Web Infected Dish

Iguana Model

2011-04-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

I finally finished 2 models last month. I am posting the first one here. It is a small model of iguana head. I worked on it for a class on modeling using a software called Mudbox.

I must admit that I have not heard about Mudbox before the class. With Mudbox, we sculpt instead of model. At first I found the process awkward, but after a while I started to enjoy sculpting. For the purpose of this class, we were basically encouraged to go overboard with details on our model (with the hope that we learn more about sculpting that way), so small models were encouraged. The modeling process is more or less illustrated in the following image.

Basically we used Mudbox to sculpt details on our models and then create a displacement map. Next, we applied the displacement map to a base model using 3ds max and then (after setting up lights) rendered the output images.

I am quite happy with this model even though I am not fully satisfied with the diffuse map. However, with my current skills, I do not know what I can do to improve it :p Anyway, here are more renders.

Here is one thing I learned while working on this model. With Mudbox 2011, exporting a Mudbox model to an OBJ file behaves in a way I did not expect. It creates 1 OBJ file; however, the OBJ file has multiple models at the same position. (I have not yet tested if the multiple models are from sculpt layers in the Mudbox file or from the sculpt levels.) I expected that I would get 1 model that has merged details from all sculpt layers. Still, this unexpected behavior can be easily fixed by opening the resulting OBJ file and then deleting models that does not have the merged details.

On 3D Modeling

2011-01-24T07:18:00.000-08:00

It has been a long time since my last post, so allow me a quick, unpolished post this time.

I have been learning how to create 3D models the last 10 months. Here are what I learned from my modeling lessons.

Modeling is basically putting vertices on 3D space in such a manner (for example, 2 vertices are connected to form an edge, 3 or more edges form a polygon) that the computer can create an image that we can recognize as objects.
Polygon modeling using 3ds Max, to me, means defining edge loops at points important to define a shape; then let the computer interpolate the area in-between (using the TurboSmooth modifier). As a computer science graduate, I see this style of modeling as a way to selectively add details.
Modeling using Mudbox begins with defining a basic shape (called the base model). Vertices on the base model should be spread as uniformly as possible; equivalently, quads on the base model should be as close as possible to a square. Next, we sub-divide the base model and add details by pulling out or pushing in vertices. As a computer science graduate, I feel this style of modeling reminiscent to brute-force algorithms. We rely on the computer hardware to handle the large amount of data generated as we keep sub-dividing the base model in order to add finer and finer details.

I found myself agreeing a friend when he said that modeling using Mudbox is just using a fancy FFD (Free Form Deformation). However, further use convinces me that the tools provided by Mudbox are much more powerful than FFD. The difference among the tools are subtle enough to fool me into thinking that sticking to one tool is enough. They, however, serve different purposes and are useful on different scenarios/problems.

All in all, I find modeling using Mudbox much closer to drawing. I can concentrate on getting proportions right, enhancing shapes, and other high-level thinking instead of worrying about the topology of the model.

Comparing Stereotypes

2010-09-04T08:42:00.000-07:00

I made an interesting observation recently. It is about Lyo and Merly, the mascots for the recent 2010 Youth Olympic Games.

The setting was a chaotic but warm family gathering, with many adults and 3 children. The TV was on, and Lyo and Merly made a brief appearance. Someone asked, "Which one is Lyo and which one is Merly?" Another replied, "Usually blue is boy, what. So blue should be Lyo and red should be Merly."

I instantaneously thought, "Hey, that's a wrong stereotype!" I was using the Power Rangers stereotype in colour scheme. Red is always the main guy; blue is one of the sidekicks, who is sometimes a girl (especially if the blue is close to cyan, like Merly's colour).

The next moment, I questioned my own thought, "Why is that wrong? After all, the boy is usually given the color blue and the girl pink, a shade of red."

I find it interesting that 2 stereotypes I take for granted clash each other in a manner I never expected.

Vague Art Discussion #1: Rhythm

2010-07-12T02:56:00.000-07:00

Now that I will be able to focus on arts (drawing and 3D modeling), I decided to start a series of blog posts in which I write my thoughts about what I learn in drawing and modeling. I'll call this series "Vague Art Discussion" because art discussions feel vague to me most of the time.

Rhythm
Last year, while my sketch group was working on our doujin artbook, I tried reading the book Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators by Michael D. Mattesi, but I could not understand it at all. Recently, the book was recommended for reading by Dom, one of our life drawing instructors. So I am trying to read the book again now, with an additional motivation to make sense of what it says. I still don't understand most of what the book says; it uses many terms that I just cannot understand: "directional force", "applied force", and "rhythm".
(This only reinforces my opinion that art discussions are vague most of the time.)

I didn't pay much attention to the word "rhythm" when reading. It started to seem important in the next life drawing class, when Dom (casually) mentioned the word while demonstrating drawing a series of sketches to depict an action. It made me want to understand this concept.

Before proceeding, let me make it clear that what I write below are my attempt to understand what rhythm means in drawing. I could very well be completely wrong.

I personally interpret rhythm as the regular beat in music. It suggests the need for time. The best way I can define rhythm is "something similar that happens more-or-less regularly".

"Something similar" because sometimes beat sound changes, yet I can still understand that rhythm continues.
"Happens more-or-less regularly" because, again, sometimes the duration between 2 beats changes, yet I can still understand that the rhythm continues.

As I re-read the paragraphs about rhythm for the third time or so, suddenly it hit me that there is a time dimension in drawing.

When drawing, I start from a position, go to another position, etc, with a pencil/charcoal. I know that I have a certain kind of speed when drawing a line; so I need a certain amount of time to draw a length of a line. Thus, drawing similar length of line takes me similar duration. This may explain the "more-or-less regular" part of rhythm description.
Now I only need to draw something similar "more-or-less regularly" and perhaps I will have my rhythm!

The example given in the book is about drawing zigzag lines, with skiing downhill as analogy (on hindsight, perhaps my finding above should be straightforward after all), so it seems like I'm getting closer to understanding rhythm.

However, this is life; obviously the next wall comes hitting me in the face very soon after that: the moment I hold a pencil and tried to apply my understanding of rhythm when drawing. The examples given in the book were drawn by people who understand rhythm, so it is easy to see rhythm in these drawings. In life drawing class, however, I see a real life model. Suddenly I realize that I need to find rhythm as an imaginary overlay from a real model. Some poses make it easier to see rhythm than others; most of the time, though, I just cannot see a rhythm on a pose. So that's something I need to be working on, I guess.

NB: Anyone reading who understand rhythm, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

Hierarchy

2010-07-08T01:56:00.000-07:00

Recently, I see the concept hierarchy everywhere. I am attending a 3D modeling class, which includes a life drawing class; and at work I am coding an editor for a web application.

In life drawing, Andrew, one of my instructors, says "Go for the large shape first". I think it's easy to imagine that the same advice applies in 3D modeling. After all, both drawing and modeling are about defining shapes.

In programming, it is more difficult to see how Andrew's advice applies. Perhaps it helps to put programming activity in the context of a development project. A project has goals and time limit. Thus, it is sensible to go for the large items first. "Large" in this case I interpret as "essential" or "must have". Then, I progressively go for smaller and smaller items to refine the system's behavior as close to the ideal behavior as possible. I interpret "smaller items" as "non-essential goals" or "nice-to-have items" and "non-essential bug fixing".

I was uncomfortable with "non-essential bug fixing" at first because, as item#5 in the Joel Test suggests, fixing bugs should have higher priority than writing new code. However, in the tight deadlines I was in, it simply felt right that non-essential bugs should wait. Re-reading what Joel wrote, I think what's important is not a rigid "fix bugs first then write new codes" rule; but finding a compromise between implementing new items and fixing bugs in items already implemented.

Anyway, I thought it's interesting to see a parallel between drawing and programming process. Perhaps I see it only now because the life drawing classes forces me to draw in a very limited time (3-minute poses, 1-minute hands, 10-minute faces, etc).

People List

2010-04-24T23:32:00.000-07:00

On a whim, I decided to compile this list of people who change my life for the better but I never meet in person.

Reading

Isaac Asimov: for writing I, Robot (my gateway drug to s.f.), The Bicentennial Man, The Gods Themselves, Nightfall.
David Brin: for writing Kiln People (my other gateway drug to s.f.), Earth, Glory Season, Otherness, The River of Time, & for coming up with the awesome story title Thor Meets Captain America.
Kurt Busiek: for writing Superman: Secret Identity
Orson Scott Card: for writing Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead.
Arthur C. Clarke: for writing Rendezvous with Rama, 3001, Childhood's End.
Thomas L. Friedman: for writing The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
Joe Haldeman: for writing The Forever War.
Robert A. Heinlein: for writing Starship Troopers.
Frank Herbert: for writing Dune (which got me interested in s.f.).
Shimoku Kio: for writing & drawing Genshiken.
Scott McCloud: for writing Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.
Frank Miller: for writing Batman: Year One.
Terry Pratchett: for writing Discworld novels.

Programming

Joel Spolsky: for writing Joel on Software (both the blog & the book, my gateway drug to self-improvement as a programmer).

Music

Andrew Aversa (a.k.a. zircon): for hosting VGDJ; remixing Ragol Weather.
Daniel Baranowsky: for remixing Knuckleduster.
Patrick Burns: for remixing Revisiting The Ruins.
Diggi Dis: for remixing And He Returned Home.
David W. Lloyd (a.k.a. djpretzel): for starting OverClocked Remix, remixing Love Hurts & Twoson Hits the Road.
wingless: for hosting VGDJ.

Anime fandom

Zac Bertschy: for hosting ANNCast.
Clarissa Graffeo: for hosting Anime World Order podcast.
Gerald Rathkolb: for hosting Anime World Order podcast.
Frederik Schodt: for writing The Astro Boy Essays (my gateway drug into reading about the anime/manga history in Japan & America), Dreamland Japan.
Justin Sevakis: for hosting ANNCast & writing a travel blog when he visited Singapore for Anime Festival Asia 2009.
Daryl Surat: for hosting Anime World Order podcast.

I will update this list from time to time.
(Last updated on 2 April 2011.)

Some Thoughts on Drawing

2010-04-22T00:43:00.000-07:00

I like to look at drawings, paintings, and sketches. Then I found out that I seemed to be better than my peers in drawing things on paper and I became interested in drawing, painting, and sketching. Soon, this interest started to make me feel the need to learn from other people who I think are better than I am.

However, I often cannot understand what (people who call themselves or are called) artists mean when they describe their work and their working process. For example, it was only recently that I found out that "organic look" means something in the line of "non-geometric look". Before that, I never understood what "organic look" meant whenever I read or heard this term.

As I continue drawing, painting and sketching, I found a lot of fuzzy concepts that I learned from going back and forth between practice and reading books on drawing and painting. Examples of such concepts are (1) the reason behind squinting eyes when painting and (2) the difference between drawing lines and painting strokes. I realize I need labels/words/terms/vocabulary to describe these things and organize them in my mind (I personally believe that organizing what I know helps in learning things that I do not yet know). It is at this point that I started to understand why artists usually use words that I did/do not understand. They try to describe fuzzy concepts that they know exist (because they use these concepts when creating things) but people in general are not familiar with. (I wonder if this is a universal problem because of specialization.)

I felt the need to write this article because of my recent experience collaborating with a friend from my drawing group. She shares similar interests in drawing, painting, and sketching (let's put "visual arts" label to this set of things), but her background and experience are very different from mine. There were times that I realized we were having difficulty to communicate (to describe what look that we want to achieve, for example). I wondered why this difficulty was there at all. As I pondered on it, my train of thought helped me to formulate the cause as I wrote in previous paragraphs. We both tried to explain what we meant using inexact words either because there were no exact words or because we did not fully understand what we wanted to describe.
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Related to this experience, there is another fuzzy concept that I started to see. I'd like to attempt to describe it here.

I find myself often using the words "high level" and "low level" to categorize things. The things can be concepts related to visual arts, programming, or anything in general; but let's to stick to visual arts concepts. A high level concept is not necessarily better/greater/more advanced than low level ones. A high level concept is built on top of a number of low level concepts (perhaps the metaphorical "top" is the reason for the term "high level"?). For example, walking is a high level concept while swinging arms, shifting body weight, moving a leg forward, and so on are low level concepts needed for walking. Low level concepts are more concrete than high level concepts. The fuzzy concepts I mentioned earlier above are high level concepts I learned from practicing low level concepts many times.

Now, an artist has his own knowledge, which is a set of high level concepts. As he practices, he learns more concepts.

On the one hand, people are naturally interested in new things, so usually they want to learn new things.
On the other, learning is a personal experience; thus learning what you are interested in means that you are likely to care about the topic deeply. Most of the time your care is deep enough to make you tie your self-worth to what you know.

I think this is why people are likely to be defensive/argumentative when discussing the concept they are currently learning. At least I often catch myself being so.

Artists with less experience care more about low level concepts, such as drawing the correct proportions, smoothing line curves, tightening up & cleaning up sketches, or even minute details of character (e.g. exact number of spikes in the case of anime hair). At some point, all these would sink to the background. The artist still thinks about all these, but they are in a background process that do not need much attention. It is at this point that he can learn new concepts because his conscious mind is free from all these. It is at this point that he starts building high level concepts using the low level concepts that now runs in the background process.

I think it is also at this point that he starts to use words people don't understand :)

Reality is no doubt much more complex than this; but, hey, that's what I can formulate in words for now.

Tobe Gundam

2010-04-09T02:07:00.001-07:00

Recently, I found that it is possible to get overwhelming nostalgia from things I am not too familiar with. I got it from listening Tobe Gundam in Operation British. I have listened to Tobe Gundam before this, but I thought it was ridiculous and I did not like it. It was listen-once-and-forget-about-it. After a while, though, I happened to hear the song and found it nostalgic. I still think it sounds outdated, but now I can enjoy the song and sometimes (when I'm in the appropriate mood) get teary eyed a little.

I also had a similar experience with the song Shine in the Storm (also in Operation British), but it is less surprising because I watched Gundam 08th MS Team, the series that has the song as opening.

Still, I think there is something about the musical style in Tobe Gundam that reminds me of my childhood (when anime was still infinitely cool).

