The year of DIY SOS

First of all,

Happy New Year!

Now that all that Christmas nonsense is out of the way it’s time to attempt to get back to writing posts a bit more regularly. Before anyone gets too excited that is likely to mean a lot of rambling on about fixing up our new house; 2011 was the marathon house buying year but 2012 is going to be a whole Olympiad of jobs that need doing on the house of many leaks!

Given the number of leaks we already have, one job that I’m not planning to do myself is replacing the bathroom. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to fit everything in without everything looking odd or squashed. My pencil and paper scribbles have evolved into a highly realistic 3D rendering quick 3D sketch in Second Life to see what it might look like. Apart from our bathroom looking extremely small when dropped in the middle of a field on its own, it was a very simple way to get a rough visualisation.

I haven’t quite managed to use bathroom sketches as an excuse to buy a Galaxy Note… yet… maybe if it was just a little bit cheaper!

The other project I keep contemplating is whether to put in some structured wiring. While decorating and pulling up floors would seem like the perfect opportunity. Unfortunately there’s no obvious place to put a so called ‘node zero’. I guess I could put a patch panel in the loft and defer choosing the final location until later. Would that work? And is there an easy trick for running cables behind dot and dab dry lined walls? Using 8 or 16 pair cable seemed like it might make things simpler than pulling through multiple cables, but that doesn’t seem particularly easy to get hold of in the UK. There’s a good chance decorating will just overtake any ideas about installing ethernet cables but I haven’t completely given up the idea.

Next job: sanding.

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Clayton Tunnel

Tomorrow is the last of the 2010 Heritage Open Days and while searching through for something to do this weekend I spotted Clayton Tunnel North Portal on the list.

(c) Aaron Concannon. Some rights reserved.

By strange coincidence I finished my MSc 13 years ago tomorrow and my dissertation was based on the Clayton Tunnel accident. As Jo rightly points out, it’s not really that freaky a coincidence, but why let logic spoil a good story! My project was basically about modelling the accident, which is nicely explained by this more recent poster. After digging around some old files, I discovered a diagram of the tunnel:

…some screen shots of some exciting grey telegraph dials:

…and a bunch of other images; thirteen years on and .gifs are still going strong. The actual dissertation on the other hand was a little more tricky to look at. After several unsuccessful attempts with Microsoft Word Viewer, Lotus Symphony and Google Docs, OpenOffice finally did a passable job opening the ancient Word format:

Being able to step in and take on an agent’s role is one of the best ways to gain understanding about a system. In the Clayton Tunnel accident, and I suspect many other situations, there are interactions between agents that depend on the other agents having a different perspective on the model. Brown and Killick provide an excellent example of this. At one point in particular the difference between their views of the world results in the last mistake leading up to the accident. As far as Killick knows there are two trains in the tunnel whereas Brown is only expecting there to be one. Now when Killick sends, “is tunnel clear?”, to Brown as a train leaves the tunnel, Brown relies, “tunnel clear”. The modeler is omniscient about the model and hence can’t step in and act on behalf of agents with a limited view of the world without bringing with them knowledge the agent shouldn’t have: there’s a conflict of interests. This limits the modeler’s ability to accurately reproduce an agent’s behaviour.

I wonder if the Open Document Format will prove to be any more future proof. (I still have an original print out just in case!) I keep thinking it would be interesting to recreate the project in Second Life or Open Sim at some point. Maybe I’ll give it a go if I get a chance, although I would be surprised if either of those are around in the same form in 10 years time, unlike the tunnel.

Sadly the Clayton Tunnel tour was fully booked so we’ll have to find something else to do instead. Maybe it’ll be open again next year.

SLorpedo Tweets

If plants can twitter, bridges can twitter and houses can twitter, why not mixed reality games? To find out, I’ve created a SLorpedo twitter account to experiment. To make it simple to find any SLorpedo games in world I’m planning to tweet locations using TinySL. Twitter also seems like a really nice way to get the score back out of Second Life; at the moment the score is only shown inside Second Life, but I quite like the idea of using a virtual world to work out the score for a real life game without ever logging in!

I also think that twitter might be an interesting way to keep track of object keys and channel keys inside Second Life, without needing my own server. So instead of copying a channel key from the Second Life client, the SLorpedo program could find out the key from Twitter… maybe.

To spiral further into mixed reality confusion, I’m also trying to display the SLorpedo Twitter feed back inside Second Life using QTtext. QTtext is a really simple way to display text on a prim using a plain text file and a media texture (even simpler than HTML on a prim which is on its way at last) and I’m hopeful that a bit of XSLT on a Twitter RSS feed will do the trick nicely.

Watch this space!