The Humble Geek

You know what really grinds my gears? When you pull out of a drive-thru window at a restaurant and you get behind some old guy going 5 below the speed limit. --Old Chinese Proverb

• Gladiators (Animal fighting)

Killing humans (and animals) in the name of sport.

• Saloons (Clubs)

Killing brain cells in the name of finding a mate.

• Reality TV

Killing common sense in the name of money.

• Social Networking

Killing privacy in the name of information.

• Government Privilege

Killing freedom in the name of power.

What do the bullet points have in common? A chronic disease found inside all living creatures that keeps us from being perfect: vanity. Heck, we even have a magazine that exclusively tailors to it!

Stop me if I'm being too obvious, but if we don't change now we are destined to have the film Idiocracy become a documentary.

A team that played team basketball has taken the 2011 NBA Championship. Congratulations are in order for the Dallas Mavericks as they put together a team of players that have tales of Finals lost but finally won their vindication tonight.

There is No "I" in Team

The 2011 NBA season was littered with media attention that was concentrated on two or three players and not a NBA team. I have no doubt that the off-season will be littered with what two or three players need to do instead of what a team needs to do to return to the NBA finals in 2012.

What Will the Future Bring

Will Kidd retire? Will there be any changes on the Dallas line up? I don't think anyone has a return trip for the Mavericks in their mind right now, but I believe it is possible. The team that had everyone in the media against them did what no one thought they could do. Go Mavs! See you in a few months!

Six years in the making, then delayed by worries about piracy (which is already broken), Gran Turismo 5 hopes to push up the bar in car simulation games. How does it fair? Follow me as I review a few aspects of the game that left an impression on me.

The game has been polished with the most expensive car wax Sony could buy. The Premium cars, tracks, and photo mode are definitely great pieces of eye candy. However, the Standard cars are a big eye sore when you have one next to a Premium. It's unfortunate that Standard cars were not at least given a larger resolution skin for their bodies.

All of the traditional Gran Turismo tracks are present along with a few new ones. The license tests unlock the full Nürburgring track. The snow and dirt tracks bring a new, challenging races. Then there's the Top Gear track, from one of my favorite shows. It's more difficult than it looks on television.

Now to get down and dirty. The computer racers do not have a clue that you exist in the race. I will be repeatedly rammed from behind or side swiped by turning cars. More than once I have had to restart a race due to an AI driver knocking me off track. This problem is often called "sitting on rails" and it is easily seen in this simul^W... game.

Mechanically the cars are all treated in a generic, arcade-like manner instead of like a simulator. Transmissions shift as fast as F1 cars. Even the 1960 models - unmodified. I have yet to see the merit in the transmission tuning upgrades. I actually own a 2005 BMW M3 and can tell you it is already modified, at stock, as good as it can get. Putting on new exhaust or intake systems hardly give more than 20 HP (and I'm talking about $5,000 in mods). In Gran Turismo 5, the tuning shop tells me the 2004 BMW M3 will get 30 HP just from a new air filter and new exhaust. The one positive thing I have seen is that the cars that have paddle shifters finally have paddle shifters in the interior view. They were missing from the Prologue version.

Created by a company based in Japan, there is an astonishing amount of NASCAR material. From special events to a large amount of cars, it seems the creators love NASCAR. The only real motorsport, Formula 1, has a lesser following with only four cars and no special events.

The menu system is a bit akward at times. For example: pausing the game, going into settings, then backing out, immediately resumes the game instead of backing out one level. Loading times seem to be at fixed times - I have a Intel G2 80gb SSD and loading times take about 15 seconds with very little activity on the HDD light. This can be annoying when there are 5 menus to go through to get to a race, too. If you don't play connected to Sony's Playstation Network, expect to be greated with a half dozen "Would you like to go online?" prompts, too.

There are patches being released to tweak parts of the game so there is hope the game will become a truer simulator over time.

The following recount is rather generic in nature so I do not have to worry about stepping on any toes, but it is all true.

Everyone has a workplace story to tell and I've finally gotten around to writing about my own. I have had a rare opportunity to write and maintain software for a company that has plenty of history. The company I, still, work for has been around almost as long as Microsoft to give you a point of reference.

In The Beginning In traditional fashion of the time, which still holds true today, the company started by buying the rights to a software that someone else wrote. The country of origin: Canada. I do not know much about the company or who were the original authors besides a few names I've seen in copyrights, so unfortunately I do not have any juicy stories to tell about them. They wrote to Minix, which surprisingly still exists today. The data was stored in ISAM databases (Google it), which unfortunately still exists today. The program displayed via a terminal-based text screen with support for input fields and displaying different types of screen layouts, which, also unfortunately, still exists today. The only saving grace was that it was written in the C language.

Abraham Lincoln The company originated in a log cabin, now turned historical landmark. I heard the winters were cold, and the summers were hot. The size of the cabin is about the size of a traditional living room with two whole stories. There was also the shift from Minix to UNIX and DOS operating systems to keep up with growing demand.

Enterprise Split Eventually the software became outdated, in a sense, for the customer base the company wished to sell to. Enterprises wanted a more robust and fully featured software. The solution? Rewrite! The company moved to a different city, but left behind the original software - to live in its own filth.

Dungeon Upkeep Keeping the software maintained to a point people could still use it was the job of a fellow I only met once when I was being interviewed (for an unrelated position!) so I can't tell you any juicy stories about them either. However, I can tell you the software essence remained the same. They continued to use the original UNIX compiler and coding techniques. These techniques include typedefs to normal C keywords and functions. Numerous programs that simply copy & paste code from other programs. Global pointers ruled the entire source code base from top to bottom. Return values were rarely checked. Instead of calling the standard rename or delete functions, system calls were made to the operating system's shell tools. The source control system involved cloning the main source directory per release - some of which I did not find when I took over. Take this scenario for instance: One customer was given a compiled program on Monday but changes would be made to the same program and given to a different customer on Tuesday. Every customer had a unique compiled version of the software. Let that settle in your mind for a moment.

Change of Hands A friend of mine, who has moved on to greener pastures, took over a few years ago. He began a very important and rigorous job of evolving the software into a state that a guy off the street could come in and program to. The code went from 1980s leftovers to 1990s l33tsauce. It was now source controlled in CVS and macros were removed. Some of the copied code were moved into libraries that were compiled against. A small set back to the improvements happened when another programmer was hired and began transforming perfectly good code into obfuscated and over coded code. String pointers were turned into "static const char *const variable;" nightmares. Functions were rewritten to be twice as long and contained bugs that I had to find and fix for about a year.

Modern Tools After I took over we released a major version. This version was the first version where all of the software was released in one update. It was all source controlled, and I implemented a sane update system that insured customers would all be on the same software level. Lately we've moved the code into git and I have been loving every minute of it. The software is slowly emerging from its colorful past.

Over the Rainbow GUI, SQL, Cross-platform. These three words are the embodiment of the future of the company. If I get a chance to finish the project, it should provide the company and its customers with a fresh breath of life.