kerimsatirli.com

After doing enough research for my movie, I had a quick look at ways to alter the content that was available to me. I made a decision that would basically nullify all the effort I put into researching various cultural and architectural aspects of Middle Eastern countries.

To save time, I wanted to utilize stock content that was readily available to everyone. Content that wouldn’t have to be altered in any way and would just be used “as-is”. The decision basically came down to me having to write a story that fit the environment (the movie sets, so to speak) rather than building an environment that would fit the story.

Back in the summer, I found this acceptable, after all, I was no “modder” (eg.: a person who is capable of modding computer games) and I didn’t think it was necessary to become one, just to create a movie.

Now, in retrospect, I think I made a very poor choice back then, I’ve been working on my own mod for the past two weeks and I must say, I find the whole process very enjoyable. I’ve “pimped” rides and repainted some stuff, I even built custom effects. I’ve analyzed and tweaked weapons, vehicles and characters.

Sure, it’s hard work, I had to learn a new scripting language (CONScript) and experienced loads of crashes whenever I wanted to test something, but in the end, I think the time I put into acquiring these skills might be very useful in the future.

The resulting mod will, however, not be used for my movie. Even though it’s highly suitable and works just fine, I decided that teaming up with the US: Intervention would enable me to utilize the game engine a lot better. Not just because they have had more time to finish their mod, but also because they are looking to promote an upcoming version of their modification with a little movie, a movie I am going to make for them.

Don’t think of the project as a sell-out though, because, if you ask me, there’s a difference between teaming up to achieve the same goal in a much more efficient way and still getting to keep your own story as opposed to teaming up with someone and rewriting everything to fit their needs.

As far as my mod is concerned, after taking some time off, I’ll release it to the world. I don’t expect it to be successful at all, but if it makes a future director’s life easier, because of the things contained within, I’m happy.

Here’s a little bit of trivia: the icon I’m using for the mod, is actually something I made back in my freshman year at college. It was one of those introductory classes, where one of my tutors told us to draw the most basic icons we could come up with that were related to a certain topic. I think we made at least 40 different icons, but the camera turned out best. It’s simple, basic, a bit childish yet clearly conveys it’s meaning. A perfect fit for the mod.

As far as the text goes, I call it a “community movie mod” because it’s not aimed at gameplay, it’s highly biased towards the US side, with only few modifications to the MEC side and no changes at all to the other armies. The mod includes stuff that wouldn’t be used in normal gameplay, but might be very handy for movie makers.

The “community” part of the mod stems from the fact that I didn’t create it on my own. Yes, I compiled the knowledge and items I found, but I’m not the author of many of the items included within. Basically, 90% of the content is available out there, for people to use, but many people, will not have the time or knowledge to integrate them into the game, so therefore, as a way to say “thank you“, I built this mod.

When I first started drafting scenes for my movie project, I decided that I wanted this project to be as intensive and educational as a standard college project. I wanted to have the feeling that it wasn’t just a fun thing to do, I wanted to learn something, I wanted to expand my knowledge in ways that would later benefit me, both personally as well as professionally.

I started out with a basic planning that included the various steps. First of all, to write a credible story, I had to get a better understanding of the way people “down there” think. What might be totally acceptable to us (think: revealing clothes worn by females) is totally unacceptable in other cultures. Sure, I did know that much, but all the knowledge I had, prior to getting accustomed to the culture, wasn’t nearly enough.

Sure, I’m a westerner, my target audience are westerners, but there’s such a thing as sticking to the facts and even though it was going to be a fictitious story, I wanted every aspect of it to be as real as possible. Every last piece of information I gathered had to be able to withstand scrutiny.

Local movies are a great way to get to know a culture better, but it’s hard to find the right kind of movie. There are lots and lots of televised stories out there that label themselves “local” but many of them are actually made to appeal to a broad, western-oriented audience. Well, long story short - I found a couple of movies, most of them lacking good subtitles (not to say there were no subtitles available, but the quality of the subtitles was well below par) and decided to not watch them for the story but rather for the people.

