Older blog entries for bratsche (starting at number 316)

Yeah, I'm now listed on IMdb for being a producer on the 1 Second Film!. Sort of cool. :)

I haven't been very good about making updates to my blog anymore. I have started a new blog at my homepage, but haven't been all that great about keeping it up to date either.

I'm moving back up to Baltimore pretty soon, because I got a good job there. That's always exciting.

Anyway, I'll post more information on the homepage blog soon.

I spent some time yesterday in Windows working on GLSL support in NeoEngine. I had started on it before, but I scrapped that code in favor of this new design. I can't really decide yet if I like the new design or not, but it involves no API breakage so it seemed like the way to go. The previous design involved breaking the API for how we deal with shaders, and it ended up complicating the API, especially for systems that use DirectX or older OpenGL shader implementations.

The major difference in GLSL is in that it allows you to link shaders into a final program object binary. All previous technology required that you send the entire source code for the vertex program, compile it, and entire source code for the fragment program, compile it.. and with each render you have to enable the vertex program and enable the fragment program. With GLSL you can upload the source code for as many vertex shaders and as many fragment shaders as you need, compile them, then link them all together. Much more like a traditional compiler. This is good, because we can make pipeline programming modular now. Well, we can do so much more easily now anyway. To do so in DirectX HLSL you need to do manually "compile" the source code together from multiple string sources before you upload it and really compile it. That's a lot of trouble.

I learned a lot about C++ I/O streams back when I was working on NeoEngine's logging system. I'm pretty happy with how it works. It's set up with a log sink and log source system (with the streambuf class used internally). It doesn't appear that there's any standard C++ stream method of doing the equivalent of mmap(), so I think I'm going to try to make an mmmap-based stream sometime. I need to use mmap() for something else I'm working on, but I'd like to keep with the C++ style stream I/O if possible. Also, just so I learn better how to use it.

I just found out that on August 17-18 my favorite violist in the world, Tabea Zimmermann, is playing Mozart Sinfonia Concertante with Christian Tetzlaff on violin, with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and Bernard Labadie conducting. Then on the 18th at Lincoln Center she and Tetzlaff are playing Mozart Duos in G and B-flat, and she's doing a Hindemith solo sonata (not sure which one).

I am so dying to go to these two concerts. This would be like the coolest thing ever.

Plus I've never been to New York, somehow. This seems like a fantastic excuse for going. :)

On Sunday we played for the Dallas Peace Society, and then a recital at UT Arlington in the evening. At the Peace Society concert there was a Mozart wind quintet, then our piano quartet played Brahms g minor quartet. At UTA Dr Solomons and Amirosh played Brahms clarinet trio with a clarinetist whose name I can't think of now, and then Amela and I joined to do the Brahms g minor quartet again, then a piece by Amirosh called Legends. It was really cool. But damn, we were tired by then.

So I'm now about to begin working on some 3d graphics stuff for a commercial project and getting paid for it. This is pretty cool, since so far I've been pretty much doing open source stuff for free and for fun, except for the small amount I got for porting code to MacOSX. Although there isn't any sort of NDA (or none that I've been told about yet), I think I probably shouldn't reveal any juicy secrets about the project. But I think it'll be a lot of fun.

So I talked to one of the Linux driver developers at ATI, and he was really cool. He's extremely interested in making the ATI drivers not suck on Linux, which is great for everyone of course. Apparently ATI is devoting more funding to this now than they have in the past so I think eventually they'll get there. It's just unfortunate that right now the drivers still suck all kinds of ass. But he gave me a list of things that he wants us to add to NeoEngine in order to make it a useful tool for debugging the drivers. He asked for binaries, but I'm on AMD64 so I couldn't give him x86 binaries (I'm using gcc 3.4.0, and multilib is currently not available there).

Edited 2004-05-21 for a typo

Amirosh scheduled our piano quartet to perform some concert for the Dallas Peace Society or something, and also for something similar that's going on in Arlington. We're playing Brahms g minor piano quartet, something that he wrote, Mozart Divertimento (minus all the repeats probably, otherwise it would take up an hour by itself), and supposedly Brahms clarinet trio, with me playing the clarinet part on viola.

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.

They make the shittiest drivers ever. Ever. Especially on Linux.

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).