Friendly Robot Overlord

I don't know exactly what the aim of this place is, but I hope to make something that if there was a version of me that was a month behind the real me, then they would find it interesting. So, if you are like me, then hopefully you will find this interesting, and that will go some way towards making up for being like me.

What follows is the thoughts I had right at the beginning. Hopefully at least some of these will be followed through. If not, they are here for public record so you can shame me a little. When writing it, it was difficult choosing a tense to write this in, given that this document is supposed to last for the whole time this site exists and stuff will change. So, to make it easier for myself I'm just going to give you my plans, and when you read this later, just check the date at the top for some context.

So, I plan on putting at least one new thing up every week (even if it is lame). And, at least for the moment, while I've got lots of ideas, one of those things will be an audio or visual effect. They will be demonstrated in the form of an example or two, an explaination and some source code for anyone who likes tinkering. To make things more fun for you, I'm not going to use any external libraries, so you won't have to go hunting for dependencies, however the downside of that is that the programs will probably only work on a limited set of input files (e.g. 24-bit bmp files or 16-bit wav files). But my aim here isn't to make standalone programs that a normal person will use, but to give the tinkerers something to tinker with.

I plan on taking some programs, disassembling them and doing some fun reverse engineering on them. The point of this won't be to stick it to the man, since I think it is just going to be a few open source programs that get done, it is purely for education and to make sure I stay a bit familiar with assembly. I think I'm a bit fearful of a day when people consider assembly to be unreadable, and that you absolutely need source code to make modifications or understand algorithms, so this is my attempt to do my bit in the fight against that.

I plan on making some fun graphs of stuff, because graphs are cool. Hopefully this will make more sense when you see it.

I will talk about me, because I know more about me than anyone else does. And who will talk about me if I don't?

I will talk about some audio stuff, because I like music and sounds.

I will build a few applications, giving the thought processes behind it, and doing it in random programming languages. I haven't fully decided how I will choose the programming language, but I don't want everything written in <language-of-the-day> because that would be boring. Very few of these applications will be useful.

There are some other things on my list, but I'm not sure if they are interesting or sustainable enough, so there will be some stuff which doesn't really fit into these categories too.

So there you have it. That is hopefully what this will look like. I don't know anyone other than me who would actually enjoy reading everything here, but that doesn't really bother me.

Who am I?

My name is Andy Owen. I work as a programmer, and am a Computer Scientist by hobby and degree. I live in Sydney, Australia and am at least 23 years old, at the time of writing this (and for the foreseeable future). I play (field) hockey, and drum. I do neither particularly well. I'm a bible believing Christian. I work for Dolby Laboratories, and enjoy it there. This isn't connected to my work at all and while I can imagine stuff I write here being inspired by the problems I'm solving there this isn't some company sponsored or endorsed place.

Andy

This is an article that you can test things in.

This site runs on a modified version of blosxom. One of the modifications was to combine it with pollxn, so you can leave comments. I'm also using a couple of plugins - flavourdir, hide, icons, markdown, static_file and timezone. The licenses for these files I believe allows me to use them all here without providing the source code, but I don't have any reason to hide it so you can download it here (bear in mind that this will probably end up out of date pretty quickly). If you don't get it, or it is really out of date, then email me and I'll fix it.

What does this combination of software do?

• Comments submitted are put into a subversion repository, so they can easily be removed, but keeping a history.
• When there is only one story on a page, all the comments for it are shown.
• Config stuff for pollxn and blossxm are merged.
• Dates in coments are shown relative to the time of the story, rather than absolute time.
• I've probably introduced some subtle bugs and security issues.
• Lets me write in markdown which is a well designed text formatting language.

The icon graphics for different categories were done in Inkscape, and really were just added so the pages looked a bit more interesting, but hopefully they will be useful as a way to quickly filter out the stuff that you don't like reading. If for some reason you want an svg file of any of the icons, then email me... but I'm sure you can do better.

My philosophy for this site is that when there isn't a feature I want, it will be hacked in. None of the code I'm writing is particularly elegant here (and at least one hack is just horrible), but it seems to fit with the blosxom style.

I don't get much spam at the moment, so this may change in the future. But at the moment, if you send an email to andy-<whatever>@ultra-premium.com then it will get to me, and I will read it. The <whatever> should be something of your own choosing, think of it as a by-line to the subject, or just think of it as a place to put stuff that I may forget to read. If any of the addresses gets too much spam I will shut it down, so far this hasn't happened, but I suspect that if anything has to be shut down in the future, it will be the plain one with no extension. I plan on keeping this email address system for the rest of my computing days, but that's just a plan.

I believe you can do something similar with gmail but it uses a '+' instead of a '-'.