One of the movies I analyzed is called “Kurtlar vadisi - Irak“, (translation: “Valley of the Wolves - Iraq”), a movie which starts out after the infamous hood event that took place on July 4th, 2003, shortly after the war began. The movie focuses on the way the people feel after being treated like animals and while the director exercised his artistic freedom to amend the story a little, I think he did a great job in portraying the issues that arise during the situations that were discussed in the movie. It might not have been the best research material I could get, but it certainly had many valid points and taught me a lot about the subject I was researching.

Other than a couple of movies, I also read a lot, both online and in books I retrieved from my mother, who spent a considerable amount of time in middle eastern countries. She also helped me in getting some parts of the cultural information I had compiled right as far as interpersonal contact was concerned. Thanks for that, mom!

After getting myself acquainted with the subject, I, by accident, came across two people, one, a Native Farsi Speaker, who moved around a lot and ended up in Canada and a person who moved from Iraq to the UK. Both of them were more than willing to elaborate in detail how they felt about their respective cultural background and about how they perceived daily life in the Middle East.

While books and movies are a great way to get to know something, I find that talking to people who actually experienced these situations, a lot more informative and a lot more entertaining.

After getting my facts right for the Middle Eastern side of the story, I wanted to get some more information about the American side. Once again, Wikipedia was able to provide me with a lot of the information I looked for and thanks to it’s great cross linking system, I came across many other resources that taught me about various other aspects that would later contribute to my story.

As fate would have it, I met an ex Marine who immediately jumped at the movie idea and agreed to help with the tactical information and experience I was lacking.

Yes, it is a movie, a very-low-budget one at that and yes, 99% of the people watching it will not catch small things like troops that cover each other in a very specific way or radio chatter that is very “to the point”, but for me personally, these things are important. I believe that these are the details that either make or break a product.

In a few days, you should be able to judge for yourself if my research paid off. I already know that it did, I’ve gotten to know some pretty interesting people and learned a fair bit about Arabic countries.

So, as far as the research is concerned, I think that the amount of time I put into it certainly meets the expectations I had before I started out. I think I’ve done more and better research for this one project than I’ve done for quite a few, bigger, projects in the past.

Yesterday marked the official beginning of the “Free Space” project, I discussed some time ago right here.

Here’s a short recap: a year ago, we had a project called “Free Space” which disappointed me a lot, the whole project wasn’t fun to do, nor was it educative and in the end, I nearly ended up without my ECTS.

I didn’t want this year to be a rerun of my first “Free Space” and decided that I’d take matters into my own hands and do something that would link up with the stuff I’m looking to do in the last two years of my time in college. Long story short, I pitched an idea about making a machinima film and my wish was granted.

So here I am, busy writing, rewriting, restructuring a story that includes references to modern politics, real events and some easter eggs. A story about the war (some) soldiers are facing during the actual war. I think it’s gonna be a nice cocktail of drama, action and suspense, but you’ll be able to judge by yourself soon.

My team is spread around the globe, most of them come from the UK and Western Europe in general, but there are also a few hailing from Northern America. Since the time differs as much as eight hours between some of my team mates, we needed a place to store information online, accessible to everyone at any time.

Back in the summer, when I started out with this project, I put most of the content into a forum that was accessible only by invitation but it didn’t work. There was little to no markup possible and copy would look the same, basically important stuff wasn’t easily distinguishable and people didn’t know what to read and what not to read.

The first solution I tried was WordPress, which works amazingly well for just about any content management but sadly didn’t work at all for this project. In the end, I just set up another subwiki in my Pimki installation and I find that to be working perfectly. Granted, I hack my Pimki (which by itself is a hack of Instiki) installation quite a bit to strip out features I didn’t need and hack in others I desperately needed, but all in all, the framework is the same and it just works.

Remote team management is so much easier if your team knows how to get to the content they need and if they are able to contribute to it without having to sign up for accounts, that’s a great plus for everyone.

On another note, thanks to this movie I’ve even expanded my Python skills a little bit. The game I’m using to create the movie is based on the Python scripting language and hacking it is insanely easy (well, not insanely easy, but let’s just say it’s working for me). The result? I’m creating my own mod, aptly titled “deeCyne.com: Machinima”. I consider it a community mod targeted at fellow movie makers who might not be able to use the content because they don’t want to get their hands dirty.

