The Quixotic Engineer

Interviews with game developers don’t usually interest me, generally because the interviewees always come off as salesmen and rarely just want to talk openly and honestly. Even if you’re similarly jaded, I urge you not to overlook the recent Snake vs Zombie event interviews, which featured a trio of important designers: Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid), Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry) and Suda51 (Killer 7).

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TV Reporter: The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet. […] He was 18 years, 4 months, 20 days, 16 hours, and 8 minutes old.

I’ve always had a fascination with narratives set in a dystopian future (see 1984, Brazil, Brave New World, Blade Runner, even Half-Life 2). The good ones evoke a convincing world that could conceivably represent our own future. The great ones use this world to explore philosophical and moral issues. What struck me as unique about the film Children of Men, however, was how it presented a world rocked by an extension of our own contemporary Western issues: divisive immigration policies, xenophobia, terrorism, and overzealous homeland security. This picture of the world looks and feels real; it is by far the most convincing vision of the future I have ever seen.

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Fellow blogger Nectarine gave me a tip recently to check out a site called Last.fm. I’ll admit that I had heard of it before, but I had never bothered to browse my way other there until today. The site essentially creates a custom radio station tailored to your tastes. That in itself is not especially unique; there are many sites that provide similar custom radio channels. There are three things, however, that in my mind really set Last.fm apart.

First is the sheer variety of artists. Last.fm appears to have collaboration from not only all of the major labels, but also a great variety of indie labels. You don’t only get the hit songs either, because Last.fm has full albums. Furthermore, since musicians can upload their own music to the site, there are opportunities to get to hear some great up and coming unsigned bands.

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This winter I took a course called System Software. In it, we learned a neat programming language called Perl. Perl was handy for that class because it happens to be very good at parsing text, and we used it to write a simple compiler. Being the pragmatic kind of person that I am, I immediately began to think of ways to use this new found skill, and the opportunity arose in a rather roundabout way.

You see, I have what I’d describe as a fairly large collection of music (roughly 18.6 days worth according to iTunes). This sometimes causes problems when I’m out shopping for CDs and I can’t quite recall which ones I already own. iTunes is able to export a list of your music as an XML document, but you end up with a large unwieldy file with roughly 15 lines per song.

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I have a friend named Sven in Software Engineering with me at Concordia. While we’ve often collaborated well together on projects, our styles of programming couldn’t be more different.

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.

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