The company I was working at for some three years, closed it’s offices in Kaunas recently. Well, it was almost a year when both intera and motion parts of the name didn’t already make any sense… At start we were doing computer vision, various game/graphics/entertainment stuff, but in the last year all development was about some computer networks management system. A couple of programmers will stay for some time to support existing systems, but afaik any new development is suspended.

I feel kinda sad, even if I blame the management for the failures mostly (we programmers never blame ourselves, you know :)). Yes, I/we could have worked harder, done better etc., but all the way I (and probably ‘we’) felt that the ambitions were too unrealistic (*), the business plans were too non-existant, the management was just a bit too poor, and some forward-thinking was ‘just a bit missing’.

I guess that’s just my attempt to transfer blame to someone else :)

That said, it’s still sad. Oh well, just keep going on.

(*) Ambitions: “by that time Sony, Nintendo and Konami will be years behind us” doesn’t sound very realistic, does it? :)

Work has really started on the next version of Project Hoshimi for Microsoft. We’ve got to:

• Add eye candy, whatever that may be. They say we can ditch some old harware (DX6 level), but methinks we can’t go really wild (“minimum ps2.0” would be cool, but not in this real world). We’ve got to add some particles, transparent blood cells, lighting fx etc. Anyone has some ideas what could be easy to implement and look extremely cool? :)

• I can’t say much, but it’s about network, client-server etc. Time to learn some network programming for me!

• The guys behind whole this thing have some really insane plans that would rock the christ child if they would really happen. Not a high probability of them happening though… Ok, back to thinking about possible eye candy and the network protocol.

The Escapist is a good read from time to time. This time, it’s Greg Costikyan:

And actually, EA tried to kill The Sims many times before it was finally released. From what I’ve heard (and this is definitely hearsay), Bing Gordon’s comment at the meeting where publishing was approved was: “Well, it’ll only sell a hundred thousand copies, but it’ll get Will off our backs.”

We’re only talking about the best-selling PC title of all fucking time.

Gee, I’d want all magazines to be like this. Focused, to the point and without trivial crap that most of them are 99% full of.

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

• The standard thing: do a demo. I have some ideas for that, but for various reasons I’m not in the mood right now to start a big/long project.

• Read some books. I’m doing this a bit.

• Learn something. Do something with wxWidgets or some Lua-only programming, but didn’t start anything yet.

• I already should do something related to the next version of Project Hoshimi for Imagine Cup 2006. I’m trying to!

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!