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December 31, 2007
New Year's Eve day!
Usually its tradition to work at least half of New Year's Eve day. However, this year we have had the most inclement weather I remember. Inches of snow have been falling and today has been no exception. Instead of work we are just sat in the house waiting for the plow to come by and free us.
We will be out of here before the eve's celebration begin.
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December 30, 2007
Brunch at the Links At Outlook
Cap and I when down to the Links At Outlook for brunch. Les is the head chef there so the food is fantastic. The only problem is eating there is slightly above our means. It is nice to treat ourselves to a fancy meal but we can make a habit of it.
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December 29, 2007
my interest
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December 28, 2007
Transformers on HD-DVD
Cap picked up Transformers on HD-DVD and I had a chance to watch it today. The art style that was picked for the Autobots and Decepticons is visually complicated. So having it display at 1080i brings out a lot of detail of the robots. This detail would probably be lost in standard 480 definition. The modelers and animators put a years of work into these visuals. It is only fair that we get to appreciate their work to its fullest.
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December 27, 2007
Earth Defense Force 2017
Earth Defense Force 2017 is a good example of a game that would be no fun if it did not have two player cooperative mode.
Basically the game revolves around running around Tokyo with bigger and bigger guns killing all manor of giant insects, robots, and UFOs. It is "inexplicably fun" to play. The story is weak and campy but the ability to level a city in the midst of a firefight makes up for it.
Earth Defense Force 2017 is seriously fun to play with friends.
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December 26, 2007
Useless time between Christmas and new years.
The time between December 25 and January 1st is incredibly useless. Nothing ever seems to get done.
I have a few projects at work right now. Chances of any of those getting done before 2008 are slim to none.
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December 25, 2007
Watching movies with Laurie
Laurie and I are now best of friends. I spent my Christmas day hanging out with her watching The Princess Bride. Not a bad way to spend it.
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December 24, 2007
And Christmas is ... done!
I managed to compress an entire seasons worth of holiday cheer into 362 miles and two days.
With this kind of efficiency I may be able to complete Christmas in a day or less next year!
Now I just sit back and relax. Cap has got his favorite Christmas movie, Gremlins. We will watch that till we retire for a long winters nap.
Marry Christmas everyone!
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December 23, 2007
Christmas celebration
I'm driving down to Connecticut to my brothers house for Christmas celebration. For scheduling reasons we are doing this a day early. For little Thorin, Christmas Day will be on the 24th. Lucky little guy.
On the way down I will be stopping at grandparents house for a short visit. I really should get down there more often. They just live south of Boston. It is not that far away but it is a pain in the butt driving down through there.
Car is all packed up and I will be leaving soon.
Posted by binhqx at 12:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 21, 2007
Lightwave UV unwrapping using ClothFX
Newtek has a great tutorial on using the ClothFX plugin to help create UV maps.
I attempted the process on a simple sphere with an image of the earth mapped to it. When the unwrapping process is animated it creates a cool unwrapping effect:
Posted by binhqx at 11:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 20, 2007
Continuous VS Discontinuous UV mapping
There is some confusion about what a continuous and discontinuous UV map are.
A common problem with UV maps generated from a spherical or cylindrical projection is a seam polygon. This occurs because a polygon containing the 360 degree point in the cylinder angle, e.g. has points on one side where the U coordinate is almost 1.0, and on the other side it is just over 0.0. The texture on this polygon is mapped from something like 0.94 to 0.12, so the entire image is squished, backwards onto this polygon. The fundamental reason for this is that the nice continuous projection is actually discontinuous at this 'seam', and a vertex at that point would have to be double-valued, using a 1.0 for one polygon, and a 0.0 for the other.Source: Advanced Guide to UV Mapping
Let me show a example of this phenomenon. This is a UV map of a 36 sided sphere with a picture of the Earth in it:
I have taken the liberty of making the edges with a orange and purple line.
