Very busy at the moment. My work is going great - If I get around to it I’ll put some screenshots up soon. My parents and sister and her boyfriend are coming over to Sweden for the first time tomorrow so there is quite a bit to do to get everything ready for them.

However in a short break, while browsing the web for some billboard style images (you’ll see why when you see my project…) I came across these beauties…

All were found via a Google image search that found this page.

So sad. So sad.

You know, I’m doing and have done lots of ninja coding on my project, stuff that I’m even pleased with, but you know what? Hardly anyone will actually ever see it and fewer people will care about it. [a single tear rolls down my cheek]

Maybe I’ll release it all to the world when it’s done and wait for the adoration of the masses to arrive at my doorstep.

—

I hate it when you have to replace an existing sub-system with new code. You are all excited about the new stuff you’ve just written - it’s shiny, new and passed all the tests and stuff - and then you drop it into the existing code base and all hell breaks loose. You then spend at least 30mins if not over an hour reconnecting all the wires so the damn thing works again. Maybe I’ll outsource this task to India. Or the Philippines.

This has sounded really negative. It shouldn’t have. Things are going well.

—

I love nonsense. I write a fair amount of it here (for example) and people say I speak it often. Some of the best nonsense I have seen in ages can be found here and here.

A music related entry today…

Last night I found out that I still had around $17 on my mperia account. For those of you who don’t know, mperia is a music site where signed and unsigned bands alike can sell their music track by track, release demos and foster a good fanbase. I’ve never been a massive user of mperia but I’ve enjoyed trawling through the thousands of tracks on it for undiscovered gems from time to time. Anyway, with my $17 I picked up the Goteki album “Revolution” for $10 and haven’t yet decided what other tracks to pick up.

Goteki are an industrial/electo band from Bristol, but that description sells them short. While I don’t care for everything they put out, tracks such as “Beatbotz” (not on the album), “Metro Deluxe”, “Shinjuku Lullaby” and the hilarious “Vectorporn” are well worth checking out. Goteki also did some music for the Timesplitters series of games. And just to rub things in I’ve discovered that they are playing tonight at The Garage in London…

I also just heard the new N.I.N single for the first time on Radio 1 together with an interview with Trent Reznor himself and I’m now definitely going to pick up the new album. I wasn’t convinced before but there seems to be no resting on laurels and the single seems fresh even if in spirit it reminds me of StarF***ers Inc. from Fragile. I wish I could have seen them at Brixton the other day (where I saw them last about 4-5 years ago incidentally), as this tour has supposedly a much more raw setup than the heavily produced setup for the Fragile tour (not complaining at all! The Fragile tour was amazing, it just be nice to see a more raw performance).

Work is going well, have a bit of thinking to do now before I get on with the next bit but all is looking good. Sadly nothing worth showing in a screen shot as it’s all behind the scenes…

Mike.

Phew.

I had three parcels to pick up at the post office (at a supermarket out of town) today so rather than pay for two bus trips (I’ve been spending too much money on public transport lately…) I decided to take Karin’s bike. Now, Karin used to have a really nice red bike that was great but it got stolen a while back and instead of risking buying another nice but expensive bike that could be stolen she bought a *very* old bike instead.

It’s ok really. Except the front brake doesn’t work. And the back brake is activated by back pedalling and isn’t too hot. And the saddle is too high. And the front tyre is half flat.

I hadn’t cycled in years until today and when I arrived at the supermarket (luckily by staying on cycle paths 90% of the time) I was a shaking wreck. After collecting the parcels I had to just sit down for about 15 minutes with a diet coke to recover. It wasn’t the physical effort of riding the bike as much as the feeling that you could, quite likely, die at any time while using it. The journey back was better and I actually quite enjoyed it but I think I’ll fix the bike up a little before I use it again.

I especially didn’t want to die today as my work has been going very well, with full state caching optmisations now complete and work on the two final sub-system pieces going nicely (light management integration and more flexible scene management). As I’m on a roll with my project I won’t be getting around to finishing off the articles I want to for a bit longer but hopefully by then I should have a couple more planned out in my head. I want to change the FLB Article quite alot now to reflect my ongoing findings with the technique.

My Luminaries had a track played on XFM tonight (should’ve mentioned this earlier…) and are being featured in an unsigned showcase thingy on XFM’s website. Basically go here and you can listen to 4 tracks from various UK unsigned bands and vote for your favourite. The track with the most votes get some airtime later in the week.

I strongly recommend that you give the lumins’ track - “All I Really Want” - a good old listen as it is, quite simply, fantastic. I love it. And if you love it too, vote for it. Simple eh?

Well, it’s twenty to six in the morning and I’ve just finished mopping the floor of the corridor outside Karin’s and my room. It’s obviously a slow time of the day.

I’ve got another coffee shop article to upload on shadow map packing but that will have to wait as it’s not on the computer I’m using now and it’s too early in the morning to copy it over. I have a bit to change in the last article (on the frame light buffer system) before I polish the layout up for a proper release.

Tonight (well, last night now) I finished replacing the texture management routines in the Demo Harness to use a templated resource handler I wrote the other day that implements much better reference counting and garbage collection.

I’m very pleased with the way it turned out as it paves the way for larger demos using the Demo Harness and eventually maybe even streaming textures from disk. I’m planning to extend the usage of the new resource handler to manage materials, effects and meshes eventually, but for now just using it for textures will do. Eventually I will also put up an article on the technique used as it is quite useful for a variety of purposes.

Right, now I have to decide whether to sleep or watch Magnum PI….decisions, decisions…

In the summer the Swedes travel from all over the country to the coast, where wild stawberries grow (which according to my Swedish language book are a Swede’s idea of heaven). This means that once busy towns such as Stockholm and Uppsala become ghost towns for a couple of months a year, with just the penguins and a few confused tourists wondering about. Uppsala being that little bit further north means that polar bears come into the town to scavenge from the mountain of reindeer carcases that have been left by the Swedes insatiable appetite for anything no one else eats (reindeer, crayfish, rotten fish…). As it stands now I am standing atop my apartment block with polar bears and mean looking penguins all around, think Day of the Dead, trying to figure out how I can reach the supermarket to rob it for food.

I am, of course, lying through my teeth. Some days it is fantasies like these that get me through the day. Sigh.

I have finished the first draft of an article about my implementation of shadow maps within my Demo Harness system - “Lighting - Shadow Maps and the Frame Light Buffer DRAFT 1“. I have yet to add in the numerous references I have used and I want to re-write various bits but as it stands it contains most of what I want to say. As the title suggests the article deals with my use of a secondary buffer, a Frame Light Buffer, to hold the results of the percentage closer filtering performed on the shadow maps together with various implementation details (nothing too specific, mind) and further extensions and optimisations. I’m reasonably happy with it but it can be improved a bit. Any comments would be appreciated either in the comments section or via email (mike -at symbol here please!- mikesspace.net) .

I actually wrote the first section sitting on a train from Stockholm to Uppsala and the rest in a coffee shop in Uppsala (Cafe Lion if anyone cares!) as I borrowed my Dad’s ultra-cool JVC sub-notebook computer during my last visit to England. I already have a super-duper laptop but sadly “super-duper” translates into “weighs a ton and sounds like a jump jet” with laptops…

EDIT: Oh yeah, the layout is also not finalised on the draft. I’ve had a few problems getting used to laying this kind of article out in wordpress.

Hold up people. Something fishy is happening with the layout of this blog. Probably due to me upgrading Wordpress the other day. Should be back to normal soon…

EDIT: Fixed!