I stumbled onto this problem when I changed one of my exe projects to a static library so I could setup two exe’s, one for unit tests, the other for releasing.  (Which by the way is a wonderful way to unit test an exe project)  Most of my projects these days use some form of inversion of control so I had static variables creating maker classes which would register themselves with the factory.  As explained in one of my previous articles here.

When I changed my project to a static library and linked it to a separate exe project my maker classes stopped registering themselves.  Why does this happen?  Well after a bit of a research I found out that when you link in a static library, the linker only links code into your project that you actually use.  All extra code is left uninitialized and put in a corner to sit while the big boss code runs.  A very interesting side effect of static linking.

Anyway, to fix this problem in visual studio you need to set “Use Library Dependency Inputs” in Linker options on your exe project.  This will make the linker link in all the object files themselves, instead of selectively linking them as needed.  I am researching some way to do this per library, because as of right now if you set this it will link ALL libraries like that.

In linux it would seem the option is -z allextract, but I have not tested this one.

If you need your static objects from a static library to be initiated like normal, this should do the trick.

Ignoring the personal information and the question addicts, what else do I have against these questions?  Well first rewind a bit and think about why they use these questions.  Typically these questions are used to restore account access after you have been compromised or forget your information.  Occasionally some people want answers just to change your log in info.  Why do web sites feel the need to verify that the one with valid credentials can also answer a bunch of personal questions?  Its just another useless security layer that might prevent <1% of unauthorized accesses for the retards using ‘password’ as their password.  Security questions are nothing more than a retard test, and having to pass a retard test each time a user wants to log in is insulting to everyone; or at least it should be.

I have no idea what my favorite book/movie/show/teacher/school/band is, and since that knocks out 80% of the available questions right off the bat I am left with ‘city I was born in’,  ‘name of high school’ or some equally obvious trivia from the life of Charles.  I can not count how many times I have tried to answer these questions only to have the computer tell me I am wrong.  Me, the real flesh and blood, knows less about my life than a computer.  Favorite bands change, pets die, K-12 merges into one big blur, these are all to be expected from the average adult; so where do these web sites get the idea that it is a good idea to ask these things?

I had a gmail account get taken over one time.  For a period of time I always put in the answer ‘none’ for every security question, including the ones on my email account.  So someone found out my email was tied to my old wow account, and sent a password reset to my address.  Turns out when you try and ‘remember my password’ with gmail it just asks for the answer to your security question.  So this smart guy entered ‘none’ and won a free expired wow account.

Why am I pissed at security questions instead if my own incompetence?  For the same reason I still fill in ‘none’ for all my answers.  I do not want to be bothered with remembering my favorite movie, my favorite book or any of that crap.  Not only that but why would I want some random web site knowing that information?

Well I think that is enough ranting, you might be wondering what I am suggesting instead.  Well I would question the use the security questions at all.  First off they should be optional, that way users are not forced to fill in garbage they will eventually forget.  What about account recovery?  There are two kinds of account recovery, a recovery for a web site account for someplace like slashdot.org, and there is account recovery for an email address.  For slashdot the answer is easy, send an email confirmation to the recorded email address.  There is no reason why a web site like slashdot’s responsibility should extend any farther than that.  You (the web site owner) do not need to worry about whether the person knows his favorite band, if he access to his email address, that should be good enough for you.

If you are the email provider you have an interesting problem.  I would argue that if you forget the password to your email address you are beyond hope.  However I will admit that is a bit harsh.  If you are that worried about your customers then I would advocate a password HINT, where they can type a phrase to remember their password.  OR let them type their own question and answer.

Other valid solutions would be ask several questions about the state of their inbox.  “When was the last time you logged in,” “Name one address in your address book,” “Who do you send the most mail to” etc.  And lets not overlook the most vital part of client identification, his ip address, browser information, operating system etc.  You get the point.

So why would you want to implement something like that when a select box with answers is incredibly easy?  Because you will impress those of us who hate security questions, and give the appearance that your web site is more intelligent than those fill in the blank wanna bees.

Well, what is money? What are those greenish photo credit: hickoryhollow113 pieces of paper or numbers on a bank statement? They are just a means to achieve an end; in other words, retirement. Sure you go on vacations, buy big houses, marry someone, but if you take a step back and look at the purpose of these little bills to any civilized human being on the planet you will see that it all leads up to the point where all of a sudden there is no reason to continue working anymore because you have enough invested that even 4% return will pay your salary each year.

