Oh boy. Do you really want to go there?

Now before I go ranting full steam, let me tell that there were really good courses and really bright teachers at my (otherwise unspectacular) university. Most of the math, physics and related fundamental sciences courses were good & taught by people who know their stuff. Even some of the computer science / programming courses were good!

With that aside, let’s bet back to ranting.

What is OOP?

Somehow conversation drifted to the topics of code design, architecture and whatnot. I asked the audience, for example, what do they think are the benefits of object oriented programming (OOP)? The answers were the following:

• Mumble mumble… weeelll… something something mumble. This was the majority’s opinion.
• OOP makes it very easy for a new guy to start at work, because everything nicely separated and he can just work on this one file without knowing anything else.
• Without OOP there’s no way to separate things out; everything becomes a mess.
• OOP uses classes, and they are nicer than not using classes. Because a class lets you… uhm… well I don’t know, but classes are nicer than no classes. I think it had something to do with something being in separate files. Or maybe in one file. I don’t actually know…
• I forget if there was anything else really.

Let me tell you how easy it is for a guy to start at work. You come to new place all inspired and excited. You’re being put into some unholy codebase that grew in a chaotic way over last N years and being assigned to do some random feature or fix some bugs. When you encounter anything smelly in the codebase (this happens fairly often), the answer to “WTF is this?” is most often “it came from the past, yeah, we don’t like it either” or “I dunno, this guy who left last year wrote it” or “yeah, I wrote it but it was ages ago, I don’t remember anything about it… wow! this is idiotic code indeed! just be careful, touching it might break everything”. All this is totally independent of whether the codebase used OOP or not.

I am exaggerating of course; the codebase doesn’t have to be that bad. But still; whether it’s good or not, or whether it’s easy for a new guy to start there is really not related to it being OOP.

Interesting!

Clearly they have no frigging clue what OOP is, besides of whatever they’ve been told by the teacher. And the teacher in turn knows about OOP based on what he read in one or two books. And the author of the books… well, we don’t know; depends on the book I guess. But this is at least a second-order disconnect from reality, if not more!

Why is that?

I guess part of the problem is teachers having no real actual work experience except by reading books. This can work for math. For a lot of programming courses… not so much. Another part is students learning in a vacuum, trying to kind of get what the lectures are about and pass the tests.

In both cases it’s totally separated from doing some real actual work and trying to apply what you’re trying to learn. Which leads to some funny things like…

How are floating point numbers stored?

I saw this about 11 years ago in one lecture of a C++ course. The teacher quickly explained how various types are stored in memory. He got over the integer types without trouble and started explaining floats.

So there’s one bit for the sign. Then come the digits before the decimal point. Since there are 10 possible choices for each digit, you need four bits of memory for each digit. Then comes one bit for the decimal point. After the decimal point, again you have four bits per digit. Done!

ORLY? This was awesome, especially trying to imagine how to store the decimal point.

See that decimal digit bit, haha! You see, it’s one bit and you can’t… what do you mean you don’t get it? And not only that; this needs variable length and… really? You’re going to a party instead? I wasn’t very popular.

Funny or not, this is not exactly telling a correct story on how floats are stored in memory on 101% of the architectures you’d ever care about.

I could tell a ton of other examples of little disconnects with reality, which I think are caused by not ever having to put your knowledge into practice.

Where do we go from here?

Now of course, the university I went to is not something that would be considered “good” by world standards. I went to several lectures by Henrik Wann Jensen at DTU at that was like night and day! But how many of these not-too-good-only-passable universities are around the world? I’d imagine certainly more than one, and certainly less than the number of MITs, Stanfords et al combined.

As a student, I somehow figured I should take a lot of things with a grain of salt doubt. And in a lot of cases, trying to do something for real trumps lab work / tests / exams in how much you’ll be able to learn. Go make a techdemo, a small game, play around with some techniques, try to implement that clever sounding paper from siggraph and observe it burst in flames, team up with friends while doing any of the above. Do it!

And that’s where ol’ George found himself out there at the FogBugz
Fixin’ the devil’s bugs
Now, a man figures it’s his bugs and he’ll assign whom he wants
But it don’t always work out that way
You see, some bugs are special for a certain target
A certain platform, or a certain person
And no matter whom you’re assignin’, that’s where the bug ‘ll end up
And in the moment of assigning your mouse turns into a dowser’s wand
And clicks where the bug wants to go.

Uhm. Yeah.

why would you want sound and physics when you can have sparsely clothed ninja space marine amazon secret agents riding on chainsaw-hoofed flying pink stealth space unicorns through a brightly colored dystopian african urban jungle fantasy wasteland island state populated with mutated propaganda-spewing gas mask-wearing alien nazi zombie demons that entered this island planet dimension through a hellgate portal invasion triggered by a black magic freak teleportation experiment resonance cascade accident caused by a power-hungry mad scientist wizard evil genius working for a multinational corporation conspiracy of lawyers and weapons manufacturers without morals, and all that in its proper realtime dynamically lit globally illuminated deferred-shaded parallax-occlusion-mapped ambient-occluded shadow-buffered high dynamic range silky smooth glory?

