Making it happen
Archive for February, 2006
OpenGL back / front faces
Feb 27th
I have always thought that OpenGL separated back faces from front faces (for use in culling for example) using the direction of the normal (after the transformation): z be positive if the normal is oriented to the back and negative if to the front – or vice-versa.
No, they are not. Actually the vertex order is responsible for this: clockwise order means front facing and counter-clockwise means back facing (you can choose this with glFrontFace GL_CW or GL_CCW). This forces you to render the object being careful to use the same vertex order. But that’s not the big problem – you can’t mirror (i.e. scale by -1) without toggling the flag.
So – lots of workarounds when it could have been so simple: just look at the normal z sign.
Cellphone trackball
Feb 24th
Apple mice (actually their scroll wheel) have evolved to 2d scrolling instead of 1d (see the Mighty Mouse). Now, remember the Nokia 7110 cellphone ? It had the best navigation ever conceived for a mobile phone: a scroll wheel – unfortunately it was the only phone with that, possibly because 2d navigation became mainstream. So, Nokia, what about embedding in future phones a small trackball instead of the current d-pad ?
Some thoughts on blogs
Feb 23rd
A big thumbs down for
“aggregative” blogs – I mean that’s why RSS aggregators are for. Their value is too small compared to creative (or DIY) blogs. I can’t think of a great value but in niche domains – but in that case there are few information sources and thus it’s no problem reading them all. In a broad domain like technology or business, however, I find a better alternative collaborative news sites like digg.com.
Experienced developer needed
Feb 22nd
We are currently looking to expand our team with an experienced developer (in Visual C++ / .NET) that is passionate about software development, interested in disruptive tehnologies and capable of guiding other developers and able to participate in designing software.
If you think you are up to the task or know somebody who would please drop me an email at andrei at krogos.ro.
Apache / Windows strange bug
Feb 22nd
So here at Krogos we have Mantis (nice site for bug tracking) running on Apache (Windows installation). Now, from time to time I’ve noticed that files are not returned completely – this means partial css / html downloaded, thirds of images shown on the client 
and so on. Until today when I used this fix.
Too much memory on the video card?
Feb 20th
And you’re not into gaming? Try to use it then for anything else.
Visual C++ refactoring
Feb 20th
Couldn’t find any add-ins for this – someone please give me a shout if they really exist. I’m saying about VS2005-like refactoring menus and of course better stuff if possible.
Back button with AJAX
Feb 20th
I’m pretty sure it can be implemented in a pretty simple way – when clicking on a button / link that has a javascript onclick handler simply store the current page status (including javascript variables though – problems here?) so you can revert the state when the Back button is pressed. So it should be feasible because Firefox already caches the pages so it has code for saving / reloading page data.
.net framework source code
Feb 15th
Why
isn’t it made publicly available? MFC is sometimes easier to work with because
of this. Also – there is no secret or protected stuff in there to say that they
are defending their IP, at least nothing I’m aware of.
