Go On and Take a Bow
Posted 09.03.10 at 07:47 AM UTC
Tagged work_and_academics | # | Comment [0]

I am treating today as a victory lap. We got through testing last weekend, hit all our performance metrics, identified and corrected a major system setup issue, and filed a defect (bug report) for the only problem not ours to fix.

Filing a defect is like punting a gigantic turd. It still stinks, and now some of it is stuck to you, but at least you don't have the turd anymore.

More Crazy
Posted 09.03.10 at 07:07 AM UTC
Tagged turkey | # | Comment [0]

Yesterday as I was walking to work, a guy had set up an electric bench grinder in the middle of a narrow, busy sidewalk outside a restaurant. He was sharpening one of the large knives they use to slice döner roast lamb chunks to make sandwiches in pita bread. No goggles, gloves, safety clothes, or anything, and no barrier to prevent somebody from walking right into him.

People just walked right by.

Absurdity, Documented
Posted 09.01.10 at 08:07 PM UTC
Tagged turkey | # | Comment [0]

In a conversation with my big boss a while back, the subject of absurdity came up. Any place is crazy, but many would say Turkey is crazier than most. It's just such an interesting country.

Have you ever had the situation when people ask how something's going, and you say "really busy, doing lots of stuff right now," and then when you try to produce details you can't, you just know you were busy?

It struck me that I can say "things are crazy here," and I could know that to be true, but in a year could I really speak for what about it was crazy, specifically?

So I'm going to do what I can to remember crazy things and write them down before I lose them and they go into one big generic mental box.

Local elections are coming up here, which from my understanding pretty much bubbles upward until the more important posts are decided. Anyway, the ruling party AKP, not our favorite, is getting a little more pressure than normal this year.

Concurrently, the AKP-controlled municipality just constructed a kind of containment housing for one of those really big urban steel trash bin things, kind of like a small dumpster, down the street from our building.

They planted these sad little one-stalk shrubs in a planter that goes around the top of the bin on all but one side (the side used to dump the thing out) and hung signs on the bin that talk about protecting the environment.

Well, the poor little bushes are already looking a little beaten down just from the bustle of a busy trashcan, but the funny thing is that the locals are feeling bad about the little guys. These trashcans are normally brim-full just about all the time (nothing is ever over-sized in Turkey except restaurants), and it's quite normal to see trash bags and furniture and whatnot piled up high above the rim of the bin.

Taking pity on the poor plants, instead of piling the trash high they're just throwing the bags and loose garbage onto the street, spilling out everywhere and stinking to high heaven. It's not too uncommon now to see the Turkish "we care about the environment" sign with garbage piled up to the bottom of the sign.

ValueError
Posted 08.28.10 at 06:06 AM UTC
Tagged work_and_academics | # | Comment [0]

Coming in on the weekend for the big testing is painful in itself, but I think I brought some additional stuff across the pond with me that makes these mornings feel even weirder.

They have thrown a garden party every day people have had to come in over the weekend. I need to start my testing with people, and the day is starting an hour after opening time because of this party.

For me, and I'm pretty sure how this would look back at the refinery or whatnot, the idea is to get finished as soon as possible and hand everybody a gift card to take their families out for dinner.

Here, you're kind of already with your family.

Priorities
Posted 08.26.10 at 07:55 AM UTC
Tagged nonsense | # | Comment [0]

We can temporarily suspend efforts on reaching world peace and identifying a reasonable solution to determining the NCAA football national champion if somebody can start working on developing banana-flavored Diet Coke.

That is a combination made in heaven.

Also, self-blocked foreign currency-denominated partial rebate settlements are booked properly in SAP without recalculating the exchange rate at the time of release to accounting.

Hence the banana + Diet Coke celebration.

That seriously just saved us around 100 man-hours per month and a huge controls risk.

Ingenious
Posted 08.25.10 at 09:03 PM UTC
Tagged nonsense, media | # | Comment [0]

I'm going to go ahead and create some prior art, claiming molybdenum for myself, so when American Express gets around to making a plastic tribute to that fine metal, they know where to send the check.

Wikipedia notes it is often used in high-pressure industrial applications, so maybe they can make a special card for air traffic controllers or postmen or something. Or Molly Ringwald can endorse it.

Mood: Sardonic

Degrees of Freedom
Posted 08.08.10 at 01:25 PM UTC
Tagged me | # | Comment [1]

Growing up in the suburban American professional and entrepreneurial hothouse, a social order that produces some of the most fortunate people in the world, can give a unique view of the different zonal borders of life. Somewhat proving my own point, I might invoke the image of a golf course: green, fairway, rough, sand, and water.

Denis Leary might define the green as:

I've got an average house,
With a nice hardwood floor.
And my wife, and my job, my kids, and my car,
My feet on my table,
And a Cuban cigar.

I'm inclined to think it's generally more about financial security heading later into life. The economic value and highly favorable odds of the system can hardly be questioned.

It's still not the easiest way for everyone. Everyone knows people who, actively or passively, bounced off the fairway and into the rough.

I can picture the face that people get - the face that I get - when we hear about someone wandering off the way. It's the same feeling you get when you find out how much a saved dollar is worth fifty years down the road. In fact, chances are, that's the kind of future you're watching the person walk away from.

On the other hand, in one of my favorite Rush songs it is said about suburbs, "Nowhere is the misfit or the dreamer so alone."

Living abroad and traveling have expanded my understanding of my own little golf course. I joke about my ABCDE's of personalities living abroad: Academics, Burnouts, Crazies, Do-gooders, and Expats. It's interesting because you can see a much more polarized and wider spectrum of people when in these conditions.

Life is (thankfully, for me) much narrower within the suburban environment. The sand trap is probably as stinging as a misdemeanor, and a job problem could probably land you deep in the drink.

What description of the rough would you get from somebody who grew up in a neighborhood you wouldn't consider safe to drive through? How about from a Rwandan subsistence farmer?

Our rug friend Suat once said something to the effect of, "These women [who make rugs in Eastern Turkey and Kurdistan] are free. You have your life and you are free to do what you want, but these women are really free."

Part of freedom is being able to alter your life and fate in whatever way you wish. I see no reason to be ashamed or particularly proud of one's own set of borders, but awareness of them makes us all better people.

People do need to realize that flimsy, symbolic expeditions into the wild begin looking like country club newsletters when they are funded by a publisher's book advance. And just dipping your toe in the water forces you to do a lot of imagining about what the pool is really like. Contentment and success are not easily mapped from one scenario to another.

When I got my drivers license, the first thing I wanted to do was jump into the truck and drive west. I told a classmate (who could have been the grounds-keeper at my little country club) this, and he looked at me like I was crazy. I couldn't describe it at the time (and wouldn't have wanted to), but it was really about realizing the newly-expanded scope of experience that had just come available.

So, for those of us with lives that support it, as you're driving up to an intersection one day look out to the west and imagine driving that way. Imagine the past-due bill notices starting to pile in, then the eviction or foreclosure, then the letters from the IRS. Watch the watchmaker's craft of mechanisms that prop up our lives and define our order begin to close in upon themselves, and keep driving, sailing, riding, and walking until you're a subsistence farmer in northwest China or a nomad in Turkmenistan.

Look up and see the same burning sun in the sky that was getting cancelled out by the air conditioning in your car, and try for a moment to even begin to envision how big, deep, and wide our world is. You won't succeed, because no one ever has.

Borscht, Anyone?
Posted 08.05.10 at 08:57 PM UTC
Tagged travel | # | Comment [0]

Well, it was way too expensive and a lot of trouble, but we finally have our Russian visas! Instead of having to appear at the consulate in person ... twice, we hired a guy who did it somehow without us being involved at all. This is the standard practice among people who actually get their visas.

