After several interviews, I am officially joining the UNCG family!

It is with much happiness that on May 28th, I will become part of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro staff!  Having worked for University California, Davis from 99-01, I am familiar with the 'university' work ethic and operating methods and I am very excited to be getting back to that again soon.

Jackson Library

My new role is part developer, part researcher and is quite a unique position and one that is new to the UNCG library.  Until I get some better pics, this is the building where my new office will be located.

Even though I just accepted a promotion with my current employer doing some pretty interesting work, being part of the UNCG team is something that I have been working towards for about a year.

Popcorn kills too, you know!

Many millions of game-developer hours ago, one of the first free-roaming action/RPG games was released with a very robust interactive environment: Ultima Underworld.  In this early medieval FPS (First-Person-Spellcaster..), players could pick up items from the ground and use them, put them down or throw them, and the items would bounce and fall 'realistically'.  They would even persist until the end of the game wherever the player chose to drop them.  Players could also combine items to make new ones.

Ultima Underworld

An example of this creative use of game items was combining a burning torch with a bushel of corn, which then populated the players inventory with yummy (digital) popcorn!  This undocumented and largely useless feature of the game shows how an open world game environment was meant to be played.  Sure.. popcorn is tasty, but how many people die from choking on popcorn every year? 

Admittedly, not many.. but probably some.  And everyone has cumulatively spent days of their life attempting to get a popcorn husk out of their gums! 

Maybe, then, the ability to create popcorn shouldn't have been programmed into the game?

Drunk driving is bad.  It kills people.  I would never suggest that it is an acceptable choice and I would never say that I disagree with the efforts of MADD to prevent drunk driving.  However, this is what MADD has to say about the latest offering in the 'Grand Theft Auto' series which gives the players the ability to visit a bar, get drunk, and (attempt) to drive a car:

Each year nearly 13,500 people die in drunk driving crashes and another half a million are injured in alcohol-related traffic crashes. This is why MADD is extremely disappointed by the decision of the manufacturers of the game Grand Theft Auto IV to include a game module where players can drive drunk. Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke. Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable. MADD is calling on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to reclassify Grand Theft Auto IV as an Adults Only game, a step up from the current rating of Mature and for the manufacturer to consider a stop in distribution – if not out of responsibility to society then out of respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving.

That is a terrible statistic, but MADD has completely missed the point!  When a player gets hammered and tries to drive a car, it is almost impossible to avoid accidents due to the completely messed up controls and twisting display. 

This isn't intended to be a fun experience in the game.. you could mess up your mission, mess up your shiney car, or hit someone and get the police chasing you! 

There is no reward for drinking and driving and there is no mission requirement where this must be done to complete the game.  Its just something that can be done.  But you don't have to do it.

The lesson that the player will take away is that, "If I do this in real life.. it could really suck!"  Isn't it better to learn that lesson on your sofa than upside down in a ditch somewhere? 

Another important point that MADD has chosen to overlook is that if the player makes the choice to get digitally drunk, they aren't required to drive. 

The player has the options of walking (still hard, but not as bad as driving).. or calling a cab!  Why not celebrate this life-lesson/"public service announcement" instead of criticizing the developers?

MADD, I like your general platform, but in the case of GTA-IV, you have missed the mark.

Aguri Suzuki takes his toys and goes home

It should come as no surprise to most that Aguri Suzuki of 'Super Aguri F1' have officially withdrawn from the 2008 F1 season (and likely from the sport).  While unfortunate for the "Super-Best-Friends" team, the sport of Formula 1 is not for the timid, nor the cash-starved.

Several sponsorship pull-outs definitely hurt Super Aguri and caused them to start the season with an untested car and heavy reliance on Honda's generousity, but it is the ruling that each team must manufacture their own car that closed the coffin on the team's challenge.

The precedent that all teams must manufacture their own chassis has been one of the few truly consistent features of this sport and it is very important that this standard is maintained.  While it would have been "nice" to see Super Aguri F1 continue in the sport, its not in the best interest of the sport in general. 

All other teams currently manufacture their own cars, so why should Super Aguri be allowed to use a 'customer' chassis from Honda (or Ferrari or McLaren...)?

I'm not one to halt progress, and in fact I try to champion change in any way that I can in my professional and personal life, but I do not see it as 'progress' to make such a fundamental change to Formula 1 which would allow anyone who can write a big enough check to join the sport.

Formula 1 requires more than money - it requires an innate skill to outthink your competitors, an insurmountable drive to excel and the raw engineering talent to get the last thousandth of a percent from a car's performance.

There have been some successes in Formula 1 with teams started by a single person with a dream: McLaren, Jordan, Tyrell, and Williams to name a few.  But out of these, half of them are no longer competing. 

The days of starting a team in your garage are over, no matter how big that garage might seem.  To make a serious attempt at success in Formula 1 requires a large automotive sponsor.  Obviously, Super Aguri has skilled drivers and a talented team - they just couldn't afford to manufacture their own car.  If Suzuki wants to own a top-level racing teamp, now that the Champ Car/IRL split is officially over, there would be no shame in joining them.

