the corner office

On the subject of graphics cards, an interview with Unreal guru Tim Sweeney:

Well, we are aiming at the kind of PC that we think will be mainstream in 2006. We will also be able to scale it down. Basically DirectX 9 cards will be minimum spec, so any DirectX 9 shipping today will be capable of running our game, but probably at reduced detail. If you only have a 256 meg video card you will be running the game one step down, whereas if you have a video card with a gig of memory then you'll be able to see the game at full detail.

That much memory on a graphics card within 2 years? That's frightening. Absolutely crazy.

(via Abiola Lapite)

Finally. I am again the pumping lemma zen master and all non-context-free grammars tremble before me. Or something.

Next: Graphics Programming. I've been looking forward to this assignment all week but given how late I am, there's not much time to really savour it. Mad rush to figure things out, sling together something half-decent looking and hand it in.

As for my Gentoo box... drat. It has a GeForce4 MX onboard GPU, and my efforts to get the nVidia drivers to work with 3D rendering have been resoundingly unsuccessful. There's a Linux app called glxgears which is supposed to give one an indication of the performance of one's graphics card. I can't even run it without freezing up the machine completely. When the study dust settles, I'll see if I can move across my XP box's Radeon.

Right now though, it's needed for my attempts at building an all-singing, all-dancing 3D African Village. I could cry. Last year we had the option of taking one of two tracks for our graphics assignments: the 'scientific' track, doing visualisations of things like Brownian motion blahdy blah, or the 'cultural' track, building a 3D African village. This year they've scrapped the scientific track, and everyone has to do the African village. Fat lot of good it does me; guess which track yours truly decided to follow last year.

That took a bit longer than expected, but Advanced Programming put to bed. Hope they mark it.

I love C++ for one simple reason: seeing and using the -> operator, a la:


I don't know why, but I get my jollies, that's for sure. Perhaps it just makes me feel all hardcore.

Now on to Computer Theory and pumping lemons and whatnot. Then I can get to my graphics assignment, which is going to be the real back-breaker.

But right now I might play with Gentoo for a bit :-)

Further to my Al Qaeda post yesterday, it seems Jackie Selebi's comments were a little out of turn:

... Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi - who made the initial revelation about al-Qaeda associates in South Africa - appears to be in hot water with his colleagues for doing so and has refused to reveal any more details of the case.

IOL: Did al-Qaeda have a plan to disrupt SA poll?

Like I said, I wonder what the real story is... I lean towards the conclusions drawn at fodder... a bit of political opportunism in hyping up the threat to ZA, and reality a little less glamourous.

Still, if we helped to disrupt terror attacks elsewhere, that ain't a bad thing. Again, kudos to our coppers.

Laurence Caromba hits the nail on the head: Where's the outrage?

The big story in local news for the past week or few has been the 70 South African mercenaries who are languishing in a Zimbabwean prison, arrested when a plot to effect a coup in Equatorial Guinea was foiled. For a generous fuel deal, Zimbabwe will extradite them to Equatorial Guinea where they will be tried and likely executed. Nobody is stupid enough to believe that the "trials" will be anything more than a torture-driven joke with a firing squad at the end. The South African government says they won't intervene unless the prisoners are sentenced to death, which is patently ridiculous: that these men will be brutally tortured is a given, that there will be no semblance of a fair trial is a given, that the death penalty will be awarded is a given, and speedy executions before anyone can intervene are also a given.

As Laurence says:

So where's the outrage? The South African government and the South African media flung themselves into a collective sense of furious indignation over prisoner abuse in Iraq. Now that Equatorial Guinea is going to do far worse to South African citizens, is it too much to ask that some anger be spared for them?

On the one hand, if you want to be a mercenary you have to consider these things to be an occupational hazard - it's not like these folks were going over to EG to assist a coup using feather dusters and stun guns, but on the other hand, the SA Government's refusal to get involved is pure hypocrisy, plain and simple.

Gobs and gobs of Distributed Systems theory out of the way. Now just to reacquaint myself with CORBA, throw together a simple server object and hand in this assignment. Tomorrow... time for bed now or else gym is going to be hell tomorrow.

