Either way you will be correct

"You can believe you can, or you can believe you can’t, either way you will be correct."
Absolutely wonderful quote from Henry Ford.

The human mind is a scary thing ...

Stepping on the shoulder of giants ...

The recent ubiquity of information using the internet, whether getting answers to questions, learning new techniques, or accessing open source code has enabled some possibilities that I think can not be fully understood at the moment.

Things can be done and achieved today that weren't even dreams 15 years ago. My concrete examples are expert community websites and using open source software.

However there seems to be a shift in the type of problem that we face.

The problem which was not knowing something, not having access to some code a few years ago has transformed in to not having the time to find out, or not following the information in the appropriate way. Maybe we can say that knowing what not to have is the most valuable skill that someone needs in this new era.

Focus would be a key attitude since the state space has increased tremendously, and we are limited so much in our time.

It was rather hard to find the giants to go over their shoulders and there used to be many many giants unnoticed, but right now it seems like you're in the middle of an American football field with a lot of giants as players and you'd have to decide about which one to select and be careful not to be tossed over with a tackle. Isaac Newton is watching from the private room, never thought it would become like this.

.... the most recent giant that I've found is Project Dark Star as a multi player server infrastructure software ...

Old gaming devices

I recently ran into this article in gamasutra : A history of gaming platforms, the Commodore 64
It reminded me of the days that my cousin had this device and the lots of fun that we have with its games, which were loaded by a tape reader and it took around 30 minutes for each tape to first load in the system. Many times the tape would just crash in the middle and you'd have to do it all over again.
However in the same time, the device that had taken my heart by far was the Japanese Famicom (Nintendo). The first game I had for it was Spartan X. I would still love to play it. And the game which was irresistible was Dragon Quest, I followed it up to the third relesase. It was probably the most precious thing to be for me for quite a while.
Around the same time again, my brother was busy with his Apple 2 e.
The first of the Ultima series was the wonderful RPG for that machine.
But these weren't the first devices for us to experience the digital gaming world with, the first was an orange box which was called a TV Game at that time, I don't really remember the brand or any more information about it now, haven't been able to find it on Wikipedia due to lack of info. The game for that device was a tennis game which consisted two sticks going up and down and a ball (square) moving between the two sticks.

The reason ...

I was watching NCAA basketball last night and something that I had thought about before kicked back at me seriously this time. How come the collegiate games have so much excitement and it seems like each and every one of the players try to do their best and show 200 percent of their capacity. This is not only in the final four, it can easily be seen from the early games too.

This kind of energy is not seen very much in NBA games.

Could it be because :
1 - They are not pros, pros have other things in mind other than the pure sports moments? Somehow like the problem that happens to some football teams with lots of professional stars.(Brazil recently)
2 - They believe in their college by all their heart since that is the only place that they have played and will play as a college player, unlike professionals which change teams often?
3 - All their fans have a strong root to the college and they all share one unique thing?
4 - They have more love towards the game since they haven't experienced all aspects? (Beginners love, there is a Samurai rule which says : "Never lose your beginners joy")
5 - They have better coaches to motivate them?
6 - They want to make it to the NBA? (... this shouldn't be on the minds of all of them)
7 - Money is not involved?
8 - ... ?

I am sure there lies great lessons in the answer to the above question because this pattern seems to repeat in many other areas.

Time

One of the most mysterious words. Can be thought about for ages.
There will be a seminar today about the meaning of time according to Iranian Sufism , it might shed a bit more light on this deep concept.

Picture is taken from wikipedia:

"A tesseract, a cube in 3 dimensions extended to a fourth, as a description of time; adhering to defined finite bounds, all possibilities for this configuration are conceptually representable."