Pretty much sums up the mainstream game industry!

In summary, Vista is not that bad.

Once you get used to changes in Explorer, different skin and so on – it’s actually usable. I think they have made some real improvements in the underlying technology, too bad they managed to “compensate” for all of that by inconsistencies and lack of polish in user interface.

At this point it’s minor quirks in UI that annoy me, but apart from that, Vista is okay. Look:

Who implemented blending of icon overlays and do they still have a job? No sir, that shield icon is not properly blended here!

Who thought it’s a good idea to make the Burn icon bright red? In 6 months, I never used it. Why is it the brightest thing in the whole Explorer window?

Try going one folder up without resorting to this drop down menu. Utilities is the current folder here. And no, there’s no keyboard shortcut for “go up” either (there was in XP, which was perfect).

And of course, the awesome shutdown menu. The two buttons – never used them. What I always use is “Shut Down” from the menu. And let’s not even talk about all the choices in the menu (no, more choices is not always better).

So yeah. It’s not stellar, it has tons of small annoyances (and some large ones – try developing web plugins with UAC on…), but it’s usable. I might have gotten used to it by now, actually.

Me on Twitter.

Дешевая популярность в тяжелые времена не мешает, поэтому в блог срать надо почаще (всем, кстати, рекомендую).

Preemptive note: Google Translate does not quite cope with it.

No, I don’t have any particular point to make. But I did not even get the t-shirt…

void GUIView::MakeVistaDWMHappyDance()
{
    // Looks like Vista has some bug in DWM. Whenever we maximize or dock
    // a view, we must do something magic, otherwise
    // white stuff appears in place of the view.
    // See http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=4208117&SiteID=1

    bool earlierThanVista = systeminfo::GetOperatingSystemNumeric() < 600;
    if( earlierThanVista )
        return;

    // What seems to work is drawing one pixel via GDI.
    // We draw it at (1,1) with usual background color.
    int grayColor = 0.61f * 255.0f;
    PAINTSTRUCT ps;
    BeginPaint(m_View, &ps);
    SetPixel(ps.hdc, 1, 1, RGB(grayColor,grayColor,grayColor));
    EndPaint(m_View, &ps);
}

I know. Reading from screen when Aero is on is slow, bad and wrong. But then, what do you do? It’s better than users staring an all-white window just because Vista decided to draw it white, no matter what you think you’re drawing into it.

…still, MakeVistaDWMHappyDance is not nearly as cool as

internal interface ICanHazCustomMenu { … }

that Nicholas added a while ago.

Ok, to be fair, Vista has lots of new features and improvements under the hood. Now, I haven’t used them, but transactional file system, exposed low level APIs to get detailed memory/IO stats, etc. etc. sound like cool & useful stuff. The problem with Vista is that all those core improvements are out-weighted by inconsistent & slow UI and some stupid blunders.

Now, Windows 7 seems to be taking on two things: 1) performance and 2) consistency. Building on all the low level improvements done in Vista, and getting the part that is visible to the user right. Yay if Microsoft can pull this off. We’ll see.

I vote that we complain enough that they don’t share plans until everything is 200% done – I personally don’t want to know about a new version of Unity until after I have already shipped at least one game built with that version.

Alternately, UT could issue press releases that lack any information that might set expectations and/or require approval from third parties:

Unity Technologies ApS, announced today that they may be releasing an update to their popular game development software at an undisclosed future time.

From their offices in Copenhagen, Unity Technologies CEO and co-founder, David Helgason, said “We’re pretty excited not to announce anything specific about this potential upcoming release as we think that many of our users may be pleased by the addition of some number of features that may not have been present in previous versions of the software.”

Tom Higgins, Product Evangelist, added “The features in this software are making it possible for a number of undisclosed companies to work on various projects that may be released in the future. I think all of our users might be inspired by the things that may currently be under development with this future version of Unity.”

edit: Uhm, based on the replies that follow, apparently it wasn’t obvious that I am not seriously requesting this.

Way to go! :)

I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe
Cubes on fire on the C sixtyfour
I watched glenzvectors on the bigscreen at TP2
All those moments will be lost on the net… like tears in the rain.
Time for DirectX

my $filter = join ‘ and ‘, map { “agr.$_ = $temp.$_” } split(/, /, $fields);

I know, it’s not that scary, and does not involve even a single regexp, but still…

Look again. And again. Eventually you’ll find where your code is broken.

(Of course, in some cases quite often the compiler is broken… GLSL, anyone?)

Pimp my code, part 15: The Greatest Bug of All says the above in a much nicer way:

Maybe the problem was there was some huge bug in Apple’s Mach, where if you open too many files in a short period of time, the filesystem tried to, like, cache the results, and the cache blew up, and as a result the filesystem incorrectly just would fail to open any more files, instead of flushing the cache.

…

I’ve also been around long enough to know that whenever I know the operating system must be bugged, since my code is correct, I should take a damn close look at my code. The old adage (not mine) is that 99% of the time operating system bugs are actually bugs in your program, and the other 1% of the time they are still bugs in your program, so look harder, dammit.

