Shadowlessness

Paul Graham has written an interesting piece on academic credentials and their value in predicting a person’s performance, vs. her actual performance. He touches on many interesting points, some very familiar for me and us; some less familiar and more intriguing. It’s a must read for almost anyone and anywhere!

Paul Graham is an old-time hacker, now turned venture-capitalist. Most of his writing, including this one, is about the life of startups and the markets in which they thrive. But if you think of it from the education perspective, you (or even I) may reach interesting solutions to the “credentials madness” that is the trend here and now.
As a failed outcome of a deeply and typically flawed education system myself, I may not be the best person to criticize it. Although the flaws in our education system is well-known to me and others, so much so that some may argue that we have stopped trying to find real problems and have confined our views to clichés, I haven’t given much thought to the practical solutions. If nothing else, that would be an interesting thought experiment.

There’s hardly anything sexier than a multicore CPU that I actually know how to program! Better yet, make that a “manycore” CPU.
Dual-core CPUs were cool, and quad-cores even cooler. But they were hardly enough to enable writing real fine-grained parallel programs. Recently Intel released “Core i7″ architecture CPUs, with four cores minimum and they all support HyperThreading, which is at best a hack and not a particularly beautiful one, but it gets the count of available hardware threads to 8, which I’m willing to settle for! (Note that semi-8-core CPUs have been available for some time, but not on desktops, and not in practical price ranges.)
When I think of all the execution units, the 64-bit wide registers, the cache hierarchy… Oooh!

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.

Here are two higher-resolution in-game videos from Soshiant: one (~90MiB) and two (~86MiB).
Here’s another video (~71MiB) showing some characters from concept, through modeling, to animations.

Note that our engine is not even in alpha. There are many bugs present, most of with are level design bugs due to our rush for the exhibition (camera placements and transitions, characters occasionally going through walls, Soshiant’s hand not being aligned with the ledges he is hanging from, etc.) But there are some engine bugs too, like the character’s hair getting stuck in a wall or ground, or the character jumping from one position to another, or the shadows poping here and there. All you see is subject to improvement, change or both.
Also, these videos are compressed with the irreplaceable Xvid codec. The third video, which is the only one with sound, features one of our original sound-tracks, composed and played by our multi-talented concept artist Soheil Danesh.
I would be very happy to hear your feed back on any and every aspect of these videos.

Amir Hosein made a post to the OGRE showcase forums about Soshiant. The response is overwhelmingly positive. I’m hoping that our love, care and enthusiasm can fuel our effort for just another year or two, and I believe we will make it, and we’ll make it big time!

Refer to these two (one and two) blog posts by our fearless team leader “Amir Hosein“.
If you are lucky enough not to be pestered by a ridiculously ineffective, yet irritatingly irritating Internet filter, you will have a peek at some of our gameplay.
You should note that this is not even alpha software. We are a long way away from a feature-complete demo, and even longer away from a game. Please bear with us!

The Soshiant website just went live. (UPDATE: Here’s the English homepage.)
And again, we are pulling an all-nighter to ready everything for the exhibition that opens tomorrow. This will be the first time that the public sees our baby, and you could imagine how excited we are.
However, there’s still a long road to go for Soshiant to become anything resembling a playable game. What we currently have is basically nothing more than a techdemo of some of the stuff that we could do, with time and of course, money.

Anyways, the exhibition is held at Tehran Mosalla. It starts tomorrow (October 22nd, Aban 1st) and goes on for 10 days. I’m told that the visiting hours are from 9AM to 9PM. If you are interested in posters, collector cards, T-shirts and some in-game and technology videos, concept art and our game, please give us a visit. We will be at “Fan-afzar Sharif” booth.

Shame on me! Boost 1.36.0 got released and I didn’t even know it was coming this soon. It’s been several weeks that I haven’t read the mailing list. Think of all the C++ goodness I’ve lost!
I’ll get it off the SVN (if my ISP let’s me; damned idiots) and build it in a few hours, and I’ll try to upload it.

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?!)

I’ve recently discovered this site. I’ve watched several of the talks there (all impressive, I must say) but this one has moved me the most. Ben Zander talks about passion of classical music, in a way that will change even the most musically challenged of us (namely yours truly, who can’t distinguish two notes even if they are as much as two octaves apart )
Of course, music is the biggest missing part from my life (trailed by mathematics) and I can’t say I understand music now, but… but I certainly felt something inside me. It was great.
Also, don’t forget to see the other great talks and presentations at TED.com.

I just found out that the current season (4th) of the massively entertaining TV series House M. D. which I follow diligently, (and I’m not ashamed at all!) has been cut down to 16 episodes (instead of 22-24.)
This was because of the “Writer’s Guild of America” strike that was resolved earlier this year, but nonetheless halted the production of many TV shows and movies and gods know what.
The next season is due to start in September, 2008. In the meantime, go watch BSG!

Firefox 3 release candidate 1 has recently been released (Download it here, if you didn’t know already.)
If you don’t use Firefox, then you have no excuse. Get it and start using it. Please let go of that mind-numbingly useless Internet Exploiter. Did you know that IE has been condemned by the UN?!
If you use Firefox 2, then you should probably upgrade too, since Firefox 3 is faster and lighter and it shows, even in normal usage. The only two problems I could imagine with this upgrade would be A, that some of your extensions don’t work with 3, or B, that you don’t like a dual Firefox system (which is what you’ll get if you install a beta 3 over a stable 2.) But that won’t bother you if you completely switch to FF3.
As an assurance, I’ve been using FF3 for some time now, and the betas have been becoming stable enough for me (even more so than “stable” FF2s.)

Firefox rules!

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!)