Making it happen
Archive for May, 2007
ATI did it again :(
May 10th
Just seen some performance numbers under NDA from ATI’s upcoming Radeon HD 2900 (R600 to be more precise), it’s terrible and I’m very upset being a hardcore fan of them 
. The performance is on par with 8800 GTS and thus less than nVidia’s top of the range 8800GTX.
If they really put only 16 texture units, shame on them, it’s incredible to have a 512-bit bus, double of everything else, and not throw at least 32 texture units .
Anti-nVidia
May 10th
Yet another strange problem on nVidia hardware, this time specifically related to a GeForce 7500 LE. Whenever I rendered into a pbuffer large enough, glFlush and glFinish had no effect and the image came out drawn partially. I’ve tried even drawing something after the scene at a specific pixel location and then looping until glReadPixels read the correct value 
still the scene was not rendered completely. The only viable workaround seemed to be tiled rendering on lower resolution pbuffers (I’ve tried with 512×512).
The bug didn’t appear with a GeForce 6600 however I left the tiled rendering enabled for all nVidia cards just to be sure .
wglChoosePixelFormatARB fails on nVidia
May 9th
Ok so I got over this strange bug, while creating a pbuffer it appears that wglChoosePixelFormatARB from Forceware drivers does not like some DCs, even if the DC passed there should be useless. It simply fails with GetLastError 0xc0070591. 0×591 appears to be ERROR_DC_NOT_FOUND.
So beware what DC you send, I finally sent one that has a OpenGL RC associated and it worked fine.
What are microformats ?
May 3rd
As Firefox 3 and IE 8 will support them, let’s take a quick look at what they are meant to be. Basically they are a way of structuring data on the web using existing HTML tags or attributes. Some standards are proposed – like for events or for reviews. For example you will have to add class=”hreview” to your HTML element where the review is written, enclose your rating with , and so on.
Besides, the once abandoned semantic html tags (cite, legend, strong) are now encouraged to be used instead of only using spans, divs + css. Microformats can be used both for smart tag-like functionality inside the browser (like click on a recognized event and set an alarm for it) and moreover they will be useful to spiders in scraping data.
Silverlight 1.1 alpha
May 2nd
Whoa! Microsoft doing a cross-platform framework ? Supporting Python and Ruby ? Now really, what happened ? 
By the way I’m pretty sure Silverlight will be the core technology for counter-attacking Google and online services.