That being said, what happened to all the other successful and profitable car manufacturers stepping up to make a mid-season pitch to bail out the Super Aguri effort?

I challenge Hyundai to enter the sport of Formula 1!  Maybe next year we could have an 'Elantra' pace car!  And in a few years, we could have a Korean F1 race!

What are you most looking forward to this weekend?

Now that I'm back from my trip to the New Jersey office and got to hug my wonderful wife (who came to the airport to get me in the wee hours this morning after my flight was delayed), I'm really looking forward to riding the Owl's Roost trail again.  We "discovered" this challenging single-track last weekend and I was pleasantly surprised that it was both technically challenging and had some fast stretches.

Lately, we've been riding around Country Park and Tanglewood, but Owl's Roost reminds us of the Kenna Cartwright trails back in Kamloops (before the pine beetle ate all the trees).  We'll bring a camera sometime and get our own shots of Owl's Roost, but the pics on the Owl's Roost page give you an idea.

There's a right way and a wrong way and another way

I found this email address validation algorithm lurking in some code that I was tweaking:

      i =document.mailform.femail.value.indexOf("@")
      j =document.mailform.femail.value.indexOf(".",i)
      k =document.mailform.femail.value.indexOf(",")
      kk =document.mailform.femail.value.indexOf("  ")
      jj =document.mailform.femail.value.lastIndexOf(".")+1
      len =document.mailform.femail.value.length
      if((i>0) && (j > (i+1)) && (k==-1) && (len -jj >=2) && (len-jj<=3))
      {
            return true;
      }
      else
      {
            alert("Please use correct E-mail format in the \"Your Friend\'s Email\" field.\n" +
                  document.mailform.femail.value + " is invalid.");
            return false;
      }

The above code works fine. kinda-sorta, but its a little ugly.  I like 'regular expressions', so this is how I would do the same thing:

      var emailRegEx = [a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*@
            (?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+(?:[A-Z]{2}|com|org|net|gov|mil|
            biz|info|mobi|name|aero|jobs|museum)\b; 
      if (document.mailform.femail.value.match(emailRegEx)) 
      { 
            return true; 
      }
      else
      { 
            alert("Please use correct E-mail format in the \"Your Friend\'s Email\" field.\n" +
                  document.mailform.femail.value + " is invalid.");
            return false; 
      }

Now, looking at my code snippet, its pretty clear whats happening:  the email address is being validated again 'emailRegEx', which will return 'true' if it matchs or 'false' if it doesn't.  Plus, it catches on when someone is trying to enter an email address like fkljhfsd@klhfsd.sfk, which the first code segment would be perfectly happy with.

Of course, the regular expression can be called 'ugly', too, but I think its quite elegant.. beautiful, even.  And I didn't have to make it up, either (every regular expression you could ever need can be found here or on any one of 100 other similar sites). 

Keep it simple, keep it clean, and don't re-invent the wheel.  I dunno.. its just the way I was raised...  :O)

"Hey, human.. I'm tripping balls down here! What's in this stuff??"

01-04-08_1851.jpg

How to move thirty feet away and be on another planet:

I am moving into a much more interesting role as an 'Implementation Engineer' and besides the pay increase and better cube, I have the advantage of already knowing the system and have already worked closely on many cases with my new manager.

The "Last Day" in a position can sometimes be a sad time or can evoke mixed feelings.  Not today!

While I don't expect any surprises, it is going to be a shock to the system to have deliverables, accountability and all the other things that go along with a "normal" job.  However, I am looking forward to this new challenge as I start doing the things that I actually find interesting!

Newcube

For the geeks out there who care, these are the technologies I am working with:

Sf

Things I'm thinking about today (no, its not "work")

Pota

Say what you will about his politics, Charlton "Chuck" Heston will live forever in the memory of everyone who had seen his films.  His vast talent took him to roles that ranged from Moses to an astronaut in a bleak future to the hero-of-the-day when LA was hit by "the big one".  He had the ability to portray both a natural and powerful strength while at the same time showing his characters' tortured internal conflicts.  This fantastic actor who left us memorable moments in nearly every one of his films, and one of my pseudonym-sakes (along with Chuck Yeager), will be missed.

Classic-clark-1000

Forty years ago today, another hero from another era was suddenly taken from us.  Jim Clark raised the bar for Formula One drivers by demonstrating a natural talent for speed that comes along maybe once every decade or so.  Even in a time when driver-safety was almost nonexistant and driver mortality was frighteningly high, no one ever thought that Jim could lose his life racing.  But on April 7, 1968 Jim Clark perished on the epic Hockenheim circuit in a Formula 2 race.  The brave Scot who exhibited an almost magical level of car control had a short but distinguished career and statistically betters even the great Michael Schumacher.

On a happy note...I have hit the 'Down 25 Pounds' mark on my weight loss plan!

"The sky broke like an egg into full sunset and the water caught fire." -- Pamela Hansford Johnson
Show us a self-taken picture of the sunset.
Submitted by Connie.

Sunset at Cape Fear