jmtd → Jonathan Dowland's Weblog
Below are the five most recent posts in my weblog. You can also see a chronological list of all posts, dating back to 1999.
This took a while to arrive! After the success of the reissue of Coil's Musick To Play In The Dark, it was inevitable that the second edition would also be reissued. The pre-order opened late November 2021 and mine arrived in late April this year.
I was toying with the idea of ordering one of the most exclusive editions direct from DAIS Records, in particular the glow in the dark one, but with international shipping the cost was pretty high. I went with a UK distributor (Boomkat) instead, who had their own exclusive edition: black-in-purple-in-clear.
I'm happy with my decision: it's one of the most interesting variants I own, and from what I've read, glow in the dark vinyl never sounds great anyway. (I think I have at least one glow in the dark 7" single somewhere)
Stand-out track: Tiny Golden Books
Since I didn't say so last time, the stand-out track on volume one is Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night, but both volumes are full of really interesting moments (🎵 One day, your eggs are going to hatch and some very strange birds are going to emerge. 🎵)
Example map with tuneables on the right
WadC — the procedural programming environment for generating Doom maps — version 3.1 has been released. The majority of this was done a long time ago, but I've dragged my feet in releasing it. I've said this before, but this is intended to be the last release I do of WadC.
The headline feature for this release is the introduction of a tuning concept I had for the UI. It occurred to me that a beginner to WadC might want to load up an example program which is potentially very complex and hard to unpick to figure out how it works. If the author could mark certain variables as "tuneable", the UI could provide an easy way for someone to tweak parameters and then see what happened.
I had in mind the walls of patch panels and knobs you see with analog synthesizers: tweak this thing over here and see what happens over there.
I think this kind of feature would be useful in other, similar programming environments, like OpenSCAD: I don't think they do yet, but I could be wrong.
This release of WadC is dedicated to the memory of Kayvan Walker (1983-2022). Kayvan was a childhood friend who committed suicide in March this year. Back in the nineties, Kayvan was responsible for introducing me to Doom in the first place: I used to visit his house on the way home to mine, as it was on the walk back from School. His mum works in IT and always encouraged us into it. Doom was so far ahead, in technical terms, of any other computer game I'd ever seen, and was the closest thing we had to virtual reality: we could create our own worlds. It's in no small part thanks to Kayvan — and his Mum — that I'm still creating worlds, nearly thirty years later. I owe my career and most of my hobbies to those pivotal moments. Thank you both.
Kayvan did a lot more for me than just introduce me to Doom, or computing. He was one of a set of friends that I had every confidence that, no matter what, we would always be friends, through thick and thin. I miss him terribly.
Please, if you reading this, are suffering, talk to someone. In the UK you can talk to Samaritans on 116 123.
I often listen to soundtracks when I'm concentrating. The Fight Club soundtrack, by the Dust Brothers, is not one I turn to very often. I do love the way it was packaged for vinyl. The cover design references IKEA, but the clever thing is it has a mailer-style pull-cord to open it up. You can't open the packaging using it without literally tearing the package in half. There is a secret, alternative way to get in with less damage, but if you try it the packaging has a surprise for you. This Image album summarizes most of the packaging secrets.
The records themselves are a pleasant mottled pink colour, reminiscent of the soap bars in the movie. They're labelled "Paper Street Soap Company".
Last week I delivered a seminar for the research group I belong to, Scalable Computing. This was a slightly-expanded version of the presentation I gave at uksystems21. The most substantial change is the addition of a fourth example to describe recent work on optimising for a second non-functional requirement: Bandwidth.
- scalable seminar 2022.pdf (PDF, 474K)
The Year page
A day page
I've been having reasonable success with time blocking, a technique I learned from Cal Newport's writings, in particular Deep Work. I'd been doing it on paper for a while, but I wanted to try and move to a digital solution.
There's a cottage industry of people making (and selling) various types of diary and planner as PDF files for use on tablets such as the Remarkable. Some of these use PDF hyperlinks to greatly improve navigating around. This one from Clou Media is particularly good, but I found that I wanted something slightly different from what I could find out there, so I decided to build my own.
I explored a couple of different approaches for how to do this. One was Latex, and here's one example of a latex-based planner, but I decided against as I spend too much time wrestling with it for my PhD work already.
Another approach might have been Pandoc, but as far as I could tell its PDF pipeline went via Latex, so I thought I might as well cut out the middleman.
Eventually I stumbled across tools to build PDFs from HTML, via "CSS Paged Media". This appealed, because I've done plenty of HTML generation. print-css.rocks is a fantastic resource to explore the print-specific CSS features. Weasyprint is a fantastic open source tool to convert appropriately-written HTML/CSS into PDF.
Finally I wanted to use a templating system to take shortcuts on writing HTML. I settled for embedded Ruby, which is something I haven't touched in over a decade. This was a relatively simple project and I found it surprisingly fun.
The results are available on GitHub: https://github.com/jmtd/planner. Right now, you get exactly what I have described. But my next plan is to add support for re-generating a planner, incorporating new information: pulling diary info from iCal, and any annotations made (such as with the Remarkable tablet) on top of the last generation and preserving them on the next.
Older posts are available on the all posts page.
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