Momentary Lapse

Well I apologize, I actually had a portion of a post typed out and saved in notepad, but have since for some reason deleted it. I have been rather busy with my internships this past weekend, but in my spare time I have mainly been reading and learning new things.

I learned splines/curves, which are pretty neat. You essentially pass a set of points and get the curve that approximates or fits between the middle two with the outer two as weights. I want to play with this in an implementation and write an article on it if I can find the time.

I also found a nice programming slideshow/video from ASM '09, which essentially broke down the current state of things as far as graphics game programming. It was given by a the lead engineer from the Unity team and in essence for any of my future projects I am pretty sure I am going to skip along with Ogre. This will simultaneously allow OpenGL as well as DirectX, and just generally be more agreeable with the things I tend to do. Namely the scene graph and everything, I'm to the point where I'm just creating my own, which is fine, but I'd rather stop re-inventing the wheel at this point - my rate of learning versus grinding is quickly going out of proportion for the time being.

Anyway, that's what my old post was going to be about, but since then I've been reading a lot more and it all kind of blurs as I've read SO much. I've come down with a cold so I've had time to just 'stare read' to pass the time. I really am going to try and take more 'blog breaks' in between readings to help disseminate things and hopefully share more indepth summaries or something of articles; as a bonus it would help my retention. Today for example I've been grooming through More Effective C# (awesome book, btw), specifically the Multi-threading section as it pertains to the tool that I am considering making multi-threaded for my internship. It was a great read, but I should have paused there. The next section, on collections and generics/actions/predicates/lambdas, ALL also (at least sort of could) apply to the things I'm doing, so I read those too. There's just no way I can be retaining everything from these articles by reading them like an addicted magazine reader. At least it's better than reading some magazine telling me I'm fat, haha.

I hope to go through the best ones and put them out in code, cementing my grasp of the concepts they cover. Regardless, I've been doing good about staying focused and really devoting my attention to what I'm reading - it's almost Zen like in a way, so at least that's something.

Sorry for this post lacking in any real content, just wanted to let you know I haven't forgotten about this thing :o)