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Ancient Erin

By iron-mitten.blogspot.com
Published On :: Sat, 19 Oct 2024 22:06:00 +0000

I saw these new ancient Irish scenary pieces from Alternative Armies last week. I thought they looked good so bought a few. These will be added to with more skulls and blades once the glue is dry.

It'll be nice to cover these in grass to give them an ancient look and feel.

This one will look great with some extra swords laying across the new rocks. Fantasy stuff really gets the creativity flowing and is so rewarding.

This is a pebble I found and thought it had an interesting shape. Taken back through the mists of time, it is now a huge fertility alter. I can't tell you what happens here, you have to use your imagination.

The great fertility stone looks very different in the moonlight. Some have said to see it move...and take on the shape of a giant woman.

A Fomorian checks out the smell of new resin on the table.

Update: I've added some greenstuff furs on some of the alters.

A few extra swords from the bits box help to finish off this weapon shrine.

Update: The next step is to dry brush them with three tones of grey. The last one is almost a white, to really bring out the details.

After the greys are dry I started playing around with watered down Contrast paint from GW. I leave the Contrast paint darker around the base of the rocks, this helps to weather them.

This is the fun part where you can add loads of subtle colours to the stones.

For this sort of scenery work I find a small make up brush is perfect. Just make sure you put it back when you're finished.

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Celtic Mythology

Fomorian Coastal Scenery

By iron-mitten.blogspot.com
Published On :: Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:16:00 +0000

Here are some rock pools to add to a coastal game mat. I've added some kelp seaweed to make them a bit more North sea.

There are also a couple of other prints that I plan to use as Fomorian shrines. Places where they honour their dead and stack weapons and armour in tribute.

To save on the greenstuff, I switched to Milliput as it's cheaper for bigger pieces.

I'll add some more skulls and weapons etc to these bases.

Update: So the Fomorians crawled out of the icy North sea in the night and adorned the pools with their burial goods.

Fomorian skulls and weapons now litter the swallow pools, soon to be covered by the rising tide.

Barnacles were just grit stuck with PVA glue. After the glue was dry I gave the grit another wash of the glue. This should make it stand up to a good dry brushing.

One of the new swirly shields gets placed in the pool. I gave the water a coat of PVA glue just to get rid of the 3D printing texture.

I will add a little more seaweed now the skulls are in.

Update: These models were sprayed black then dry brushed with grey and white. Contrast colours were then painted over the highlighted pools.

To make them look a bit more aquatic and fantasy, I included colours like blue and purple into the palette.

Here we can see a highlighted model before the Contrast paint washes.

Update: started to pick out the barnacles and shields etc.

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Celtic Mythology

Eugene Zaikonnikov: Breaking the Kernighan's Law

By blog.funcall.org
Published On :: Sun, 15 Sep 2024 15:00:00 GMT

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.." — Brian W. Kernighan.

I'm a sucker for sage advice much as anyone else, and Kernighan is certainly right on money in the epigraph. Alas there comes a time in programmer's career when you just end up there despite the warning. It could be that you were indeed too clever for your own good, or maybe the code isn't quite yours anymore after each of your colleague's take on it over the years. Or just sometimes, the problem is indeed so hard that it strains your capacity as a coder.

It would usually start with a reasonable idea made into first iteration code. The solution looks fundamentally sound but then as you explore the problem space further it begins to seep nuance, either as manifestation of some real world complexity or your lack of foresight. When I run into this my first instinct is to instrument the code. If the problem is formidable you got to respect it: flailing around blindly modifying things or ugh, doing a rewrite at this stage is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time. It helps to find a promising spot, chisel it, gain a foothold in the problem, and repeat until you crack it. Comfortable debugging tools here can really help to erode the original Kernighan coefficient from 2 to maybe 1.6 or 1.4 where you can still have a chance.

Lisp users are fortunate with the options of interactive debugging, and one facility I reach often for is the plain BREAK. It's easy enough to wrap it into a conditional for particular matches you want to debug. However sometimes you want it to trigger after a particular sequence of events across different positions in code has taken place. While still doable it quickly becomes cumbersome and this state machine starts to occupy too much mental space which is already scarce. So one day, partly as a displacement activity from being intimidated by a Really Hard Problem I wrote down my debugging patterns as a handful of macros.

