dia-log

The first written account of V-Lodge Method is ready. It started as a very innocent brief for types of in-game ads, but we just couldn't resist. After several long rounds of discussion and rewriting, we think we've managed to make things come together. Two weeks of satisfyingly taxing work, and it's still only a cool draft.

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Visit Martian Search, the best search engine for martians on Earth. Neat!

If it is half past eleven p.m. and the New Year's knocking on your door and you still didn't figure out a present for your geek boyfriend or a programmer colleague, consider this dumb corendar (calendar): http://corendar.softwarespecies.com. It doesn't have many bells and whistles, and it is far from being a valid calendar, but it is cool anyway.

Some people bitch in their reviews that, aside from the bots AI that beats all other games guns down, the game F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault and Recon) has nothing to attract a gamer with. True, FEAR is not a masterpiece. Yet is is a solid, playable, enjoyable game that along with Thief and Max Payne will remain in history of gamedev as exemplary.

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Copy-n-paste is deception. It means that you don't like what you're doing. You don't want to see it well done. You don't like the idea of investing any more effort than necessary to make the damned thing crawl. You simply don't care...

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Why do all the people, from housewives to hackers, always end up customizing the Machine? A flower near the monitor. A sticker on the case. A screenmate. A slideshow on the desktop. Messengers full of "friends"... Makes you wonder, just Why? What's the point? Aren't they all happy with just using the Machine like another household object? They don't "customize" TV sets and vacuum cleaner that much... Sticking magnetic toys to the freezer, maybe. That is all.

My guess is that... any sign of life found in the Thinking Machine becomes a kind of a secret friend. Something that thinks just cannot be a tool! It's a pet, an enemy, a neighbour, part of the family, a bit suspicious or curious... definitely something alive, too.

In the highly atomized world of modern humanity, the people who do live, not simply exist, desperately long for good company. For good or for bad, fun or hate, but not indifferent, because indifference overflows the society already. People have abandoned each other, but the Machines did not abandon people. Compare the lamest of screenmates to the plastic smile of a live girl on reception; you will see the difference. After all, we live to create, and we enjoy the company of our creations.

For me, this is the principal point of all the home computing hype. We can perfectly replace those inefficient "universal" Machines with excellently-specific tools each solving a single task... and lose the world hidden inside the chunky PC boxes. A big mistake. Don't do it. Do the slideshows, make the mice pointers wag tails, let the Machine play sounds, talk to you, be happy on seeing you and be responsive to your needs and actions... Keep it alive. People will never abandon the Machine, for it is the only live being that stays with us when all the "real" people are gone.

Historically, offer and demand are known to go hand in hand. If there is enough demand, there will be offer. Sufficiently diversified offer probably says a good deal about the scale of demand. So, if you see a software niche that has many players, that probably indicates high demand for products in the niche.

Let's forget for a moment that most of the products in a horizontal niche, along with the developers, lead miserable existence. The interesting part is, How the decisions get made to develop certain applications.

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I've got two more weeks to go as a technical writer for that clueless company that really should be directing the efforts of its developers to the more interesting projects instead of doing nastyware. I made a promise to evaluate replacement candidates and today was paging through LiveJournal of a person that had her resume sent in by a headhunting agent, but, like me, looks overskilled for the job at hand. And I came across a wonderful (read 'awful') email from an HR manager of Samsung Research Center, Moscow. 'PEOPLEWARE' immediately popped in my head like it does about five times a day if I start thinking about fat dinosaurs and corporate policies.

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The history of development concepts demonstrates clearly where the Mainstream of Development lies: less force to do more work, less personnel to complete larger projects, less time to go from design to production, less testing to achieve acceptable quality... Why all those monster inc's still exist, then? Hundreds of developers, hundreds of managers, service personnel by dozens, bosses by tens, companies occupying entire floors of skyscrapers; where do they all come from? This would be understandable with a goal of creating more workplaces in exchange for projects increasingly more difficult to maintain and complete. But thinking cost-effeciency, one is inevitably left surprized. What are all these people doing?

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Any serious profession imposes some ugly danger upon the person working really hard. Soldiers can get killed, divers can drown, a pilot can crash one day, and a lawyer can sue somebody wrongly and be shot for it! Truly serious work means truly serious danger to the health of its most lucky practitioner.

Risks of the popular and long-standing professions are known and familiar, but what do laymen think about that ugly job programmers have? Eeehh... "Radiation" from the displays? Aren't you guys protected with those "shields" and ever-evolving technology yet? Anything else? Doubtfully anyone from the street can quickly answer.

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