Star Wars

mrwise and I saw it last week on Galaxy's digital display. I must say, the digital display does make a difference. I hadn't seen a movie in digital before and the crispness and lack of random spots was noticeable. It was like watching a DVD, except on a giant screen and in much higher resolution.

As for the movie itself, the effects were stunning, of course, and the dialog was better than the last one, though that certainly isn't saying much. It did set up the story for the next 3 films rather nicely, which was satisfying. It definitely left me feeling much better than I did after episodes I and II.

Grazaphics

Spent last weekend rotating, scaling and translating a cube. It's fun, and it's interesting to actually implement the full rendering pipline and all the co-ordinate systems, etc. It's also probably the first time since I started this degree that I've actually used some of the math they tought me for something useful.

It's harder than it looks

mrwise

The Brick Brewery kisses mrwise's ass

June 06, 2005 (link)

Apple on Intel

Wow, this is certainly interesting. Every few years somebody would say "Apple's going to switch to Intel" and everybody would say "yeah, sure, just like Microsoft is going to release a Linux distribution."

But it actually happened. Anybody taking bets on how long it will be before somebody figures out how to run the Intel OS X on normal x86 hardware?

June 09, 2005 (link)

Life

Had lunch with drheld, mag, dcoombs and sfllaw today, at a random burger place in the plaza. Their veggie burger was pretty decent, and as always it was nice to see some Nitiots. Thanks for lunch guys!

June 10, 2005 (link)

Pointers

dcoombs' last post reminded me of a recent question somebody asked on the newsgroup for cs349. Now you must keep in mind that this is a 3rd-year course, with quite a number of prerequisites.

So the question went something like this:

I want to use gettimeofday() to get the current time with high resolution (where "high" in this case means higher than time()). So I do this:

struct timeval *time;
struct timezone *zone;
gettimeofday(time, zone);

And, oddly enough, I get this weird "segmentation fault" dealy when I run my code.

Now, quite frankly, I find this disturbing. And by that, I don't mean to insult the person who asked the question; it is reasonably clear that their coding abilities are not exactly stellar, but that's not my point. My point is that this person is a 3rd-year CS major at Waterloo, and in their first 2 years here they have failed to learn this very basic idea that before you can do something interesting with a pointer you need to make it point at something valid.

How did this happen? How did this person pass all of their courses until now? Don't get me wrong; it's not that I believe that attending this school automatically makes you wonderful or anything, but shouldn't this be raising questions about how students are evaluated? I mean at the end of the day, if a student can't write code, should they really get a CS degree? Sigh.

My only possible explanation is that the person asking the question had the same prof I did for cs246: Mavaddat. If you've ever taken a course with Mavaddat you know that he absolutely cannot answer questions, wouldn't know a C++ class if kicked him in the crotch and is absolutely, unequivocally, without a doubt the worst person on the planet to teach anybody about pointers. The fact that this guy taught cs246 several times makes me incredibly angry. Thankfully, he isn't teaching it any more, and they're even using WvStreams for that course now, so maybe the level of suck will drop. Hey, I can hope.

June 12, 2005 (link)

Résumés

(Note: for the remainder of this entry I will be replacing 'é' with 'e', for the simple reason that I am lazy.)

sfllaw: keep in mind that JobMine requires students to write their resumes in HTML. HTML looks different in every browser (depending on the rendering engine but also on things like font settings). This makes it pretty tough to write a resume where everything lines up perfectly all the time, so at least where layout is concerned I think some leniency is required. If it's things like grammar, spelling and useless content you're talking about, then yeah, there's no excuse :)

June 14, 2005 (link)

Grazaphics

Just finished my 3rd graphics assignment, with a whole 5 hours to spare! How's that for JIT delivery? This assignment was actually really cool; it was hierarchical modelling. So you take a DAG of primitives (spheres and cubes and cylinders in my case; I don't have the teapot primitive yet), traverse it, and push and pop transformations as you go, to (hopefully) generate something interesting.

My "puppet" was Bender from Futurama. I think I did a reasonable job; had I had a bit longer I could have done better with the mouth and limbs, and given him a beer bottle, but I did manage to get the cigar in there and for an assignment I started on Friday, I think it turned out pretty well.

Obligatory screenshot

Life

mrwise and I celebrate after finishing each graphics assignment, so we'll be boozing and foosing it up tomorrow night. My friend thap will also be in town for a few days, so I might actually do something other than assignments for a change.

Pointers

adewherst wrote to inform me that the suck continues with cs246. Apparently they were only using WvStreams briefly, and now barely teach any C++ or pointer stuff at all. Way to suck, guys.

June 17, 2005 (link)

Suspend

Last night, while procrastinating my PMATH assignment, I got suspend working on my laptop. It involved some kernel patchy patchy, but after that it worked remarkably well. It seems to work as well as the suspend worked in OS X on my iBook, so no more reboots for me. Yay!

My recent experience with this laptop has made me realise that Linux has come a long way. A year ago, I wouldn't have expected to be able to buy random x86 laptop and have everything work. Now, it wasn't quite "out of the box," but I chose to run Gentoo. The "shiny thing" distros like Ubuntu and SuSE will undoubtedly have all the tweaks integrated in short order (if they don't already).

And who knows, since Dell is apparently interested in selling OS X on its computers, I might be able to run OS X on this laptop in a year or two. Of course I switched back to Linux since OS X pissed me off too much, but the idea of OS X on a Dell does still kinda warp my brain. I mean really, Apple is using x86 and Microsoft is using PPC (in the XBOX 360). What is the world coming to?

June 20, 2005 (link)

Bad luck

I have the worst luck when it comes to exams at this school. Every term except for one, I've had an exam on the last possible day. And the one term I didn't, it was the second-last day. The tradition continues; PMATH 336 is on August 13th. Punks.

June 22, 2005 (link)

Caffeine

adewherst: I'm afraid you're terribly mistaken. Caffeine is a much better thing to which to be addicted than sugar. Mmmmmmmmmm.. caffeine.. aaauuughghg.

Pants (or rather, lack thereof)

mrwise and I wrote our grazaphics midterm today, pantsless. It was klassy.

June 23, 2005 (link)

Your Inner European is Dutch!

Open minded and tolerant. You're up for just about anything.

Who's Your Inner European?

Well, it is pretty accurate. And I didn't event say I smoke weed in the one overtly obvious question where it was asked :)

School

Just wrote the fourth of my 4 midterms this week. They all went pretty well, including grazaphics, which I thought had gone badly. Now I just have to finish a PMATH assignment and I can stop doing work for 12 hours or so...

Sigh. School in the summer just feels plain wrong. I'm really starting to want to get out of this place, especially since all of my non-coop friends have graduated and people like mag and jim are finishing up, too. Hoh well, just one more term after this one. Just one more. That's what I have to keep telling myself...

June 27, 2005 (link)

Google Scholar

I've been using Google Scholar today researching things for my grazaphics project, and I gotta say, it's pretty damn decent. This is actually the first time I've tried it (I know, as a Googler, I should be ashamed, but I just don't do research that often).

Anyway, if you ever do need to look up a paper, try it! A lot of the papers I found were even available in full.

June 28, 2005 (link)

Same Sex Marriage

The bill has been passed. Finally. It's always nice to see a little less savagery and barbarity in the world.

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