Cody Russell

Happy Thanksgiving

Spent some time with family. Watched Detroit make like three interceptions in a row against Green Bay, although I don’t really like or understand football so it made no difference to me.

Installing stuff

Installing Visual C++ .NET under Windows XP again today. It’s amazing how slow this installer is.

I installing Linux 2.6.0-test10 recently, but I haven’t yet gotten my NVIDIA drivers working under it yet, so I’m still using the “nv” drivers with no GLX or GL goodies. According to minion.de, there are some issues with certain AGP chipsets in 2.6.0′s AGPGART, but I am told that my VIA chipset has been pretty thoroughly tested and doesn’t have any known issues now, so this may not be the problem. I’m going to try to rebuild my kernel with AGPGART as an external module and see if using NvAGP set to “1″ in XF86Config with nvidia.o unloaded from the kernel solves the problem.

New cubemapping support

I ditched the old envmap code in favor of some new lower-level cubemap/texcoord gen code that doesn’t rely upon Cg programs. It should be faster, more portable, and ultimately more useful.

Fedora Core 1

I just switched my Linux system from using Red Hat 9 over to using Fedora Core 1, and so far it seems to be really nice. There are a few bugs in it, apparently. I reported one myself. It’s still quite nice, and seems to run a little bit faster than Red Hat 9 was running, plus it has updated packages for everything I like to use. It includes OpenOffice 1.1.0, which I absolutely love (especially the PDF export feature), gcc 3.3.2, GNOME 2.4, and lots of other cool stuff. The installer also uses the correct X driver for GeForce FX cards, which the Red Hat 9 installer didn’t seem to do, and so I had to use the text-mode installer to get RH9 to install. It also includes a program called yum for updating RPM packages, which is very nice.

Chema

I’m very sad to hear about Chema. I didn’t really know him, but we had talked on #gnome and #mono many times before and he was always really cool. He will be missed.

GNOME/gcj/Java

mjw (re GNOME/gcj/Java): That is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time! =)

Car problems

No, not more of them. I was hanging out with Gerry and Shannon last night, and she has the same type of car I have, only a year newer in model, and she said she’s had all the same problems I have had. So it seems that they’re common problems among drivers of this car.

Kasia writing newspaper articles

I found an article Kasia wrote for some newspaper in Michigan, about some concert that was going on there. That is sort of cool.

Matrix Revolutions

Feh.

Vardi painting

Cathy bought a new painting by Emanuel Vardi, and it’s really nice. He made it for her personally, and she’s very happy with it. If she’ll let me, I’ll post a photo of it online sometime. He also did an amazing work that now resides in the Primrose Archive at BYU. I love that painting.

I guess he’s hanging out in Dallas right now and Cathy told him about VLA THE IMPALER and she said he’s interested in seeing it. Vardi played on an Iizuka viola for years, and when I played on it at Mr Iizuka’s shop I thought it was, by far, the best viola I had ever played on or heard. Vardi’s viola was for sale, but he wanted more than twice the amount that Mr Iizuka was selling a new viola for, so I asked Mr Iizuka to make a viola very much like Vardi’s, and so became VLA THE IMPALER.

Star Wars: Clone Wars

So yesterday I made sure that I would be home at 7pm so I could watch the first episode of Clone Wars on Cartoon Network. It was cool, I guess, but I sort of assumed it was going to be a 30 minute long cartoon episode, or something thereabouts. No, no! It was a 5 minute short. That was quite disappointing after I had gone out of my way to be home for it. So it turns out the series is going to be something like 30 episodes, each about 5 minutes long. wtf. Who does that anyway?

dangermaus: GPU seems like a poor choice of a name for that project, since it already has a very established meaning. That’s like trying to name a project “CPU” or “RAM” or “LCD” or something.

Matrix Revolutions

I’m going to see it tonight with Gerry and Shannon, but I don’t have high expectations for it. We’ll see.

