The Three Motivators

There were 3 warriors who needed to cross a great desert on horseback.  Nobody had ever crossed that desert and lived to tell about it.

Not only was the desert hot and dry, it was on fire.  Clouds of black smoke blocked all view, and obscured the sun overhead.

But there was no other way.

So the first warrior set off.  After 2 days his horse was starting to show fatigue.  But the warrior had seen many battles, he had commanded armies, he knew something about survival.  He dismounted and looked his horse in the face.  "We'll die here if you give up.  You can't get tired now.  Keep going!"

After 2 more days the horse had collapsed.  The warrior found his way, but not without a great loss.


The second warrior went through similar circumstances, but rather than talking about death - he tried feeding his horse treats, and entertaining him by telling a wide variety of "a horse walks into a bar" jokes.

"So, why the long face?"

Same outcome as the first warrior - the horse eventually collapsed.



Now what did the 3rd warrior do?  He and his horse made it through alive.  How?

This warrior first of all had keen control of his senses.  This came with training - he didn't just read a story or a book and learn that control.  It took practice and a transformation of his conditioned mind into an awareness of the most subtle cues.

As a result, the warrior knew when he was acting out of compulsion and fear and when he was acting fluidly.  He made no distinction between himself and the horse, or himself and the desert.  The horse was also aware the warrior had no fear.  Not as a contrivance "no fear", like what you might see on a bumper-sticker.  "No fear" doesn't describe it positively.  "All clarity" would be more accurate.  The warrior was "all clarity" and the horse could see that.

So when the horse was beginning to show fatigue, the warrior also dismounted, and looked his horse in the face.  "I have seen a vision of our arrival - and they are waiting for us with great anticipation!  Today, we will not die!"  The warrior's face was completely radiant!  This was because he really had seen such a vision.


The affect on the horse was an invigoration - a perfect dissolution of fatigue.  He was completely renewed, and continued through the desert refreshed.  Such refreshment, when moments before he had been so tired, how can this be?



The 2 motivators commonly talked about are "fear" and "greed".  But both of them, in whatever form they take, are really forms of harassment, and not based in true Authority.  They are two demons, that drive common people mad chasing this way and that, both tormenting themselves and others.

Don't do that.


The 3rd motivator is like "Soul".  It is much more subtle, and sometimes seems miraculous!  Performance is maximized in such a place.  The body relaxes without fear, and the blood vessels aren't constricted by tension.  Everything flows.  It isn't a question of "how can we motivate you?"

It's a selfless, pure, abiding in love.

And isn't that why we are all here?  Because deep down, we really love what we do?  Why would anyone resort to any smaller Vision than such an abiding?

Call for Android testers

Pre-Alpha Unity build for Android.

Ship shoots on a timer.  Touch the screen and ship follows your finger.  My high score is 200,000.

Feel free to try it.  Please let me know your results, heap size, etc.


http://tinyurl.com/cuwjmuk

Copyright 2012 Frank Braker

DIRECTIONS:

Download file from your Android phone.  Click on "Downloads" and click the 
downloaded file - it will ask if you want to install "SpaceWithText".  Install it and run.

This is a 3D test and AI demonstration.  It might not run on all Android phones.

Spawning cubes show their current behavior, which is driven by a behavior tree.

Running an android app on the emulator

$ ./emulator.exe -avd dodo

Javabrain@ShinyGrand /cygdrive/c/Users/Javabrain/AppData/Local/Android/android-sdk/tools
$ cp /cygdrive/c/Users/Javabrain/Downloads/airnow.apk .

Javabrain@ShinyGrand /cygdrive/c/Users/Javabrain/AppData/Local/Android/android-sdk/tools
$ ./emulator.exe -avd dodo &
[1] 6412

Javabrain@ShinyGrand /cygdrive/c/Users/Javabrain/AppData/Local/Android/android-sdk/tools
$ adb install airnow.apk
        pkg: /data/local/tmp/airnow.apk
Success
683 KB/s (141336 bytes in 0.202s)

Javabrain@ShinyGrand /cygdrive/c/Users/Javabrain/AppData/Local/Android/android-sdk/tools
$

Patterns and Rules

Here's a good link:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132649/the_case_for_game_design_patterns.php?print=1

While the author is talking about "Game Design Patterns", it brings up a progression of Design Pattern discussion:

http://www.slideshare.net/JoshuaKerievsky/a-timeless-way-of-communicating-alexandrian-pattern-languages

Perhaps most well known among software engineers is the "Gang of Four" Design Patterns book.  Whenever I've heard the term "patterns", I've assumed this was the usage.  Not true!  Design Patterns seem to have originated in architecture, with applications in gardening, theme park design - not just software.

