Archive for March, 2006
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006
Another good day at work today hacking on our $MAGIC_SOLUTION to some hard problems in graphics. Another morning of staning around a whiteboard passing the hacking pen from person to person doing integral after integral[1] coming up with some workable solution. We now have $MAGIC_SOLUTION running at ~100fps on our cards which is pretty nice and it looks pretty sexy too. Now we just need to add a little sparkle before the management get back from GDC and make us work on boring problems again :).
Also in other news, last night I went to James’s birthday party in King’s. An interesting experience since everyone reminded me what and old fart I was. On the other hand I got to meet loads of new people and have loads of fun chatting away. I even finally met someone IRL I’ve known via IRC for about 3 years. I finally got back home at $WEE_WEE_WEE_HOURS and was a little late for work though :(. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again in a hurry.
Usual Carlton geek meet tonight so that should be fun and I’ll have to bite my tongue not to go squeeing about our exciting $MAGIC_SOLUTION algorithm.
[1] Well this is computer graphics so approximating integral after integral :)
Posted in Graphics, Hacking, Hardware, Improv, Life, Social, work | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
Now look at this sexy thing here…
I love my g4m1ng ch1×0r!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
Some days at work are great. Today was one of them. At the beginning of the day there was a sudden ‘whiteboard moment’ when someone had a good idea for an exciting new graphics algorithm. Cue a great hour of standing around integrating, estimating, designing and deriving leading to an interesting idea. Then there came a great period of communal hacking leading to a really satisfying end.
This is when I enjoy coding the most.
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Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
Don’t-ya just love procrastination? Yesterday I was going to spend a few moments tarting up my CV[1] so that I can apply for various jobs (the version linked to is heavily weighted in the direction of one particular company). I happened to notice that said company wanted it in either plain text or HTML. I couldn’t just run it through pdftotext and fiddle could I? Oh no. Instead I now have XML-itis with respect to my CV. It is all generated from one single lump of XML that is run through one stylesheet to generate the HTML and another to generate the LaTeX for the PDF. On the up side wirting the HTML myself means I could make it play nicely with the links browser so I could just dump a plain text version easily :).
So after all that I can get back to actually customising the CV :). Now I just need to find a convenient way to explain that UK Universities don’t have grades, my PhD doesn’t actually have any taught component and that my degree didn’t have student-visible per-course marks for each year. Joys :).
In fact I don’t think that’ll be a problem at all really. I can generate a faux list of courses where I got a first and my degree itself ended with a first equivalent.
[1] PDF version
Posted in Hacking, Life, Rants, Technology | No Comments »
Monday, March 20th, 2006
A long lunch break at work today to go and see an events organiser at Homerton college for a show ICE is doing at a conference at the beginning of April. How exciting to actually be asked if we want professional things like mics and light and stuff!
Posted in Improv | No Comments »
Friday, March 17th, 2006
I was randomly browsing and discovered an interesting sounding article on the PhysX processor. For those not in the know the PhysX processor is to dynamics what a graphics card is to graphics. Unfortunately this article is very, very, very wrong. Perhaps the most obvious bit of wrongness is the following.
For the PC Ageia have created a custom processor dedicated to handling physics for much the same reason. According to Ageia, current dual core processors can handle around 1,000 “ridged bodies” whereas the PhysX Physics Processor unit (PPU) can handle up to 32,000.
Ridged bodies? Surely that should be ‘rigid bodies’! The PhysX processor is, after all, a rigid body dynamics chip.
Another thing to note is that our rigid-body engine quite happily churns away at close to 2,000 bodies but then that is because we’re using the power of Geometric Algebra…
Posted in Hardware, Maths, Rants, Technology, work | No Comments »
Friday, March 17th, 2006
Tom’s Hardware, a quite cool but semi-up-itself site has a good article on the making of the film Tron. I’m hankering to fish out the old VHS tape of it I have somewhere now and relive my childhood.
The first time I ever saw Tron was on some cross-channel ferry sometime in, most likely, the late 80s. I remember thinking how cool it was then despite the ship’s ‘cinema’ (actually a telly in a wooden case, the doors of which kept swinging to and fro AFAICR).
Posted in Film, Life, Nostalgia, Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, March 16th, 2006
From a 1up.com story:
Kutaragi stated that the purpose of today’s meeting was not to show any new hardware or games… He did offer some tantalizing new details about the system, though. PS3 will include a 60GB hard drive (which is upgradeable) with Linux preinstalled.
Words cannot express how much I want to have a damn good play with the cell processor…
Posted in Technology, work | No Comments »
Thursday, March 16th, 2006
I’ve just had one of those spams where the subject and text part is randomly generated. The spam subject was ‘etymology Marxist’ (sic). This got me wondering exactly what such a beast would be. We all know about grammar nazis and their characteristics but would an etymology marxist be any better?
I suppose they would suggest that the best way of deciding the origin of words would be as a collective effort. They might propose that certain words and idioms such as ‘raised to the ground’, ’should of’ and ‘aint’ should be ‘correct’ since the proles use them. They would argue that the OED might view an in-print unquoted use of a word as an addition to the language so the OED is perhaps a true etymology marxist.
Posted in Rants | No Comments »
Thursday, March 16th, 2006
Up bright and early this morning after having an interesting period of being semi-awake since 6am. I actually predicted the alarm going off with remarkable accuracy (woke up, thought ‘hmm the alarm should be going off’ and lo and behold it did).
Jennie had fun last night going for dinner with some exciting new-media gaming chix0rs (expect a name drop post from her at some point :)) and I ended up getting semi-squiffy with work when we went to the pub to celebrate the new person arriving and our CTO not being around for another week and a bit.
This brings me onto a classing LiveJournal (or temp.l4.me.uk depending where you read this) wibble about work and my life that I shall hide behind a cut…
(more…)
Posted in Jennie, Life, Wibbles, work | No Comments »