This chart shows how the site’s RSS subscriptions have grown since June 2008 (according to Feedburner.) These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do illustrate that I’ve had a very fortunate year! The big spike in October came from being linked by Kotaku and the front page of Digg in the space of a week (many thanks to Maggie Greene.)

This year I wrote 41 posts, overhauled my blog design twice, and made my first two non-trivial games: Inventory Tetris and Rockwell, Papyrus, Skia. There’s more to come! I’m currently hard at work on a substantially larger secret project in pygame, and experimenting with flixel when I have a moment to spare.

More significantly, this last year saw the game blogging community really begin to gel. The conversation that started in blogs and comments moved to Twitter and the #GBConfab IRC channel, then came full circle as cross-posts, podcasts and shared experiences. The game writing archive Critical Distance was born out of this spirit of collaboration, and will hopefully serve to further expand the conversation.

In fact, the game blogging community is already so large that I do not feel that I can adequately thank everyone individually. Therefore, I’d like to thank all of you for your support, your critical insight, and your humour. I look forward to many more trips around the sun writing and learning with you all.

To all my quieter readers: thanks for sticking around, and happy Canada day!

For the curious, here’s a chart of my RSS subscription growth over the last year. The first big peak was the day my Gmail spam post was linked by Lifehacker, and the count has been steadily growing ever since. The occasional sharp valleys are days when Google Reader didn’t publish a subscriber count.

Writing this blog has been rewarding in ways that I really did not expect. The most obvious benefit is that my writing ability has significantly improved through frequent practice. I’ve also had a chance to learn a great deal about web technologies, such as PHP, JavaScript, XHTML and feed syndication (RSS.) Furthermore, I’ve worked with some great open source applications, such as GIMP, Audacity, and WordPress.

More importantly, I’ve had a chance to get to know some really interesting people. Blogging is largely a social activity, and I think that getting to know fellow bloggers with similar interests is the best part. Many thanks to Michael, Nav, Leigh, Mitch, Dan, Ben, Corvus, Daniel, Dave and Tim for all the stimulating and thoughtful conversations and debates.

Thank you to all my other (quieter) readers as well. It’s very edifying when someone likes your writing enough to stick around. I’ll do my best to keep writing quality posts in the future. One year down, here’s to many many more!

As part of the Software Engineering curriculum, I was required to take “Principles of Electrical Engineering” this semester. This is a mandatory course for all engineers at Concordia, so the class was full of people working in a somewhat unfamiliar domain. It was a tough course, but fortunately I had a good background in electromagnetism from my pure & applied science Cégep degree (Cégep is pre-university in Quebec.)

One thing I noticed while taking the class was how most students simply reduced the circuit analysis to math and never bothered to properly grok how electrical systems actually work. I was definitely guilty of this as well; I have only a very abstract notion of what capacitors actually do but know enough to blindly calculate their impedance. Indeed, some of my classmates had only a vague notion of the physical difference between voltage and current.

I’ve had to explain the basics of electricity to others once or twice in my lifetime, and I’ve come up with a rather simple analogy to do so. As a disclaimer, I’ll repeat that I’m not an electrical engineer and have only a rudimentary knowledge of electrical systems. There are many good analogies to explain how electricity works, and I happen to like this one.

Imagine the circuit as a system of roads, and on these roads are trucks delivering watermelons. Why watermelons you ask? Because they’re delicious, don’t ask silly questions. These trucks drive around the circuit, picking up watermelons (charges) at the farms (voltage/current sources) and dropping them off at the markets (resistors.) Therefore:

• The trucks are the charge carriers, and number of trucks is analogous to the current (amperes.) In other words, a current of 10A in a systems can be viewed as having ten trucks driving around.
• The voltage (volts) is comparable to the number of watermelons. Saying the potential difference across a resistor is 40V is analogous to saying 40 watermelons were dropped off at that market.
• Resistance (ohms) is the number of watermelons per truck that need to be dropped off at the market. If a resistor has a value of 10 ohms, then each truck that passes it will drop off 10 watermelons.

How well does this analogy hold up? It properly illustrates Ohm’s law, the quintessential electrical formula. The law states that potential difference across a resistor (V) is equal to the current (I) times the resistance (R). In other words, the number of watermelons dropped off at a market is equal to the number of watermelons per truck times the number of trucks.

As with most analogies, this is a rather gross simplification. Amperage is not actually a measure of the number of charge carriers, but rather the number of charge carriers per second. In many ways electrical charge (Coulombs) is a better analogy for the number of trucks, and amperage for a more general “flow of traffic.” Furthermore, voltage is actually defined as the amount of energy in Joules (watermelons?) per charge carrier (truck.)

