May 19, 2004 General Comments Off on

Submitted my GUADEC paper last Friday, in time for the deadline. Although I finished it at 2am. It’s online here as a .tex and a .pdf, as well as a trivial plug-in that does very little, but does it reasonably correctly.

A couple of factual inaccuracies – shadow tiles have nothing to do with render speed as I say in the paper. It simply means that you are drawing on a copy of a tile, rather than the tile itself, and then all of the tiles get merged up to the “real” tiles in one, undoable, step. Otherwise, if we don’t use shadow tiles when drawing in a plug-in, and we cancel, we are drawing directly on the image’s tiles. Bad stuff.

Also, a consequence of marking tiles as not dirty, even if we are going to draw to them, is that the data for those tiles doesn’t get passed back to the core. This is interesting for multi-pass algorithms like Gaussian IIR, which is the application of a decomposable convolution matrix. So we have an intermediate drawable where we apply a horizontal vector, and on which we apply a vertical vector afterwards.

May 11, 2004 General Comments Off on

Feels good to win at football again. My team has been doing particularly badly this year – we now have a record of 2-2-10 in the league we play in, and lost a couple of matches with double-figure scores against us.

So winning 4-2 against a pretty decent team (even if we didn’t really deserve it – their attack was more wasteful than the French government) makes it all seem worthwhile again.

May 10, 2004 General Comments Off on

Bought lots of clothes for Thomas over the weekend.

Realised that there’s a reason why kids DVDs are much more expensive than adult DVDs in brick & mortar shops (even though they’re around the same price online). DVD companies (esp. Disney) and shops realise that kids have an genetically inbuilt instinctive ability to give their parents headaches until they buy them what they want.

A parent will look at a DVD, automatically put a value on it, compare the value to the price, and either buy or not buy. A kid doesn’t do that. And the value of a kid’s DVD to a parent is the cost of not having a headache all day, so the parents usually cough up.

So far, we’ve been good. There was no way I was going to pay 25 euros for “Winnie the Pooh, the Movie”. And opportunism like that kind of pisses me off. But I guess that’s commerce for you.