With a discontinuous UV map the polygons at the edge have different values for the same points on different polygons. The texture wraps around the entire sphere and the seams fall on just one edge.
A continuous UV map has only one UV value for each point. This forces one polygon to be used to stretch from one side of the map to the other. The result is a section of the spear will have a compressed and mirrored copy of the entire texture.
Posted by binhqx at 3:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 19, 2007
1000 blog posts
The little counter that says how many blog posts I have written has hit 999. That makes this number 1000!
Quite a few of the posts have been just a picture or a sentence or even just a word. Other posts have been longer. I will have to see where I take things from here.
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December 18, 2007
Email Crashed!
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December 17, 2007
Hanging out with Shanda-panda
Shanda is a short on places to live right now so she will be camping out at LaTour for the week.
Tonight we just hung out and watched movies all night. It is fun to have a new friend to chill out with.
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December 16, 2007
Snowy December
I do not remember last time we got so much snow in a December.
Did I mention that this picture was taken through a old wardrobe we found in the attic?
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December 15, 2007
Ari's birthday
Today I spent the afternoon at my aunti's house with my cute little cousin Ariel. It was her fifth birthday and they through a heck of a party.
Parties are great, even if I only know a few of the people there. Although I think the best part was after everyone went home and I just chilled out with Ari with coloring books and a DVD of Shrek the Third.
Fun after noon!
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December 14, 2007
Advice
It is strange. Sometimes I get the best advice from the people that I least expect it from. How often do you take advice about living from someone who's life is in shambles?
Posted by binhqx at 6:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 13, 2007
shared_ptr and other boost goodness
shared_ptr is a like the auto_ptr. They both keep track of when a object is in scope and delete the object when nothing else is referencing it.
The difference is the only one auto_ptr can keep a reference to object in memory. If the reference is passed to a different auto_ptr, the reference is removed from the first auto_ptr. The shared_ptr can can have multiple instances pointing to the same object. The object will not be deleted from memory until all the shared_ptrs that reference it are deleted or fall out of scope.
I think this will be very helpful in places where multiple parts of a program need to utilize a single resource simultaneously. For example, when rendering multiple polygons that use the same texture data. In this case, using a shared_ptr will alow us to know when there are objects the need the texture to be rendered. The texture will not be removed from memory until all the polygons that use it are gone.
Posted by binhqx at 4:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 12, 2007
auto_ptr is cool!
auto_ptr is a cool little template found in C++ standard library. It is used like a regular pointer, but will automatically deallocate the object it contains when the auto_ptr goes out of scope. This makes a convenient way to put objets out in the heap and not need to remember to clean them up when the function that used them comes to a end. This could get rid of a lot of possible memory leaks.
Posted by binhqx at 4:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 11, 2007
Discontinuous UV maps pains!
Lightwave 6.5 has the option to create discontinuous UV maps. The simplest way to describe a discontinuous UV map is it can have different UV values for the same vertex on different polygons. So when the model is read from the Lightwave file it has two vertex maps for each UV map. The first vertex map is he normal UV map. The second vertex map contains the spacial cases that occur on the seams of a discontinuous UV map. Each one has a vertex and associated polygon with the new UV values. When it comes time to render the UV map polygon it must use the special case UVs if they are available.
The whole thing ended up adding a lot of complication to the lightwave model loading code. We just decided for the mean time we will just not support discontinuous UV map. We will add that feature when we get some free time.
Posted by binhqx at 4:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 10, 2007
Digging in for some serious code refactoring.
The volume of code that is being written here are Medaverse is starting to get quite large. A lot of it is being written quickly to save time. Now seams to be good a time as any to make sure that we have not given our self enough rope to hang ourselves with.
I plan on going through the code and refactoring it. I have a few ideas where just applying a design pattern or two will make the code so much easier to understand.
