Pretty, isn't it?

A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for.

Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You’re stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing else left to eat.

Sure, once in a while, there’s a peanut butter cup or an English toffee. But they’re gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you’re desperate enough to eat those, all you’ve got left is…is an empty box, filled with useless, brown paper wrappers.

I am a bit too jaded at times, aren’t I?

But now I’m back in the UK and, as usual, I’m in that mushy feeling state of mind. My whole view of living in the UK for the better part of the year tended to oscillate between “I’m not really living anything behind so let’s go go go!” to “Is it really worth leaving?” over the years, mostly being in tight connection to whether I had a special someone and if she was coming with me or not.

As you can guess, now I’m in the latter of the two mind sets, which makes this post have some sort of context that was missing before.

Love is that pair of sneakers you just can’t part with; you’ve been through everything in them, shared the ground beneath your world at every step and even though they may now look old and battered and broken they’re an part of who you are. They represent you, they’ve “grown” with you and every dent, tear and spot represents a shared memory, a shared act.

Yes, I can also see that Romanian saying “a fi calcat in picioare” (“to be stepped on”) forming in your head after the whole shoe analogy and you know what, it’s a valid thought! Love always represents a gamble, you’re always taking a risk when you allow yourself to say those three words that can make or break a moment or more, but in the end it’s a risk that’s worth taking; sure, you can end up being used and abused and stepped on, but hey, it’s a learning experience, right? It’s a risk that needs taking towards being happy. Sure, there are people who are happy and content without love, but I’m not one of them.

Cory Doctorow asks an interesting question in Eastern Standard Tribe: “Would you rather be smart, or happy?” this being closely tied to one of the themes of the book which is betrayal: the main character, Art, is used and manipulated by his girlfriend for her own gain. Art is generally a smart person, but he lets his guard down when love gets in the way which ends with him locked up in an insane asylum (no, that’s not the end of the book, I won’t spoil it for you) – happiness, even though fleeting and maybe fake, leads to his almost destruction.

I think that this, smart versus happy, like almost everything in life is a balancing act; you’re high on your wire, the lights on you and the crowd holding their breath while you make your way across, well, life, trying not to fall – keep everything in balance and you’re good, healthy and possibly more successful, don’t and you fall to your doom (sorry, life rarely has safety nets).

You might think that everything I’ve written so far is a cliché, but you know what?

The biggest truths aren’t original. The truth is ketchup. It’s Jim Belushi. Its job isn’t to blow our minds. It’s to be within reach.                                                                                       - Jeff Winger

In the end though, every time I think about love I fall back to a thing I once read (and for the life and deep regret of me I can’t remember where):

Being in love, truly in love, means renouncing all possible lives except the one shared with the person you love.

In fact, their motto is ONE event. One beat. ONE audience… ONE worldwide. which nicely fits the concept on which the event is built on.

Going back to the event at hand, this was the second global edition for 2011 but the first one here in Romania (as far as I know), and took place in the Artexpo hall in the Bucharest National Theater. The place was a nice choice as it provided enough space for the audience, even though the main room was split in two smaller ones, each with its own screen for better viewing and distribution of seats; the downside though was that the room was somewhat chilly, especially if you came unprepared and hoping for a cozy atmosphere. The audio and video quality were good overall, even though at times (especially during the last film, Goodbye Mr Chu) it was a bit too loud and thus noisy for my taste.

Another plus is the fact that drinks – both nonalcoholic and alcoholic – could be had and that the main viewing room was a non-smoking area. This is worth mentioning on its own because at many of the “alternative” cultural events of this kind smoking is permitted in the main room which leads to both viewing and seeing problems depending on the venue, the number of people and the ventilation system.

