I was messing with some Japanese sites, where I accidentally read that a city in Bosnia (or should I say Bosnia and Herzegovina ?), is erecting a statue on honor of Bruce Lee !
BBC has an article with a picture, also a previous article with a picture of the sculptor posing behind the sculture.
I like the take of Mail & Guardian online that titles the news as: Bosnia to ‘beat’ Hong Kong with Bruce Lee statue ..in true competitive spirit !
It’s very curious that a city somewhere in the world would choose to honour Bruce Lee !! I don’t see that happening in Italy, I doubt that it would ever happen, on such an official scale, in USA either.
Although I’m a fan of Bruce Lee, he’s not particularly my inspiration in life.. I mean, he’s there exercising everyday on getting his body and his mind to beat up a human opponent by means of violent physical contact. It’s a bit difficult to send a good message as the vehicle can lead to great misinterpretation (one could believe that bursting into violence would be a valid solution).
Still, of course, I’m a Bruce Lee fan. Partially because I was very interested in martial arts when I was younger, partially because Bruce Lee is a symbol of the underdog (facing Hollywood and the racial discrimination) and also someone that made martial arts so popoular. Martial arts can be a serious thing, a form of discipline, an inspiration to better oneself by means of rigorous exercise.
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 1:04 AM EST
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A few weeks ago, on a weekend morning, I was abruptly awaken by a phone mail. It was some sort of invite to a community service, namely hi5.com.
I turn on the PC and I see all my email accounts having received the same invite, apparently started from a friend of mine. I then proceed to accept the invite and I join only to find out that my friend’s account isn’t there anymore.
I continue browsing around, it’s fun, there are so many people. Click on one picture and see the person (cute) friends. Apparently also my friend has thousands of friends already ! (even thought he only existed for a minute or so !)
Eventually I get to talk to my friend personally: he tells me that the invite was an accident. Somehow hi5.com managed send one to invite to every email in his Hotmail’s account ! He told me that he thought he was going to select some friends form his contacts but hi5.com instead simply send invites to everyone. Ence his unsubscription.
It’s not impossible that there may have been some sort of warning at some point, which her may have oversaw. But it definitely wasn’t clearly visible (my friend has a good sight 8). I don’t think that a service should allow for such an operation to take place anyway. Who in the right of his/her mind would want to invite every single contact to anywhere ?!
Browsing around hi5.com was interesting. I’m very curious, I’m one of those that likes to read personals, that likes to see people commercializing themselves.. but definitely from a distance. Hi5.com seems rather overcrowded.. and where there is a crowd, there are some horny men trying to become “friends” (ah ah !) to some vanity chicks. Cute chicks, which are volatile by nature, on the net can grow into some super-pumped-up queen bees. They can get a billion compliments from any number of seeking individuals (bees). The men think that they have nothing to lose and they proceed in trying to become “friends” to anything that they like and some more. It’s like a kid in a toy store. The kid will try ask for anything in sight ! Compliments are free and one may get lucky.. you never know !
Well, it may not be all that bad.. but, generally, I think that hi5.com has put itself in a bad place for the long term.
Next is orkut.com. I’ve been invited there by a friend, I joined and the first thing I didn’t like was.. the looks ! A community container has to feel like home, but Orkut’s spartan and bluish looks really doesn’t feel comfortable.
Orkut quickly placed me on a search for friends within my area (Japan). There’s really a lot of them from Japan, but, strangely, they all seem to speak Portuguese ! ..Japanese, from Brazil ! There were even some pregnant women. One had her huge naked belly fully visible…. what is this ?!
A community site’s goal is also to link people into communities. So, today I tried again, this time looking for communities instead of people. I tried some “3D graphics” or “game programming”. I found 3-4 communities. They didn’t seem very active, but, again, lots of comments in Portuguese !!!
It felt like living in some sort of globalized place where quantity of people finally impose dominant languages over English.
English or Portuguese, I don’t really care. I live in Japan because I like the country. I was interested in Japan since I was a child and so I’d much rather get into some sort of community portal where I can learn about living Japan and Japanese language.
Enter mixi.jp, possibly, currently the fastest growing site in Japan. I saw people from work using it. A friend tells me that he hears people talking about it in the streets.
You can get there only with an invitation and, luckily, there is no option to invite 100 email addresses at once.
It’s all in Japanese and it looks a lot more cozy than Orkut. The layout has fixed width, which is better suited for a site where a page may have little content (e.g. a personal profile). The choice of colors is also better, with a warm tone. There is a profile portion, a diary and a home page with links to recent updates of friends or communities to which one is related. No fancy HTML editing for the diary, but pictures can be easily attached. The first 100MB are free, after that one can pay for more..