Both the mod and the hacks I made to Pimki will be released once I’m done with the movie (though, not immediately afterwards, I’ll probably take some time off). I found that various sites that were rich with information contributed passively to the making of this movie and as such, giving something back is a logical step to me.

That said, it’s time to go back and create some more storyboards.

Whenever you read news from the entertainment industry, you hear C - level staff complaining about how bad digital music is hurting sales and how hard it is to sell music to people because everyone just pirates it, you’ve heard those for years now, you’ll keep hearing them for quite some time more.

Sure, there’s Apple and the iTMS, which is doing quite well - because there are lots of iPods out there and people are easily tricked into buying more than one song ( “come on mom, it’s only a buck!” ). The whole store is doing well, in fact, a lot better than the top 10 stores that sell DRM-secured Windows Media Audio files together, but there are still those that dislike how Apple handles DRM.

Now, I don’t feel like getting into the whole DRM discussion more than I have to, mostly because I’m no expert on it, but from personal experience I know that certain DRM schemes are hurting the customers and put them off.

For example, my ISP provides those that subscribe to one of the better packages with credits for their (WMA-powered) online music store. You don’t pay for it 1:1, it’s all included in your subscription. A nice idea, it keeps people from downloading pirated music … or does it?

In the past, I’d “buy” my albums at the store, then proceed to a P2P site to download the MP3s, including coverart and intelligently named files (rather than “artistid_tracknumber_trackname.wma”). Technically speaking, I didn’t do anything bad, I didn’t share those MP3s with anyone and I was able to listen to them on the device of my choosing (I have / had quite a few devices and I dislike the idea of losing 50% of my media library because of device lock-in). I didn’t even bother downloading the WMA-encrypted files, why waste bandwidth after all?

So, you won’t believe how happy I was when I first discovered the goodness that is MagnaTune. Sure, they haven’t signed any uber-famous acts like Britney Spears or Robbie Williams (who’d want them anyway?), but that doesn’t mean that any of their artists aren’t great musicians. All of the performers are screened and the team from MagnaTune then decides who actually gets to be included in their portfolio.

While that is a a good feature on it’s own, here’s what I really love about them: when you buy a CD, you get to decide how much you pay for it. Say, if you’re short on cash, you could spend a couple bucks, burn that CD, then impress your girlfriend with it while you propose to her. She accepts and you’re so thankful that you decided to buy the CD again and now pay a bigger amount. Granted, I’m quite sure this hasn’t happened (yet), but it’s one way to describe their pricing policies.

When you buy a CD, it’s up to you how you want it. There are quite a few different formats, high and higher bitrate MP3, FLAC, WAV, everything really. And if you happen to lose your music along the road, you just hit up their re-download form and you’ll get a mail with all your music downloads again, at no extra charge, naturally.

Another thing I love is that with every album you purchase, you get three tickets to give away to friends. They can then download the same album you bought for free. Sure, you could send out more tickets, but then again, why hurt those that try to please you?

Like every good web-based company, they have a blog available, with lots of great information, should you be looking for more reading. Oh, and they’re working on a Second Life space too.

Another company that just gets it is CANDdYRAT Records. Like MagnaTune, they have a nice selection of artists in their line up. They approach marketing in an innovative way, if you ask me. I am, like most people, too busy to go out and look for music, I’d much rather get a list of suggestions (just like last.fm and Pandora do) and then take my pick.

Recently, I’ve been using YouTube to discover new music and came across a great clip called Drifting from Andy McKee. The whole clip is available on YouTube and the user that uploaded it, who actually is the owner of CANdYRAT Records, had another 44 videos available for my entertainment.

I was so fascinated by the Andy McKee stuff that I kept watching clip after clip. His music sounds great, but I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have bought it if I wouldn’t have gotten a chance to see the guy in action. Thanks to the use of some innovative marketing of his assets, Mr. R. Poland managed to turn a listener into a customer and so I decided to order my very own copy of the “Art of Motion”.

Ordering the CD didn’t go down without a hitch though, the first time I tried, Paypal asked me for a credit card, even though I had enough funds in my account to cover it. After asking for some assistance from CANdYRAT Records, I was quickly presented with alternate solutions. In the end, I tried again with Paypal a day later and it just worked. During the whole order process, I received quick replies to emails whenever I had a question and was finally told that my order would arrive in 7 to 10 business days.