Despite its flaws, I feel that the watermelon truck analogy does a better job of defining charge carriers and potential than the popular water comparison. If you have an analogy that worked for you when learning about electricity, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

UPDATE: The site is looking slightly less “default WordPress”, and I’ve imported all the pages from Blogger. I’ve redirected Feedburner over to the new site, here’s hoping everything goes smoothly.

UPDATE 2: I’ve done some more behind the scenes work, including redirecting all traffic from my Blogger site to here and fixing broken embedded objects. I’m still hoping to play around with the CSS, as well as change how my sidebar archive looks.

Blogger’s been good to me for the last 7 months, but I recently got it into my head that owning my own domain would be a good investment. Over the next few days/weeks, I’ll be moving this whole operation over to a WordPress blog at www.gangles.ca, Gangles being a handle I’ve used for years (and it seemed more memorable than quixotic-engineer.ca)

I used NetFirms as a domain registrar, hence the current splash page, but will be using A Small Orange as a host at Tim‘s recommendation. I’ll keep you guys updated here as the site progresses, here’s hoping it all goes smoothly.

I’m also looking for good WordPress plug-ins, so please drop me a comment with your suggestions.

To both long-time readers and those who have stumbled upon my site by chance, I wish you all a merry Christmas. Drive safely and have a good time with friends and family!

I found a few definitions of the word on the net, but I most preferred this one from Wikipedia: “Quixotism is the description of a person or an act that is caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals. It also serves to describe an idealism without regard to practicality.” Engineers are practical by definition, but as a nerd who believes in open-source software, video games as art and harnessing nuclear fusion (someday!), I can’t help but feel like a dreamer at times.

Soldiers and veterans deserve all of our support, since the government does not do nearly enough for returning soldiers (ex: one in four homeless people is a military veteran). Political speeches and flag waving don’t do our courageous men and women any good. Here are a few organizations that are really making a difference:

You may or may not know that I’ve been a long-time of proponent of the Segway Personal Transporter. Why, you might ask, would I support these silly devices? I have two important personal reasons.

Firstly, they’re a triumph of engineering. As vehicles that constantly appear to be in peril of falling over, they defy our expectations by remaining in perfect balance using a combination of computers and gyroscopes. Anything that harnesses the power of physics to do something counter-intuitive (see the levitating frog experiment) is alright in my books.

Secondly, it is literally impossible to look cool on a Segway. They’re the dorkiest things imaginable, something out of a bad sci-fi film. In that sense, they’re the antithesis of the modern trend of form over function. If buying an SUV is supposed to make you look sporty and tough, then a Segway gives you a vibe somewhere between a mad scientist and Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. Therefore, riding one anyways is a giant “fuck you” to the modern fashion obsessed, cosmetic surgery, teeth whitening madness; I look like a huge nerd and I don’t care!

Need further proof that Segways are awesome? How about the Chicago police officer who chased down a shooting suspect on his Segway. Cruising at 12.5 mph, the officer wore down the suspect to the point of exhaustion then jumped off and arrested him. As District Commander Kevin Ryan put it: “These don’t wear down — people do.” What I wouldn’t give to have seen THAT chase scene.

Would I actually buy a Segway? No, they cost upwards of 5000 USD and I’m already a big fan of walking and biking. Despite what some enthusiasts believe, I don’t think that any able person can really justify personally owning a Segway. I do, however, see potential in the device for tourism, police patrols and post offices. They rent Segways in the Old Port of Montreal, and one of these days I’m going to make the time to give one a whirl.

[Thanks to Clive Thompson at Collision Detection for the Segway Policeman Story]

As of last Monday, I have officially begun my career in programming… as an intern (or stagiaire as we say in La Belle Province). As part of Concordia’s co-op program, I’ll be spending my fall semester working full time as a programmer at a Montreal company called 123 Certification. The job involves working with a small team on their largest product, the Arc Simulator, which is designed to teach welding in a way that is safe and cost-effective. It is quite literally virtual reality; the student wears a sort of VR helmet and uses motion-sensing tools.

Needless to say, it’s been a dramatic learning experience so far. I’ve spent a good part of the last week reading code and documentation, and have just recently had a chance to get my hands metaphorically dirty with some code debugging. I’m hoping to learn a great deal about handling 3D objects, working on a large scale project and coding professionally!

Living next to [America] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
-Former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau on Canada/US relations

With four major political parties to choose from (not to mention the rising Green party), Canadians are afforded some protection from the strongly polarized politics found down south. However, you can’t live in America’s hat without forming some kind of opinion about what’s happening. After being linked to this extreme-left video and this extreme-right one in the space of a week, my internal BS sensor was overworked and I felt the need to throw in my 2 cents on the issue.

