Cody Russell

Stupid cvs errors

Don’t you just hate those?

I was fixing the smart pointer classes with respect to gcc and Visual C++ 6, and I accidentally committed a fucking massive patch that I’m working on for the terrain engine. D’oh!

Kill Bill

Violent. Bloody. Fun.

I liked it a lot.

For some reason I had really been looking forward to this movie, but I’m not really sure exactly why. I always think positively of Quentin Tarantino as a director, but when I sat down and thought about it I realized I really only liked one of his movies. I didn’t really like Reservoir Dogs and I didn’t like Jackie Brown. So I’m not sure why I think of him as someone I like in a general way.

So I had been looking forward to it. I didn’t really know what it was about for a long time, but I looked forward to it. It just looked cool for some reason, in a way similar to how Pulp Fiction was. Maybe it was the music, I don’t know. So I saw it finally, and I liked it more than I was even expecting to.

Limbs were flying.. pieces of limbs were flying, even. Blood was pretty much all over the place during a large portion of the movie.

A major complaint of mine about Matrix Reloaded was the length of the action scenes. I think I need to revise that complaint after seeing this movie, because there were probably just as lengthy of action sequences, and probably more of them. The short answer is that these didn’t suck like the ones in Matrix Reloaded did. They had style to them, and they kept having style. If they were doing the same moves over and over again, it wasn’t noticeable and certainly not irritating the way it was in the Matrix movie. The action scenes there just got really boring, really fast.

Fucking cool

According to a recent FCC decision, the use of the word “fuck” as an adjective in the phrase, “this is really, really fucking brilliant” by Bono of U2 during the last Golden Globe Awards is neither indecent nor obscene.

Check it:

As a threshold matter, the material aired during the “Golden Globe Awards” program does not describe or depict sexual and excretory activities and organs. The word “fucking” may be crude and offensive, but, in the context presented here, did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. Rather, the performer used the word “fucking” as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation. Indeed, in similar circumstances, we have found that offensive language used as an insult rather than as a description of sexual or excretory activity or organs is not within the scope of the Commission’s prohibition of indecent program content.

Hackings

I found my old code for environmental reflection mapping and integrated it into a NeoEngine class and committed that and a test program for it. I had to fix a bug in the OpenGL render backend for it to work, and so it is now. While I was in there I fixed another bug that has been annoying me for awhile.. skyboxes were being drawn with an ugly seam between each face. Sort of wrecks the illusion that a skybox is supposed to create. =) It’s easy enough to fix, though, using GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE.

Misc

Various stuff

I got Halo for PC (of course!), but it runs quite slowly on my machine so I have to turn all the features down to minimum and play in 640×480 mode. That doesn’t please me immensely. I totally need to upgrade my computer, but it’s going to have to wait a couple months at least before I do.

I found a cool article on fourier transforms. If you’re into that sort of thing, check it out.

I’ve been getting more into Sibelius’ music recently. Four Humoresques, Op.89 for violin and orchestra is great. The third is so cool! There’s a great recording of all of Sibelius’ works for violin and orchestra recorded by Christian Tetzlaff.

It was pointed out to me by Jim Meier that the compass menus I was talking about are more commonly called pie menus. Thanks, Jim.

Half-Life 2 source and keyloggers

So I keep reading that the Half-Life 2 source code was compromised and got leaked onto the net somehow. That’s pretty freaking crazy. Since it was done using a key logger, it makes me wonder what’s going on with that fiasco at Peabody last year where the computer lab administrator was running a keylogger on all the Windows computers. I’d like to ask Cameron, but he never responds to emails so it’s not worth the time to write to him.

Engine developments

There’s a guy who is working on a Python-based game development kit using NeoEngine now. Mattias and I are formulating plans to develop an actual demo pretty soon, and a guy who goes by hanzo on irc is working on some 3d models for us using Blender. If anyone else out there is a 3d artist using Blender, Maya, Realsoft3D, or 3ds Max and is interested in getting some work into a demo, drop me an email.

I took my old environmental reflection mapping code and tried to work it into the core engine, but I need to make some fundamental changes to the material system to get it to work in a sensible way.

OpenOffice

I have to admit that I am quite impressed with OpenOffice 1.1.0 now. I have been wanting to convert my resume from Microsoft .doc to PDF format for some time, but I didn’t really want to shell out the cash for a copy of Adobe Acrobat. But OpenOffice.org just released version 1.1.0 the other day, and it comes with an instant PDF export feature, plus it opened my Microsoft Word file seemingly perfectly. I’m very happy, so I installed it on both Linux and Windows now and I’m going to officially switch to it as my permanent word processor now.

Bach C major suite prelude

I’ve never liked this prelude, but I’ve always loved the rest of the suite. I avoided learning the suite, though, basically just because I didn’t like the prelude. But now I have to learn the prelude for an audition and I am slightly annoyed. But I thought Paul Coletti performed this suite at UTA once, and I remember not disliking it nearly as much when I heard him play it. But I seem to be alone in thinking he did this, because nobody else here thinks he performed it there. I need to go to the library and do some research through their recordings, because I’m certain that I heard him perform it and I’m fairly sure it was there.

I want to listen to that recording because I want to see what it was that he did that I liked better than everyone else. One thing I remember was that he takes very, very little time in between movements. Most people perform Bach and they take way too much time in between the movements, and it makes it really difficult to sit through those recitals. I love Bach suites, but I hate listening to them in recitals usually. Anyway, I know there was something else I liked about his performance.. something specific to the prelude, because that’s the issue at hand. I am only going to be playing that, so time between movements is a total non-issue right now.