Why, Mr Wachowski? Why?

2010-03-16T01:53:00.000-07:00

I just watched The Matrix Revolutions yesterday; so in some way, this post is a sequel to previous post. I started by interpreting the film as an anime story, but I found this approach not so successful this time. Maybe I'm getting less imaginative.

On the other hand, I did get some new understanding of the film on this rewatch. I didn't understand where the revolution is in Revolutions. I thought the film ended with just another cycle starting. But yesterday I thought maybe Neo did do things differently from previous Ones. Maybe in previous iterations Smith didn't get free. Maybe Neo (and everyone else) is actually tricked by the Oracle just to make some changes to the Matrix (the next to final scene suggests that there are some changes that the Architect is not happy about). However, I don't agree that the change is a revolution, though. To me it is simply a change. Perhaps my understanding of the word "revolution" is warped?
Anyway, the film further downgraded my impression of Neo as a figure. I thought he was the center of the Matrix storyline. I think the Oracle is actually the central figure. Neo is just an actor in her plan.

All in all, I think Revolutions fails as a film because it fails to convey so many things essential to understanding the story.

The biggest thing it fails to convey is the "revolutions" to the Matrix in the end. It could have shown people who want to be free actually get freed. Or a short scene of the freed people restarted human community in the real world. Perhaps even communication between friends, some of whom want to be free and others choose to stay in the Matrix?

Another big thing it fails to convey is the Smiths as an unstoppable threat to the Matrix and, therefore, the machines. So what if he infects everyone in the Matrix? What can the Smiths do to actually crash the Matrix? Divide by zero?

And perhaps what happens to Neo at the end adds to my questioning Revolutions' quality as a film. So the trilogy hooks us to this main character, Neo, and you cannot give him a satisfying end? Why?

On hindsight, perhaps Revolutions was one of the films that made me cynical about films with good-looking visual effects.

Reloading Neo & Trinity

2010-03-10T17:17:00.000-08:00

I just re-watched The Matrix Reloaded a few days ago. I was curious how I would find the film on the N-th rewatch. This time I think I could finally reconcile my expectation of the film as a successor of The Matrix (one of my favourite films) and what I saw on screen.

As a starter, I was surprised to find the dialogs not as intelligent as I thought it was. I think Reloaded's trick is to portray the characters as if they have personal thoughts not revealed to the audience. For example, both the Oracle and the Architect present Neo with options and the dialog makes it as if Neo knows what he will choose. One particular line (the Oracle's) that stuck with me is "We are all here to do what we are all here to do." I used to find this kind of circular dialog interesting; now I see it as a trick a story-teller uses to avoid giving explanation (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

Next is the visual. I watched the film in the cinema when Reloaded was out. Then, I was not informed about special effects techniques (later on, I took a fun module related to special effects in university) but I could see that certain effect shots are computer-generated (e.g. Neo "doing his Superman thing", Neo spinning during the burly brawl, Neo saving Morpheus & the Key Maker from truck collision). With such a high expectation on its shoulder, Reloaded did quite badly. For some reason, I could accept this only now. Maybe because I love The Matrix too damn much.

(I wonder if anyone gets the reference in that last sentence. I couldn't believe that Neo actually say this line in the emotional climax of the film.)

A related factor is the fighting scenes. In The Matrix, the fight scenes are tightly edited. The longest fighting scene I could remember is perhaps the dojo fight between Morpheus & Neo. In Reloaded, the fighting scenes are just too long. I don't know if they are long to show that Neo actually enjoys being a God in the Matrix or whether it's simply having too long fighting scenes. And as cool Keanu Reeves is, he just does not look convincing in fighting scenes.

Next is influence. I read a lot of articles and books about how anime influences The Matrix. I like anime and I've watched a reasonable number of anime titles; but I could never see concrete manifestation of anime influence in The Matrix. Well, one particular scene in Reloaded that hit me was a close up to Neo's hand gripping his chair holder as he flew in the Matrix to save Trinity. I think it is a common visual cue used in manga & anime.

This is just a small, trivial manifestation; but it convinced me to think of the characters in a different light. I've always thought of them as American action film characters. To me, such characters always seem to know what to do next. They usually know their surroundings well enough to grab an object to get them out of any situation. They never seem to have to stop and think (even if there were indeed a number of scenes in which Neo actually ponders on his dream in Reloaded).

Anyway, I started to think of Neo as an anime character. I tried to match the anime tropes I know of with his actions in Reloaded. The result was surprising to me. I've always thought Neo is like Batman: sure he has personal problems, but he is tough enough to ignore all his personal problems to safe others. But maybe Neo is like... Kira Yamato in Gundam Seed. The reason that he saves people from the Matrix is not because he is tough or because he is a good person. The reason is an opportunity to once again escape reality and get into the Matrix because he is a God in the Matrix. Perhaps Neo defines himself as his ablity in the Matrix, which is in conflict with his love for Trinity because Trinity is always in danger when they are in the Matrix.

And that finally brings me to another realization about Trinity. Again, I started to interpret her as an anime character. I used to think that her character is strong and independent. Sure she admires and loves Neo; but if Neo dies, she will perhaps grieve and then carried on with her life. I saw her as a woman brought up in American culture (I don't know how to describe this well; I just know that there definitely a trend in personality difference between people growing up in Asia, America, and Europe; what follows below may explain what I mean better).

Seeing her as an anime character opens some possibilities. For example, it is possible that her decision to go into the Matrix (despite her promising Neo not to) is partly motivated by her valuing herself less than Neo. It's a kind of partial selflessness. I find this trope used very often (if not always) in tragic Chinese love stories; but surprisingly rare in American films. With this interpretation in mind, I can see that scene on the rooftop (where it climaxed with Neo massaging Trinity's heart) could have been made with much heavier melodrama if Reloaded were a tragic Chinese love film.
(Imagine this: Trinity teary and smiling with a mortal wound, saying that she is happy that she could safe Neo's life and that she has no regrets. Then she stops breathing, complete with her head turning to the side. Neo will then start crying and calling her name loudly multiple times before finally, with tears streaking down his face, he shook his head, saying that he could not accept this. She's his one love and she must live! Only then did we get to the heart-massaging-in-code scene. I'm not saying that this alternative is better; I'm just saying that I suddenly could see this alternative and all the cultural assumptions behind such a scene.)

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Anyway, I just found this little song by Chiaki Ishikawa called Uninstall. Never mind the weird title, it is very addictive. I found myself humming "uninstall, uninstall..."

Youth Rebellion++

2010-02-12T22:54:00.000-08:00

I just read Solanin and To Terra volume 1. On the surface, they are completely different:

Solanin (2005-2006) is a slice-of-life story. The story ingredients are "normal:" boyfriend, parents, bands, music, the city, work...
To Terra (1977-1980) is a sci-fi story. The story ingredients are fantastic: space travel, space cadets, telepathy, super computers, closely controlled society...

Yet, at the core, they touch one thing in common: youth rebellion. (To Terra is a long manga, so this applies only to the first 2 parts of volume 1, I think.)

I thought what was the chance for me picking 2 random manga titles from the library that share a similar theme packaged in 2 very different genres? But perhaps it's quite likely because at my current age, I tend to gravitate towards this kind of stories.

And perhaps "youth rebellion" is not what I meant. It's one step after that. What happens to people after the rebellious phase? As Solanin puts it, they can either accept what life they have or they can fight their life to the end.

These are 2 abstract choices inevitably interpreted differently by different people, but I think there's truth to them. I think they are not mutually exclusive. We can pick one choice for one aspect in life and pick the other in another aspect. (Perhaps this is what hobbies are for? To experiment with the other choice we didn't pick the first time?)

I think that happiness is related to what we choose between the two. It interesting to note that a character in Solanin explicitly asks the question "Are you happy?" and "Am I happy?". To Terra, on the other hand, uses the word "sadness". Of course these words are the product of translation from Japanese to English; perhaps the actual Japanese words have some different connotation/meaning. But still, it's funny to see how some themes are universal (across genres and time).

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On another note, I recently read the novel and then watched the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was blown away when I checked the year of the film on the back of the DVD case. 1969! It made me re-think my credits to films like Star Wars (1977) that I thought pioneered special effects for space films. Star Wars deserves a big credit, after all the 3 films shaped my generation's imagination. However, 2001 shaped the imagination of the generation that worked on Star Wars! The realization was amazing.

Even now, I'm still re-evaluating 2001's influence. I can't help noticing that the space stations in To Terra look very similar to those in 2001 (they look like wheels). Some space ships have segments that is reminiscent to the space ship Discovery One in 2001.

(It's interesting that To Terra started running in the same year as the first Star Wars film came out. Is this just coincidence? Or was the boom in space travel stories caused by 2001?)

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Yet another topic is the drawing style in To Terra. I can't help noticing that it is very similar to that in Candy Candy. The way they depict emotion and gags are very similar. Perhaps it's no wonder because they ran in more-or-less the same years. But it made me wonder if this is because of Osamu Tezuka's influence.

I used to think of Tezuka simply as "Astro Boy author." Then I found out that he also drew Kimba the White Lion (the original title was Jungle Emperor). I thought, okay, so he also drew some serious stories, but it still looks like some cute stuff.

Next, I found out that he also drew Black Jack. I thought, okay, so he also drew some dark stories, but some Black Jack stories are plain ridiculous.

Then, I found Anime World Order podcast and finally found out why Tezuka was called the god of manga. His works are like 2001 (the film) in the sense that 2001 looks outdated but I can still be blown away that it looks that good despite its age.

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Let's close this post by coming back to the theme of youth rebellion. When I first read David Brin's article, I was amazed that every generation rebelled. It's human nature. It left the nagging question "so why things change gradually?" I think the answer is because it is also human nature to resist change. As I grow older, I realize that every generation actually walks more or less the same path as the previous generation did. Sensibility, taste, fashion, appearance, etc change. But the general trend is the same.

In my personal experience, it was scary/loathsome to realize that I am following the steps of the very people I tried to be different from/rebel against. And then I realized that perhaps this was because we found the "best way;" I just agreed with what people before me found. That's not something to be unhappy about.

Cast Off! K-On!

2009-12-18T07:22:00.000-08:00

Just a few days ago I realized dreadfully that I was getting shallow. Recent show I watched are painfully light and perhaps shallow, but I found them very entertaining for multiple reasons.

First, I watch Kamen Rider Kabuto. To me, recent Kamen Rider titles are fun because of their gimmicks: costume design, fighting choreography (usually for climactic moments), and the Rider powers (cheap special effects that are fun to watch). With Kamen Rider Kabuto, I enjoyed Kabuto design. I also love the concept of "Cast Off", where a Rider takes off his heavy armor to reveal a slimmer form, and "Clock Up", essentially a mode in which the Riders and the monsters move very fast. I think I accepted that Kamen Rider is half comedy while watching Kabuto.

I was disappointed by the later part of the series, though. I usually enjoy the powered-up form a series introduce mid-way. But Kabuto's "Hyper Form" is just too powerful and poorly executed. It could have turned the series even more fun, but it didn't (it turned the series worse, in my opinion).

Still, I love that voice, "Cast Off! Change Beetle."

Next, I watched K-On! It's very light-hearted and, as Anime World Order may put it, nothing really happened. But it reminded me of high school days. With that weird (to me) notion of friendship.
I personally keep only a few friends I am (relatively) close with and hang out with them often. The way things worked, one way or another people move on and these friends keep changing. That is to say, friend who used to be close usually drift further and I accept this a fact of life.
So, the notion of making really close friends in high school, which I guess what I did, only reminds me of the next thing awaiting in the corner: U-U-U-University. Where people are very likely to go on their separate ways. It was when transitioning to university that I realized that in real life, people prioritize on what they want to do, not friendship. It sounds terrible, but that's fast of life for me. Maybe that's why I don't keep very close friends anymore.

Anyway, watching K-On! was a so-happy-and-nostalgic-that-it-hurts-a-little for me.

But these on their own did not trigger the said realization above. It was when I started watching Baccano! that I realized I was having trouble watching somewhat complex story. I remembered I used to look for this kind of stories in anime. Compare it to the kind of shows that I watch now. Maybe I'm too comfortable in my comfort zone?

Anyway, I'm still continuing inside my comfort zone with Kamen Ride D-D-D-Decade!

That Heightened State

2009-11-08T07:09:00.000-08:00

Today I had a deadline. It isn't important what the deadline was for; what's important is that I could not run away from it and it was important to me.

The thing that is different about this deadline is that I had so many things to do before it came that I knew it was impossible to finish them all. I have not had this kind of deadline for a long time. I think the last time I had it was back in university (5 years ago?). It gave me that heightened state of body and mind in which I don't care about anything else other than finishing things before the deadline.
At the same time, I experienced despair because I knew I could not finish all these things. This aspect made me frantic, then emotional, then exhausted. It made me appreciate the opportunity to rest on the bus on my way to a final touch ups before submission. Surprisingly, it helped me to think what is important and what is not. Was it really important to finish all the things I listed down? Or was it more important to made enough changes until my team mate & I were satisfied? After submission, I felt tired and somewhat empty, which I also experienced with similar bad deadlines.

The new things this time, tough, are these:

I strangely feel ready for the next thing. In my previous experience with bad deadlines, I felt too exhausted to do anything.
The thought about what is important and what is not made it easier for me to accept a personal rejection. I was dreading that I would be even more down after the deadline passed.

I wish I could slow down to think about this more, but there are more things to do before this year ends (somehow all things are concentrated at year's end), so I thought I'd write this down so I can revisit it someday.

Batman Begins as API

2009-10-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

One of the lines I remember from the film Batman Begins is "it's not who I am underneath but what I do that defines me". I thought it was a cheesy film line until I connected it with API design.

The goal of an API (Application Programming Interface) is to provide functionalities to a programmer so he can do things without needing to worry about how to implement/achieve those things. It is not what is implemented underneath but what it does that defines an API. In other words, Batman (who stole the line from Rachel) referred to himself as an API. (My mind blew at this point.)

In conclusion, this realization is an obvious candidate for a gag comic for programmers; I just don't have time yet to draw it. (See? It's not what I do when drawing but what I draw that defines a comic. Holy API Batman!)

