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.
Read more...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.
Read more...My latest project is forcing me to learn all about Web services in a very short period of time.
Good.
I’ve been wanting to work with SOAP for years now, and signs suggest that’s where the IT industry is headed. (No, it’s not there yet, believe it or not.) I could be securing myself a job for the next decade. An interesting one, even.
Read more...You know you've officially been corrupted when...
…you see the Reuters headline “Crack found in space shuttle foam insulation”, and your first thought is that one of the astronauts must have wanted to bring his stash with him.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060703/ts_nm/space_shuttle_crack_dc
Read more...Slap to forehead...
I’ve been trying to figure out why the new features in yesterday’s software release wasn’t working - at all.
-I checked the release checksums (which tell you that the files installed are the versions you think they are). They matched. -I re-ran my unit tests to see if the new features worked in development. They did. -I pored over the source code to see what could have caused it to fail in production. I didn’t find anything. -Eventually, I was trying pretty much random stuff - I went to the production server and looked at the date on the executable file. …April 3rd?!
Finally, after more searching, I figured it out - Operations had installed the new version correctly… on the wrong server. Per my instructions.
My release scripts auto-generate deployment instructions (because you can only type the damn thing so many times before you want to kick in your monitor). I had copied the config from a different project, without changing the server name.
Tiny mistake, made to look very big by our tedious release process. When do I get to just sit down and write code again?
Read more...Flickr Favorites...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nephariuz/favorites/
Read more...The Sofa Incident
.flickr-photo { border: solid 1px #000000; }.flickr-frame { float: right; text-align: center; margin-left: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }<div class="flickr-frame"> 
The Sofa Incident,
originally uploaded by nephariuz. </div>Our couch has a recliner seat, and one afternoon I found something
sticking out of it. Still not sure how this happened.
The limitations of software...
“Just be aware that you can’t stay more than 32,767 days at any one hotel.” –The developer across the way from me
Read more...Just had my second randomly-started conversation on Ruby of the day. Seems like everybody wants to program in it, but almost nobody actually does.
Doesn’t matter; with the kind of mindshare the language is getting, major corporate acceptance is probably less than a decade away.
Read more...Here’s yet another glimpse into my daily train of thought - my del.icio.us bookmarks page.
HTML: http://del.icio.us/nephariuz RSS: http://del.icio.us/rss/nephariuz
I use “Lazy Sheep” (http://ejohn.org/apps/sheep/) to add stuff. It’s a JavaScript bookmark that I simply click when I’m viewing an interesting page, and it’ll add it to del.icio.us with tags borrowed from other users. Yes, I’m probably helping pollute the site with lame tags in some cases, but I wouldn’t submit at all if it weren’t for this shortcut. At some point I’ll go into the account and clean things up a bit.
So, anyone else have a del.icio.us/Furl/othersocialbookmarking account? If not, get one!
Read more...