-- MichaelCurtis - 04 Jun 2009

Automagically: June 4, 2009

Automagically is the term used to describe how things work that we don't fully understand. My CMSC 331 (Programming Languages) professor introduced me to the term, describing the way compilers work, or something like that. It also describes how this research project will come together. Hopefully, at the end of the summer I won't use "automagically" to describe anything.

Today, I met with Mina, Hamadi, Kira, Wutthigrai and Dr. West about our progress with blackjack and other team goals. Apparently, we've hit a roadblock regarding our middleware (TGEA) and so we'll have to use TGE instead, since the combat pack only works with TGE. We could port it to TGEA, but porting is tedious, takes forever, and could cause you to become short with your dear teammates. Mina came up with a great idea of inducing fear to measure game performance/reaction time and while I had other ideas (which are usually too complex to be workable), her idea seems more workable. So hopefully we'll finish blackjack quickly and be able to take some time with the FPS.

MichaelOren - 05 Jun 2009 - 12:41

"Automagically" is also sometimes used by technical folks in a condescending way to talk to non-technical folks about operating system installs and such. Used mostly by the hardcore, compile the kernel themselves (e.g. Gentoo) Linux users. I like the idea of inducing fear--that's what I'm hoping Nintendo will do with games for the vitality sensor (and not just use it for the Nintendo Home Gym...)