Week 13 : Tenacity

I am always amazed how unpredictable life can be, no matter how hard you plan things out problems crop up. In an effort to make my transition to California as smooth as possible I had started fixing up my house in Kentucky for sale. As of two weeks ago the porch was redone, and it was on the market. However last week my tenets told me about loosing hot water and a rushing sound. Well several plumbers later it seems there is a leak in the slab. Long story short we have to re route the plumbing. Sadly this cuts into my profits but in for a penny in for a pound I suppose. At least now I have a reason to redo the kitchen and in turn I can charge more money. Always look on the bright side!

Let it be a leak in a house or a bug in the code, I have found you must be tenacious. Come up with a plan and execute, if the plan looks like it will fail, time to re plan. There is no one solution, free will and acts of god will always present challenges. But hey if there wasn't these bad times how would you learn to appreciate the good times. Life is a series of peaks and valleys, when you are in a valley keep your head on that next peak and you will get there.



See you in Twenty Eight Weeks

Week 12 : Comics

This week I'd like to talk comics. The fact that Tell Tale Games sees the importance of comics for source material is a HUGE reason I want to work with them. I have read comics all of my life, aside from a small break from high school through my bachelors. Comics taught me to read, manage money and gave me my first feeling of independence. You see Mom couldn't leave the car in the parking lot next to the comic store or it would be towed, so I was given the money and freedom to buy whatever I wanted, quite a lot of responsibility for a seven year old.

In the beginning I was a die hard Marvel fan particularly the X-men, Captain America and Hawkeye. In actuality I loved the costumes, one enemy I really liked was Madcap, he had a clown like suit and could reattach his own limbs and make people crazy if they looked into his eyes. I favored the art so much it started me drawing. I had collected the Marvel Universe volumes, which had all the living and dead characters over the years.I would research any characters that had a sweet outfit and draw them.

My nephew re introduced me to comics with the 'Walking Dead' and Marvel's Ultimate series after college. So you see I was an avid 'Walking Dead' fan well before the show or the game. The writer Robert Kirkman is a fellow Kentuckian, as well as the original artist Tony Moore. I loved their work and wanted to support fellow local artists. At that time I took it upon myself to fill in the gaps in comic lore by reading 'The Watchmen', and 'The Sandman' series. But it was the newer comics that got me hooked again. I realized it wasn't the publisher that I liked it was the writers. So I expanded my Kirkman collection to include 'Invincible'. Next was Bill Willingham and 'Fables', I really like the concept and have read all of them as well as the off shoot comics like 'Jack the Fable'. Then I found Brian K Vaughn who wrote 'Y the Last man', 'Ex Machina' and most currently 'Saga' by far he is my favorite. I cannot stress enough how great Saga is, it is new so go read it.

This summer I chose to fill in the gaps of Marvel's cosmic story lines including; Adam Warlock, Captain Marvel, Thanos, The Eternals, Annihilation War, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Kree and Skrulls as well as catching up with the X-men story lines. As you can see from the image below I read quite a lot this summer. I was hooked again, but I knew I was headed to California and didn't want to lug around another huge box of books, I left most of my collection in Kentucky before I came here. So I switched to kindle, If you took that photo and multiplied it by three you would be close to what I have read since the summer began.

I would like to conclude by saying I have some thoughts on 'The Wolf Among Us' but will reserve them for our interview.

See you In Twenty Nine Weeks

AR

Week 11 : Video Game Security

This week I am referring you to a research paper I just finished about Taxonomy, Authentication and Encryption for online video games

Video Game Security

Enjoy

See you in thirty weeks.

AR

Week 10 : MetaSploit

This was a very fun week, we finally got to do some true penetration tests. Until this week most of the Cyber forensics class was very theoretical with some minor application like port scanning. However we were introduced to metasploit, which is a Security analyst's dream. Metasploit is a program that shows you all the possible exploits on a particular OS. It is open sourced and constantly updated so you have wealth of information to use.

Let me explain the process,  let say you are asked to penetrate a website. Well you use dig to get the IP address of the site, you then use nmap to extract available Ports and potential operating systems. Then you use metasploit to infiltrate the computer. In class we opened up a reverse console on a Windows XP machine. We were then able to navigate, download and upload files . . .  it was very cool. This particular exploit tricked the target computer into starting the TCP connection. You see most firewall protect against incoming connections but not outgoing. So we told the target computer the attacker's IP and it opened a console to us, clever.