But what’s a film screening without movies? This edition was built around 6 short films and one music video; in order of appearance, they were:

1. Lars And Peter
2. Klaxons – Twin Flames (the music video) – Dir: Saam Farahmand
3. The Mystery of The Flying Kicks – Dir: Matthew Bate
4. Flying Lotus – Kill Your Co-workers – Dir: Beeple
5. The Drift – Dir: Kelly Sears
6. Mary Last Seen – Dir: Sean Durkin
7. Goodbye Mr Chu – Dir: Stephanie Lansaque & Francois Leroy

The most interesting films in my opinion were The Mystery of The Flying Kicks (you can see part of it embedded at the end of this post), a “documentary” about the random shoes you see hanging from utility wires built on a call and tell your story concept and Mary Last Seen, a strange film a bit open to interpretation, but in my opinion revolves around the stages a (failed) relationship passes through, from the beginning of the journey to the abandonment at the end.

Flying Lotus and Goodbye Mr Chu had the most interesting visual style of the lot, but story wise just seemed bland, a trait which Lars And Peter also shared.

One problem I saw was the lack of small breaks between films, which would make discussing the material just viewed a lot easier as it is fresh in your mind, as well as going and getting something to drink much easier; this would also allow the movies to settle in and make the even seem a bit longer, as the one hour head to head screening can seem a bit short and underwhelming otherwise.

This edition finished with a live performance by Hijack & Giuser, which unfortunately weren’t my cup of tea so I passed on the opportunity to see them play and instead opted for a bite to eat and a small chat.

Overall the event was nice and worth the price of admission (15 RON, or around $5 US), but could be even better with some small breaks between films and some more promotion done ahead of time.

And as promised, here’s a small part of The Mystery of Flying Kicks.

Heck, even the common Hello World! has issues. Let’s take for example:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

void main(int argc, char **argv) {
  printf("Hello World!\n");
}

Someone forgot to check their return values (the standard is int main and not void main), things aren’t localized, and it will randomly trap on exit on some platforms. And, it is as published 20 years ago in a typical C textbook.

And this is just a small sample, imagine a codebase of million lines of code.

A good read about secure coding practices is the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle; it’s entire purpose it to make code as secure as engineering practices know how to accomplish. You can download it from here.

Over time, people have figured out which axioms are convenient for solving large classes of problems. This leads some to prove more & more corollaries under that system. Others work to unify existing branches of math — no doubt appealing to an internal sense of elegance, but just as importantly, allowing the techniques developed for certain problems to be brought to bear against a host of other problems that had previously been modeled in the other language, but never solved. Eventually, algorithmic tricks are honed for the most common operations; the trickier assumptions are formally derived; and several centuries later, a whitewashed summary of these concepts gets distilled into textbooks as The One True Math.

That strategy is great for establishing basic numeric literacy in a large population. But it doesn’t stand up to critical scrutiny. If you want to answer questions like “what is infinity?”, be prepared to accept that some things you’ve learned aren’t true…and more importantly, none of them is True (capital T). Ultimately math always boils down to “because I said so” — just like it does when you’re answering that kid who keeps repeating “why? why? why?” He might be the world’s greatest philosopher, if you think about it…but he’s also really annoying. So it is with math. Brush away your preconceptions about what numbers “must” mean (because that’s what I was always taught, dammit!) and suddenly your brain will hurt a lot less.

For starters:

• There is no such thing as a “point.” It’s a silly concept some Greek guy made up because it helped him solve a few problems. If points don’t help you solve the problem at hand, you can safely ignore them, because they literally don’t exist.
• Same goes for “lines”, “triangles”, and so on.
• Even “numbers” are completely, 100% abstract. Really. Some numeric concepts (eg positive integers) happen to be easy to map to real world objects. Some are harder (irrationals). Some are just damn confusing (semi-lattices). Everyone thinks of integers as the One True Number System…but they’re all equally fake.
• The relationship known as “equals” is also 100% made-up. To a mathematician, there is actually tons of variety in the world of so-called “equivalence relations.”
• The concept “number of points on a continuous line” is particularly fuzzy. It wasn’t fully developed until the early 19th century, which in math terms might as well be yesterday. Although “number” and “line” have widely accepted definitions by now, “points on a line” remains sufficiently vague — and the ways said quantity might or might not be useful in various situations are sufficiently diverse — that real mathematicians would surely stick to more precise terminology.