Ultimately these pieces of paper are your retirement, nothing more. They certainly do not represent any real wealth, as millions found out last November. Do not get me wrong I am not going to discuss what some call “The Federal Bank Conspiracy.” Which includes theories explaining the devaluation of the dollar, global government, criminals in fancy suits (although you would do yourself a favor by learning a little bit about the origin and meaning of those green bits of paper). I am just going to explain some of my own reasons for not defining my life by my eventual retirement.

I will start by saying that I work for no one but myself. When I am looking for work I want to know two things, is the job interesting, and will it challenge me. The prospective job must have both these qualities or it would just turn into a job I do for money, which as I have already established is not what I am after. I do not mean this in a strictly programming sense either. A job can be interesting in many ways, in general, if I will learn something interesting from the job, then its interesting. If a job presents many challenges that require unique solutions, involves traveling to different places, meeting many different people, exploring the inner workings of many different organizations; these are all examples of something I personally would find interesting. Of course its not a complete list, but the general idea of one. Also its worth mentioning that I am not some complete snob who does not give the time of day to any proposition that does not entertain me every second of the day. I am only saying that I am not the type who sits at a desk for years never asking questions and never adventuring farther than the water cooler.

In my opinion there are two different types of programmers. There are the builders and the maintainers. The builders are the guys you hire to come in, design a system, layout the ground work, the algorithms, the design and in general build at least the foundation of the actual application. Most of the time the builders stick around for the entire project; well, I would at least. Once the application is done the builders move on, they seek new challenges, new opportunities, new excitement, etc. There is nothing to be gained from sticking to the same product for years, that is the job of the maintainer.
The maintainer by contrast does not design, build, or care about the project at all. He sits at a desk and makes sure that no one touches the code base without his approval and only after a year of testing has been cleared. He is your typical white collar just-waiting-for-my-retirement guy. He does nothing interesting, indeed, he wants nothing interesting to happen. He does not want the chore of having to think, so he sits and grows old waiting for the day when he can sit on the beach at Maui all day and really enjoy the last 20 years of his life. (note – dramatized for effect)

If you can sense my obvious bias in these two paragraphs then you can obviously guess which group I file myself into. I am a builder, through and through. Throw me a nifty bone in the form of a challenge or opportunity every month or so and I will be happy as a clam.

To make a position challenging by my definition would be to consistently test the limits of my knowledge. It is no fun constantly solving problems and puzzles with an understanding I gained from the first of such problems. I enjoy conversations and problems that sit right on my boundary between the known and unknown. In my never ending quest to learn everything about everything; constantly testing the limits of my knowledge plays a key role in expanding my expertise. Sure, I may do something wrong or admit that I am unsure of something, but that just means I will have to do some research and learn.

If you work for a big company you might say, “Well, we are only interested in the person who knows the spec like the back of his hand.” I would like to discuss this thinking. Firstly, there is a big difference between knowledge and understanding. I think everyone can agree that knowledge is good. Knowledge means that when you open visual studio you can write a program to fork a new process, print hello world, write to a shared memory location, parse a text file and handle windows messages all from your head. That is great! But do you understand how any of that works?

Having knowledge is good, that is a given.  In my opinion though, having understanding is better.  Lets say someone absolutely knows Perl.  He knows every character, every function, every trick, etc.  He knows Perl, but he does not understand Perl.  If you have a very important Perl project to accomplish this guy sounds like the perfect match right?  Consider this, have you ever heard these words from your programmer “No, that is not possible”?  That is the mark of someone who has knowledge but no understanding.  He knows that within his knowledge there is no way to do such a thing, therefore there is no way to do it.  He does not understand the fundamental building blocks so if something comes up that does not fit in the right hole he says you are SOL.

Someone with understanding however would know how to rearrange those blocks to achieve your result.  He may make a mistake, he most certainly does not know ever nuance of the technology, but he understands how it works, and therefore he knows what is good and what would be a bad idea.  Not only that, he also understands potential problems before they happen.  I will try to paint a picture here.  If you imagine your project as a flow of water, probably a river of some sort.  Someone with knowledge will attempt to navigate down your river using the same boat for all your rivers.  He does not understand how the boat works, he just knows that given enough time, energy, and money he will eventually reach the end.  Someone with understanding on the other hand can see the whirlpools, branches, fallen trees in the river; he will design a boat on the spot to perform under those exact circumstances.  If he gets hung up somewhere or it is not going as planned, he will make an adjustment and start again.  He understands the technology, so learning and implementing the framework is simply an exercise in patience.

