Blue Chamber

Given that our generation was shockingly lied to by the previous generation's over-eager futurists (see: Retro-Futurism) it's more than likely that yours truly, the little boy who loved to gaze at the stars, will never set foot in space within his lifetime, As for leaving the solar system, visiting other stars and planets? Well, not even those wacky futurists were willing to go that far. But what about leaving the galaxy altogether? Pure Science fiction.

And so it was until I discovered a magical blue box, bigger on the inside a piece of software that lets you do just that. It's called SpaceEngine. I rather like it. I think you'll like it. But rather than me waffle on making pictures with my powerful word-gluing-together skills, how about I take you on a little pictorial tour, hmm?

Buckle up. The Pan-Galactic Express is ready to depart!



We start our journey having leapt 1 km straight up from Earth's surface. It's mid-afternoon, the sun is shining and the skies are blue, if a touch cloudy. SpaceEngine does better terrain than this but not on Earth, for some reason. Still, it's rendering land, sea, clouds and marvellous atmospheric lighting so I won't be too harsh on the old girl right out of the gate. Let's move on, shall we? Press F3, type 'Moon', click GOTO, and after a short smoothly-rendered trip out into space...



La Luna! The Moon: Earth's perfect partner. Beautiful, isn't she? One of the first things you might notice is the lack of stars. Well, SpaceEngine cleverly has an autofilter setting that attempts to mirror the way your eyes focus on the brightest thing in the sky. Fill your vision with, say, a planet crazy with reflected light from the nearby star and all that other deep-field stellar photon-screaming dies down until you are left with only a few pinpricks, most likely the closest and/or brightest. Filtering like this isn't always a boon – it's biggest drawback is that is robs you of the ability to click on any star, and I do mean ANY star to travel to. To bring that back you have to arrange your view so that there's nothing big and luminous on screen, not always easy when you've got several galactic temptresses begging lustily for your Take Screenshot key (F11). Or you can turn it off in the settings. I prefer it this way – looks more realistic. Anyhoo. Let's move a little closer.



Moving around in SpaceEngine is surprisingly intuitive. It uses the WASD keys, Q and E to rotate, and the mouse scroll-wheel to set your velocity up or down. It can be quite difficult to judge how fast you actually want to be going, depending on the size of and distance from your target, but a bit of trial and error gets you there soon enough. Or you let the program take you there, as described above. I'm finding the moon a bit boring. Not least because it's totally grey like Aberdeen. And it's still in Earth's backyard - Next!



Mars! Or should I say Mars and Friends! Deimos in the foreground, Phobos as a little dot in the lower left. I've never been as fascinated with Mars as most people like to be. Life? That was proved years ago by that little animated chap who likes to say DiscombobuLAY-TOR. Face on Mars? Whatever. And it always struck me as weird to worship a planet that uses rust like shake-and-vac. Let's drop down to the surface and see if we can locate poor old Beagle 2, eh?



See? Told you SpaceEngine did better terrain. Hmm. Getting bored of this tooling around the solar system. You want the Grand Tour, go see that nice Prof' Cox. You and I have a date in another galaxy! But first, let's complete our chocolatey theme by having a look at where we live, the Milky Way, from the outside!



I don't know why these things are called 'spirals' when 'Spider in a whirlpool' is more descriptive, and also works to deter nefarious types.

If you scroll the mouse wheel like your life depended on on it for about ten seconds your velocity counter goes up to something approaching the infamous Ludicrous Speed. Then when you move, you see stars whizzing past like they do in Star Trek. A few more scrolls, and you begin to sense that you're actually moving through the structure of the Milky Way itself. It's quite the thing to see. I recommend having a fiddle once I'm done talking at you. We, however, are going to cheat a bit and let the software take us to the Andromeda Galaxy! Make it so! Engage! (Oh, let me play...wheeeee)



This is your brain on SpaceEngine, looking at Andromeda. No, not the cheesy Kevin Sorbo-fest that appalled as much as it made you nauseus. The actual, honest-to-gosh real galaxy. See that little orange one down corner right? M111. Cute. Soon to be invaded and made part of my empire. Let's scoot around Andromeda a bit (said Kevin Sorbo, gripping his Force-Lance).



Too beautiful for words, right? I know, they should have sent a poet. Instead, all you've got is me, Fuckity McBrain-Damage. Let's go for an explore inside Andromeda (Said Kevin [OH JUST GET ON WITH IT- Editor]...



This shot exists entirely to convince you I'm not making this shit up. As we move into the galactic cloud,it resolves into....shitloads of shiny fusion globes! Those big black objects are SpaceEngine struggling with stellar clusters. Tightly packed formations of stars that, by rights, should probably be gleaming orbs from a distance like this but show up black in SE. Never mind. Move into those clusters, by the way, and you will be bloody surrounded by the buggers. The simulation at work here is so mighty I may even refer to it as almighty (that'll be the deity - ho ho!). Oh, and unless you want to cripple your PC DON'T – whatever you do – head into the galactic core! A screaming PC is not a happy sound.



