November Status

It has been a while since my last post, well, since the post before the last post. I should write more in general,  the main reason is that these writings are a chance for me to reflect on myself and assess my current status, these help me get out of the usual mold and see life from a different angle. Well, here it goes then.. what should I write about? hmmm.. lets see... I am just going to start from .. right .. here.. Infected Mushroom is playing now, the name of the song is "Nation of Wusses", how ironic... I'm going to start off with my son, my son is 4.5 years old now, he has changed quite a lot, in fact he changes every two weeks, it is all a quite an experience, the way he changes, the way he talks, the way he sees me and expects things from me, it all makes me want to try more to be a good role model for him, a real big challenge but really interesting. The wonderful thing is that we can now enjoy playing video games together, both on PS3 and the iPad, I remember what a wonderful joy it was for me when my father played a bit of Family Computer with me and my brother back in the 80s and the same memories enhance the joy I get from playing video games with my son.

Testament is playing now, Dragon Attack, just pure awesomeness. We spent yesterday and today working on Kuro mostly, two packed days of focused work on our side game project for the iOS devices. MLD has been exceptional and these days were a blast, looking forward to a productive day tomorrow, thanks to the very long weekend here. It is magical how much work can be done when there is an intense focus, not to forget about the wonderful accompanying music. The whole Garshasp project had a few of such events which defined its structure and were major leaps for the product in terms of quality and team morale.

Team morale, its all about the team, its all about the players, we've been always lucky to have great players around us, we've lost many, we've gained many, its all about great guys wanting to do great work. Its all about the process that matters. The process which runs on the foundation of great developers. "A" class people.

Pearl Jam is playing now and I couldn't be more happy. The latest Soundgarden album is great, not as magical as the old albums but still quite good for these days. Alice in Chains was around these days, fabulous, I don't know what really happened in the 90's in Seattle, but whatever it was, the result was the best musics of the world, period.

I am looking forward to Lakers this year, saw Kobe and Howard perform the Showtime! Kobe is just great, not quite Micheal Jordan but still good. They're gonna win it this year.

What am I writing about really? Nothing major, just reflecting.

There are quite a few areas that I researched about with enthusiasm recently. One was related to creativity. I had to talk about it a bit for the class that I had, read about it in un-related books and I attended one of the distant learning courses of Stanford about the subject. This is a very significant topic for life in general. The beauty of it is that it stems from the right hemisphere of the brain where it is all about magic and intuition. The part of the brain which reminds us to not be so analytic about everything. The scalability of creativity is what makes it super valuable with great lessons to learn from for small teams that can not compete with the big players in terms of money or experience. MNO introduced me to a wonderful presentation by Ken Stanley entitled: "Discovery without Objectives" which is quite related to the idea of the value of creativity and novelty. The presentation and the related papers about "Novelty Search" are exceptional. There is so much wisdom hidden underneath the concepts that can be used for diverse fields such as AI, Sociology, Science, Math and Psychology.

On the technical side of things, we've been pursuing an exciting new path to develop a brand new game engine with yzt for quite a while now, we hold regular code jam sessions and the progress of the core of the engine has been really well so far, I learn extensively from guru yzt in each session and this is a priceless experience. The code base is heavily based on C++11. The component system and basic features including the networking layer have been implemented so far, quite exciting. One big question mark is the rendering system. OGRE has been quite nice to use previously, but our extreme care towards performance might lead us to other solutions. We'll have to see. In one alternative universe stemming from a few days from now, yzt can develop a super efficient and capable graphics engine to act as the front end of the developing engine.

Wolfmother, oh so great! "Indukti... And who's the God Now?!" Words can't explain ....

This is going to be a bit shorter than I thought and will have to stop here.

Twit

Planning to give twitter a try, https://twitter.com/#!/ahfassihi

Post Storm

It sure feels strange ... a project we were engaged with seriously for the past couple of years is out of the door, leaving a mesmerizing calm atmosphere behind for us ... a rather static state, it is, which brings out confusion at times, confused in breaking the symmetry and selecting among the infinite options ... something which was away for a long time ... in times where there was one thing to do every day and every second, and that was to push the whole project into a converging state of acceptable quality ... something which would ride you everyday... a storm that showed you absolute failure inches away a lot of times...it was quite fun... it was quite hard ... it had a world to learn from ... it added a lot more scars ... scars that are seeds to power ...