A post well worth reading… about the process of investigating tricky bugs. And sincere as well. It’s so good that I’ll just quote it again:

It’s a bug we should have caught. We should have spent the time to get the images in the 10,000 item file. I messed up.

Software is written by humans. Humans get tired. Humans become discouraged. They aren’t perfect beings. As developers, we want to pretend this isn’t so, that our software springs from our head whole and immaculate like the goddess Athena. Customers don’t want to hear us admit that we fail.

The measure of a man cannot be whether he ever makes mistakes, because he will make mistakes. It’s what he does in response to his mistakes. The same is true of companies.

We have to apologize, we have to fix the problem, and we have to learn from our mistakes.

So very true.

I am not sure what shutdown buttons do when they look like this. I guess they are invincible, or something. Ha, I’m your log off button! You can’t kill me!

Yes, one of the updates installed was the ATI driver update, so I guess there’s some glitch somewhere in the driver update that makes some buttons be displayed like this… But hey, this is not some random driver that I found on the net, it’s the one that is officially suggested by Vista’s update!

From AnandTech’s Radeon HD 4850 & 4870 review: I can has vertex data?

Edit: gee, nowadays the reviews have funny performance measures. Like, FPS per square centimeter (of GPU die size)! It does actually make (some) sense, but it’s still funny. Frames per second per square centimeter… mmm… delicious.

CAN I HAS MOIRE SHADOWS?

What kind of filtering does Resize() function use? Nearest-neighbor, bilinear, bicubic, biawesome?

Since then “biawesome” became a local meme at work. Biawesome is awesome on steroids.

Here it is: aras-p.info/blogas

It’s probably three frames per second. In the menu!

I did not see the game itself yet, got bored while waiting for the after-menu-but-before-game intro movie to end (it’s not skippable, and it also ran at about three FPS). This is after watching half a dozen obligatory before-menu intro movies at 3 FPS with stuttering sound (“nvidia,vidia,vidia,vidia… the way it’s meant,meant,meant,meant…” – TWIMTBP).

All of this on a half-decent PC, I think – Intel Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, Radeon 3850, Windows XP, latest drivers, none of extra stuff running; the PC is able to run other 3D stuff just fine. I’m sure the developers and EA’s testing labs have tested everything extensively, but sometimes something completely random apparently can make things be oh so slow. Oh well. Get back to work.

What if the eyes were orthographic?

Think about it…. that would be totally weird!

Similar, no?

This is actually me debugging point light shadows (that happen to use depth encoded into RGBA8 cubemaps).

This is what happens when you use a too wide Poisson disc blurring in screen space and no prevention of “shadow leakage” over different depths.

LOL! Internet!

…OTEE crew playing dance minigame in WarioWare: Smooth Moves. The game is awesome – you get lots of fun and look stupid at the same time!

Also updated the dezign of the website & blog. Colors are for wimps, grayscale for the win!

Amsterdam airport:

Officer: You speak English sir?
Me: Yeah.
O (takes a look at my passport): Ah, you speak Russian of course!
M: No, not really.
O: But your language is very similar to Russian, right?
M: Hm…

Well, here we know who gets the Linguist of the Year award.

Seattle-Tahoma airport, lady at checkin: “what kind of passport is that?“. It also takes 5 times to enter my last name properly, from the printed letters in the passport. Each time trying to persuade me that I did change the ticket date of course!

Seattle-Tahoma airport, security: “sir, you have been selected for additional screening“. Do they randomly select people for that quite involved process? Why this “selection” happens immediately after they take a look at my passport?

Random quotes:

Ten minutes walk is a long distance! Ten minutes of walking distance in the States is a very good reason to buy a car. At least SUV; preferably a Hummer.

DirectX SDK is the source of all sorts of high frequency goodness.

Sony is always good at announcements.

No? Rumours on the internet? Shock! Horror!

One day I got an email like “Hey Aras, where are you we need to finish up our project soon”. Ok, I don’t know who is the sender, know nothing about any project I should be “in”, and the sender’s email address does not match the signature, so I just marked it as spam and forgot about it.

A couple of days later Paulius forwards me a message from the same sender, saying that he can’t reach me, the project has a deadline soon, so he started looking through nesnausk.org and write to other people out there.

I still thought this is some advanced new form of phishing!

I check the website from the signature of the sender. It’s a real website; a bunch of people developing (or trying to develop) a MMO game. In the “technology” section of the website was a link to in.out.side demo: “this is a techdemo of the engine we developed”. WTF!?

Contacting the original email sender revealed all the story, which is quite simple in fact. They were looking for a programmer and found someone posting on gamedev.net forums, saying he has done in.out.side demo that won Imagine Cup 2005. He presented himself as me (with a slightly altered name) and agreed to work with them. How is this thing called by the way? Identity theft? Some time passed, in my understanding they haven’t ever seen any code from that guy, and then he just disappeared.

What makes it funny though that the guy never received any money from the job he was supposed to do either. I could understand reasoning behind presenting oneself as some other guy, taking the money and then running fast – but presenting oneself as someone else, doing nothing and getting nothing in return? Does not strike me as a viable “business plan”…

The moral? Never trust anyone online, especially if they are from Lithuania :)