The progression for game design continues to "The 400 Project", which is deliberately a list of "rules" rather than patterns, as discussed in the GDC presentations:

http://www.finitearts.com/Pages/400page.html

This is all fine.  It provides a great framework and vocabulary for discussion.  These are recipe books in architectural and experiential domains.

[Edit:  What I'm wondering now, is how to put wieners, rocks, paper and scissors to good use!]

[Edit: For GoF patterns, this also looks like a good discussion: http://www.oodesign.com ]

Behavior Trees

The general design in Unity is to write multiple behavior scripts, and attach them to a game object.  For example, a "rotate" script and a "shoot-at-anything-that-gets-close" script are attached to an object separately, rather than combining all behaviors into one script.

I like this approach - until an object needs to only apply behaviors selectively.  At that point I realized a finite state machine (FSM) was probably the way to go.  If an object had several scripts attached to it, there would need to be an FSM script which messaged all the other scripts so they knew what state the object was in.  Ugly.

Fine - ask Dr. Google.

People are still using FSMs out there - but the new glorious technology now seems to be Behavior Trees (BT).

I'm just beginning to teach myself about this tool.  There is some comparison between BT and hierarchical finite state machines (HFSM) - the latter which I have no experience with.

An FSM will go from state to state with transition events, and have the capacity to become a fascinating conversation piece among the more super-genius programmers spaghetti nightmare.  Even very simple FSMs can be painful to look at.

BT appears to remove some of the FSM free-form.  They seem to provide a framework of limited logic-flow.  It makes me wonder if eventually processors will be optimized around BT - because it looks like a sort of graphical programming language.  More importantly, it looks like a new way of thinking and building engines.

Here is the best summary page I've found so far (and an excellent blog overall on the subject):

http://aigamedev.com/open/articles/popular-behavior-tree-design/

Browser Sandboxing

"Dad?  What's the safest way to browse the internet?"

"Oh.. borrow your friend's PC.  After you finish browsing, ask them to re-install everything.  Do this every day."


Have you ever wished you had a friend who was this kind?

Here's how.  Please take a close look at this screenshot:

This screenshot was taken from Windows Vista (see the tab at the bottom), running VirtualBox, which is running Linux Mint 12, which has Firefox browsing webpages and AdBlock Pro installed.
It is not the fastest way to browse the web.  But it is the safest.


Why would you want to do this?

The advantage to running a virtual machine (VirtualBox, VMWare, there are many to choose from) - is that it sandboxes whatever applications are running on the machine.  It's easy to take a snapshot of the machine's state and revert to that snapshot later.

Can't you do that in Windows?  Yes.  Sort of.  Windows has System Restore - but it has it's problems.

Windows System Restore automatically creates restore points, that allows reverting the state of executable files.  There are many details of System Restore I won't go into - nor claim to know anything about.  What's important is - it's all automatic.  If you wait a month or two, old restore points will be overwritten with newer restore points.

If you inadvertently install malware, if it isn't detected before an old enough restore point is overwritten, the only mechanism for removing the virus is an AntiVirus (AV) program, or manually.  So you're at the mercy of AV and websites to keep your browsing safe.

Also, System Restore is a time consuming process.  You might not want to spend 10 minutes every day restoring your system to a restore point.  With VirtualBox, restore points snapshots can be restored relatively quickly, depending on the size of the virtual machine.  I've got Linux Mint set up on a small, 8GB drive, so snapshots take about 15 seconds to save and restore.


My Horror Story

Last week I was getting ready to do my taxes on my laptop, when, browsing to yahoo.com to check e-mail, the website returned with "Welcome to nginx!".  After looking into this problem for several hours, it became clear that:

1) no antivirus program website says anything about "Welcome to nginx!"

2) the anti-spamware program I was using didn't find all the cookies that another program found

3) the process for fixing "Welcome to nginx!" involved posting log output onto a forum and waiting for experts to respond with recommendations

4) "Welcome to nginx!" issues have been showing up for several years now, with apparently many different causes


Number 3 killed me.  I didn't have several weeks to figure out what was wrong with my laptop - I needed to go forward with my taxes right away.  And doing my taxes on a potentially infected machine was not an option.

 Time to format the hard-drive and re-install the whole laptop from the ground up!

I suppose I could have relied on System Restore - but even if I reverted to the oldest restore point, there was no way to know if my system would be clean, because the source of the problem couldn't be found.


Using VirtualBox as a Sandboxed Browser

At this point it became clear that I would always be at the mercy of someone else to keep my system clean.  Websites have to be free of malware.  Antivirus programs have to stay up to date.  It's an endless cycle of malware development and anti-malware response.

The source of all malware is almost always the internet.  The only alternative is someone giving you a CD/DVD/USB disk that is infected.


So why not uninstall the browser from the main OS?  This is exactly what running the browser exclusively on a virtual machine allows you to do.  For most browsing it does the job quite adequately.