The fact that the service is aimed at the Japanese public is already a big step forward. I don’t mean to sound racist (I’m not Japanese myself, after all !), but not everything was meant to be mixed together. I speak English a lot better than I even understand Japanese, but at the same time, I have more in common with Japanese than white Americans from the USA, for example. (back to the: “I live in Japan, therefore that’s where my main interest is”).
To conclude, I must admit that I don’t necessarily feel fit to be part of some sort of community portal. It somewhat subtracts from my individuality and places me at the same level of many other people that I don’t know. I prefer to express myself here, on kazzuya.com.. my site, my place ! However, the community thing experience is interesting, as it somewhat puts me in touch with people with whom I can potentially physically relate. While forcing me to read and write Japanese.
One interesting feature of mixi is that one can see a log of people that have visited his/her own personal page with time and date. This is useful to indirectly start some sort of connection. It’s a bit like being noticed as you look at someone in the street.
For example, the other day I went to a trance music event at a club. Back home I browsed around mixi looking for people that mentioned that event. I read what some had to say, without commenting. The next day, some of those people saw me visiting, came to my page, saw my diary entry about having gone to the event, and posted comments (something like: “I couldn’t go, how was it ?”).
Both Mixi and Orkut have their Web 2.0ish fashionable beta specifier next to their title. Not sure if they mean their service is in beta stage or if the whole Internet community concept is beta..
The Internet has great potential to extend into anything, there is still an infinite number of potential killer apps.. and sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to a single feature or the color of the background !
woo !
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 3:47 AM EST
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Today I saw the final episode !
There is a special episode left. I wanted to watch it, but I realized that I haven’t downloaded it yet.
Anyhow, following the board where the subtitles are, I got to a page where there are some more info: here is a nice picture where the main characters are protraied.
Then of course wikipedia itself has an entry with a link to the original archives of the messages !
After seeing the series, that often protraits the chatting, I’m very curious to go and read the actual board.
It will take time, but with rikaichan it should be doable !
mooooooo
Posted by Davide Pasca as Japan at 12:34 AM EST
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The story goes that one night, a normally wimpy guy, finds the courage to save a girl from being harassed by some old drunk in a train. The same day, the guy reports the fact to a message board. Specifying that he thought that he felt something for her.
A couple of days later, she sends him a present to thank him for having helped her. The guy, again, shares the events on the message board. He’s very timid and insecure. A 23 years old otaku (devoted to manga, anime and videogames, with little or no experience with girls). The girl, instead is slightly older, taller, good looking, mild mannered and from a rich family.
Otaku are most definitely not the ideal target for most Japanese women. As an example, the poster that I have in my room, and that I’ve been told I should get rid of, is something that an otaku would hang.
The place where otaku hang in Tokyo is Akihabara (from here the word akibake). A place where one can find the latest computer parts, but also, events about new anime and games.. some of which explicitly meant for a public of otaku (filled with cute girls !), and also special cafe’s where one is served by cute girls dressed as maids (moeee (from 萌える moeru, a word of recent use around Akihabara to express introverted sense of cuteness (?!)).
Anyway, the story continues with the guy being supported by the people on the message board in trying to find the courage to get involved with the girl, while trying to acquire skills to hide his being otaku.
It’s a love story of modern times, supposedly a real one, which became widely popoular on a famous Japanese message board.
Not long ago the book came out and, recently the TV series and a movie.
I missed the TV series, actually I found out about it only when it was too late, but, luckly a friend gave me a link to where one can find the episodes on the net, even with English subtitles made by fansub groups (really useful as the dialogue at times is really fast paced and it can get quite complex to follow !).
I’m at the 10th episode, of 11 total, plus a special finale, it’s quite good, dramatic but funny, too. I can see why it had so much success.
Well.. doesn’t happen everyday to meet a beautiful girl that one actually feels like feeling something for (they are usually stuckup bitches (products of our society, nevertheless)). The problem with most adult people is not so much that they can’t find someone, but more that they can’t find someone they truly like.. can’t blame people for that, since there is so little passion in everyday life..
The girl in the series is clearly likeable. A somewhat perfect Japanese prototype: very pretty, thin, gentle, introverted, educated (partially raised in LA, a detail used to give her a “from another world” and “English speaking” look, although, normally, a Japanese girl raised in LA would find it hard to be gentle, introverted and thin 8).
The guy, on the other hand, is pretty wimpy, shy to the point that he has to take so much courage just to call a girl up.
The story strikes a chord especially for those otaku-oriented individuals that can put themselves in the shoes of the male protagonist.
While I don’t consider myself an Akihabara-otaku, I can definitely appreciate the point of view of the guy. He finds a girl that likes him for his humane personality, a girl that doesn’t take advantage of him, and, at the same time, he tries his best to try to please her.
