Last Course

Its done. The semester is over. I did my graphics final project demo yesterday and handed it in last night. That was the last step. Now I'm through courses. All I have left is a year of thesis. I got to find a topic now and follow it through until I graduate InshAllah.

Now I can fully focus on work and manage my own time a little. I'm looking forward to my thesis year. Its back to the time in your life when your searching for that big wave to ride. I feel if I carry on looking for that big thing I'm not going to end up picking a topic. I'm going to try and discover what I love best. So far I'm thinking of combining AI and graphics, but I still need to take an in depth look at things. Its going to be a tough time ahead. Working and masters isn't the easiest thing in the world i must say.

We will see what happens and hope for the best...

Application of Mathematics

Its really awesome when you finally learn why you took all that mathematical crap quite some time ago! Calculus, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry.....you name it. We science and engineering students have all seen them! We have seen some applications of these cool equations but the majority of them we haven't or maybe I've just forgotten with the overload of this semester coming to a stressful end. :D

It's only through these two courses that I'm taking this semester that I realized the power of mathematics. Well obviously I knew all along the importance of math and that it is like a universal language but my thoughts have been lingering about this for sometime so guess what, I'm here writing up a post about it.

There are actual courses that we at my university haven't probably heard of. At MIT they have a course called "Applying Mathematics" or something like that. Its a whole freaking course. Luckily for me and the rest of the students, we have an agreement with MIT which gives us MIT OpenCourseware. It's really profound to get an insight into the stuff they take there.

Anywayz thought I'd share the pico-second of inspirational thought that went through my neural net of a brain. I need to get back to studying Backpropogation, Hopfield, Kohanan and bla bla bla. Need to comprehend all the work these great guys including mr. backpropagation (:p) brought to life and pay tribute to the research and dedication that they have given us. "Ay kalam tahn".

"Who among us shall change life, time shall tell" - Anonymous
"Where there is a will, there is a bill" - K. Sohano
"Where there is a will, there is a hill to match that will. Only those who challenge the hill shall see the greener grass on the other side" - from the book "Wind of Sway"

An Interesting and Inspirational Read

I came across this read as I was fiddling around on the Internet and dreaming of days to come instead of studying for my final exam tomorrow. Its called "Advise to A Beginning Graduate Student". Check it out HERE

ScribeFire

ScribeFire is an interesting extension for firefox that allows you to blog. This is the first post I'm writing using it. Im not sure yet if it makes a difference to the conventional way of opening up the blog via URL, logging in and then writing. Maybe it is a few clicks faster. Actually it must be. To start blogging with ScribeFire you use one click and then you may have to select the blog you want to publish to. In my case most of my blogging activity is on one blog so its one click. With the conventional method, it takes you about three. It actually depends greatly on how you have your browser configured. If you use automatic login using cookies in your browser then it saves you time of logging in. Anywayz, just thought I'd try out this new feature. I think I will use it in future.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Bifurcation

I'm being tormented by two paths in life. Its an awkward situation being stuck between two opportunities, each quite different from the other. They could collide in the end actually, which would make a very interesting combination. Now its just a matter of weighting the pros and cons of each and querying my heart for answers. A wise man once told me, "Do what you love, so that you love what you do". It turns out to be a quote from somewhere. It is very important to do what you love, and its no easy task finding what you love to do. You can read an interesting but hell of a long article here. I didn't read the whole thing, but skimmed through highlights. Seems interesting. Anywayz, I'm fed up of writing. Need to get home. I'm still at work and what seemed to be an ever simple task turned out to be a pain in the back but thank goodness I'm finished now.

I bet your thinking, "what kind of gibberish is this guy speaking?". Well the answer to what your thinking is that I'm speaking the normal gibberish that haunts peoples' minds as they approach huge decisions in life...

Its the end of the week and the weekend is just about to begin. I have a long one coming up. I have to finish my A-Life neural net by Sunday. Hope all goes well as the final two weeks of the semester are upon us. May God have mercy on all our souls...

Particle Systems

This graphics course has been one of the most enjoyable course I've ever taken. It is something else when you can see what your creating and fiddling around with.

My final project is going to deal with particle systems. Particle systems are what are used to render what are called "fuzzy phenomena". Examples of fuzzy phenomena are: fire, smoke, liquid...etc. These are all quite difficult to render using the conventional rendering methods. The simplest and most basic particle systems is where you represent each particle by a pixel. More complex particle systems represent the particles by 3D meshes or metaballs.

Here are examples of particle systems:



I hope to create scenes like these...

