Getting "pwned" a bit too often lately? Maybe you need some liquid 1337. Guaranteed to keep those 0mg h34dsh0tz coming!

Yes, I actually did buy it just because of the name. I'm that much of a geek. But there's money to be made here!

What's the first thing you should do when you are robbed? Post about it on the Internets. Ok, maybe I did a lot of other things since this happened, but...

Protip: Don't leave even the slightest hint that anything of value is in your car. Better yet, don't even leave anything valuable in your car. Even if you think you are parked in what seems to be a safe area.

I woke up on Thursday to my roommate telling me that someone broke into my car. I go out there, and indeed my window is smashed. Of course, the iPod is gone, the GPS, the car stereo, and some chargers/FM transmitter for the iPod. About $700 total to replace it all including the window. Yet somehow I wasn't furious at seeing this. Guess I quickly realized the stuff was gone and there was nothing to do except get the window fixed right away and move on.

This isn't the first time I was a victim of cowardly crime in Atlanta. Though others I've talked to have faced more of the gun-in-your-face variety. The area around my school is pretty rough. Crime spreads onto campus too, there's even violent carjackings and assaults... you name it. It seems to have gotten a lot worse in the last year or so. I'm not sure if it's the economy, gangs getting bigger, kids doing some of it for kicks, addicts, or what. I'm just glad I'm getting the hell out of the area when I graduate. I think this and my talks with others who've suffered far worse have convinced me to live somewhere quieter and safer. I can just drive downtown if I want to do something.

The neighborhood I live in doesn't *seem* really rough like say Home Park right next to campus. Loring Heights is pretty quiet. But unfortunately criminals can move around, and the ghetto isn't far off. Looks like they make their rounds through various neighborhoods looking for any opportunity.

I usually make a point of hiding all my valuables in my glovebox and always locking all the doors. Especially if I'm parked in an unfamiliar or rough area. At my house I got a little lazy, but even when it happened everything was in the glove box except the plastic (empty) mount for the GPS and the faceplate to the car stereo. Big mistake. It's a pain in the ass to try to move everything around to protect your crap though. I've been here for three years without issue, but I guess it's only a matter of time.

Another factor that made it easier for this to happen was that I was parked on the street in front of my house. Lots of people on my street do this. But I'd have been safer up my driveway (and thus near my windows). Theives can just walk or drive down the street to case targets. There are other roommates here with their own cars now, and I don't use mine much since I ride my bike to campus. Where it was parked the thief actually had a decent hiding spot that was somewhat hidden from the road by my car and a bush, though there's a streetlight right there.

A whole lot of good locking the doors did. Just cost me $190 to fix the window thanks to that. I guess it might deter slightly less determined crooks, but if they really want to get in, they will. I think even with a car alarm they could empty your glovebox or grab that bag they see and be gone before you get there (if you're even nearby).

Trying to file a police report is pretty funny too. I find the Atlanta PD's own number, and then they tell me that to file a police report I have to dial 911. Wait, what? It's not an emergency! So I end up dialing them, and quickly explain that I just want to report a crime. The operator takes down some info, then says they're sending out an officer. Only problem is, I've gotta head to class and nobody can be at the house to talk to him. I ask if he can come in the evening, but they don't set up appointments. What a pain... and I'm sure tons of crimes go unreported because of how convoluted it can be to try to report them. Obviously this wouldn't get my stuff back, but at least they should know what goes on in this neighborhood.

It's been relatively painless to replace things. I got the window fixed for $191 at Brian Diamond Glass. They were able to take care of things within a few hours, including cleaning up all the broken glass bits. I went to Fry's today and put in a new car stereo, which ran me $174 including parts and labor. They all come with front aux inputs for MP3 players which will be nice, the FM transmitter worked but the sound quality could be better and interference was an issue especially on long trips where previously clear frequencies become used by radio stations. I found the same GPS I had for $130 on ebay. My new roommate has the same generation ipod (but 60GB) that he doesn't use anymore since he got an iPhone, he's looking to sell it and may sell it for cheap to me.

But you can't buy back your false sense of security. I came home the next day expecting the back door to be kicked in and all of my stuff missing. It would be difficult to lose my computers. I have stuff backed up, but reinstalling/reconfiguring so much software would be rough.

