It’s also where I’ve been working (well, interning) at, as a junior artist/programmer for the past 7(8?) months. And today was my last day at what has possibly been the best work environment I’ve ever encountered in my life.

The story actually began a long time ago, when I was finishing my short stint at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore back last December or so. I came down for an interview at Mikoishi, not knowing what to expect and hoping against hope that I would get to work on their actual current game project (I had thought it was a fighting game), since up to that point, all I had ever done on games was essentially whatever I did in my spare time.

The interview didn’t exactly go very well, I think, and I was uncharacteristically nervous when Amy (one of the bosses) brought up the subject of my mom, who had actually done the initial contact/negotiations for me to be brought on board. It got worse when I was introduced to one of the directors on the art team, who, I think, wasn’t exactly wowed by the inadequacy of my portfolio or my customary matter-of-fact responses to questions (sorry about that, Joelle, if you’re reading). Although I was accepted, I couldn’t help but feel that I was out of my league.

That feeling got a lot worse when I first started. I met a couple of the artists, who were drawing/painting stuff about a million times faster and better than what I could do, and it was all I could do not to just to admit out loud that I would probably be better off just making coffee for the team and shadowing them instead of being given an actual workstation.

After an initial and enthusiastic briefing about the game we were working on by the art director, I got introduced to my work partner, who in turn introduced me to our 3rd-party particle system used for the game.

(Note: I am not writing anything about the game at this time as it’s not released yet. While I personally feel that we should be doing more to promote the game, I respect our producer’s wishes and trust his expertise in these areas.)

Anyway, the first thing he asked me was, “have you ever used a particle system before?”, to which I was relieved to be able to reply, honestly, “Yes, I’ve worked with Combustion and XSI’s particle systems before”.

“Like, particleillusion?”, was the next question, to which I could only reply, sheepishly, “No”, having no fucking clue what particleillusion was at that time.

“Oh, it’s alright then. Just, you know, explore,” was the response, to which I was thinking shit, what if I can’t get the hang of it?

I guess at this point I’m going to thank my physics/maths teachers, because if not for my studies on kinematics/forces, I would never have been able to grasp as much of the IDE as I did. And now, at last, I’d daresay that I’ve come a long way since that first day when I was sure that I’d be kicked out within a week for not measuring up to standard. While I admittedly still can’t paint/draw for fuck, I’ve learned, if anything, that it never hurts to try shit out. If it doesn’t work, throw that shit away and try something else instead of planning for every eventuality and automatically discarding options based on distant, uncertain possibilities. By following the latter method, you unknowingly limit your own creativity and your output suffers as a result.

It seems, sometimes, that the time I spent there has passed so quickly, too quickly. Yet, I remember almost every single thing I’ve done, every line of code I’ve written (except which visual effect I worked on, that always fucks my mind up for some reason), every time I’ve cursed an engine crash/graphic artifact. There’s so much I had to do, and yet, at the end of all things, I feel like I should have done more.

It was pretty much the same whoever I talked to. Whenever I talked to a programmer or even a QA team member, I always felt as if I didn’t belong, that I was intruding on the territory of what someone else would probably have done had I not so rudely butted in. I followed the old army axiom, “listen to everything and say nothing”, the equivalent of lurking.

But as time went by, and as I started joining in discussions about art, about gameplay, about programming, I found something existed about this company that every other work environment lacked: the fact that this company was more open to ideas and changes than most other game companies. Imagine me, an intern, a wannabe artist, actually being allowed to speak my mind about the look of a spell that an artist working in the industry for years had designed! Imagine me, a C++ beginner, helping out the programmers by finding API functions in the particle system’s SDK that could be used to give the artists much more control over the look of their designs! Imagine me, a random gamer (though I like to think I’m pretty good in awp_map_fair), taking part in gameplay discussions with the producer!

I mean, all these are small things when you consider them from the sanctity of a chair and a desk, but you really have to experience it in order to understand why it means so much to me.

Time does go by, though, and before too long, I have to leave. But leaving means cooling down, and that means problems.

