bsod’s braindumps

Beer vs. Whisky

I don’t kniw what it is, but good beer (afflingen) gets me drunk faster than bad whiskey (jonny walker red label). And there are differences… being drunk on beer is seems to be much more happy somehow. This all brings me to the topic of ‘hacking the internal voice’. Your internal voice talks in a certain language. If you master a certain language, you can let your internal voice talk in that language, which is a more efficent way to talk to people speaking that language, because you leave out the translation part. I suppose a foreign language is something like a subroutine. You can switch it on and of, at will. Just imagine the following.. you can have your internal voice speak english, or you can have your internal voice speak duch, and translate the thing you thought of in dutch into english. The latter case is more work, but the fact you can switch this combined with the idea that the ‘english’ part of my brain is the same for internal voice and ‘translation’ uhh well. you get the idea. Oh by the way, i’m ugly.

What The Hammock

It’s been a busy few days. I’ve been hanging out with people, mostly. I must admit I didn’t even go to one single lecture/presentation. I suppose it doesnt really matter because they are all available on rehash, as mp4 video. Hanging in the hammocks is nice aswell, but you really want wireless to work, for that. While I’m writing this, I hear the last few applauses from the main tent, where the closing ceremony is being held. Quite a few people have left already, and we’re gonna go in a few hours aswel. Basically four days of typing and talking are over. It’s a pity these kind events dont last longer The food was excellent, beer available 24/7, and the network is mostly up, apart from wiki which didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to.

I did attend to the pgp keysigning party, and that’s something good. I’ve done some preparation for it, and was happy it all worked out. I still have to do the actual signing for all those people, but I’m gonna do that when I get home and am showered, shaven, fed, sober and not sleep-deprived.

Arghh pgp keysigning party

This is a bummer, they closed subscription to the keysigning party before I was able to subscribe, so i’ve printed the list, it’s checksums, and a load of strips for my own pgp key info.

Nikon Coolpix 7600

I made myself a bit poorer today, because I bought a Nikon Coolpix 7600 digital camera. I’m a beginner at digital photography, but not a complete n00b. This baby gives me high quality photo’s, is easy to use, and not too big. As a bonus, it can do video and audio recordings. Because of the video option, I bought an insane 1 GB memory stick with it.

I’ve been playing with most of the options for a little while now, and I like what I bought. I like the way it presents itself as a USB drive, it’s easy presets. (Especially the ‘museum’ preset, which is ment for places where you are not allowed to use the flashlight.) A nice bonus is the voice recording option, which I’m surely gonna use at WTH to do a sneaky recording of someone Basically this camera gives me excellent jpegs, good quicktime movies, and okay voice recordings as .wav files.

Getting ready for WTH

Allright, it’s time to start thinking about What The Hack. The wiki is the biggest source of information right now, and I suppose a wiki is perfect for events like this. It also seems that one needs a DECT phone. Allrighty then, I’ll take the smallest one. The program looks nice, I’ve seen several talks and workshops I want to attend to. The IRC channel is also nicely crouded. So all is well. It’s a pity that the dns for my superstring.nl will not be fixed before the event, which is quite unfortunate. I’ll have to attend the PGP keysigning party with an email address that will only work in the future:(

.dds compressed textures

What are .dds textures? They are a compressed texture format originating from DirectX, having:
* reduced video memory usage
* artist modifyable mipmaps
as their main features.

When I tried to port an old program that uses .dds texture files, I had a problem. dds files are not supported by OpenSource implementations because it is legally entangled. What this means is that you cannot have .dds files as the only source for the textures, and for each .dds file, you must have a fallback ‘normal’ .tga or .png texture. This normal texture has a different memory footprint, and dont get me started on the mipmaps. And storing the same texture twice is bad news.

But this is only on disk. The whole point of compressed textures is that they are stored in compressed format into the video board memory. So you can have more textures without swapping to main memory.

If you are like me, and only code for opengl 1.5+ capable video boards, you can safely assume the presence of the GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc extension and be done with it.

It’s a shame that such an important feature is not free for all to use. But hey, if a DirectX feature creaps into OpenGL, you can expect it to run only on Windows.

C++ interface for OpenGL

OpenGL has this convention of encoding the type of the arguments into the function name. For example, we have glColor3f(), which specifies a color. gl (opengl api) Color (the actual name) 3f (this function takes 3 Floating points).

This just begs for a C++ solution. class gl { inline void Color(float r, float g, float b) { ::glColor3f(r,g,b); } … };

Integer values are used throughout OpenGL as constants. GL_ADD for example. in a C++ class you could have an: enum { ADD = 0×0104 }; and gone are all the GL_ and glXX() prefixes and suffixes.

*sigh* If only there where no tokens starting with a number, like GL_3D. And as far as the inline functions go: there is a glColor3fv(GLfloat* v) and a glColor4fv(GLfloat* v) and NO way you’re gonna express that difference in C++. So guys, just use the good old C interface and be done with it.