Stupid mailing lists

April 15, 2006 General Comments Off

I’m on this stupid viola mailing list. I used to be on it, then I got so annoyed with the quality of the messages there that I finally quit, and then I joined again awhile back to post a couple messages. Now I’m quickly remembering what a stupid mailing list it is.

It is always full of stupid questions, but the primary ones that used to annoy me the most were:

  • What is your favorite type of strings?
  • What kind of rosin do you use?
  • Can you take your viola on airplanes?

The questions themselves aren’t really that bad. It was the frequency that they came up that annoyed me. But they’re constantly asked by new people who just joined the list and have no idea that the same question has been asked hundreds of times before. So I didn’t hold it against people, but I couldn’t help still being annoyed.

But today a guy posted a question asking how to find sheet music for Amazing Grace for viola. I was so incredibly annoyed.. almost angry. Why? Because the exact same guy posted the exact same question on February 27. Peopled responded to him, and on March 5 he thanked them for their responses and said that he received several
good ideas.

So I responded pretty rudely, and he got mad at me and told me in a private email that all the responses were for “violin or piano” arrangements of Amazing Grace. I went back and looked them up and found that Michael Kimber
responded with a mention of his arrangement for viola and piano, and Alistair Kok recommended the poster look on Last Resort Music. I did a quick search and found an arrangement for viola and piano.

I finally wrote back to him again and apologized for being rude, and I told him there’s an arrangement for viola and piano available from Latham Music. But now I sort of wish I hadn’t apologized for being rude. He should apologize to the list for being a tard.

COLLADA

April 15, 2006 hacking Comments Off

I started developing support for COLLADA in neoengine, in the form of a converter. Mattias convinced me that it’s probably pointless and
unwise to bother trying to make runtime support for it.

I’m taking the route of using Sony’s COLLADA DOM library for now, at least as a starting point. I dislike the design of it, but it’s the fastest way to get support.

One of the biggest motivations for this was knowing that NVIDIA’s upcoming tool, FX Composer 2, is going to support COLLADA documents. This will hopefully give us a very excellent material editor, at least for Windows platforms. Depending on how they design it, it would be awesome if we can get it to run on Linux. This may be possible via Mono because FX Composer 2 is being rewritten in C#. It very likely may still be impossible, depending on what external libraries they P/Invoke to. Then there is also the other obvious issue that we don’t have Managed DirectX on other
platforms.