In both of the aforementioned videos, these amateur interviewers head down to the opposite camp’s rally and start doing Michael Moore style interviews (i.e. lots of talking heads and very little substance). In a textbook example of the Straw man fallacy, they single out the dumbest/loudest people in the room and start asking them directed questions about various controversial topics. These people make incredibly ignorant claims and hyperbolic statements (comparing Bush to Hitler? see Godwin’s Law), which the filmmakers love because they can use these to discredit the entire party.

While these videos are really nothing more than amateur footage on YouTube, they’re symptomatic of a larger social issue; namely, the kind of groupthinking that’s emerging from these political parties. It’s easy and fun to belong to a group. You all believe in the same things, so you can get together and act smug about how you’ve got it all figured out. You can insult the other party’s viewpoint without fear of a counter-argument. If a moral problem is too complicated to think about, you can follow the party line with zeal. By subscribing to the beliefs of a group, you’re immediately undermining yourself as a rational agent. You’re substituting your own reason with the reasoning of the group, and groups are notoriously unreasonable. As Dilbert author Scott Adams put it:

As soon as you tell me “Carl joined a group,” I can tell you Carl is no longer as rational as he used to be. His judgment will start to conform to the group’s judgment, and the group’s judgment will be based on some ever-drifting sense of values that lost its rational connecting tissue long ago.

It’s in this spirit that I invite you to assert yourself as a rational agent by challenging your assumptions. Engage in meaningful dialogue with people who do not share your beliefs, and play Devil’s Advocate sometimes. As author Stephen Covey described it: seek first to understand, then to be understood. If someone is able to argue persuasively against an idea you hold, either research a counter-argument or consider changing your beliefs.

As Chris Rock so eloquently put it (video embedded below, NSFW): in the end you’ll find that you’re liberal about some things and conservative about others, and that’s the way it should be.

What does mean for you? Probably not much. If you’re already subscribed to this site’s feed, you may or may not need to re-subscribe to the new Feedburner feed (I’m not sure). If this post has meant nothing to you, never fear, it’s a minor technical matter and you can safely ignore it!

UPDATE: It turns out that redirecting my Atom feed to Feedburner was messing up my Google sitemap, which in turn was causing my pages to be indexed poorly. New subscribers to the feed will now be directed directly to Feedburner, but anyone who subsribed to the old feed will no longer be redirected. This won’t actually affect what you get very much, but I just thought I’d let you know.

Sven likes to research and prepare. He reads the class textbook religiously and writes out his algorithms extensively beforehand. When he gets down to the nitty gritty of writing code, he’s already almost done.

I, on the other hand, throw myself into programming projects headfirst. I implement new concepts on the fly and learn by doing. I’ve described it as “gonzo coding” to some people, though if I really wanted to be true to Mr. Thompson’s legacy I’d avoid editing too. In practice the opposite is true, with large segments of code needing to be tweaked to fit my mercurial plans and abstract visions.

When planning this blog, however, I took a page from the book of Sven and read lots of advice for new bloggers. Some of it was technical and mostly involved toying with the html of the Blogger template. Some suggestions dealt with the page’s aesthetics, while others referred to accessibility and writing style.

What really struck me was the advice to avoid new blogger burnout. I recognized immediately what they were talking about: I may have a dozen good ideas for new posts right now, but if I update too frequently I may find myself at a loss for fresh ideas in a matter of weeks.

To avoid this predicament, the general consensus was that it is essential to create an update schedule and be consistent. In theory, not only will this set a manageable pace for blogging but also let readers know when they can expect new content.

Therefore, I’m letting you, my handful of readers, know that I plan to publish a new post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Coming this Wednesday: a much more substantial post about webcomics.

“Blogs are terribly self-serving, aren’t they?” That was the beginning of the first draft of my introduction. That first draft was rambling and cheeky, but it was mostly just cocky. That wasn’t the tone I wanted for this blog, so I figured I’d re-write it and be a little more honest.

Though I’ve adopted the online pseudonym “Mr. Bubbles” for the moment, I may change to my real name eventually. I first have to decide whether or not this blog is too embarrassing for my friends and family to read. I’m a software engineering major studying at Concordia university in Montreal. I could tell you about my interests here, but I think that will mostly be revealed by what I write about, such as music, gaming, books, etc.

To be truthful, I’m still wary that this blog might be entirely narcissistic, so I’ll be writing about things other than myself as much as possible. For the moment, I think I’ll finish with the last paragraph that I salvaged from my first draft: “If you do happen to be a non-me person (of which there are many), feel free to leave a comment. Nasty or nice. I promise that I won’t delete your comments unless I feel like it.”