Since I don't make a habit out of photographing and displaying my passport, here is an example of what it looks like (it's a sticker that takes up a whole sheet):

Russia is a very difficult place to get into, and then to tour, but I expect it to be well worth the trouble.

I Want My, I Want My, I Want My MCE
Posted 08.03.10 at 09:23 PM UTC
Tagged technical | # | Comment [0]

The logic behind netbooks is that they pretty much do just about anything you would normally want to do.

Converting full-length movies from mpeg4 to xvid is apparently not one of those things. I started this job in the morning; it's past midnight now and we're just now at 87% on the second of two passes.

Visions of Core i5's will dance through my head tonight.

Efendi and Sigma
Posted 08.02.10 at 07:41 AM UTC
Tagged programming | # | Comment [3]

I'm very happy with Efendi. I have a little file locking bug in my sqlite database that occasionally hiccups, but generally it's stable and there's nothing I would add. Well, for the sake of completeness there is actually no comment editing facility once the comment is approved, but for me that's not important.

Sigma is really going nicely. I am eager to get it on my system sometime soon. My job will be to jump in after Meta finishes the combat core. I have learned a lot more about Python, and I know some design patterns that will straighten out mistakes I made years ago. We'll get the codebase nice and tidy and start looking at the last few big things to do.

Unless you've dabbled in what I might call stateless scenarios, a lot of this thinking is very peculiar. When I say stateless I mean: there is no way to "pause" a MUD, because it's a world rather than a game. If one player wants to stop, what about everyone else?

A good example of the illogicality of the big blockages is shopkeeping. If you think about going to the store in Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy, you probably expect a tunnel-vision scenario: the shopkeeper engages you, you say what you want, you pay, sell something, and get out. Seems like a small thing.

Again, you might have three people in the room in a MUD scenario, and getting that individual attention becomes either difficult to implement or could even cause a break in the "reality" of the world.

Also, if somebody comes in and attacks you, you had better be able to know. How do I manage that state? Are you in state SHOPPING, and a certain list of actions bring you back to state PLAYING? But you don't get any world action updates until then? That's hardly realistic or reasonable. Screwing with player state (meaning, effectively pulling a player's perception or even existence out of the world for some reason), is frowned upon because it takes away the activeness of the surroundings. You're back in Zelda, where everybody only ever talks to you.

But how do you manage a shopping scenario where people are entering and exiting the room while you're looking at the product list? How do you define who a shopkeeper is in a game, and can a human player become one?

The fact is, it's probably best to have a 'shop' command, which can take the name of a character to be specific when we have multiple shop keepers. This prints out a product list and a 'buy' or 'sell' command completes the transaction. If you don't like scrolly text, set a notification threshold to ignore player movements and conversations for a while.

I think a 'vend' command is nice, where you put a tag on items that are currently being sold by a character. This allows individuals to become shopkeepers.

Then, you have to think architecture: I think it's best to have shopkeeper be a 'persona' where a character automatically puts a 'vend' tag on any item added to his inventory. This ties up a lot of loose ends in one swipe, as a sold item would be automatically tagged as it entered the inventory of the purchasing shopkeeper. Another option would be to have a kind of special case somewhere:

if character == shopkeeper then ...

Sigma has always been about putting a system around things to make sure good logic can be good logic throughout the game. For me, it's almost always better for an automated action to simulate a typed command:

character.queue('go west')

rather than use some library command:

move_character_between_rooms(character, room1, room2)

The result is the same, but let the command interpreter figure out what to do about moving a character. Because as the game gets more complex, moving a character becomes a highly controlled activity: checks to make sure the player is not asleep while trying to move, not fighting (or if allowed, that needs to be an attempt to run away), not dead, not logging in, and if there are followers the followers need to be moved as well. You tear the game asunder if you start calling brute-force backend functions to do these tasks.

Circle, the old premade engine we used in high school, didn't have this rich of a backend interface. I struggled to make things work because I overlooked necessary checks when extending the system.