Posting this from Google Docs & Spreadsheet .
Light years ahead of WordPresse’s pressing editor.

Enjoy and be gay !

Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 2:58 PM EST

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A couple of days ago I saw yet another episode of Lost and decided to give up on watching it !
I was pissed because some major character that I liked, died. It sucks.. but I see how this is good for the producers. They train spectators to get over killing off main characters, so that they don’t have to rely on some star that may become a bit too demanding one day. The hassle of being asked tons of money from an actor, trying killing its character off, and eventually having to succumb to the star’s requests.
Aside form killing off characters with ease, Lost tends to have too many loose ends (something that would certainly drive Lieutenant Columbo crazy ..those loose ends !). The writers throw in a lot of bones that may or may not eventually be used. Lots of weird stuff, actually lots of smoke.. on the last episode I watched I was well into the second season and there was still the “forest monster” thing lingering around… something yet to be seen, but that indirectly already made its appearance from the first episodes.
At this point I feel like I’ve been given the run around… and feel somewhat laughed about when in some episodes a good tracker (the story develops in some island with a large jungle) finds out that he/she is being followed, and walks around in circle for hours to make fun of the clueless follower.
The simplified formula of Lost is: pack lots of action and some bland sexual tension in the first episodes, then slowly shift more into character development, a lot of it, with detailed flashbacks, and once there is enough momentum, just keep rehashing old weird stuff, create new weird stuff, keep developing characters, kills some, find new ones.
I guess it works, but it’s become clear that the development is very dynamic. There isn’t a real story, the logic of all of it is weak and one is bound to be left with too many questions that have been brought up just to test waters, without any commitment to be solved from the authors.

ummmumm !

Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 12:58 PM EDT

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Tonight (Friday) I went out !
Supposedly a lot of friends would gather. Practically, it didn’t go very well. Somehow, foreigners living in Tokyo tend to group. It’s true it’s not easy to have fun with Japanese guys, because of the obvious cultural gap, but, at the same time, associating with people just because they are Italian, isn’t a very good thing.
As a general rule, one should think “if I were in Italy, where I had an ample choice of Italian friends, would I still associate with X ?”. Not surprisingly, the answer is usually, no.
Somehow the fun of going out isn’t there anymore (or, for the time being). ..the usual places, the usual faces. I’m also generally disappointed on stupid some people can be, or weak, or both. But I’m not just a victim. I certainly do my part every time the mood is wrong. Social behaviors aren’t as random as one may think. I sometimes feel like people may rely on me to direct things. Untold but obvious situations where I fail.
I’m not a people’s person, I’m not a cool guy. I don’t have the charisma to drag people along. I’m don’t have the optimism in trying to animate the nightlife. I can be listening the most involving music in the most suggestive club, and start analyzing the graphics effects showing on some display.
To be charismatic one needs to think the right way. One has to avoid deep thoughts, be cool, look satisfied yet interested, act with the right amount determination at the right time. You can do something now or do it in 1 minute and have a completely different result.
I sometimes think about acting ! I woudln’t want to be working as an actor.. I would just like to be able to pretend to be in a certain way to be able to fix things around me. To bring out a good dose of fake charisma. Acting is no joke. If you can act (lie) you can get laid ! All one has to do is to keep a straight face to some woman, tell her all the bullshit she wants to hear, and use a little patience.

wooo I’m very sleepy. Time to go pretend to sleep 8)

Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 7:26 AM 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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This is probably already obvious, but it came to my mind only the other day: Apple computers moving to Intel chips is the smartest move.
I figure that my computer-illiterate family would be much better off with a Mac, yet, software traps everyone !
My sister has to use AutoCAD for her studies. A cool new program comes out and it’s most likely to be running for Windows. As a developer, PC gives more opportunities… but most users are probably better off with the Macintosh.

Currently one can install and run some versions of Windows, using some emulator. However that’s also a CPU emulator. Something that sensibly degrades performance (forget using AutoCAD !).
On an Intel-based Mac, in order to run Wintel applications, emulators will simply have to implement the virtual machine functionalities, without the burden of emulating a modern CPU. This is something that VMware and Virtual PC are already doing, and I’m betting that at least VMware is already a Mac-Intel developer…

Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 6:05 PM EST

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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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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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Recently I watched the movie American Pyscho. I liked it among other things, because it was set in the 80s. Very nice soundtrack 8) although the setting was not too convincing. It didn’t look naturally 80ish. Everything was so neat and clean, which reflects the main character, but doesn’t give the 80s feeling, with its pink-candy look. Still, who cares, it’s not a documentary.
I mention the movie only now, because today I had my 5 minutes of “psycho”. One works every single day, comes back home at night, struggles to find the time to even do the laundry, works on his birthday, always say yes, yes (hai !). Then works 40 hours towards the end.. only to be awaken the next day “where are you ?”, “what what I’m.. was I supposed to work ?”, “no but there is a bug, come at 1PM”.
Then I pick up and go to work, to see what’s this bug about, only to find out there is no single real bug, but rather a need to apport several consistent changes. I get into the office hoping to get out soon but I realize that I’m going to work into the night, again !
I tried my best, but eventually I snapped, walked off some sort of meeting and went to cope with a sudden attack of rage !
I very much prefer the Japanese work environment, because everyone is so kind to each other, but at the same time, one can only take so much, and eventually snaps losing control. It’s something that scares me. When a person regrets to the animal stage anything could happen.
Ten minutes later I was at my desk silently working on the code (hai, hai !).

Of course, as usual, not all bad things come to do bad. All this hard work has reminded me that there is still quite a bit of personal work that I have to do to gain my freedom. Also reminded me that I do need to work towards this freedom.. by freedom, I mean to reach the point where I don’t need to find myself in very limiting conditions where I’m constantly told what and how to do it.

Woo !!

P.S.
 ”A signo’, io me vado a fa du orette de sonno !”
 ”Sto lavoro non e’ n’lavoro, e na galera !!”

 From the movie Bianco Rosso e Verdone. Where a truck driver (the magnificent Mario Brega) says that his job is like a jail and he’s going for a two hours nap 8)

Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 2:37 AM EST

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