Well, what do you know - 2 business days (not counting Saturday, where postal service is, technically speaking available) later, I received a small package with the CD I longed for.

With both companies, support has been great. I wasn’t hassled by any DRM-schemes, I received personal support whenever I had questions and paying for the media was easy too. So if you’re looking to expand your media library, have a look at both MagnaTune and CANdYRAT Records, maybe you’ll find your new favorite artist(s) there…

Yesterday marked the last day of the winter-term of my second year in college. After 8 weeks of research, meetings, brainstorming, writing, editing and rendering, our vision of the future is finally done.

2046 will be the year of the MindNet and the MindLink, two utilities that will enhance our daily life in ways unknown to mankind before then:

The MindNet is the natural evolution of the Internet. It all started out a few decades ago as a network for scientists, now (2007), the web is a place to meet interesting people and broaden your knowledge, but only a small part is accessible via conventional means (search engines). This will change, over the next few years we’ll see more and more things being available as an online solution, the concept of PCs will not disappear but it will change radically. Your data isn’t bound to a geographical location (read: your PC’s harddisk) anymore, it will be available everywhere, only to you, unless you decide to share it.

The MindNet is part knowledge base, part search engine, part smart summarizer and part entertainment solution. You don’t have to be able to ask the perfect question to get a perfect answer, no, by means of narrowing it down and automagical content analysis, the MindNet will hook you up with the information you are looking for.

The MindLink is the device that enables you to access the MindNet. Wearable Technology, first introduced at the beginning of this century was the first step towards the MindLink. Human interfaces, seen in Tablet PCs and Nintendo’s Wii combined with the first mind controlled harddisk, which were made available to consumers in 2012 mark an important step towards the change our interaction with computers underwent.

Silicon-based computing hit a roadblock, so to speak. Technology couldn’t get any smaller anymore, so the move towards organic computing, which was based on research and development carried out since the late nineties, was inevitable.

Organic computers were so powerful, that mankind was able to solve many of the environmental issues that emerged during the beginning of the century. With the new processing power, scientists also built artificial brains that helped in the R&D process towards a system that would allow people to download (and upload) data into their brains. Only a few years later, the first non damaging connection to a human brain had been established.

The MindLink enables the user to tap into a vast array of knowledge, not just raw data but processed information that could be used right from the start…

Check out the clip here or here (make sure you enlarge the player’s window by clicking the icon in the upper right corner though).

Kudos to Jero for editing the clip and thanks, Scott, for recording the voice over.

While just about everyone is writing about Google Reader’s new Trend feature, I’d much rather talk about another statistics page that has been available for quite some time now but hasn’t generated the same buzz:

Last.fm, a site that lets you track what you’re listening too (and has done so for close to three years for me now) has an interesting array of statistical reportings available to users.

While I did talk about my favourite music of 2006, and listed various artists, it would appear that I totally forgot the one group I’ve listened to most throughout 2006: The Oddities.

I was first introduced to The Oddities in May 2006, while reading up on some of the characters of Stargate: Atlantis. Turns out that one of the main actors from Season 1, Rainbow Sun Francks also produces a hip hop group and being the true fan that I am, I set out to discover their music.

Long story short, according to Last.fm’s rolling year charts, I’ve listened to their track “Oddities” a staggering 306 times on my PC, probably another 50 times on my iPod.

Second in line was Bløf’s “De mooiste verliezers”, a beautiful, Dutch, track about (personal) change(s). Acid Food, from a band called Mogwai, concludes this top 3. Their track was featured on MadV’s Video “Goodbye” (in other news, MadV’s video “The Message” is simply amazing.)

Looking at my other charts, it’s quite interesting to see that I don’t have a particular preference for any one genre; I’ve listened to hip hop, rock, electric music, alternative, post-rock, instrumental and most of all indie stuff during the last years and I’m guessing that that will not change in the foreseeable future.

Normally, I don’t blog this late (or early, depends on how you look at it) but I had to get some work done for a client of mine and as such, I kept checking my email every now and then for new stuff. I was just about to close down when the one email I’ve been waiting for for quite some time finally arrived.