My last week was mostly spent teaching my replacement (also an intern) most of the stuff that our team had developed and how it all worked. Unfortunately, due to the dreaded manpower issue, how everything went from the particle system into the game was mostly under my purview and a couple of the programmers’. Because the programmers had much bigger issues to worry about (e.g. the game actually being playable), most of the time I had to work on my own with the particle system’s SDK to try and find out what other capabilities I could prod someone to code into the main source for me.

I hope it went well, especially since I didn’t really have time to test what the new guy had learned. In fact, I honestly worry about whether he will be able to take up the challenge of being the Point of Contact for anything to do with the particle system’s integration with the engine. He’s learned fast, and well enough for someone who has had absolutely zero prior programming experience, but somehow, even as I’m writing this, my mind still conjures up horrible images of an entire team of tired individuals closing in on a overworked, sleepless intern who has been staying up through the night to figure out an unsolvable bug.

Yea, I know. I’m not usually one to wax euphoric about stuff, but I really enjoyed my time spent at Mikoishi, even if I should have been preparing for my future and all that. But if we all just cared about our own future, there would be no future, and so fuck that. I’m really going to miss the place.

Amy, Alex, Cash, Joelle, Danny, Nat, Ros, Patrick, Ke Liang, Anton, Eunice, Ben, Wilson, Mansoor, Yun, Joe, Khalid, Ker Ching, Tristan, Melvin, Stone, Jeevan, Lin Yew, Sean, John, if any of you get to read this, I know I’ve probably said this before and it sounds retardedly cliche, but I honestly can’t offer a more genuine word of thanks for all the help, advice (and in Cash/Mansoor’s cases, car rides!) you’ve given me. I really hope that Dark Grounds takes off. (And that you guys get your 10% back sometime soon!)

Anyway, it sort of relates to what I’m about to talk about now, as I wrap up the most cohesive rant I’ve ever made with a Part 3.

In part 1, I wrote about security, and how there seems to be a certain stigma attached to the Mac as being more secure than its rivals. In the sequel, I went on about its perceived ease of usage and how even a simple task, such as connecting to a windows server, required the Mac to go through a Terminal while Windows would have a GUI available for you to interact with (and yes, I know you can connect via Finder, but you’re still going to have to use Samba or some other interface to connect, and really, do you know my dad knows how to type smb://(ip goes here) in Finder?).

Like I said before, I could just go on and on forever about the Mac, but for now I’ll settle with making my final case against the Mac: efficiency.

I’m going to start out by declaring that while I’m someone who does tweak my Windows services and actively searches for ways to cut my RAM usage, I’m not like one of those users who will mess around with bash for hours on end to get Compiz working exactly the way they want it, right down to building their own applications from source to ensure optimal performance. I’m ok with having it run well, just with as little waste as possible without going through rings of fire.

Windows is, by default, horribly bloated. Even if you toss your OEM disk into the local incinerator and grab a clean windows ISO off the net, there’s a lot of bullshit that Microsoft decided to introduce for some unknown reason. A mild example would be the fucking search assistant puppy, and a more recent one would be Windows Flip 3D, which I have personally ranked #1 as the most, absolutely useless feature anyone could want of all time. At least, until Aero Peek came along.

OS X, then, seems like a clear winner when it comes to this sort of thing. Macs come with much less retarded daemons running in the background by default, Spotlight is generally snappy (and installing Quicksilver makes it far more delightful), and since Macintosh SKUs are strictly controlled, there are no retarded OEM distros of it flying around to piss us off.

Unfortunately though, and I really hate to say it, but even with the seemingly cleaner overall feel that the Mac provides (and I’m not talking about the look), it has so much absolute bullshit embedded by default that I absolutely cannot fathom why anyone would prefer it for efficiency.

Expose is nice, the dashboard is ok (certainly better than the Windows Sidebar by a fucking country mile), but for fuck’s sake, please let me disable these services with a goddamn GUI instead of (again) using a command prompt. I mean, let’s face it: this is an operating system that prides itself on being pretty as shit, and I have to perform such rituals through a command prompt. Notwithstanding the fact that it’s unintuitive, it’s also inefficient.

And that’s the problem: the Mac gives you a clean slate, but God forbid if you want to maybe polish the slate a little more. It all goes horribly wrong when you try to do so. From trying to remove mouse acceleration to getting information about a particular daemon, everything is designed to make your life just that little bit harder if you’re not doing whatever a normal, average Joe would want to do.

