The life and times of a software and web developer
I seem to have fallen into a pattern of posting every other day at the moment. This is not intentional. Hell – posting every day was never really intentional – but I suppose it became a “thing” after a while. During the last year I probably went more than a month at various points without … Continue reading Every Other Day
Just glancing at the clock, it’s a little after 10pm on “Boxing Day” – the day after Christmas Day. I’m not sure if other countries around the world call it “Boxing Day”, but we do here. I’m not entirely sure why – I’m sure a visit to either Google or Wikipedia would answer that – … Continue reading Christmas
While browsing YouTube videos late one evening a few months ago, I happened upon a presentation about the Google “Alpha Zero” project. If you’ve not heard of it, it’s a Google artificial intelligence project investigating machine learning techniques, and used chess as an example. Cutting a long story short, the system learned to play chess … Continue reading Chess
Sixteen thousand steps. That’s what the Apple Health app tells me, on the shiny new iPhone that’s been in my pocket all day long. Nearly thirteen kilometres. That’s about the size of a day out and about with my younger children. And you wonder why I’m not overweight, given that I typically sit at a … Continue reading Sixteen Thousand Steps
I’m not entirely sure why I missed a day on the blog yesterday. I suppose life happened. I’ll go with that. While I was at work, and the children were at a holiday club, my other half took a vast collection of old video games to the trade-in store, and gave them a very busy … Continue reading Forty Thousand Winks
Do you ever have days when you wonder what you did – where the day went? I know I spent quite some time signing my younger daughters up for XBox Live accounts – and then trying to make head or tail of some sort of team building thing in FIFA 17 for them. I think … Continue reading The Day Vanishes
Welcome to the junk room. I’m one can of cider down, and have just closed the web browser in order to remove distractions. It’s just me, Scrivener, and the light from an angle-poise lamp standing guard on the corner of the desk. I played chess today. I haven’t played chess in a very long time. … Continue reading Chess and Melrose
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. So begins the text adventure game “Zork”, written by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling between 1977 and 1979. Although not the first computer game (Spacewar almost certainly claims … Continue reading Interactive Fiction
This week Deep Mind – the Google team behind the “Alpha Zero” artificial intelligence project – tried out the game of chess on the system. Alpha Zero spent four hours learning to play chess from scratch – essentially playing against itself – before being pitted against the result of perhaps forty years of chess software … Continue reading The Beginning, or the End ?
While skimming updates posted to the social internet by far flung friends earlier this evening, I got sucked into reading a post recalling somebody’s formative years – and how many of their favourite memories were attached to Washington Square Park. I stopped in my tracks, opened a chat window, and asked the author directly: “Is … Continue reading Washington Square Park