I am going to get a little stereotypical here, but I already have so if you are still reading I am going to assume you do not care. The difference I just illustrated is the difference between someone who graduated high school, college, whatever, with a 4.0 GPA and the person who graduated with a 3.0 GPA. While trying to stick to the topic here, I think we can all agree that school is just a dump truck full of knowledge. The standard curriculum contains no material that teaches understanding. And I am going to blow your mind here and say that that is GOOD.
My views on public schooling really deserve their own post, but so you can sleep tonight I will explain what I mean. Understanding should not be taught in a class of thirty other students. In that scenario you are simply trying to tell a group how to think, which simply does not work. Well.. it does work for those ‘A’ students. Which is why you see the ‘A’ students dropping out of college and/or jobs and the ‘B’ students graduating with honors. In high school they have the mistaken concept that understanding should be taught and so they try to stress what they call ‘Critical Thinking Skills.’ Which are nothing more than ‘Try and Guess what I Mean’ quizzes. The students who willingly surrender their mind and identity to these people end up getting the ‘A’s, then, they get to college and all of a sudden the teachers do not give a damn about their mind. Here is the student, saying “Here! This is me, this is my mind, take it and inject your thoughts and programming into it so that I can score 100% on the test” and the teacher completely ignores him. They do not give a damn about his understanding, they are paid to talk for an hour and talk is all they do. By the way, these are the kids who grow up to be the maintainers. I am really getting off topic here so I will leave that for you to mull over.

Ok so back on topic, money, ok. In my entire article so far I have not addressed the main issue. So, if you feel like you understand my position a little better now how would you pay me? You do not know right? That is because money is irrelevant. I mean sure, it helps buy certain necessities and what not, but I hold practically zero interest in it. I work to be challenged, to learn, to expand my knowledge. If there were a job out there that would guarantee me all these things every minute of the day I would gladly pay to work there.
Now I do not mean to say that you can get away with paying me half of what everyone else makes. I do enjoy getting paid, its just not nearly as interesting as my own self improvement. If you put a stack of money in front of me, along side a problem of equal proportion, I would choose the problem every day of the week.

So I guess it all boils down to one point. I would argue that you should pay me exactly what you think you should pay me. If I do a crappy job, pay me less, if I design something that saves the company millions, then by all means pay me more; I promise I will not hate you for it.
This seems odd to most managers for some reason. Usually you get a salary employee that you expect to pay so much a month, the cheaper the better. My views could not be more different. I will not demand a high salary, I just demand that you pay me what you feel like you should pay me. If you are sitting in a dark lit room snickering about this programmer who you hired for super cheap and does the work of five of your regular programmers then you are doing it wrong. Talent deserves to be recognized, and incompetence deserves to be punished. Its really as simple as that.

The Star Wars the Old Republic people were at pax demoing their game during one of two very packed events in the main hall. Most attendees (including myself) waited 2 hours or more to get into the theater for the show. My main attraction to TOR is directly connected to my love of the original KOTOR. I expect Bioware to put out a decent game, but I am worried about the direction of this new mmo. The producers on the stage were very proud to label their mmo kotor 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 all in one package. The team recently announced that the game will have fully voiced dialog and a story driven game play experience. This sounds great for a single player game but I am concerned about how they will connect the dots. Single player mmo’s have been tried, as well as mmo’s for single players; how does Bioware expect to succeed where others have failed?
They also made the announcement that Coruscant will be a playable zone, which was apparently PAX exclusive news. They also had a video clip of the zone but its not worth talking about.
All in all I was a bit disappointed in the presentation. I liked getting updated on some of the features of the classes, but nothing they presented or talked about could not have taken place in a booth with a PLAYABLE DEMO. Oh, all the attendees received a free steam copy of KOTOR; I do not wish to knock the game, but come on guys, how about a raffle for beta access or something other than a free copy of a six year old game.
Also, back to the story. The original kotor was great because it felt like the developers told LucasArts to sit in a corner and leave the story to Bioware. The strength of the game was due to the very minor attachment to the movies and thus, to George Lucas. Unfortunately the designers of this mmo were emphasizing connections to the movies and original story, which goes against the very foundation of the original KOTOR game. While I am a Star Wars fan for the most part, I feel that having as little to do with George Lucas these days is a strength. So while they were standing up there announcing all this back story as connected to the movies, I was sitting very uncomfortably praying they really do know what they are doing.