Alife

A term referring to Artificial Life. I'm working on a project for my other course (Neural Nets course) which consists of a neural net that acts as the brain of a creature in an environment. The neural network controls the creature's actions through out its life. I've tried this before in an undergraduate course. I was so close to creating a neural net optimized to use PSO as the backpropagation algorithm. Unfortunately that project didn't quite work properly. I think I had a couple of days to do that project and I decided to be cool and do everything from scratch. It was a gallant attempt and I think I was a scratch away from making it work. Anywayz, with that behind me, I now have a week left to finish this neural net project.

I probably told you before that this is my last semester taking courses. The next and after next will be dedicated purely to research. I still haven't found a topic or field for that matter. I talked to my probably-to-be adviser and we brainstormed for ideas. I left the office with the intent to do more research and find a topic where I can combine graphics and AI. Of course as the semester is coming to an end, there isn't much time left and I'll be up to my neck in work. I'll even have my job to attend to.

This is an update of recent events. It's almost dawn here in Cairo. Its 5:47 am and pretty cold. I'm sure its nothing to what its like in Vancouver, where a friend of mine immigrated to. There right now, its highs of -6 and lows of -8. Shit! Thats cold. Anyway, I slept early and woke up at 4:00 am. I have work in a few hours but decided to use this time to work on the project. As usual I get carried away with searching for a thesis topic and haven't been focusing that much on the project.

Peer Classes

A friend of mine was asked recently in an interview, "What are peer classes?". I decided to find out what a peer class is.

For example if you desire to use a c++ class code in a java program, an approach of doing this is creating a java class which is equivalent to the c++ class. The java class is the peer class and tracks the state of the c++ object.

You can see this here

Tracy

Tonight I submitted Tracy (the final version). I'm satisfied with the outcome of this project. The images Tracy produces is far better than the OpenGL graphics.

In case your wondering, Tracy (Beta version) is my ray tracer. Here's a starter pic:



There she is rendering shading, illumination, reflections, shadows and the whole package. Beautiful isn't it? I hope you agree. Here's another image for those of you who are doubting Tracy.



Take that you paranoid readers out there. It took me quite some time to render these images. Of course I wasn't working full time on it, so maybe thats why.

Now I have my fingers crossed for a proper grade in this and the previous assignment. I still have a neural networks project to do for this coming Sunday (thats in 6 days). Since I'm taking tomorrow off as a rest between the hurricanes, that leaves me with five days. Lets hope for the best.

I'm going to create artificial life. I plan on developing a neural network that controls the actions of small creatures in an artificial environment. I've decided to call these tiny creatures ... I don't know what I'm gonna call them. Have to think of something. The C# neural network library I plan on using was created by a guy called Franck Fleurey and can be found at . I've just taken an initial look at it and downloaded the source code.

This is the time when the hurricanes collide. The time just before the end of the semester, when everything just starts to fall and fall and your left clambering behind. This semester is the last semester I will take courses in. The next semester and the one after will be left for my thesis. Im getting frantic about the thought of thesis. I still havent made up my mind on what field im gonna go for. The ones im surely interested in is AI, graphics and pervasive systems. I believe that anything I do, I will have to apply some AI to.

Lets leave this for further posts where I set out to discover which field to do my thesis in.

Quaking Quake

I just tried out Quake 4 and this is a game not to be taken lightly. I previously thought my laptop was a monster, with a ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 which has 512 MB of RAM. It also has 1.5 Gegs RAM. Unfortunately my thoughts were not matched when I put this game in. It would not run at the maximum video setting. Even in the minimum video mode, the graphics sometimes screwed up in the middle of gameplay. I thought I have a above average gaming system here. Maybe or maybe not...

Quake 4 is a very gruesome and bloody game. From the very beginning I felt its darkness and evil. The first scene shows soldiers floating in space with missing eyes and limbs and bloody faces and bodies. Ouch! Anywayz I started playing and I was chilled up the spine from step 1 as I faced the first Strogg. They produce a sickening growl before they attack and one of them has a sharp metal arm that he pokes you with and as you get poke you loose focus and the screen distorts as if the spike is actually hitting you. My heart was pounding all through the short time I played it and I jump up in my seat suddenly every time a monstrous Strogg came out of no where. And they don't die straight away, they take a beating to fall to the floor.



Respect to the graphics. I read about the real-time ray-tracing technique that Quake 4 utilizes for rendering and collision detection. The shadows too are done very well. The game is very dark. Pretty kool stuff, I must say. Quake 4 uses the same engine as its predecessor and Doom 3. The funny thing is I'm taking ray-tracing in the graphics course I'm taking. Only yesterday did we discuss the differences between ray-tracing, using z-buffer algorithm and BSP object rendering. Im new to all this, so its all very exciting!!! I cant wait to do my next project.

