My name is Amit J. Patel. There are many other Amit Patels around. In fact there are many other Amit J. Patels around. I'd prefer to have a unique name, but I really like the name Amit. What can I do? Maybe I could be Amit J. Hacker, but people already know me as Amit J. Patel. Ah, what a dilemma!
I went to Dunbar HSEP, a high school in Fort Worth, TX; then I went to Rice University in Houston, TX; then I went to Stanford University for a Ph.D. in Computer Science . My thesis was about the foundations of object-oriented programming languages and how object-oriented features can be used side-by-side with non-object-oriented features.
I am now working as a developer at Google. Life at a startup is exciting, but it leaves little time for my thesis work or games.
Before Google, I had spare time, and I wrote games and maintained a page about game programming. The topics I chose to cover were those that were related to game projects I had worked on or wanted to work on: tile based games, hexagonal grids, artificial intelligence, object-oriented games, adventure games, game design, scripting languages, and the most popular section of my site: pathfinding. I hope to start working on games and other projects in 2002.
The best way to contact me is email, but you can also find me at various MOOs, including LambdaMOO. You can read about MOOs in article on Lingua Franca, from the social aspects to virtual universities, a meeting place for biologists, and educational MOOs.
I am an INTP on the
Meyer-Briggs system.
Occasionally I test as INFP. Einstein was an
INTP. I am considered to be a pioneer on the
iVALS
survey. My VALS type is
Fulfilled,
with a secondary type of Achiever,
but I do not think they are right about me being an
Achiever. My Geek Code (v3.12) is
GCS d- s a- C++ US P--- L+ E++>+++ W++(+++) N+++ !o K-- w---
O+++ M(+) V PS+ P- Y+ PGP- t*() 5+ X+() R tv+(++) b+>++ DI+++
D- G e+++>++++ h- r++>+++ y+
. Before you make a geek code for yourself,
ask yourself, "Am I a
geek?"
Did you want to see what I look like?
I am a font geek. I am a big fan of anti-aliased text, although the stuff you see on Win98 isn't much good. Xft/XRender and Mac OS X have really good anti-aliased fonts. I use gdkxft to get anti-aliased fonts in Gtk apps. Then I use a Mozilla patch to make Mozilla and Galeon use Gtk. And I have an XftConfig file that supports CJK fonts in Mozilla (by default I lost my CJK fonts while browsing the web with gdkxft).