Kimmo’s Blog 2.0

As part of my work duties and my past academic record, I’ve come in contact with many a person that are referenced as nerds. By themselves too I might admit. This experience lends itself for me to make some observations on the nature of these people.

I’m not a nerd. There would be some notoriety in being but I’m not. My life is a collection of being in the middle, not quite this or that. This has some drawbacks and advantages, among the latter might be the ability to make observations one otherwise couldn’t.

Many nerds seem to be interested in language but language as a system. As a collection of rules and exceptions to those rules. I’m also interested in language, but mainly as a vehicle for meaning, the different ways to portray the same meaning and different meaning with the same apparent utterances.

I think this fascination with rules explains the interest many nerds have with programming. Programming languages are a far cry from the vagueness of human language. My interest in programming is mostly pragmatic, it is a means to an end. Most computer games, even today, are still written in programming languages. If you are interested in realizing computer games, it pays to know programming. I also enjoy solving problems, which programming ultimately is.

The supposed onsocialness of nerds is a muddier issue. Some nerds are as sociable as consultants. Some seem to lack certain confidence that translates in some minds as awkwardness in social settings. Some possess some esoteric interests that might translate poorly into conversation topics in a more broad setting. I like to think myself as socially adept, I have a broad range of subjects I’m somewhat familiar with, I have a quick mind although I have certain hang-ups, I’m not going to go in detail here. Although I’m not that drawn to people as such, I find you humans genuinely interesting.

I have been thinking about more practical issues concerning my apprentice-project. I have always thought that something like this should be made in Java to allow as wide an availability as possible. I also think that something like this should be made as easy as possible to produce, even at the cost of efficiency. Especially since this project isn’t primarily meant to display my mad coding skillz. And there are plenty of computational resources on todays computers to squander.

Being as easy on me as possible means that I want to make use of existing components as far as possible. This means they have to be fitting licence-wise. Fortunately this doesn’t seem to be an issue for me, since most these components are released as Free software or at least Open source. I have been looking for a physics and a 3d-engine.

ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) sounds suitable for my needs, only it isn’t in Java. Versions of it do exist for the 3 major platforms, so I don’t consider this a major problem. It’s usability with Java is an issue, however. There exists a wrapper (ODEJava) for Java that provides a bridge to allow it’s use in Java. As this is a work-in-progress the price is unstability.

For the 3d-engine I’ve been considering jMonkeyEngine which seems more than capable for my needs and is Open source as well. And seems to have a interface for ODE as well. I’ll have to set-up these things and get experimenting.