Could have been far worse I guess... so there's an expensive lesson and story to tell. If only I could have a German Shepherd that lived in my car. This does make me likely to get renter's insurance or a security system once I move somewhere upon graduation though.

Time to finally get around to posting about how the internship at Mythic went. So, what's it like to work in the games industry? Which stereotypes are more true? That it's the incredibly fun dream job for any gamer nerd? Or that the working conditions are crazy and people are constantly working late nights and weekends? There's some truth to both sides, but overall it's a great place for anyone that loves games and really wants to be challenged. Games, and of course MMOs, have a lot of tough technical problems to solve if they are to be successful. I got to see the pros and cons of working in the industry firsthand, and I think for me the pros far outweigh the cons.

Warhammer Online was very close to launch in my time at Mythic, so as with many games, perhaps this could be called "crunch" time. Yes, many worked more than the 40 hour workweek. But nobody was forcing them to do it or trying to get them to do more hours without pay. They (we) just really wanted to make WAR the best game it could be without delaying it anymore. The games industry is not staffed with people who want the typical 9-5 then get out of there job. It's full of very driven people who want their game to kick ass. And that often means extraordinary effort. They do help out with anyone staying late though, such as with free catered dinners. At least one senior developer said that Mythic's crunch didn't really feel like crunch at all compared to when he was working on Xbox games at another studio.

There's an enormous amount to learn from the people and the codebase. It was great to work with excellent and very experienced programmers. There's at least one guy who worked for the NSA for a number of years, another from Microsoft, someone who was literally a rocket scientist at NASA, of course many who were industry vets and worked at other studios, and so on. Be it tips about Visual Studio, graphics knowledge, C++ help, and so many other things they can teach you a lot. Now, many of them are of course very busy, but I was definitely able to talk to someone when I needed to. Getting to see the technology, the code, was of course fascinating. C++ is a very different beast from .NET. I also got to pick up some Lua experience and some more XML experience too.

Perhaps I'll write more later, but here are a few pictures. There are more on my facebook profile. I ran out of space on my CoC account, so I'm going to try using flickr for these. Click the links to get to bigger versions (click "all sizes").

The animated Halloween torches rock.

Sometimes fans give the studio different gifts. Someone made this amazing Squig.

There's plenty of art on the walls.

One of the many walls of concept art. I think this stuff was mostly Dwarf related.

Conference room with a fantasy twist.

Paul's office! There are plenty of pairs of red shoes within.

Intern's office

Perhaps one day I too shall have a cube this awesome.

Anyhow, buy Warhammer! September 18th!

Vanity license plates in Virginia only cost $10 a year, so I seem to see a lot more of them than in Georgia. That or people up here just really like to show off. Anyhow, some of the people at work have some nice ones. The one above isn't one of them, probably not a good idea to snap actual shots of someone's plates without permission.

But a few I have seen...

DIAF NUB

OMG MOVE

DYE NUB

LOL WTF

I have to get around to posting some great quotes from around the studio sometime! "If I made the classes balanced to begin with, what would I get paid for later?"

The general hysteria and ignorance of many gamers about a recent announcement about content in our game that won't make it at launch is a bit ridiculous. Luckily some are a bit more reasonable. Others seem to take the news and twist it into headlines and summaries making us look bad while leaving out so many important details. Those who know what the game is like know that having six capital cities with the level of content/polish desired would be about equivalent to WoW launching with every single pre-BC raid instance (without any feedback from how previous raids worked out for the playerbase). Our cities are a great deal of the endgame encounters/content, with tons of quests, bosses, pvp and such inside. Not just the cool looking place where the auction house is. This stuff isn't a secret to anyone who looks around to actually read about the game. It's interesting to be on the inside though and see how the public watching your game reacts to what info is released.

I picked up a book and started reading for fun, it's probably been way too long. Fascinating stuff so far. Good to know what your own special part of Hell will be like and what your punishment will be, right?