Cerulean Studios just opened up the Trillian Astra Alpha to a bigger group of testers, me included. Now, if you know me, you know that if there’s one thing I try to evangelize, it’s most definitely the software that, more or less, controls my online life. While this piece of software might be a simple replacement for MSN Messenger, AIM, Y! Messenger or Google Talk, Trillian, to me, is truly the hub of everything online.

Back in May 2006, the lead developer of Trillian offered people a chance to be included in the beta testing, I signed up and now, more than half a year later, I’m looking at the goodness that is Astra. I can’t write much about it, yet, since I haven’t anything, but rest assured, over the following days I will certainly blog about my favorite software some more.

For now, you’ll have to make do with this here.

Note: the title refers to a weapon system of the same name as the fourth version of Trillian is called. See here for more information.

While checking my email today, I was a bit annoyed by my, seemingly, defunct spam filter. It seems that more and more mail is left untagged lately and more and more spam is ending up in my mailbox.

So while looking through the latest messages from people I never heard off and offers about mortgages and medicine I don’t need, I came across one of these messages from amazon.com - considering that I never buy there, cause they discriminate against people who don’t have access to a credit card, I was about to delete the message, when my fast-scanning eyes spotted a name I recognized: Iliumsoft.

Now, if you ever used a Pocket PC or Smartphone (or a Palm Handheld device, for that matter), you have probably heard of their premier application called eWallet. This application provides the perfect solution for people who do a lot of stuff online as well as off line. Me, I use it to store anything that I don’t want to see flying around, including personal details, important addresses as well as license keys for applications I bought.

After 18 months of development, Marc, Iliumsoft’s product manager, put out a call for help on their blog. The company was nearing the RTM stage of product development and needed some people to look at the product and put it through some stress testing to ensure that the application lived up to the expectations of the developers.

Thanks to a business kind-of relationship Marc and I established back when I was a reviewer for a tech site, I was included in the beta and was given a chance to look at eWallet 5.0 before the general public could.

I’ve been beta-testing software for about four years now, sometimes developers say “thank you”, sometimes you even get a license key and sometimes you end up with nothing but a timebombed application that will stop working a couple of weeks after the final product is released.

Iliumsoft however, values their testers. At the beginning of this week, Marc sent me an email with license keys for the whole eWallet range. The total of this “gig” alone comes down to a hefty $70 and to be honest, I wouldn’t have expected that. One key, of my own choosing, say Desktop or Smartphone, yes - but all four? Nope, I didn’t see that one coming.

However, as if that wasn’t generous enough, Iliumsoft also gifted me with this here:

this $20 gift certificate from amazon.com is Iliumsoft’s way of saying “thank you” and it’s awesome. Iliumsoft really wouldn’t have to do this, after all, they have enough momentum going for them as their reports show, yet they did. It seems that not everyone forgets where they “come from” once their sales go up. Keep it that way guys.

Marc and everyone else from Iliumsoft, it was most definitely my pleasure. Your responsiveness, be it in regards of support issues or feature suggestions is truly amazing. My Smartphone would be a useless piece of technology, if it weren’t for the data I collected within eWallet. You guys help me remember the things I am used to forgetting and I’m sincerely thankful for that.

Some time ago, I invited a few people to start a new blog. To ensure that their first experience would be one of bliss and not of technical terms that scare them away, I offered to host their blog, acquire a domain and even set up the whole magic.

Now, some four months later, it’s time for a short recap:

I started out with the following statistics:

• 66% male
• 66% Dutch
• 66% of the content will be written in English

Of the three people I talked to, only one really took me up on my idea and started a blog. Since the beginning of September, Ben has written ten posts. It’s less than I expected, but I’m still glad he takes the time to write. After all, both his and my life has been so hectic that we rarely got the time to talk to each other and his blog provided me with the opportunity to follow his life every now and then.

The other two people decided not to go through with the blog because they believe their (possible) content to be boring and uninteresting. Which is, at least if you ask me, the one thing that keeps more people from blogging. It’s a pity, because one way or another, all our lives have those certain events that are interesting, both to one self as well as the world.

That said, I’m glad that Jack started to blog more often and after some coercing, Josef and Kevin started blogs too.

So, do I consider the “get more people to blog” - project, a failed project? No. It didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to turn out but all in all, more people, some due to my influence, are blogging now and that’s all that counts.