I Remember Love

2009-10-19T05:38:00.000-07:00

After listening to Anime World Order's review of Macross Do You Remember Love (DYRL), I decided to watch the film (the review is practically a love letter to the film). Before watching, my memory of Macross is Hikaru/Rick in his cockpit, taking off (I think the scene is in Robotech intro). I also vaguely remember that it is about humanity's hopeless battle for survival against an overwhelmingly more advanced alien force (the Zentradi).

I think DYRL is meant to be a film for Macross fans who had watched the whole series to reminiscent about what they like from the series. As a stand alone film, it's not great. Things just happen and there is not much explanation. I could barely follow because I know the basic premise of Macross. Still, I can understand why Mr Surat (of Anime World Order) described this film as everything he remembered about 80s anime. Watching it gave me a kind of nostalgia and the main theme song, Ai Obote Imasu Ka (Do You Remember Love?) reminded me of 80s love songs I used to (involuntarily) listen to in my childhood.

My opinion is that DYRL is the film to watch if you want to know what started the whole Macross franchise without going through a long anime (36 episodes). The downside is that the film does not have time to elaborate the things that make Macross so wonderful.

Related to that, I finished watching Macross Frontier a few weeks back. It's a crappy show that looks good, IMO. The backgrounds are pretty, the characters are good looking; but the battles are messy (I don't remember any battle scene that managed to grip me) and the story is practically non-existent. The one thing that's great about the anime is the music.

Finally, I just noticed that Minmay has a drill hair. Wow. So we had drill hair even back then in 1984?

Please Set My Attribute

2009-10-09T00:16:00.000-07:00

I just found out (probably a few years later than everyone else) that Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) does not seem to implement the functions getAttribute() and setAttribute() correctly. I was not too upset, though, because there is a quick work around: using the functions getAttributeNode() & setAttributeNode() instead.

---
Another thing I just found out is this neat thing called "Itano Circus". It is a style to present a battle scene in a dramatic manner using patterns formed by lines. A line can be a it missile trail, a bullet trail, or even energy trail. Apparently, the style was pioneered by Ichiro Itano. Here is a video to describe how it looks.

I personally think it is a generalized form of Macross Missile Massacre.

Only Tourism

2009-10-04T08:06:00.000-07:00

Only today I watched Only Yesterday and I already made up my mind to tell people tomorrow that I watched Only Yesterday only yesterday.

So yeah, I just watched Only Yesterday (Omoide Poro Poro). I think I like the film/anime because I am one of those people who work in an office setting where they do the same thing everyday and wish for something different.
The one thing I found interesting is that the film touched this particular topic. The city person in me thinks that farming life in the village is idyllic, nice, beautiful, etc. I come to this conclusion because I go to such village setting for holidays (which means limited period of stay, no need to earn a living, probably I'll eat the best food all the time, and novelty factor is still in effect). If I try to use a different mind set, say I live in the village permanently and need to make a living out of farming (which means unlimited period of stay, a must to work, eating not-so-nice food to minimize spending, and basically doing the same things everyday), HEY! Suddenly farming life is not so attractive.

This thought came to me when I visited Tomi and went to his hometown. It's interesting that since then I kept encountering this thought in different versions; Only Yesterday was one such encounters.

Oh, the film also made me think how to think of dividing with fraction (for example, 1/3 : 1/4) intuitively. I could not come with a direct way; my indirect way is to think of "dividing by 4" as "multiplying with 1/4", thus "dividing by 1/4" is like "multiplying by 4". Do you see the pattern, Taeko-san?
(Yes, this film also has mathematics! And drama! And sports! Even downhill driving!!! (Though admittedly there was no drifting nor tofu...) Oh, it also has pineapple. That's ananas in Finnish! (Okay, I should stop typing random things now.))

A Message from the Past

2009-09-21T21:05:00.000-07:00

Hi, my name is FreakedOutProgrammer009 and I come from the past to warn you about the future. Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) actually has 4 rendering modes, not just 2 as you might believe. Please refer to this article, Activating Browser Modes with Doctype, and scroll down to the section "IE8 Complications".

Time is running out and I have to go now. Please remember this message...

Fitting Gundam names in a sentence

2009-09-15T02:06:00.000-07:00

It started with an ad I saw while walking to work. It was an ad for watches; the upper half has a picture of a lady hugging a huge rabbit, while the lower half has a picture of another lady hugging a wolf. Each half has a text, they are:

"Waiting for a lifetime for [something I don't remember]?"
"Taking the moment to [do something I don't remember]?"

Those sentences made me think, "On impluse..." which at the time seemed to me to be between the 2 extremes the ad had. And, as I think of the word "impulse", which is a Gundam, I completed the sentence with more Gundam references, "I strike for freedom".

So, I arrived at the question, "How many Gundam names can I fit in one sentence without making it sound unnatural?"

I spent the next 5 minutes thinking of such a sentence, but I failed to come up with anything good. But, hey, I reached work by then.

A New Finding

2009-09-11T01:29:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to Anime World Order podcast. They are very informative. For example, I just know that Patlabor stands for "Patrol(ing) Labor". After 20 years, I finally know!

Another Summer

2009-08-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

The last 2 films I watched happened to be adaptations of 80s(?) cartoons. It thus feels natural to compare them.
(Spoiler warning if you haven't seen these films.)

The first film is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (I'm sure everyone noticed that the acronym of the title sounds like Transformers: Rolling on the Floor, possibly laughing). I did not expect coherent story; I was quite ready to overlook stupidities and just enjoy the visual.

I did enjoy the visual.

The opening part was cool. They managed to capture the different fighting styles between the Arcee team (smaller in size so they rely on speed and coordination) and Optimus (more bulky, but delivers decisive blows).
The puma-like Decepticon is cool. I love the shot in which it ran out of the sea and onto a beach.
I love the fight scene between Optimus and the Decepticons (I remember Megatron, Starscream, and some other disposable robot to be owned by Optimus).
I looked forward to the combining robots, which turned out to be Devastator (or was it?). I enjoyed that scene too.

Somehow, despite all the nice visuals and my attempt to overlook the stupidities, the film still left some bitterness in my mind. All my disappointments with the film can perhaps be traced to the fact that the film did not spend any time to tell us more about the robot characters.

Who is Optimus Prime? Why is he so keen on hunting down the Decepticons (other than because "Decepticons are evil")?
Who are the Autobots? Are they really good robots? Why are they willing to come to earth? What are their stories? What do they do on when they are not fighting Decepticons?
Similarly, what do the Decepticons do off-screen?
I also find myself asking why The Fallen made it to the title of the film. Even though he is supposed to be the big bad, he does not feel like on at all (and he ultimately got trashed in few seconds).
The robots are tweaked to be stronger/weaker so much that the outcome of fight scenes feel random. For example, Megatron feels much weaker in this film (he was much more menacing in the first film) while Optimus and Bumblebee are much stronger. It is ironic that Megatron still said "You are so weak!" to Optimus.
The supposedly climactic battle felt overdrawn (and boring) for me. Had it been edited more tightly, I think the film could have been around 2 hours long.

In short, the film does not feel like a Transformers film to me. It felt like a generic good-robots-fighting-evil-robots film. Compare this with how well Spider-man films adapted Spider-man comics.

The second film is G.I. Joe. I did not plan to watch it; I decided to watch it because a friend invited me to. So, I probably had no expectation and no idea what I can expect from the film (though I thought the accelerator suits were potentially cool when watching the trailers). My friend and I did agree that probably the visual would be inferior compared to Transformers; we hoped that the film had some other means to compensate.

I found the film entertaining even though there are many joke attempts and scenes that I found lame. (Strong spoiler warning.)

Scarlett reading a book while running on treadmill is simply ridiculous.
Duke is supposed to be the main character, I think. But I found myself tolerating him instead of rooting for him. (Why couldn't he face Baroness after her brother was killed? To me, that does not feel like "a real American hero" at all.)
I didn't really understand why Snake Eyes took his vow of silence. And why did the master favor him over Storm Shadow?
How Baroness ended up at the end of the film is weird and disappointing. I was hoping that there would be an irreversible twist between her and Duke, but nothing happened. It was simply a good ending for her :\
How the 2 big bads (are they Cobra Commander & Destro?) ended up is also lame. They finally announced their real identity as the big bads in a dramatic manner; then they were captured.

There are other things I don't like, but I guess they are nit-picking.

On the good side, the visual is good enough not to distract from the film. More importantly, I feel that the film is more faithful to the original material than Transformers.

I liked how the film sneaked in references, like "knowing is half the battle" and "he is a real American hero". I also like the line "when all fail, we don't" (because it is easy to sneak in real life conversations).
Accelerator suit scenes are good. (I remembered thinking, "They should have something like this in Starship Troopers film.")
Baroness is hot :3 (probably the greatest redeeming value in this film?)
Snake Eyes is cool. The film did a good job on this one because I thought it's quite easy to slip and make his character pretentious or "trying too hard to be cool".

Probably I won't remember this film for long, but it was entertaining.

After these films, I'm somewhat numb with action-oriented summer films. But summer has not ended yet. I'm planning to watch Up! next week. I hope it will be good.

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants to Manage Paths

2009-07-07T22:13:00.000-07:00

In other words, using other people's code instead of implementing path management from scratch.

I needed to add a JavaScript function to resolve paths. Resolving paths can mean 2 things; in my case, I want a function that accepts a path (which is potentially a relative path) and outputs an absolute path. The catch is that the function is implemented in JavaScript.

After 2 days of search, my colleagues found js-uri, a small JavaScript library that does exactly what I need. So far, it performs beautifully.

To test the function, I use the test cases given in RFC 1808 section 5.

I hope someone will find this useful when he/she needs to resolve paths in JavaScript :)

Using link to trigger click event

2009-06-23T02:17:00.000-07:00

I just spent almost a full day (not mentioning past frustrations) to find the cause of yet another strange IE6 behaviour. Here is what happened.

The web application I was debugging uses this:

<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="SomeJsFunction();">Call SomeJsFunction</a>

SomeJsFunction shows an iframe that continuously fetches images from a remote source. The link works fine for IE7, Firefox 2, and Firefox 3. Yet with IE6 somehow the iframe does not fetch any image at all. Why? That was the question that causes much debugging frustration.

Thanks to this particular post at dbug, I found out that the cause is that using "javascript" as a pseudo-protocol is apparently a bad thing. An alternative is to use "#". It ends my problem.

However, if you want to go further and be good, this topic at StackOverflow suggests many other, better alternatives.

Office Move = Biking

2009-05-06T20:08:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago the company I worked for moved office. Our new office is so close to my apartment that I had thoughts to bike to work. Thoughts became a want, a want became words I blurt out during lunch session, and the words became the peer pressure I succumb to.

Just kidding. I really wanted to try biking to work and so I did. I was caught in a heavy rain the very first day I biked and spent that day in a wet pair of jeans in an air-conditioned room.

Please interpret the two paragraphs above as my cynical sense of humor. I really enjoy avoiding crowded MRT.

I will post some photos of my bike soon. It a transforming bike! With 3 forms no less! That's half of Sixshot's forms!

---
Onto the progress of my otariiman life.

Recently I finished watching Gundam OO season 2. Even though I enjoyed it better than season 1, I can't help thinking that it missed so much potential. I start to think that this is a characteristic of a Gundam series. A lot of potential storylines/conflicts/interesting exploration in the beginning of the series only to be killed off by some weird/stupid/unsatisfying plot progress or even abandoned altogether (such as Kati & Kujou's past).

Anyway, I predictably fell in love with Gundams all over again. OO Gundam + OO Raiser look so goodddd... I like Cherudim with its armor bits and just love Seravee/Seraphim trick. On the other hand, I don't understand why Arios is in season 2 at all. Most of the time Arios is either out of the action (e.g. guarding Celestial Being's escape pods) or just shooting generic units.

And I absolutely loathe what Graham became. There's another perfectly fine potential totally wasted.

As OO season 2 just ended, I had thoughts of drawing a (thin) fanart book for it this year. (I'm typing my thoughts here with the hope the same cycle I described above to repeat itself.) I had a scene idea for each Gundam; but I don't know if I can finish enough pages on time (i.e. before November).

Ultimate Reality TV Game Show

2009-04-08T02:36:00.000-07:00

While on a cold bus ride home from Gleneagles Medical Centre, an idea for the ultimate reality tv show dawned to me: "My Life Is Better Than Your Life". It sounds so full of nastiness >:D

Other than that, I realized that "platformers" (the game genre) rhymes with "transformers" (the thing in physics or the title of that robot franchise). I think this is an important fact to remember, in case I need it when writing a poem or a trinary.

Have a Few Web Amusements

2009-02-13T05:05:00.000-08:00

A few amusements I got from the Web this week:

Live enactment of Super Mario (with Obama cameo!)
Initial D parody in Lucky Star

Meanwhile, I'm inking an amusing Genshiken fanart. I will post it by tomorrow <3

[14 Feb edit]
As promised, here it is: "What have you done, Sasahara-san?!"

14 Months Later

2009-01-30T02:15:00.000-08:00

This post is a follow-up of this post on November 2007. In that post, I listed the following books to read:

A Clockwork Orange*
Brave New World
Ender's Game*
The Selfish Gene
Epic of Gilgamesh
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Neuromancer*
In the Beginning...was the Command Line*

I surprised myself by actually following the list and read 4 items (those marked with an asterix). I finished only Ender's Game, actually. I couldn't stand the language in A Clockwork Orange and I have seen too many recent cyberpunk stuff to appreciate Neuromancer. I do like In the Beginning...was the Command Line but I only read the beginning part of it, the reason being I read an online version of it instead of printed version (and it's too long for me to read on screen).

I do have a much longer reading list on my notebook. Trying to keep learning, I suppose (yes, this post is going nowhere so I'll stop now).

Mirror's Edge postmortem article

2008-12-13T07:20:00.000-08:00

I bumped into an article on Mirror's Edge postmortem interview from Reddit today. I think it's worth reading if only for an example of good replies for an interview. I'm sure a lot of details are omitted, but a little dose of honesty in the replies makes me respect Tom Farrer, the interviewee.

