Eli Bendersky's website - Miscellanea

My articles published in a book!

2009-04-28T12:27:31-07:00

A few years ago I've written several programming articles for the GameDev online community website. The full list of articles is here. Well, a couple of months ago I was contacted by some guys from GameDev who planned to release a series of books collecting the most notable articles from the website into related chunks, editing them and adding some new material. My articles made it into the "Advanced Game Programming" book. The book (ISBN-10: 1598638068) was published last month. So this is a first book publication for me! Although I made practically no money from it ($50 for each of my 3 chapters, without sale royalties), it does give me some bragging rights :-)

Here's a shot from the book's table of contents, showing two of my chapters:

Unfortunately, the code accompanying chapter 6 has not been published with the book, so I've collected it together and placed it online here.

Productivity insights from "Getting things done"

2008-06-20T07:36:10-07:00

I've read David Allen's "Getting things done" before, and yesterday I wanted to refresh my memory regarding the productivity tips it offers.

So I skimmed through the book for a couple of hours. I think that I'm better at organization than I was in the past, so most of the tips in the book were quite obvious. However, I still gleaned a few interesting insights I want to file here for future review:

Tasks stay on your mind and make you worry mainly because they're unclear. Replace vague topics by concrete goals that can be acted upon. For example, if a part of your todo list now looks like:
- Foo
- Bar
Replace it by:
- Talk to Joe about implementing Foo
- Bar: read about super Widgets
- Bar: implement a mega Widget for patch 12
- Bar: do a code review
Some relevant quotes: "This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy". and "It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action"
You should periodically sort and empty your master to-do list. Emptying it doesn't necessarily mean doing everything on it. Rather, all the items on the list have to be assorted to more specific locations, like a calendar, per-project to-do lists and so on. Keeping a lot of stuff on the master list for long periods of time is counterproductive.
Weekly reviews of your tasks and goals are very important. No matter how well we try to organize ourselves, work often gets too hectic to follow a clearly defined plan all the time. A weekly review is a method to keep it all under control in the long run. Once a week, take some time to review all your pending tasks and to-do lists and set up more concrete goals for the week to come.

million, billion, milliard

2005-07-12T22:46:00-07:00

A curious fact: how much "billion" is depends on where you live, and what language you speak.

In the American system, a billion is 1,000 millions, that is 10e9. In the British system, it's 10e12 (million millions). 10e12 is "trillion" in the American system - but hold on, it's 10e18 in the British system. 10e18 in American is "quintillion" but 10e30 in British.

Now, in Spanish a billón follows the British system: 10e12. An "American" billion in Spanish is "mil millones" - literally "a thousand millions".

To make things more interesting, there's another name for 10e9 - the "milliard". It's only rarely used in English, but is routinely used in Russian and Hebrew to describe 10e9. In fact, neither in Russian nor in Hebrew the word "billion" is used at all. "Trillion" in Russian and Hebrew follows the American system - 10e12

china, pebble bed nuclear reactors and hydrogen

2005-07-03T21:09:00-07:00

A very interesting Wired article here about efforts of Chinise scientists and industries to open pebble-bed nuclear reactors for massive use.

Nuclear reactors have long been known to provide one of the most environmentally friendly power source, and surely the most powerful one. Their problem is safety (think three mile island, or Chernobyl).

The pebble-bed nuclear reactor design is different. It is inherently safe - its safety governed by physical laws. If you turn off all safety gear of such a reactor and send the operators home for supper, nothing will happen. The physical properties of the design impose a negative feedback that causes the reactor to cool off once it reaches a certain non-critical temperature. More about this on Wikipedia.

Moreover, such a reactor can be used to efficiently generate hydrogen - which will provide ample fuel for fuel-cell powered vehicles.

China plans on deploying 30 such plants by 2020 (the first will begin construction next year). I think it's great, perhaps from here will the freedom from oil come ?

Curious that such advances come from China. It is a huge country with a lot of bright people, and it has immense needs for power and other resources. Smart people + demand fuels scientific advance.

random: elevators, vacum cleaners, books

2005-05-04T10:04:00-07:00

Found a news-note about a pneumatic air-driven elevator. Looks like a great idea, really. It seems so simple, hence the geniality. If I think of an elevator these days - it's a mess of cords, weights, steel rods and engines. The pneumatic elevator looks like a toy in comparison, but it works ! A nice solution for people's homes.
Speaking of sucked-in air... Our vacuum cleaner died, and trying to show I'm worth my EE degree, armed with a small multi-meter, a few screwdrivers, a rubber hand-glove and a flashlight I disassembled it to "debug" the problem. I managed to bring the engine to life for a few seconds, twice (by doing a "vacuum-cleaner CPR") but it seems burned and not wanting to function... Ah, so we have to buy a new one.
I have books flowing to me from many sources now - yay ! A few unread books on the shelf, a few in my Palm, two coming from Russia, two from a friend in Canada, two from O'Reilly for a review. Happy happy...