Older blog entries for bratsche (starting at number 309)

This sounds like it'll be pretty cool, except for a couple things: I don't know the Brahms trio very well, and I don't have the music yet.. and the Mozart is freaking hard for viola. Oh, and the fact that this would be the longest chamber music recital ever, even with the Mozart cut down some. So I think that Brahms trio has to go.

Damn.

I was driving with Oksana to a concert today and she was saying she would like to get some people together to try to play a Bartok string quartet. I don't know how that's going to work since Amirosh claims he doesn't like Bartok string quartets (Dr. Solomons and I both think that's totally crazy.. we think he must have never heard them in order to say something so dumb), and also since Amela doesn't seem to get along well with other violinists.

I think I'm doomed to play trios and piano quartets for the rest of my life.

We got bug reports about NeoEngine crashing in the vertex buffer code. Whenever glGenBuffersARB() was called, *boom*!

At first it seemed like somehow the pointers were getting mixed up. But that seemed totally whacked. I didn't think that was it.

The same code ran just fine on NVIDIA hardware (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD.. it didn't matter) and it ran fine on ATI hardware under Windows. So the crash seemed to be specific to ATI on Linux.

But no, it wasn't that simple either. We discovered certain combinations of glibc versions and features that would selectively fuck up the ATI drivers.

But we didn't stop there, oh no!

Wait.. yeah we did. Fuck it, ATI drivers suck ass. We should just cease to support ATI hardware (especially on Linux).

I know the runtime speeds are faster on x86, but I'm not sure by how much. But on AMD64 platform the runtime speeds are an incredible increase in speed over what they were in the last compiler. They added -march=k8 to 3.4, and apparently that improves a lot of stuff.

This is the 1966/67 Böhm recording with Bayreuth, published by Philips. It's a live performance, so you can sometimes hear a couple ambient sounds of coughing or whatever. At least I noticed it when I was listening to the opening of Das Rheingold in the car yesterday.

I've been mostly busy re-organizing the code into a library, and dealing with auto* hackery today. I made a simple test that renders a triangle in a GTK window and posted a screenshot.

Another argument was that some people can't spare the extra bandwidth to download the Gnome libs and stuff. That's such bullshit. Then there was the argument that they can't really spare the extra disk space, even though it is a small amount. Bullshit.

The application in question is a GUI developer tool for developers using NeoEngine. It's not a tool for end users. So if a "developer" is that low on disk space, I think they're going to have a hard time developing anything anyway. So this was all such a stupid discussion.

I saw on Conan's show that there is a Kill Bill action figure. It's The Bride (Uma Thurman's character) in her cool yellow outfit, with a fucking big, red splotch of blood on the front of the shirt. It's so cool. But it's an amusing toy because action figures are "for kids", but I think most parents would object to their kids having this fucking bloody Uma Thurman action figure. I want to get one now! =)

I started working on a soft shadow generator yesterday. That should be really cool when it's ready, I hope.

Cameron and I watched a dog dig in about three different spots in the sand at the beach while its owner threw a tennis ball at it and it fetched. It was a lot funnier to watch than it sounds. But then we talked about supersticious pigeons, behavioral patterns, and other interesting things. Cameron and Amy and I went to the museum, which is free on Tuesdays (we liked that). Yi-Ping and Monica were going to go meet us, but they flaked out and just stayed over at Monica's place instead. We observed the emergent fashion trends of women baring a single breast, then both breasts, then back to none at all during a certain series of 18th century paintings.