Friday, June 6, 2008
Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'
Acquired a book on rotations and quaternions. At last, the parametric ball will be mine to toy with, bitches. Expect some kind of demo to come of this.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Happy Birthday, Sara
Happy Birthday, Sara! Need birthday blog posts. Sorry everyone went out of town just in time for it.
Sprezzatura
You would probably like to know this word.
Sprezzatura: a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it
Whether this involves being an asshole about it is a decision left to the courtier.
Sprezzatura: a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it
Whether this involves being an asshole about it is a decision left to the courtier.
Working in the Dark
I'm using slides as a primary resource to assemble my own presentation. Reading the slides has raised questions, and I have no direct way of answering them. I'm beginning to detect the faint aroma of Engineering by PowerPoint.
--
comp.lang.c++ occasionally poses C++ questions I haven't been able to answer. This is concerning.
I suppose I consciously avoid facing some of these issues by my design and development style. I cite this phenomenon as the big reason why C++ amateurs stay amateurs and don't necessarily realize it. That said, I've never worked on a "big" C++ project that required things like overriding new and delete operators, passing custom allocators to STL objects, or doing anything that really required virtual base classes and multiple inheritance. Having never faced those issues, I haven't been exposed to the sort of deep and nuanced language and implementation issues, and haven't received the educational benefit of trying to solve them.
--
I want to setup an installation of TRAC or some similar bug tracking resource. It'd be a good way to organize thoughts and fix other people's bugs. Ahem.
--
Whatever happened to Linkwell?
--
comp.lang.c++ occasionally poses C++ questions I haven't been able to answer. This is concerning.
I suppose I consciously avoid facing some of these issues by my design and development style. I cite this phenomenon as the big reason why C++ amateurs stay amateurs and don't necessarily realize it. That said, I've never worked on a "big" C++ project that required things like overriding new and delete operators, passing custom allocators to STL objects, or doing anything that really required virtual base classes and multiple inheritance. Having never faced those issues, I haven't been exposed to the sort of deep and nuanced language and implementation issues, and haven't received the educational benefit of trying to solve them.
--
I want to setup an installation of TRAC or some similar bug tracking resource. It'd be a good way to organize thoughts and fix other people's bugs. Ahem.
--
Whatever happened to Linkwell?
Inappropriate at Any Speed
AndyKerr on academic compilers during today's project-wide meeting:
"That depends on how pluggable their backends are . . . so to speak."
In other news, Shooter's sound effects were totally better than The Bourne Supremacy's. I don't know how the Academy passed it over.
"That depends on how pluggable their backends are . . . so to speak."
In other news, Shooter's sound effects were totally better than The Bourne Supremacy's. I don't know how the Academy passed it over.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Newsgroup fun
From comp.lang.c:
No requirement at all.
> Why should it? There is no requirement anywhere
> (afaik) to have a fully comforting compiler.
Even though it's only May, I'm already putting that in the running for Best Typo of the Year.
No requirement at all.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Random DC Photos
Here is a selection of images taken with my 640x480 camera phone since my arrival. I apologize for their quality. I didn't spend a lot of time formatting things, so you may have to right-click on each image and select 'View Image' to get the right most columns of pixels.
My house.
My desk.
Steps of the Jefferson Memorial.
Jefferson himself. He owns joo metaphorically, and, in the case of his slaves, quite literally.
My glorious steed parked near the steps of the Capitol. Together, we are like one, impatient spirit.
The Capitol, workplace of our country's most collectively despised and yet honored citizens.
The Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roberts was clearly not in the house this day, for it is not overflowing with dancing hoes and playas eager to sip Tanqueray with the man.
Pro-life douches. Some might say it's noble and brave that they're standing up for what they believe. To these I say that no one gets commendation for being a strong-willed dumbass. To earn praise, you also have to be right. If these assholes really wanted to reduce the number of abortions that took place in this country, they'd be lobbying for subsidized birth control and sex education that acknowledges the possibility of sex. Assholes. Oh man.
A Lunar Module in the National Air & Space Museum. This is a genuine flight article that would have been flown on one of the later Apollo lunar missions. These missions were canceled to save money and a Saturn V to launch Skylab.
