Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Well, Varsity have reviewed our show. Since the review doesn’t appear to be on the website I’ve transcribed it below for my own reference :)

Improvisation! [sic]

ADC, 22 Feb
Lottie Oram

“Isn’t the word ‘nut’ an abstract noun?” Not a heckle the average comedian is often faced with, but then this is the crazy cut-throat world of improvised comedy. This is a world where hair-brained situations and schemes are thrown together at the whim of the audience and often strung out with nothing more than a few well-placed jokes and a silly hat. Thankfully, the Iceberg [sic] improv team had plenty of both, and some sparkly capes too.

The premise was that, with a little help from out nut/noun obsessed audience, the comedians would improvise four origianl TV shows with titles provided by the audience, complete with commercial breaks and weather forecasts. Titles were predictably ‘zany’ and included such smashers as “the Wellingtons of doom” and “the rise of the flying crumble birds”. But the comedians did well to make the enforced wackiness work.

Some of the best moments included a man walking into a dating agency looking for a randomly aggressive, incoherent girlfriend, shopping channel hosts trying to sell suck tricky items as a vibrating elephant, Thursday and Bolivia; and, of course, a man who confuses mutagen for breadcrumbs resulting in the formation of a race of murderous crows. The madness culminates in a fierce battle of words and leeks between an evil wizard and the self proclaimed king of Wales followed by a rousing song summing up the moral message of [the] evening, “eevil crows, eevil crows, we don’t want none of those”.

All in all this was a very witty, silly and fast-paced show. Not every situation worked and the performers’ various attempts at portraying foreign accents were quite amusingly dire. But the comedians were a quick-witted and self-deprecating enough bunch to make the assorted cock-ups seem rather endeering. For many comedians one of the most terrifying things would be standing up on stage with absolutely no material prepared. You have to be impressed with the people who can make it up on the spot and make it work. The Iceberg [sic] team will be performing an Amnesty gig, in their own words “soon”, and it’s well worth catching up with them, even just to throw in your own nut-based heckle. God bless the Cambridge audience.

Somewhat stupidly I’ve accidently installed the spiffifity branch of metacity over the top of my real install. Consequently I have snow falling in a beautifully alpha-blended yet annoying manner on my screen :).

A terribly busy few days. Firstly we had our ADC show Improvision! today which was pretty damn good all things considered. A few first night hiccups which are annoying because it is a one-night show and so we can’t fix them :). The audience laughed, some nice belly laughs and a few spontaneous rounds of applause which, I hope, meant that they enjoyed it overall. My `team’ didn’t win but then I was up against the unstoppable might of Alex Wilber, whose friends seemed to encompase half the audience. The spit and sellotape sound and lighting mostly held up as well. The show was truly improvised. Up until this morning we had no lighting or sound guys, no sound at all and no fixed plan for the show. Luckily it was OK on the night. I’m pretty much mentally drained now. The strain of having to manage a plot, act in it and simultaneously be in other plots as necessary, all as different spontaneous characters and still be funny is really quite hard on the ol’ little cells.

In other news I’ve lots of running around wrt references, Academic stuff and a potential meeting tomorrow in the Cavendish (although I don’t know exactly where). I may duck out of that meeting since I’ll probably be knackered tomorrow.

Today has been a bad day. Lots of little things getting to you until one curls up in a ball of misery. Generally speaking I want it to be 6 months in the future or I want to have a holiday[1] at some point.

[1] This would be defined as going somehwere with wireless Internet, a lovely girlfriend and with nothing to do except lie in bed, read books, drink tea and surf random sites. It would not include a city break or any other ’stressful’ holiday. In fact the ideal would be to lie in a big fluffy bed somewhere in the Lake District/Snowdonia with ice-water waterfalls outside the window. The remains of a cooked breakfast with runny egg and white-toast lie on my bedside table, I have started reading and am 1/4 way through LOTR. It is noticably cold but I am in bed and I hear nothing other than the sound of the running water and a kettle singing, see nothing other than the early morning light and the warmly decorated plush yet comfortingly empty room and smell nothing more than the fresh sheets, crisp forest air and the coffee that will be going past my lips in but a few moments. I also know that this is but the first day and I have a week to go of this.