Of a special note is Mr Farrer's mentioning Singapore as one of the cities that influence Mirror's Edge cityscape design.

Liking what you do

2008-12-11T06:13:00.000-08:00

There are times when I feel as if whatever I am doing, it all does not matter to the world. Last few weeks have been such times. This week is perhaps the start of my healing process. It started off with me going out with my good, old friends and somehow everything looked much better after that.

Today, I found something that reminds me that it does not matter how difficult and painful the process is, it is my attitude while throughout the process that matters most in life. That thing is David Sirlin's (very long) article on the process to balance Street Fighter II HD Remix. If you are a Street Fighter fan, I recommend going through some parts of the articles.

What I would like to highlight is the overview and the feature list.

Let's start with the overview. Quoting the opening paragraph:

"Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix was originally going to be a graphical update of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but along the way some magic happened. HD Remix is now a completely new Street Fighter game—the 6th installment in the SF2 series."

I originally thought that HD Remix is nothing more than a masochistic project to update the sprites to Street Fighter II. Only after reading Sirlin's articles that I appreciate its magic. It is the product of hard work done by people who love what they do. (Also note the magic that a company actually allows such magic possible. It's much easier and less risky for them to do the masochist project.)
Balancing a game is very difficult. It is very easy for a player, who experience only a portion of the whole game to criticize, "Hey, this part is not balanced!" It's much, much more difficult to look at the whole game and balance every part (or at least most parts).

I guess the point it reminds me of is this. When I like doing something, I usually want to get better at it. And as I get better, the thought of doing the thing makes me mentally recall a long list of difficult things I need to go through to do well.
This is where I usually lose patience. This week I learnt that patience is not that difficult for the benefits it brings.

You might say that the introduction, like so many other introductions, is more interesting because it promises to give us things. Well, the summary of things the article gives is in the feature list. My highlights are:

#7 double-blind character selection online. A simple point perhaps, but it happens every single time we play, so the cumulative effect is great.
#13 hitbox display. It's obvious that the purpose for this feature is for players to refine their skills. If this does not show "love-what-I-do"-ness, I don't know what does.
#15 dipswitches. I thinks this is the most hardcore feature of all: enabling known bugs on purpose because they affect gameplay. I personally probably won't use this feature, but I can appreciate that there are people who (like the game so much that they) do.

You can watch one of David Sirlin's matches: EvoWest 2007 Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Finals.

Three Panel Soul

2008-12-09T08:07:00.000-08:00

From the misty realm of teh Interweb, I found Three Panel Soul webcomic. It has a style that I like and quite a number of strips are funny. But this is not the reason for this post.

The reason for this post is that I find this particular strip on companionship cute, heart-warming, and yet painful.

Now go on, browse through that archive :)

Firefox Woes

2008-12-04T23:07:00.001-08:00

I intended to write about this in April 2009 but I soon forgot about it. Well, today the problem showed up once more so let's get this one out of the way.

A plugin for web browser is a program that can communicate with a web browser and make the browser do additional things that a browser usually cannot do. For example, browsers cannot play videos on its own. That's why we need to install Flash plugin to play a Youtube video.

A scriptable plugin for a web browser is a special kind of plugin: we can write JavaScript codes to program how the plugin should behave. Internet Explorer browser and Firefox browser provides different mechanism for us to crate a scriptable plugin. In this post, I will consider only the Firefox mechanism because this post has the title "Firefox Woes".

Mozilla provides a number of ways to write scriptable plugins. One of them is the NPAPI. Ignoring that the documentation provided is confusing, there is one particular NPAPI bug that is annoying enough for me to want to write this post: the unsigned integer bug in NPAPI.

What could they have been thinking?

Star Fruit

2008-11-28T19:42:00.000-08:00

While browsing the Piggy Farm forum, I impulsively clicked on Bryan B. Wong's Live Journal. I find this particular entry amusing. Apparently, random butter tried buying some star fruits because of Bryan's Start Fruit manga.

Well, Wikipedia says that star fruit is native ot India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia (wow, I didn't know that!). My point is that I grew up with star fruit, so I never think of it as anything special (in the neither-good-nor-bad sense). It's quite interesting to see how other people find it :D

This is why I think I'll need to proceed with caution if I ever go to countries like Japan or China or Korea. They have way too many risky food stuff :)
---

More new knowledge about Indonesian stuff from the eyes of non Indonesians: bilimbi. Is this what we Javanese call "blimbing wuluh"? Wahaha, fascinating! I call star fruit "blimbing" in my native tongue (which is a mix of Indonesian language, Javanese language, and some Chinese dialect of which proper name I never know of). "Blimbing wuluh" is entirely different. I think it's much more acidic or something and thus is more suitable for cooking (as opposed to eating as a fruit). Again, I never really pay attention to it so I don't know much about it either.

---
I think this post somehow joins my otaku side and my nerd side. Childhood things tend to do that.

Figurine Fun

2008-11-25T01:28:00.000-08:00

I went to Anime Festival Asia over the weekend. It was lots of fun.

Some photo highlights:

I bought myself the Kamen Rider Black/RX figurine. It has one main body to which I can attach Kamen Rider Black armor or Black RX armor. Check out my first bunch of shots on my Picasa album.

Out of the package, the figure has the Black RX armor on. I took them off and put on the Black armor. I found the Black armor more attractive; I love the grasshopper look of it. Black RX looks too neat and robot-y. What I soon found out while posing the figurine during the photo shot, though, is that the Black armor comes off far too easily. The small pieces just "hugs" the main body, in contrast to Black RX armor that can be secured comfortably. Still, I did have fun with it and to a certain extent re-discover my liking for photography.

That reminds me of Wei Man's remark about figurines. Before this, she didn't understand what's so good about figurines. Somehow, she bought her first figurines from AFA: a poseable Yuffie (of FF7, her favourite character) figurine and a bunch of Magna Carta figurines. While posing Yuffie, she saw how well-designed figurines work and she was wowed. It was fun to see her finding the charm of poseable figurine (and taking photos of them). One more otaku in our sketch group, mwahaha.

Life near the Frontier

2008-10-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

The last few months I've been working on an API written in JavaScript (let's call it JSAPI) at work. Naturally I looked for a Doxygen-like tool to generate the documentation. It is very surprising that there are only a handful of such tools.

First, I tried out JSDoc. It's simple and easy to use; plus the output looks like something out of JavaDoc. The problem is, it does not handle string containing JavaScript code (the kind of string you'd feed to eval()) correctly.

Next, I tried JsDoc Toolkit. It is okay, but there does not seem to be a way to control the output. What I want to achieve is grouping functions in a big class by functionality. JsDoc Toolkit simply outputs all functions sorted alphabetically, so I end up with GetThings() functions at the top and SetThings() at the bottom. Lots of scrolling and eye straining needed to find functions I want.

Finally, I followed the recommendation from "The State of JavaScript Documentation Tools" article. I decided to switch to Natural Docs. After a painful day of converting my existing comments into Natural Docs format; I'm quite happy with the output. My only gripe is that there is only 1 file for all functions in our API. I'd prefer a way to output 1 output file for each class. I really like the layout of the output, though.

This whole process gives me the feeling that support for JavaScript documentation is rather minimum even though it is (very?) popular. After all, it's the only scripting language for a browser. Why is it so? Is it because no one has used it for a large API yet? What about Google Maps API? (Actually I wonder what Google uses to generate their documentation. If you know, please tell me by commenting.)

Then I realized that this is the problem with any JavaScript tool. For example, until now I haven't found a satisfactory IDE for JavaScript. Generic text editor is fine (I'm still using EditPlus myself), but navigating a big JSAPI file (thousands of lines) is a pain. I want something like Visual Studio's automatically-generated drop-down list of functions. For now, the best solution I found is Aptana Studio. But honestly, it feels slow and clunky to me. The only reason I'm using it is for its auto-generated function index.

If I think about it, it feels odd that there is no nice IDE for such a popular language. I'm curious what other JSAPI developers use. Surely they don't just use a generic text editor?

Iji

2008-10-14T07:58:00.000-07:00

I came across an indie game called Iji a few weeks back. When I saw the trailer, I thought it looked decent but not great as a video. The game itself is very good (if not great). The story is decent (even though the story-telling might feel slow), the action is great, the music is awesome, and game design encourages replay.

Iji is the name of the main character. She was visiting a military complex when an alien race attacked earth from orbit. She woke up a few months later, after receiving cyborg treatment. She now has a personal nanofield (her armor) and a nanogun. When the game starts, Iji's nanogun is a mere shotgun that is effective on short range. As the game progresses, she picks up more powerful alien weapons.
In addition, there is leveling up involved. Iji can collect nano by killing enemies or collecting from crates. After collecting a certain amount of nano, she can level up. At each level up, we can pick which stat to improve. There are 7 stats to choose from.
Finally, opening certain doors and crates requires "cracking". Cracking is a mini-game that is not too fun on its own; but the main game still progresses as Iji is cracking, so it has a certain strategic factor. What is awesome is that if Iji's cracking stat is high enough, we can also crack an enemy's personal nanofield to create confusion.

For me, the highlights of the game are:

The boss fights. Later bosses definitely needs some thought the first time we fight them.
The soundtrack. It's awesome! Even more awesome, they just released a high quality soundtrack recently (10 Oct). My favourite tracks are 3 Cans Later (sector 2), Seven Four (sector 5), and Tor. The high quality soundtrack includes a bonus track, Organ Smash, that grows on me. A minor complain from me is that the soundtrack is in mono.
The story. Story-telling can be better; but as the game gets near the ending, the story grows on me. Maybe the in-game voice acting biased me a little :)

All in all, I think Iji is worth playing if you are into 2D platformers. You can download it from Daniel's base.

VGA splitter

2008-09-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I bought a Cintiq Wacom tablet. It turns out to function as both a tablet and a monitor. (I kind of expected it to work as simply as Graphire, but on hindsight this is of course stupid.) Since my PC has only one VGA out, I got myself:

a VGA splitter 2/4 port VGA splitter. Model MT-2504-A. I jsut reaplized that the pack does not have a brand (unless "VGA Splitter" is a brand).
a Manhattan monitor cable HD15 Male/HD15 Male. The packaging points to http://www.manhattan-products.com/index.shtml; but strangely I cannot find the product on the website.

They are supposed to be of good quality (I asked the store attendant) so I had high hopes. Well, it is rather disappointing. My monitor is visibly blurry now. Especially for white Arial/Verdana fonts on a colored background (a common thing in websites). I guess it's acceptable for browsing, but it's definitely not good enough for digital inking (what I hoped to do with my Cintiq).

And so that's the disappointment of today (other than the fact that Games Convention Asia does not open on Sunday, which I think very stupid).

Asking the Right Question

2008-09-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

Let me begin with realizations:

I used to play games a lot. I played Sonic 3 to the point that I could collect all 7 Chaos Emeralds on the second level (Hydrocity Zone act 2). I played Contra so often that I could finish the game without dying even once (same thing with Lifeforce). I thought, "Hey, I'm invincible on these games!" Of course, many years later, the Internet proved me wrong (there are many people out there who've done crazier things). Even before I found out about these, I slowly realized with horror that I'm not a hardcore gamer at all. I'm just a casual one.
I used to like programming a lot. I started with GWBasic, moved on to QBasic, Pascal... Even in university, at which I started to realize that programming can be difficult and not fun, I still see programming as the thing I'll do in my life. As I started working, though, I slowly realized--again with horror--that I'm not so hardcore a programmer that I can do it for life. There are so many things around programming that I don't think I can do.

I see a pattern here. Right now I don't think I can do anything for life. I think variety is one thing that I need as I change over time. (People change. That's another realization.) The point I'm getting to, however, is about finding out what I'd like to do for life (at the moment anyway).

One of my lecturers once said that it's much easier to find out what you didn't like to do than to find out what you liked to do. My personal experience persuade me to agree with him. Then, I asked, were I doomed to try things one by one, abandoning things I found not to my liking? (Computer Science students may relate that I didn't like this mainly because it felt like "exhaustive search".) I still think that that is the only way to find things out (and get things done); but the pattern I mentioned above provides me with an alternative heuristic.

Maybe we should ask not "what I want/like to do" but also "what I am willing to do in a hardcore manner". (You may quickly think "Define hardcore!". I'll leave it to each to define hardcore. After all, it's just a heuristic, not algorithm.)

I was really excited by this personal finding until I realized that the heuristic is equivalent to "finding your passion". I just replaced passion with hardcore :D

Search

2008-09-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

Ever since I learned about it, I've always preferred to use Firefox than Internet Explorer (IE) even though I couldn't really tell why. Lately, I've been working a lot with both browsers (and in the process got awestruck by the sheer amount of work a browser does each time we view a web page) and got to know them a little bit. It was this experience that showed me how much more flexible (and developer-friendly, to a certain extent) Firefox is. Here are a few things I like about Firefox:

I can easily install mutiple versions of it in the same computer. Very useful to test your web application quickly. With IE, oops, it's closely tied with the Windows OS. I know that there is a way around this (by copying multiple DLL plus registry acrobatics IIRC), but it's very painful.
Add-ons are wonderful. My personal favourite is Foxmark that synchronizes bookmarks across different computers. Very useful if you use Firefox both at work and at home.
Firefox has Firebug, very helpful in debugging JavaScript. IE8 does promise a Firebug-inspired debugging tool; but basically debugging JavaScript in IE6 and IE7 (the 2 currently most popular browsers) is very painful.

Then, in the middle of development work, a unique incident put things to perspective. My parents visited me, so my Dad used my computer to browse the Internet. I see my Dad as a typical user, who does not care about development niceties, but care a lot about convenience. He is used to IE, of course. So I told him to use Firefox. As he used Firefox, he kept commenting how difficult it was to use. The biggest reason, I think, is different feel from IE. But here is the remark that got me thinking: IE allows him to save a web page in one file, whereas Firefox does not.

I could not understand that. Surely when I save blah.html, I always get a "blah_files" folder that stores non-text content. So I tried out IE. It does allow me to save everything in one file. Microsoft proprietary format, of course. (I'm guessing it's somekind of zip-based compression that IE can uncompress on the fly.) But my Dad doesn't care about that. All he cares about is that everything is in one file and there is no chance that he accidentally separates text content from non-text content.

