I was looking at the sessions scheduled for the Game Developers Conference and I found one titled Continuous Collision Detection of General Convex Objects Under Translation. The Gilbert-Johnson-Keerthi algorithm (GJK) is used in SOLID. Someone we saw a couple years ago also gave an overview and demos on SOLID. I was impressed then and I'd be willing to see it again. The speaker, Gino van den Bergen, seems to be affiliated with the SOLID project. I haven't yet used the library myself, but if I have time, I might download the FreeSOLID package from SourceForge and try it out. That's a lot of time, but maybe. Anyhow, here's an overview of what I'd expect to do based on the SOLID API Documentation.
I just read in the Google Blog that they now support another type of search. Use "movie:" before your search to find movies. Of course I had to try out 'movie: Fresh Prince' and of course google figured it out. If you give it a name of a movie that's playing it offers to find show times for a US zip code. The results, of course, include a link to a google map. It looks nice and clean for now, but they can't give it away forever.
So without coffee, I find myself drinking having more chocolate these days. I know, chocolate has some caffeine in it too. I'm passing on caffeinated teas, pop and coffee-drinks though.
I ended up only sleeping a few hours last night and figured that some hot chocolate would go a long way to keeping me coherent and mostly lucid. There's a machine at work that was developed, I think, by the research arm of NASA about eight years ago. It has hot chocolate and a bunch of coffee beverages in it. Well, it can produce the beverages from a spout on command - I can't say for certain where they originate.
Early to bed
Early to rise
Makes a man healthy,
Wealthy and wise
Looks like GDC plans are ramping up for others as well. Robin Hunicke's posted a list of some San Francisco bars on her blog gewgaw. This is the kind of information I need right now. Back on the first trip to San Jose, CitySearch was useful. These days, CitySearch seems to be a hollow shell of its former self.
She's got the bars listed by area, and so that's convinced me to once-and-for-all figure out how to navigate the city. I like to do this before a trip so that I can follow directions better and get more out of brochures or ads for places that I see when I'm there. Without knowing that the Embarcadero goes by the Wharf, I won't be able to use my time nearly as well.
I tried not to be fazed by new technology. I have to keep my geek cool attitude in check. But this is the first time I've tried out the notebook on the internet at the coffeeshop. I have to say I can definitely see the allure. Very much with the jet-set, like I should be in a commercial somewhere.
Have a look at Google Maps
This is more like it. A map I can really pan. Google really pushes for smooth interaction in the user interface. It looks like they break up the map into many small chunks. I'd guess they send enough area around the actual displayed map to let you start panning then send along more asynchronously as soon as you indicate which direction you want to move. It's not rocket science, it's just attention to good user interface design. And the resources to spend time getting it right. Kudos.
Last night my girlfriend and I tried something we’d never done before. Let me tell you all about it. Someone recommended Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (PS2)
to me, they’d played it start to finish and it was a great game. I figured she’s pretty open-minded, and she likes a couple other games on the PlayStation 2, so let’s try it. She was open to the idea, but the problem is it’s the fist time she’s played anything in a Dungeons & Dragons or Bard’s Tale genre.
After all that research I did, I finally bought the Compaq Presario R3000Z. Pretty exciting for me as I haven't had a new laptop notebook in ... six years? This one is pretty well-equipped, but I think I've been over enough specs to make even my eyes glaze over. I ordered it at Best Buy in the end and they talked me in to a $10 card that gives me back a couple bucks for every hundred that I spend. I think it ends up netting me $40 off (pay $10 for the card, get $50 back in gift cards). Of course the price of this will be eternal spam. So what else is new.
I got a PlayStation 2 game for Christmas called Drakengard by Square Enix. It's is the most hacking-est, slashing-est game I've ever played. I thought I was getting pretty far, a few levels in, because my sword has a pretty large blast radius. Yes, I said blast radius. In the great anime tradition, this game give range to the weapon as if it were somehow explosive. I like that sort of thing because it just raises the scale of the game. By scale I just mean that If you fought baddies one at a time in the old side-scrollers, in Drakengard you're fighting them five and ten at a time.