Well, It’s snowing…

Not very deep, but the snow is getting heavier.

It was a sad day today as Karin’s farfar passed away this afternoon. While it brings relief to both him and Karin’s family it doesn’t quite make up for the feeling of loss to Karin’s family. He died how he wanted to though, at Karin’s parents home.

On a lighter note, there is some nutjob running around our neighbourhood with a hand gun. Apparently there have been a few sightings over the last week or so and a couple of days ago someone shot out a couple of windows just down the road from here. Karin and I missed this in the news and our friend Jonas, who lives in the same corridor as us, told me today. Jonas, god bless him, spends much time worrying about such matters as US foreign policy and the possibility of terrorists having nuclear weapons on a daily basis so having this occur so close must be putting him into overdrive! Poor guy. Fear not for Karin and I though as I have my bullet repelling haircut so we will be fine (well, we haven’t been shot yet have we? - the haircut must work!).

Talking of hair, my mop top is reaching a point of critical mass. I could happily provide both Patrick Stewart and Sir Ben Kingsley with enough hair for a decent wig each and still have enough left over to look as dashing as ever. I’ve been living in Sweden for about 8 months now and I have never been to a Swedish hair dresser - I’m concerned that the language barrier (as low as it is) may result in disaster! I have a month to go before I hit UK soil again so I may have to bite the bullet soon!

I have also had a thoroughly un-productive day today that I am about to attempt to salvage with an hours work before bed (it is 3:30am however).

Hopefully next week will have cheerier overtones.

(Just noticed I used a little ‘g’ for god. Interesting. Read into it what you will.)

Karin and I went to Stockholm a couple of days ago as her farfar (paternal grandfather) is very ill. His health has been deteriorating for a while and now he has not long to go. It’s sad for everyone and Karin is finding it hard as she is very close to him. I came back from Stockholm yesterday and Karin followed today as she has university work to do. It’s never nice when a family member is badly ill especially for Karin and her family as Karin’s morfar (maternal grandfather) died less than six months ago.

My project is still going well, and although the break was for a sad reason I think it did me good. The renderer is now “feature complete”, which means it does everything planned at this stage, although possibly not in the correct manner (although the internal architecture is final there are still some optimisations to be done for speed). I still have to put my “project management cap” back on tomorrow and just double check but it looks good. I still have to re-write the base model loading code and associated bits (planned to be located in a plugin) so there is not much to see but a few tests with hard-coded 3D models have shown that most code paths are working fine - still a little bit of testing to be done as well. This means that I can now move onto other things such as the controller architecture, plugin framework (to allow myself and others to extend the DemoHarness’ functionality easily) and the LUA (scripting language) bindings. Good progress.

While I was investigating the best way to load DirectX X files in the plugin (I’m not 100% happy with the method used in the first version) I wrote a small utility to browse the hierarchical structure of an X file - xFileBrowser. It took just over an hour to write using VB.NET and works well. Just in case it is useful to others you can find it here. The current download is just the exe file directly and it requires the latest .NET version to be installed together with the latest version of the DirectX SDK. I’ll release a better packaged version later (I’ve just noticed that it is 5:30am) that won’t require the SDK to be installed.

Well I think I’ll get some sleep now.

Hmmm. I’ve got a bad vibe going on.

Probably because I spent most of the day cleaning the apartment (which in itself was not a bad thing to do and I didn’t mind doing it) and now I feel that I should have done more work. Also Karin’s friend Sofia is staying over for a couple of days and although we all get on great I find it hard to sleep with someone else in the room. Also having the guest bed set up makes it hard for me do do my normal night time routine of getting up in the middle of the night and pacing the corridors listening to see who is having some Late Night Fun. Oops! Did I say that out loud? In reality my late night routine is much less perverted and usually consists of watching Cagney and Lacey on late night TV while eating some form of instant food.

Anyway, all will be well no doubt.

The first snow of the year here in Uppsala fell today for about an hour. Just a light dusting on top of the frost that formed in the night. According to the weather men it’s going to be a milder year here in Sweden this year with no (or little) snow predicted for Stockholm. Out here in the academic hub that is Uppsala the heat given off by the collective brains of those oh-so-clever people at the University is apparently failing to fight back the elements so it looks like we will be in for more snow. Which will be nice. A reasonable amount of snow is preferable to a small amount in my opinion as it is less slippery on the street as the ice is hidden under the snow.

Well, I guess I’m off to the pub now as Karin and Sofia are already there with some of Karin’s classmates (Karin had an exam today, which went well, so people are gathering to relax and unwind). Wish me luck as I dice with death on the icy paths between here and town. Wish me more luck for my safe return.

“And every now and then
it seems to me it’s come to this
- that promises and prophecies
was all I had to give”

- Joy Surrender, We Are The Ark, The Ark

I like that quote. Makes you think.

I like the way the last line can be interpreted two ways - it changes who the negative emphasis is being placed on.
“was all *I* had to give” - I didn’t have anything else to give. Negative emphasis on me.
“was all I *HAD* to give” - I didn’t have to give you anything else other than the promises and prophecies. Negative emphasis on the other.

For those of you who don’t know “The Ark” are a Swedish Camp-Glam-Pop-Rock band. I guess they sit somewhere between Queen and The Darkness. Although it is generally incredibly uncool to like them amoung certain stratas of society they are actually pretty good for what they are - enjoyable, fun, usually high energy music. And when you actually read the lyrics there are some real gems - even if they are sung in some ultra-stadium-glam-pop-rock style!

Another lyrical pearl from We Are The Ark:

“I am dangerous, ’cause I’m ridiculous
and it seems to me, that I’m a threat to the
whole society ’cause I ain’t got no dignity”

- Ain’t Too Proud To Bow

Ho Ho Ho.

