GamePlay Form

Hi there,

Below is a small Gameplay Form which I would like you to fill. It'll help me a lot.

If you feel this form looks a little cosy here, you can go directly to the form here

Optimisation – A Devil Unleashed

Optimisation – A Devil Unleashed

"Optimization hinders evolution."                - Anon. (Source: Internet)

I don’t know how my Professor was feeling when he was teaching us to write a so-called “Optimal Algorithm”, but I was not feeling good about it. I have never felt good about Optimisation in general, and this was no exception. I’ve never hated engineering in my life, but this was probably the first time I was feeling oblivious about an aspect of engineering. Optimisation was probably getting more share of assiduity than it deserved, and in my mind I could imagine the fate of engineering if things continued to be how they are.

"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason — including blind stupidity." 

— W.A. Wulf (Source: Internet)

“Optimisation has always been a natural part of engineering”, a friend of mine once said. True however he may be, I caught a different but equally true meaning of the statement – “Optimisation is only a part of engineering”. But the way I’ve spent my two (and a half) years here indicates me that we’ve hardly done anything but optimisation. Adding salt to the wound, one of our professors once claimed “All Engineering problems are, beyond a point, money related problems”. I know Technology hardly has any fault in this, but then there is no fault of Science either. It is mostly the domain and aspect of the problem – the “application” factor as we can label it that causes  Optimisation to creep in. (Just because I am writing Optimisation in Camel Case every time doesn’t mean I have any sort of reverence towards it, Nota Bene.)

I have always believed that Everything in life has some pros and cons – what may look good in one aspect may be bad in some other. But everybody has some priorities – it is like a window – we can’t see the entire world through it – but we pick only those things that look good while viewing from that window. This ideology again has its own advantages and disadvantages.

"The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet."                 — Michael A. Jackson (Source: Internet)

Optimisation, as I believe, is by all means born to create hierarchy. For the very same reason, I have never understood why Optimisation is done in case of algorithms – the ugly and complex algorithm is chosen over the beautiful and simple one. Why don’t we realise how unjust it is for the beautiful algorithm to get rejected? What if such beautiful algorithms get livid and spark a riot tomorrow? Does the human race today have any protective measures to fight algorithms?

“Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.”               Paul Graham (Source: Internet)

At the end of it all I can only say that Optimisation in the form that it portrayed – as being of religious importance to Engineering – appears Paranormal to me. As a precautionary measure for a Layman passing by, every Institute should have a “Beware of Optimisation” Board on its Entrance. As I conclude, the fate of Engineering appears clear to me. Either it has to threat Optimisation out of practice or someday some of its own  tools  (a revolting Algorithm for example) will seal its fate.

-         Pankaj Bhambhani

Science, Technology, Technique and the Blackbox

Science ? - The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment

(Source:Google)

Technology ? - The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes (Source:Google)

Technique ? - A way of carrying out a particular task, esp. the execution or performance of an artistic work (Source:Google)

Blackbox ? - In science and engineering, a black box is a device, system or object which can be viewed solely in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings, that is, its implementation is "opaque" (black). Almost anything might be referred to as a black box: a transistor, an algorithm, or the human mind. (Source:Wikipedia)

Are they “all” interconnected ?

My thoughts : Science is everything and everything is science. (In reference to the above four).

Technology, Technique and Blackbox are all Science behind the scene. All Science.

If we (by “we”, I mean the End User) interpret Technology, Technique and Blackbox – all as a job or an aid for a job, then we can think in this way. - They can all be considered as a Development Kit (DK). Just in case of softwares, we have Software Development Kit (SDK), which are all just libraries of code behind the scene, we can think here that Technology is nothing but a Development Kit (DK), which is nothing but Science behind the scene.

Same is true for technique and black boxed approach. A Technique – like driving a car – can be considered as a Development Kit (DK) which is nothing but an abstraction of a set of scientic principles which are aidful for that job. These scientific principles are moulded for easier and quick manipulation for the particular technique or job. When we learn a new technique, we dont learn anything new, we only combine a set of scientific principles that we already know and mould them in a manner that we can easily remeber and can quickly use.

In the case of a car, we can clearly realise that the actual working of car engine is pretty complex and what we really see is an abstraction of the science that goes in the making of the car engine. What we see is the Steering, the Gear, the Clutch, the Acclerator and the Brake. We think of our car in terms of these parameters, hence , these parameters comprise our Development Kit (DK). The Car does not appear to us in terms of its science, in terms of the actual scientific principles that lie behind the scenes, but those principles are “moulded” for easier and quick manipulation – it is really easy for us to view the car in terms of the Steering and the Gear rather than to view that car in terms of its complex interconnections. This is a very good example of a black boxed approach. Another good example is the Computer – very similiar to the above example works on complex interconnections but is viewed differently and abstractly.

It can be concluded from the above that Technology, Technique and the Blackbox are no different from science, at least behind the scene, and therefore should not be viewed differently either. This observation can help us keep our minds composed in case we face a new Technology, because we generally need not learn anything new, we only need to mould science together to achieve success.

Season of KDE

Hi,

I took part in Season of KDE this year (2011) and I worked with Choqok - a Microblogging Client. Choqok had support for three Microblogging services as of now - Twitter, OCS (Open Collaboration Services) and Laconica - and we planned to add a fourth Service - Facebook.

More specifically Akonadi has its own resource library for interacting with Facebook - it can get friends, events, notes, photos, etc. We used this library for our "Choqok Facebook Plugin".

As of now, this Facebook Resource is bundled with Akonadi Resource , but they soon plan to release KFacebook as a separate library for Applications that want to interact with Facebook .

The First Part of the Job was to broaden the Facebook Library to be able to add , retrieve and manipulate Facebook Post Objects - the news feed and the wall posts,
Once this was done, building the rest of the plugin wasnt going to be very difficult, though it wasnt a piece of cake either :) . The code of other microblogs proved to be very, very beneficial in approaching the development as well as in clearing the queries.

As of now, the Choqok Facebook Plugin can be used to post "text" messages, it can show your Facebook "Home" Timeline - wherein it can show links and text status with ease. For Photos and Videos, we have a link of the photos in the status in place of actual Photos/Videos. And, of course, there is a link to the current Post, using which you can view it on Facebook.

Currently, the facebook plugin is not merged into the main Choqok Repository, but is avaialble as a sub project on github. You can download the reposotory here ( it is named "Choqok-Trial"). Build it and try it out. Leave feedback as comments. You can also contact me personally on my email pankajb64@gmail.com

A big Thanks to my mentor - Mehrdad Momeny for guiding me through and to Thomas McGuire for helping me with Akonadi Facebook Resource. Thanks to the entire KDE community in general for such a warm welcome. :)

I have included some of the snapshots of the Choqok Facebook Plugin. Check out





Thanks
Pankaj Bhambhani.

Banana 3ds max

Some time ago I was trying to learn Autodesk 3ds Max as a part of Game Development. I tried to create a bunch of bananas, but the bananas ended up looking like toothpaste tubes. It is shown below.

My FPS Game in Unity

I recently created a simple First person Shooter (FPS) game with the Unity 3D Game Engine.

And its now running on Google's Servers (on Google App Engine).

Here's The Link. Try it!!

My First Unity FPS Game

P.S. : You may need to install the Unity Web Player if you don't have it installed already.