WebGL spec is final
Khronos released version 1.0 of the WebGL specification a few days ago at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Entries in category Coding
So long Mandelbrot and thanks for all the fractals
The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot died today of pancreatic cancer at the age of 85. I guess most people don’t have a clue who he is, but he used to be one of my unlikely childhood heroes.
The epic fail of modern software development
In this age of high-level computing it’s quite easy to ignore the basic building blocks. You don’t have to understand the difference between float and double as long as you know your DRY and KISS, right? Not quite. There is a ton of things that can go bump in the night if you don’t watch your step.
Euphoria renders the future
Euphoria is a system for simulating 3D characters with muscles and skeleton, instead of using predetermined keyframes or motion capture. They have a beautiful demonstration video of the system in action. This is probably the coolest thing I’ve seen in this field since a video in the mid-nineties where interacting AI objects were visualized as flatshaded polygons.
Stack Overflow through the rear mirror
Almost a year ago I noticed that two of my favorite coding bloggers, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, were founding a company together amusingly called Stack Overflow. Their aim was to create a site with useful information for fellow coders, generated by user content.
The bliss of software installation
It’s rant monday! I’ve been trying to install yet another version of Microsofts SQL Server. Yes, it’s a lot of fun, I’m totally thrilled and all that. However, while progressing through the joyful bliss of installation, it suddenly complains about being unable to install with the short message “Setup failed. Refer to the setup log.”
Excel as 3D engine
Everyone knows the Easter eggs where Excel97 was turned into a flight simulator and Word97 a pinball game. But that was ten years ago and surely the modern versions can do much more? Enter Excel the 3D engine! Peter Rakos had a bit of time to spare and used Excel to calculate and render basic 3D.
MSDN Live 2007 hits the road again
It has only been seven months since the last roadshow but the MSDN Live team is on the road again. Just as last time, a lot was said about ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight and rich clients.
Silverlight dominates at MIX07
The MIX conference is currently held in Las Vegas, just as last year. The reports are pouring in and they mostly contain the word “Silverlight” in one way or another. Flash is the most popular choice for graphics-intense presentations on the web today.
Return of the flatshade polygon cubes
During the golden age of demo coding, people were in awe if you managed to produce a large 3D cube in 50 fps. These were the days before graphical APIs so you had to write everything by hand, including line drawing routines and polygon clippers. To avoid hardware limitations, there were illusion tricks to create a seemingly endless parade of cubes across the screen.