This is the camera from Surveyor 3. Surveyor 3 was an unmanned spacecraft that landed softly on the Ocean of Storms (a lava flow on the Moon) in 1967. It took photographs and scraped the surface with a retractable robotic arm (not unlike Mars Phoenix is doing now a bit further from Earth). In 1969, the crew of Apollo 12 landed several hundred yards away, approached it, took photographs of the occasion, and removed the camera mounted on the top surface of the lander. It now sits on display in the Air&Space Museum facing ugly tourists instead of an incredible panorama of Surveyor Crater on the surface of the Moon.
Iwo Jima Memorial. This is on my route to the Memorial Bridge between downtown Arlington and Arlington National Cemetery, so I get to see it a lot. I always stop to gaze for a minute. It's a pretty powerful monument and something large and imposing to live up to.
--
There are additional images in this directory that I didn't believe my captions could do justice. Four photos contain the text on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial which you can read and obtain context from the wikipedia article.
--
Update
Inside of the original propeller spinner for the Spirit of St. Louis. The first part of Lindbergh's flight was to fly from San Diego, California, to Long Island, New York. From there he would fly to Le Borget Field in Paris. When he landed in Long Island, cracks in the propeller spinner (above) were discovered, and a new one was quickly manufactured. Since this one was intended to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, people involved with the project [construction of the plane, fund raising, flight planning, etc] signed their names to the inside. The swastika in the center surely receives much attention, but in fact it has no relation to the Nazi emblem. It's simply a symbol that has been around for thousands of years meant to convey good luck. This version differs from what later became the official Nazi insignia in two distinct ways: it is not rotated 45 degrees, and the arms of the swastika are oriented in the opposite direction. Clearly, I took a photo of it anyway because everyone loves the hint of a good scandal.
/Update
My house.
My desk.
Steps of the Jefferson Memorial.
Jefferson himself. He owns joo metaphorically, and, in the case of his slaves, quite literally.
My glorious steed parked near the steps of the Capitol. Together, we are like one, impatient spirit.
The Capitol, workplace of our country's most collectively despised and yet honored citizens.
The Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roberts was clearly not in the house this day, for it is not overflowing with dancing hoes and playas eager to sip Tanqueray with the man.
Pro-life douches. Some might say it's noble and brave that they're standing up for what they believe. To these I say that no one gets commendation for being a strong-willed dumbass. To earn praise, you also have to be right. If these assholes really wanted to reduce the number of abortions that took place in this country, they'd be lobbying for subsidized birth control and sex education that acknowledges the possibility of sex. Assholes. Oh man.
A Lunar Module in the National Air & Space Museum. This is a genuine flight article that would have been flown on one of the later Apollo lunar missions. These missions were canceled to save money and a Saturn V to launch Skylab.
This is the camera from Surveyor 3. Surveyor 3 was an unmanned spacecraft that landed softly on the Ocean of Storms (a lava flow on the Moon) in 1967. It took photographs and scraped the surface with a retractable robotic arm (not unlike Mars Phoenix is doing now a bit further from Earth). In 1969, the crew of Apollo 12 landed several hundred yards away, approached it, took photographs of the occasion, and removed the camera mounted on the top surface of the lander. It now sits on display in the Air&Space Museum facing ugly tourists instead of an incredible panorama of Surveyor Crater on the surface of the Moon.
Iwo Jima Memorial. This is on my route to the Memorial Bridge between downtown Arlington and Arlington National Cemetery, so I get to see it a lot. I always stop to gaze for a minute. It's a pretty powerful monument and something large and imposing to live up to.
--
There are additional images in this directory that I didn't believe my captions could do justice. Four photos contain the text on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial which you can read and obtain context from the wikipedia article.
--
Update
Inside of the original propeller spinner for the Spirit of St. Louis. The first part of Lindbergh's flight was to fly from San Diego, California, to Long Island, New York. From there he would fly to Le Borget Field in Paris. When he landed in Long Island, cracks in the propeller spinner (above) were discovered, and a new one was quickly manufactured. Since this one was intended to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, people involved with the project [construction of the plane, fund raising, flight planning, etc] signed their names to the inside. The swastika in the center surely receives much attention, but in fact it has no relation to the Nazi emblem. It's simply a symbol that has been around for thousands of years meant to convey good luck. This version differs from what later became the official Nazi insignia in two distinct ways: it is not rotated 45 degrees, and the arms of the swastika are oriented in the opposite direction. Clearly, I took a photo of it anyway because everyone loves the hint of a good scandal.
/Update
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