This is especially prevalent when doing production work. Example: While I was at Lucasfilm, I had to figure out Final Cut Pro more or less by myself (thank god I had worked a little with it in school for a week or so, because most of my prior NLE experience was with Premiere), and it was an absolute nightmare. To capture from our Panasonic camcorder and Lumix GH-1 (which is one of those new-fangled DSLRs that can shoot 720p video), I had to go through iMovie (which, incidentally, has the worst user interface of any video editor barring WMM) to capture individual clips from the camera. All because FCP cannot capture from anything other than a tape deck. For fuck’s sake, even Adobe Premiere can do that, and it sure as hell costs less.

Anyway, it didn’t stop there. People complain all the time to me about Adobe Premiere’s UI and say, “Oh, I wish it was more like Final Cut’s.” Having used both (and a lot more other NLEs besides), I have to agree that Premiere’s UI isn’t exactly good, hell, none of Adobe’s UIs are as good as people think they are, but who in their right mind would prefer FCP’s UI instead? It was so maddeningly annoying, from the stupid Mac limits of not being able to maximize windows to the maddeningly small icons that littered the interface. At least Premiere let me click on what I wanted to. Combined with the Mighty Mouse, working in FCP was like trying to perform eye surgery whilst having my hands encased in concrete.

And the coup de grace: the crashes. FCP was generally quite stable, right up until the point where I tried to import video from the GH-1 camera directly. Firstly, the Mac would not recognize the camera as a media device, no matter what I did. Thinking it was probably just drivers, I brought the GH-1 over to a windows rig, extracted the .mts files directly from it, used Mediacoder to reencode them in an AVI container so that FCP could actually bring it in onto the timeline.

At which point FCP crashed unceremoniously with the message “General Error.” No dump file, no error code, nothing else other than that laughable excuse for an exception. Who even writes error handling like this? They might as well have written “Fuck you” for all the good it did.

I tried using Compressor to reencode the movie with the Apple Intermediate Codec, and Compressor basically just hung. Then the whole Mac locked up, and even the vulcan key-combo (Control-Command-Power) failed to get it out of its frozen state. A cold boot was the only option.

At this point, having wasted a few hours trying to find the dump files for Compressor and FCP, I decided to just use Mediacoder on a Windows rig to convert the .mts files to fully uncompressed and place them in an AVI container. To my surprise, FCP actually managed to bring it in, but because the Mac rig was a 32-bit OS X, it quickly ran out of RAM/juice and FCP again stuttered when I scrubbed the timeline before crashing again, with the same error.

At this point, time was running short, so I tried re-converting them again, this time using h.264 with minimal compression. To my surprise, it worked, though FCP still handled the files a little sluggishly. Much later, I learned that the original files shot with the GH-1 were encoded in a highly compressed h.264 format, which FCP had trouble decoding, and Compressor couldn’t decode it at all. Additionally, FCP’s h.264 live decoding performance was apparently quite bad, which explained the lag I experienced when I finally got to editing the video.

Would this have happened if I had used an all-Windows workflow? Probably so, but at least I wouldn’t have had to waste a few hours fucking around and wondering what on earth I had done to get such a retarded exception message. And even though Mediacoder is third-party software, the fact remains that it could read and convert between formats comfortably, while the Mac couldn’t even mount the camera as a generic filesystem, let alone a media device.

And of course, if I had had access to an OpenSUSE rig right from the start along with maybe something like kdenlive or LiVES, everything would have been a lot clearer right from the start.

But after all this, what am I trying to get at? Well, look at how Apple treated its professional customers by killing off Shake and dumping a small subset of its features into Motion and FCP. Look at how Apple fucks over people with problems by writing such stupid exception messages. Look at the ongoing war with Flash, if you think I’m talking about things long past. Look at iTunes and its performance on the Mac compared to its performance on other operating systems. Hell, look at the problems now with the iPhone 4. All these show just how little respect Apple has for its educated customer base, and how much they’re shifting their focus to the admittedly probably more profitable pool of idiots out there who buy iPods without even considering alternatives.