Length

For most real world situations, length is the more interesting property by far. All you care about is whether your new apartment has 9′ ceilings, not how many atoms high the drywall is stacked. When you glance at the cashier, you instantly perceive that (physically) longer lines will probably take “longer” — see, the concept has even invaded our language!

By comparison, saying that all lines are “equal” sounds silly. It’s true that mathematicians use cardinality to establish equivalence relations between otherwise incomparable sets, but cashiers don’t give a shit about bijections! 99% of the time, the kind of logic that leads people to conclude your lines are “the same” in some sense is pure mental masturbation.

Nevertheless, since our world is composed of discrete objects, length and cardinality occasionally feel intertwined, if not identical. After all, you could measure the # of atoms from floor to ceiling, or the # of items in each shopper’s cart. If anything you’d expect your counting to make your length estimates more accurate. Maybe you’d be right.

The world of mathematics is blissfully unaware of all this, however. Until you prove a connection between cardinality and arc length, or introduce another axiom that explicitly links them, they remain completely independent concepts, floating in their own theoretical bubbles. The relationship you & I perceive between counting and geometry is a coincidence brought about by the physical universe + sloppy teaching.

Is “converge” the same as “equals” when it comes to infinite series?

First things first: “equals” is a loaded term, especially with a subject like infinite series. As we saw earlier, there are many ways one might define equivalence between mathematical objects. Of course, we’d never get anywhere if we let the multitude of competing theories impede communication. Which is why mathematicians have lots of precisely-defined jargon in this area: identical, congruent, reflexive, isomorphic, isometric, homeomorphic, etc. are terms you might (should) encounter. When you confine the discussion to integer arithmetic and similar stuff seen in schools, the differences are subtle at best. Suffice to say they widen when you introduce more interesting mathematical concepts — such as infinity — to the point that exploring those differences has become an important branch of mathematics in itself.

So anyway, your question here is totally fair. It shows you have good instincts.

On to infinite convergence. Before we can talk intelligently about assigning a value to such entities, we have to ask, why bother? There’s no such thing as an infinite sum. There’s no such thing as “1+1″, either, but at least we can all intuit why it’s useful to adopt the common definition when it’s time to buy two apples at the grocery. What does an infinite sum buy us? Even if we walked up to the cashier carrying every last atom in the universe, it wouldn’t require us to add infinitely many times, right?

The answer is: unless you solve Zeno’s paradox, you can’t do calculus. After all, Newton’s original book was called The Calculus of Infinitesimals. (among other things, the title should serve as a big reminder that there are many kinds of calculus, not just the one stuffed into AP tests!) So the real question becomes: do you know calc? Do you want to?

Once you can divide a curve into infinitely small segments (differentiate) and total up the area of infinitely small shapes underneath it (integrate), huge swaths of real world calculations get much easier. The benefit to physics is direct & obvious. (Newton was a physicist.) Engineering, finance, probability, and pretty much every social science that needs to solve constrained-optimization problems are equally indebted to infinitesimals. Clearly, these techniques have enormously widespread appeal.

And that, children, is why some folks casually say that 2 + 1 + 1/2 + 1/4… “equals” 4. Because Calc 101 says so, and calc is really useful stuff, so lots of people learn it nowadays.

But remember, calculus is just something we made up. In fact, it wasn’t rigorously defined until the 19th century, hundreds of years *after* Newton and Leibnitz. Even today, there is no law of the universe stating Thou Shalt Believe In The Cauchy-Weierstrass Formulation.

So yeah, this post was brought to you by a total lack of sleep and a small fever. Lucky me and lucky you.

BetterExplained also has some good re-explanations of math-ey concepts should you be interested in learning more.