Within

.... and a friend says : "... we've got many enemies out there ..." and all I can think of is this great statement:
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." W. Durant

Typhoon Ends

Finally time has stopped a bit and there is a chance to write. The past few weeks have been really intense. Trying to finish the remaining tasks for Garshasp and prepare for the Game Connection event which is going to start tomorrow morning. After wild days and nights of non stop efforts, we are finally here in Lyon and ready to start off the first day of the three days for Game Connection tomorrow morning. We will start with a few meetings with some real big publishers and go all the way until 6pm with meetings every 30 minutes. It is a unique experience and something we are looking forward to very much.

The guys in the team have really done a great job one more time for Garshasp and our hope is to be able to demonstrate this good work to as many publishing companies as possible and find the path for this team to get stronger and do better everyday.

The compact days before our trip was followed by a long stay in the airport at Rome, 9 hours before our connection flight to Lyon and we did experience something quite new for a long time, just waiting and doing nothing.

Lyon is a nice city, 25 years has passed since the last time I was in France and I am seeing the Country from a different perspective this time, either me or the Country has changed a lot, or maybe both :).

The teacher again

Lessons I learn from my 9 months old kid.

1. How to put up 100 percent effort.
2. How to focus.
3. How Happiness is always "Right Here", "Right Now".

1388

My motto for starting out 1388, "Back to Basics". In work in life and in what I know.

Lessons

Lessons I learn from my 4 months old baby:

• How to not pretend and be what you really are.
• How to see the little beautiful details in everything around.
• How to enjoy music.
• How to stare at someone you like for hours. ;)

Back to class...

A new beginning

I feel like a just passed an important milestone and there is a new beginning ahead. The number one priority in this next phase is to complete Soshiant Game with the level of quality which we have been after. There are going to be some business meetings regarding finding possible funding for this project but either way, the project will go on full force, we just have to see who will ride this wave with us.

There have been a few requests to our team for creating small to medium size games but we will not follow those paths since the number one priority is to finish up our own product. Those projects will derail us and make us lose the focus and a project based work on game development is not part of our main strategy anyway. That is the easy path, we are selecting the hard path. No slavery.

Everyone who feels they can be categorized as technical advises us to buy a 3rd party game engine and explain to us how we can never finish up this project with the path we have taken, using OGRE3D and our own code, well this is our little message to all these technical friends: "spend your time minding your own business!".

Adoosh

Welcome my old pal, Adoosh, to the blogging atmosphere. We always had lots to talk about with a few friends of mine around and now that everybody is so distant, physically, these blog rings can re-ignite some of the heat. At least the discussions can be crystalized this time ...

Looking ahead ...

I hope our viewpoints converge in the future ...
Seems more like 180 now ...

Here I come I come I come ...

So here he is, you can see the little dude (aka. my son) in the picture.
Today is his 4th day living in our dimensions and I feel I've gained a lot baby handling skills already ;).
He was code named "Daanaa" for a while, the pre-release code name was "Maahyar" which might be the actual name.
I might as well open up a "baby" category from now on in this blog!

Flashbacks

I thought about and was reminded about anyone I had ever known today, well unless they had name overlaps and their name was down in the name stack in my memory for each name. The stack actually sorts based on impact.

How did this happen? Well try going from A to Z of a Book of Names and you'll get what I mean. We are trying to select a name for the upcoming baby.

Boy!

Last night we found out that our child is going to be a boy! The good news is that he is healthy so far.(5 more months to go)

It wouldn't have made a difference for me whether a boy or a girl but I might be able to understand the inner feelings of a boy a little better, girls are just too complex ;).

Lets see how things will go.

Winter resolutions

While a lot of my big and small friends, the ones in Antarctica , are getting ready to hibernate the whole winter, my plans are to be as awake as possible. At the end of the winter, the development and pre-production stages for our game in progress should be finished and we should be ready for production. This means a lot of tasks and tests need to be done. I'd have to spend much time on the project, which means less time for me at Fanafzar while more conscious about the situation. I am once again a soldier, starting from zero, prepared to test the extremes. Very critical 3 months ahead. This should be the time that the core of the open source project we are working on needs to be solidified and many other projects are hoping to see light in this dark winter. So sleep tight my friends, and sleep some for me too...

This is what Hafez had for me on Yalda night... interestingly related... I will change my perspective.

In Dreams Shall I live...

I get shocked many times at the power of creativity that my mind somehow digs up while I have shut down whatever I can... while asleep. The sub conscious proves to me to be the real master. Like last night, I found myself in a hotel, packing up to get to the airport and 1001 things went wrong, creating obstacles in my goal to get out of this hotel, a few examples: getting stuck in the elevator, elevator not stopping at that floor, losing the keys, getting lost in the lobby, losing the bus, and right when this sub conscious king was running out of ideas, my feet were so tired that I couldn't move, I had found a solution to all other problems but this time the legs just stopped working .... I guess once it gets too surreal then that's the time your conscious slave can overcome the situation and you wake up ... quite happily in fact... but the conscious slave still envies the unconscious king about the power of imagination and creativity that it has ...