You could say that I should vote with my wallet. (I do!) Maybe I’m just a whiner. But consider this: Windows Flip 3D was born out of the requests from idiots who had been accustomed to the Mac’s eye-candy, along with Sidebar and the more asinine Aero Peek. Premiere’s UI changes make it seem almost like an FCP clone these days, and there are more copies of the Mac’s scrollbars in downloadable themes these days then there are animated GIFs in webpages. What we’re witnessing is the pollution of our everyday applications, all thanks to the popularity of the Mac’s success, whether for better or for worse.

And I, for one, very much prefer that this behaviour stops at once before another application crashes with an even dumber exception message.

In any case, it’s pretty brilliant. It’s about the only real UI feature that I liked from OS X and Compiz, and one that was incredibly useful during my stint at Lucasfilm. In case you have no idea what Expose on the Mac looks like, basically think of it as the window manager Windows Flip 3D should have shamelessly copied, copyright issues be damned.

Which brings me to the 2nd part of my short discussion about Apple products.

Last time I talked about security and the various beefs I had regarding Apple’s much-touted superior security as compared to its rivals. There’s a lot more that I want to say on that issue, but I might as well write a goddamn book if I ever put all of my thoughts to print. Instead, since I’m pretty sure the average person couldn’t give a flying fuck about their security these days, I’m going to move on to what are perceived as more practical issues.

Like usability, for instance. Let’s start right from the beginning.

When you start Mac OS X, it, like any other operating system, goes through the ministrations of setting itself up for you in the most transparent manner possible. And yet my dad was unable to understand it without requiring (again) my assistance, even when the instructions were written, supposedly, in an ‘idiot-proof’ manner.

If the army has taught me anything at all, it’s that there’s no such thing as idiot-proof. Or unbreakable, either. What’s important is that idiots will be idiots, and people who actually know their ass from their thumb should be able to do whatever they need, fast.

The problem with the Mac, however, is that the design philosophy behind it has always been about ease of use. This does not mean efficiency of use, and that’s exactly where the problem lies.

A simple example would be fact that the delete button on the Mac does not function as a delete button at all without some config tweaks. You delete characters, but not files? I’m sorry, there’s a term for that. It’s called backspace.

A bigger example would be the shortcut for the dock, which is Ctrl-F3. Now, the whole point of keyboard macros is to free oneself from having to use a cumbersome, clumsy mouse to perform actions quickly and efficiently, much like how I have set up my taskbar in Windows 7 to activate Photoshop with the shortcut Win + 1. Or in the office, where I have Launchy set to launch any fucking thing short of a nuclear missle with a simple press of Win + Space and the first few letters of whatever it is I want. (For the record, I absolutely abhore Vista/7′s start search function because it is about as fast as my mom. And my mom has polio.)

Anyway, when you hit Ctrl-F3 on the Mac, you get the dock popping up….and you have no way to select any application on it. Not with arrow keys, not with the numbers. The only thing you can do is launch the currently selected app with the return key. I mean, who the fuck even came up with that? If I have to use the mouse to select whatever I want from the dock, then what was the whole point of even including a shortcut for the dock in the first place?

These are minor annoyances, to be sure, but there’s a fuck ton of these seemingly retarded design decisions hanging around the Mac, and all of them seem to be centered around focusing on the mouse to perform actions instead of the keyboard, which, incidentally, is the biggest hunk of absolute white plastic trash I have ever used in my life (Apple standard keyboard A1048), which is fitting, since the mouse joined it in that list as well (Apple Mighty Mouse).

The whole problem, I feel, is that Macs were designed to look good first, and everything else was placed on the backburner to that. It’s like one of the guys who I’m currently working with at my company, who buys clothing and other apparel based on their look, and not their function. I mean, I’m all for stuff looking great (Hell, I’m trying to be an artist) but when it comes to the Great Debate about form versus function, I always believe function comes before the bling.

(And if you’re curious, basically the keyboard had keys that were spaced out waaaay too wide, forcing my hands into awkward positions when trying to type or perform shortcuts. It required a lot more hand movement than usual as well, since I literally had to stretch my fingers sometimes to reach keys that I wanted. And the rubber dome feel of it was worse than usual. The modifier keys felt hard and annoying to press, while the normal alphabetical keys activated much too easily. And I hope the numpad was spoilt because it was just fucking over-sensitive, making it nigh impossible to use.