Argh, someone's posted a video with me in it on the interwebs. The Creative Director on Warhammer Online, Paul Barnett, is this crazy Briton who occasionally likes to post clips of stuff around the studio on his "video blog". He's kind of also the public face of Mythic and the game in many cases, appearing on shows like G4TV'S X-Play and explaining/hyping things in the game on videos on the website. He's definitely a fun personality, though he claims he took us out to dinner in the video... it was lunch. But it was good times.

Paul's Video Blog Click "Interns"

Work goes well on WAR, I've moved on to some stuff in the client after wrapping up some art tools work. And there are definitely people there to make me feel kinda dumb, from the ex-Microsofties to the guy who was literally a rocket scientist. But it seems like they're happy with some work I've done so far!

Check out the Spore Creature Creator (free demo!).

For some reason the first thing I wanted to make was Diablo. I did what I could with the limited parts in the free demo. Though this is definitely a good enough distraction to spend the $10 on. Or maybe I can get it free working for EA... who knows.

It's almost more fun just to look at what others have made, just like with the Check Mii Out channel on the Wii for Miis. There are some pretty incredible creations already. Like what this guy has done.

Or this guy with his turtle:

I tried to keep my site going on the PC in Atlanta... but that only lasted so long. Despite the UPS, at some point the guy living there unplugged the LAN cable going to my room. I was able to walk through what was up on the phone. I thought it was something else, but when we couldn't even ping my PC even though it was on... Anyhow, it's plugged in again!

I'd migrated stuff over to the new desktop I brought to DC. However, Verizon took two+ weeks to get us set up with FIOS. I figured I'd be fine running this site off the new desktop then, but Verizon blocks port 80 inbound. Migrating the webserver wasn't as easy as I was hoping, but it went to a new version of everything... OS, webserver, ASP.NET, database.

So Mythic is a pretty cool place. Game developers eat a lot of junk food. They may scream "I'M GONNA NERF YOU!" when they lose to another designer in a duel. They claim to not be intimidating, but may carry axes or shoot you with a nerf gun. It's pretty funny to overhear discussions about which classes need to be nerfed, buffed, changed to be more fun, etc. And to hear people in the WAR beta complain about stuff while you're sitting in the studio. Best to keep quiet I suppose and just seem like another regular old tester.

Last week some elementary school kids were on a field trip to see the studio. Why didn't I get to do something that cool back then? Beats the crap out of field trips I remember. I also got to sign a poster. I've never signed anything. I guess they didn't know I was just an intern. But apparently someone in customer support knew a kid in the hospital that really liked WAR and wanted something special. So she got the devs to sign a poster for him. Including the interns!

Coming soon, pictures of the studio (if they let me) and capitol hill. And more stuff when I have time. There's tons of game art all over the walls here, and some pretty cool things fans/guilds gave the studio like a large battle standard when one guild "captured" our studio, a great big Squiq statue, etc.

Warning: Nerd post

So here's the best video I've seen online in some time. Thanks Chris! Blows my mind to think how much time he spent on it... (or maybe it was a group effort?). Beats the pants off any of the other "autopilot" type levels videos.

A few recognizable game tunes in the medly, but I'm not Japanese enough to get the rest I guess.

So this was the crazy 18 hour semester. Actually, it didn't turn out to be that bad in part due to how I planned it out, what I registered for and also in part because of getting lucky. At least one course normally would've been a lot more work than it was (Networking II specifically). I'm going to write this as I fill out my course surveys to save some time. Some of these are copy/paste from there. I wish I could just link to my completed surveys and choose to make them public, but they don't offer that. I know people google to find out about courses, so maybe this will be useful to someone. I'm not sure how detailed I'll be but here goes. There's a lot more I can say about these courses beyond a couple paragraphs, but these are some quick thoughts.

Course: CS3510 Design & Analysis of Algorithms

Professor: Yan Z Ding

So this course used to be required for all CS majors, but in the softened up cirriculum that the newer students are on (Threads) they don't have to take this depending on how they specialize. Which is really a shame, because this and a couple other requirements that are now often electives are courses any CS major should have under their belt. You learn a lot of important stuff here. As a result, the course size was small. Only about 11 people actually stayed with it and didn't drop or just stop showing up (out of the 20 who started according to the prof).

