tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-261454282011-08-24T08:16:06.030-04:00Ceci n'est pas un blogJaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.comBlogger371100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-18515532770856899932009-02-11T08:57:00.005-05:002009-02-11T09:12:29.047-05:00

I went to check my e-mail this morning, and was thrilled to see a message from "iTunes", notifying me that iLightning was ready for sale! Wheee! I've been checking my e-mail every few hours for a couple of days now.Interestingly, the app is already available through the iTunes store. I was wondering whether I would get a chance for final confirmation, first, to allow me to upload the iLightning

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-54345122362125365212009-01-28T11:32:00.005-05:002009-01-28T11:52:43.905-05:00

Occasionally, friends or co-workers ask me to recommend investing books. I used to suggest a list of reading, but now I'm going to change this standard advice. If you can only read one book about investing, read Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. If you can read more than one book, read it first, anyway, to put the other stuff in context.This book has much wider applications than finance. He

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-84970091088719321402008-11-30T16:00:00.004-05:002008-11-30T16:04:27.060-05:00

Can one do for clothing design and manufacturing what lulu.com has done for publishing?How does Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) design and manufacture its clothing?It looks like someone's tried to do this already, but the site doesn't seem fresh. What's the story?Motivation: I've got a hoodie that is a bit more dressy, and less sporty than others. I have a drafty house and use it in winter. The

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-8388889039767688632008-11-30T14:04:00.006-05:002008-11-30T14:20:42.354-05:00

A friend just introduced me to the turn-of-the (last) century Ukrainian painter Ilya Repin. His realistic works are incredibly lit and detailed. I love this stuff.Comparing period costumes to even extremely carefully designed fantasy costumes (for instance, in the Lord of the Rings movies) just shows the amazing detail and crazy variety of real costumes. Even the simplest cloak or tunic in these

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-48785036261268014332008-11-11T00:22:00.008-05:002008-11-11T01:04:38.466-05:00

This is old news, but I just read John Kessel's essay, Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality.It's a thoughtful and thorough criticism of the Sci-Fi novels Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card. It also touches on issues of victimization that seem to explain the novels' appeal to adolescents. Kessel writes:       Card has spoken in interviews

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-42739630924953642092008-11-03T11:39:00.002-05:002008-11-03T11:42:56.065-05:00

You have to code for use before you can code for re-use.Code reuse through incest: having to derive a new class to create a new style of button.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-37068566809731597582008-06-27T11:38:00.003-04:002008-06-27T11:44:26.639-04:00

I took part in the Toronto Indie Game Jam again, this May, with some friends. We had 2.5 days to create a small game. We decided to use the Unity engine, and actually managed a fun demo, with breaks for Mother's Day, and prior obligations.Office Smash is up on the TOJam site, here. You can play it from your browser, as long as you download the Unity plug-in (like Flash/Shockwave).Here's a Youtube

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-20305103980370515642007-08-25T20:11:00.000-04:002007-08-25T20:22:36.730-04:00

We spent a day in Madrid, before connecting to Asturias. Since we didn't have a place to stay, and since it was 36 degrees C, we decided to camp out on the city tour buses. Here are the pics.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-90573133621727080302007-05-06T13:13:00.000-04:002007-05-06T13:23:08.996-04:00

Recently, I've been doing some work with BSP trees. One of the problems you run in to is that you need a way to split polygons when they straddle a partitioning plane. I derived some code to do this, before finding this wonderful FAQ that also provides sample code. My code's in Python, whereas the BSP FAQ's code is in C++. The algorithms are basically the same, except I've combined polygon

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-17119919925184207512007-04-30T15:01:00.000-04:002008-12-09T10:26:40.276-05:00

Trish's dad and I are re-doing the front yard. So far, we've stripped off the old porch, and are reinforcing the supports, while we wait for the new decking to arrive. This involved much sledge-hammering, pry-barring, and entirely too much nail-removal.Here I am, working hard!

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-87453194196229543152007-04-17T11:27:00.000-04:002007-04-17T12:17:12.169-04:00

I've been working on some ideas for procedural graphics recently. For the non-programmers out there, that means graphics that are designed (not just drawn) by computer programs, not by humans.I've found a very productive (and free) way to experiment, using Python to write the code, and POV-Ray to draw the results. The one drawback is that POV-Ray is not a real-time renderer. I.e. it takes a few

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-29840656493282900742007-03-20T23:55:00.000-04:002007-03-21T00:15:07.527-04:00

This is addictive:http://justin.tv/">Justin TVI'm watching live video, effectively through someone else's eyes, of a talk at YCombinator. In California. In real-time.I went to the original YCombinator startup school, and I've been following Paul Graham and Trevor Blackwell's companies, as well as reading Jessica Livingston's book. It's surreal to see them there live.It's funny. I used to be

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-82153108756739572452007-03-19T07:50:00.000-04:002007-03-19T08:00:58.110-04:00

