Today for some reason I tried again to go look at the trailer, or whatever has to offer the web site of Gears of War. A game that I’ve been criticizing recently just based on the fact that the title is lame.
Believe it or not, Firefox managed to crash as I was inputting my birth date, a check required to see if I’m adult enough to watch the Gears of War trailer. Well, I guess I’m not old enough ! Nice job !!

Onto more interesting things.. Tuesday I went back to work after two weeks of vacation ! The extra long winter holiday is due to the fact that the R&D section got new desks, furniture. It all smells new. Gone are the tall cubicles, in favor of a more open space environment. A change that some found annoying, as there is an obvious loss of privacy. There are still dividers, but they are not as tall and they don’t cover the back sides of the dutiful workers. The idea is that one can turn around and speak directly to the other 3 coworkers placed at the remaining 3 corners.
I like also the new open-space meeting room, with projector and white-board for potentially anyone to see. Cool ! Involvement !
I also like how some windows lost the curtains.. nice sunlight coming in ! There are also some simple red sofas on green carpet, short tables and white boards right by the windows, not too far form my desk. Cool, cool !

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary, work at 2:29 AM EST

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My favorite place in Tokyo is the Shibuya area. It’s filled with sexy young girls wearing miniskirts with over-knees stockings over high heels and superpadded bras.
Most of them also carry $1000+ Luis Vuitton bags and one has to wonder how would a 18 years old girl afford to spend so much on a bag.  ..but women are in high demand and those girls really make their best to look their best.
Miniskirts can do wonders. A cute girl waiting for a friend has a good chance to get hit by a youngster offering to go for a tea at a cafe or for a meal depending on the time of the day. That’s called nanpa. A practice that is relatively well tolerated.. in the sense that one doesn’t get sent to Hell but rather ignored most of the time.. and could possibly actually manage to get a phone number !

There are then those that approach girls for business. The so called scouts. They look for girls hungry for money and willing to work at various levels of the “entertainment business”.
Hostess bars (or Kyabakura) offer quite a bit of money depending on the qualities of the girl and on the level of work. Working there, a girl gets to meet wealthy customers that may ask them to meet outside work for social events, but not necessarily for sex. Sex would be bad business because some customers could stop going once they got too intimate with their favorite girl.

Sex is still big business however. Recently a friend of mine got offered 100,000 yen (about $850 or 650 Euro) per session of some sort of photographic business.
In those cases the scout will come ask what’s your wish for material goods and will tell you something like: OK, you can have it if you come work a couple of days for this business.
100,000 yen is a lot of money for a day of work !! This works also because porn acresses in Japan are not necessarily professionals. You don’t need a boobs job. Acting shy and passive has its appeal and surely comes easier than the aggressive exaggerated acting that is seen in porn from western countries.

In all this, I sometimes try to think what it means to be a young girl.. to be in a situation where you have to decide what to do with life and be courted by countless guys offering you drinks, food, presents just for spending your time with them. And easy money for being promiscuous.

..it’s easy if you are easy 8)

Posted by Davide Pasca as Society, Japan, work at 2:47 AM EST

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As the month started, I started working too. My new employer is a popoular Japanese game developer and publisher.

On my first day, I got in the office at 10:30 in the morning. There I underwent the general introduction for new employees along with 10 other new recruits, although only one other programmer, which actually ended up in my team.

I can say that I’m pretty happy with how things  have gone so far. Working for a big company has it’s advantages. I got a superfast Dual Core Pentium 4 3GHz, 2GB of RAM an nVidia Quadro FX, a 24 inches Dell LCD monitor (Dell is selling some huge and cheap monitors here in Japan recently !) …and a crappy, supercheap ball mouse from Microsoft. I guess real programmers aren’t supposed to use mouses 8)

My coworkers are pretty cool. They all seem motivated, talkative. There is palpable excitement, it’s a great feeling, it makes me want to work ! The other day I had a private meeting with a guy in my team just to talk about graphics.
After many years I’m also being asked to go to GDC and Siggraph !! Yes !!

Admittedly, I’m in a sort of a special team, concerned more about research and less about immediate development. Other coworkers are working very long hours, and I fear the day when that will come for me.

