July 2010
1 post
Quick thoughts on Virtual Textures
1) I’d assume it wouldn’t be a bad idea to lay out the individual pages along a Hilbert or Peano curve, ensuring locality. Possibly one per MIP level?
2) Determining what to page in - shouldn’t we just do that one frame delayed? Operate on the current set of paged in tables, use the result of current render for next set of tables.
3) Ideally, that would mean no separate render...
September 2009
2 posts
Find all PPC libraries, binaries and applications... →
The second one from Kevin Ballard finds nothing for me….
Procedural Content Generation →
An entire Wiki on procedural content generation - not that there’s too much there, but it’s a good start if you want to delve into the subject.
May 2009
5 posts
SKYHOOK Wireless: Application Developers >... →
Who knew - skyhook actually makes their wireless location API available to developers. Since I don’t see any other way they are making money, I guess there is money in selling API keys these days. (Which really just means access to data.)
The Desert of Profile APIs
I’ve been looking a little bit into the APIs for social apps that let you modify your own profile, and it’s an amazing desert. They are non-existent, incomplete (changing your profile pic is frequently left out), shoddy, you name it.
“OpenSocial” seems to sort-of, kind-of allow it. It is possible that the newUpdatePersonAppRequest actually is capable of handling updating...
Attention Management - take2
There are quite a few really nifty desktops out there - but I never realized why anybody would use them. After all, screen real estate is *valuable*
The Mac’s dashboard is a first step in providing these widgets without impacting user experience. With a multi-monitor setup, it would be great if the “unused” desktop could slowly fade in the background, to be replaced by your...
Attention Management
I spent the last year or so thinking a lot about managing where my attention goes. While I love reading hundreds of RSS feeds, twittering, facebooking, etc, it’s simply not practical to do it all the time.
So far, I mostly considered how to filter wheat from chaff. But it occurs to me that there is a second part to attention management - how busy am I right now, and how important is what...
geisha house - I'd love to try it →
Themed Sushi bar - how can you be more Hollywood? ;)
April 2009
6 posts
What's the point of desktop backgrounds?
That’s one of the mysteries of life for me. I mean, why spend time on beautifying the one thing in your life that you shouldn’t see?
There’s never enough screen real estate as-is, so what’s the point in putting a picture on it?
Screensaver, I can possibly see - although even there, I wonder why you’d spend time looking at a screen if there’s nothing to...
Nihilogic : Canvas Visualizations of Sorting... →
Incredibly cool visualization of sort algorithms
“This is not idiomatic code, this is idiotic code!”
– Facebook | Rachel Blum
Horse head pillow →
A better web search/link manager
And still, there is no decent tool that actually leverages the hard work lots of people put in cataloging their links in delicious, furl and friends.
Obvious features that I’d like to see and never have:
* Learn about synonyms & words that cover similar areas. If I search for rendering, graphics is also a likely candidate
* Give us tools to *manage* our tags. I’ve archived...
“and all these problems we struggle with were solved 40 years ago by people who...”
– Quinn Dunki
March 2009
13 posts
Excellent overview of Open Source Game Development... →
Gradual Typing in Programming Languages →
Yes! This is where programming languages *must* head. The freedom of dynamic typing and the safety of static typing! (As opposed to C++: Freedom of static typing and safety of dynamic typing)
Text relevance visualization
I wonder how a twitter client (or really, a client for any online conversation) would look like if it would
a) it would grade posts by relevance to you personally. (Karma, Bayesian filtering - pick your poison)
b) would slowly fade out less relevant text via both size and font colors - maybe even similar to the OS X dock effect. (I.e. your current focus gets the most attention)
Setting up a Symbol Server →
Punch, brothers, punch →
Text Embossing Technique With CSS | Steve Reynolds... →
WatchUbigraph: Free dynamic graph visualization software
Kay's K9s: Needle Felted Cats →
Awesome cat miniatures - never seen anything this lifelike
Easy visualization of SQL schemas →
Always wanted to visualize your schema? SQLFairy will come to you at night ;)
More Perforce Speedup; Perforce & Games →
Presentation from Guerilla Games on how to better use P4 for game development at a large scale. Also, plenty of scripts to make your life easier.
Cross-posting from Tumblr to del.icio.us
I post many of my links here, since I usually like having them accessible in blog format. At the same time, del.icio.us is great for searching for links. I’d love a cross-posting solution that picks up tumblr links and sends them to delicious, magnolia, etc.
Perforce Knowledge Base: TRACK2SQL →
Ever wanted to make your perforce server faster? You need to read the logs, and it’s a pain to do so. This script transforms them to SQL, so you can easily write queries against your logs
http://kb.perforce.com/P4dServerReference/Performan... →
Rant of the week
Talking about sloppy practices on the job:
Pay attention to spelling. And while we’re at it, know about your business model .It’s a SKU, not a skew.
If you have to use a new and hip language, be sure you actually understand said language. (I.e. if you use Ruby and constantly check if your objects are of the right class, you FAIL)
If you ever hardcode computer/file names, I will not...
October 2008
2 posts
Parsing VS.NET .sln solution files
There really seems to be no good library for parsing .sln files - that’s a pity. There are plenty of things I’d like to do with .sln files via a scripting language, and I just can’t do them.
There are some hacks, i.e. the removal/readding of sourcecontrol bindings: John Robbins’ Blog : Working Offline with TFS
As a starting point, there’s also some code that...
A better code search
It would be rather interesting to see *local* code searches move from pure substring matching to a more intelligent approach - i.e. identify what the user could possibly be looking for, prioritize those search results.
Always put declaration, definition first, then sites referencing it, *then* substrings.
Also, it would be nifty to exclude similar results like google does. Codase is going in...
June 2008
3 posts
Custom Techmeme?
Having a customizable TechMeme would be a very nifty thing - give custom weights to individual feeds, be able to exclude certain sites, slant it towards your own interests….
InfoQ: Boo: a First Class Language in Visual... →
More and more, people are starting to take advantage of the VS.NET IDE integration. I’m at least aware of this and WoW development.
Wonder if Apple will put up a counterpoint to this…
Bloom Filters: Designing a Spellchecker « I POWER... →
Nice short description of bloom filters. Great data structure for quick lookups into large data sets. Tuneable set of false positives
Makes me somehow think I can abuse this for large-scale data management. If I just knew how….
May 2008
5 posts
JSon via LUA?
Just struck me - why are we re-inventing formats in LUA if we have JSon? There’s even a little parser at: http://www.chipmunkav.com/downloads/Json.lua with what seems like a BSD style license
txt2re: headache relief for programmers :: regular... →
Excellent example-based regular expression builder
Execute a function in any Win32 DLL - Reflection... →
And more unmangling info. I might take a stab at this this weekend
vc language Re: MSVC C++ name demangling →
Interesting links on the name demangling issue for C++ and MSVC
C/Invoke Website: Lua Binding Documentation →
A fascinating idea - provides the ability to bind C functions in a DLL via LUA, so you can dynamically load them. This sounds like a wonderful idea for C/C++ unit testing - bind functions to your scripting language of choices, then run the tests without an extra link step. Add to that the ability to actually parse mangled names, and you should be able to create bindings to most C++...
April 2008
2 posts
pocketguitar on the iPhone →
Have virtual guitar sessions on your iPhone
Tagged Tags
I just wonder what will happen if user can tag tags, not only content. I.e. if I talk on my blog about Ruby, it’s also a talk about (programming) languages. So I’d go and tag ‘Ruby’ as ‘programming’ and language. Seems a useful concept to me, yet nobody has done that so far?
November 2007
28 posts
Pastry & Dessert Places in L.A.
Orchid Bakery 1927 Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles 310-441-4420 Recommended: Napoleons Also, Godiva @ Century City. Try the Hazelnut biscuit Juniors, on Westwood Blvd. just north of Pico, is supposed to have excellent Chocolate Cake
midomi - find a tune by humming it →
2 GB SD Memory card with... →
Awesome. Let’s get rid of USB cables!
The Nerd Handbook →
Awesome description of how your average techie thinks and works. Want to understand us? Read this!
Crayon Physics Deluxe - awesome 2D physics game in... →
Stochastics and Stocks. (Stockastics, if you will)
Interesting idea - is the previous evenings trading and the next mornings trading statistically correlated? I’d love to find it out, but first, I’d need intra-day historical trading data. Wish I knew where to get that…
A better search engine
It would be really nice to have a search engine that was capable of searching multiple sites. Start off with Google, add in del.icio.us, flickr, whatever site you think appropriate. Give preference to pages already referenced by you. (Basically, a way to influence PageRank with your own opinions)
“I hope you weren’t gonna lick my mouse, even if you’re healthy”
– Overheard in the office…
Nifty Review of Orange Box →