For a little while now, I've been using TiddlyWiki as my personal notebook. It rocks! The nice thing is that everything is stored in just one HTML page; so, it's just one file. If you want to back it up, or transfer it, you're just copying one file. You don't need anyone's permission to install it, since it runs on your machine, not some IT-administered server.Instead of having wiki pages linked

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-45504068822883495812007-03-19T07:12:00.000-04:002007-03-19T07:32:13.861-04:00

Well, I'm kind of late to this party, but I finally got a copy of Founders At Work. I had a feeling it would be good, from reading the free bits on the website, and I was not disappointed. This book rocks!It's a collection of interviews with startup founders and early employees talking about the early days of some now-famous software companies. I've been hooked on these kinds of stories ever

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1170297095538530712007-01-31T21:02:00.000-05:002007-01-31T21:35:35.313-05:00

I've been hearing about Haskell a fair bit lately, so I thought I'd take a look at it. I've only played around with it for an hour or so, so it's too early to draw any real conclusions. I need to pick a small project to implement in the language.I'm working through Yet Another Haskell Tutorial, using the GHC implementation.The article that first got me to thinking about the language was this post

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1167875619552738922007-01-03T20:43:00.000-05:002007-01-03T20:53:39.563-05:00

While visiting Trish's parents at Longbow Lake, we discovered that some wasps had built a nest under the gazebo. Barry and I removed and dissected the nest. Trish stayed safe, inside. There wasn't any danger, since the temperature was well below zero. Here are the pics.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1167874921019682832007-01-03T20:34:00.000-05:002007-01-03T20:42:01.030-05:00

Happy New Year! 2007's going to be great!We spent Christmas Eve with my parents; we then flew to Winnipeg, and drove to Kenora, to spend a week with Trish's parents. Here are some pictures of sunset over Longbow Lake.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1166569056548365322006-12-19T17:55:00.000-05:002006-12-19T17:57:36.550-05:00

BeatIt is a neat little music game by Sean Barrett. As you play the game, your firing patterns and the enemies make music. I love the concept, and it's well executed.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1166568786817544302006-12-19T17:50:00.000-05:002006-12-19T17:53:06.826-05:00

Yay! According to the computer, I passed the second CSC exam. So, that's it. I'd forgotten what that late-December-I-just-wrote-my-last-exam high felt like. I was grinning all the way home.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1165875076644546752006-12-11T16:58:00.000-05:002006-12-11T17:22:50.676-05:00

Whew! Well, I dodged that bullet! I just wrote the first of two computerized exams for the Canadian Securities Course (CSC), and I passed!I signed up for the course on Dec 31 2005. According to the rules, you have a year to take the two exams before needing to pay to extend the timeline. With my time running out, I scheduled my exams at the end of November. The first was today, and the next one

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1153803087089140952006-07-25T00:49:00.000-04:002006-07-25T00:57:47.183-04:00

Alright, this is it. I'm officially going on a diet. Why should anyone care about some (almost) fat North American, when people around the world are starving? Well, you shouldn't, but I'm going to try to document the experience honestly, and to provide real data. Maybe you're another fat North American. Maybe I can inspire you.I've started another blog, just for this diet. Read all about it here.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1152482575026220512006-07-09T17:52:00.000-04:002006-07-09T18:06:29.366-04:00

A friend invited me to a public party by the folks at newmindspace. I'd never been to one of their events before, and didn't know what to expect. It was a blast!We were instructed to meet at Queen's park, at 7pm, in costume. After waiting for people to gather, we walked over to Museum station, and took the TTC down to Union station. From there, we paraded east along Front street, and the

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1152481959588615042006-07-09T17:47:00.000-04:002006-07-09T18:05:58.500-04:00

I'll be starting a contract with Transgaming on Tuesday! I'll be working on the "console team", helping to port games from one system to another. It'll be interesting to see how this differs from creating a game from scratch.I'd been working on an independent action game, but once my severance package ran out I had to submit to The First Rule of Independent Games.Rule 1: Don't quit your day job!

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1148615376408342772006-05-25T23:45:00.000-04:002006-05-25T23:49:36.423-04:00

Coding. Got munchies. 24/7 grocery is closed for renovations -- liars!Went to the gas station.Got "roasted chicken" Lay's chips on a this-can't-be-good-but-it'll-be-interesting whim.It turns out, they taste like Swiss Chalet's mash-potato gravy (not the Chalet Sauce)! Salty, but good.I'm not sure the world should care.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1148493018193266882006-05-24T13:44:00.000-04:002006-05-24T13:51:04.880-04:00

The Toronto Indie Game Jam games are available here.Our game, "Horde!" is here. Currently, it's PC only, and you can't really do much except place factories to produce non-functional ladders. We have an updated version that adds some more game play, and Mac OSX support, but we need to package it. I recommend trying Bubble Thing, as well. It's a really polished little ambient / abstract shooter

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1148103946076738642006-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:002006-05-20T02:04:57.423-04:00