Something else that was really big this year were the 3d glasses from nVidia. Honestly I find the glasses fun, but rather pointless. I have a couple of major gripes with this technology. Firstly, in order for a game to be supported a profile must be made for it by an nVidia dev. Now, the library of supported games is huge, and since its nVidia you probably will not have to worry about any AAA titles shipping without 3d support, but its still a drawback that the device cannot simply work with all games. I realize I am asking the impossible, which is why I do not expect 3d glasses to take off anytime soon. My other problem is with the obvious viewing problems. Not for the person playing the game, I mean for the people watching. A major thing that makes some games fun is the party aspect. Where other people can watch you being a badass. They cannot watch your screen unless they too have 3d specs; I somehow do not expect every gamer to invest in 3-4 pairs of glasses just so they can show off to their friends when no glasses and no 3d works just as well.
In the end its just a gimmick. A very nicely executed and kinda interesting gimmick, but developers cannot use the tech to build game play elements into their games, and thus it fails to have any appeal outside of the cool kid gamer crowd.
Another thing that was at pax was a gamer suit that would provide feedback to the player when punched, hurt, thrown around, whatever. Again, a cool gimmick but nothing more. When I think of these things I picture some form of uber gamer sitting around with 3d glasses, gaming vest, feedback chair, climate feedback; It is not to big of a jump to just say ‘virtual reality.’ While I do hope that all these little pieces to eventually contribute to the eventual realization of true VR, by themselves they are not worth the sometimes very large investment.

I just have a couple more pictures to post so here is my wrap up. The picture here is one an artist took all three days at pax to finish and as you can see it is very well realized. Speaking with a little bit of experience with pastels I greatly respect this man for having the stamina to not only endure all three days surrounded by really big nerds asking questions all the time, but also to do great work with what has to be one of the messiest drawing materials in existence.

My final pic is of one of the table at the Geek Chic booth, where I would say they have perfected the ultimate table top for paper game players. Each table is multifunction, multiuse, the tables themselves come with addons, designs for every style of game, tons of utility features, and much more. As a consumer you are looking at a cost of $1500 or more for the basic table so a bit out of the price range of the standard gamer but I think they are doing some neat stuff over there.

On a side note, I am not sure how long this video will last, but I filmed a friend of mine playing Dragon Age: Origins at the Intel booth on a PC. The video is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuQWQVZU–E

Blizzard wins the award for best booth in my opinion. They did not do anything too fancy, they just setup twenty or so computers with playable demos for Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft Cataclysm. Even though Blizzard can easily afford to have three major games in development their booth was both simple and to the point. The line for each computer was at least 4 people long all throughout the day; as such I did not actually play any of the games.

Other notable booths include Wizards of the Coast and Bioshock 2. I enjoyed WoC’s booth because they had gm’s running participants through dungeons in dnd 4. They had computers setup to generate characters which you would then use to participate in a short session right there in the exhibition hall. The noise in the hall must have made it really hard to hear the gm for the most part; but I thought it was a neat idea.

Bioshock 2′s booth wins the award for most creative. They put a movie set up with old fashioned furnishings complete with radio, typewriter, etc. The room was messy, papers and books all over the place. There were clues written on papers and letters; all in all it was a very unique booth and I am afraid my picture does not quite do it justice. The actually footage of the game available at the show was no different than what is available online.

There are panels at pax, where experts talk to a crowded room about certain things; I went to a couple today but I will hold off on writing about those until later. Some of the data or ideas they present are interesting so I want to write a review and critique of all the panels I go to in one article.

select duration.minutes from cdrs;
select duration.seconds from cdrs;

You can also program them to read weird string inputs that other data types can not handle.  Recently I wrote a custom data type to read a duration field of the format minutes:seconds.tenths; so standard input went something like ’002:34.2.’

Writing a custom data type is actually very simple.  You just open a new sql data type project in Visual Studio and VS will integrate nicely with your sql server; even going so far as to upload the data type for you and run tests.  There are numerous tutorials online for programming a data type however so I will not cover that aspect.