The incident made me think, "Hmm... so what's so great about Firefox for a user like my Dad?" It's funny that I can't think of any. So many productive features and I just cannot see how my Dad will switch to Firefox just for them. Bookmark synchronization? Oh, he remembers all the URLs he needs (just a handful of them). Installing multiple versions of a browser? What for? JavaScript debugger? What JavaScript? Even Firefox 3's Awesome Bar?

What I learned was that Internet browsing is but one activity among many. What a sobering revelation.
---

But let's get back to Awesome Bar. At first I thought it's cool, but so what? It's only until I started to use it while doing research at work that I decided that I could no longer live without it. My job is to be efficient in learning things new to my company. And research is usually not smooth. I usually read a number of pages to find some consistent pattern or repetition of a concept, and then realize that a page I read sometime ago make more sense than the time I read it. So I need to get back to that page. There are a few tricks to get back to the page:

Never close any tabs. Obviously impractical. Which tab was which?
Bookmark all pages I've seen. I did practice this once. Still the same question: which bookmark was which?
Repeat the same search steps, something like re-tracing my earlier steps. It works if I remember exactly what steps I took. Even if I do remember, how many clicks do I need to get to that one page?
Awesome bar. Type the phrase I remember, scan the list of pages and usually I get back to the page I want.

Last week, Google launched their browser, Google Chrome. It has something similar that they call the Omnibar. Their new tab feature arguably pushes this idea one step forward; I personally don't use find their new tab concept that useful. I'm still in love with the Awesome Bar :)

What I love about Chrome is its task bar. Shift+Esc quickly becomes my favourite shortcut. In relation with the revelation I wrote above, Chrome definitely feels like a web developer's browser rather than a consumer's. (I think a lot of articles about Chrome misunderstood it. Chrome is not a "Firefox killer," a term that implies Chrome is intended for consumers. Sure, consumers can use it; but its features are nicest for developers.)

Hamthology Vol. 2 Launches!

2008-07-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

We officially launches Hamthology vol. 2!
You can visit our online store at Lulu.com. It has a 10-page* preview (that takes quite a while to load), so please check it out :)

* Technically, it's only a 4-page preview because the first 6 pages are title page, table of contents, and various other things. That's why I'm typing this as a fine print, mwahaha!

So what is Hamthology, you ask? It is a comic anthology done by folks at the Piggy Farm forum (I contribute a not-so-short comic in the volume). We emphasize on the community aspect of the process. Your support is greatly appreciated :)

Acknowledged

2008-06-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

Today I manned G Element's booth at BroadcastAsia 2008 (I'm working at G Element). I honestly did not look forward to it because my experience on the first day of the event (Tuesday) was rather disappointing. We (2 of my bosses and I) presented to so many people who are too high up in management that they don't appreciate our exhibit. This is understandable; but it doesn't change the fact that it's very disappointing to present something I believe in to people who don't appreciate it.

Today, however, was surprisingly good. A lot of people who do technical things (who, I suppose, are relatively low in their respective management hierarchy). My first moment of relief was when I presented to a bunch of NUS (National University of Singapore) students. I don't know if they actually study Computer Science or programming, but it was great to hear "Wow, it's 3D application running on a browser!" It was as great an acknowledgment as I can possibly expect. Indeed, it is not trivial to run 3D application on a web browser (it's true that there are plugins like Unity and Google Earth, but the thing we are developing is our own 3D plugin).
After that, I felt like I was set free somehow. I can't help being excited when presenting for the rest of the day. I didn't even mind when some people obviously didn't fully understand (i.e. what happened in the first day).

Another great moment was when a visitor muttered, "Impressive..." Maybe it was an involuntary word from him, but to me it meant a lot. Someone else acknowledged what I believe in. That felt really good.

Painting moments

2008-04-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

I've just finished painting a pinup for Hamthology volume 2. It ties up Onward in vol. 1 to the story I'm working on with Kyr for vol. 2, titled "Sometimes the Red Queen Laughs" (STRQL). I wanted to write this post while working on STRQL.

I was overly eager to finish the comic becauseI've been working on it for so long and I started to feel that it was taking too much of my time. I wanted to move on to other things so badly. Without knowing it, I succumbed into "mechanical mode"; that is, I worked in order to finish quickly.

This affected the way I drew without me realizing it. It was when Ken, my drawing instructor, explicitly said that I needed to "play around more" that I started to reflect on my unconscious thoughts.
I had to force myself to slow down and feel whatever experience the process made me to go through. I tried strokes that I wouldn't want to consider previously and they gave me surprisingly fun result. I guess I started to understand the saying "enjoy what you are doing and you will produce good things".

Some things remained difficult, of course. I still couldn't produce satisfying hair highlights. But the process was very rewarding. I experience a few "Sharingan moments".
---

Let me sidetrack to explain what I mean by a Sharingan moment.

I met with Sharingan while reading Naruto. If you are willing to read overly long description for Sharingan, you can read its Wikipedia entry. For this post, you only need to know that in one scene in the manga, Sasuke (while using Sharingan) could see the next move his opponent was going to make. I think that doesn't mean he can predict the future, it's more likely that he can see the most likely steps his opponent going to make based on his current position/posture/move because of physical constraints (gravity and momentum).
---

Similarly, while working on STRQL, there were moments that I could see where I should put my next stroke. It sounds incredible perhaps, but I did experience it. I could see an image of the small part I was working on and so it was easy to decide the next stroke. A few moments after I first experienced this, I was overwhelmed by the triumphant feeling. Too bad it didn't always happen and I don't know what triggered it. (Is this why athletes are advised to visualize themselves winning?)
---

While reflecting on these moments, I wondered what made me feel triumphant. Put in another way, why is it so rewarding to experience new things?
My train of thoughts brought forward what I read sometime ago, something like: "I feel that I spent my life searching for something I don't know."

Alright, I found the source after searching Reddit. Go here and go to image number 14. It's a photo gallery titled "It's Complicated: the American Teenager" by Robin Bowman. The exact line is different from what I remember (even in meaning, now that I re-read it); illustrating that mind does distort memory.

Could it be this search that makes us/me feel rewarded on discovering new things? Even if we know that countless other people probably have discovered the same thing over and over?
---

If you are interested in such lines of thoughts, you might be interested to read David Brin's Uplift novels, particularly "Startide Rising". Most characters there reflect on their own thoughts in a similar manner (or, more likely what actually happened, the way I think was influenced by the characters in "Startide Rising").

Otherness

2008-03-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading Otherness (as you can see on my LibraryThing thingy on the right of this blog's main page). It's a collection of short s.f. stories by David Brin. The theme "otherness" seems to be in somewhat academic context: other people's opinions/points of view/sets of values that are different from yours are valuable to everyone. I interpret it as something in the line if "diversify to be safe".

I find a strange attraction in Brin's stories. I personally think he has a problem with his endings--abrupt endings to stories that to me seems to unfinished. What attracts me is perhaps his weird and diverse science topic he uses to drive his stories. Another attraction is perhaps I tend to agree with his views.

Anyway, the comic drawing I'm going to seems to be approaching story telling phase. Last week we got short story (300 words) writing homework. The theme was playing around with well-known fairy tales. Simple stuff to get warmed up with. The process was enjoyable, actually. Story writing is different from drawing, yet they share a number of similarities too. Everything starts with ideas in my head, followed by a process of translating those ideas into something concrete. The difference lies in this process of translation.

In this case, the important thing is the difference.

This reminds me of a quotation I read while reading about Windows Forms (WinForms): "what important is the difference". I found this quotation interesting because it is the flipside of abstraction--factoring out common characteristics of things--a staple in computer science.

What is a Man?

2008-02-22T06:19:00.000-08:00

I can't think of an appropriate title, so I typed a random title. It does, however, show that I've been playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

I've been scripting at work. PHP, Perl, JavaScript, HTML, SQL statements... All these culminate in a new local search at Earth@sg website. Please try it out. I welcome bug reports and feedback.

Today, I found Johnny Lee's Wii project website. Have a look at his videos. I'm especially impressed with his head tracking video. He scripted his explanation well; and his execution of the video is really good. The highlight, though, is the demo around 3/4 into the video. Wow! That's just awesome.

At home, I'm currently working on my entry for IFS's Pepper Project. I'm a little nervous on this piece as I'm working on it with my full capacity, yet it does not look that good compared to the entries submitted thus far.
I received some feedback from the good folks at IndoCG forum (it seems to be down at the moment; the URL is http://www.indocg.com/forum/). So, yeah, I'm still on it. Your feedback are welcome, too :)

Courage

2008-01-28T23:29:00.000-08:00

I got this link today from Reddit: minus.

The final panel for some reason has a lot of impact on me. It has a strange mixture of ignorance/innocence, determination, and "can-do" spirit to it. Love it!

Hamthology Vol. 2

2008-01-26T00:46:00.000-08:00

Sometime last week I read that one good thing to do to get into a field (in the article gives programming in PHP as an example) is to start a blog about what you do in that field. Now, I want to get into manga drawing further; so probably I will convert this blog somewhat to be partially about drawing.

And speaking about drawing, right now I'm drawing for Hamthology volume 2. I drew a 7-page story for Hamthology vol 1. Doubling the page count is not that bad; the bigger obstacle I found is multiple characters and speech bubbles (the short story I drew was single-character without dialog). I keep forgetting how to draw characters. This means that when I draw, say, Edward Elric, my drawing looks different from him. Or make him look too young.
Another new thing I'm trying to get a hang of is speech bubbles. I was too used to planning a panel to be filled with a scene and ended up with panels that are so full that speech bubbles simply don't fit in.

In addition to Hamthology, I also want to submit an entry for Pepper Project. No clear idea about what I'll draw yet, but it should be something about posing (something I need to practice on).

Links:

Hamthology official website
Order Hamthology vol 1 :)
Pepper Project @ Imaginary Friend Studios

In the Beginning... Was the Command Line

2007-12-08T06:45:00.000-08:00

Remember sometime ago I posted that I will read this book called "At the Beginning... Was the Command Line"? Well, apparently it is a long essay that was originally published online and got printed because it is popular. You can get it here:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

If you want to know the author, Mr Neal Stephenson, a little better, you can read his Slashdot interview (he sounds like a cool guy):
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217

Another little story is about another book in my want-to-read list, "Neuromancer". I was moody Friday evening and didn't feel like going home directly from work but too moody to go to crowded place. So I went to a second-hand bookstore near my home. As I was browsing the SF section, I saw "Neuromancer". Wow! I quickly fished out the book... and saw a fantasy-like cover, which forced me to read the title more carefully. It's actually "Necromancer". Geh.

The Other Side of Life

2007-11-26T04:13:00.000-08:00

Last week (and today) is an interesting experience for me. Two people that I know, even though not so closely in one case and only through music in the other, passed away in a young age. One is Pierre, the other is Reuben Kee.

Respective blogs and articles are here:

For Pierre: http://www.inmemoryofpicant.blogspot.com/ (blog); http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/22506 (article)
For Reuben Kee: http://www.vgfrequency.com/?p=341 (blog); http://www.straitstimes.com/Latest%2BNews/Singapore/STIStory_180302.html (article)

The scary thing about last week's experience is that I do not know how to react to the news. Certainly there is shock, mainly because I have a connection to these people. I want to somehow show my appreciation to these connections; and reality hits hard that there is only limited way for me to do so. The Internet does connect people, but somehow it feels lacking for such news.

I do not know much about Pierre, so I can only offer my condolences to his family and friends.
For Reuben, I do know some of his music and I like some of them. I can only let the world know what his music:

OC Remix: http://www.ocremix.org/remixer/reubenkee/
Anime Remix: http://www.animeremix.org/remixer/23/

And the communities's tribute to him:

OC Remix: http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=13286
Anime Remix: http://www.animeremix.org/animix_forums/viewtopic.php?id=1956

Rest in Peace, Pierre and Reuben.

Book Titles

2007-11-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

There is a thread in Reddit to list book titles. Here is what I choose in a very biased manner:

A Clockwork Orange
Brave New World
Enders Game
The Selfish Gene
Epic of Gilgamesh
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Neuromancer
In the Beginning...was the Command Line

Other than that, guess I'd mention these to hint what is influencing me at the moment:

Cry Engine demo was out early this week. Very demanding about GPU; but gorgeous graphics... Lovely tropical island look & amazing sea water.
There will be stage building feature in Super Smash Bros Brawl (let's abbrev. it as SSB Brawl). Apparently there were earlier SSB 64 and SSB Melee. Some early pro gamer impression from the payable demo is that Brawl is completely different from Melee. (Sonic's in Brawl, btw.)
Drawing can be seen as an organized activity to put what I see in my mind onto paper. Sometimes I feel it can almost be mechanized (put into a deterministic algorithm); but then even scratching a pencil line is ambiguous. Why 65.2937492873498237498 degrees instead of, say 65.33948290482340234980 degrees? Why 23.2348982309480 mm line instead of 25.2349239048209 mm one?
Painting is somewhat similar. Only I can think in terms of patches instead of "blocks".
Some people with too much time in their hands actually wrote a compiler for LOLcode. Sure LOLcats are fun; but writing a compiler for LOLcode seems rather extreme, no?
Whoever says Perl scripting is dead needs to experience moar Perl. Many, many extensions on CPAN; some with really helpful manual.
I found an evidence today that people do seem to agree that wisdom and intelligence/genius are mutually exclusive after certain threshold. Example: Kurt Godel is a genius, but he is certainly not wise. My colleague, Ian, told me a quotation from ADnD (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons): "When it rains, intelligence tells you that it is water falling from the sky; wisdom tells you to take cover."

"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"

2007-10-22T05:36:00.000-07:00

I've made fun of this quotation a lot. It sounds so cheesy.

Actually, the first time I read it, I didn't understand it. A first enlightenment came while (out of all things) learning Object-Oriented (OO) programming. Only 2 weeks ago, I had a second enlightenment. This time, it's as real-world a scenario as it gets.

