Shadowlessness

(This has nothing to do with BiteFight. This was an old draft of mine which I took off the dusty shelf, in part by means of inspiration from this.)

I am finished doing what I swore an oath to God 28 years ago to never do again. I’ve created, “something that kills people.” And in that purpose, I was a success. I’ve done this because, philosophically, I am sympathetic to your aim. I can tell you with no ego, this is my finest sword. If on your journey, you should encounter God, God will be cut.

Hattori Hanzo
Volume 1, Kill Bill

(He is talking about the amulet hanging from his neck, which is a symbol of war wizards’ primary edict.)

The ruby is meant to represent a drop of blood. It is the symbolic representation of the way of the primary edict.
It means only one thing, and everything: cut. Once committed to fight, cut. Everything else is secondary. Cut. That is your duty, your purpose, your hunger. There is no rule more important, no commitment that overrides that one. Cut.
The lines are a portrayal of the dance. Cut from the void, not from bewilderment. Cut the enemy as quickly and directly as possible. Cut with certainty. Cut decisively, resolutely. Cut into his strength. Flow through the gaps in his guard. Cut him. Cut him down utterly. Don’t allow him a breath. Crush Him. Cut him without mercy to the depths of his spirit.
It is the balance to life: death. It is the dance with death.

Richard Rahl
Temple of the Winds, The Sword of Truth

Death rides on my shoulder, death walks in my footsteps; I am death…

Lews Therin Telamon
Lord of Chaos, Wheel of Time

Here’s a new idea: listen to Opeth’s “Watershed” album while walking in heavy, dry and driving snow.
You should give it a try sometime.

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:

1. There are 64 days in a year after October 28th!
2. 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!
3. 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.)
4. John Locke died on this day. No, not that John Locke, this John Locke! (Sorry, couldn’t resist a “Lost” reference.)
5. 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.
6. 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.

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.”

I’ve been living disconnected from the world. I’ve practically stopped answering my phone, and I’ve been ignoring my (online) life for the most part.
This is because we are making a push to prepare our game, Soshiant (sorry, no link) for a demo which is in about two weeks. What we are hoping to accomplish is close to impossible, and we only have our “hunger and foolishness” to drive us. To be honest, everybody else is driven and determined, and I’m just tagging along for the ride.
What keeps us sustained is mugs of Syros’s magical Mojo, and a lot of heavy metal. Oh, and let’s not forget tiny steps of accomplishment every now and again.
Right now, I’m just enjoying working towards something magnificent and beautiful. “Good day to be alive, Sir!”

My very good friend Maryam Elahi got married yesterday and I couldn’t be there, mostly because her wedding was in Mashhad and I was stuck here in Tehran.
I have known her for 6-7 years now (since 2002, if memory serves,) and we have been teammates, classmates and coworkers at one time or the other, and I’m sure she understands that while I really wanted to be there, I really couldn’t. She is one of my best friends, and I hope I have been (and continue to be) at least an OK friend for her.
Here is my most sincere and heartfelt congratulations and merry wishes, for you Maryam and your husband. May you have a great and interesting life together. It’s encouraging (and at the same time frightening) to see another of my friends taking the plunge. Just kidding! May you “live happily ever after.”

(BTW, I’m a bit curious. Is wishing someone a marriage full of surprises a good wish or an ill one?!)

This Friday I was coming back from Tehran on a train. This train was one I haven’t traveled by before (see, it only runs around 6 AM, and I honestly didn’t know that particular time existed before!)
Anyway, since this was a fast train, the cars didn’t have compartments and there were seats instead of beds.
The most amusing feature of this train, aside having no power outlet to keep Rincewind and Fenchurch (my portable music player, which I had forgotten to fully charge) running, were the inter-car doors. These doors were sliding doors with a button to open and close then. You wouldn’t believe how cool these were. After one pressed the button, the door would open rapidly and with a hiss. The movement speed, the acceleration at first and eventual slow-down, the hisss sound it made upon opening and closure… it was perfect. Made you feel you were in a sci-fi universe. Not like those stupid photo-sensor doors that have none of these features.
I had not slept for about 24 hours before I boarded this train, and I couldn’t sleep on-board for an unknown reason. Here I was sitting less than two meters away from this cool door, and I just watch it open and close, open and close, in an almost complete trance. I think the people sitting around me all thought I was high or something, with my staring at the door and my stupid grin and my not noticing anything that went on about.

Oh, in case you were wondering, the title refers to the doors that Sirius Cybernetics Corporation made for the starship Heart of Gold. If you don’t know what that is off the bat, get your mind in a gutter and go read the most important work of literature of all times: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Here’s an overdue congratulations to my friend Amir Hossein, whose boy is now just about 10 days old.
I raise my glass in salute to your family. Cheers!

(Should I have titled these series “Managing Your Online Life”? But there’s almost no distinction between my online life and my life, so I don’t feel the need.)

