Plan for Brett Fattori

Slow month, lazy coding, reading a lot...

It's been a slow month... Really slow since IGC, in fact. I feel like there isn't as much time in a day anymore. It might have something to do with it getting dark earlier and earlier. It might have something to do with enjoying my regular job and sticking it out there for an hour or two more... Who knows.

Anyways, it's a slow month. I haven't spent as much time as I could coding on dRacer. I've been playing a lot of Halo 2 again. A friend I used to work with at my old job likes to get on an play after 11pm. This leads to many a late night gaming. I suck at Halo 2... I'm only a 9 right now. Here's an aggravated story:

I start one evening with a score of 13. I'm all pumped up and ready to rumble, and what not. It starts us out on Turf, Team Slayer, with just rocket launchers. Way cool, and the guys I'm playing against aren't maniacs or sucky. We're all having a blast, and then I notice it. One of the guys on my team is blowing himself up. Seems his 10 is making his matchmaking to challenging, and he's decided that my game is the one where he's gonna blow his own brains out over and over. This was a poor design decision in Halo 2... No one should be able to lower my score because he decides that he likes to ride rockets! Well, I had the best game of my entire Halo 2 experience... 14 kills, with a 98% hit ratio. However, this fucktard killed himself 34 times in a row so we ended up losing and my score went from 13 to 10. Needless to say, that ruined my gaming night and put me in a sour mood.

So, this month has also been a research month. I've been looking into combinatorial coding and adaptive applications. There are some interesting papers and research on this topic. People are finding new ways to make programs "evolve" everyday. Joe pointed me to some information regarding using random bit ordering and removal to see about making code more efficient. It's an interesting fact that removing and reordering bits in an application, until it can be run again, is also an optimizational technique. Not exactly an efficient one, as it's more like the 1000's of monkeys, 1000's of keyboards thing. It'll be interesting to see what comes of this field of research.

Okay, enough blathering... until next time.

- Brett