space travel and the AI constructs (HAL and the Monolith) that are entirely possible. (In both novels Clarke took leaps in the conclusion, with inertia-less travel of “Rama” and the StarChild of “2001″, but these are minor instances and are still possible, albeit with technology we have not yet discovered. And, of course, we have not yet shown that any of this is impossible…)

Similarly, Stross’ “Accelerando” series of short stories is deeply rooted in current or around-the-corner science. Which is what draws me to (as well as terrifies me about) the series. And, just like Clarke, Stross takes a small leap in imagining a galactic router in orbit around a brown dwarf. And, once again, we have not shown that this is something that is impossible.

Niven’s Known Space works are also someting that I would consider “possible”, though he does take more leaps, such as with teleportation technology (not FTL, since it does operate at the speed of light), the near-indestructible General Products hulls (described as a single molecule bounded with energy fields) and the scrith material that makes up Ringworld (umm, sufficiently advanced technology?). All of these I can accept since (a) the technology presented is self-consistent, (b) is not a deus ex machina and (c) the technology may be possible.

So, after that huge lead-in, what do I want to say? Simply this: I can’t plot soft sci-fi. Here I am, sitting around with oodles of time on my hands, attempting to think of a short story to write, and I can’t seem to come up with anything that’s not based on real (or around-the-corner) technology. Gah! It’s frustrating! Every idea I come up with, every what-if scenario, I dismiss it immediately if I can see no way for it to be possible. And that’s really not the spirit of writing sci-fi, now is it? One shouldn’t keep coming up with ways to foil a story, to put holes in their own concepts, to consistently, time after time find ways that something just won’t work. The spirit of sci-fi is one of possibility. The eternal question of what-if is invariably answered (by actual authors, not by this hack) with a resounding “hell yeah”. The concepts are pushed upon the reader with an authoritative voice, one that almost resounds from the heavens, as if spoken by Zeus himself, and firmly convinces the reader that what they have just glimpsed is not a fantasy but a reality.

Oh well, c’est la vie. Back to “Cryptonomicon”.

—

Currently listening to The Seed (2.0) by The Roots.

Yeah, that’s all. Nothing more. Just lamenting the lack of an Xbox 360 for the next two weeks.

Oh fine, here’s an unrelated… thing: Eddie Izzard, mass-murdering fuck-heads, tea and cake.

Mathematician 2: Anything else?

Mathematician 1: My oldest son has red hair.

Mathematician 2: Ah, I know their ages.

What are they?

—

A husband and a wife of 30 years are being interviewed and are asked how they managed to keep a family together all this time. The wife responds: “It’s all about a clear separation of labor. My husband makes the big decisions and I make the small ones. I choose what’s for dinner, what school our kids attend and what house to get. My husband decides when to declare war on China.”

—

This really should not have come as a surprise for me, but I was amazed at how different people can interpret the above joke to further advocate their own personal views and opinions. Meh.

—

The mirror test (Wikipedia article here) is a method of measuring self-awareness by verifying if an animal is able to recognize itself in a mirror. But, really, I don’t see this as anything monumental. It’s not so much testing self-awareness as testing the complexity of the physical model that the organism maintains. (What I am here calling a physical model is the conceptual model of the world we necessarily maintain in our minds. This is the model that allows you to, for instance, walk around your house without concentrating too much on your surroundings, as you know where everything should be and was, the last time your model was “updated”. Unless you have little furry creatures in your house and they are liable to run under your feet.) The mirror test seems to only gauge if the subject’s physical model is robust enough to properly map the external environment to self when faced with contradicting visual input. Nothing more.

—

Currently listening to Pink Floyd.

Count Smallington, originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Count Smallington, or Gosha as he is known to his family

This is my first attempt at using UFRaw. Don’t have access to Lightroom2, so have to make do. And I have to say, the program is really quite something. It has as many image controls as Lightroom (at least, the major ones), but it is more difficult to use and doesn’t have a great interface, but in a pinch – money or time or simply availability – it’s a great solution.

More of the Christmas 2009 set are here.

The kid behind me keeps kicking the seat. Freaking kid. He used to kick my neighbor’s seat, but then the neighbor said a few words to the parents. And now I get to put up with this nonsense. Such is life?

Started reading “Cryptonomicon” just now… What the feck? Did the kid just drop one? Certainly smells like it. I hate flying.
Anyway, started “Cryptonomicon”. Got to the part where Lawrence is having that strange dream while Turing gets an umlaut. Decided to pause. Don’t really care for the strange-dream portion of the book. Can’t wait for Randy’s introduction.

Tried to code a bit, but small lunch tray and the relative proximity of others’ elbows made this a “fail”. So now I get to plan what features my GPS logger app will have instead of actually coding it.

Coding’s more fun.