Im starting to dread the moment when I go back home tonight after work and after my masters class and play the evil Quake 4 in the darkness and solitude of my own room. "Its just a game" - they always used to say. We will see...

Graphics Premiere

I created my first openGL graphics composition. This was our first assignment in a graphics course Im taking. The whole idea of the project was to draw graphics on a buffer without using openGL functions. Once the buffer has been drawn on, we only use openGL to output the buffer to the screen.



Of course the composition you see above has animations, color changing, color filling and size changing. I tried to experiment with all the basic techniques in 2D.

I hope the grade I get for this lives up to the effort I put in. InshAllah.

My next challenge will be trying to create a 3D corridor with a box in the middle with fog, lighting effects and (something i'm dying to do) image wrapping. This will be my ultimate goal. After this I want to experiment with 3D modeling and importing real 3D model characters like Warcraft orcs or something and do some animations.

Until my next blog entry...

Which game console is the greenest of them all?

One guy was probably soooo bored that he decided to discover the "greenest" of the three major game consoles in the market.

He measured the power consumption of the Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. To no surprise the Xbox 360 proved to be a monstrous energy sucking creature taking in 194 watts. This was followed by the PS3 with a 171 watt energy footprint. The Wii sips in 17 watts and has been declared the greenest game console.



So the little Wii has beaten its bulky brethren at the "Greenest of them all" contest. If you want to help keep energy consumption down to a minimum, buy a Wii instead of the other two.

Copyleft

Copyleft is an interesting term i came across. It is kind of the opposite of copyright. It uses copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of some work and force any further modifications to also apply this.

Am I a geek? A nerd perhaps...?

According to a t-shirt I got from the Microsoft store @ Microsoft HQ in Redmond, a geek is a excessive computer user. With this, Im definitely a geek.

According to Wikipedia a geek is the following:
1: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken, bat or snake
2: a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked
3: an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity

Hmm. I dont qualify for 1 or 2. 3 sounds more like me. I am an enthusiast and a bit of an expers in some technological fields. I am after all a software engineer.

So I guess I do qualify as a geek. What about a nerd? I was once called "Closet Nerd". What this person meant was that I studied my ass off in secret and did not like to show I was studying. This was kind of true, but not for the fact that I wanted to hide it, but because I was unable at the time to study in groups. I found it very distracting and inefficient.

According to Wikipedia again (my favorite source of information) a nerd is:
A person who passionately pursues intellectual or esoteric knowledge or pastimes rather than engaging in social life.

Well right now I definitely classify as a nerd and a geek...hehe...

The Halo Effect

Im sure if your a gamer then you've heard of Halo 3 (the third part to the XBOX's killer app). Its believed to be the biggest entertainment release ever. In the first 24 hours it made 170 million dollars.

This of course smacked me right in the back, coz I was dying to be a part of the whole hype about the game and try out the revolutionary MMO (massive multi-player online)
FPS (First Person Shooter). I dont have an XBOX, and believe you me, when I say Im dying to buy one now to try out Halo 3. In order curb my vein-racketing urge to play it, I decided to check out the history of Halo and go out and buy Halo 1 : Evolved Combat, the first game in the Halo trio.

I bought it from a local shop and started playing. I must say it has been one of the most enjoyable games Ive ever played. The storyline is catchy and the way you can ride vehicles and fly Banchees really really appealed to me. It satisfied my current surge for computer gaming.

Well Ive just finished the game in easy mode. Took me around 3 sittings to finish the game. Unfortunately Halo 2 runs only on Vista and I dont have Vista. So Im still thinking of buying an XBOX but I read some reviews about it and there are many complaints. People are complaining of the Red Light Of Doom (RLOD), I think its called. The console freezes up and stops working and displays a red ring of light. They have claimed to have fixed the problem in all newer versions. The slight probability that this could happen to me, has made me rule out ordering it from abroad. If I do decide to buy the XBOX, it will be from Egypt for a higher price.

Hmm, I dont really know, maybe I should wait a while until i cool down a bit and my gaming hormones settle down.

I also finished Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow around a week and a half ago. I bought a multiplayer game called Battlefield 2142 which seemed interesting, but I got fed up of the limited single player mode.

As you can see i'm in a gaming frenzy...

Which game am I going to try out next!!!! Oh I bought Quake 4 which I anticipate to be awesome, but there is something wrong with the setup files. I'll return it. I cant wait to play it, now that im done with Halo.