The mouse was fucking worthless, and I’ll just leave it at that. Seriously, whoever bought that instead of just spending a couple of bucks on an old Logitech MX518 or even 500 is a fucking retard. Instead, they spent probably twice or even thrice the amount for a lousy sensor, a downright damaging grip design and a cheaper feel than a hooker’s tits.)

But with all this, I feel, the most damning thing of all is the lie about how Macs are easy to migrate to and work with. There’s a popular saying about how you buy Windows if you want to do work and you buy a Mac if you want to get work done. Well, let’s see. To transfer a PDF to my dad’s Macbook all I had to do on my Win 7 rig was to find his name in Network and Sharing Center, login to a guest account and dump it in there.

For him to connect to me, however, was a whole different story. I told him about Samba and how to use it, and he stared in astonishment as I opened up Terminal on his mac to connect to my rig via direct IP connection, since he couldn’t see my network name under his equivalent. It was then that I realized what I had just done; I had just connected my Windows rig to a Mac using a fully-functional GUI, while vice versa required a command line.

(And of course, the moment he connected, his mac started dumped .DS_Store thumbnail files in the /Public folder. Good job there creating shit files, Apple.)

Ok, so maybe I’m going a bit far with this. A lot of my friends tell me they have no choice but to use the Mac for specialized applications such as video editing and compositing, since they work with Final Cut and (previously) Shake and would rather die than use Adobe Premiere. Fair enough; I agree that Premiere’s (and Adobe’s) UI design is pretty fucking stupid in general. However I’m going to say outright that the solution isn’t to use FCP or Shake either, because those are much worse choices.

Sounds crazy? Hear me out. And this time, it’s not like I’m basing it on minimal experience, either.

I’ll get to work on Part 3 in a few days, maybe.

And before I am pointed to Newegg for something that would blow the specs of this worthless rig out of the water for about 500 bucks less, could I just point out that I am in Singapore, where computing equipment seems cheap until you realize it’s actually all cardboard being marked up at inexorbitant prices.

In any case, I’m not going to dwell on the vagaries of my new purchase for now; perhaps in a future post, after I get everything settled on it, like a new home.

Instead, I wish to talk about hats.

A long time ago, there was a hat-maker which made decent hats. These hats were comfortable, though not luxurious; they were relatively cheap and above all plain functional in every way. For every minor foible that developed with the hat, the man on the street would find a cunning workaround.

However, one day, another hat-maker suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They made hats which looked wonderful, with the earlier utilitarianism and older conservative styling norms thrown out, going for a minimalist and chic feel.

It caught on immediately, with the general populace swayed by the good looks and the promise of having a hat which wore differently than what they had been accustomed to for years. Even with the murmurs about the hats being slightly less comfortable and somewhat perplexing sometimes in their actual wear design, people loved it.

The first hat-maker didn’t just look at their business being taken away, of course. They started to ask their customers, “What do you even see in those other hats? Would you like us to try and make our hats better, maybe make them more like those other hats?”

And like all good customers, they said yes, and like all good companies, the hat-maker listened, and so they tried to make their hats more like the others, and now, nearing the end of my overly-long metaphor, I’m going to point out that all these hat-makers have managed to achieve is make Aero utterly fucking useless and allow Compiz, a goddamn Linux window manager, to remain essentially undefeated when to comes to having fancy shit on your desktop.

I used to be somewhat neutral about a year ago, when a Macintosh, to me, was just a “commercial UNIX-like distro”. Now, after 2 months at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore and being forced to work with it and Final Cut Pro on a relatively simple project, I’ve changed my mind. The only reason anyone should use a Macintosh now is because they absolutely WILL DIE if they don’t have access to Final Cut Pro, because they’re still in the compositing industry and haven’t switched to Nuke, or because they’re too lazy to learn how to do things right in Windows, or even any of the popular distros out there for Linux. Or, as I strongly suspect, because they just want to look cool.