Wow! This great-looking game is just 96 kB (about 1/100th the size of a small 3d game).So how do you fit a game that looks better than Quake 3 into 96 kB? You use procedural methods to generate all of the artwork! Instead of storing and compressing the graphics -- 3d models, textures, animations, you store the instructions for creating the graphics, and have the game synthesize them at load time.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1147804396935444642006-05-16T14:32:00.000-04:002006-05-16T14:40:29.103-04:00

I won't be playing in the London Goodlife Fitness and Tennis Club Early Bird Open. My right wrist is still sore, and I hurt my left rotator-cuff during the TOJam. There's nothing like typing on a laptop for 25 hours, and sleeping on the couch, to encourage RSI.The shoulder's a lot better than it was -- I can lift my arm again, and my wrist is no worse than it was during the last tournament. I

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1147111924581870822006-05-08T14:01:00.000-04:002006-05-08T15:18:31.166-04:00

Well, so much for posting regular updates; we were just too busy!The TOJam's over now, and it was a blast. The organizers did a great job -- it exceeded our expectations.We managed to demo our game, but there's little gameplay. It's closer to an interactive toy at this point. That was the case for most of the games demoed, but there were some polished exceptions. I think we'll keep working on it,

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1146849319688160072006-05-05T12:30:00.000-04:002006-05-05T13:27:15.850-04:00

Well, the Toronto Indie Game Jam starts tonight at 6pm. I'm pretty excited although I'm not really sure what to expect. I've been loading my laptop up with tools, picking some books I want to bring, and some music to listen to.I have high hopes for the event. Martin and I have been tossing around some game ideas that seem really fun, and only slightly impossible to finish.At first, I was a put

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1146845849809202332006-05-05T12:07:00.000-04:002006-05-05T12:17:29.810-04:00

Success! In recognition of my first-round defeat last week, I'm now tied for #64 in Ontario, Class C. Of course, since #74 is the lowest rank, that puts me in 2nd last place. Considering that you get points just for showing up, the rankings are pretty useless until you get into the top 20-30.The next tournament I'd like to play is the London Goodlife Fitness and Tennis Club Early Bird Open, on

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1146601086983899302006-05-02T16:15:00.000-04:002006-05-02T16:18:40.340-04:00

Alright! I just got my confirmation that I've succesfully registered for the Toronto Indie Game Jam. It should be a fun weekend!

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1146370777314920472006-04-29T23:46:00.000-04:002006-04-30T01:16:24.730-04:00

On a whim, I decided last week to enter an OTA-sanctioned tennis tournament. After a few e-mails, the kindly OTA person sent me my player number by e-mail a few hours before the tournament entry deadline. Great! I signed up. Then came the realization: now what? I hadn't actually played tennis this year, and only a handful of times last year. The last time I played an OTA sanctioned tourny was

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1145293514018594602006-04-17T13:00:00.000-04:002006-04-17T13:06:44.933-04:00

There's a great article describing the making of the acclaimed PS2 game, Shadow of the Colossus. It's super-detailed -- I'm amazed that the developers would give out this much information. Kudos!Thanks, Stanley, for pointing me to this!

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1145218393249748852006-04-16T15:56:00.000-04:002006-04-17T13:08:07.596-04:00

Yesterday we took some friends out to Queen's Pasta Cafe for a birthday lunch. Mmmmm.The food was excellent, and the desserts were just naughty. I had rigatoni with sausage, in a tomato cream sauce. I'm not usually a fan of blue cheese, but the gorgonzola in the sauce gave it a nice bite. For dessert I had a piece of blueberry-white chocolate cheesecake.We were a group of six, and the service was

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1145085011823048282006-04-15T02:52:00.000-04:002006-04-15T03:10:11.830-04:00

Wow! In collecting links for the previous post, I learned that one of my all-time favourite games, Another World, was rotoscoped. Eric Chahi, the (sole!) designer, filmed his kid brother running and jumping. The game was very cinematic and artistic for its time. Apparently it used 2D-polygons some years before the development of Macromedia (um Adobe) Flash.Well, that's all very interesting ...

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1145082418621707412006-04-15T02:10:00.000-04:002006-04-15T02:52:44.556-04:00

I just saw the trailer for the new film-adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly".There's a Wired article that describes some of the problems they ran into in production. I always love production horror stories; they let me put my various death-marches in perspective. I suppose I shouldn't revel in others' misery, but it's more of a comfort thing. I understand their pain.Rotoscoping is

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26145428.post-1145078785086748892006-04-15T01:23:00.000-04:002006-04-15T01:27:17.516-04:00

Well, I caved and decided to sign up with one of the blog hosting services. I needed to optimise my process. Previously I was hand-editing my old unblog page in Textpad, or Emacs, and manually editing the RSS feed. Ugh -- not a recipe for frequent posting.

Jaba Adamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08855709569800147747noreply@blogger.com0