This story reminded me that it’s OK to be shy and mild-mannered. One should take pride in that (within the due limits 8).
Time to ZZZZ.. I need to be in shape for tomorrow night.. going to see Armin Van Buuren, wooo !!
moooooooooooo(e)
Posted by Davide Pasca as Society, Japan at 1:31 AM EST
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Today at the gym I weighted 72.70 !!! Drama, disappointment, despair !!
Well, it was kind of expected as I haven’t been able to go to the gym for a while and started eating a lot of.. shit.. because of the work schedule.
Recently, in the shower, I’ve been playing with my belly (!) It definitely looks like it could lose one Kg of fat only there.
My face looks also tired. My eyes look heavy and they feel heavy. I was built to sleep 8 hours per night, but I end up sleeping 6 or so (this is my fault though), plus 20-25 minutes at lunch break.
Therefore.. since I now have time to go to the gym, and I have no excuse to eat like a MF, I shall start working on the situation as of today.
The real big problem with people getting fat, is that they can’t stop eating. Eating is great and is too easy (in this part of the World). So, there is really no excuse in complaining on being fat. Wanna lose weight ? ..Don’t eat !
I plan on losing 2 Kg in one month, let’s see if I can get there. Let’s see if I’m a real man or if I’m a pussy !!
woo !
Posted by Davide Pasca as Society, Diary at 10:17 PM EST
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I went back to my simple walkchurch demo to see what I could do to to get finally to some point where I can have some good lighting.
Because the church has no roof, and because the main problem with Radiosity is to get sharp shadows, I decided that the main light source for the time being will be the Sun. Or, generally, a directional light source. A light source so far away that can be considered as coming from infinite and thus casting hard shadows without penumbra.
Since the original light source is really just one and it’s a point, it would be a waste to go and do the full Radiosity hemicube calculation on the receiving triangles. It’s best to have a special case, where I avoid the hemicube calculation process (where for every triangle one has to render the whole scene 5 times (a whole hemisphere), just to, at most, spot the well known and unique light source).
The quick solution is to simply copy the light source energy into those triangles that are visible by the light source. To do that properly while using 3D acceleration, I decided to render the scene from the light source point of view, with triangle writing out unique IDs as their color. I will then read the frame buffer and see which triangles are actually visible (can tell by their IDs !). Because the point of view is the one form the light source, visible triangles are actually visible to the light source.
This thing is nothing really new, it’s a cheap mix between the Shadows Z-Buffer technique (the idea of rendering form the light source) and some accelerated Radiosity hemicube rendering implementations (the idea of assigning a triangle ID as a color).
I’m currently rendering the image from the light source point of view. I could read it already with glReadPixels(), but I decided that I want also to make a step further and take the time to implement the ARB_frame_buffer_object extension to get acquainted with the useful extension that allows to render offscreen and re-use that buffer for texturing.
The problems with this technique are however already evident. It doesn’t tell me if a triangle is completely in light or only partially (partially lit triangles will need special shadow casting to give the shadow edges).
The problem of aliasing also arises: when rendered, triangles could end up being as small as 0 pixels ! This means that if the resolution is relatively low, I may miss some triangles, which will be considered as not receiving any energy, while actually they are receiving some.
This is a signal theory issue.. it’s the price that one has to pay when dealing with discrete values, as opposed to geometrical ones.. which make for very accurate solutions but don’t map well to 3D hardware accelerators.
Posted by Davide Pasca as 3D Graphics at 3:41 AM EST
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I wasn’t made to have children. Aibo is pissing me off already and I keep turning it off.. until the day that I can re-program it so that it will not bother me.
Today, back from a club, I told a friend of mine that I download porno movies and that, to me, they seem like documentaries. You watch people having sex, and that’s just like those animals you see in TV. Some penetration exercise. Perhaps more complicated, but, in the end, all about reproduction.
I’m eventually supposed to give up on myself and live a hopeless life, dedicated to raising some child that is supposed to be my evolution. A better person, smarter, taller, whatever.
I say: fack that !!! Fack evolution, leave me alone. No offspring is going to replace me ! I own my own life and I’m going to do the best of it. I don’t want to dedicate the rest of my life on some Davide 1.2. To make a children is like to retire from life. You stop growing and start growing something else. That doesn’t work for me.
In my foreseeable future, my creations will be robots, not humans.
It’s not to be excluded that, some day, some woman will seduce me into conceiving some children. There are some very attractive potential mates out there.. with their big hips and large breasts, ensuring me that they can grow a better copy than me.. feed him/her well… still… when the time comes, I must resist.. remember not to give in, remember than doing robots for myself is better than raising children at the expense of slowing my life to a stand still.