Listening to Bon Jovi right now. Will switch to Pink Floyd soon enough. Forrest was right, “Wish You Were Here” is a better album than “Dark Side of the Moon”. Though only in the “if I listen to a million and one albums, 500 thousand will be DSotM, 500 thousand and one will be WYWH” sense. Still.

Q:What’s worse than a kid kciking your seat?
A: A smelly kid kicking your seat.
Q: What’s worse than a smelly kid kicking your seat?
A: A smelly, crying kid kicking your seat.

Should be in Chicago in twenty minutes. Rather “should have been”. Or “should have be”? What the hell is the tense form for a late flight?

Code after the jump.

function GetGuidsOfPowerSchemes
{
	param(
		[ref]$highPerformanceSchemeGuid,
		[ref]$powerSaverSchemeGuid,
		$powercfgOutput)

	$powerSchemeGuidString = "Power Scheme GUID: "
	$highPerformanceString = "(High Performance)"
	$powerSaverString = "(Power saver)"
	$highPerformanceSchemeGuid.Value = $null
	$powerSaverSchemeGuid.Value = $null

	foreach($config in $powercfgOutput)
	{
		$configsString = New-Object
			-TypeName "System.String"
			-ArgumentList "$config"
		if (
			$configsString.IndexOf(
				$powerSchemeGuidString,
				[System.StringComparison]::OrdinalIgnoreCase)
			-eq 0)
		{
			$guid = New-Object
				-TypeName "System.Guid"
				-ArgumentList (
					$configsString.Substring(
						$powerSchemeGuidString.Length,
						36))
			if (
				$configsString.IndexOf(
					$highPerformanceString,
					[System.StringComparison]::OrdinalIgnoreCase)
				-gt 0)
			{
				$highPerformanceSchemeGuid.Value = $guid
			}
			elseif (
				$configsString.IndexOf(
					$powerSaverString,
					[System.StringComparison]::OrdinalIgnoreCase)
				-gt 0)
			{
				$powerSaverSchemeGuid.Value = $guid
			}
		}
	}
}

$garbage = [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Text")

$highPerformanceSchemeGuid = $null
$powerSaverSchemeGuid = $null
$configsList = powercfg -list
GetGuidsOfPowerSchemes
	-powercfgOutput $configsList
	-highPerformanceSchemeGuid ([ref]$highPerformanceSchemeGuid)
	-powerSaverSchemeGuid ([ref]$powerSaverSchemeGuid)

$highPerformanceSchemeActiveGuid = $null
$powerSaverSchemeActiveGuid = $null
$configsList = powercfg -getactivescheme
GetGuidsOfPowerSchemes
	-powercfgOutput $configsList
	-highPerformanceSchemeGuid ([ref]$highPerformanceSchemeActiveGuid)
	-powerSaverSchemeGuid ([ref]$powerSaverSchemeActiveGuid)

Write-Host "Active schemes"
if ($highPerformanceSchemeActiveGuid -ne $null 
	-and $powerSaverSchemeGuid -ne $null)
{
	Write-Host "High power, setting to low"
	$garbage = powercfg -setactive $powerSaverSchemeGuid
}
elseif ($powerSaverSchemeActiveGuid -ne $null
	-and $highPerformanceSchemeGuid -ne $null)
{
	Write-Host "Low power, setting to high"
	$garbage = powercfg -setactive $highPerformanceSchemeGuid
}
elseif ($highPerformanceSchemeGuid -ne $null)
{
	Write-Host "Power setting not determined, setting to high"
	$garbage = powercfg -setactive $highPerformanceSchemeGuid
}
else
{
	Write-Host "Unable to determine current setting and cannot find high setting"
}

All the real work is done by an application called powercfg. The script just gets the available power schemes, checks which scheme is now active and sets the other scheme (identified by GUIDs) to be the active one. Pretty straightforward stuff, but still required me to “parse” the input. Of course, a regex would have worked better, but that’s yet another thing I need to learn.

Code is after the jump.

The problem is that SharePoint does not expose this functionality anywhere. So I write the script to query for the items, delete all the returned items, query again (paging issues), delete again and keep going until no more items are found. For paging, make sure to get no more than about 2,000 items, otherwise queries aren’t performant and you may even get exceptions thrown.

