I still have to come up with a good title..

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Have you ever experienced physical fear to move away from the corner you’re crouching into?

I just did. For the longest 7 minutes of ..ehm.. my life.

A carnage. A disaster. Totally in the hands of the adversary team, whose players were at least so decent not to teabag their waiting-to-respawn prey.

Well, this post marks my first week of playing Halo Reach.

Great single player campaign, lovely moments (often related to a great soundtrack!), and really powerful storytelling to keep all the action tied up.

There were a bit of wtf moments, some unclear passages, and I totally did not get what happened to one of the spartans of the Noble team, at the end of the game.. Reason more to replay it, increasing the difficulty level.

Well, this actually brings up some interesting things. In this game, increasing the difficulty level does not mean more adversaries less vulnerable to bullets. The harder the level, the more aggressive the AI gets. Flanking maneuvers, grenade trajectories that know where you will go even before you decide to do so and much much more.

As I read in an other article, I totally agree with the statement that playing this Halo at higher difficulties will make a better player out of you.

And then the multiplayer experience. How the fuck didn’t I discover it before?

It’s a whole game by itself. It adds an enormous value to the package.

I was initially very skeptical.. I thought I would have been the classic noob, getting shot by everybody at any moment, constantly respawning and making my team loose. But no, the interesting thing is that the story went much differently.

The system has a really good way to organize balanced matches between players of similar skill.

Even if in the beginning I often ended up just trying to survive more than an average 14 seconds, with time and practice the game got much more interesting, and balanced. If you have Halo, or any other game offering the multiplayer experience, I really suggest you to give it a shot!

Here the link to my service record! http://www.bungie.net/Stats/Reach/Default.aspx?player=baroquenroll

And so.. was it worthy the money and the anticipation? Hell yea, without a doubt!

Quoting a guy from Bungie: “Two men enter. The better man leaves. The lesser man is respawning. And that’s Halo.”

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The other day we were eating pistachios in the kitchen. Eating made us talk, Talking made us talk about religion.

Long story short, there was a quick exchange of lines and an idea sparkling to life..
“How about a virtual confessional, where to confess your sins and mechanically unburden your conscience after being forgiven by God?!”

That happened yesterday night. Tonight instead I’m ready to roll, with a nice jQuery based ad-hoc microsite.

And yea, after all the effort of building the system, and the even bigger effort to come up with realistic “priest-talk”, why not to use this for any purpose more remunerative than just a good laugh..? (the good laugh was the only reason thus then.)

Exactly, right what you are thinking! Selling a television.

So yea, let’s see how it goes. Tomorrow I’ll be putting fliers in both entrances, with those funky vintage pieces of papers linking to the application..

..and now GO, and rinse your soul!

http://www.lucsali.com/wtf/confessional/

See also: Trying it the Guerrilla Way

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“The more I hear about this.. It just gets crazier and crazier..”  - Jesus Camp

The first article I read today in the news, as expected, was one about the 9/11 anniversary.

I’m sure that this “event” has different significances for every different person: In my case, it always makes me think about the part played by religion in this global situation.

Now that BBC’s top new story is about the controversy of that guy planning an international “Burn a Koran Day“, I really feel like posting a documentary from 2006, called Jesus Camp.

I’ll leave it up to you to connect the dots and see the reasoning behind this post.

Keywords? Indoctrination, brainwash, abuse and the dangerous consequences of an irrational belief, be it from any church, or any religion.

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..and now I can get back to my half eaten breakfast..

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..experimenting new ways of passing the message through to the new fellows of the Kitchen of Wonders..

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Spring 2007, the young codewarrior Lucas gets ready to face his Electronics and Telecommunications highschool exam..

Well, good memories about that project! Practically we had this robotic arm (ARMDROID) in the laboratory, and as it often happens with laboratory goodies, nobody was using it. Few people knew of its existence, even less knew how to make it work. Great occasion to dive into that and make it work by brute force

Using Visual Basic I developed a graphic user interface which consisted in a buttons board, each one controlling a separate motor on the machine. Visual Basic was actually not taking care of the automation: When the logic of the program required a movement of the robot (or better said, a stepper motor to activate), VB would output a package of information via the RS232 data interface using a custom communication protocol. On the other side of the cable a microprocessor would be waiting to be fed info..! After having translated the information received according to the communication protocol, an Assembly program running on the micro would manage all the logic needed to set the state of the pins of a parallel socket, only way to connect to the robot (yeps, it was THAT vintage!).

Long story short, Visual Basic -> serial -> Assembly -> parallel -> something unknown going on in the robot itself.
And that’s how the magic happens.

With time the project began to grow in scope, including a virtual representation of the robot itself (always in VB).
This was actually the power horse of the whole thing: Having been too lazy to study the maths required to do matrix calculation (i wanted to drive a robot, not study maths.), I ended up having to do all the calculations required to show a pseudo-3D object in an orthogonal view using basic trigonometry.
Pretty funny stuff, here how the calculation of one coordinate of one extreme of one line would look like:

Line15.X1 = Line3.X2 + (Cos(mano * Kmano * pgreco / 360) * Cos(polsoA * KpolsoA * pgreco / 720) -- Sin(mano * Kmano * pgreco / 360) * Sin(polsoA * KpolsoA * pgreco / 720)) * (Cos(mano * Kmano * pgreco / 360) * Cos(base * Kbase * pgreco / 360) -- Sin(mano * Kmano * pgreco / 360) * Sin(base * Kbase * pgreco / 360)) * LungDito

But hey, it got the job done!

So, having had this virtual representation of the robot running, I implemented a new control mode: It was now possible to pilot ArmDroid using a multifunction joystick.
Last goodie? How about having a “Learn mode” that would allow an operator to record “waypoints”, and having the robot automatically follow them? Yes we can!

When time for the exam came, ArmDroid was capable of executing a prerecorded program, while also granting manual control via a buttons board or using a joystick.

Now I’m awaiting for Skynet to become self aware, to crosscode it with ArmDroid and finally have a cute little robotic arm pet.
Like a handicapped puppy, with only one arm. A big orange metallic one.

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