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October 3rd, 2007
08:18 am
There is probably at least one person reading this who would like to vote for Ron Paul and is not a member of the Republican Party.
Hurry up
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July 25th, 2007
07:43 pm - On functions with descriptive names:
float sqrt( float t )
{
return t * t;
}
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June 10th, 2007
09:17 pm - Veggie-Burger?
I'm experimenting with simple, cheap* pilafs. Yesterday, I had red quinoa*, lentils, and blackeyed peas. That turned out pretty well, so I did the same thing today, replacing blackeyed peas with red beans. I decided that it needed a subtle tomato flavor (I'm not a huge fan of tomatoes, but I'm glad to put them where they make sense). Since I was done cooking, I took a shortcut by putting some ketchup on the side. That was when I realized that my creation bore a resemblance to hamburger. Sort of like a raw food-type hamburger (this was cooked, but it had that macrobiotic appearance). I doubt I will ever buy TVP sloppy-joe mix again (for the first time?).
*Quinoa is actually pretty expensive for a grain (although not that bad for food in general, especially considering its nutritive value), or at the very least I haven't found a decent supplier for it. Since I bought it from a regular supermarket, I probably did not get the best price on it.
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May 29th, 2007
07:55 pm - And I thought I was free.
Damn you, Bawls! Damn you!
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May 28th, 2007
11:09 pm
I've just spent far too much time without the internet. There may or may not be a larger update.
I'm apparently a gamer even when I'm preparing food (and no, I'm not playing Cooking Mama). My recipe for baked tofu includes an XBox and my recipe for szechuan eggplant includes Bawls.
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May 5th, 2007
February 20th, 2007
09:59 pm
Clearly in violation of Facebook's Terms of Service, someone has posted this pornographic image:
I hope it is appreciated by all two of you that get it.
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February 19th, 2007
08:21 pm
You know that writers are having too much fun with their craft when they refer to "practitioners" of "mammaldom."
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February 14th, 2007
12:45 am
Crying is a lot like masturbating. It's ok to do, but best kept private.
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February 9th, 2007
February 6th, 2007
January 31st, 2007
12:24 am
My mistake. I assumed that a video card listing support for advanced hardware accelerated 3D graphics features would be able to perform these operations faster than they'd be executed in software.
...interesting that if I call CreateDevice with the enumerated type D3DDEVTYPE_HAL, specifying that I want hardware rasterization, the call fails on this machine. It works if I specify D3DDEVTYPE_REF, or software rasterization. Hmm. And there's nothing wrong with my graphics card, Intel?
EDIT: It's also nice to know that Buy.com's 14-day return policy is so stringently enforced that the deadline can be reached before I even receive the product. I'm now the proud owner of a $2000 brick.
EDIT2: As it turns out, the integrated Intel graphics controller actually supports hardware rasterization, as long as I specify software vertex processing. It's annoying since I upgraded primarily since this machine supports shader 2.0 - my old one with the integrated ATI card didn't - but at least I can run my game at a decent speed. Consider this a lesson in double-checking hardware specs in software. In any case, I'm actually pretty happy with the ThinkPad X60s with its small size, TracPoint, and ridiculous battery life. So what if it can't even run half of the tools that come with DirectX?
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January 28th, 2007
04:13 pm
This article is perhaps of interest to anyone who ingests organic* substances on a regular basis.
For a little background information, the contributor is also the author of a book that serves as an apologist take on eating meat (the article here is on general nutrition and food politics of recent history, but there is no doubt an influence from the author's research for his book).
*referring to anything comprised partially of carbon atoms, as opposed to the oft-abused agricultural standard
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January 25th, 2007
10:26 pm
I was reading an article in the Times again, an opinion piece about the ethical debate surrounding "Ashley." For those of you with better things to do than read trashy news articles, Ashley is a severely retarded nine-year-old girl whose mental state will never progress past that of a normal three-month-old's. The ethical debate is about whether or not her parents should be allowed to have extensive surgery performed on her to similarly retard her physical state.
This particular article had the following passage, which I found myself nodding strongly to:
"Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?"
As obvious as it seems to me, the un-PC comparison shocked me by appearing in the relatively conservative NYT (although I do recall a similarly shocking if less self-evident statement in a recent article blaming America's "drug problem" on abortion). A glance at the author confirmed my recognition: Peter Singer.
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12:11 pm
I think I learned something new about myself today. I'm just not sure exactly what it is. It might be something I already know, just manifested differently. It might be something entirely physical (the feeling is reminiscent of something I get once in a while when I drink mate). Fixing it is going to be hard, but if there are nonphysical ramifications (and even a little if there aren't), it will be worth it.
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January 11th, 2007
07:28 pm
Yet again, I've been trying to cut down on my caffeine addiction.
Yet again, by sheer force of willpower, I've been moderately successful.