CORBA. Bleh. The promise of distributed computing really fascinates me. I like the idea of "systems" where autonomous services and objects all interact in a huge entropic lovefest... where a person at the perimeter asks for X and the complex and chaotic agents of a huge networked machine chatter back and forth between each other, to eventually spit back a response to the user. Here you go Mr User, and don't even *begin* to imagine what happened to get you this answer.

The problem is that by the time I get to the nitty-gritty, my overwhelming impression of CORBA is of trying to sprint through treacle. There is just so much goop needed to make it all hang together. I wonder whether this is something that is a non-issue in our days of ever-ballooning hardware capability and it's just me being naively prejudiced. What's it like out there in the real CORBA world?

But I must admit that this year, I'm finding myself more open to the concepts and possibilities. Last year I just thought it plain sucked. So I'm approaching it all with an open mind this time around.

One more thing: I hope this year's final assignment isn't another networked Tic Tac Toe game.

Not sure what to make of this: Al Qaeda ring bust in SA

Speaking about the South African operation, [Police Commissioner] Selebi told the committee: "We arrested some people who had evil intentions against this country - we did not tell anybody - five days before the election. We got these people to leave."

Of course, it's worrying. Well done to the SAPS for nailing these people and booting them out. But I'd like to know what these evil intentions were... unlike Spain, there would have been nothing to gain from "influencing" our elections. Iraq and the Middle East were a complete non-issue. We're not involved in Iraq, our government has condemend the US occupation and we must be one of the most Middle-East friendly nations in the world. I find it hard to believe that we'd be the target of "evil intentions."

Aside: as Vaz mentions, hearing that boxes of South African passports were found in UK raids isn't particularly reassuring, least of all for the rest of the world's perception of us.

*mutter* *mutter* Microsoft Visio *mutter* crap *mutter* crash costing me precious work *mutter* since when did older versions of Visio ever do that *mutter* *mutter*

Operating systems assignment finally in the bag. That took far too long. Advanced Programming next, then Computer Theory, then Computer Graphics. I might have missed one. Either way, I start the first real bit of C++ work I've done this year. Yay!

The only other personal news to report is that I had a bit of a set-to this morning, with a cold-calling estate agent. I was polite with a... brittle edge. I tried to explain that cold-calling and pissing off potential customers is no way to generate business, surely? "No, we only do it every 6 months." Problem is, they and every other estate agent in the city do it every 6 months, and I end up getting a call a day. I conveyed this and my frustration. She sounded apologetic but I don't think she gave a toss, really, even after my "do you really think I'd use you people after you've wasted my time like this?" routine. Not that I own this place, mind you.

Ronwen says I have to be nice to the telemarketers, many of whom desperately need the work and don't particularly enjoy doing what they do. I don't know if I agree with her but she is the Boss and all, so I try to be nice and civil. I think there is a difference between poor Sannie trying to flog timeshare holidays to make ends meet and Pam Frickin' Golding wannabes cashing in on the property boom and trying to increase their mindshare so that when I finally wake up one day and decide "hmm, I think I'll re-enter the property market today," theirs is the first name I'll think of. Not bloody likely, and I feel far less guilty about letting them know how I feel. Politely (with a brittle edge), of course.

I'm supposed to be on leave to catch up on my mountain of overdue assignments. I got home from gym this morning, sat down at my PC and spent the rest of the day dealing with work stuff. It's after 4 already. Goes to show, I suppose, I can run but I can't hide.

Gym... first time back after nearly 2 weeks. I think I know myself by now... without a personal trainer, I'd never go to gym, full stop. So I coughed up for another batch of sessions with Warren. I just tell myself all the money I'm saving by not buying smokes each month helps pay for it. That's not entirely true. It would be cheaper to smoke. And life would be a lot more enjoyable. For now, at least.

Anyway, I have chosen the High Road and must stick with it. This does not change the fact that hyperextensions suck. Oddly, I always dreaded the idea of super-circuit running between exercises, but apart from the puffing and wheezing, it's not bad. It actually helps to spread the pain all over your body so each set of repetitions of whatever it is you're doing becomes less dreadful.

It was good to be back, though. One gets to recognise the regulars - the hardcore mofos and the posers and preeners and the little old ladies, and of course the gymbods who make everyone else look bad. I've also noticed that my trainer tends to go into drill instructor mode whenever we're near one of these gymbods. I was quite tempted to go up to one auntie today and just say 'listen lady, won't you please just sod off for half an hour so I can get through this session alive?'