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| NEWS and NOTESJanuary 23, 2006, (Calgary)
Fighter PilotsFighter pilots used to have it so easy. Aside from that annoying, eat-flaming-death-scenario, the old fighter planes were at least user friendly. The old piston-engined, propellor-driven fighters of the last century were paragons of simple operation. The entire user interface consisted of a handful of gauges, dials and switches, two rudder pedals plus a throttle and a stick. The stick was fiendishly simple; push forward to go down, pull back to point upward and bend it left or right to bank accordingly. Push on the throttle to go faster and pull to slow down. That's pretty much the user interface short course.
While the stick and throttle setup neatly matched the typical pilot's number of hands, the actual purpose of flying was to shoot down other airplanes and for that you also had to pull a trigger. It was discovered early on, however, that reaching for the machine gun meant not actually driving the airplane, to the detriment of everyone other than the intended target.
The obvious solution was to simply move the trigger onto the stick, allowing the pilot to both fire the gun and fly the plane without juggling throttle, stick and trigger between two hands. If shooting people out of the sky is your kinda deal, you would likely be pleased.
But along came the jet age and the situation suddenly became more complicated. The pilot wasn't just asked to fly the airplane and shoot things anymore: Now he was also a radar operator and a systems engineer, who administered a huge variety of increasingly complicated weapons, all the while zipping around the sky at a dozen miles a minute. There were now way too many buttons, knobs and switches for a two-armed pilot to operate without flat-spinning his way to oblivion.December 20, 2004, (Whitehorse)
Do not callI just got a telemarketing call on my cellphone from Dish Network trying to sell me on getting Cinemax. I'd cancel it, except my wife digs TV and I don't have a neighbor I can watch SciFi Friday at.
I just called and changed the contact number to my wife's cell, and apparently they can enter a note to put it on the do not call list. Sounded to me like she was typing a custom note in a TextBox created for customer wishes that's saved in some obscure database table.
I'm fixin' to email them and see if I can get my 2 Cingular rollover minutes back. Maybe Cingular can block the number? This is a business phone so I can't have telemarketers costing me time and money.November 23, 2004, (Paris)
eHatcheryRegarding this O'Reilly post. There was a place called eHatchery here in Atlanta that was basically a big building full of offices, supplies, and connectivity. It's goal was to help dot-com startups get on their way. On the way out, I hear you could get Aeron chairs for a steal.
When her majesty's laptop was working, she played Second Life every so often; it was more like a large virtual chatroom where she could play dressup, and socialize en-masse.
Her friend would make models that did stuff; the most notable being Final Fantasy 7 'esque "big gun" that this girl would carry around, and it lobbed kittens out of it; because of the physics of the game, they'd bounce around; pretty decent range too taking into account wind resistance.
September 09, 2004, (Edmonton)
BlittingMy original goal in posting was to show my older version of Battlefield, a simple tile-based map engine based on Sprites, and one based on Diesel. A milestone I had reached as getting the TileMap, a base class, to using blitting only, and scrolling via double-buffering (copying pixels from a larger bitmap, not-shown off-screen). While this made the map scroll really fast, when I started adding Sprites, it still kept a good refresh rate, but started using way more processor than I had experienced in earlier tests on a smaller scale using Flash Player 8.
Frustrated, I realized I had to re-write even all of the sub-classes in Battlefield that rendered sprites, as well as the main walking character. I did so at the cost of not updating the older Sprite one with which to do benchmarking at a later date. Don't care, though, because again, I feel blitting is worth spending more time on perfecting and optimizing.
So, without further adu, I present a really early build of Diesel, a blitting engine, and Battlefield a simple tile-based engine example that uses Diesel. |