This was probably the hardest course this semester, maybe not in workload but in the material. Yan did an OK job teaching it I suppose. I can think of ways to improve teaching this, such as some online animations/applets that are really cool to show certain graph theory algorithms. On tests studying sorta helped, but it was also just came down to whether or not you can think up an algorithm or not using what you know (you can use algorithms in class as building blocks).

This course involves zero programming. It's all writing out algorithms in words and psuedocode on paper, explaining things, proofs, analyzing running time/correctness, etc. You can code up the algorithms yourself to test your work and just play around, and I did this some towards the start of the course (to also get more C++ experience too). I'm a big programmer so I wished it involved more applied stuff and less theory.

It is good that Yan grades on a curve, because test averages were something like 39 and 45 for each test (out of 80).

One funny thing that happened was that the second midterm test (of two) was not announced online, and that a number of students like to sort of never come to class. So the test was announced several times in class leading up to it, but these people were clueless about it. One guy got lucky and happened to come to class the day of the test, and was a little surprised when he saw everyone cramming. So anyhow, there was a lot of crying about that apparently. Not sure what Yan did with those who missed it, but hopefully they got shafted.

There are actually a lot of cool animations/applets online you can play with that show some of the algorithms discussed very well, and I think Yan should've made use of them. Or you could even have students make their own.

Course: CS4251 Networking II

Professor: Nick Feamster

This course was taught by a new professor who was teaching it for the first time, Nick Feamster. Overall he did a good job, the lectures seemed well planned. People had questions which he tried to answer, and if he couldn't he'd try to find the answer and bring it to the next lecture. He had wanted to do a few more assignments and a project, but apparently did not have time to come up with them. Which wasn't so bad, since I took so many hours. Normally this course would've been a lot more work I think.

I was kind of hoping there would be some assignments on programming networked applications, like in the first networking course. I also hoped the focus would be towards the top end of the network stack, but then again, a lot of the real networking stuff does happen at lower layers. There were a few written assignments (using tools, answering questions, doing a little calculations) and then a hands on. The hands on was about using Emulab, which is pretty interesting. You can set up a network topology you define in a sort of config file (actually has its own language), and then their system assigns however many nodes you need to create your network. The nodes are actual PCs running somewhere. You can SSH into them and set them up, in our case with a few networking things like software routers and switches (Click, Quagga) to learn about things like ARP and OSPF. Reminded me a little of my work at Careerbuilder.com and remoting into so many servers.

I'd rather not have spent time on things like the physical layer and encodings, modulation, etc. I like to have those EE details abstracted away as a CS major =D. In my opinion that part should be dropped in favor of some programming assignments. We talked about bittorrent and content overlay networks in general towards the end, so a programming assignment in that area would be nice.

Course: CS4400 Intro to Database Systems

Professor: Edward R. Omiecinski

I've already got significant experience here from my previous job, but with something so critical to so much software development I wanted to be even more solid in this area. This course definitely helped me out, from getting better at making entity relationship diagrams, to relational schema diagrams, to understanding how different kinds of indexes work, functional depencies and eliminating redundancy, and a lot of other goodness.

Omiecinski mostly follows slides from the book and every now and then works out an example on paper. He really should've been more solid on things like working out the algorithms to find a minimal cover of dependencies, determining if a relation is in certain normal forms, reducing it to multiple relations to get there, stuff in that area. There weren't any practice problems here, so looking at the practice test I wasn't sure how to work some of them.

So in this class there's a big project that spans three phases. This time it was, funny enough since I worked with this at a huge enterprise level, a job board. At first you just make an ER diagram from the project description and UI mockups, then you make a relational schema, then SQL to create the tables and constraints/triggers/indexes/etc, then sample data. Finally, for the last phase you can either do a lightweight which isn't much additional work but you have to take the final, or do heavyweight which is to make an application that uses your tables. It can be an ASP.NET app, php/mysql, Java JDBC, etc... they give you a choice. With the heavyweight option you don't have to take the final. I was thinking of just taking the final since my group had two non-CS people and one who sort-of but didn't really know PHP (I don't, I'd go with ASP.NET). But I wasn't sure how I did on the last test with material Omiecinski didn't cover too well (turned out to not be so bad) and my group all wanted to do Heavy, so I did that. And ended up doing 90% of it myself. Ah well, they did at least show up to try to help. Try being the important part. So I spent a bunch of time on it over a weekend and banged it out, worked nicely and some of the requiremrents (such as reports) were definitely non-trivial.

