Steve Cooper's Personal Blog

I’m looking for a license agreement for Ariadne. Anyone help with any ideas?

Wow. today’s been mad. And it’s taught me something. But I’m not quite sure what yet…

So far today, I’ve got myself a new website admin (Chris K), a set of early-beta testers (Paul Tucker, Paul Marshall, Jerry), a load of late-beta testers (rosie, ellen, ) a production guy (woody), possibly a logo designer, I’ve become a paypal online merchant, got a forum for my testers, and … well. I’ve forgotten everything I’ve done today.

But I beheld the power of the hivemind. And verily, I wondered with great admiration.

Thanks, everyone.

Would you like free software and dinner? Want to help save a drowning man?

As you all know, I’ve got to get a damned good quality version of Ariadne out the door by the end of next week. The better the program, the more likely NG is to react well and either give me a quote or mention me on his blog. His blog, I hear, gets about 50,000 hits a day; if I could get even a small fraction of that audience to look at and buy Ariadne, I’ll be very happy. If I have a big NG quote on the front cover of the CD, I can probably expect to quadruple the chance of a sale.

It’s a pretty tall order for me – the program’s nowhere near a tested and ready state yet – it’s not even feature-complete. There’s no documentation, and I have no way to sell it even if it were ready. So, I’m spending every free second this week trying to whip it into shape.

I’m hoping that I might prevail upon some of my friends for help in this; I have a number of ideas for discrete jobs, and if anyone is willing to complete one of these jobs to a professional standard, I’ll be happy to give them free copies of Ariadne for life. If NG either gives me an endorsement or a blog-mention, I’ll take you for dinner, too.

So here’s the list of jobs. If you want to help, tell me what you’ll do by sending an email ASAP to steve at stevecooper.org.

The Jobs;

DOCUMENTATION

* The Rough Guide: Write a short description (probably 5-10 pages) of how Ariadne works. I just need a tutorial-style guide, a getting-started kinda thing, not a full reference. This’ll involve lots of coordination with me, as obviously the software isn’t finished yet. Probably a rolling thing that goes on throughout the week. (Hell, if you want Neil Gaiman to read some of your writing, this is your chance ;)
* Website: Redesign my website to inform people about ariadne, and guide them to a sale. Really needs less than a dozen pages, focusing more on clear written content than graphical tomfoolery.

TESTING

* Early User Testing: I’d like three people to download, install and run Ariadne by tuesday this week (25th) to give me general user interface comments.
* Download & Test: Next weekend (29-30 Jan) I’ll need as many people as possible installing and running the software, and giving me feedback.
* Testing at Frances Street: On Sun 30 Jan, I’ll be hosting a ‘bring a laptop and test stuff’ session. As bugs crop up, I’ll fix and give out reinstallation CDs.

PRODUCTION

(In both cases, obviously, I’ll cover any costs)

* CD Cases; Print 100 copies of my cover art onto quality A4 paper. Trim with a guillotine, insert into DVD cases. (I have the DVD cases, but don’t have photo-quality paper).
* CD Design: Design an image for the top of the CD itself. Print 100 blank CDs with the artwork on top, so that I can burn them when they’re ready.

WEB SALES AND ACTIVATION

* Merchant Site: Recommend me a site which will take credit-card orders for the software by Wednesday 26th Jan. If I OK the recommendation, set it up for me.
* Software Activation: Recommend an off-the-shelf activation system for preventing piracy that can be built into a .Net application.

BUSINESS

* Business Setup: Recommend a legal structure for selling things; should come in the form of a set of instructions I have to follow, something like ‘set up a limited company at website A, send a letter to Companies House stating ‘B’, contact the inland revenue and tell then ‘C’, ask your bank to do D.

He’s a lovely man, and he doesn’t use a mac. I’m so goddamned relieved.

I’ll be fed-exing him a copy of Ariadne within a week or two. Which means I really ought to write a bit more of it…

So, after the fantastic goddess ellenscult pointed me at an apropos comment on Neil Gaiman’s blog, I sent him a short email about Ariadne. He’s replied, and the upshot is that he wants to have a play with it. I’ll be preparing a version for him in the coming week.

I’ve been having vague and uneducated thoughts about generating prose, as a kind of prompt to help blocked writers. At the minute, I’ve got this surreal prose generator that uses word lists and sentence templates. It generates stuff like this;

“A tank of screaming tongues gaped its wicked, scorched fire, and strove it. As it tore and spat, it was jumping nothing, in front of the tooth of the male rag. a planet had no hole, despite the priest, scorched and silence, despaired. a cathedral of holy flowers prayed its pure, blessed samurai, and puked it. As it rued and dishonoured, it was gaping something, close to a destiny of the worst lust. It despised into the delight on deep nails from the mongol queen.”

Which is fun enough, I guess. What I was wondering, though, was whether I could improve the quality of the output with spam filtering. So, as people use the generator, they can mark lines as good or bad, and it learns, filtering out the bad lines.

Here’s how I thought it might work. The user chooses more sensible lines – ones with a thematic consistency. Eg, the line “a cathedral of holy flowers prayed its pure, blessed samurai, and puked it.” because it contains cathedral, holy, and blessed, and promoting phrases line “screaming tongues”, “scorched fire”, but demoting things with no thematic link.

So I was wondering – anyone know anything about Bayesian filtering, and whether it can be applied to groups of words rather than single ones? Or, maybe, anyone know of a linked dictionary of some kind, which tells you that ‘cathedral’ is close to ‘church’ but distant from ‘sausage’?

Or, in fact, any other ideas at all about the subject.

Usual steve-at-steve-cooper-dot-org email address, if you wanna send me something by email.

I’ve been made aware recently that there’s a difference between really practical software and really fun software. Totally practical software is something like a database entry system. Boring but valuable to whoever needs the data. Totally fun software is something like a game, where you do no useful work but, instead, just enjoy yourself.

Now, there’s a middle category, where you have fun creating something useful. Writer’s software falls into this, but so does stuff like t-shirt printing software, hobby software like family trees, or ‘builder’ software like garden designer software.

I want to make Ariadne fun to use (or people will just play games), and practical (or people will just use word.)

It’s gonna be tricky.