Google vs. Evil: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html

It's an old article in Wired.com; but still an interesting read, I think. Google is a unique story that really resembles a superhero beginning/origin/year one story. Two university students with the ambition to do good for mankind by providing a usable, fair search engine. And then they got a super power. Real super power. I can't even begin to imagine how it feels to have such power that countries feel the need to talk to you, a mere person. Even more, you have the power to impact so many people's life.

Anyway, with such a slogan as "Don't be Evil", I wonder why it took me so long to link a comic book quotation to Google.

Films

2007-10-07T07:53:00.000-07:00

These days I feel like thinking somewhat coherently on whether or not I like a film and why.

Let's start with the film I just saw, Hulk.
I don't like this film; it is a bad good film I think. My reasons:

I don't relate to Bruce Banner, the main character, at all. I usually relate to characters because they have their problems (or some interesting trait, ability, or charm) and I appreciate this problem (or trait or ability or charm). Sure Bruce had an unhappy childhood; but he doesn't seem to mind that at all, so that doesn't seem to be a problem. Sure he has difficulty in progressing with his research; but again, this is not shown to bother him at all. (Compare this with how we are presented with Peter Parker's multiple problems in Spider-man films.)
I don't see a natural confrontation; all conflicts seem to be forced to me. Examples:

Why did David Banner blew up the military lab? Sure he is angry, but do angry scientists have the heart to blow up his own lab (even if it is actually owned by some other, uncaring entity)?

What was the point of Hulk fighting the 3 dogs? (More specifically, if you send 3 assassins to terminate a target, would you go about calling people and tell them that you just sent 3 assassins?)

Why was Bruce so angry when he found out about his genetics that he turned into Hulk for the first time? He didn't seem to be bothered about anything at all thus far (he was even happy after the gamma radiation accident), why finding out that his genetics were altered bothered him so much?

The final conflict between David and Bruce (which was probably intended to be the climax) is simply rubbish. I don't understand why David Banner turned to be so evil and I certainly don't understand why they decided to make him into some elemental being (even in a Marvel universe, there is such a thing as absurdity).
(This final point is the result of reading Wikipedia.) There is no humor at all; the film takes itself too seriously.

To me, the best moments of the film is when Hulk fought the military in the desert. It was a classic Hulk moment of being misunderstood and abused. People are afraid of him so they treat him like a monster; which only feeds his anger and in turn increases the people's fear and so on and on the spiral goes.
They should have written the script to make that moment to be the climax of the film.

Getting busy

2007-08-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

Right now is probably one of the best times in my life. I have all the opportunity to do what I like.

Now, the difficult thing is that I still have many things I want to do and I definitely cannot do all of them at the same time. I want to:

create a Dev ID for my deviantArt page;
work on another short comic for Hamthology vol. 2;
try making a 2D animation (Tsunami Channel OP that I've delayed since the time when dinosaurs still walk on earth (around the time Jurrasic Park was popular, I mean (maybe)));
continue working on my Joan of Arc 3D model;
colour the WIB poster I started working on some time ago;
work on a simple 3D scene engine.

The order reflects the likelihood of my starting each work.
A little interesting to note that the short comic on point #2 has "choices" as the theme :)

Besides that, I'm still reading books, of course. I'm currently on The Transparent Society by David Brin. It's an interesting read about how the Internet opens up whole new possibilities and problems. Even more amazing is the fact that the book was published in 1998. That means, what, he started writing it around 1996? When the Internet was just starting (and Netscape was still fighting the Browser War against IE)?

Anyway, time to get busy :)

Happiness and Publication

2007-06-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

I just read the book "Ten Philosophical Mistakes" by Mortimer J. Adler. One of its chapters is about Happiness. My impression (which could be wrong) about the chapter is that it is important to distinguish contentment and happiness (I did not have the chance to read the chapter in full because I had to return the book to the library). What I understand from my partially reading the chapter is that we are content when we get what we want; but this is not happiness. Happiness is achieved when we know we live responsibly according to our moral values.

This sounds just like Dan Gilbert's point in his TED Talk (link to video of his talk). Gilbert says that statistically, a person who fails an exam now will be just as happy in 3 months as another person who wins a lottery now. His point is similar to (if not the same as) Adler's: when you get what you want, you are not necessarily happy. Gilbert went further by saying that we can synthesize happiness; that accepting what is happening to us will bring us a happiness as real as that we got from winning a lottery.

---
The second part of this post is about the question I automatically asked when I realized this: "So did Dan Gilbert actually say nothing new in his talk? How can he justify his talk?"

Then I realized that we are not living in an academic world (and Gilbert did have an additional point after all; though I'm sure someone else has come up with it). It is not necessary for all talks, books, and articles to contain a completely new idea (one thing constantly demanded in an academic publication; even a survey paper has to have a new way to structure past ideas). In real world, getting a concept popular is one serious business.
There is definitely a benefit in redundancy. Different writing styles suit different kind of people; the more writings there are on a subject, the more likely it is for that subject to be known. The more people know about a concept, the more likely it is for the concept to be useful.

This is one thing that I do not like about the current state of academic world: there is little motivation for its members to make new concepts popular, especially in computer science. Performance is usually measured by number of papers published, weighted by the importance of conference/journal in which it appears. Book chapters might actually be weighted less than a paper in a first-tier conference even though a chapter takes more time to prepare. Note that this is a chapter for a technical book that is more or less regarded as "important" or "prestigious". What is the chance that an academic is willing to take the time to write a book accessible to the public?
To me personally, it seems that the generally accepted "solution" is letting the public know about new discoveries when they in the form of a product. Even then, the explanation is usually vague, something like "the computer software will try to process the recording to understand what the speaker is saying." Sounds simple enough, so why did it take speech processing research so long and still not solve the problem of robust speech recognition? True, writing a full-fledged technical details on stochastic methods used to solve the problem will probably turn readers off; but is there not a way to reveal just enough technicality for the public to appreciate the difficulty (and frustrations) in such a research problem?

I am especially concerned about this because personally I am reading books that lightly touches on foreign topics I have never learned before, like philosophy (I studied computer science). I do not want to read philosophy text books; they will take too much of my time just to know what philosophy is. What I want is a book that I can read in around 2 weeks and will give me a reasonable overview. It does not matter that it is not deep enough, I will read more on topics I find interesting. It does not matter that it is not completely correct nor completely complete; I only want a reasonable overview.

And remember, readers who are interested enough about a subject are willing to endure a reasonable amount of unfamiliar technicality. It is alright to include a few equations in your book.

Starch and varlings

2007-05-19T23:46:00.000-07:00

I had a misconception about starch. I used to think that starch makes people stupid. It's a long story that started in my childhood. I grew up in a somewhat stagnant society in which people do not mind committing little sins for a little profit. Or just to stay alive. (It's not as bad as I'm making it perhaps.)

Anyway, the story is that schools are popular places for snack sellers to open their "mobile" stalls. Reason is hundreds of kids running out to buy snacks 3 times a day (2 breaks & end of school). The problem is that as tasty as these snacks used to be, sellers do substitute expensive ingredients with cheaper ones. For example, meatballs no longer contain meat but mostly starch and some compound that simulate the bouncy/chewy texture; more starch added to make "syrup candies" more "syrupy"; and especially colourful food colouring is added to make snacks look more attractive.
Anyway, my parents used to tell me not to buy these snacks. Reason being cheap ingredients are added to substitute costly ones partly or even completely, with starch being mentioned as a prime example. These snacks made me stupid, so I was told. Somehow, I made the connection that this means starch made me (and people in general) stupid.

Now I understand that it is the lack of protein (because starch substitutes meat) is the real culprit.

Another misconception is related to this snack seller example. Food hawkers on side streets also do this substitution trick. Note that such business is usually handed down from parents to their children. Then, add inflation and globalization at the background. In other words, ingredients are getting more expensive but they need to keep the price low so customers can afford the food. And there is more competition from Kentucky Fried Chicken and Mc Donald's.
I can understand that the hawkers are more or less forced to substitute costly ingredients, give less sauce, and other tricks to keep cost low in order to survive. The price is that with each trick, the taste inevitably degrades. Many such stalls finally stops selling because customers no longer come, one reason being the food is no longer nice as it used to be.

Somehow, I made another link of reasoning and concluded that things only get worse as generations pass. All talks about "good old days" only reinforced this conclusion. How my city used to have vast paddy fields when my Dad was in elementary school. How the temperature used to be much cooler. How the roads used to be much more peaceful with minimum number of motored vehicles.

Thank goodness for writers like David Brin, who wrote novel I am currently reading, Glory Season. His writing is one major influence in freeing my mind from these misconceptions. That human can get better. That we should look to the future, think about what we can do, instead of fretting about the good old days, the lost golden age in the past.

A novel cannot be interesting without a central character. She is Maia, a varling like me (all of us, really). She is born in a maternal society in which human can breed via sexual mating and self-cloning (apparently some organisms as complex as insects and even lizards are blessed with this ability). What is more, self-cloning is preferred to form clans. Children born from mating are called varlings and automatically become second class citizens. Thus, Maia's story easily attracts my sympathy.
One theme (among so many in the novel) that strikes me at this particular stage of my life is, quoting the afterword, "no plan, no system or stereotype, can suppress an individual who is boldly determined to be different."

Back to misconceptions, on our eyes it is obvious that isolated society into which Maia is born cannot be sustained for long. Sooner or later people will want openness. To Maia and other women in this society though, this concept is far from obvious. It is almost heretical.
It pushes me more than I like (or comfortable with) to re-evaluating what I learned from my parents. It is an obvious necessity to other people, but it is almost heretical to me.

Other novels by David Brin that I enjoyed reading are Kiln People and Earth.
You can check his official website here: http://www.davidbrin.com/index.html

Nooooooo....

2007-05-17T18:32:00.000-07:00

Melinda is out from American Idol? How can quantum mechanics and probability theory explain this?

(Disclaimer: This is some trashy impulsive post.)

The Third Installment

2007-05-13T04:06:00.000-07:00

I looked forward to Spider-Man 3 really badly. I was skeptical on the first and second films, and was proven wrong both times. So I thought the third one must be just as good or even better. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong again.

Spidey 3 is not a bad film. It looks as good as the first two; but I did not feel the same resonance as I did with the first two. There was even moments that I thought, "I hate this Peter Parker." I could not identify what exactly the film lacks compared to the other two. Execution, perhaps?

Probably the main reason is too many things going on in one film. I suspect the writers added Venom because a lot of fans wrote that they wanted to see Venom in the third film all over teh Intarweb. I wonder if the film would be better had the villain been only Sandman. That way, more time is available to explore "the battle within"--promised by the film's tag line--Peter and Harry (and, to certain extent, MJ).

(Warning: possible spoilers after this.)

Moments I dislike in the film:

The way Harry changed his mind by his butler. I was expecting the change to be some thing like "my father went that way, I won't; I am a different man from him." What I got was a (somewhat) immature change of mind just because an older person says so.
WTH did Harry jumped in front of Peter in the climax fight? How could he change that far in the span of (probably) a few minutes?
The resolution between Marko and Peter. Ugh, just by "I forgive you" everything is alright? What about the things Marko did so far? The Spidey I know would have said "I understand your situation and everything, but I still gotta put you behind bars."

I do like the tension built up between Peter and MJ. I think their problem happens everywhere. After all, is it not more difficult to tell our negative stories (e.g. being fired from a play) to the closest person than to (more-or-less) strangers?

Good film, but could have been incredible.

Tag line

2007-05-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

True to MediaCorp tradition, they are airing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 on Channel 5. It is the ad for Spider-Man 2 that makes me cringe. It shows some moody emotional close ups of MJ and Peter. And they add text that goes more or less like this:
"You can never escape from a relationship with Spider-Man..."
"... because he is the only one who sticks around."
I'm not sure if this is an attempt at humor or honestly serious stuff; I just find it unbearably bad.

The other night, though, there is such ad for another (much lower budget) program, Lifeline, I think. It's a local drama about civil defense officers. The ad is a collection of shots from the show; but the audio is replaced with siren. With the audio/video goes the text that goes something like:
"Siren sound..."
"... is it a sign of trouble..."
"... or is it a sign of hope?"

For some reason that tag line sticks to my mind even though I saw it only once.

I guess the statement gets into me because recently I experienced first-hand such double-meaning things. Things that can be interpreted in different ways depending on where you were when it happened. For accident victims, siren sound may mean hope. For by-standers,
siren sound may be an annoyance or even a sign of trouble.

I cannot help but thinking that emotion is a function of physical position (how close I am to the siren to be annoyed), social position (if I am with friends I am more likely to be concerned about what happened than if I am alone), and "role" (I cannot find a better word; this means whether I am an accident victim or a by-stander).

I'm sure there are more dimensions to human to fully define the function that explains human emotions; but I was happy to find myself thinking in this somewhat analytic mode. The reason is that I'm currently reading Computer Science: Reflections from the Field, Reflections on the Field. It is a somewhat easy to read book about different areas in Computer Science (CS).

Reading the book is almost like re-living the moments I spent with a friend/more-than-friend who is no longer with me; replacing the emotional pain with intellectual & egoistical pains. The book reminds me of the wonder & excitement I experienced when studying CS during undergrad time. One plus about the book is that it is narrative than technical; I learned quite a number of historical accounts on how the CS concepts I learnt was developed.

Database (a small joke: what do you mean people are still doing research on database?), algorithm, computability, P and NP, machine translation, NLP, statistical methods, Gaussian classifier, Alan Turing, game playing, Claude Shannon, Noam Chomsky, different levels of grammars, lambda calculus, relational calculus...

Anyway, this post is going nowhere so I'll stop now.

Breach

2007-04-17T06:28:00.000-07:00

I saw Breach on Sunday without planning. I did make a kind of appointment with Tomi to see a film on Sunday and he offered 2 titles. Breach looked tamer for our mood (we were pretty beat up after the 3-hour bike ride on Saturday afternoon (at least I was beat up)), so we picked it.

I was a little skeptical about the film, but a little into the film and I was hooked. I especially liked the briefing when Agent Linney said "You will tell her 'I've got a new boos, his name is Cooper.'" and the screen is overlayed with him getting into his house, saying the exact same word to his wife. From that point on, I decided that I'd like the film.

