richard vodden’s blog

This is extremely exciting. I’m bored. Wait, exciting isn’t exactly what I meant. I have a terminal lack of things to do. In fact I have many things to do, but for the most part I completely lack the inclination or resources. Mostly inclination. I feel like a “yoooth”. You know, the people who wander around the skate park wearing skull caps and kicking things. That’s what I really want to do - kick something. I wonder what. Maybe a football. That, I feel would be far to much like actually playing football which would be, frankly, embarrasing. You see? This is exactly my problem. Before I have really decided to do something, my brain has come up with a marvelous reason for me not to do it.
M’eh. Sod the lot of it. Maybe I’ll read something. Probably not though.

I’ve got a very exciting book. It has the same title as this blog entry. I really can recommend it to anyone who has thought about game AI and how it might be coded. Its quite a theoretical book, so there isn’t much code and the code there is is written for VS6. This of course disgusts me, so here is a patch which turns the chapter 15 tree into cross platform code. It also adds a nice GNU Makefile so you can compile it in most places (-Wall of course) although this has only been tested on linux. If anyone successfully uses this patch on another platform, post a comment!! Patches for the proceeding chapters will, of course, be posted as I get to them.

Despite having booked almost all of November off, I find myself in the enviable position of having 17 days leave remaining. Which must be used up before January the 2nd. The observant amoungst you will notice that in fact there aren’t 17 working days left in the year, so I’ve booked it all off. The upshot being, I’m not going to work until the 10th of January.
Instead, I’m playing Sim City 4. A game which I can recommend to everyone. Currently I have a population of 25 thousand and about 400 grand (USD) in the bank. I’m about to set a killer robot on the commercial district cause I don’t like it.
Meanwhile, I’ve played my last concert of the year (and indeed first), probably been on my last proper drinking session of the year (in London) and generally doing last things. Right now I’m bored. Dum di dum di dum…

I have a brand new Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo D 1845 complete with a 15.1″ widescreen display. I’m extremely pleased with it. At the moment I’m fighting the installation of Gentoo… several slightly unsupported things are making life complicated. I’ll post a complete howto for the device once I’ve worked it all out!

Well, after nearly 10 years of playing the Baritone I have now transferred back to playing Cornet. I am currently right and the end of the back row for Capital Concert Brass, a rather promising new 2nd section band with some extrememly strong players. My first rehearsal was last night and proved that your lip can indeed go very very quickly when you haven’t played for 4 years. Hmm… time to start saving up for a prestige

When when when will people learn that data rate is not bandwidth. It is really annoying to keep having confusing conversations with IT contractors who use “bandwidth” when they mean bitrate (or datarate). To explain, bandwidth is the highest frequency your channel can transmitted minus the lowest frequency your channel can transmit, it is measured in Hertz. Bit rate is maximum number of digits your digital transmission line can cope with per second it is measured in bits per second (bps). There is a relationship between the two, but they are definately different. While I’m at it I’ll explain the difference between bit rate and data rate as well. While both of these quantities are measured in bps, data rate is the rate at which useful digits can go through your transmission line, where as bit rate is the rate of actual bits going down your transmission line. By way of example, a 100base-T LAN has a bitrate of 100Mbps… try actually getting 100Mbps of useful data down the line.

Well this is very very exciting. I have spent three days at work. So far I have: identified a problem with PDC codes, and discovered that its a contractual nightmare to sort out;worked out that VITC won’t pass through TC10, and that’s a very expensive thing to sort out; and moved BORIS.
Having celebrated the final croc club meeting of 2004 last night I now have a hangover. Now I’m about to go to Mike Moate’s birthday party, so tomorrow I’ll have a hangover too. Our boiler has stopped working as well, which is quite rude. I’ve turned the immersion heater on, so although we are cold, we can wash!

There is an amazing programme on BBC2 at the moment. The programme is telling the story of a company (Pickfords Removals) who are trying to reduce the number of people calling in sick when they are not really. There methodology represents a fundamental missunderstanding of how to get the best out of there employees. There ideas include : Hiring AHP - A firm who force employees to explain to trained nurses why they are off sick; paying only the legal minimum sick pay, including not paying the first three days of absence.

I think they have completely missed the point. They should be looking at why people are taking “sickies” not scaring them into not taking time off. Now Pickfords are facing the oposite problem. Employees are turning up to work when they are ill because they can’t afford to lose a days pay! This puts other peoples heath, and probably safety, at very grave risk.

I emplore some management consultant somewhere who wants to earn a fortune to work out exactly what is going on. There must be a way to dramatically reduce the number of unjustified absences without using fear tactics!?!?!