First of all I want to make a distinction between “computer programming” and “software engineering”: the former can write code while the latter can engineer it. The analogy I’d use to describe the scope is “construction worker vs. architect,” except in this case the construction worker is also white collar.

While a computer programmer can churn out lines of code one after another he doesn’t know concepts such as analysis of algorithms, Big O notation or even software profiling. You can at an extreme think of this guy as a code monkey.

There’s a priceless look some give when other start talking about the various frameworks and concepts they’re working with. (SOA? Web services? SOAP?)

I guess what I’m saying is that there are various levels of “programmer”, and you might want to consider what kind of programmer you’re interested in becoming. It’s a pretty broad category.There are several major categories that every programmer has to deal with, and it helps to know the categories and even that there are categories:

Technologies

Elements of programming like SOAP, J2EE, and even (to a large extent) typical programming languages like C++, Java, C#, and SQL are “mere” technologies. Programming languages often have important ideas embedded in them (see below), but for the most part are particular frameworks for getting work done. HR departments set great store by these, because they are easy to turn into checklists.

They are important today (because companies really don’t want to pay for your training), but in terms of being a really competent programmer, these for the most part, are not a barrier to becoming one. It’s just that there are so many, few of us have time to become proficient in a tithe of them. These, then, represent a combination of choice (“I want to be a SOAP guy”) and happenstance (“my job gave me a chance to learn TCP/IP networking and I seized it”). They tend to dominate your daily life in practice, so even though happenstance matters, try to exercise choice, here.

These are also the easiest things for the self-taught programmer to learn.

Theory

This is the real thing that “members of the guild” have that self-taught programmers have difficulty getting on their own.

It’s a huge world of what can be called “applied logic” and if your degree program doesn’t feature a lot of it, then your degree program is basically geared to turning out mere technologists instead of programmers. Look for topics like computation theory, algorithms, compiler theory, artificial intelligence, and like things. You can, without a degree, get jobs without knowing this stuff, but your competitiveness will always suffer if you do not learn this stuff.

If you get a job without a degree, promise yourself to find the time to get this background. You’ll earn more and be happier and more productive when you do.

Technique

These are specific sub-disciplines of programming that have been adopted over the years. Most bubbled up out of real practice, but were adopted in curricula.

They are either taught on the job or in school, but which are practiced tell you a lot about the kind of company you are working for. This is the world of software engineering and includes topics like structured programming (old hat, but still relevant), encapsulation, object-oriented programming (getting to be old hat), agile programming, the software life cycle, and like topics. Learn these not just to generate useful code, but to generate code that can be delivered and maintained in the context of an organization that hires dozens to hundreds of programmers.

This is something that can be learned on the job, but can be at least “book learned” in a degree program. It is difficult to self-teach, because it is all about “programming in the large” in the context of actual teams delivering projects. Some of the topics here are embedded in programming languages (e.g. object-oriented programming has distinct flavors based on whether it is C++ or Java, say), and that’s important to know, too, as you learn particular languages — they embed biases in how you think about important topics. Be sure, therefore, to learn more than one computer language over time (far too many people learn or are proficient in only one — these people, in my experience, are always the most limited because they don’t know that some of what they cherish are artifacts of their favorite language — learn even two and this becomes clear).

Other stuff

Because programming is now getting to be an older discipline, there’s a surprising degree of choice about “what kind do I become.” Remain curious, then, because there may be a technology (and, therefore, a series of jobs) in any of the categories above that you will find to be much more enjoyable than others. And, this is a tough enough job that you will definitely want to enjoy what you are working with. Indeed, if you don’t do this, then no matter how much it pays, you may find yourself wanting to do something else if you evolve into some purgatory of a decent paying job, but in a technology that really doesn’t make you want to get up in the morning.

Curiosity will also keep you from becoming the 55 year old COBOL programmer who is basically paid to support 30 year old code and nothing else. Some of these guys can be well paid, but the trick is, if you don’t keep learning new things, you can go from well paid to unemployed all too easily and not enjoy the work, when you get it, in the bargain.