Well, I do like the film. There is a hollow aftertaste, though. It was exciting and everything, but somehow the whole story feels too simple. No doubt the plot has been simplified to fit years of work into 2 hours of relatively exciting series of events; but probably another reason for the simplistic feeling is the fact that work is hard because we have to face it everyday. Over and over and over... every single day. In a film, two long, torturing weeks can pass is 2 seconds.

Yes, I think the skipping of 2 weeks before Cooper's final "drop" was one of the transition that I instantaneously disliked.

Eric's personal doubt about whether or not to go on with work when it messes up his (married) life so much is a good hook for the audience, I think. It resonates with me because I experienced this only some months ago.

All in all, Breach was a good film for last weekend's occasion. I don't think it is "all time" good, though. I still can't get over the hollow aftertaste.

Finally, let me say my condolences to the family and friends of the victims in the Virginia Tech shooting.

Extra, extra

2007-03-10T22:24:00.000-08:00

I forgot to mention yesterday about what I think "Pursuit of Happyness" did not capture enough. It's sustained self-discipline. It is very difficult to do. The film did capture it somewhat by showing Will Smith reading while standing because his room does not have a light, the black lines under his eyes when he is in the office, and Smith did mention in one of his narrations "away from my self-discipline thing".
But I thought it should have captured it more. Yesterday I saw monetary difficulty dominates pretty much enerything else.

Anyway, here are things I found from Reddit today.

First is Iran photos: http://www.pbase.com/k_amj/throughout_iran&page=all
Shoot me, but I never know that Iran has ski resort(s). Sure photos tend to show only the good side of a place, but at least they revealed new things to me. There is a marching band on the streets of Aashura, there is that seemingly tranquil Valasht Lake, and there is a scenic spot in Tehran.

And a little reading on Spartan culture: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=441339&in_page_id=1879
The cause is, of course, the film 300. In my opinion, this only confirms my belief that pop art is powerful. Who in Singapore cares about how Spartan lives? Well, now there are quite a few, thanks to a film.

Somebody should do the same to computer science so that people know that computer science students do *NOT* fix computers.

"Pursuit of Happyness" versus "What Could He Be Thinking?"

2007-03-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

With this post, I command you to read the book What Could He Be Thinking? by Michael Gurian as a tie-in for the film Pursuit of Happyness.

However, this post will not discuss the film nor the book in depth. It will mention some points from the film, but it is more about the themes I found in the film, not about the film itself. Of course there will be chances of spoilers and what not. Do not read on if you do not want to know what happens before watching the film.

Instead, this post will tell you that as I was walking out from the cinema, I felt kind of numb. What Could He Be Thinking? enabled me to see that Chris Gardner, Will Smith's character, struggled for more than just meeting end's meet and being good to his son. I think his most difficult struggle is keeping his self-worth. It *was* mentioned in the film, as Smith narrated that he felt underappreciated and used because he was the one singled out to get coffee, donuts, and move a car. Also when he blurted out to his son about never to let anyone tell him that cannot do something.

All these struggles, in my opinion, ultimately leads in how Gardner must keep himself up; convincing himself that he is not worthless; finding out his self worth; whether he is being a good father like he wants to be. And the scene in "the cave" showed that he is scared. The door banging kind of confirms his fear that he is so worthless that his son must sleep in that condition.

Had I not read the book, probably I thought the film was just okay.

Another interesting thing is that long after the film ended, around an hour or so, as I walked out the bathroom, I realized the meaning of one of Smith's lines. He said something like "Why did Jefferson word it pursuit of happiness? Maybe he knew that we cannot get happiness and can only pursue it."
What I realized is something as simple as this. Smith really meant "Why not word it simply as happiness? Why add the word pursuit?". Simple point, but once I realize it, it is kind of weird. "Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness". Why not "life, liberty, and happiness"?
Well, the actual reason was more historical than thoughtful. Read it from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_happiness

Anyway, for one reason or another, that walking out of the cinema also happened to mark what I hope to be the end of a phase in my personal life. A lot of realizations dawned on me. They are simple and probably cliche, but they feel different when I appreciate their meaning instead of reading them as words:

Why keep being involved in something not working?
Why must I be nice to others on my expense?
If it must be done, why can't I be not nice to another person?
Why is it that by "not being nice", I think of "being nasty"? Isn't there a neutral ground in the middle?
Why is it so bad to lose a friend whom I (now realize that I) don't even know?
Why is it so bad to say "I don't want to do this anymore" and quit?

So yeah, stuff happened and it was nobody's fault that I was hurting and am now possibly (which, according to Chris Gardner may or may not happen) hurting another. But then again, probably (which, according to Chris Gardner has a good chance to happen) the other person does not even notice about what I am doing. So, yeah, whatever.

Speaking of whatever, I think Gardner's wife (at least the way the film portrayed her) was practicing "intimate separateness". She gave him space to prove his self-worth by allowing him to keep his son.

But then again, maybe I am looking for symbols so I see them everywhere.

Ah, one final thing: if you enjoy watching animations, do see Howl's Moving Castle. The story is weird, but the animation fully redeems it. I do admit that some characters (especially Howl himself) change look now and then, probably due to different animators' work; but the scenery animation and blending of 2D and 3D animations are.... simply amazing.

Dreams Come True

2007-02-25T01:52:00.000-08:00

The title is not exactly what's happening to my life, but I'd like to quote some lines from the wacky Remix by Star Salzman over at OverClocked Remix:

Remember it's not the end of the world when
You lose all your continues
You can start all over again

Of course an incident happened in my life which makes these lines more meaningful than it was intended. Something in the line of "you'll find pattern everywhere if you look hard enough."
I don't really feel like telling it here, but I want to write an entry. So here it is.

Check the remix (music and lyrics) here: http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01149/

Quotations

2007-02-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

If you go to my LibraryThing catalog, you'll see that I read a lot (too much?) of comic books. A recent read is a hard cover compilation volume titled "The World's Greatest Super-Heroes". Probably not an inviting title for people who read classics and technical books, but you should see the artwork. It's done by Alex Ross (remember this name). He always render his pages in gouache painting and make these victional characters look alive. (Perhaps he tries too hard to preserve the conventional look of the characters, but his rendering more than makes up for it, I think.)
But it is not the only strength of this volume.

Let me introduce another name: Paul Dini. He did the text; and this entry is a list of quotations from the text. The book is a compilation of a number of stories:

Superman: Peace on Earth
The Batman: War on Crime
Shazam: Power of Hope
Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth
Justice League of America: Secret Origins
Liberty and Justice

Again, probably the titles of individual stories turn off people even more. Admittedly, they do sound so typically ignorant and cheesy. So I'd better get into the good stuff--the quotations.

They come up slowly to take the food and then move back, pale and silent as ghosts.
Only one little boy speaks. He looks at what I've given him, then at me, and asks, "Will you come back tomorrow?"
I look away.

This is a narration by the superhero who started it all: Superman. Even with his god-like powers, he cannot solve all problems in the world on his own. I think this is an important realization for every person toward maturity. As Stephen Covey puts it, first we become independent. The next step is realizing that we are all inter-dependent and embrace this concept.

Similar narrations:

I can't overcome their generations of fear any more than I can force them to accept what I've brought.
In other countries I am reviled as a political activist, a usurper, or a fraud. They don't want me there regardless of what I'm bringing or whom it could help.
It was never my intention to turn human beings into a desperate, unthinking mob.
My mission ends here, incomplete and in failure.

Next is the Batman.

What kind of man would I have become if things had been different?If, instead of using my fortune as a means to fight crime, I allowed myself to be ruled by it and all its temptations.
If I truly became what I appeared to be to others [as Bruce Wayne]?
I try to imagine what my life would have been like as a poor child on the street, my family gone, no one to look after me.
Stripped of those sources, would I still have tried to fight crime however Icould, or would I have turned my anger back on society as so many others have done?

I'm no billionaire, but there are times that I think of these questions myself. "What if I were born on 'the other side'?" I think it is crucial to understand our "self" better than anyone else can tell/teach us.

Finally, there is this quotation that I really like. It was written at the beginning of Superman's story and repeated at the end. The important point is that in the beginning, it was his Pa's belief; in the end, it was his.

He knew not every seed would make it, but Pa wanted to give each one the chance to grow.
I tell them not every seed will make it--
--but all of them deserve the chance to grow.

I grew up in a society in which a definition of success is more or less dictated from parents to children. Further, kids are expected to succeed. Any less, it is a shame for your parents. Of course I'm lucky enough that my parents are understanding, but undeniably there was a time in which I felt the most worthlessest kid because I found myself to at the long tail of kids. That I didn't deserve a good life because I failed.
But somehow I slowly figured that because I'm alive, I deserve to live and am responsible to live.

The "seed" in that last quotation symbolizes so many things in life that I strangely attracted to it even though it is probably so straightforward and meaningless to others.

Anyway, I'm not good at explaining things and right now I'm not sure if I understand why I like this quotation, so I'll stop here. Let me finish with a wish.

Often times, I overhear people saying more-or-less in the tone of "super hero stories are for kids". Even the word "super hero" itself seems to be... "not for grown-ups". Well, this is true for the older versions of super hero stories. But writings always blow up a theme, a concept larger than life. Recent super hero stories do this to individuals. They blow up individuals to tell our struggle to fit in, our conflict (internal and external).

Well, there are stories that really are for kids; but it's unfair to label a large class using a label of a smaller subclass.

Guess what I wish is like anyone else's wish in this ever niche-going society: please show a little more appreciation to my little niche interest.

Kamen Rider for computer science

2007-02-05T18:44:00.000-08:00

I just thought of a crazy idea. First, we'll need to trace back why it is even able to cross my mind in the first place.

I liked Kamen Rider Black. It's a show "for kids", probably people will say it is similar to Power Rangers. I think I can accept this in terms of casual public's thinking: action figure tie-ins, heroes fighting monsters with enough time to pose to the camera, etc. But as a fan, I disagree quite strongly. While there are excellent Power Ranger series (Ninja Storm and Space Patrol Delta come to mind), Kamen Rider series usually have a much darker background story, complete with conspiracy theory paranoia (and, of course, Kamen Riders no longer pose that much).

Well, anyway, note the "Black" sub-title. It was rather long ago (long, long ago, 20th century--if you get the reference, heh). These days, Kamen Riders are getting weirder (and sometimes childish). Take Kamen Rider 555 for example. A person needs to wear the belt (Kamen Rider trade mark equipment/morpher) , dial "555" on a mobile phone, put the mobile onto the belt, and whola, he transforms into Kamen Rider Faiz. Silly, huh? (But I love Faiz, the action sequences and gimmicks somehow got into me.)
Well, recently Kids Central plays Kamen Rider Blade. Of course the main Rider uses a sword.

Now, extrapolating, what if we were to design a Kamen Rider series to get kids into computer science? (As a part of our grand scheme to take over the world peacefully.) Kamen Rider EM came to my mind. EM = expectation maximization (Google it, there are a lot of tutorials out there). Well, one of the uses of EM algorithm is to estimate Gaussian mixture distrubution, so probably we can represent each monster as points on high-dimensional space. The Rider will pose dramatically as he tried to estimate parameters needed to fit the monster's points. Once he can fit the points using a Gaussian distribution, that's when he delivers the final, destructive blow. A punch maybe. Or a kick. Gaussian Kick?
Then, as the series progresses, of course he will meet stronger monsters. Even ones he clearly cannot defeat. So he will need an upgrade. He needs a better model to defeat the monsters.

Well, a monster does not usually follow the same fighting pattern all the time. So, a better model is to assume that the monster assumes a certain fighting state at a point in time. Each fighting state can be modeled by a Gaussian mixture; while the change from one fighting state to another can be modeled by transition probabilities.
Whole, Kamen Rider EM evolves into Kamen Rider HMM. Now he has new weapons: Ergodic shield and, uhm, Left-to-right Sword.

Another Rider to accompany EM in the series can be other classes of computation. Instead of statistical powers, this Rider prefers deterministic powers. Kamen Rider Algo perhaps? Not sure yet how he fights and what weapons he has.

Some thoughts for another day when I'm re-visit algorithms perhaps.
(Yes, I got this crazy idea while re-reading about EM algorithms.)

And that's enough fantasy for one day.

Chinese Restaurant

2007-02-04T06:25:00.000-08:00

Channel News Asia currently airs a show called Chinese Restaurant on Sunday afternoons. The premise of the show is this. At each episode, the host (who we never really see but whose voice we always hear) will travel to a place and look for a Chinese restaurant at the place. He will see the restaurant owner(s) and asks him/her/them how thet got there.

At almost every episode I find myself relate to the story surprisingly easily. The story of the people who actually travelled to the new place from China is probably similar in taste as my gransparents' story. As bitter-sweet as they are, what touches close to my heart is the question the host asks to their children/grand children: Do they consider themselves Chinese or, say in my case, Indonesian.

There, you already have an obvious clue why the question matters to me.

In the episode shown today, however, the story is a little different. The restaurant owner this time is "Noisy Jim". He was a 16 year-old when his family travelled from China to Canada. The difference this time is that we hear the story from him, not his parents.
(Another different aspect is that Jim's restaurant does NOT sell Chinese food. He sells western food like bacon and eggs for breakfast; pork chop for lunch; pie for dinner.)
What Jim had to say when the host asks his question is this. "I am me. (pause) That's how I think of it. I am me. Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, it doesn't matter. That's why my thinking never changes."

I wish I can answer the same question as confidently as Jim did. I can't. My answer is still a shaky "A part of me thinks I am 100% Chinese, but another part of me is undeniably Indonesian." I see myself as both. I've said this once and I'm saying it again: it sucks even more when both sides of these 2 identities I have "clashes". It is never fun to be stuck in the middle.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm denying my origin by never bothering to re-learn the Mandarin language (I learnt it when I was in elementary and soon forgot it because I never used it). Sometimes I wonder why in hell I'm now more comfortable speaking about things that matter to me in English.

On one hand, surely this cannot be wrong? After all, this is me.
On the other hand, what about my origin? Doesn't it matter at all to me?

Maybe I'm thinking about this in an improper angle. Maybe I should not see them as clashing or whatever.

