Short notice: The site was just migrated to a new server and finally gets to use PHP 5 and MySQL 5.1. This is nice, but due to some subtle compatibility issues, there are some minor problems around. I’ll fix them soon enough, in the meantime, please don’t be surprised about them, I do know about it.
Today was the main day of the Bildungsstreik protests, and I happened to have some time for it, so I thought I’d post some pictures.
Only german
Seit gestern hat auch die RWTH Aachen einen besetzten Hörsaal wo Leute für bessere Studienbedingungen demonstrieren, also dachte ich mir, ich gehe mal hin und dokumentiere, was ich dort so sehe.
A quite interesting technology for video games is SIMD, spelled out Single Instruction Multiple Data, meaning that one computer instruction processes more than one value. This may be best illustrated by an example. A normal piece of code that every game needs will look vaguely like this:
University is fully active again, so my progress is now somewhat slower and will remain so. Still, I was able to implement a number of nice (as in essential) features, which means it’s time for a new Video!
A new technology called PhotoSketch is [making the rounds on the interwebs][kottke]. It’s quite awesome: You sketch a scene, label the parts, and then the app automatically delivers a scene composited from photographs found on the Internet. There has been [some skepticism about this][august], however. As that site does not allow comments, I thought I’d post my thoughts here instead.
I may have been quiet for the past two days, but that does not mean I’ve not been working. After much prodding, I was able to generate the following video:
I had originally announced it for yesterday evening, but now I finally did it: After a lot of work, much of which was spent on the converter as such, I have a graphical representation of railroad tracks. What does this mean precisely?
I’ve been accused of not updating this blog often enough. Of course, I could detract by pointing to my [Photography section][pictures] or my [Twitter account][twitter], both of which are updated significantly more often, but the fact remains that yes, I have pretty much neglected this. Today, this will change, though[^1].
I have to travel more. It seems that of all the places I tried, I can work best in an ICE. Thanks to a long train journey yesterday and few changes I made today, the level editor for my iPhone train simulator improved a lot.
It’s been too long since I last posted about something fun programming, so today I’m going to post about something fun with programming again. [As you may recall][lastpost], I’ve recently posted about starting development on a level editor for my new railroad app. Over the past few weeks, it has gained a lot of traction, which can be best shown in a screenshot.
Quick note: I’ve just [posted the slides and sample code][download] from my [Cocoaheads-Talk today][previous]. It’s in Keynote format, I’ll post a PDF version (if anybody wants annotated as well) later. Do note that it’s german only.
I’ve [talked about the Cocoaheads Aachen-Meeting before][before], which are meets of Mac OS X and iPhone developers. I just wanted to say that next time I’m going to hold a little talk there.
There are lots of important topics one could blog about right now: The german federal government thinks Paintball is more dangerous than guns, for example. Then there are the planned internet filters. Fighting against child pornography is clearly a good idea, but it turns out that you can easily get the providers to shut down the websites completely, and there is no judicial oversight planned, or any method to get sites that are listed wrongly off the list again, making this a troubling possibility for censorship. And finally, there’s always the economy. In times like these, it’s a good idea to look at a more upbeat topic, such as the new Star Trek movie.
It’s been too long since I last posted something about my software projects, so I want to give an overview here. First of all, [Hubschrauber][hubi] is going along nicely, although I haven’t done much work on it lately. Instead there’s something different that has no name yet, but just might turn out to be interesting.
A few days have passed since the horrible killing spree in Winnenden near Stuttgart. Not many, but enough to get the discussion about consequences going, which invariably deal with the same questions every time.
I’ve just read an interesting blog by gundam-genki about the frequent issues of piracy, DRM and the like concerning music, video games and movies, and I wanted to reply to that. Since I have more to say about this than just a little, I wanted to do this in the form of a blog instead of a reply, so that more people might reply and tell me what an idiot I am. You can also read this on DeviantART, although there is no real advantage to doing so.
Holy crap, I’ve really neglected the blog here. Sorry about that!
Deutsche Version