# Delete an item from the announcements list by using a CAML query

param(
    [string] $web = $(throw "The parameter web is required"),
    [string] $list = $(throw "The parameter list is required"),
    [string] $caml = $(throw "The parameter caml is required"),</code>
    [int] $rowLimit = 1000,
    [switch] $whatif = $true
)

[System.reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
$spsite = New-Object -TypeName "Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite" -ArgumentList $web
$spweb = $spsite.OpenWeb()
$splist = $spweb.Lists[$list]

$query=new-object -TypeName "Microsoft.SharePoint.SPQuery"
$query.Query = $caml
$query.RowLimit = $rowLimit

$col = $null
do
{
    $col=$splist.GetItems($query)

    Write-Host ("Items returned = [" + $col.Count + "]")

    $col | % {
        Write-Host ("Found item with ID = [" + $_.ID + "] and title = [" + $_.Title + "]")
        if (!$whatif)
        {
            Write-Host ("Deleting item with ID = " + $_.ID)
            $_.Delete()
        }
    }

    $query.ListItemCollectionPosition = $col.ListItemCollectionPosition
}
while ($col.ListItemCollectionPosition -ne $null)

$spweb.Dispose()
$spsite.Dispose()

Sample usage:

DeleteSPItemsWithCaml.ps1
 -web http://test06/sites/english
 -list "Pages"
 -whatIf:$true
 -caml "<Where><Contains><FieldRef Name=`"Title`" /><Value Type=`"Text`">Test</Value></Contains></Where>"

This will list out, but not delete, all the items in the Pages list on my test box/site where the Title field contains “Test”. Notice that quotes are escaped with the ` symbol.

DeleteSPItemsWithCaml.ps1
 -web http://test06/sites/english
 -list "Other Content"
 -whatIf:$false
 -rowLimit 10
 -caml "<Where><Contains><FieldRef Name=`"Title`" /><Value Type=`"Text`">Category1</Value></Contains></Where>"

This will delete all matching items. The difference is that now the whatIf parameter is false, so this is not a “test”. Also, I’ve changed the rowLimit parameter, which results in each query getting 10 items at a time.

I use the whatIf parameter in practically all my scripts, and set it to a default of true, so that I can test out the script without screwing anything up. In this case, it’s particularly important.

A final note on the script: when running it against our huge list of a million items, we noticed incredibly slow perf. One of my coworkers found a solution, though: sort the results so you’re deleting the largest items first. Here’s a sample query for that. The relevant CAML is highlighted.

  <Where>
    <Lt>
      <FieldRef Name="StartTime" />
      <Value Type="DateTime">2009-11-18T12:24:59Z</Value>
    </Lt>
  </Where>
  <OrderBy>
    <FieldRef Name="JobSize" Ascending="FALSE" />
  </OrderBy>

EDIT: And about 3 minutes after posting up this image, my laptop died, due to a dead battery.

As opposed to last year, when I spent a lot of time on the concept behind the story and no time at all on actually plotting out the flow, this year I’ve jotted down the summaries of all the scenes, ahead of time. So now all I have to do is allot the required number of days per scene (about 2.5) and the story feels like it’s writing itself. It’s a much less stressful and more enjoyable NaNo experience than last year’s. And hey, I’m already at 10,000 words. I missed a day last week due to excessive alcohol intake (Trivia Tuesday, you understand) but aside from that I’ve been writing regularly, every day, about 1.6 thousand words, the required amount for me to coast through November and have 50 thousand words by December.

Speaking of alcohol intake, I’m considering not having less booze than normal, as I’ve found that writing while intoxicated just doesn’t cut it for me. At that point, I’d rather be listening to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin or playing GTA: IV. Not exactly a good writing atmosphere.

And speaking of music (yes, this post is taking on a very tangential motif, but what the hell do I care?!), I’ve recently discovered Led Zeppelin and I gotta say: shit, I’ve been missing out! “Ramble On” is one of the best songs I have ever heard. Period. (Have you noticed that it starts out kinda like The Guess Who’s “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature”? It’s weird, but I constantly think I’m going to hear “no sugar tonight” just as the song breaks into obvious Led Zeppelin.)

Sadly, I don’t expect to be writing much here until way after NaNo is over. This post itself is being written in between lunch and watching “Back to the Future: Part 2″. After that, probably going to head out to a coffee shop to get the day’s allotment of sci-fi written up.

And, if that’s not all, we will now be able to experience Liberty City from yet another perspective. Niko was an OK character, certainly nothing stellar and sometimes just an asshole. Johnny was great, someone I could really enjoy playing as, but his was a dark world. Luis, the protagonist of the new game, will be the body-guard and assistant of the titular character, Anthony “Gay Tony” Prince. Seems like we’ll now be able to experience Liberty from a different vantage point. Some places, a tough biker or an immigrant mobster just can’t get into (at least, not without a fire-fight or an invite from double-crossing politicians).

In a bit of related news, a few hours ago I got an email from an online guide that is apparently considering using one of my photos on their site. The site is free, I’ll get no money for this, and all I heard is that my photo is being short-listed, but it’s still something. I’ll post here, obviously, if my photo gets picked.

—

Currently listening to: Jethro Tull

Well, on to the first photo. This one I took on my first day in Vegas, somewhere in Caesar’s Palace.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Best. Album. Ever. Even beats out The White Album. I know, I know, how dare I say such blasphemous words? But the truth is not blasphemous. (No matter what some close-minded turds tell you.)