Curious people also take small risks (transitioning from one technology to another, one language to another) and so in years like 2009, they have enough variety on their résumé to be in real demand.

And remember, if someone tells you that you can’t even code your way out of a paper bag and you don’t instantly write the following code on whatever you can then you don’t belong in the world of code.

class PaperBag {
public:
     PaperBag() { }
     void getOut() { }

};

int main() {
     PaperBag myBag;
     myBag.getOut();

     return 0;

}

When I was faced with choosing a language on which to concentrate I was in the exact situation as the people mentioned above. I made the decision to go with Microsoft/.NET and I think this has been one of the best moves I ever made.

In my experience Microsoft/.NET leads the others by huge margins in consistently providing lots of free developer content at user groups, code camps, MSDN events, etc. This means that one can milk the many developer events for all they were worth, and be able to quickly grow the skill set to get good at .NET rapidly.

With With Java and PHP, there is rarely much available other than on-line forums and mailing lists. You don’t get the same level of local community, and you don’t have real faces that you can meet and ask questions to; this can be invaluable when you are networking to find job opportunities, etc.

This is not to say that with .NET you don’t have online resources; you still have volumes of on-line content, possibly even more and better than what is available for Java and/or PHP. The in-person events are in addition, not instead of learning resources, and it makes a big difference when learning and when networking.

Another big advantage of MS as a career choice, is that you can stair-step into a RAD drag-drop Jr. programmer role to get your feet wet. From what I saw and if I understand correctly the answers to many a threads online, Java and PHP don’t have similar Jr. programmer capabilities where a newer developer can crank out minor applications with lots of the innards automatically code-generated for you. This can be a valuable career step if you need to build your skill-set before tackling industrial sized development projects.

So in the end, take the ecosystem and the community into account when starting a new language or deciding to pursue a career in a specific direction – it can save you a lot of headache and pain down the road.

This may seem like a dumb move at first: why in hell give up a cozy office, proper tea and the English lifestyle in favor of noisy, somewhat dirty and weird Romania?

The first thing that came to mind was the money I would save by working from home: cut out paying rent, transport, utilities and a major part of food and I look up at saving around £300 a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. This alone is an important enough reason in itself, but coupled with the rest that will follow will make the decision sound more rational.

Regarding my work, all of it is tied to a computer, so it doesn’t matter that it’s the PC from the office or my laptop; the truth is that most of the time I already code on my laptop even while at work because I want to have my environment just so and my tools already there and set up to my exact desires without having to go & get approval before installing a specific utility I’ll end up using only once. As for my coworkers, we already do 99% of our communication via internet (email, IM, VoIP) because we want and are required to have a paper trail, so that won’t change much in our interactions. I also work better when I’m alone as I’m able to focus better at the task at hand.

Being back home also means that I have those meat-friends so much closer which makes everything so much better; add in the parks, cafe’s, pubs and clubs I love, combine them with those people and you end up being much more happy. Don’t get me wrong, I like the acquaintances I have here and some places, but I miss the mood from back home.

As for the city itself, I love it so much more than the little town I’m spending my days now; I’ll have shops open in the middle of the night, places to roam and new things to discover.

Also, this isn’t a definitive move – I’ll be back in the UK next October as Uni starts again – but it does give me a small hint about the future paths I may take. I guess that as long as I’ll be able to work remotely and get a nice and stable income this will allow me to either stay in a place or roam as I like for as long as I have an internet connection and a plug to charge my laptop.

I know that this may not be seen as a “career”, but as long as I’m happy and can support myself and meet my goals it’s great. What more could I want?

Many thanks as well to the lovely people I’ve talked with about this before deciding and their arguments for and against the move!

To enable it -devmode needs to be added the the launch options of the game which then allows the user to use the editor by pressing F1; pressing F1 again exits the editor and places the player in the level level.