I parked us near a star that was passing by and bingo! It harboured a life-bearing world! Pressing F2 when clicked upon a star brings up a little table of all stellar and planetary grade objects in the system. Right-click again you can even see how many moons a world has. Thats how I found this little world, Planet RS random-credit-card number, Cool Terra with life. Mine for the conquering!



Here we are in orbit. It's very Indigo. I like that. Indigo is a space colour. A word about lens flare. In SE currently it's very...exuberant. As in, JJ Abrahms would think twice about using this much lens flare. Like most things in SE it can be turned off. Results vary, depending on locale.



Within the atmosphere of RS random-credit-card-number! Here we are, an unimaginable distance from home, and not a Stargate - or Starbucks - to be seen. Make joyful noise, friend! This planet appears to be wholly composed of the stuff you get from your tap, so no dinosaurs with laser-beam eyes to be seen. I did look for space whales but the developer hasn't quite implemented sub-sea environments yet, or any actual signs of life. These are planned, though. I'll just let those last two sentences sink in...

That's right. SpaceEngine is only jobbing as a galactic tour guide until the developer codes in more of a game. Brilliantly, he's looking to emulate one of the finest pieces of space software ever made, Noctis, a game about exploring the universe that was made in the early days of Dos on PC, back when processors were made from twigs and dry leaves, and graphics cards were made of actual cardboard. This, for me, is like a Christian being told that Jesus has just phoned to say he's actually on his way for this second coming we've all been waiting for. I'd sell body parts for this. Not mine, but I'd still sell them. Now, let's blow this pop-stand. Let's see if we can get out of the Universe.



Hmm. Not quite, but this, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a 3-Dimensional representation of the games' universe .I'm not sure exactly how realistic this is but is IS Fully spinney-rotatey and each and every single point of light you see there represents an entire galaxy full of stars, planets, moons, and bloggers, that you can click on and visit in your magical WhateverMachineShipThing. Quite takes your breath away, doesn't it? No? Please yourselves.

Oh, and before you ask. I did check around for a little Truman-style hatch into the Universe next door but didn't find anything, although the searchable surface area does extend for several quintillion googols, by my reckoning, so don't hold your breath.

Sigh. Let's go home.



And there she is. Earth. Big Blue Marble. Third Rock from the Sun. Work Camp Gorrock-Hz13. We're looking at the arse-end of Africa, I believe, tipped clockwise from its default orientation (Hmm, I wonder what Kevin Sorbo's default orientation is...). It's good to be home again, isn't it, folks? Nice to get away and all but home is, after all, where you keep all your stuff. Thanks for tavelling with Pan-Galactic Express, and we do hope you've enjoyed your complimentary Gargleblasters. Those life-forms that still have higher functions are invited to fill out our Feedback form. We wish you a safe journey and pleasant onward travel to your eventual destination. Thanks for flying Pan-Galactic.

Notes: Download the software here. WARNING: needs a muscular PC!

Lastly, if you've read this far - well done, true believer! Have a video for your trouble!

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there’s a new Internet Browser on the block!

Google Chrome be it’s name and – arrrr – she be a fine, quick browser to boot*. Still in Beta, meaning there’s still a lot of work to do before it’s suitable to release to the general public, but what’s already there is impressive.

The thing is FAST. Having considered Opera 9.5 the current pinnacle of browser speed (with Firefox 3 nipping very closely at its heels) I was blown away by how much faster and more responsive Chrome feels, particularly on JavaScript-heavy pages; it actually makes Opera look like a sluggish, last-gen product...

Another feature I particularly like is the separate processes-per-tab. No longer do we have to suffer browsers that completely lock-up when just one tab misbehaves! Further, these separate process are ‘sandboxed’: a technical term describing how the browser segregates each progress from the wider OS it’s running on. Malware and other nasty little web-buggers should now have no access to vital systems, now that they are securely confined to their particular browser tab, keeping you safer online.

There’s a 30-page comic presentation that goes into depth about the design process and new features which isn’t as dull as you might think. Having read it, I find myself greatly excited by Chrome for already managing to find several key improvements in a crowded and fiercely contested browser market. Ok, lots of what it does has been ‘taken’ from Opera (inspired, homaged or ripped-off, depending on how generous you feel) - the Speed-dial, the tabs above the address bar, the ‘Omnibar’ search functionality – but in all cases they’ve made small but genuine improvements.

Google Chrome, Yesterday
I have a great feeling about this piece of software, this beautiful hodge-podge mongrel of ideas and tech drawn from Opera, Firefox and Safari. It’s Open Source, too, meaning that once the source code has been released into the wild anyone can integrate their favourite features/extensions/plugins/themes...which should manage the neat trick of keeping nearly everyone happy. Not only that, but any feature that Chrome has can be freely adopted by any of its competitors.