Like I said I recently created a data type for my data parsing.  I put it into my table but soon found that assigning my specific data processing user permissions to the object was harder than you would expect.  I kept getting the error

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]EXECUTE permission denied on object 'data_type', database 'db', schema 'dbo'. (SQL-42000)

Trying

grant execute on [data_type] to cdr;

returned ‘object not found.’  Ms sql’s security assignment tool did not help either, it never did ‘find’ the object I created.

I eventually found my way to this msdn page which at least revealed the secret missing keyword.  To set the permission on the object use this query

grant execute on TYPE::[dbo].[data_type] to cdr;

photo credit: Idhren

I bring this up because this last weekend I started playing Aion.  A very nice game that I have high hopes for, but its probably the first MMO that I am actually interested in a bit of the lore; I even went so far as to read some of the important quest text.  Its shocking yes, but they really did do a good job making the player feel like they are not just a drop of water in an ocean; which is worthy of recognition in itself.  Unfortunately, Aion suffers from the unique name dilemma so while I am trying to rescue the damsel from a horde of black winged bandits I am constantly running into ‘XXSlayerXX’ or ‘RoGeGardian’ and that is just terrible from an immersion perspective.

But what can be done about it?  After all, a lot depends on character names.  PMs, brokers, mail, friend lists, etc etc.  Obviously a new system has to enhance game play, not restrict it.  I propose a system where each character is assigned a unique number, not a name, which can be used for all these means of communication with just a little extra effort on the programmers side.

To illustrate my concept I will run through a few normal MMO actions and highlight how this idea works in comparison to the character name.

Auctions

This is the easiest, when a character posts an item you simply register the item with the character id instead of the character name.  All transactions, searches, bids, use the character id instead of the name.  A really simple swap out in this instance.

PMs

Probably the first problem that would come to your mind.  Obviously having to type /tell 00283023 to talk to a player would be murder on your player base.  PMs can be handled nicely, it just takes a little more work and polish out of the box.  For instance, to talk to someone who made a comment in the chat window, just click on their name and reply.  The reply would pull the character number from the chat window so the player would see the character name but actually be replying using his number.  Now, if you want to type up a pm to someone you met in an instance but did not befriend, things get a little more complicated.  Lets say for the sake of argument that you remember his character name and you wish to send him a message.

There are two solutions I can think of off the top of my head.  First, typing /tell William will bring up a list of all ‘Williams’ in the world sorted by last interaction.  Meaning if he met William during a live event the previous night, that William would be listed above a William he met out in the plains last week.  For this to work players would need to keep record of the players they meet and timestamps, not impossible but not very practical.

My next solution would be to improve the friend system to be more intelligent.  Instead of storing a list of people the player manually types in, it could store a list of acquaintances that the player has met over time.  It could list people he met, ordered by zones, time spent with the person, number of interactions with the person, etc.  This way the player would build a network of contacts in the world without having to manually type in their names or numbers.  These two systems not only improve the experience for the player, but also improve immersion since this is normally how people relate to each other.  I can think of five different ‘Chris’s I know, but when attempting to address one I use the social path that has been created between us.  My social network determines the means to communicate.

Mail

Another tricky problem which can be gracefully solved by an expansion on the friend list concept I wrote about above.  When the player tries to send mail he can browse his social network for a contact to send mail to.  This is a good time to mention that chatting with another player would make a new network with that person.  This includes someone chatting in general, city, trade, whatever.  To model those interactions a network of recent chat messages would be displayed for the player to pick out the appropriate recipient.

Groups / Raids

Most groups and raids are formed by pm messages or chat window invites.  Since we have already established that in the chat window a name is really a character id handing invite requests is as easy as opening a new pm.

A final note about the new social system.  Updating and management does not need to be left completely to the program.  With a new friends system comes a completely different way of interacting with players in the world.  Players should be able to modify their networks, add people to groups, tag communities of links.  I have more than once wished to have a system where I could tag players or organize relationships by specific words.  Not wishing to come off as an elitist but I am sure more than one of you have wanted to tag someone ‘noob’, ‘idiot’, or  ‘can’t play his class.’  With a more friendly social network system you could organize your contacts, including all the people you no longer want to interact with into a group.  Then when they say something in chat, send you a pm, invite you to a raid, you will have fair warning.

When all is said and done I am really advocating a new type of system for interacting with players in an online world.  One built on networks of links instead of a simple one dimensional friends list.

