Well, I caved and decided to sign up with one of the blog hosting services. I needed to optimise my process. Previously I was hand-editing this page in Textpad, or Emacs, and manually editing the RSS feed.
The blog is here. Please update your news-readers with the new feed. The new feed used Atom, instead of RSS. I'll no longer be updating this page. See you at the new digs!
I've spent about half my time over the last two weeks reading. That wasn't the plan, but it seems that once I'm into a book, I can't put it down except for occasional sleep episodes. Birthday books flooded my queue, so I had a lot to catch up on.
First up was Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. This is an alternate-history novel set in Great Britain, from about 1810 to 1820. The title characters were magicians who revived the tradition of English Magic that had lain dormant since the middle ages.
I love historical fiction and weird magic, so it's no surprise that I liked this book. The magic is strange, and often impractical with a fairy-tale feeling. This is Neil Gaiman meets Jane Austen, with a dry sense of humour throughout.
I love the made-up folk and fairy tales in the book. They're odd and seem somehow naive, which adds to their pseudo-authenticity. Although it's not referred to in the book, I'm thinking of something like this painting: Brueghel's Land of Cockaigne, compared to something out of the Lord of the Rings, say. There's something dorky and nonsensical about it.
Overall, I think the book should have been shorter. At almost 800 pages, there were times when I was tempted to skim forward to see how the plot would advance. I guess it's hard to please everyone when balancing plot with ambiance, especially in historical fiction.
More reviews soon...
Well, we had a great one-week vacation in California, visiting Jeff, Susan, and their new daughter. We were just south-east of LA, so it was pleasantly warm. It sure is nice to eat breakfast out in the garden. The whole not freezing-to-death in the middle of February thing was good too.
We took a side-trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Vegas was a fake amusement park for adults, as expected. We stayed at New York New York. I lost $33 on video poker at the Bellagio, but Trish came out 20% ahead. I can now say that whatever coding horrors I may have committed due to excessive schedule pressure, my video poker games were way more entertaining. Kudos to the artists. Of course, no one will ever play the games. Who was it who said "Shipping is a feature"? Sigh.
So, the real reason we went to Las Vegas was to see Cirque du Soleil's Zumanity. It did not disappoint! Yes, the show is sexy. Yes, it's outrageous. It's also a work of absolute technical mastery. If the trapeze artists were any less good, there'd be trapeze artist shaped craters in the audience.
What to say about the Grand Canyon? It's freaking huge! Standing at Mather's Point, looking out over the widest part of the canyon, it's almost impossible to understand how big the thing is. It just goes down, down, and down. We only had half a day to spend there, so we took a half-hour helicopter tour. That was well worth the price. A moving view-point reveals layers and perspectives that don't make sense from a static view. I'd love to go back and hike or raft in the canyon. I'll post the video some time soon.
We also went down to LegoLand. MiniLand was especially impressive. LEGO replicas of New York skyscrapers that are twice as tall as a person. San-Francisco's Chinatown. Sadly, I was shooting pictures in manual mode and I forgot to set the white balance. So ... all of those outdoor, sunlit pictures were shot on an indoor, fluorescent light setting. There's only so much you can do in Photoshop. Saturation won't let you have the detail back. I'll post the pics anyway, once I figure out how to make a gallery.
Speaking of LEGO, we got to meet an interesting family. Not only did their son whup my a** at board games, he (and his brother) are also world LEGO champions. The dad, aside from being a really nice guy (who whupped my a** at James Bond trivia) designed some of the original arcade games. The mom did some of the programming. Remember Star Fire? It was the first game to have a high-score list. Really.
So, 7000 km of flight and 1600 km of driving add up to one great trip. I'll have to tell my grand-kids about the good old days when two people could fly across a continent, then drive across a few states. That was before the fuel ran out. Oh, and before the machines took over. Maybe the neighbour with the Masai spear knows something we don't. Hmmm.
We don't need a guest room. We don't need a dining room table. It's an office, and that's a desk. This office can seat two comfortably. We could get a third in if we all promise to shower every day. That's a whole dev team!
The pic's a couple of days old, and the new dining room table arrived today, courtesy of Loblaws, and PC points. Now we can have more than two people at a time, for dinner. That's a lot of food, though. We might need a bigger freezer.
As of Wednesday, December 7th, my employer, Davisville Game Studio is no more! The project I was working on has been re-organized, and nearly the whole team was let go.
Well, it sucks to put in that much effort and not ship. Again. On the other hand, I'm a free man. This is actually very good timing for me. Some startup ideas were just coming to a boil, and I was pissed that I wouldn't get any vacation until the end of the project.
I'll probably take some time off, but more than that I can now do my own Winter Founders Program.
From now own, it's up to me.
P.S. I'm currently not looking for work. I do know a bunch of people who are, though. If you're looking for programmers, production artists, animators, modellers, designers, or quality assurance folks, let me know. I'll try to put you in touch with some good people.
I just read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in full, for the first time. I know, I know, I'm only 8 years behind the times. There's a lot of good stuff in there, but I especially liked this quote from the section "On Management and the Maginot Line":
Rather, I want to suggest what may be a wider lesson about software, (and probably about every kind of creative or professional work). Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency.And this one:
It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.
I've often considered my own programming more as difficult play, than as work. My wife feels the same way about her music. I think Paul Graham obviously had The Cathedral and the Bazaar in mind when he wrote What Business Can Learn from Open Source.
I should mention that my Dad bought the CatB book some years ago, and hinted that maybe I should read it. I skimmed the intro, but never got back to it. My dad's 73, and he just installed VC 2005 so that he could compile some C++ examples from one of my Game Programming Gems books. A few years ago he was reading about an obscure little language called Python, and loaned me the book. About 17 or 18 years ago, he was tinkering with an esoteric program called Mathematica. I thought it made neat 3D graphs, but that functional programming stuff was just plain weird. Dad, you rock! Keep hacking!
One of the guys at work found this at a nearby convenience store. I had to buy one. Wish my camera had a better macro lens, though. Genuine Caribbean Taste. Alright!
I went to startup school. I don't have anything intelligent to write about it that hasn't been said already. I'm almost 30 and my current obsession isn't on Google's acquisition radar. Sigh.
Actually, it was a blast, and Boston is a great city. Paul Graham sounds like a surfer-ized John Carmack. Stephen Wolfram seems like a nice guy. Steve Wozniak would be put on Ritalin today. Manic Animal Optimizer. Yar!
Audio and slides are here.
Schadenfruzen: The sadness of realizing that the frozen dinner doesn't look as good as the photo on the package, mingled with the anticipation of food.
I just rented Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. It's amazingly good. So much more mature than the big-boobs and up-skirt obsessed comic. It's a thoughtful, beautiful movie reminiscent of Blade Runner.
I also watched Appleseed. It had a reasonably intelligent story, and some amazing mecha designs by Masamune Shirow. It was full of the usual annoying anime cliches, and the CG was pretty uneven.
From the code attic -- here's a little asteroids game that I wrote.
I used Adobe Premiere, and After Effects. Mostly, I followed this tutorial. Instead of using hand-placed keys, I used After Effects' motion tracking feature on the blade tip and hilt. You can see where I didn't have enough data at the end of the clip.
Obviously, it's not polished, but I'm happy with this output given it only took two evenings and I'd never used AE before.