The offices take several floors of a pretty large building. There are little or no directions around. So, one has to pretty much carry around printed maps of the floors !

It’s so different now that there are actual refreshment rooms. I can just step out and grab a coffee or a snack.
Work time is also flexible. One is expected to do at least 8 hours of work per day but can get in anytime before 11 AM and leave by 4 PM or so (provided that 8 hours have past).  ..well at least in theory.
The actual work time rules seem to be a bit more complicated but I honestly didn’t catch the details. It was all explained in Japanese.
Some of my coworkers speak good English, but otherwise a minimum level of Japanese is required.

cool cool

…and my new TeraStation 1.6TB gave me problems again. After downgrading the firmware and restructuring the array, disk 3 failed again. I then restructured again, made a disk check (takes several hours) which says that things are OK, but I doubt that !
I’m now trying to see if the support at Buffalo can give any hint, before sending the TeraStation back to them for eventual repair.

Sort of sucks.. and I’m sleepy !

zzzzzzzzzzz
poof

Edit: Fack ! I fixed the spelling error !

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary, Japan, work at 3:59 AM EST

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Here comes another slow update.
I have potentially a lot to write about but I generally let it go.. I could write so much more.. but it’s better this way, people should get busy doing their stuff rather than read other people’s stuff 8)
First of all, a suggestion (I got from Rasty !) to keep in touch with this blog or with any other blogs: Google Reader. It’s basically a page that groups RSS and Atom feeds. A feed is a streamlined version of a web page comprised of a series of articles. An RSS reader is a page/software that shows all those articles coming from different sites in a single view.
The useful thing in all this is that one doesn’t need to actually bother going to a site to see if something new is up.
This is potentially deleterious though, because one may want people to go to the actual site to see additional content.. but then again, people easily get bored of sites that are updated rarely and would probably end up forgetting a site after a few failed attempts to find fresh news.

Now, about work, I think I pretty much decided. I will go for the company that lets me do research. Research sounds good, but I doubt I will have total freedom.. still ! I like the idea. I honestly don’t feel too much the need to work on a shipping game…. I still get recognition for working with a famous company and so family and friends are set ! That saves also a lot of time for people I meet for the first time and to whom I need to explain where I work at.
Great.. but with all the papers I have to sign and things I have to do (including a medical check !), I don’t want to celebrate until I’m actually hired !

In the meantime I kept working on DSharingu. I finally managed to remotely control my mother’s PC.. and that was really all I was asking for !!
The application has matured quite a bit. It has a few key features that one would expect from a modern application: on-line update, tabbed views, good installer. But also has unique features that make this application so important to me. The most important feature for me is the ability to set the application to keep trying to connect to another PC.
I have a fixed address on the Internet and my mother’s PC can safely keep trying to call me at that address. The minute I need to access her PC, I run DSharingu on my side and accept the next incoming connection (currently tries to connect every 20 seconds). As I mentioned before, this is because she has her connection firewalled by the provider.
The remote desktop’s view is shown using only 4 gray levels. But, frankly, that’s all it’s needed to administer a computer. Still, color will come back at a later time.

DSharingu doesn’t do much more than VNC, in fact it’s probably quite slower and I still have to implement the keyboard interaction.. but it fits my needs as they grow and it’s also a launch pod.
With DSharingu I have an application in place that starts when the PC starts and that can easily be updated. I can now start adding features and  easily bring them to my mother’s PC.
Videochat would be nice, but honestly I think that a web-cam feature is more useful. By web-cam I mean a program that grabs images from a video source (usually a cheap camera attached by the USB port) and that sends it over FTP to a web server. The image is then associated to a page that can be watched with ease.
Because of the inherently inefficient method of transfer (sending whole JPEGs over FTP and forcing browsers to reload the image), updates come rarely.
Slow updates are not necessarily bad though. With no animation to speak of, people think of a web-cam as a detached view, something to leave on and mostly forget about…  I better be careful with that !!