Contents

The Editor
Editor Binds
Setting the Character in Dev mode
Disclaimer

The Editor

The editor is accessed by pressing F1 in developer mode and allows the creation and editing of new or existing levels in the game. In case there are black bars in the user interface, the mouse pointer needs to be moved further down to be able to click on the NEW/LOAD/SAVE buttons and other UI elements while in the editor.

To save new levels, a folder called Levels needs to be created in the Super Meat Boy directory. Please note not to start the new level immediately; instead, when starting the game, add the command-line: -palette palettefile.lp

palettefile.lp can be one of the following:

• 4bit1.lp
• end.lp
• factory.lp
• forest.lp
• gb.lp
• glitch.lp
• hell.lp
• hospital.lp
• rapture.lp
• retro1.lp

Editor binds

The keys used in the editor are as follow:

Setting the character in dev mode

To set the character you play as in dev mode you can use -devmode -char # as a launch option, replacing the # with the number of the character you wish to play as.

Disclaimer

The content of this article was originally written for the Wikipedia page of the game and was published as such there. Unfortunately it was considered to be too in depth and was later removed. That old version can be still read via this link.

I hope that centralizing all this information spread across multiple forums and multiple days will be of some use to people interested in creating levels and modding the game.

Some say we never learn, or that we’re stubborn and stupid for making the seemingly same mistakes over and over, not seeing the small changes made in hope of a different result. They expect us to take new paths without realizing that a new path can be almost identical to the old one. But we do get better, we learn from our mistakes and each new step is an iteration, not a leap; despite everything we play it safe even though the appearances may defy that. And when we jump we’re miles away from where we’re expected to be, as it would matter to us what is expected by others.

Practice makes perfect and this can’t be more true! We do the seemingly same mind numbing math problems over and over and over until they become part of us, until we reach the point that the logic behind the method is so ingrained in ourselves that we can do them without thinking. We write code the same way, line after line after line after leap. We drink our coffee and gin in the same way, meet new people through steps and jumps and conquer ourselves in the process.

We fail relationships, start new ones and fail again, we tweak and try again in the hope that we’ll succeed. We’re tweakers, looking at the big picture and see the hurricane we unleash with the flap of the wing. We’re also not afraid of tired cliché’s and speaking in plural because we honestly don’t really care that much.

And from time to time something comes along and reminds us of our nature. Something that would seem irrelevant and childish to others opens whole new worlds and paths for us.

And we might fail again on those new paths, just as well as we might succeed. We’re a bit masochistic with ourselves, taking higher risks and blind leaps, hoping that we’ll win the game; if not, we’ll just start over and tweak what needs to be tweaked.

But back to the small things! Super Meat Boy is one of those small things, both in his world and in ours. He sprints into pits and spikes and saws in the desperate struggle to meet his goal, and just as we do, when he fails he tweaks; change the timing at this jump and the height at the next and voilà, we’re right next to the love of our life. But, as in life, nothing is that easy, as she is stolen away and we find ourselves in the mud yet again, catching a glimpse of our goal… and we do it again and again, until we win. Until we’ve proven to the world and ourselves that we’re the best, that there’s nothing more. And just when you reach that point you realize that you could have been a bit faster on Chapter 3, level 5, and you do it all again, for the thrill of pushing your limits.

You reach exhaustion but automatism already took place, muscle memory letting the brain rest. That’s why we do it again and again… because we can free our mind of menial tasks and dream of 8bit worlds through purple vortexes, worlds which grant us super powers such as sticking to walls or gliding. That or we find ourselves fat and slow and useless, but nobody wants to think about that, not even those tofu eating boys.

Yes, Super Meat Boy was my little thing that made me realize that it’s good to do it over and over and over again, conquering exhaustion and lack of inspiration, learning from mistakes and tweaking. It’s a nice metaphor for our daily lives, our goal always in sight but rarely in reach.

We put on bandages, take a deep breath and jump on!