I, given the time of year, have recently been looking at Valentine’s pressies. ASDA sell a set of ‘hilarious’ novelty cheque-books where one may give to the object of your affection a number of cheques to be redeemed for sexual or domestic services. The front of the book was somewhat familiar…

Yes, the BSD daemon has obviously realised that *BSD is dieing[sic] and has taken what jobs he can. I’m not entirely sure the BSD guys will be that happy. The vouchers are apparently produced by New Moons Ltd, Hemel Hempstead, Herts HP3 9RW. Telephone: 01442 242199. Feel free to check that they have a valid license.

Well after a weekend of hacking my xine-based multimedia player has suddenly hit the point of actually being usable. Screen-shots are below. Firstly I should clear up a confusion - I’m not intending much of this code to ever become too public. Perhaps if the player becomes a little more polished I’ll release that and certainly my bug-fixes will be going back to the xine guys but the middle-ground xine-lib -> framework stuff has already been done and if anyone wants to use xine on OS X I’d point them to the xine CVS first. OTOH my little framework suits my needs (and hides away the nasty C API presenting an Objective C face). This wrapping has also been done but I have a tradition of wrapping xine when I learn a new language (hence me writing Perl, Python and .NET wrappers even though some of these already exist). I tend to just get a kick out of writing a DVD player with 10 lines of Perl…

Talking of DVD playback, the DVD playing side of the app is now completely usable for DVD navigation and watching (including full-screen support) with both keyboard and mouse navigation. I successfully watched LOTR:TFOTR last night with it and have been testing with the Appendix DVDs and my trusty ol’ DVD Demystified test DVD.

Finally there is a screenshot showing the new UI. *cough* QuickTime *cough*.

Update: Another screenie showing a possible icon and splash-screen. Note that the splash-screen is loaded from a loaclizable resource should the app ever get translated into another language :).

Well it turns out that the porting of xine is fairly easy. I actually have a fairly functional DVD player now.

Now I have a nice fast machine I have started to play with getting some of the tings I wanted to do once I had a speedy Mac out of the way. One of these things was a nice port of xine to OS X. Luckily a fair amount of work has already been done byt the xine hackers to get xine to compile on OS X and already there has been some work on packaging it up into a framework. Unfortunatley this packaging is neither automatic, nor convenient for people wanting to hide the xine engine inside their own apps. Fortunately, with a little shell script magic, a xine framework suitable for dropping into Xcode can be created and today I got the first xine-based multimedia player working on my mac (screenie). Note that this doesn’t need an installer, all the xine libraries are hidden inside the App bundle by magic (regardless of how awful you think this is, it is the ‘Mac-way’). Codec plugins, etc can either be loaded from within the App bundle or from the user’s or System’s Library folder. I’m also providing a choice with the framework, one can use the C API directly or you can use a thin Cocoa shim which basically just abstracts away the memory management. It all seems to Just Work (TM).

Note that this was about one evening’s work due to the clean and portable nature of the xine API. The longest bit was me having to devise the required magic incantations with ‘install_name_tool’ to be able to embed the libxine.dylib inside the Framework bundle.

Why am I doing this I hear you all cry. Well mostly because a) the Apple DVD player doesn’t deinterlace video or allow you to skip copyright wanrings etc which annoys me and b) VideoLan doesn’t seem to quite work with all DVDs unlike the dvdnav-based xine which does.

I’ve just written to a couple of GA-gods asking for references in the most astonishingly polite and English way I could manage. Hopefully they’ll look kindly on this little insect and grant a favour. I’ve also to finish my CV (tonight’s job - must force myself) and write a 1,000 word research proposal. Actually that might not be too hard given that I actually have to avenues I want to research in. Unfortunately I need to make it sound very maths-y and not to engineer-y or computing-y. Oh well. I also need to apply to MSR and decide who I want to be a referee for that.

I want this game.