I started with a hint on how to keep in touch with the blog and I end with a hint on how to update one: use Docs & Spreadsheet from Google !
To post updates I need some minimal HTML code.
I used to use Crimson Editor which is a text/code editor non-WYSIWYG. I tried Wordpress’s WYSIWYG editor but that seems to have a mind of its own and sometimes generates an HTML mess. GMail’s editor works nice but doesn’t show the underlying HTML code, so when I paste into Wordpress’s editor I get plain text.

This Docs seems to work nicely (though not quite perfectly.. I have to go remove a link manually after I’m done writing !), it has a real-time spell  checker.

cul cul.. zzzzzzzz !!!

Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, Diary, work at 6:58 AM EDT

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There should be a legal limit to how much one can say “yes” without understanding what he’s saying “yes” about !
“Hai” in Japanese is mostly used as a reassurance, especially over the phone where one is constantly supposed to acknowledge things.
So, Friday I finally got the offer I was waiting for, but I wasn’t sure it was an offer.. I understood more or less, but I had to wait until I got something in the mail to be really sure 8)

The situation with work now is that the larger company has made a pretty good offer, the smaller one was caught a bit off-guard as I asked for a delay. They said it’s their fault for not trying to find out what I was up to (shopping around). But of course it’s also my fault for not trying to make things clear from the start. Although I think I may have hinted in one of the interviews that I was really looking around.
It’ wouldn’t have been too smart of me to resign from a company and go look for another position to just one company.
Having more than one offer also raised my perspective salary quite a bit, which is only fair I think 8)

I will have to go for two more interviews and really take a decision. By now I have a pretty clear idea of where I would like to go to, but I also need to make sure I value all offers and keep in good terms with everyone.
I will have to reject some offers and I’m not too comfortable with that. Refusing good working positions for good money has a rather strong consumeristic taste.
In one case I may have a chance to join a team that filled my programming I dreams ever since my arcade games addicted teenager years.
It feels so good to be so close to realize a dream, but also feels bad to think that I may have to give up on that.
One has to trade constantly.. it’s all matter of time, how do you spend your next N years ?

I’m generally happy however. I’ll need strength to make a final decision soon, but however it goes I feel like I’m achieving great things from my perspective.
As it’s often said, anyone can achieve his or her dreams, it’s only matter of being very dedicated, very very patient and daring at the right time.

And now back to DSharingu coding. The current version is buggy as hell and I’m working on some major changes (multiple connections with tabbed views).
I’ve somehow managed to get my mother to install the application and help me to debug it. I still can’t see her computer’s screen… being able to do that is my mission for the time being !!!

woooooo !!!!

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary, Japan, work at 5:52 PM EDT

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Two days ago an XBox 360 prototype (actually a beta devkit) died on me. I was definitely not pushing the limit. Certainly my office isn’t freezing cold.. however those things are to be expected with prototypes.
When I was working at Squaresoft, around the time when PS2 was announced, there was a rumor in the company that in the offices in Japan a PS2 prototype caught on fire 8) ..eheheh
Today I worked until about 9:30 PM.. there is definitely a lot of work to do and, most importantly, much of the work is of unknown nature. Basically new consoles always bring new things. This time around MS is really pushing the Live (online playing) feature. Every game has to have it. Although the documentation is all there, there is still quite a bit of work to do, to understand and implement everything. Making a game to run online is no joke. It’s surely very appealing to the player (and to MS, which can bill gamers 8), but the burden added to the developer is substantial.
So, while this generation of consoles is much easier to program on the graphics level (it’s either DirectX or OpenGL), these kind of added features are enough to keep the developer busy. It quite possibly may require an extra person to work on the whole network thing.. especially for the first kind of such titles.. where completely new code has to be written.
I’m also not quite sure how things work with the usual real-time game data communication. My experience is that lag and various Internet data transfer uncertainties can keep a developer pretty busy playing around with parameters and techniques to get the thing running reliably.
It’s not fun to have to deal with all these issues while on a schedule. It’s already too early to predict how much time it will all take. Once I’ll have a clearer idea.. is when I’ll have to start working until late in the evening..

Ummmmmmm !!!

Posted by Davide Pasca as work, Videogames at 1:09 AM EDT

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