Right back to work now, instead of reading the lyrics to what I’m listening to on Lyrical…

After a week or two of working at night and sleeping in the day I have now got my sleeping back around to within normal operating parameters. For some reason I seem to be generally waking up before 6am, but you can’t have everything. My work is going very well with the re-write of the renderer somewhere around 80%+ done. At least the damn thing draws things again now so I don’t have to spend my time staring at a blank screen.

I’ve also setup the documentation system I will be using for the DemoHarness project. It won’t be public until the new DemoHarness reaches a near feature complete level but I’m starting to cover some topics now so I don’t have a load to do at the end. The doc system is running on DokuWiki with a modified theme and a few other tweaks. I’m really pleased with it actually. When the DemoHarness goes public it should really prove it’s worth.

Thinking about it, most people reading this will have no idea what the DemoHarness is. Well, put in non-technical terms it is a system that allows game programmers to quickly prototype and demonstrate new ideas and techniques related to game development. What I am working on now is the second iteration of the technology. The first iteration, although more or less fully functional was not particularly robust in certain areas. This led to problems when working with large demos running on the system.

I took the decision to re-design the internal architecture and re-write the system from near scratch earlier this year. After a brief stint of writers block this re-write is going very well. This is mainly because all of the problems have already been solved or made apparent by my work on the first version. I am very happy with the design of the DemoHarness now (give or take a couple of small areas) which is saying something as I’m not usually happy with much that I do.

The DemoHarness system is the result of too many years of research, work and idle pondering on the topic of game development!

—-

We had a meal for the people in the corridor where Karin and I live last Saturday and it was great fun. Everyone who came made one dish for the meal and afterwards we just sat around talking and listening to music for ages. It was really good fun, although my hangover allowed a nasty little flu to take hold for a couple of days and since then I’ve had a terribly cold!

Anyway, a couple of pictures can be found on my Flickr page or by clicking on the thumbnail below.

Just a quick note to say that I am having problems sending email from my normal account. I can still receive all email fine, just sending is problematic. Because of this I’m not sending many emails, as I have to use webmail to send mail from my mikesspace account for now. Just letting people know in case I’m slow to reply to someone. Hopefully it will get sorted out soon.

[This was written a couple of days ago, but I delayed posting it so that Karin could read it first.]

Well, my “weekend” this week was Sunday and Monday, when I did little work. Today I woke late and didn’t do as much work as I would have liked in the day so I’m pulling the nightshift so my conscience will let me sleep later.

On Sunday I met Karin in Stockholm so that we could attend a memorial service for her grandfather who died earlier in the year (my, that was a bit blunt. I’ll use “passed away” next time). It turns out that Karin’s grandfather (or morfar in Swedish speak) was a member of what can only really be described as a gentlemen’s club and the memorial service was organised by this club for all it’s members that had passed away (much better) this year. The service was held in Storkyrkan (Stockholm’s cathedral) and was quite a major event. It lasted about one and a half hours. All the members were in their super-smart formal dress with (for reasons unknown to us non-members) numerous medals pinned to their jackets (although they are not related to the military) - so many medals in some cases that if you closed your eyes you could be forgiven for thinking that a batallion of morris dancers were sneaking up on you. The service was very nice with alot of music provided by a cluster of musically inclined members, and was nice for the family of the members who had passed away.

I am tempted to use the oppotunity of this talk of “gentlemen’s clubs” to tell the story of how Dan and I disturbed a couples’ first date in Reading with drunken talk of murders and violence *allegedly* commited at the behest of various Freemasons but I will resist. I have more important things to talk about.

Pornography!

After the service Karin’s family and I went to an Italian restaurant in Gamla Stan (the old town of Stockholm) for a nice meal. The food was excellent even if the staff did treat me slightly oddly when they were told that I don’t eat beef or lamb. But the pornography comes in later, after the meal. Just before we left I went to the toilet. Nothing unusual there. As I was washing my hands I looked up to the painted murial on the tiled wall. It was in a faux classical style and looked innocent enough. But then you realise exactly what is going on in the picture. Blatant sins of the flesh! So shocked was I that I had to take a couple of pictures of it. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge. (You can probably get away with looking at them at work office people - they are not that bad).

Considering that the restaurant was otherwise porn-free I wonder if that was what the restaurant owner had in mind when he asked the artist to paint the picture…

…

IKEA are having to rename their combined food storage and waste disposal unit after a number of complaints. The IKEA sales department are currently trying to think of alternative names for the “BinLader”.

Ho ho ho. OK, so I made that up. (Yeah…that’s about the level of my sense of humor).

Well things are going pretty well. As I felt my writers block easing up about a week ago I decided that I would set a date of November 1st for my return to work, no matter what. So far everything is going well and I have achieved a good amount in these past 4 days. Karin obviously knows me too well now, as on the 30th of October I told her that I would need to spend the next day preparing for my return to work. “I’ll need to spend some time in the coffee shop making notes, some time checking over existing notes and source code and I’ll have to concentrate alot. Of course I’ll also need…” As I started to list my final requirement Karin finished the sentance for me: “Beer?”. “Exactly!”. So I spent the day drinking coffee, travelling to buy beer (damn you, Swedish Government booze monolopy) and reading print outs and notes while drinking beer. Perfect. I flipped back into my work pretty seamlessly on the 1st so everything worked as planned.

I have tomorrow on my own as Karin went to Stockholm today and I won’t be joining her until Sunday so I’m expecting to get a whole load of work done then.

So that’s it. There was something else, but I seem to have forgotten. Oh well, I’ll post it if I remember.

Man. I’m pleased with that IKEA joke…