This course is interesting in that it has various majors in it besides CS people. They can do the lightweight option or get lucky and have a CS major do the heavyweight =). They'll get a very thourough look at databases, including some things I thought only DBAs would usually know/care about. I suppose SQL is their most career-useful takeaway, but that's only maybe 25% of the course. There's more theory.

Course: HTS3061 Modern China

Professor: Hanchao Lu

An interesting and not very difficult course. I did send an email asking about something once, which was never replied to.

I think spreading the papers around a bit more rather than two together at the end might be preferable.

Professor was very open to questions in lectures and always answered them.

Course: PHYS2212 Intro Physics II Electricity and Magnetism

Professor: James Gole

This material isn't particularly crazy hard, but Gold is definitely effective in teaching it. He has a no-nonsense, very clear lecture style if a bit old fashioned. He seems to struggle a bit with using the computer, and his old age may be getting to him a bit with the hearing problem and such, but overall he's a great prof in my mind.

I know he had to miss a lecture due to a heart problem, but I hope his health does not decline any time soon! I'm really not sure why people cry about the intro physics courses at Tech so much. Maybe the sting has been taken out, but either way they aren't hard nowadays.

Course: LCC3401 Technical Communication

Professor: Michael Fournier

In the past I've only had perhaps three professors I consider just plain bad, but now a fourth has joined the club. Michael Fournier. Avoid him if it all possible when you register for LCC3401!

I could go on and on about things that were just not right. The workload was pretty unreasonably huge for a two hour course. I have reason to believe he didn't give out any (or many) A's, even to people who busted their butt a lot more than I did for such a waste of time course. I don't feel like I came away from it with anything useful that will make me a better writer. Lectures were pretty bad, I recall one where he was showing pictures of confusing signs... one of those photo compilations that I'd already seen earlier when it turned up on Digg or somewhere. Others where he showed examples of bad websites, yes we all know what bad websites look like. Teach us something useful. He was often sloppy too, from grading (claiming we were missing things that were clearly in our submissions), to assignment descriptions so full of writing errors they were difficult to read.

A big part of the course revolved around reading, taking quizzes about, analyzing, and coming up with a big report and digital artifact about Madame Bovary. It may be a classic piece of literature, but I think this guy was stretching a bit to try to fit it into Technical Communication. I know you're an English professor and would rather be teaching about actual literature, but don't try to force this course into something it isn't.

Everyone in our group despised this guy. Again, it's extremely rare for me to have a flat out bad professor at Tech. Avoid Fournier.

So I made it, I've got my chance in the game industry now! I recently accepted a position at EA Mythic for an internship this summer. This means I will basically be getting paid to be doing my thing as the huge coding/gaming geek I already am. Sure, my interests expand quite a bit beyond that... but games have been my main hobby since being a kid and are a big part of why I pursued a CS/software technological education: so that I could make my own games and perhaps one day help create games for millions to enjoy. That day has come!

That's not to say software development on its own doesn't interest me unless it's game development, that's far from true. I've very much enjoyed all sorts of other projects I've worked on over the years. But games are still the most interesting, most challenging, most fun projects. It's great to get something cool working, but it's even better when just using what you've created is a lot of fun... for you and others. Other software people or companies use out of necessity, but millions of people spend their time and money on their own just to be entertained with games. There are many difficult problems to solve to create modern commercial games, especially with Mythic's market... Massively Multiplayer Online Games. These involve particularly challenging networking, database, and distributed architecture problems for instance.

