The Quixotic Engineer

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!

Growing up in Canada in the early nineties, one of my favorite television shows was called ReBoot. The show was groundbreaking for its time, both for its use of computer animation and its unique computer-world setting. The characters, plot, concepts and voice acting were all top notch, and the show was littered with jokes and references that only an adult would get (not entirely unlike recent animated films such as Shrek). I still get a kick out of the rare occasions when I catch a rerun while flipping channels.

→ Read more

In my anticipation for the game, I had made myself a little plan for Bioshock. I was going to harvest the little buggers the first time around and go buckwild with ADAM. I would then know which plasmids were worth picking up to use the second time around, when I would rescue them all. It was a good idea, in theory…

…but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Rapture is a city filled with people who have compromised their morality in order to survive. If I did the same, would I be any better than they are? I decided that being kind of guy who clings to his values under pressure better fit the narrative I was building up in my head. I’ve saved five of them so far, and exploring the alternate reward scheme is turning out to be quite interesting.

Is it silly to personalize a video game in this manner? Yeah, it is. It’s also, in my mind, the mark of a great work of fiction.

…and that concludes a very busy four day programming marathon. The final project for my Databases class involved creating a database and web interface for a hospital. We were a five person group, and I was responsible for designing the interface for the doctors, nurses and residents. Elaine wrote the interface for Administrators and Directors, Sven and Fadhl were in charge of the MySQL database and Alex used Dreamweaver to make a great looking site.

All in all this was a great learning experience. Fortunately for me, Elaine was quite familiar with PHP/Javascript and sent me over lots of code that I could use as a template for my own work. I was already familiar with Perl and Html, so PHP wasn’t especially foreign. I managed to write ~18 interactive pages that allowed doctors to view their patient list, add/modify/delete patients, view their schedules and paystubs, etc.

→ Read more

I’ve finally taken the plunge into next-gen! I had been considering picking up one of the three new consoles for some time, but I figured it was only sensible to finish my 6-hour exam marathon on Wednesday first (or I’d never get any studying done). With that behind me, I had a choice between the “lots of power, no games” PS3, the “cool idea, how about some decent games?” Wii and the “breaks after 2 months” Xbox 360. It was a tough call, and I’ll curse myself if I get the dreaded red ring, but I went with an Xbox 360 Elite in the end.

The difference that really struck me between this machine and my last-gen consoles is how well it has integrated online capabilities. I don’t know if Xbox Live on the first Xbox was as good as this, but I’m very impressed at how it’s all available up front. From the moment you turn it on (which you now do from your couch with a wireless controller), you’re immediately logged on to your Xbox profile, and that one profile handles your whole account both online and offline. You can press the guide button at any time, even in game, and it will pull up the Xbox dashboard.

→ Read more