Cody Russell

Ying xiong (Hero)

I went to see this film yesterday, and absolutely loved it. As you expect, it has a lot of the style of Crouching Tiger and some of the older Hong Kong action movies. It’s absolutely beautiful and has some of the most brilliantly-used CG effects I’ve seen in a movie, but without being so in-your-face about it like most American movies try to be these days (read: Matrix, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings). Naturally, the choreography is pretty stunning as well. I’ve been sort of disappointed with the kind of movies Jet Li has been making for the past few years, and so it’s really great to see him work in this movie. And, as always, Zhang Zi-yi is absolutely gorgeous in this movie!

Engine hacking

Support for OpenGL Shading Language went into cvs several days ago, and it’s working perfectly. I’m happy that’s done. I started working on a command-line utility for working with chunk files and needed a nice way of doing argument parsing, so I started working on a template-based method of handling them yesterday. There are still a couple things in the design that need to be worked out, but it’s mostly very good now I think. It fits very well with the existing application framework too.

Photos

Sorry, they’re still not up. I want to integrate the photo display with the CGI scripts for this webpage, and just haven’t had time to work on that yet. I’ll try to get to it later this month.

Opera

We had a relatively very nice performance of Rossini’s Barber of Seville last night. I’ve been having problems with one person in the orchestra, and those problems aren’t going away.. but everyone around that person managed to ignore the Bad Things that were going on well enough to pull off a good performance. This is also an outdoor opera performance, and the weather was particularly in our favor last night. The instruments stayed in tune much better than they typically do. Since it’s an outdoor thing, I decided not to use VLA THE IMPALER, my beautiful Iizuka viola. It makes me sad not to play on that viola, but I would be more sad if something bad happened to it.

I think the cast of this opera is very good. In particular, I think Matt Boehler (Don Basilio) and Daniel Teadt (Figaro) are really excellent.