Imagine working in a game studio in Microsoft and developing something as complex and enjoyable as Halo 3. I can only dream of working in something like this. If I ever do (inshAllah), I hope it lives up to my dreams, and I live up to my dream.

Splinter Cell

I was so bored I decided to buy a book and game from Virgin megastores. I bought "The Rule of Four", said to be "The Davinci Code - for people with brains" and "Splinter Cell" (a PC game). I started reading the book. Its interesting but for the last two days Ive been mesmerized by the game. It is not a new game - the version I have was created back in 2005. I bought the espionage pack, so its basically two versions of the game for the price of one.

The game is pretty cool and when I bumped up the graphics settings in the game, my 512 MB ATI graphics card showed its power. The game itself is intense, lots of situations where your trying to figure out where you went wrong. Im still on level 3 so much more to enjoy! :D

The book is pretty cool so far. It talks about an old book called the Hypermacatia or something like that, that has baffled people for years and contains a hidden secret. Cant wait to find out what the secret is all about!!

So this is how I turned my boring weekend into a jovial two-day festival...lol...there is still a pending graphics assignment I need to finish by next week. T out!

HAHA.....A hilarious time!!!

The funniest sheizer ever! Shows how much fun we had in South Korea. Check it out! Its from a self-record booth called Hello World in the Imagine Cup competition in Seoul. People go in and record themselves doing the craziest of things and talking about random issues. It was published on channel8.msdn.com. I am proud to declare myself evident in the clip with the rest of the Egyptian team and my Korean friend I talked about in a previous entry (haven't seen him for 11 years and then met again on facebook). Enjoy...

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/188/

When the light shines

El humdulilah. This last month has been an extremely exciting one.

I met Bill Gates. As I told you in the previous post about meeting a prominent person. This person is Bill Gates.

Our group was selected out of the 40-something teams participating in the Imagine Cup world finals this year. We were one of the lucky 10 who were invited to Redmond to present and demo before Bill Gates, Craig Mundie (Microsoft CTO) and other high ranking executives. It was unbelievable and as I sit here reminiscing, I still cant believe it. I think we did quite well too. Although I usually speak better in public, I dont think I was very bad as I was reassured and rewarded by a convincing nod from the richest person in the world.

As things come fast, they go fast and now Im sitting in my new job. I just got back from Seattle the day before yesterday. On the way back we stopped in Paris for seven hours. Thanks to Cherif Naggar, a friend of mine, I was given a flash tour of Paris. I saw the Eiffel Tower, the Arc and its famous boulevard and even had time to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. All this was in little less than 3 hours.

We have approximately 40 days left until the actual competition in South Korea. It will be hell, but inshAllah will pay off. Ya Rab.

Time has flown

Time has flown since I last blogged. The world has spun out of control lately. The following took place:

- 525 has ended...successfully el humdulilah.

- Imagine Cup has taken a twisted turn, bringing with it a dream. Unfortunately with every dream there comes a sacrifice or a time of great hardship. Next week we are supposed to be meeting a prominent and world-famous figure. I would rather not talking about it before it actually happens. InshAllah no obstacles block our path. Right now I'm drowning in my own stress and tension as we are preparing for this major event. Ill tell you all about it after it happens and happens successfully inshAllah.

- Im changing jobs, this week may be my last here at IBM. I feel weird. This could be because I'm listening to the latest Linkin Park album and filling up with emotions.
I will definitely miss the people here. But life is a bunch of stepping stones, moving from one phase to the next, ultimately trying to optimize your condition.

Time is limited as usual. Life is a perpetual battle against the element of this universe that cannot be overcome (TIME). I will do my best...

525

Just a number? Hardly a number! Its the number of a course. Its not just a course. Its more! CSCI 525 is a graduate (master's degree) course given in The American University in Cairo.

This course has been the most mind-boggling course I have ever taken. It has been one of the hardest and most demanding. At the same time it has been very displeasing. On the other hand I don't think I have ever enjoyed a course like this. It has been so challenging to the extent my mind was not powerful enough. LOL, I find this relevant to the subtitle of my blog: "An insight into a mind. A powerful tool, but only when tamed". Despite the tiring mind-boggling stress I managed to pull off a good grade in the second midterm. I was pleased with this...el humdulilah. There is still the daunting task of preparing for the final exam which is comprehensive and writing a literature survey paper of the Weighted Max-Sat problem. The person who writes the best paper will win a bump up in his end grade. WOW, I would love that. Fortunately and unfortunately I'm up against a lot of competition and im short of time since I have another final next week.

Life is hardship. If things came easy, there would be no self-pride and success...