Anyway why I am I posting this?  Well I have nothing to say about Pax in particular, like I said I have never been there and my general understanding is its like an E3 only good and open to the public.  I was roped into taking this trip by a friend and we plan to spend a week along the west coast.  That being said Pax started out as only a minor side attraction for us, as we had already planned on traveling out there.  It was not until I started reading about community events and enthusiasm that a lot of people seem to have that I started to seriously look forward to attending the conference.

First off, Pax is a convention where all sorts of game company’s get together to show their stuff.  It is from the Penny Arcade people so that was +1 in my book right away.  Now, I have also attended CPL which was fun, but I was disappointed with the sponsor turnout and activities.  I did not attend to compete, I was only there to have fun and promote Prodod.

Recently, the exhibitor list was published here and I am quite pleased with the turnout.  First off I just want to say that Knights of the Old Republic is my favorite RPG of all time.  Of course I am excited about Bioware’s new MMO; I am even more excited to see it at PAX.  I have sort of gotten off track here let me back up.

What has struck me most during these last few days is the amount of fan participation in the event.  There are pre-pax events, post-pax events, during-pax events, and each and every one of them sound like a ton of fun.  Need to travel to PAX?  If you go by car or train there is a group for you.  During the event there will be several games going on between groups of attendees including Pax-Prank, Assassins, and Pax Buttoneers.  All these events got me thinking about the substantial amount of time that volunteers are spending on an event they are paying for themselves.

There was a point in there somewhere but I seem to have misplaced it.  Truth be told I just felt like writing another article and I had nothing else to write about.  My current projects are on hold while I get accustomed to working full time and I have had no design revelations as of late.  I am trying to keep this site free of political sway so I cannot comment on recent events.

I will be taking a camera so expect a ‘Pics’ thread in a month or so.

Firstly, for those like me, the Core i7 is the newest cpu from Intel.  The chip has four cores and two process threads each, so you can run

eight concurrent programs without a hitch.  The truly amazing part of this cpu though is the overclockability.  I bought the Core i7 920 which is clocked at 2.6Ghz by default.  After toying around for 6+ hours tweaking this and that I ended up stable at 4Ghz.

The cpu is very stable and sturdy, even at almost 1.7v core (default 1.25).  Compared to my old FX-55 ( remember how leet that processor used to be, haha ) its like a different world.  As you can see from the picture I am currently running at 3.6Ghz because the processor was getting a little to hot when under load.  It would peak at 90 degrees celcius at 4Ghz, max operating tempurature is widely accepted as 100 degrees celcius.  This is not documented or set by Intel, its more of a rumor.  Apparently at 100 degrees the cpu starts to underclock itself, therefore 100 degrees is the max.

Also, unless you are very lucky in order to achieve 4Ghz you must enable Intel’s Turbo Boost technology, which automatically adjusts the cpu multiplier based on load.  Usually the cpu’s multiplier is set to 20, but with Turbo enabled and heavy load the cpu will overclock to 21.  Unfortunently according to the posts I read online when the cpu overclocks itself it only overclocks a couple of cores.  Therefore even though the cpu makes it to 4Ghz when under load its really just a number, the true frequency is a bit lower.

Therefore I decided to disable Turbo and leave the cpu at 3.8Ghz for a time.  After a few days I decided to lower it further to 3.6Ghz to keep the voltage within spec.  Believe me though, the Core i7 is an amazingly strong overclocker.

As a special note, the board I got does not allow setting the multiplier over 20, but I hear talk of a future bios update to allow it.

Ok, enough of the shameless self promotion, as for blog content.  I have a couple articles in the works but have yet to publish them as usual.  I have been a little lazy the last few months due to a varity of things.  Firstly college obviously, secondly I have adopted a new sleep schedule known as polyphasic sleep.  During my adaption period I fell behind on a lot of projects I was working on so I am now catching up.  I might post a summary of my research and theories on this sleep schedule, but I did not want to do a daily sleep log like thousands of others have.

Also on the backburner is an update to my game AI project.  After running some scalled tests involved word processing I have moved into simple game development to test action automation and decision making.  The first difficulty involving the 3d engine has been crossed and I am not in AI development mode.  I chose to use Ogre3d as the engine mainly because I have had positive experiences with it in the past.  I will be posting my research on that project soon.