I Will Miss You

Janet, you were my closest friend. We didn't talk too frequently, but we didn't have to. Now I'm wishing we had seen each other more often anyway, but it's too late.

I am sad that you have been taken away so young, but you were a great young woman, and you had done many good things. It is sad that you could not continue on, but it is good that you never held back and gave life your all. Your time was not wasted. I am greatful for your true, honest friendship all these years.

I will miss you dearly and always. Rest in peace, Janet Yip (February 12, 1983 - November 29, 2006).

Love Ian

I Made This

Sony Media Software recently released Photo Go, an application for organizing your photos. You can correct the colour in your photos, remove red eye, straighten photos, apply effects, etc. You can order prints from ImageStation, you can email photos, you can export photos to removeable devices, import photos from your cameras and other devices, etc.

BUT! What's more important than all that is that I made this product. Me. Its my baby. This app was completed on a really tight schedule. It was started by me and the other co-op back in the Winter term. I did research on how to handle the data management, and implemented the prototype back end architecture. The other co-op, Richard, worked on the photo list UI control. By the end of our term we had an app that could scan for photos in folders that you selected and it would show them in the list, with animation and (mostly) invisible caching of the thumbnails. It was rough, but it got transformed into a useful product over the few months after I left to go back to school. When I came back to Sony this term, the team finished up last minute bug fixes in the first couple of weeks (I didn't work on it) and it went gold shortly after. Exciting times. Certainly exciting to see a product you worked on go from scratch to finish.

Very cool. You can even download a demo from the website if you'd care to try it out.

Poker Night at the Office

Working at a small office is great. I work for Sony Media Software, and even though Sony is a big company, our Waterloo office only has 9 guys. How is the small office environment so great? Well, poker nights for one.

We hardly use the calendar in Outlook, and when we
do, its for poker. Poker at 5 pm. Order in dinner, lead into poker. So good.

And as some of you know, we also play cards and video games at lunch. You can't beat this kind of environment when it comes to work places.

Nerrrrrrrrrd!!

You know you're a math or engineering nerd when you find this comic funny:

One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve

Family Guy this past Sunday pulled out a classic bit from way back, that really old Sesame Street pinball counting sequence. It brought back all these memories I had locked away that I had forgotten were from Sesame Street. That show was really good, not like the stupid Barney type crap we have these days.

Here's the Family Guy clip, and the original Sesame Street clip. Enjoy!

Athiesm's about Integrity, man.

In a conversation with my very good friend Helen, we came to talking about atheism (which I cannot stop spelling incorrectly as athiesm). Helen and I, with her being strongly rooted in her Christianity, often come to the topic of religion and God and athiesm. After entertaining ourselves with some website's claim that very few prison inmates are non-religious, she asked me what my definition of athiesm would be.

After a bit of googling I (re)found www.positiveatheism.org and came across this transcript of a public radio address by Joseph Lewis. Very well spoken, very good read. If you read it, make sure you understand what you're reading. Don't gloss over any point he makes. That won't do you any good. For instance, Lewis says the following:

If Atheism is sometimes called a "negative" philosophy, it is because the conditions of life make a negative philosophy best suited to meet the exigencies of existence, and only in that sense can it be called "negative."

I sorta got what he was saying but I had to mull over this for a while to really get it. After getting it though, it helped my understanding very much.

In this address, Lewis puts it well, closely matching what I believe atheism to be defined as:

It [Athiesm] has dedicated itself to a passionate quest for the truth. It believes that truth for truth's sake is the highest ideal, and that virtue is its own reward.

So the point is its primarily about understanding who we are, where we are, what we're doing, and what's going on around us. It's about learning the truth, and upholding the truth. Simply thus.

Very good read.

Flash?!

I couldn't watch this video with sound, but I'm told this program is written in flash. Certainly looks like it, with its fancy animations and the fact that its running inside Internet Explorer.

Its a scrabbooking web app for creating interesting scrapbook like collections of your photos. You can share your creations online, or order an entire book of each scrapbook you create. Looks amazing, but it also looks like it would take a LOT of time to build a nice looking scrapbook.

http://media.podtech.net/media/2006/10/PID_001162/Podtech_scrapblog_demo.mov

scrapblog.com

Absent Minded Ambition

I don't have any drive anymore. There's a slight ambition tugging at me, struggling to pull me through each day, but with my mind elsewhere most of the time. Its as if that excitement I used to get from completing pieces of software and seeing them work has lost its lustre. Its still exciting, its just that I don't care anymore. I've seen it before, I know things will work if I work hard enough to get them working. It isn't enough anymore for me to just see code come to life and function. I need more than that. And I don't know what that something more is.

Power of the Lead Developer

I was going through some shared library code here at Sony Media Software, looking for some string functions that I had seen before. As I was looking I came across some code that filled me with a giddy sense of wile. Our top of the engineering chain, the lead of leads, a guy named Curt, has special code sprinkled all throughout our code base. Stuff that protects us from shooting ourselves in the foot, months or years after having pulled the trigger, so to speak. Kinda like child safety mechanisms.

Anyway, the particular code that made me smile was this:

#if defined(CURT_NO_MERCY)
// a whole slew of deprecations of standard
// library functions such as strcpy
#endif

No mercy indeed. Oh the power.

Today Marks the End

October 12 2006, the first day of snow fall. That's right, its snowing here in Waterloo right now. I'm wearing a t-shirt! At least I'm not wearing shorts like my fellow co-op here is. Muha. :(

Update: It's even worse now! This isn't a nice mid-fall light flurry, this is a HUGE heavy flurry that's already accumulating after only 10 maybe 20 minutes. Its really windy too. The snow is blowing sideways. What an unexpected day.

From Scratch

New beginning. Pritesh's recently publicized opinion on Xanga mixed with his switch to Blogger convinced me to switch as well. I'm not sure what it is about Xanga that has made us switch. Probably the clutteriness of its look. Too much going on. Here's to a new start!

Also, originally I made the title Undeclared variable: $iwjh$, but Undeclared Variable by itself has a ring to it, so I stuck with that. Think that title sucks? Too bad, I'm a programmer. C2065 that shit*.

* I know, I know, C2065** is undeclared identifier. Undeclared variable sounds better.
** For those of you not in the know, C2065 is a Microsoft C++ Compiler error code.