Do It Yourself Steps

Here's how:

- Download VirtualBox (or whatever virtual machine you like best).  [If you like another virtual machine better - please tell me and I might switch.]

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

- Download Linux Mint (or whatever OS you like best).  [I like Linux Mint because it's free, and it comes with Flash Player, and websites like youtube and vimeo work fine.]
  Download the iso image, which VirtualBox can open just as if it was an installation CD/DVD.  You can also burn the iso image to a CD if you like - but it isn't required.

http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php (DVD, 32-bit - or try the others)


- Create a virtual machine in VirtualBox, set it up as recommended (1024MB RAM might be overkill, but it's what I'm using, and an 8GB disk, although smaller might reduce snapshot saving/recovering).

- Run the virtual machine in VirtualBox.  This will bring up the first boot wizard and you can select the Linux Mint ISO file as a boot in the browse folder button.  This is identical to booting a machine from a CD.  Linux Mint should come up (it may require you to create a user account before logging in - just follow the steps).

- Install Linux Mint onto the virtual machine.  Once the OS is up, you'll be tempted to run various apps - go ahead.  But it's still running like an OS from a CD.  The Install To Harddrive should be right there on the desktop which will start the process of installation.  Run this.  Answer all the questions.  Wait for it to install, which takes about 20 minutes or longer.  After the install is finished and Linux has booted up from the hard-drive,  you can add the Guest Additions

- Install Guest Additions and a File Share.  If you want to transfer files between your main OS and the virtual machine, install the guest additions from VirtualBox (not from Linux) - it's in the Devices pull down menu.  It will start an app and it might complain "are you sure?" - type "yes" and hit return.  When this has finished, you should be able to create a file share from VirtualBox as part of the virtual machine's settings.  [If you took any machine snapshots before this, it may complain that the machine is not mutable and can't add a share, so do this before taking any snapshots.]

 I created a file share called VirtualBoxShare.  At this point, I could open a terminal (UXTERM or some such) and type "su" to log in as superuser, then type "ls /media" and sf_VirtualBoxShare shows up in the list.

- Mount the file share.  This is optional.  As superuser, you can transfer files around, but if you want access from the regular account, log in as su, and type "mount -t vboxsf VirtualBoxShare /home/<your username>/ShareDir" where you replace ShareDir with whatever directory you want, and <your username> with whatever your username is.  If this doesn't work, try just typing "mount" to see all the mounts available and find the file share that VirtualBox created in the previous step.  "chmod 777 /home/<your username>/ShareDir" or "chmod 777 /media/sf_VirtualBoxShare" might help too...


Bask In the Boundless Safety of Sandboxed Browsing

That's it.  From there it was easy to take a screenshot from Windows, paste it into Paint, and save the file into the VirtualBoxShare directory I had set up on VirtualBox, then open Firefox from Linux Mint, log into blogger.com and post that picture by selecting it from ShareDir - the directory I had mounted.

[And at this point, there's really no more need for any browser in Windows.  All file downloading can take place in the virtual machine, and files saved in the file share if you want to run them from Windows.]


Don't forget to take a snapshot of the disk image.  Then upon closing the virtual machine, restore to the snapshot.  Any malware that might infect the machine after taking a snapshot is wiped out in the few seconds it takes to restore to the snapshot.

Making an executable difficult to hack

Apparently it's relatively trivial to take any exe file, use disassembler and a binary editor, and modify it.  This is how cracked versions of code get published via torrent websites.

So either the exe has to be tiny, and the user always has to download it from a server to run it - but I think even that can be cracked relatively easily.  If you use an exe checksum, then the code that forms a response that uses the checksum could be modded to respond with the correct checksum - but at least that executable would have to cracked for every new version, and if the server is capable of generating a new executable every day - then it's too much trouble to have it cracked.  Creating a script that modifies the exe checksum every day seems like it would be easy to do.  But it also raises the server bandwidth.

Another approach is to have self-modifying code that consists of assembly language embedded in a table and written to an area of memory to be executed.  Fine so they modify the table.  Now if it resides in 10,000 different tables (maybe use a perl/etc script to generate the tables) to obfuscate the assembly code, it requires much more work to crack.  This begins to get into the realm of "if you code this - you're crazy" and "if you crack this - you've really earned some sort of easter egg that asks you and anyone running the cracked version to at least donate to charity".

I might wind up with the common model - all code is crackable, but most of the population is honest, and half the people running cracked code only want to know precisely what it is they would be paying for if they bought the product.  And it probably helps ALOT to maintain an attitude of humility.  Am I going to go broke if some people hack my code?  What the whole problem means at the most fundamental level - work for me, and the cracker - work that could have been used more productively, and increased burden on honest users, is something to continually keep in mind.

If you have ideas, or find interesting threads on the subject - maybe something to look at.