The moment

.. you feel the wind move by your ears... you see the nervous face in front of you ... in complete rhythm with the movement ... in complete rhythm with the sound ... get pushed to the right ... the wind goes by faster... the sweat on your face makes you feel really cool ... a sudden force felt on the leg ... a sudden stop ... the left hand comes to show support ... while the heart is pushing out the blood, you feel weight less ... the movement of the wind gets slower ... a white object passes by your eyes ... everything else goes down ... suddenly you feel time has stopped, everything has stopped... at the peak ... why am not always in this state ... time to let go ... release it ... the moment of absolute confidence ... you let go ... seems like by doing that, all the mass of the earth starts to pull you down ... the wind starts to move slowly by the ears again ... feel the ground again ... try to control the land ... everything moves again ... where was I? ... what is the next move? ... what you had released has reached the rim now ... (better go in it !)

Also know as pull up J !

Google Reader

Started using it a while ago ... it was ok ... then it was nice ... then it was cool ... now can't live without ...

Google Reader

Change in title

There is a new title for this blog. The increment operator is being used for "Thought".

I have recently been thinking about the idea of how we have two things in the whole world, processes and entities and how these two transform into one another and the duality in between. Well a lot can be said about this topic and a lot has been said, I will probably touch upon it every once in a while since I really believe there are some very basic and critical ideas hidden in this area of knowledge.

It seems that being in a process is one attitude which is needed for improvement. At every instant of time, you can think about making something better, trying again, working harder, playing harder, moving ... and these are all example of being in a process. Staying in an entity situation would be when you believe that you are at a state and need to remain there, or stop from doing something to change state .... not performing any actions... which seems to be something that could stop improvement and a real danger for evolution, maybe we should be grateful that evolution itself never thinks this way.

So what about the ++ operator? Whenever you look at it, it is incrementing, it is moving, it is trying again and never rests in a state, never becomes an entity ... hmm.. what a nice thing... lots of things can be learned from this small operator... can make anything enhance and evolve.

Every post in this blog would be the result of an increment in the thought process, or maybe every post can cause an increment in the thought process of the author, which might probably be the real reason behind this blog... reminds me of reflection... well at least this is what I wish for and the thoughts becoming an entity is what I would try to avoid...

.. and it has to be a prefix operator rather than a postfix operator...

The task...

The most exciting, challenging, interesting, .... task right now would be creating a character model which can shows passive reactions and also active reactions to the environment.

A kind of tuned rag doll with biometric measurements for the passive reactions plus joints and springs and something novel for the active part.

hmm...

Shock

The new game from 2k games really shocks you , BioShock.

Other than very nice graphics and a polished look, the whole design, character AI, physics and sound implementation is really nice. Ken Levine is the designer.

I get goose bumps whenever the enemies (zombies) attack ! Very immersing. They move very well, look frightening and say very creepy things.

However, the one game which I can't wait anymore to get my hands on is : Assassin's Creed.

C++ coder...

How nice would it be right now if a very talented c++ coder would fall from the sky... right into our office ... help out in the creation of the underlying modification in the arrangement of bits on a CD/DVD which is going to have the title "Soshians" some day ...

ok back to the PhysX tutorials.

Pain

Sepultura once had this in the lyrics: " Pain makes me stronger ... everyday..."
It is interesting to know in what aspects it makes you stronger and it could be analyzed thoroughly.. however a new aspect hit me last night while I was in pain ( tooth ache) ... I noticed that time goes by very slowly and you really feel every moment and every instant of time... well the downside is having a hard time but generally feeling every moment and being in the instant will make you stronger ...

Physics wars

Well there are a lot of good physics engines available these days and my search space has narrowed down to two of these species. Physx and ODE.

PhysX seems to be more professional while ODE is like the standard for academics research.

Some research will reveal which one is best for our case.

Back from the North...

Ok back from a short trip to the north and ready to roll... hmm.. lots of things to do ... have to see how things are winding down at Fanafzar and focus on Soshians... well at least this is the code name for now.

What is software?

This was probably the most mind crunching question I heard today... "What is software?" ... what is it really?

Well actually two kind of people ask this question, the very novice guys and the very experienced guys in the field of software... in my case the person was of the second kind and this throws you in a deep thought ...