Enter BRAKE. Its features reflect my personal preferences so are not necessarily your cup of tea but it could be a starting point to explore in this direction. Things it can do:

act as a simple BREAK with no arguments (duh)
wrap an s-expression, passing through its values upon continuing
trigger sequentially based on the specified position for a common tag
allow for marks that don't trigger the break but mark the position as reached
provide conditional versions for the expressions above
print traces of tagged breakpoints/marks

If you compile functions with debug on you hopefully should be able to see the wrapped sexpr's result values.

(use-package '(brake))

(defun fizzbuzz ()
  (loop for n from 100 downto 0
	for fizz = (zerop (mod n 3))
	for buzz = (zerop (mod n 5)) do
	(format t "~a "
		(if (not (or fizz buzz))
		    (format nil "~d" n)
		  (brake-when (= n 0)
			      (concatenate 'string
					   (if fizz "Fizz" "")
					   (if buzz "Buzz" "")))))))

These macros try to detect common cases for tagged sequences being either aborted via break or completed to the last step, resetting them after to the initial state. However it is possible for a sequence to end up "abandoned", which can be cleaned up by a manual command.

Say in the example below we want to break when the two first branches were triggered in a specific order. The sequence of 1, 3, 4 will reinitialize once the state 4 is reached, allowing to trigger continuously. At the same time if we blow our stack it should reset to initial when aborting.

(defun ack (m n)
  (cond ((zerop m) (mark :ack 3 (1+ n)))
        ((zerop n) (mark :ack 1 (ack (1- m) 1)))
        (t (brake :ack 4 (ack (1- m) (ack m (1- n)))))))

In addition there are a few utility functions to report on the state of brakepoints, enable or disable brakes based on tags and turn tracing on or off. Tracing isn't meant to replace the semantics of TRACE but to provide a souped up version of debug by print statements everyone loves.

CL-USER> (report-brakes)
Tag :M is DISABLED, traced, with 3 defined steps, current state is initial
Tag :F is DISABLED with 2 defined steps, current state is 0
Tag :ACK is ENABLED with 3 defined steps, current state is initial

Disabling breakpoints without recompilation is really handy and something I find using all the time. The ability to wrap a sexpr was often sorely missed when using BREAK in constructs without implicit body.

Sequencing across threads is sketchy as the code isn't guarded but in many cases it can work, and the appeal of it in debugging races is clear. One of those days I hope to make it more robust while avoiding potential deadlocks but it isn't there yet. Where it already shines tho is in debugging complex iterations, mutually recursive functions and state machines.

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Patrick Stein: Ray Tracing In One Weekend (in Lisp, and n-dimenions)

By nklein.com
Published On :: Fri, 27 Sep 2024 02:37:31 GMT

Earlier this year, I started working through the online book Ray Tracing In One Weekend (Book 1). I have been following along with it in Common Lisp, and I have been extending it all from 3-dimensional to n-dimensional.

I reproduced 4-dimensional versions of all of the book images which you can see on my weekend-raytracer github page.

Here is the final image. This is a 250-samples-per-pixel, 640x360x10 image plane of three large hyperspheres (one mirrored, one diffuse, one glass) atop a very large, diffuse hypersphere. Also atop this very large hypersphere are a bunch of smaller hyperspheres of varying colors and materials. The image is rendered with some defocus-blur.

Final image of 4-dimensional scene

Caveat: This depends on a patched version of the policy-cond library that is not in the current Quicklisp distribution but should be in the next.

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My Halloween Season Story, "Unquiet Graves," in CLARKESWORLD

By floggingbabel.blogspot.com
Published On :: Fri, 01 Nov 2024 20:24:00 +0000

I am always happiest when a story of mine comes into print. Today, I have the joy of introducing you to "Unquiet Graves," a seasonal tale of graveyard misbehavior and betrayal. Oh, and there's nothing supernatural about it at all.

You can read the story here. But if you're like me, you'll just go to Clarkesworld, look over the table of contents, and decide which story you want to read first. Mine by preference, but follow your whim.

And for those who like trivia . . .

I came up with the handheld's app many long years ago and it took forever to come up with a story for it. You'll notice that it is left unnamed in the story. That's because its secret name was "The Graveyard Reader." Which is the title of a well-known story by Theodore Sturgeon. While I was writing the story, I thought of it as "The New Graveyard Reader." But Sturgeon's story and mine go off in totally different directions, and giving mine (or even the app) a title suggesting there was some implicit connection between the two would only cause confusion.

The title I finally came up with was derived from "The Unquiet Grave" by that most prolific of all poets, Anonymous. If you look it up, I suggest you do so after reading my story. It gives away some of the plot.

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