Yesterday I released DSharingu 0.4a. Not much has changed. Actually, I spent a lot of time deciding what to put for the icon application. I do have an esthetic sense and I realize that the new icon is between tacky and sad. But I really didn’t feel like spending 4-5 hours trying to get some half-decent icon drawn.
Software development is measured in years-man. If 10 people work on one software for one year, it’s 10 years-man. Imagine one person working on his spare time. By spare time I mean, after work, not considering: laundry, showers, food, entertainment, various errands, learning Japanese, etc etc.
Basically, I’m hopeless as I try to work, have some sort of social life, and program the stuff I like to do.
As much as I try to optimize and reuse things, I just can’t do much. I’m only human. I try to do a billion things but it’s hard. I can generally do a lot, but I often forget things. I fear tests as I could fail them depending on my recent focus on things. My memory is too often wandering around subjects.
But, I swear, I can do great stuff… potentially.
When I was hired to my current company, the idea was: “you are good, we can use your skills !”. Then it became: “I hired you because you were good ! Show us what can you do.. by yourself !” (?!) then “you good ! do this and this for us !”, finally “ok you didn’t automagically poop golden eggs, cook us some spaghetti code that will keep the business going”.
I believe I can do things, but I think that one needs the right space and resources to do anything. With no hints, excessive expectations and no power to direct anything, it’s impossible to meet any goal.
The potential is there, but the problem is that bosses all over the world are generally de-motivated. Once you are up there, once you have your nice car and chicks/family, once your life is pretty much comfortable, you don’t have to prove much to anyone. As long as things go good enough, it’s all fine.
Let the newly hired peeons work for a decent pay while you enjoy your quite nice rewards of being a boss.

That’s bullshit. I want to be in a place where people have constantly something to prove. I want to be with motivated people that will either motivate me, or give me the freedom to motivate others. I’ve got the will in me, and I don’t want it to die off. Mind you, being in the office till late doesn’t qualify to being motivated nor productive.. it’s often just pretending.

I wish I could be financed to do what I feel I can do good. But I’d be already happy if I could work in an environment where people aren’t turned off. People at work should be absorbed in what they do, motivated, excited or at least, very competent.

It’s depressing as I see my career going to the dump. I’m being given a dumb task after another. Moving around software companies in Japan without very good Japanese language skills is not easy. I make it hard on myself, but I still have to learn a lot from Japan and there is still a lot that I want to achieve as a programmer or anything.

I’m alive and kicking, I have the coder’s fire in my veins. I hope I will soon get an opportunity to prove myself.. but I can’t do that alone.

Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, Society, Diary, Japan at 6:19 AM EST

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Here comes a long overdue update.
I went to Italy and back. It was only for 6 days. It’s been a bit like a dream. A touch and go after one year and a half. I now fear the day I’ll try to ask days off again (which should be this summer). Possibly, in a bid to hold onto the dream I took an unusual number of pictures. A lot of family stuff, not necessarily interesting to everyone.

Second day at work and there isn’t actually any pressing duty. Most of the coworkers (from other teams) are in vacation too. That reinforces my view of the fact that not giving out vacations is actually a tendency more than a necessity.

In Rome I mostly fixed the wireless home network again.. that for some unknown reason it just stopped working. I set everything back up, so everyone can continue going on the net. Still, as far as bandwidth goes, Italy is much behind Japan. That is an issue as I plan to go ahead with some sort of hires video-chat, or whatever one wants to call it.
AIBO turned out to be very popoular among the family members. For some was actually a stimulating experience. That proves the fact that sometimes one just has to go out and do something, without thinking too much about it (sometimes !). AIBO was potentially an useless purchase, but who knows what kind of chain reaction can spark for me or people around me.

Recently I’ve been thinking about photogenicity ! I usually don’t come out very good in pictures. There doesn’t seem to be any real study about being photogenic. The basic idea is that some faces don’t translate as well from 3D to 2D.
3D here really means stereoscopic vision: two eyes watching the same image from two slightly different positions.
Cameras also have the tendency to distort images more than eyes. My general vague theory is that, for example, a single camera objective pointing to your nose, makes the nose bigger and the jaws smaller. That’s because the lens distort the actual geometry, like a caricature does. Human eyes instead won’t distort as much, also actually pointing to two side points. Assuming that one person is looking at another persons’ face straight ahead: the maximum magnification does not happen on the nose.