I’ve always casted doubts on anything, this time I cast doubts on evolution: I shall better myself by means of my own intelligence, not by evolution.
ole’
Posted by Davide Pasca as Society, Diary at 5:32 AM EST
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Just when I thought that I was really, really done.. I spent another weekend in the office, culminating on Sunday, when I worked for 28 hours straight into Monday afternoon. Then back home, and in bed by 9PM !
Am I really done now ? I hope so. Working on the current project has been a painful experience. Too little time, too many things to do, too much mixing of old and new code between programmers with no planning. Woo !
It’s almost 6AM and, I’m clearly awake. Good, perhaps it’s the beginning of a new life. A new life where I wake up early in the morning and calmly shower, dress, read the newspaper in front of a delicious breakfast and finally go to work all dressed with suit and tie ..right ! I actually woke up at 4:38, and tried to force myself in bed. That didn’t work, as I started thinking about simulating the World !
I must stop having those thoughts. They make my heard hurt.. so to speak.
Changing subject.. I finally decided to move back to kazzuya.com from Blogger. The reason is that I had this site here dead and I wanted to use it somehow. Archive what was old and bring a little life back. My web host provider had those “one click installs” which included Wordpress, and I just went for it. Installing was easy, importing articles and comments was a bit more complicated, but it all went well in the end.
The old site was all done by me using PHP and MySQL. I liked the front design, while the backend was rather ..emm.. functional ! However, being web-development really not my field, I don’t have that urge to use my code, so, it didn’t hurt to switch to another system. Something more standard and well diffused. Standard formats are good, they make it for easy backup and distribution.
The new site is not complete. Two things that I had to add immediately were the links to the javakazrace and the PSEmu GPU plug-in. Those are the two main sources of traffic of this site and it would have been an injustice to let the new visitors down (”I came here to get a plug-in and I found a stupid blog !”).
Blog blog blog ! One writes a diary for years and suddenly a new cool word comes out and he’s hip ! .. I think that that’s bullshit. However, it’s good that the concept of writing a diary on the Internet has been mainstreamed. It’s good for people to communicate but in the past, services like Geocities, were a pain as they didn’t clearly define class of contents and visitors’ feedback.
Comes to show that potential means nothing. Most people need to be spoonfed or they won’t have the time or willingness to take the extra steps to achieve something. That fits in my view of the World where people are divided by users and developers (developers !! developers !! developers !!).
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 5:55 AM EST
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I’m finally done with all the crunch. I’m slowly getting used to having a life again.
Tuesday I left work at 6:30 PM and went to eat yakiniku with some colleagues.
Yesterday after work I went to get an haircut (wow !). Then I got home and re-started working on my latest 3D engine stuff.
Today (the 3rd), was a national holiday, so I slept late and then went to the gym. There, much to my surprise, I weighted 71.95 !! One month of practically not moving, and my weight hasn’t increased !
I suppose that I traded some muscle for fat, but still, I’m pretty happy 8)
As for 3D research, I’m putting much emphasis on doing Radiosity at a decent speed. Not real-time, but still at a somewhat usable rate for pre-calculations. Of course the usual problem with Radiosity is that it doesn’t work very well with sharp shadows if one simply subdivides the geometry with quad patches.
I’m pretty convinced that I’m going to do a pre-split of the geometry following any early hard shadows. This should be done with a shadow volume algorithm which directly cuts the geometry (as opposed to stencil shadow volumes). Alternatively, I could somewhat try to solve the Radiosity at a low frequency and then apply the hard shadows as a post process in real-time. Basically separating direct lighting from indirect lighting (which is where the coolness of Radiosity really is).
The general situation, however, is pretty desperate. I think that generally there isn’t very much analytical thinking in the world of 3D graphics. It’s hard to find some well thought concepts. With lighting, it’s obvious that there is a need for an unified system to handle a wide range of level of detail. Because the most common materials are of a diffuse type (reflect light very poorly, so to speak), it’s obvious that for indirectly illuminated entities, if light is considered a signal, one only needs bother to a much lower frequency of that signal.
I think that everything should be somewhat submitted to a LOD structure (wavelets, Fourier), while algorithms should somewhat work on higher dimensional spaces.
For example, if one has a triangle and wants to do Radiosity rendering, with hemicubes, the process is of doing three different hemicube renderings, one for each vertex. That’s clearly a waste of calculations, because most of the times, the three vertices will pretty much see the same scene, they will most likely either be in shadow or not be in shadow. On a higher dimensional space, instead, one single hyper-rendering would span across the whole triangle. This would imply an increase in calculations of orders of magnitude, but also open the door to more clever algorithms to bring back the number of calculations with a better understanding of the situation: implicitly understand if and where a high frequency lighting happens on the surface of a triangle (example: cut by a shadow or not ?).
And we go to sleep !
zzzzzzzzz
Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 3:19 AM EST
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