I’m going to say right now that Windows has a lot of bullshit I’m not happy with. I’m also going to say that the Macintosh operating system on the whole however is complete bullshit in the way it’s marketed as being safer, easier to use and overall more efficient than its rivals.

Let’s start with security. I’m not going to go into the “there are more virii for Windows than there are for Mac” because frankly if you think that argument holds any water of any sort you are scum need to install Noscript on Firefox and stop fooling around with your Facebook apps. I’m not exactly a hacker by any stretch of the imagination, but I managed to get admin access on my uncle’s Macbook (he had guest accounts enabled) and access to his drive within a couple of minutes via a few Terminal commands. You can literally create an admin account from the command line using a guest account. I mean even with Windows you have to fuck around with the registry to reset an admin’s password, and I think these days it has to be done via booting into a Linux kernel and using a registry editor? In any case it’s not like I can just walk by and go, “Oh look I think I want admin access now” and BOOM a few commands and a reboot later I have full root access.

I find security doesn’t stop there, either. There’s so much rubbish going around Apple’s other prides and joys that I really wonder how anyone can claim they’re not as bad as Adobe when it comes to patching vulnerabilities.

But what if security isn’t a major concern? What if, like me, you plan to secure your investment simply by running FF with Noscript and just locking your room door? Would that mean a Mac would be more palatable?

Part I of my Macintosh story concludes here.

It’s been more than half a year since I last worried about tanks and treads, and as one might expect, there are quite a few updates that have transpired since I last bothered to update this section of the Internet. For starters, the theme has changed.

This iteration of Harsh has actually been ready for about 5 months, give or take; I just couldn’t be bothered to code it into a WordPress template. However, as I will have very little time from here out to update the site, I gave in and spent the whole day smashing in the template, wrecking my previous philosophies about semantic markup and elegant solutions in the process. Indeed, I don’t even think this layout is cross-browser compliant. But seriously, IE can fuck off.

So most people like me who’ve just gotten out of their National Service probably spend their time working part-time or just lazing around until the start of their respective educational courses. I originally wanted to be part of the latter group, but my parents weren’t having any of that. A few strings pulled later, I found myself at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, as my brand-spanking new resume shows.

I was there for 2 months, during which I learned how to hate the Macintosh Operating System, along with Final Cut Pro. But at least I got some fame and fortune out of it, since it was a temporary position compared to an internship. Basically it just meant I was receiving around double what I would have gotten otherwise. Also, the banner I did for them was at the booth for SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009!

How awesome was it to have a banner that I basically just ctrl-c’ed and ctrl-v’ed in Photoshop shown at such an event? So awesome.

Anyway, after that mindless Photoshop automaton experience, I immediately got to work at my new company, Mikoishi Studios. Since I’m still interning there at this very moment, I guess I probably shouldn’t write too much about what I’m doing until the project nears a more polished state of completion. However, I will say that it’s probably been the best working experience I’ve ever had or heard about so far (Apart from Google, I guess). It’s hard to beat 2 hour-lunch breaks and an art director who’s best described as perpetually insane.

And in the midst of all this, I got a letter last week stating that my application for a Bachelor’s Degree of Fine Arts in Production Animation has actually been accepted by DigiPen USA. Basically, I had applied for both the Singapore and US campuses previously, but the Singapore campus suddenly had a change of rules and starting only accepting students with prior diplomas/experience, thus leaving students like me with only their GCE ‘A’ level educational certificates out in the cold.

So, I guess I’m going to Redmond. Which is both excellent and absolutely terrifying, as this means I have to rush about a billion things, including my passport, my visa, my accommodation, my logistics and my pre-semester assignment before I can even start to think about breathing normally.

Tl;dr: I’m free! …work, work, work, probably going to study programming in Singapore, what’s this in the mail, HOLY SHIT YES, HOLY SHIT NO I have to prepare a million things.

Yea. I’ll find some time to write more about my internship though, because what I’ve been working on over the past few months is pretty breathtaking. I just hope the rest of the world thinks the same way when it finally sees the light of day.

Excuse the horrible language right there, though; I’m currently rather busy with other endeavours at the moment. I’ll try to explain in a few days, but even that’s looking mighty unlikely. I’ll see.