The Real Ones

A real coder once said:

"Of course, none of this would have mattered unless the code could be compiled very quickly, so full-blown traditional compilers were out of the question. Instead, we wrote a streamlined compiler custom designed for the task, which we call the "welder.""

In fact this is how it can be, if the environment isn't what you really need, just BUILD the environment for yourself.

This code was Michael Abrash, talking about the software renderer they made called Pixomatic which performs DX7 level hardware functionality on software.

In fact it's been the work of people like him and Carmack who have worked on Quake that shaped the 3D games world for ever. Magic happens when real people join forces.

Swine Dance

This time it is called the "Swine Flu". The whole pattern seems to repeat itself, an outbreak, seemingly of a newly heard disease, everyone talks about it, the news show governments and meetings and plans and quarantines, people are afraid, for a few weeks your favorite news channel resembles a lot of Hollywood movies about outbreaks and after a while, everything is under control and you will never hear about it anymore, hmm... was it Mad Cow Disease? Sars Disease? Enter Swine Flu.

The whole thing seems a bit strange. I feel that there are a lot of things unsaid about these stories and the level of reality behind these shows remains a mystery. Whatever is behind all this, I assume that there exists high incentives for many controlling entities.

I wonder how the whole thing might be related to "Economy of Fear", one great article about this subject is here, a little paragraph from it:

"By keeping the population in a state of artificially heightened apprehension, the government-cum-media prepares the ground for planting specific measures of taxation, regulation, surveillance, reporting, and other invasions of the people's wealth, privacy, and freedoms. Left alone for a while, relieved of this ceaseless bombardment of warnings, people would soon come to understand that hardly any of the announced threats has any substance and that they can manage their own affairs quite well without the security-related regimentation and tax-extortion the government seeks to justify."

Or this article, with this excerpt:

"The economy of fear was always used to keep people down, to remind us that there are forces out there bigger than us. But, it seems, the doomsayers try to be bigger than us, try to tell us to change our way of living, our thinking, our whole existence."

In any case, take out the mask, you won't ever get that flu!

Inspirational

I watched this video on TED from John Wooden, the famous basketball coach, today, highly inspirational. The talk is just great. The main topic revolves around the definitions of success and he describes how he believes in success being defined inside every individuals scope and related to how hard someone tries compared to their potential and the difference between winning and success. He describes how the journeys are more important than the destinations.

John Wooden is currently 98 years old, wow.

Fantasy to Come

Fantasy Football is a new project which we've started. It will be a Fantasy Football game for the Iranian Football League. Design has just started and the expected due date is in 3 months before the new season starts.

Get ready if you're a Football fan since loads of fun is about to come.

Main development is being carried out by our highly skilled technical guru, Babak Arj. Code base using .net 3.5, DB is SQL Server 2008 and LINQ for DB interactions.

Seminar Done

The Business Intelligence Seminar went well. Our good friend, Iman Eftekhari opened up the seminar with an introduction to BI, Dr.Abdollah Zadeh from Amir Kabir University expanded the definitions for BI and the program was followed by other professionals talking about problems that can arise in BI implementation projects and an introduction to MS Sharepoint as a front end portal for managing BI Solutions. Iman finished with some demos on Microsoft products for Business Intelligence.

There were a few things we wished could have been handled better but considering the fact that this was our first Seminar experience, it was ok.

We are looking forward to expand the consulting and implementation fields here at Fanafzar to include BI in the near future.

Dev blog

We've setup a dev blog for Garshasp. Its development can be followed here:

dev.garshasp.ir/blog

The Future

We went over an interesting presentation from GDC09 regarding parallel coding strategies for game AI which covered a few basic strategies for making the main component interactions parallel to embrace the multi core and many core architectures. These include double buffering, messaging, asynchronous requests and Job scheduling. This is one major area which we'll need to focus on for the very near future of our development. The Zorvan engine is not threaded properly right now(except for resource loading and the potential to run in a different thread for the physics simulation loop) but one of the most important design goals for MAGE is a mutli threaded kernel.

An interesting software engineering concept which I came across to during the presentation that has good use for multi threaded Job scheduling systems is "Futures" and "Promises". These definitions have been thought about for a while now but they are finding practical uses these days with the heightened significance for parallel code. Languages which have supported this feature include Joule and E.

yzt pointed me out to the Boost implementation for the idea.

As always, the engineers rolling the boost library (probably aliens from outer space), are providing c++ implementations for any statement in the form of:" .... but c++ does not support this feature ! ", with Boost it can!