Maybe part of this fact can be due to the inhibition that our brain system gets while awake.

Wow, I just did a small google and came up with this interesting and strange article!

Or maybe I am sleep now and awake when I am sleep? Sounds so much "Waking Life", an absolutely wonderful movie by the way.

Rain

Rain brings me a special feeling usually, something rather negative, and the reason has its roots in old times... days that we used to go to school, early in the morning .. with one goal in mind...heart beating as we got close to the entrance of the high school... the basketball court was waiting there for us.. usually a few already playing... sometimes you were there first and had to show the toughest patience till the first dude with the ball showed up... and then it was all show time ... until the $%#^ing bell rang ... and the rest of the game had to be played in the mind ... while the often useless teachers were playing there own game ...
Now nothing could stop those early morning days but there was something that could turn it light a little bit .. and that was nothing but the lovely "RAIN"... or "SNOW" ... however the max that it could punish us was to have all the hands, face and clothes dirty from the splash of dirt and water caused by a bounce....
Maybe if this sub conscious associative memory didn't exist in my mind, then I would've loved rain since during my childhood when I was in Japan rain was as usual as sunshine and I have never felt bad getting wet in the rain.. in fact I like it a lot... my Persian culture praises rain a lot and it has been considered something very precious since the ancient times..
Well rain returned this morning again after all these years of not being able to show how viscous it was and ruined our Thursday morning basketball ... it is "November Rain" anyway ...

Ending

It all ended, was very useful and informative. However the flight back to dubai is canceled due to lots of fog in Dubai and we will have to get back with one day delay. Lots of time to blog now.

Anyway probably the most interesting discovery for today came from a presentation that we got in the Malta NCC center about how they prepare their lecturers for the courses, mostly related to the practices the lecturers can follow to improve their efficiency in the class and being able to transfer the information to the students. The topic was really really interesting. I will have to reflect on it as much as I can later on.

One of the ideas in the presentation was that 90 percent of the knowledge that we have is in our subconscious, when we try to teach something, we are usually trying to be conscious about what we are talking about and this isn't easy. This is why we have many good professionals who aren't necessarily good teachers. The more you become an expert in a field, the more it moves into your subconscious. (The samurai have a good statement about this fact related to the definition of a Meijin, a master samurai who will engage in a war in a subconscious manner) And also this is why a lot of sub conscious actions of the teacher are important in the whole process, like the way he talks, his posture or body language, maybe sometimes more than what he is trying to say.

Other interesting topics were learning models and how it is important for the lecturers to know themselves first, the type of learner they are and then be able to understand what kind of weak points they might have, and how they can improve it in order to provide a solution for all types of learners in the class.

I'd have to launch a big research campaign now that I have found proper systematic information about these areas. I might be back with more later. :)

Rain and Sun at the same time is very popular in Malta.

In the heat of the conference

Ok so I am here in the heat of the conference right now, the first day is over, so far things have been gone really good, the networking in this conference was great and I met lots of useful people both from NCC and from other centers.

I also found out about the secret behind the success of the Malta center (they got excellence in education award from NCC today). Close relationship with the industry and customizing the program. They had a full program about it today, they even have strong support from their government and their minister of IT had a talk too. The idea is to have the student work part time while studying, 3 days work, 2 days study. This provides a good understanding about the concepts for the students and broadens their view, leading to more motivation towards their studies. Classically the opposite was thought.

Looking back I see that the best students that I have known have been the ones who had tried to use their knowledge in a real situation, now this can be employment job or any other stand alone real project. Of course there are some other "Getting good grades" students who never worked and their sole reason for getting the good marks is being afraid badly of getting bad grades. These turn to be useless eventually.

Let's see what happens tomorrow.

Malta is a real nice place with wonderful weather and really really expensive. 100 US dollars will be 28 Maltese Lira, hard to imagine such currency, seeing expensive products having a price tag of 55 Liras gives you a good feeling by the way, before trying to do the math of course :)

The rest has been fine other than my luggage getting lost in the connection in Dubai, it should be here tomorrow afternoon, the end of the conference and I can grab it with me to go back to Iran.

End of log

Trip

I've been teaching for NCC Education for a while and this week there will be a regional conference that I will be attending. The conference will be held in Malta.