I had an interesting story recently, but was waiting for gamedev.net to be back up&running again. So…

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 :)

At work the other day:

Jesus says: use the debugger!

Headphones on, winamp alternatively playing The Jupiter Sound and Four Themes and a Masterplan by Little Bitchard. Just the right kind of music for asp.net coding. At least the music is good :)

After taking a break, I already want to do something programming-related in my free time. What should I?

On the unrelated note, I’m doing a Oracle and XSLT related project at work. While Oracle stuff I’m dealing with really sucks, XSLT isn’t bad at all. Sure, it’s not “programming” that I’d love very much, but the whole concept is very powerful.

Maybe XML isn’t such a bad thing afterall, especially once you start doing funky things with XSLT and XPath. I still love the quote “XML is a giant step in no direction at all” though :)

It’s never too early for Software Of The Week awards, even if it’s only Tuesday. Ladies and gentlement, Aras’ picks are:

• Software That Rocks award goes to TortoiseSVN and PmWiki. Both are slick, sexy and do not try to annoy you. They actually work (that’s already something!), they do not crash whenever I do just-a-bit-non-usual action, they do not corrupt my files behind my back.
• Software That Sucks award this week goes to Oracle Reports and Designer 10g. Sorry dear Oracle, but the best description I have for those is “Ugh”. For a longer description, just invert everything that’s written in the first point.

See you later!

I want to implement automatic mesh unwrapper (for normalmapping, lightmapping or similar). Not that I need it much, just so, for it’s own purpose. The most recent thing I’ve read is Bounded Distortion Piecewise Mesh Parametrization; now I only need to find some time to actually do something. Ain’t an easy task!

The other thing to try is: take ATI’s NormalMapper and take a look at their octree implementation. Try replacing it with several regular grids, or tweak the octree. Fun project, also without any real purpose… (again, the reason I don’t do this is “no time” :))

Finally, I have one really stupid&simple soft-shadows idea for oldskool projected shadows. It’s something between Mitchell’s ‘Poisson Shadow Blur’ and Valient & de Boer’s ‘Fractional Disk Soft Shadows’ in ShaderX3. I think actually trying to implement it (instead of just an idea that came up while taking a bath) would be only several hours…

I must sound like a loser complaining about lack of time. The truth is, I could get that time probably, if I’d were more organized.