My mom is using Linux and GNOME

I’ve got my mom using Linux and GNOME these days, and she is really happy with it. It’s a little surprising I guess, but she finds it easier to deal with than Windows 98. I suspect that Windows 2000 or XP would be a different matter, but she is content to use GNOME and Linux for now. Her computing needs are pretty simple, so she never comes across the rough edges. I’m not exactly sure why Win98 was so difficult for her to use, but she claims it was.

New texture management

I’m playing around with some new texture management code in NeoEngine now, and it should make dealing with things like cubemaps and spheremaps simpler.

New shader management

I haven’t actually started on this yet, but I’ve been giving some thought to redesigning the entire pipeline programming part of NeoEngine to be more robust. Right now we stick to Cg for all vertex and fragment programs, but this is could easily be something that holds us back in the future. As a part of this design I’d like to take into consideration older features like texture shaders and register combiners. Those might have to fall into a separate area of development though.

Reading through stuff..

Josh and I got together last night to read through some music. We read through the entire “Arpeggione” sonata, which was fine until the last movement where it got hard and I need to practice. Then we read through Schumann’s “Märchenbilder”, which was cool except the third movement is hard to read up to tempo unless you’ve been practicing it recently. It was pretty fun. We went to go hear Brandon’s jazz group play after that. It was cool.

Chamber music

Rehearsals for Brahms and Dvorak were cancelled all week, which sort of sucked. Tomorrow I’m reading through Mozart g-minor piano quartet with a different group. That should be cool, because I like that quartet a lot. I also might be playing Schubert two-cello quintet sometime, which would be great. I love Schubert chamber music.

Michelle getting married

I’ve been talking to an old friend of mine, Michelle Mitchell, through email recently and she’s getting married sometime soon. That’s really cool for her. She’s a really good violinist, and now she’s mostly teaching. I expect that she’s probably a really good teacher. Anyway, I’m very happy for her that she’s getting married. Congrats.

Strings breaking

I keep having Helicore strings break after a short lifetime recently, and so I finally got annoyed enough to write to them and complain. They told me to send all the broken strings to them and they’ll replace them. All I have now is a C and a G, so I’m sending both of those to the D’Addario company. They said it may help them diagnose why the strings broke and hopefully help them improve the quality of their strings. I definitely hope it helps, because I like the way Helicore strings sound.

Sally got a full set of Larsen strings on her viola recently, and apparently it sounds absolutely fantastic. I’d like to try out a set also, but they’re quite expensive. I’ve been using a Larsen for my A for many years now, and for the longest time Larsen only made three strings: viola A, cello A, and cello D. But apparently now they have full sets of strings for both cello and viola, and I’m eager to try them out sometime.

Working wireless!

802.11g Wireless PCI card working in Linux finally

I finally got this Linksys PCI card working in Linux by using the Linuxant DriverLoader and the Windows drivers for the Linksys wmp54g card. This is so cool.

I wonder if they will make a similar product for other types of drivers, like printer drivers or something.

NeoEngine 0.6.2 Release

The latest release of NeoEngine came out today. Basic terrain code is in, environmental reflection mapping is in, new build system that supports static library builds is in, and numerous other cool things.

Being really, really pissed off

I found out a few days ago that my car’s state inspection sticker expired last month, so I took the car to be inspected and have the sticker updated. Well, the car failed because it was missing this little translucent piece of plastic in front of the driver’s side headlight that they called the headlight lense.

So, I went to buy another headlight lense at the dealership, but they say you can’t buy just that, you have to buy the entire headlight housing and it cost $80. It would have been another $50 on top of that except I decided to install it myself.

So I take the car back to the place to get it re-inspected today and they tell me that now the passenger’s side headlight lense is missing. WHAT THE FUCK. I’m beginning to be of the opinion that the place that does the inspections is knocking out my headlights on purpose for some reason, but I obviously can’t prove that.

I’m getting really pissed off, and really frustrated because that is a fucking expensive little piece of plastic, and the odds are not high that both of those will just fall off right at inspection time.