Thus with one dramatic and seemingly effortless gesture, Google manages to re-energise the so-called 'browser war', and shows us a little bit of the future, too. I’ll be keeping a very close eye on this one from now on...

[UPDATE] One thing Chrome doesn't do very well is render this blog! I'm missing my funky custom header image! CSS problems, perhaps?

- - -
*No, there was no reason for the pirate-speak there, that's just the way it sounded in my head as I was writing it.

In honour of the Coldstream Civic Week I’m not attending, next week - 4th to 10th August - shall be a special week devoted to feeding my inner Sci-Fi nut all the Sci-Fi it can handle. After a few weeks of markedly increased social activity, next week will see me disconnecting telephones, locking the front door and posting vicious, discouraging notices on my front gate and door along the lines of:

“F*** Off, World: My neglected soul and I are cheerfully pretending you don’t exist.”
I won't be taking any time off work but I won't be meeting anyone afterwards either.

The other and possibly only legitimate reason for this celebration is the imminent arrival of two pieces of SF media, one of which has been several years in the making:

1) The Hidden Empire series – book 7: The Ashes of Worlds, by Kevin J Anderson.

The keener-eyed among you will have noticed the shiny numeral in that title and yes, just as with those dreadfully written but massively popular books about some spotty wizard and his chums, this number seven is also the last in the series.

Across the six previous novels, one per year, I’ve been through an epic space opera set on a variety of worlds, populated by a diverse cast of interesting characters all threatened by a slightly-clichéd-but-still-fairly-cool collection of aliens, monsters, evil politicians and killer robots. By the end of book six, we’d begun to see the forces of goodness finally standing tall and booting evil squarely in the rump. There are, however, a few loose ends running about - some large, some small - who’s rumps are, as yet, un-booted...

This is MY Harry Potter moment, so I intend to have the tear-eyed fun you all had last year before you found out that Snape kills Dumbledore. (Is it too late to ruin the plot for anyone? Oh, shame...). I won’t be queuing from midnight outside Waterstones – I’m doing what the smarter Potter-ites did and ordering through Amazon – but I will be giggling and squealing like a girl when I tear open the package.

Also en route from Amazon is

2) Stargate Atlantis: Complete Season 4

The second best sci-fi series that I currently collect (BSG = 1, Doctor Who is in 3rd) reaches Season 4 on DVD. I don’t watch it on TV for the simple reason I’m of the firm opinion TV is a dying medium and just isn’t worth shelling out whatever exorbitant price per month Sky are charging these days for another hundred or so channels of moronic garbage that I’ll flick through constantly until I throw the remote away in disgust before finding the few priceless twinkling programming gems I would actually watch. (SKY TV killed British telly, you know, leaving only the shambling corpse-like remnant to stagger along chewing people’s brains away with endless reality shows, shows about making money through whatever medium (houses, entrepeneurial enterprise) and a plethora of aggravating celebrity cooks)

*deepbreath/popsquicktablet*

Yes, so, season three ended - as most series do - on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the Ancient city of Atlantis lost in space having narrowly escaped a deadly energy beam death ray fired at them by a super-powerful colony of humaniform robotic intelligences known as Replicators, who the Atlantis team met and managed to royally irritate several episodes earlier. Proactively bombing their homeworld in the finale (in the name of protection) didn’t do much to help ease tensions either, he says wagging a stern finger at the US military, although that 90-second long shot of the cluster-nuke falling through the atmosphere was sheer CGI sex.

Season four has apparently suffered a little in terms of quality, what with all that Writer’s Strike business that happened in the US (something about them not getting paid for stuff they do on the internet which is identical to the stuff they do for telly but without the cheery wage packet at the end) but I’m looking forward to it anyway, although replacing Dr Weir – the lovely, very capable and very moral civilian leader of Atlantis since the show’s beginning - with Col. Samantha Carter, a refugee from the whoops-just-finished Stargate SG1 is bound to piss me off as much as it did when I first heard about it two years ago.

Her hair is apparently shit for the whole year, too (Ha! Take that, Amanda Tapping!). But I hear they got rid of her as well, now, in Season five for the crime of being dreadfully dull so at least I can take heart from her being a temporary fixture. Oh, but wait! Now that they've killed the Atlantis Doctor with the laughable scottish accent they're replacing him with actress Jewel Staite, known and revered among SF geeks for her portrayal of Kaylee in Joss Whedon's legendary and cruelly cancelled series, Firefly - hurrah!

Anyhoo, it should be great, and even bad SG:A can’t be any worse than the depths of fantastical willy-waving Doctor Who has been mining recently. (Don’t ask – I might tell you...)

4th of August, folks. Can’t wait. [/ALIGN]

Run Rabbit Junk, an awesome piece of background music from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This next piece is the sublime title theme from the show, entitled Inner Universe. I've rarely heard such beautiful choral female melodies...made even better, IMHO, by fact she's singing in Japanese and I can't understand a word! Enjoy!



Hello! I'm a Tachikoma!. And I RULE!