Archive for the ‘General’ Category.
The IMDb DB
After having lost it for a couple of years(!) I found the IMDB data files again! You can start from here and get the Gzipped text files from an FTP mirror.
Oh, so much data! Sweet sweet data! My “Sprunger” is fully tumescent!
Giving HTML Emails a Try
I have decided to change my all-plain-text email policy and give HTML emails a try. This is mainly due to bad right-to-left support in plain text email messages (or in Thunderbird?) but there are other reasons. I will give it a try and in a few weeks decide whether I like to make it permanent or not.
I don’t know why I feel so shitty about it, like I’m cheating on my significant other or something!
Garshasp’s Release Day
Tonight at midnight is Garshasp’s official release day. Finally! After many delays, tomorrow people can supposedly buy Garshasp at retail stores all over Iran.
The reason that I say “supposedly” is because that our distributor, a company named Lohe Zarrin e Nikan (I won’t even bother to link to their website) is a bunch of idiots who have done their best to disrupt the release and demean Garshasp. They have postponed the release date with no apparent reason for more than two weeks (not to mention their previous blunders and postpones for a couple of months,) they missed a huge (by Iranian standards) public game show, they rejected our designed retail packaging, they have used their own idiotic artwork for promotional material (which not only have nothing to do with Garshasp, but are also so very hideous.) Oh, and they have printed on the package that all rights of Garshasp are reserved for them! I must add that none of the above is permitted by the terms of the distribution contract we have with them!
Tonight is the culmination of years of our lives, and instead of partying and drinking and stuff, everyone has already gone home. No one even mentioned the release, as if we have all given up hope about this event being of any note and importance.
Tonight Garshasp is released, and not even we care. How’s that for a sad state of affairs?
Theme Change and Getting Unanalytical
I have changed the theme of my blog (as you can see, unless you are syndicating) from Barthelme to something called Fluid Blue. It was mostly out of boredom, and I’m not sure about the result yet.
In other news, I have decided to drop Google Analytics usage on my blog; mostly as a statement in support of privacy activism. I really like Google, and most of the time they do the Right Thing, so I’m not really worried about them stockpiling and misusing our data. However, why should you guys (my less-than-a-handful of readers) trust Google with your data for my benefit?! That’s certainly an attitude I want other people to have toward me, so I’m gonna start from myself and scrap Google Analytics and I don’t think I would use any kind of 3rd-party user tracking system unless their handling and storage of the data is completely and provably secure, anonymous and temporary.
An obvious side effect of this is that I can no longer know how many people are reading my blog. I’d appreciate if you guys (I know there are at least two, so my sentence is syntactically and semantically correct) would be more active, comment-wise!
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.
The Problem
Religion is harmful. Throughout history so much conflict, war and misery has been caused by organized religion that religious people hardly even see it. They probably attribute it to human nature, or “other religions.”
I believe, and I think people would agree if they think about it, that religion has been the most effective and most used tool for mass conditioning and mass brain-washing. It has always brought an illogical imbalance to societies and has caused endless strife and animosity within them.
I’m not talking here about the wrongness of the concept of religion. All religion is bullshit, and all religion that divides people based on any criteria (believers and non-believers, sinners and saints, etc.) is harmful and must be treated as a disease of mind, but I’m not here to try to prove what seems to be obvious if you forget your childhood upbringing and conditioning. What I’m talking about is the danger and destructive effect of systematic, organized and political religion.
You look at human history, and almost every time there has been a war or oppression or genocide, it has had its roots in religion, in one way or the other. But, you might object, religion has brought happiness and peace of mind to billions. Well, while the extent of the happiness and the number of people affected by it is debatable, it can’t be denied that religious beliefs have been beneficial to many. But so has been the cartoons made by Disney! Have they not brought joy and happiness to hundreds of millions or perhaps billions, too? And there hasn’t been any wars or mass murders or tortures caused by a Walt Disney film. We must start analyzing the benefit/harm ratio of religions rationally.
So for some reason, among all the works of fiction it has been religion and religious materials that have gained special attention and have been given special status. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they have had more time with our collective brains to turn them into mush and turn us into brainless zombies. Maybe if you think about religion in terms of the theory of memes, it will become apparent that everything about a religion, specially the more widespread ones, is evolved with one most important purpose: to let it survive. That usually means spreading to as many people as possible. That means bringing people in and keeping them hooked up and destroying its rivals, be they other religions or science or whatnot. And we humans, have been the tools to be controlled by these vicious, dangerous and single-minded memes to ensure their survival.
If you think the purpose of any long lasting and popular religion is human happiness, you should think again. The purpose of any religion is its own survival and dominance. A few million people here and there doesn’t make much difference as long as the long-term success of that meme is guaranteed.
To those of you who still think, in this day and age, that any idea like religion should be enforced or even be allowed to be advertised or be a part of any government or ruling body, I can only say to look at history. Look at your own lives! Look at our own lives and the lives of those like us!
