Strange Aeons

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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

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2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

NYC Odyssey Day 4

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I spent the morning and early afternoon working on my notes before heading to Brooklyn College in the early evening to help celebrate the end of the first week of the Bridges to Computing school. I spent some time with Valerie and her lovely little pitbull whilst Simon was finishing up at the college.We then bought sushi and had an evening of pool playing and beer drinking which later devolved into pool playing and martini drinking. Eventually Valerie called it a night and Simon and I took the subway into Manhattan, Simon to head home and me to head to the Slipper Room for my last night of entertainment in NYC. All in all today was pretty good, I got a new gym bag, one of the bridges to computing schwag bags. Simon and Betsy used the same supplier as the NY AAMAS in 2004 which is the best bag that I have gotten from a conference yet and has travelled all round the world with me. I also discovered that Burlesque shows last longer in proportion to the number of tips dropped into the tip bucket and that Martinis in Manhattan are really quite expensive and strong.
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NYC Odyssey Day 3

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I spent all day today sat in Simon Parson's office at Brookyn College working up notes for possible collaboration based upon the last couple of days discussions. Simon was busy with the summer school so I managed to catch him every now and then. Basically the day was productive but essentially I travelled about 5000 miles to sit in a basement office in Brooklyn coming up with ideas that didn't necessarily depend upon the circumstances. That said, once I clocked off (which is a rare occurrence for people working in academia), I grabbed a shower before taking the Q to Coney Island. I had dinner at Nathans again and spent some time looking at the bikes of the biker club who appeared to have me there. I then sauntered along Surf Avenue to the sideshow where I had a few beers before heading into tonight's "Burleseque at the Beach" titled "Sealo's British Invasion" show which was hosted by Mat Fraser. I have seen Mat on British TV many times and was really pleased to meet him person and have the opportunity to shake his hand and chat to him for a while. The blurb for his show is as follows:
Mat Fraser presents: Sealo's British Invasion Salute the Queen and wear your Union Jack with pride, it time for the all British night of classy, brassy, and arsey girls and boys to reclaim the America’s, stiff upper tits, and tally hoe, what? Starring a bawdy bevvy of all British Burlesque Beauties, hosted by your favourite British Freak, the sealboy himself, Mr Mat Fraser!
Basically we had a show filled with lovelies enacting typical British stereotypes in the typical Burlesque form, which was funny and sexy and better than almost any other entertainment form. On one level I think that I like Burlesque for exactly the same reason that I read speculative fiction. This is because they break the rules. The shows are not as polished as something from Hollywood. The audience has the opportunity to interact with (and in this case get sprayed with liquid (which I hope was sparkling wine)) the artists. At the Coney Island Sideshow you get to see, and interact with,  the stars of the show at the bar, drinking the same beer as yourself, and in Mat's case, clearing his bar tab from earlier that night. Basically Burlesque doesn't obey the rules of "what is cool right now" but acknowledges that the classic shows actually had entertainment value and that sometimes a corny, or old, or even bad joke is still funny if delivered in the right way... ... with nipple tassles. I plan to head to the Slipper Room to see Julie Atlas Muz tomorrow night. She was in tonight"s show where her British accent made Dick Van Dyke sound like Olivier ;) More information once there is something to talk about. Either way she is one of the best Burlesque artists, or even just one of the best performance artists, to see.  So if you get the chance, see one of her shows.
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Julie Atlas Muz Photograph Source: http://www.leahmeyerhoff.com/

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Telly-On-The-Go With N810 Media Encoding

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After my rail trip earlier this week where I had free, but so slow as to be unusable, WiFi I resolved to load some media onto my N810 to help pass the time on future journeys. Early experiments showed that the N810 can play the average xvid avi downloaded from your favourite torrent site. However it didn't necessarily play them well. Firstly, you need to install mplayer which gets better performance out of the hardware than the stock media player. Then, so long as the scene isn't high-motion you can watch your tv show, or movie, or whatever. To get good performance though really needs a re-encode, especially to play media downloaded from iplayer (maybe via my earlier technique for timeshifting British TV) which is unwatchable. The best solution that I have found is tablet-encode which provides mencoder profiles for the N810 and is command-line based so is ripe for scripting. Usage is simple, as all good software should be:
tablet-encode tablet-encode --help tablet-encode --preset list tablet-encode input.avi output.avi tablet-encode --list file1.avi file2.avi file3.avi tablet-encode --preset best input.avi output.avi tablet-encode dvd: film.avi tablet-encode --preset best dvd://1 dvd://2 dvd://3 media/ tablet-encode --gui input.avi output.avi
Tablet-encode can be downloaded from Maemo.org.
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Backing Up DVDs on Linux

I recently needed to back-up some DVDs on my Linux box. In the past I used mac the ripper and handbrake on my mac mini to convert to xvid but am slowly weaning myself away from the cult of mac and onto Linux full time. I hadn't, until recently, found a decent way to transcode from DVD to other formats that was as reliable and rapid as my old tools. However I have discovered the combination of Vobcopy and Avidemux which are great for fairly straightforward DVD structures. When things are a little more complication then I have found other tools such as OGMRip, dvd::rip, and Thoggen. Vobcopy is a particularly nice little tool, especially the -l option that copies an entire DVD into a single large vob file, and the -m option that mirrors the dvd structure onto the hard disk. Vobcopy also has a particularly sane default that automatically copies the contents of the disk in the default DVD drive into 2GB split files in the current directory rather than just printing out a rather terse usage message to the terminal which is what I had expected when I tried it initially. One thing that I should have checked first though was that I had libdvdcss2 installed. The easy way to do this is to try to open the DVD in VLC. If it fails then it is probably not installed. I know that there are other ways to check whether this library is installed but a second element of this is that if the DVD plays in VLC then at least you know that you can access the disc correctly and check that things look good. Anyhow, because I had only recently upgraded my workstation to Ubuntu 8.10 I had not yet gotten around to installing libdvdcss2 on it, and I spent a while trying to rip a DVD before I realised why it wasn't working correctly. I couldn't see a simple way to install this via synaptic so resorted to googling for a solution:
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install w64codecs & libdvdcss2
Your DVD watching and ripping tools should now work on encrypted DVDs.
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R.I.P. Paul Newman

"We are such spendthrifts with our lives. The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out."
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Here’s to swimmin’ with bow legged women!

Yes I know that Quint said it but I think it fits and is a better send off than "we need a bigger boat". Anyhoo, as somebody who has always ranked Jaws as probably my favourite film and definitely one of the most technically perfect films ever I was saddened to learn that Roy Scheider has passed away. He was an actor from a bygone era of film and television, an older generation of actors who are sadly fading away now, who performed great roles in iconic films and cemented a position in the minds and hearts of the their fans. As well as Jaws I enjoyed, at various times in my life, his roles in the excellent films 2010, The French Connection, and Marathon Man, more mainstream movies like Blue Thunder and television series such as Seaquest D.S.V.. In common with many actors of his generation, I can't say that I was ever a fan, but I did, and still do, appreciate his performances in those films of his that I have watched. R. I. P.
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Posterous theme by Cory Watilo.
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