The episode ended in a rather bitter taste because Jim passed away two months after the host saw him.

All in all, I recommend this show to any fellow overseas Chinese out there. I think it captures our stories well (not too much sugar coating nor simplification).

Stormwatch

2006-12-07T03:04:00.000-08:00

I just had to trace back the origins of The Authority, so I borrowed Stormwatch last weekend. The first collection I read, "Lightning Strikes", was a little of expected disappointment: less sophisticated story, not-so-attractive drawing, and characters are more stereotyped.

Still, I got to know more likeable characters like Winter and Jackson King before and while he was still the Weatherman. I was little disappointed to see that Jack Hawksmoor and Jenny Sparks were not given any major roles.

All these changes as the story continues. I especially like the story arc with The High. Probably this is the first time Ellis introduced the concept of a team with a Doctor and an Engineer, a concept brought forward into The Authority.
The final moments in the story have sooo much potential to be a comic-book tragedy. I think somehow the panels and drawing did not succeed in conveying this. I can still see the tragic circumstances, but it could have been better.

The end of Stormwatch, though, is really cataclysmic. Almost everyone dies. Guess I am fortunate enough to read The Authority first before reading this end. It is such a cliffhanger, I don't think I can survive it had I read the story in the proper order :D

Anyway, I think The Authority is a good evolution from Stormwatch. There is another story branch with Jackson King called The Monarchy. I have not got my hand on it yet, but Wikipedia says story telling is confusing and fan reactions are so bad that the series got cancelled. Probably I don't miss much :)

I certainly develop a lot of respect to WildStorm after reading these 2 series. Marvel universe seem much tamer compared to WildStorm universe. Superheroes, even protagonists, die. Arguably this reduces the concept of a superhero into a supersoldier, partially dispensible in a battle. But I think it reminds me that that's how life is.

A little dose of reality

2006-12-01T22:36:00.000-08:00

I'm currently busy preparing for a journal article in addition to some other stuff which I'm starting to believe to be unimportant. Well, anyway, here is a dose of reality from the Internet: 10 Fascinating Facts about Iraq Overlooked by the Media (http://www.neatorama.com/2006/09/05/ten-fascinating-facts-about-iraq-overlooked-by-the-media/)

Is this relevant to what I do (for living)? No, not at all. But, I'd like to argue, it's much more important than what I do. This is about living people, not some l337 algorithm with some potential commercial application.

And somehow it reassures me that those additional stuff I do really does matter. (See it for yourself from here http://www1.nvpc.org.sg/sub_page.asp?pid=101&sid=265 and here http://www.migrantvoices.org/index.html)

The Authority

2006-11-28T07:41:00.000-08:00

Just found it last Saturday at Jurong East Regional Library. I really like it.

At first look, I thought it had the good look suitable to my taste. Nice lines, good colours.

Then I thought the characters were rip-offs from older superheroes. The Midnighter looks like Batman, from his mask to the 3 small "hooks" along his lower arm (even his name suggests Batman feel). Apollo is like a toned-down Superman with rays shooting out his eyes, vulnerability, and flight. Even Swift looks like Hawkgirl from Justice League.

But then I saw Jenny Spark.

Of course I didn't know her name yet, but I like her attitude. And she looked to be in charge. So I thought, "Oh well, why not?"

And it did not disappoint. Though externally it looks like another clone of Justice League or The Avengers, its universe has a very different feeling. Justice League is just too full of powerful creatures (sometimes I wonder what Batman or Flash can even hope to do); while the few copies of The Avengers that I got to read were boring--not much going on in those books, yet somehow they are *collections* of chapters.

The Authority, on the other hand, is rather fast-paced (enemies defeated in 2 or 3 chapters!) and a lot is going on. The characters are likable and have just enough power to get the action going.
The universe has a nice blend of fantasy and sci-fi-ish feel. Fantasy (and symbolism) is aplenty. Jenny Spark is the Spirit of the Twentieth Century. She is 100 years old in 1998. She embodies the scientific/technology progress in the 20th century, electricity. I read from Wikipedia later that her successor, Jenny Quantum, will be called the Spirit of the Twenty First Century. I know this sounds like mambo-jambo, but it has a nice feel of consistency to it.
Another symbolism example is my favourite character in the team: Jack Hawksmoor. On my first read, I like him only because of his attitude and his moves. (I guess he embodies a lot of qualities I like in a superhero. He is fast, agile, and somewhat cunning.) He is "God of the Cities". I did not understand the significance of his name until I read from Wikipedia later that he can only survive inside urban regions; and he can become one with a city, as if the city is a living being; and he can be affected physically by the condition of a city he is in if he "connects" to it (he had a nosebleed when he connected to a destroyed Moscow). Of course this kind of power is full of BS if we thnk about it; but somehow it reinforces the consistency feeling I got from the characters' names.

Sci-fi-ish feel is a rather generous allowance I made because I like the comic. Guess I'd refrain from making this point because I can shoot it down even as I'm thinking the case :
Another difference is that The Authority does not hesitate to take necessary actions to get to its goal, including *gasp* killing. Traditional DC and Marvel superheroes always, always refrain from killing; arguing that that is the line which seperates them from the villains. Even the celebrated Kingdom Come revolves around this issue of killing.
And, by being utilitarian in terms of killing, the comic has so much potential in asking the questions "why superheroes do good", "who watches the watchmen", and other questions which starts from the fact that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

There are minus points that I miss, I'm sure. For one, they are completely separated from the rest of the world. Who cares if big cities like Moscow, London, and LA keep getting destroyed? As long as we get to the bad guys. Who cares about an empty building being destroyed? Who cares about the common men when the story is so exciting around the super people? All in all, the comic gets to a point in which we have the idea that human is too stupid and powerless to develop itself and make progress. We need The Authority to save us (heck, there isn't even a concept of progress there).

And, of course, superpowers in general are not so clearly defined in this universe, unlike Marvel universe in which we know just how strong Spidey is, and we know that even though Hulk is huge, he cannot be as huge as Godzilla or Ultraman. In The Authority, though, Jenny Spark sometimes just fight hand-to-hand with her powers. Then, when the aliens invaded LA, she conveniently has the power to zap every single alien ship while taking a gigantic form (or at least somekind of projection of her body). And also, in the alien's world, she can be powerful enough to destroy whole major part of a city. What Midnighter can do is also not too clear. He seems to be a super soldier; sometimes he can beat a bunch of enemies easily, at others one guard takes him a whole page to defeat. And about the same can be said about everyone else.
I guess the only point which does not make this unclear definiton to destroy the comic's appeal is some limited consistency of how the characters use their powers. Jenny can never fly; whereas Swift, the Winged Huntress, always takes aerial position during combat. And the battles are not just a series of bam, bam, ka-pows; somehow Jenny can always yell at someone to do something and that something is a necessary step to winning.

Try reading it yourself.
My favourite character is Jack Hawksmoor. Who is yours?

One final teaser for potential readers in Singapore: Jenny Quantum, the Spirit of the Twenty First Century, is born in Singapore.

Life is a kind of search

2006-11-24T23:02:00.000-08:00

I especially like Dream Theater's kind of ironic lyric from Octavarium part I, Someone Like Him.
I remember when I was a kid, I was so sure that I don't want a lot of things about grown-up people. Things like responsibility, complicated cause-and-effect system, bureaucracy... But, as I grow up myself, I get exposed to these things. With much painful resistance, I learned their values, how these things are useful in social life. And so, now I think my kid self will hate my current self if somehow they could meet and interact.

Quoted from Someone Like Him:

I never wanted to become
Someone like him
...
So many years have passed
...
So suddenly
The only thing
I wanted
To become
To be someone just like him

One thing that I'd like to comment is that people usually see this process of growing up as "losing your innocence." That's correct. However, I believe that innocence is NOT a virtue. What is the difference between innocence and ignorance? The virtue here is not about not knowing evil, but being exposed to evil and being able to recognize and resist it.
True, this makes it difficult for any adult to teach and understand young kids. Somehow, we cannot understand how we used to think. This is a common side effect of learning and knowing. Ask any PhD student ot university professor to explain their research topic. I'm sure you'll see them thinking hard about how to explain a highly specialized stuff to another person who don't even know the basics necessary to understand why this specialized stuff is so difficult to do. In this case, research is "life", the researcher is "an adult", and you are "a young, innocent kid."

---

I'm starting to realize that life is a form of constant search. You find a thing, understand its use and deficiencies, and search for another thing to overcome the deficiencies or some other unsatisfied needs.

Quoted from The Answer Lies Within, still by Dream Theater:

Life is short, so learn from your mistakes
And stand behind, the choices that you made
Face each day with both eyes open wide
And try to give, don't keep it all inside

Don't let the day go by
Don't let it end
Don't let a day go by, in doubt,
The answer lies within

You've got the future on your side
You've gonna be fine now
I know whatever you decide
You are gonna shine!!!

I think I am still immature in my own search because I'm just a sucker for the bold line. Sometimes I wonder how other people can learn these things so quickly in their own search.

---

New remixes over at OverClocked Remix:

(1) Moon Rhapsody, a first remix by DrumUltimA. It's from the game Cave Story.
http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01524/
Somehow I like the remix even though Im not familiar with the original tune.

(2) Via, by Tepid, TO, and pixietricks, from the game Final Fantasy X.
http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01521/
It's got Tepid and TO, so it's got to be good :)

(3) Knuckleduster by Daniel Baranowsky from Sonic 3.
http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01526/
I was rather skeptical to read that Marble Garden tune from Sonic 3 got lyricized, even if it's by Mr Baranowsky. The fact that Sonic 3 is probably *the* favourite game I had during high school time just thickens my skepticism. But it turned out to be good, so I recommend it :)
Oh, this remix is a part of the remix album Project Chaos: http://s3k.ocremix.org

Things to Do

2006-11-22T07:59:00.000-08:00

Met Yongki today. We are buddies since undergrad days. I remember thinking how he changes all these years before we meet. Well, as it goes, we also meet Steven. And Vivy.

And so, it was a rather explicit comparison of what way we are taking.

It got me thinking about why I am doing what I am doing. Is this what I wanted to do? Is this what I want to do? Why am I doing things I did not want to do? These remind me of one essay in the book Superheroes and Philosophy. How we easily lose sight of what we wanted to do because we are doing what we are doing.

Guess it was good to be reminded about what I wanted. Then, it's easy to compare that to what I did. What I chose to do.

Then I see the temptations I need to resist in keeping the status quo. I need to move closer to what I want instead of keeping this status quo.

3 Weeks

2006-10-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

It's been 3 weeks. I've read 3 books meanwhile: The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and The Long Tail.

It's interesting to note that only after I'm through with a few chapters in the second and the third books that it dawned on me that all these books discuss different angles of the same phenomenon. The first introduces the phenomenon head-on, journalist style; the second is the more sobre personal angle in facing the phenomenon; and the third formalizes a framework to explain outcomes of the phenomenon.

It's globalization.

Globalization is here. And nobody can stop it. It's transforming things faceless and less personal. And it increases the gap between the rich (the hits/the head) and the poor (the non-hits/the tail). And we need to make sure it is sustainable to prevent a (potentially violent) backlash.
All coincidences in life and the choices we made brought us here today. Coincidences put us in the time of globalization. Our choices bring each of us to our current unique state of personal life. What do we do from here?
And nobody really understands what exactly globalization brings. We think we start to understand it better. One example of such understanding is formulating the "long tail" phenomenon.

One interesting point is that The Long Tail says individual thing in the tail (the poort) is small, but collectively they can compete with the hits (the head/the rich). This agrees nicely with the fact that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening.

I personally think that one bad thing about globalization is the fact that "winner takes all". To me, this seems to be the reason why globalization can result in a backlash. And certainly it stimulates efforts which may result in globalization being unsustainable.

I'm still not sure myself how to interpret all these...
---

New link:
* Uncyclopedia: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
A warning, though, it is a complete waste of time :9

The Rise of the Middle Class

2006-09-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

I just found out today from reading The Lexus and The Olive Tree that the large middle class is a mid-twentieth century phenomenon (I thought it has always been for much longer than that).

I find this interesting because it opens a lot of questions. Does that mean that the gap between the rich and the poor was extremely wide before mid 20th century? What causes this rise of large middle class?
And what was it like to live in a society without a large middle class? (It seems we will be living in such a society in several decades or even sooner.)

One large topic to research on :)

It was a good meeting

2006-09-26T23:15:00.000-07:00

... it really was. Sure, it was longer than I expected and it was the opposite of how I imagined it would be. Boy, was I criticized a lot!

But it was a damn good meeting.

It gives me much, much more motivation to go on than if it went the way I imagined it would be. Feels like it's been so long since the last time I have this sense of curiosity.

Fun VS Sense of Purpose

2006-09-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

While working on my poster presentation and an oral presentation early this week, I finally experienced "fun" while working for the first time in quite a while. The fun, the anticipation of how people would react to my poster/PowerPoint slides was so great that I could work on them without the heavy feeling that I was working.

It got me thinking. What is the difference between fun and sense of purpose? I can work with a similar intensity when I have a sense of purpose in what I'm doing. Is fun just a special case of sense of purpose? Or is sense of purpose just a different form of anticipation of how my method will perform?

Or is it really anticipation itself that can drive me to work like mad?

Probably it's anticipation.
Wow, that's one more thing I learn about myself as a result of writing my thoughts.

---
And here are fun things I enjoyed this week:

Twin Blood, a Double Dragon II remix by Sixto Sounds. The original tune is played on the second phase of the last boss, I believe. I've always imagined it played using blown instruments for "grand feeling" instead of guitar for "rock feeling" (like in this remix); so this remix was a little nice surprise for me :)
Pixietricks and Big Giant Circles are OCRemix judges now.
And, of course, VGDJ episode #57: when the 2 hosts are goofy.
ZOMGpixietrickshasacrushandit'snotzircon?

A start

2006-09-14T05:20:00.000-07:00

Well, I decided to stop making choices which only causes pain to myself. So, I start this blog. This time I'll be more respectable. Yeah, go me!

Anyway, these days I keep getting a mix of opposite things all the time. Makes me unsure how to respond to life, really. But I think life is good.