As I get deeper into the class I will keep you posted on what I am learning. I am also writing a paper on how to secure video games from hacker's attacks though authentication and encryption, so keep an eye out for that.

See you in thirty one weeks.

Week 9 : Web Formats

The calm before the storm, literally. As I write this Tropical Storm Karen approaches the Gulf coast, coincidentally this week has provided an unexpected lull. The beginning of the week looked as thought it would be full of work. I was put to grading Distributed System projects. It was an interesting project where students had to create a file of data in XML, an XSD for validation and XSLT file to generate a HTML file. I must say I find using W3C standards enjoyable and long for the day when computers are fast enough that everyone is using them. I remember when I was first introduced to XML, validation was strictly DTD (no one was willing to use XSD)  and the only way to use XML seemed to be through SOAP. Granted I was a noob and the only language I had under my belt was HTML and a little JavaScript but it was interesting none the less.

That reminds me of a little story I told this week. A few students were discussing Python with me and were having trouble getting their heads around the syntax. So I told them of how I learned HTML. Officially I learned HTML my last semester for my Bachelors, but I really didn't appreciate that I had learned most of the language in that course. So I bought a book, as I tend to do a lot. It was a pretty think book, a thousand pages or more. So I read it and was still not convinced that I knew HTML. So I bought another and another, about halfway through the third book I realized, hey this is all familiar. It was then that I realized I understood the depth of HTML. Of course you can't really know a language until you teach it. Luckily the first class I taught was HTML. The student body ranged from kids out of high school to an elderly lady. I taught that course for several years, I could catch a missing 'carrot' (< >) from two rows behind a student. I was living breathing HTML interpreter.

Oh well hopefully the rain will hold off long enough for my Tennis clinic.

See you in Thirty Two weeks.

Week 8 : Projects

It has been another busy week in Grad school.

This week I started my Computer Vision Project, an application to determine how beautiful one is based of the Greek Ratio phi. To start am using Haar cascades to locate facial features. Once I have the right facial values I intend to run an algorithm to look for the Golden Ratio.  Phi is thought to be a ratio of beauty, it was used when constructing the Parthenon and many Greek sculptures of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. So if this is true I should be able to find evidence of phi in faces of movie stars.

To go along with that project I have started a paper in my Cyber forensics course focused on security for video games. So far all the academic papers I have read deal with building a taxonomy, while the developer articles deal with implementing authentication and encryption .

This is on top of the normal work load, which has been interesting. We have learned how to acquire IP addresses for websites and will start port scanning next week in forensics class. In computer vision we are doing feature recognition and corner detection. Who would have thought so much interesting information can be learned by running an matrix over an image. I am really enjoying image processing feel free to check out my work as it develops HERE 

Well I still need to work on my Unity Planner and grade some Java projects, so I better get to it, otherwise I'll have no weekend.

Have a great day and see you in
Thirty-Three weeks

Anthony

 

Week 7 : Planning

It was another busy week, which is why this post is coming late in the week. I wanted to talk about my graduate project, but before we delve deep into it I will use this post to describe what a Planner is.

My project is integrating a Planner into Unity. A Planner is an system that takes a set of axioms, operators and tasks to accomplish a goal. The result is a plan which consist of several actions that need to take place in order to accomplish the goal.

Traditionally game AI design focus on the state machine to control the AI agent's behavior. However state machines are fragile because they depend heavily on the game design. If the design changes, the state machine has to change which may result in some unpredictable behavior. It makes maintenance and code reuse very cumbersome for the AI programmer.

Planners on the other hand are different. The planner and the game engine will have a mapping from the planner's primitive tasks to actions in the game engine; such as 'go to object' or 'pick up object'. These actions can be reused in many products which permits code reuse. Similarly once a planner and game engine can communicate, the planner can use the game state for the axioms it needs to develop a plan which the game engine receives and executes. The only thing that needs to be re-coded is the operators for the plan.

Operators are the rules for forming the plan. Once the AI programmer has a working system they can focus on the Agent's behavior by changing the operators. If a new feature is requested the programmer simply considers what game state information is needed, if any, and works to incorporate the features into the planner's operators.

The greatest part about planners is the opportunity for unpredictable plans. Unlike the state machine where the agent must go through a series of steps to accomplish a goal, an agent's plan might deviate. This unpredictable behavior is more in keeping with human behavior, which makes the experience more enjoyable for the users.

Now you have the basics of planner technology, there are plenty of books on planners, I encourage you to read more on it if this is new to you. We will revisit this topic in later posts.

See you in Thirty Four Weeks.

AR