FRIED STEW

8:00 pm

Studious & Apart:

Today we are doing a) Math and b) Making the computer work right. It seems so basic and stupid, but I've let my computer get hacky and weird over the course of the last two years. I've barely tweaked autoexec.bat and config.sys. They still affect everything. So, I spent the last half hour making everything load high, enabling small tweaks, and generally ensuring that nothing weird goes on during boot that I can avoid.

Math?

Yes I'm doing math. Know how to implement a camera in a 3D engine? Well, in computers, everything is just made of information. In programming, you want everything to be made of as little information as necessary. I think one reason might be in the interest of optimization, using little memory, but for me it is because I'm not real bright and I lose track of stuff when there's a lot of it.

So. The least amount of information you need to make a camera abstraction is 3 things, I guess. Where the camera is, what the camera is looking at and what angle the camera is tilted at along the axis that those two points describe. (You can't describe 3 angles with two points, it seems) With only that information, you can make normalized vectors to make a translation matrix which will turn object-position space into camera-view space (when rasterized). As far as I know, I haven't done it yet. It's friday, though, and I can stay up all fookin night trying. See if I don't.

See, especially, if I don't, because the neighbors are doing this hooting indian thing.

8:14 pm

Going out to get coke, dinner, and c00l off. It's too damn hot. Perhaps, though, I'll just bring my dinner back here and eat 'n code-think.

wenne comma dance, a tough me tough somma demma somma raggamuffin and rough comma dance hall anne mosh megge top like kaiam dynamite anna must blow up (!)

11:30 pm

Had dinner at "Cafe Septieme", home of wait staff who have been told not to actually talk or smile. I had the, uh, french sounding pasta-shmasta a la mare, which my wait person re-pronounced for me. It was like a seafood riot in the pasta ghetto. Pretty good, despite being expensivey and served by Latifah the grouch.

I'm writing code! I think I write good code when I'm good an agitated. Today I finished a database utility which I named "DBWalk". I think it's probably the only code I've ever written that I don't feel like I can improve. And I only used the word "fuX0red" once in the comments. Well, now I've got a code sample, at least.

Now I'm back home writing sorky windows programs. Glide and Borland aren't liking each other much. Oh wait, now they are. Borland doesn't like #ifndef. It does like #if !defined. Hee hoo.