When people talk about dream jobs, game developer is often mentioned. Perhaps game designer to be more specific since the whole programming/math bit scares many, but the engineers have some role in design of course. Even with separate designers, everything has to go through the engineers or tools they've provided. I should be happy working with the technical problems and software design, but I do have my opinions on MMOs. Being in the studio there's the opportunity to directly voice ideas to the people making design decisions and it would be an incredible experience even just to listen in on design discussions. Some EA developers that were speaking to students in classes last semester had an interesting tale. These guys were engineers, and they weren't happy with a direction the designers were going in. They had a great idea they thought would be much more fun, so they went ahead and implemented it to let everyone try it out. Their choices stuck! It sounded like there's sometimes a bit of conflict between designers and engineers, I'm sure that really varies by studio though and it will be interesting to see how it is at Mythic.

Of course, with a job so many want comes huge competition. EA gets thousands of applicants for these jobs, but only a tiny few get offers. Only top CS students from top CS schools really have a shot at the software engineer spots most likely. That means I wasn't just competing with the great students at Gatech for a spot, but with students from schools like Carnegie Mellon too. I should probably stop with the annoying bragging, but among the things I have to be proud of in my life this has to be near the top. People who are really into games are pretty stoked just to have a chance to talk to game developers or to see a studio, much less work there.

Mythic is currrently developing a next generation MMORPG slated to come out later this year, Warhammer Online. This game is pretty highly anticipated, and from what I've seen the developers have some great ideas. Pulling it all off is another matter, but I've got my shot to help make sure that happens. The game is in beta now so it is mostly finished, but it sounds like there's still quite a few things to be done. So far there are waaaay more people who want to play the game (probably less interested in actual testing) in the beta, but I think I can get in now that I work for them =). Some of my friends want beta keys so hopefully I can help them out. Maybe I can name an item or NPC!

That game is based on the Warhammer universe, which has been around for a quarter century now and was created by UK based Games Workshop. It's a tabletop strategy game, part of it involves buying and painting miniature figures to customize and expand your armies that you can use whenever you play against others. There's a Games Workshop at Mall of Georgia which is having a special event pretty soon to try to get people interested in Warhammer Online to try out the original strategy game, I may go check it out. Also, of course Blizzard's WarCraft universe was pretty heavily influenced by the much older Warhammer franchise.

A big change that comes with this is moving to Washington DC. For now this is just for the summer, but if I decide Mythic is the place for me and they decide I'm right for them it would be a more permanent move once I graduate in December. Having to move further away from friends and family is the one not so great part about this. Hopefully I'll stay in touch with old friends, and as far as new friends there probably isn't a group of people I'd get along with more than game developers. And there will be a few other interns too. Maybe one who knows the area if I'm lucky. EA finds places for interns to live and helps pay for it, but you can always find your own place too if you want. I've heard good things about Fairfax, but the one big negative is that it's VERY expensive to live there.

Hopefully I will impress this summer. There will be a lot of proprietery, unfamiliar technology... but it's not like I haven't faced that before (at my last company) and overcome it quickly. CareerBuilder has a very large infrastructure and code base that I worked in and learned a lot from. Besides the people on my team I'll also have a mentor on another team to help me out too. What could be more interesting code to study than the code behing an MMORPG anyhow?

There's so much more I want to write, but one last note for now. I am aware of EA's reputation and the whole EA spouse lawsuit about overtime. However, Mythic is a fairly recent acquisition by EA and remains fairly autonomous from what I know. My last company was also owned by a parent company (or rather three), and since it always did so well on its own the parent companies mostly didn't mess with it too much. Also, I have reason to believe that the company has made changes to better working conditions for developers. I know a couple other people that have done internships and they loved it. So I think I'll take their word over random people on the internet ragging on EA. It was also made pretty clear that overtime pay is in fact there for interns. And if there's one thing I'd be motivated and excited about enough to not mind putting in overtime it's games. I'm there to learn as much as I can this summer and to contribute as much as I can, so that may mean working more than 40 hours.

And yes I know about business decisions that don't seem so great like this one. Somehow I doubt one of the engineers came up with that one. Maybe execs will later decide that while getting a bit more money with that idea might be nice it'll ultimately hurt the game and hurt sales. Then again, the hardcore gamer people who post about stuff like that online are a pretty small fraction of EA's customers. I'm sure some will just bring up stuff like that when I mention EA, but hopefully most realize that it's a huge company and likely most in it are just doing what they can to make great games despite sometimes not so great decisions made by execs.