Some general notes first. When it comes to online life (or even life in general,) the most important thing you have is data, period. So you have to think about data accessibility, portability and protection.
Let me give you an example. If you use Yahoo! mail as your primary email, you are not OK. Your email is held hostage on Yahoo! servers. You have no way of reaching it. Even if you pay for premium services, you only get lousy POP3 service and the ability to download all your email as an archive. The keyword here is “all”. You can’t chop it up and the download is not restartable or resumable. Imagine downloading a 3GiB file in those situations! If you forward your email to another account, you won’t get a local copy anymore and you can’t forward the mail already in your inbox. It doesn’t support IMAP so you can’t remotely manage and move your email around in your mailbox. Both the web-based interfaces are so brain-dead that any form of bulk operation is tremendously hard or virtually impossible. So you tell me whether my almost 90000 email messages in my Yahoo! mailbox are accessible or not? Can I get a backup copy of my email so that if someone malevolently accessed my account and deleted all my email, I won’t be left high and dry? Can I be sure that Yahoo! will not start enforcing its own brand of sanctions against Iran and blocking my access to my email from tonight? Can I be sure that my email is not read by Yahoo itself, or not forwarded to Michael Chertoff’s or Jack Valenti’s desks as a result of something similar to the Patriot Act?
So, accessibility, portability and security are important!

Don’t trust anyone! Don’t trust corporations. Don’t trust governments. However, keep in mind that both keeping security and breaking security cost money and time (usually.) Weigh the trade offs and then make decisions. If your data is not worth anything to you, then it may not be cost-effective for you to protect it. If it’s not worth anything to anybody, then it may not be cost-effective for an adversary to try and gain access to you data.

Also remember that I live in Iran. My whole life I’ve been struggling with unreliable and lacking technological infrastructure, services and options. The situation is unlikely to improve in near or even far future. Therefore, I cannot download 3GiB from a webserver in a single connection. My connection will get interrupted. I cannot be sure that I’ll have Internet connectivity in my home for 12 hours straight without disruption because I have no grounds to sue my ISP when I get disconnected for 1 to 5 minutes every 2 to 3 hours (or 5 hours of no connectivity every once in a while.) Actually, I can’t even trust my cellphone, hard-line phone or even electricity to be available all the time (they almost always are, but I can’t expect them to, and no one will be accountable if they are not, and there are few or no alternatives to switch to in that case, and the providers know that.)

Unfortunately, I have to use Windows for all my current work and therefor I use it most of the time (who am I kidding? I use Windows almost exclusively.) But I hate Windows. Although I have to admit it was getting better and better with Windows XP and Windows 2000. It sucked a lot less than it used to. But then Microsoft went and just did it; yo and behold a beast straight from the Dungeon Dimensions: (Do I really have to name it? I’m afraid that there might be a “Taboo” on it so they can track me if I use the name!) It starts with a ‘V’ and ends with an ‘ista’! I’m not hopeless though. It’s not the OS you use, it’s how you use it and what you use it for! I count myself a proponent of free software and opensource software, and crossplatformity is a real concern for me.

One more piece of advice. Sam (no last name) never walks into a place he doesn’t know how to walk out of. You should never ever put your data somewhere you don’t know how to take it out of. This point is more important that anything else to remember and utilize. Avoid vendor lock-ins like the black plague and tomato juice mixed together! If your email or hosting provider can’t secure your data, or your day-to-day access is hard, but you can export your data in a usable manner, then you have no problems. You can pack up and move anytime you want. So, always devise an escape route before you put your data in. (Hey, that’s good “Hitman” and “Commandos” advice too!)

The above factors affect the choices I make and opinions I have.

*Expect the next parts at a time indeterminately far away.*

(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:

• Email
• 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.

I bought a 1 TB external hard disk the other day (oh, yeah!) As I was strolling along, I was listening to (using the good-quality earphones that I had finally got to replace my broken (in a car accident) ones!) Camel’s Stationary Traveller [sic] (among others) and were thinking about the few projects that I have at hand and a couple of them that I actually like and care for.
Then it hit me that I was actually cheerful! That was such a big shock that I instantly suspected the smog and fumes in Tehran air! I figured that they had finally added those Cannabis-derived substances to the gas we pump into our cars.
But I was cheerful on my own. I realized that a pair of good headphones, a new and attractive programming project, a couple of new friends, a terabyte of free disk space and a handful of rock masterpieces can make me really happy. I can live in this self-made castle of dreams for some time.

But the next track was “King Nothing.”

I was being pestered for a long time by my blog software to upgrade to the latest version. If it’s not obvious, I use Wordpress and I’m happy with it. It’s pretty, fast enough, power-user-friendly (but only to some extent, probably more luser-friendly) and developer-friendly too (I guess!)
Anyway, I was being told by my software at every opportunity that I needed to upgrade from 2.3.1 (?) to the new 2.5.0 version. But I had already done the upgrade once (from 2.3.0 to 2.3.1) and since it disabled my theme and plugins and the custom edits to the template, I was resisting the upgrade (as I had resisted the upgrade to 2.3.2 before that.)
But then 2.5.1 came out and I was reviewing the list of security fixes and was quite concerned, since some of the fixed vulnerabilities were quite relevant to me.
To make a long story short (well… not much longer than I’ve already told!) I took the plunge and upgraded a while ago.
And I was pleasantly surprised! No problem at all. None of the redoing of the customizations this time. I’m told that Serendipity (or as that ilk like to write: s9y) is nice too, but for the time being I’m staying happily with Wordpress (despite s9y’s cooler name!)