Jay McGavren's Journal

From “doshichan”:

> Put your iTunes/Winamp/WMP on shuffle. Say the following > questions aloud, and press play. Use the song title as the > answer to the question. No cheating.

1. How does the world see you? Leponx - Junkie Sartre and Hexaquart 2. Will I have a happy life? My Own Summer (Shove It) - Deftones 3. What do my friends think of me? Lounge Fly - Stone Temple Pilots 4. Do people secretly lust after me? Forever - Orbital 5. How can I make myself happy? Reanimator - Amon Tobin 6. What should I do with my life? What Would You Say - Dave Matthews Band 7. Will I ever have children? Push Eject - Boom Boom Satellites 8. What is some good advice for me? Whirlpool - Seal 9. How will I be remembered? The Fear - Mu-Ziq 10. What’s my signature dancing song? Little by Little - Groove Armada 11. What’s my current theme song? Skylined - The Prodigy 12. What do others think is my current theme song? Lost in the K-Hole - The Chemical Brothers 13. What shall they play at my funeral? It’s Crowded - Prefuse 73 14. What type of women do I like? Assault on Precinct Zero - Plaid 15. How’s my love life? Morning and a Day - Boom Bip

I have nearly 700 automatically generated classes here in front of me. I need exactly one of those 700 classes, and I can’t just keep the others because some of them won’t compile. Unfortunately, I don’t know which of the others that one class depends on.

The best solution I can come up with right now is to move all but the target class to the trash, attempt to compile, and restore the classes it says are missing, one by one.

It’s going to be a long afternoon.

Our system tracks “cuisine types” for restaurants, and there’s a table to translate each type into a code:

American: AMER Chinese: CHIN Italian: ITAL

…and so on. Well, today in the development system I found this entry:

Jack In The Box: ECOL

Small world...

For some reason it took me until today to realize that my new project does exactly the same thing as my last major project at my prior employer.

Different programming language. Talks to different vendors. (For now. An upcoming enhancement might work with one of the same systems as the old project.) Different communication protocol. But it does the same damn thing.

Last night's dream...

I was in a game from the makers of Halo (I wasn’t playing it, I was IN it), at an arctic base filled with hundreds of people.

My assignment was to disrupt some sort of nuclear energy experiment they were conducting. I had multiple opportunities to do so, by sabotaging the centrifuges where they were refining uranium, or by waylaying the truck that delivered the finished product to the reactor. Unfortunately I missed both chances, and they were able to complete the experiment. The reactor glowed, and the “boss” burst forth from it - a giant, white-furred baboon. The thing went on a rampage, and I was barely able to avoid it as it careened across the snowy landscape, killing residents of the base left and right.

All this was like a mental preview of how far games have yet to go. This scene had the narrative and structure of a video game, and yet it WAS real life in all other respects. Not some low-res, two-dimensional image populated with a couple dozen people and controlled via a joystick, but oh-my-god-dive-outta-the-way-it’s-headed-right-for-us reality.

Too bad I won’t get to experience this during my lifetime. Here’s the technologies that would have to improve to match what I saw:

-Video. Not just higher-than-HDTV resolution, but stereoscopic as well. -Input. We’d need full-body, real-time motion capture. -Graphics. The full polygon output of a single game system today might have been able to render a single character in this world, but there were nearly a hundred of them. -Processing. Each of these characters was fully autonomous and capable of responding to spoken requests. Running all those AIs would bring any modern system to a crawl. -Physics. There were a whole lot of ragdolls flying around when that baboon let loose. But there’s promise in this area: I bet the Ageia PhysX card coming out this fall could have done it.