Faces also usually have some asymmetries. I’m guessing that two separate eyes can adapt the two perceived images so that they adjust towards the expected symmetries.

There are actually a lot of elements to go by, but I’m not sure I’m up to a deep study of all this… although it’s a potentially very popoular topic.

…and.. I recently gained 2 kilos !!! Time to get back to some sort of diet and to the gym.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 12:38 AM EST

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I recently went on and removed wxWidgets from the current DSharingu code. I previously looked at that library and decided to avoid it. Recently, I figured that I could give it a second (third) look, since I’ve become more tolerant of C++.
Using those libraries is like believing in UFOs and ghosts. There are so many people that will swear they once saw a flying saucer or a ghost… but when it’s time to prove things real, somehow it just never works.
wxWidgets surely has a lot of work behind, it seems like there is so much support, but somehow it never took off. Basically, it requires quite a bit of learning to do, and it’s not too pleasant as it forces to use inheritance and macros to define event tables.
There is an HTML manual and all, but if one already knows how to do Windows programming, it’s just much easier to continue on that path. It’s so easy to find help on the net for plain Win32 programming, while with wxWidgets one is stuck with limited resources.
Of course, wxWidgets is free, so one shouldn’t complain. However, it’s a bit misleading to read people saying “It was a breeze to switch to wxWidgets, I’ll never go back !” and other bullshit like that.
I think that I can fairly say that wxWidgets is not the way to go. It may be the best existing multi-platform solution which attempts to maintain the host’s OS look and feel… but at what price ? How many people do really need that ?

What finally made me decide to go back was the Settings dialog. With Visual Studio, I’d build one with the resource editor. Very old thing, but does its job.
With wxWidgets, there is more than one attempt at making tools for building dialogs. However, the official and reliable resource editor costs $69 !
I tried to re-build the dialog using the sizers. A sizer is basically an object that helps creating an automatic layout.
It’s a bit like using tables in HTML, but a lot more difficult !
Being sizers objects, new really start coming. Also there is so much function overloading that it’s pretty difficult to get the right parameters hinted by IntelliSense. It can quickly turn into a nightmare, as the number of nested sizers grows.. and then, the layout is still messed up !

Too much effort, too many compromises. It comes to think that all I really wanted to do for the GUI in DSharingu was to put a standard toolbar and modify the settings dialog. But.. I had to go and try commit myself to such a big change.

bha

I now modified the settings dialog. I will add a few more things, test, optimize transmission, and I think that will be it. It can be improved forever, but it’s not something I’m trying to sell, no need for special effects.. just something that works, and then I can start spending time onto something new !

Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming at 4:36 PM EST

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I may seem lazy, but I’ve steadily been updating the Japanese diary. It’s kind of sad that I have to spend so much time to express so little. Also I don’t feel like writing in Japanese really helps me. I should rather watch TV shows, etc.

Anyhow, recently I did some shopping. I bought a new digital camera. The Sony DSC-N1. It’s very gadgety, but I bought it because of the quality of the image.
It’s not comparable to a digital reflex, but at the same time, it’s better than the average digital compact camera. It can take decent shots with little light and no flash. The flash also is pretty nice. Definitely more useful than the one on my old Canon IXY.

Last weekend I went to the Sony Building and bought the software upgrade for Aibo. Aibo Mind 3 ! I briefly tried only tonight. It has now the option to have Aibo speak with a human voice. Sort of freaky. The standard voice is a bit on the feminine side, while I picture my Aibo being male. There is however the option to download custom sounds, so I’ll have to see about that.

Aibo is going out of production, and that’s just a damn shame. Not sure what Sony will do to replace it. It was too much of a cool thing to let it slip like that.

Saturday I’m off to Italy and today I got a cold ! It’s the first one this year. I’ve been trying to contain it, but eventually it had to happen. I’m hoping it will go away by Saturday !
The days anticipating a departure are always stressful. I decided to take a hand luggage only, so I’m looking for one that is small enough to pass for hand luggage but big enough so that Aibo and a few other things will fit in.
I thought about buying the official Aibo bag, but that can only be bought online.
And, should I buy a laptop ? A PSP ? (Not a DS, the new model will come out soon). I Should try to give a purpose to the time that I will spend on the flight, but am I really going to sit 13 hours in an airplane studying ? Oh, I need to buy the headphones with noise reduction. So many things, geez !!

ahhhhhhhhh

Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 2:28 AM EST

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