For those libertarians and agnostics among you, I have to say that I don’t think religion is something to be ignored and always categorized as a personal choice. Religion is harmful and dangerous. It’s not only publicly recognized dangerous religions and ideologies like Nazism that are dangerous, but the idea of any mass of humans controlled by any religion. We cannot afford to remain agnostic any more. People are entitled to their own beliefs of course, but those beliefs should never ever be the basis for special treatment or ever be let to come to power anywhere at any time.
October 28th
That’s my birthday, if you where wondering.
(Just a quick fact: this year, due to incompatibility of Gregorian and Persian leap years, and the relative inaccuracy of the former, my birthday was October 27th.
As a friend mentioned, my 28th birthday was not on the 28th of the month. In fact, as she again noted, the first time my age turned perfect after I knew what it was, I lost my perfect birth day of the month.)
Anyway, last year I found out that my birthday is the same with Bill Gates. This year, I was cursing my bad luck when I stumbled upon the fact that I share this birthday with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Sharing anything with the guy is anything but an honor by default!
Here are some fun facts about my birthday:
- There are 64 days in a year after October 28th!
- I have the exact same age (±24 hours) with the Czech football player Milan Baroš. I’ve known this for several years now, but I don’t know how. My best guess is IMDB!
- John Romero is born on this day. Since we are in the same business (behold the shameless arrogance!) I must include him here. I firmly believe that “id Software” would still be making great games (as opposed to great engines only) if he were still with them. (Incidentally, this is one of the few posters that I’d be willing to hang in my room instead of James Hetfield’s Jolly Roger pose poster.)
- John Locke died on this day. No, not that John Locke, this John Locke! (Sorry, couldn’t resist a “Lost” reference.)
- A guy named Landon Curt Noll has this birthday too. I knew him from the IOCCC (he is called chongo over there.) (Warning: if you think you know C, and are not ready for a rude wake up, don’t go there! Here‘s the Wikipedia page for a milder kick) but apparently he is quite a diverse person!
Also, we used the FNV hash function (co-authored by him) in the “Silent2″ project (maybe 10 people in the entire world know what that is!) without me realizing who he was. Alas, I had to abandon that project, which I regret to this day, since the concept and opportunity were both very unique.
- A whole bunch of other stuff have happened on this day, some of the most famous of which can be viewed on or accessed through the Wikipedia page.
Quench My Thirst With Gasoline
I woke up yesterday, 7AM. It’s now 9PM and I’ve just come home, and I’m gonna eat something, and I’m gonna go to sleep after 38 hours. That’s a personal record. And I’ve been at work, non-stop for 27 hours.
And you know what, I’m just feeling conventionally tired and I may even try and work on my own programs a bit. I never thought I would be at work 27 hours and be this happy (well, as far as I get happy, which is not much.)
And my work was hard, at least for someone with my limited practical knowledge (or theoretical, for that matter.) I implemented the whole shadow system for our game project Soshiant from the ground up, after several failed attempts at using Ogre‘s shadowing services and several other attempts to figure out the pieces needed to use Ogre’s facilities from other people’s code (nobody seems to have had the problems that we had!) Anyway, me implementing generic shadow-mapping was like a blind man with Parkinson’s trying to fix a deaf and mute man’s teeth: full of screams, blood and gore. But that’s another story for another time.
My pint here is that I was doing something I liked, and that I’m not badly incompetent at, on a project that engaged me, with people that interest me. Therefore, I cannot wait to get more (after I’m rested well enough of course. I’m a lazy slob after all, and nothing can change that.) What I’m saying is that “Give me fuel, give me fire, give that which I desire.”
Managing Your Life on the “Good Side” of the Line – Part 0
(Of course I mean on the line!)
A few days back, a friend asked me about my opinions on the online services I use. I think he mentioned hosting services, etc. While I can’t tell exactly, I’m pretty sure he was asking a subquestion of the question: How does one manages her online life?
Now that’s a question to ponder about! Of course, my friend only wanted to know my opinion. He doesn’t want or need a shrink wrapped answer, which I can’t provide anyway. Since when do I have a life, to advise other people about it?!
Anyways, this is a huge subject to begin with, and I have not solved the problems myself. I have some guidelines and opinions that have worked out for me, but no definite answers.
First off, one’s online life concerns at least the following areas, in no particular order:
- Passwords and Keys
- Bookmarks/Browsing History
- Files
- Calendar and Schedule
- Code
- Contacts
- Online Profile/Social Networking
- Web Presence/Weblog/Journal
- Realtime Communication (Chat/VoIP/Video/Collaborative Text Editing/etc.)
In the course of the rant that will ensue, you will find any and every useless piece of (mis)information that I couldn’t find a more suitable place to deliver. Don’t expect me to stay on-topic and don’t expect composed and well-thought-out literature here!
Let me start with this: It was Roman emperor Nero who burned Rome down (in the 1st century A.D.) and now, it’s the software Nero that is burning ROMs ((almost) Read-Only Memories.) You see how useless and irrelevant it was! Don’t expect it to get any better!
OK, now I’m being serious. What I write about this subject is what I believe to be good and sound ways to lead an online life. Please, correct me if I’m wrong. Help me if I’m mistaken. Guide me if there’s a better (or equally bad) way.
