Archive for the ‘cool’ Category.
Garshasp on Steam!
By the prickling of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes…
Garshasp is up on Steam and Gamers’ Gate, and it will be available for purchase shortly. This is a huge step for us, specially if we are received well.
I am now praying to all the gods I don’t believe in to make it so (witness the vanity and weakness of man!)
Akindled
Well, it’s obvious, is it not? I got a Kindle (latest generation, i.e. three, 6″, graphite and no 3G) and the huge thanks for it goes to my brother Ehsan, because I absolutely love it!
Oh, and I named it “Rand.” What else was I going to name it, “Kevin”?! The reason for this name should be obvious to anyone who has read the first few books of the Wheel of Time. Also, I thought after a few female names for my gadgets and toys (Fenchurch for my iPod, Metis for my phone, Eros for my PSP, Jane for one of my portable disks) it was time for a male character to be in this dramatis personae.
Now to the Kindle itself. It’s clean, cool and chic. It’s very light and thin too. There are some things to be desired, like a more controllable music playback or generic notes, but in my opinion they just distract from this device’s one true raison d’etre: to read books on. And it does that splendidly! The built-in browser is surprisingly capable. It is based on Webkit, but the size and nature of the device and the keyboard make it less usable than one might hope. Did I mention that the display of text is practically like real print?!
By the way, it should be obvious that I’m writing these on Rand.
An ABSOLUTELY Unmissable Talk on Modern Hardware
Iff[sic] you are a programmer, if you don’t do anything else even if you don’t eat and even if you don’t shower, please please please please please watch this presentation.
The presenter is Dr. Cliff Click, and the topic is an in-depth view of modern code execution architecture. The talk is from 2009, and it has been on my to{do} list for almost 6 months. It is the best thing I have seen in the last year (and I played God of War III!) if not in many years. The guy is obviously very knowledgeable and he talks extremely fast, which just means that he packs an incredible amount of invaluable information into this 50+ minute talk.
I can’t stress this enough. Take an hour to watch this. Please! If you are a game developer, or any programmer with a conscience, you have to watch it right now! I’m not kidding here. Watch this through.
On an ego-boosting note, I just watched this talk and I already knew almost all of it (I have to brush up on the newer cache-coherency protocols though; those have also been on my to{do} list for some time now!) It did have some eye-opening “Aha!” moments for me. I may write about them later.
What are you doing still reading my shithead rant?! GO WATCH THIS!Cliff Click’s Crash Course in Modern Hardware (hosted locally.)
A New Blog of Note!
I found this person who was looking for a place to put up a blog. I gave that person space and here is the result. In my opinion, it is definitely worth a read. It contains mostly scraps of fiction with a theme of fantasy, some dark poetry and the like.
You know how the world is for a new blogger! Go and have a look, and leave a comment or two even if it is a one liner. Encourage the blogger if you like it at all.
Miracle of Flaming Hand
I saw my left hand burning tonight. It was engulfed in blue and yellowish flames of naphtha. I would have watched and enjoyed the sight much more if my right hand hadn’t been aflame before with my Zippo in it and I hadn’t thrown it into a glass of water!
You see kids, there is actually no way of putting out a Zippo if it’s out of the case, say for refueling. I would really have liked to stop and take a picture for demonstration purposes, but saving a drowning Zippo is much more important.
“3D Modeling for Games” Educational Challenge
Fanafzar Game Studios, the company I work for and the makers of Garshasp with the help of CGArt.ir society and several notable others are orchestrating a 3D modeling competition for aspiring and experienced game artists. You can read every thing about it over here.
The reason’s for holding such an event is at least three-fold. First is to show how many talented artist live and work in Iran. Second is to get them into a challenge that will benefit all of them as they work towards a common goal with each other. The third one is to find a few really talented and driven modelers and persuade them to come and work with us on our upcoming projects!
Oh, I forgot to say that the first prize is a PS3 bundled with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves! (I wish I was a 3D artist! No one gives such prizes to game programmers!)
So, even if you are not interested yourselves, please spread the word around.
A Lesson in “Test” Attitude
Back in the old days of the net, even before I was born, people did implement TCP/IP stacks. And since there weren’t much of a solid and standard specification (not to mentions decades of engineering experience in implementation and maintenance of network stacks,) these implementations tended to be buggy, unstable and non-conforming. To test these various TCP/IP implementations (such as they were,) people used to come together and just test them against each other and compare their functions. These sessions and discussions and reviews were called “TCP and IP bake offs”. It has been said that as a result of these discussions, the specifications were as likely to change as the implementations!
These dudes pretty much built the whole frakking Internet without the bureaucracy and the 3000-page conformance guidelines and the 2-million line test suit or the 12 years worth of committee meetings. Their procedures, and much more importantly their attitudes is quite concisely demonstrated in RFC 1025.
Kindle
How many people (who doesn’t matter very much!) do I have to kill to get one of these babies?! And how many more must I slay to get a 3G network in Iran so the wireless facilities work too?! You know what, scratch that. As long as the built-in DRM misfeatures are not too draconian and/or can be circumvented, I don’t care about the wireless connectivity. I could always USB my PDFs over.
I just told a friend the other day that how much I wished for a pile of good books and a lot of time to read them. The books I do have, more than enough, it is the time I find myself constrained about. A Kindle would give me the ability to read everywhere.
Most of the fiction I “read” these days is in the form of audiobook. And you can’t listen to audiobooks while going around on public transportation or walking on the streets or just stretching in your home in the mornings (that would be normal people’s afternoons.) Because people absolutely can’t leave you alone for 10 minutes, and audiobooks are not a snap to pause and resume. Besides, I can’t listen to technical books, even if there where such things.
And I can’t read books on my computers, because there are much more immediately fun ways to use a computer screen and attempting to multitask between writing code and reading an ebook is just not workable!
Anyway, I think a perfect solution for me is Kindle DX (because it has PDF support) as long as the DRM is not too constricting. I guess I’d have to dust off my old ninja outfit. We are raiding Amazon warehouses tonight!
Death In His Blood
Death… is in my blood.
Fate has brought me here.
I hope for nothing.
I fear nothing.
If you haven’t already seen the new God of War III trailer, cut off your pinkie and go watch it immediately (here’s the lower-resolution version if you are bandwidth-bound.) This is a great trailer, one that makes you lose sleep or want to kill your friend and steal his PS3. (FYI, this is an in-engine, real-time-rendered, albeit scripted footage.)
God of War is a great game, perhaps the best game ever (OK, all-time top three.) If you have never played it, you have missed a lot in your life, believe you me! It’s like you’ve never watched the Matrix or Fight Club or The God Father. It somehow completes one’s life experience. I’m not saying you have to like it or them, but you got to experience them at least. (What? You don’t like them? Get the hell out of here.)