I've not experienced a migraine since I returned from Italy (more on that later, maybe, after I complete some more important writing projects), despite very little caffeine intake. Part of this may be due to my sleeping patterns up until this week, where I slept about ten to twelve hours from mid/late afternoon to very early morning, often with a nap somewhere during the day (I've long known that sleeping seems to reset my caffeine cycle - further evidence that caffeine is indeed a replacement for sleep ;-p). On this pattern, I actually managed to go several days without caffeine with no drastically ill effects (or perhaps my obscene laziness is a direct symptom of withdrawal. All reference frames being equal, I elect to go with the more positive one).
Once school started and I had to keep a more realistic schedule, I tried going as long as I could without caffeine. No headaches, or even that feeling that often precedes them. What I did experience was a little mild fatigue, which has been gradually (though quicker than you might expect) disappearing, and a feeling of antsiness, which has not (at least not without a dose of good old brain-altering substance).
This is the part that scares me. In a recent discussion on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) veganpeople, it was brought up that coffee (and perhaps caffeine in general) is an effective treatment for ADD. As it so happens, I was diagnosed with ADD (like many others, leading me to suspect the diagnosis, as I still do) when I was a kid, which combined with other factors in forging a part of my life that I would rathor not discuss. In any case, this makes me wonder. Am I going to be dependent on caffeine in a way that I cannot remedy?
I'm going to continue this experiment as far as it will go (if history is any indicator, I'll give up soon enough and readdict myself with some series of large doses for maintaining alertness during some event that seemed important at the time). In any case, it does look like I'll be able to get by with much smaller doses than I've needed in the past (one tea bag was enough to get me to focus today).
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January 9th, 2007
11:14 pm
I'm enjoying Call of Duty 3 for the Wii (yeah, the piss-poor sword controls in Red Steel were enough to preclude me from buying the game), but there's something about the AI that irks me.
I wouldn't claim to be an expert in game AI, but I've taken a few classes in it, been lectured by true veterans of the trade, and implemented some meager examples of my own. Evidently, this is sufficient enough that I can watch the patterns the agents take, this stream of Nazi fodder. I can almost see self-imagined debugging graphics depicting at a high level how this code works. I can pinpoint the locations of the nodes the agents are allowed to shoot from and I can deduce the general algorithm they use to determine who goes where.
And I groan as I watch the brave defender of the Fatherland, eager to die (in vain, since I totally own the "normal" difficulty) for his country. So eager, in fact, that he will run in place if he cannot make it to his designated shooting node, despite the fact that he has a clear shot at me (and me, incidentally, at him). So eager, in fact, that he will run to fill the node where the last several of his countrymen met their doom one by one.
I'm willing (indeed, quite happy) to buy some of the standard gimmicks that game AI designers throw in to make the game more playable, but I don't appreciate being able to rationalize agent behavior as the product of a coding technique.
What's even scarier is that I can do the same kind of thing in real life.
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December 22nd, 2006
12:46 am
1000. One thousand...
Let's just say it's a good thing I got the GCN version of Zelda, and not the Wii version, or I might be kind of tired by now.
In all seriousness, it's a damn good thing I live alone.
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December 2nd, 2006
04:34 am
This tin of energy mints is serving as my Deakfast. It assures me that "This product is as safe as coffee or energy drinks." Not that it's safe, by any definition of the word. Only that it's as safe as other indulgences with which I might attempt to wear out my brain by the time I'm 35. It also states that it's "Not a substitute for sleep."
Hah!
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November 26th, 2006
08:41 pm - Red Steel
The (biggest) problem with Red Steel's swordfighting mechanism is that it doesn't take rotation as an input.
Generally, when you want a sword to cut something, you need the sharp side to be pointing towards the thing you want to cut (eg, in the direction of the swing). You are required to rotate the sword if you want to cut in multiple directions. Of course, I do this instinctively as I swing the Wii controller in the direction I want my avatar's sword to move.
Unfortunately, since the game does not take rotation as an input (it can - in fact the same game actually uses controller rotation for a gun orientation aesthetic in the shooting portion), it does not register that my controller is tilted. Therefore, when I swing from left to right, the accelerometer reads an upward swing in the controller's reference frame and the game dutifully reads it as such (or not at all, since it doesn't seem to take an upward swing as a valid input).
I can stand that there are only a finite number of predetermined attacks, from which to select the best approximate to the actual movement of the Wii controller (although I think they should at least have added a few more). I can even stand that there's no penalization for improper rotation of the sword whatsoever (although having it would have made for an excellent gameplay dynamic).
Granted, a video game is always just an approximation of what it attempts to be, and there will always be some small disadvantage to doing what is correct in the realistic situation as opposed to taking advantage of the dynamics of the simulation, but I think this issue in particular is just plain tantamount to punishing a player for performing the correct movements.
I think I'll still get (or at least rent or borrow) the game when I get a Wii. I'm amused enough by the shooting control scheme (as a lefty, I'd rather be able to choose my handedness, but the rotation animation is only a small irk). However, I'm still waiting for a good swordfighting game. Come on, I know the Wii can do it.
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