I am currently doing work on PS3, and our renderer by default colours the screen blue. So when the game starts up without crashing, before any data is loaded and displayed, we at least get what I like to refer to as the “Blue Screen of Life”.
Archive for March, 2006
BSOL
Thursday, March 30th, 2006bread fraud
Sunday, March 26th, 2006I was robbed! I bought a loaf expecting it to be nice. It turned out to be only half there!
Anyway, the sandwiches still tasted nice.
PS. 1000000000000 boos to flickr for requiring the “Organizr” to use flash. And the same to Macromedia for not providing flash for 64-bit machines. Get with the 21st Century guys!
unimpressed pt 2
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006a nightmare
Monday, March 20th, 2006Last night I dreamt that the IT guys at work took my home PC and “upgraded” it with Windows Vista. They didn’t seem to understand that I don’t use Windows – my remonstrations fell on deaf ears.
In other news, I spent the weekend playing with fractals. When fractals were first popular, I was a teenager and I wasn’t yet a serious programmer. Sure, I played with Fractint, and I read Chaos, but I didn’t really get it then. It’s one thing to look at pretty pictures and at some level blithely accept that there’s some maths behind it. It’s quite another to actually write a program and really see that some very simple code is producing something with infinite complexity. I spent a couple of hours adjusting my program and just exploring the Mandelbrot set and corresponding Julia sets.
Happy St Gertrude's Day
Friday, March 17th, 2006Today is the memorial day of St Gertrude of Nivelles, patron saint of the recently deceased.
engrish strikes again
Friday, March 10th, 2006I'm sitting at my desk almost crying with laughter over this.
unimpressed
Thursday, March 9th, 2006Am I just a grumpy old git? AOAP. Here are two things that failed to impress me recently.
(Found on Google Video) “Amazing” juggling finale. Not that amazing. Half a dozen tricks with 3 balls and lots of moving your body around trying to sell it. I think he's making it look a lot harder than it actually is.
Ageia's physics hardware/SDK. I think it's trying to solve a problem that really doesn't exist. There are existing physics solutions that solve rigid body dynamics on a multiprocessor system in software quite nicely thanks. Fluid dynamics are nice and “next gen”-y (isosurface generation in hardware is cool, assuming it's not patented), but again people are already doing this stuff on the GPU. Heck I was prototyping it over a year ago! And I don't think Ageia is going to catch up with GPU manufacturers in processing scale. Also, their demo movies are very lacking. What is that, a few hundred particles? Yawn. Could have been done 5 years ago.
how to impress people
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006Scene: start of a meeting, waiting for people to arrive
A_manager_01 enters, stage right.
a_manager_01: 4 reviews down, 24 to go!
elbeno: You've done 14%, then?
a_manager_01: yep.
a_manager_01: …is it really 14%?
elbeno: 14.285714 recurring.
a_manager_01: …
(Knowing what 1/7th is as a decimal comes in handy)