Posted by binhqx at 2:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 9, 2007
Never use text messaging for important conversations
Text messaging is great for sending those short notes back and forth. Its nice and impersonal, good for transmitting without emotional content.
However, when the time comes to send a important, emotionally charged messages, text messaging fails miserably. So much of the nonverbal subtext is just striped out. It leaves the recipient guessing about the intentions of the sender.
So if you ever have something important to say, do not used text messaging.
Posted by binhqx at 3:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 8, 2007
The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.Source Wikipedia
Not only is it a theory, but there is a protocol suite designed to facilitate primate literature duplication:
RFC 2795
Posted by binhqx at 3:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 7, 2007
To much to drink!
I was planning to a have simple night at Mojitos. A few drinks, some jovial conversation, and plenty of music.
It started out ok. Then few people showed up and started buy me shots and drinks. Of course I have to be courteous and except these gifts. Next thing I know I'm smashed due to having good manners.
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December 6, 2007
Good programing day
There is nothing better then dropping a algorithm into place and it just works the first time it is tested. Not even a syntactic error!
Thats some good programing.
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December 5, 2007
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Cap and I played through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune this weekend. Yes it is a PS3 title. Yes we do have a PS3 at LaTour. This is the only game on the PS3 that I have enjoyed.
The game itself is very well crafted. It flows well and the story and characters are just as well thought out. The gamely mechanics are on pair with any other third person fighter puzzler game. Nothing too special there.
The game is short. Cap and I finished it in just two days. I like games of this length because it does not require dedication of my entire schedule just to play it.
I recommend Uncharted for anyone looking for a fast action packed adventure (and have $500 to buy a PS3).
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December 4, 2007
sum born evil
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December 3, 2007
Thinking politically
On my way home from work today I started to think about what I has seen while watching the latest GOP debate. It was a just panel of fussy old white men who's opinions only varied a few degreases for each other. Instead of debating the merits of there platforms, they just attacked and defended each others integrity. Is if the most important aspect of a political leader is his honesty.
However, the one exception to this homogeneous candidate pool is Ron Paul. It was easy to tell that the candidates have been blind sided by Ron Paul's very different policies to fix our current situations. Especially how he intends to handle the war. This time around the others where ready and made sure that Ron Paul looked like a crazy old hippy that has no idea what reality is.
The prevailing view that America has toward the rest of the world is a faceless/soulless entity outside our borders that wants to do nothing more then destroy our livelihood. The way to save ourselves is to strengthen our borders and preemptively strike and kill the members of this entity before they can do the save to us.
When a individual thinks this way it is paranoid personality disorder. When a nation thinks this way it is nationalism. In contemporary, America it is extolled as patriotism.
Here is a different way of looking at it. There is no formless entity that wants to kill us. There are individuals that want to kill Americans, but these are people, human beings that have reasons and motivations to kill Americans. To protect ours selves we needs to examine their reasons and motivations and find a way defuse them. This could be by compromising, or education, or simply understanding and respecting our differences. The answer is not to intimidate, or terrify into submission, or just kill those who desire to kill us.
One of the oldest stores of human virtue tells us that violence and hate will only create more violence and hate. It is a terrifying cycle that will only end when there is no one left alive to feel the hate, to feel anything. Hate, mistrust, and violence fuel the funeral pyre upon which we lay our shared humanity.
Even I have been brainwashed to believe that this type of though is the domain of whimsical idealist. Perhaps just talking out our problems and free love will not fix the worlds problems, but the unabated destruction of those who have wronged us will only amplify them.
Posted by binhqx at 4:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 2, 2007
A fantastic Sunday
I ended up getting back together with Laurie. So I am in a great mood. A great mood, but exhausted. I am going back to take a nap.
Happy thoughts!
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December 1, 2007
All done moping around
I am through with moping around. Tonight I am going out and just having a good time.
Observation:
Its cold out. Winter arrived on exactly December first this year.
Posted by binhqx at 2:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack