Archives 2005

Grams was really on her game today, and honestly, I sucked. Came really close to losing every single game, took 4 or 5 shots to sink the black in all three games I won. At one point she had a 4 or 5 ball run. Took 111 pictures on the trip, almost all of them ...

Very pleasant evening tonight. Went to Sara's birthday party, which was populated by interesting, intelligent people who care about the world and the people in it. I wound up talking with quite a nice variety of people, from a bookseller and her (paper) game developer husband (he's given up hope that Americans can ever learn ...

Have to be careful lest I create a photo-blog (no-one wants that!) For those in other areas, yes, this is what downtown Toronto (particularly the Forest Hill area) looks like in Winter.

Continuing to play with the camera. Very impressive for still-life shots (though I haven't much to use for subject-matter). Getting a better feel ...

As regular readers (all four of you) will know, I've been intending to buy a new digital camera to replace the one for which I traded my scanner (sight-unseen) many months ago. So, today I finally made the time to go down to College Street and pick one up.

As intended, I bought the Powershot ...

Went to a friend's birthday party tonight. Was held at the Trane Studio (a bar of sorts). The music was good (live, for the most part), no complaints there. It's just that it was so loud that the only way to make oneself heard was to scream in one another's ears. It only took 30 ...

Spent part of my day trying to tease out answers as to why Cinemon went berserk last night, acting as though the network was experiencing sporadic failures all over the joint. When I thought to post my musings, Bryan noted that, yes, there had been sporadic failures all over the network.

Which got me thinking; ...

Wound up rebuilding a friend's machine on Tuesday night. Unfortunately, it was a very slow machine, so it took far longer than I was hoping. She was asleep by the time I was ready to start configuring the email client, so I just left it for her. Oops. I use a hardware firewall (and Mozilla), ...

Added code to cycle through defined viewpoints in a VRML97 file, to adopt the specified fieldOfView of the viewpoint, and to respect the "jump" flag in deciding whether to update position and rotation.

I think with that I'm basically done tinkering with the Viewpoint support. It's by no means a full VRML97 viewpoint implementation, but ...

Have been doing all of our testing/development work with a partially-specified hierarchy provided by ACI. The change last week, which I thought of as creating an over-specified hierarchy in the demo/testing code had actually come darn close to simulating precisely a normal hierarchy. The extreme slowdown turns out to be a real effect that we ...

Developing Cinemon got really slow sometime late last week, mostly because of the more aggressive scanning parameters and the larger physical map. On the real system these don't have that much of an effect, but the demo/dev system is just crawling. Instead of a 20s cycle it's become a 3 or 4 minute cycle. That ...