Introducing: The Wiki

Let’s try something else.

A blog doesn’t really work for me. I always feel obliged to write some elaborated, polished article, when all I want to to dump some quick thoughts. Perhaps a wiki works better – time will tell…

So here it is: The Wiki. Note that this is not an open wiki; edit privileges are reserved to your humble host. In the unlikely case that you want to keep up with my updates, you can subscribe to the Recent Changes feed. It’ll be noisier than the usual blog feed, and its delta format needs a bit getting-used-to.

This blog will live on for the occasional ‘meta’ news, like this one.

Links are now on Google Reader

Did I mention that I suck at blogging?

My dear readership probably noticed that I made a few “Links YYYY-MM-DD” entries, featuring stuff on the web that I read or just thought to be useful or interesting. I do read a lot (I have about one hour commute time every day and a phone that it good enough to read feeds and websites), but manually preparing these entries proved to be way to much work for a lazy person as your humble host. So I just started to “share” these links in Google Reader and in the unlikely event that you care about this, you can find and subscribe to them at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/odahoda.

Sign of life

Almost two month without a post. Did I mention that I suck at blogging?
I will not promise to do a better job from now on, because I know the chances are high that this won’t happen…
Didn’t I read somewhere that most blogs are dead or just have posts with excuses for no real updates?

Mental compass

After reading Hofstadter’s book a bit, in becomes more and more clear into which direction I should go. Artificial intelligence has been a topic of interest to me for a long time. Especially playing with the algorithm used to implement programs like copycat or jumbo has been something I wanted to do when I read the book the first time, though I never did it.

Of course I do not think that I can scale that thing up to create an AI that is smart enough to be a sufficient simulation of a human mind or just a NPC’s mind. More like a “decision engine” that tells what to do next based on some input, not unlike more traditional, rule based systems. But I have the faint hope that it could be more flexible and yield more natural results. Perhaps it could also be more resistant against deadlocks and infinite loops. Also I do not intend to use it for ultra complex subjects like dialogs (at least not right now, perhaps when I’m old and gray). I think the approach can be used in more abstract scenarios like building and populating towns. Well, we’ll see.

And for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, either read the book or wait until I write more about it.

Subversion repository

I just create a project at code.google.com. Right now there’s only a little Python module called gltoy which I intend to use for toying around with OpenGL. So – not much to see here right now.

About the author

I’m located in Zürich, Switzerland and work as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Google. My job is about managing and administrating the stuff that is sitting behind Youtube and other Google properties that use some kind of video functionality. My job also involved writing some code, but that’s not the primary focus area.

Writing software has been the most entertaining occupation for me since I started dabbling with computers. Creating games was always high on the list, although there was always some other stuff on it as well, like math software, web content management and server administration systems. The list of software I actually published is very limited though.

I am not and never was a professional game developer. But I did stick my nose into that area and at some time even seriously considered getting a job in this industry.

I am not a hardcore gamer – but I must admit that we just recently bought a new computer for the sole purpose of playing recent games. I do enjoy playing games, mostly role playing games. So this site is about topics originating from this genre.

I do know what it takes to develop a serious software project. At my day job I have to deal with some really freaking huge systems – I can’t give you any numbers, but that’s for your own good, because they would simply blow your head away. And another significant part of that knowledge comes from trying and failing as well.

My time to pursue projects outside of my day job is very limited. The job is quite demanding (but fun) and I got family, so the opportunities for mindless hacking sessions are rather small.

I suck at blogging and my personal website is horribly out of data at the time of writing this.

Motivation

We all know the “perfect game.” We play a game and think “Wow, that’s cool, *but*…” If you are like me, then thousand of ideas pop up in your head – how you would do this better or that differently. Once the brain starts spinning, it produces step by step a blueprint of “the perfect game” – the ultimate experience (at least how far you’re able to envision it).

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