The Brad Hole

I think Matt Kennedy Gould said it best : "What is going on?!?"

I read on the rumor sites this morning that Apple has once again revised the shipping dates for the 2.5GHz G5s, this time back to the original dates. I went to check my order online, and sure enough, now it says that mine has shipped, from Shenzhen, CN (which I assume is in China). I assume it'll get here some time next week because of that, although it does have a "priority overnite" shipping status. It looks like my vegan ritual paid off big time.

In not-so-related news, Joe Schmo 2 is the greatest TV series of all time. The "pearl necklace" eviction ceremony was nothing short of genius.

Posted by bradman at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So the 2.5 GHz G5 I ordered back in mid-June to replace my aging 800 MHz G4 got cancelled and re-ordered today. The previous expected shipping date was "On or before 7/30/04". Now it reads "On or before 9/10/2004". D'oh! I've still got that Apple loaner - due back a few weeks ago now! I'll be doing a sacrifice to the Apple Loan Gods tomorrow to let me keep it just a little bit longer.

For those not in the know, a sacrifice to the Apple Loan Gods is also known as a "Vegan Ritual." It typically involves burning a black turtleneck while drinking ritualistic "Blood of the Bean" (otherwise known as organic soy milk). For an extra punch, you can optionally throw tofurkey on the fire. (The soy milk helps to distract you from the smell of burning tofurkey.)

Posted by bradman at 01:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Not too long ago, I was drawn into watching The Bourne Identity, which Beth had captured on TiVo. I honestly had zero interest in it, but as I was passing through and saw her watching it, it totally drew me in. In the end, I found it much more enjoyable than I would have anticipated.

Given that, I was definitely open to seeing the sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, which we did earlier this evening. It lacked a little of the uniqueness that made Bourne Identity work so well, but I still liked it. One part in particular stood out - the car chase through Moscow at the end. It was confusing, kinetic and exciting all at the same time.

Also, I have decided that I want to drive a Russian taxi cab for a living. I'm tired of crashing programs - I want to crash cars! Wearing a five-point harness while I play Nascar 2003 just doesn't cut it.

(Side note - has anyone else noticed that all the "Buy" and "Pre-Order" links on the Aspyr website now take you to Amazon?)

Posted by bradman at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Sad news in Phoenix - Cotton Fitzsimmons passed away on Saturday. I guess I hadn't been following the news very closely, because I didn't even realize he was ill. The Suns home page is also running a nice retrospective.

I'm a big fan of the Phoenix Suns. One of my friends worked for them for many, many years and I've been to a ton of games, a lot of them during the Cotton era. When he later moved on to doing color commentary beside Al McCoy, I learned many basketball terms, like "spread the floor and penetrate" and "he needs to come out for a blow."

He was such a likable and personable guy and easily my favorite Suns coach. Thanks for the memories, Cotton.

Posted by bradman at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've started to get some grief about the lack of blog updates recently, but the truth is I've been really in the thick of it with KOTOR. Luckily it's starting to finally wind down, but it's been a pretty hectic month. I've learned quite a bit of interesting details as this beta period has progressed. Here are some highlights.

1. Some of the vertex shaders in KOTOR are extremely long and complex, and cause some video cards to fall off the "fast path" because they exceed the hardware-accelerated programmability on those cards. When this happens, they fall back to the software vertex program "emulator" (for lack of a better word) to give you the same visual end-result. In those cases, OpenGL doesn't give you an error (or any way to tell this has happened) other than performance taking a hit in some scenes. Luckily it's not a common occurrence on the affected cards, but it's a bit of a downer nonetheless.

2. KOTOR does some interesting, albeit perfectly legal, things with the client state that can cause OpenGL to crash on the Mac. For example, if you enable, say, GL_VERTEX_ARRAY, then call something that causes OpenGL to want to "validate" its internal state (like clearing the stencil buffer) and have not called glVertexPointer in between those calls, the current GL implementation will try to map the vertex array during the stencil clear (or other operation). If it's not been set and is NULL, this causes a crash. Luckily I've been able to work around this, so it's not a big deal.

3. Hands-up everyone who has played a game that uses fragment programs (also known as pixel shaders and/or register combiners) on 10.2.8. Now hands-up everyone who has noticed that they are considerably more bug free on 10.3.4. :-)

4. Vertex buffer objects (VBOs) are so much easier to program for than Apple's old vertex array range combined with vertex array objects. I like that they encompass the VAO/VAR stuff and also encompass Apple's "element array" extension in one tidy package without having to manage memory or deal with gl fences or any of that other bothersome stuff.

5. KOTOR has a whole lot of game in it. I've been poking away at it in my spare time on the Mac. Right now I'm 35 hours into it (according to the timestamp on the saved game) and I've still got the last third of the game to go. I've been playing as a "light side" male, and I understand there are some pretty big changes to the quests if you play dark side or female. I'm very curious to go through and play as a dark side female to maximize that.

Posted by bradman at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sunday afternoon, I flew out to San Francisco for WWDC 2004. I didn't have a lot of spare time this year, what with KOTOR being in beta right now, but I did stay through the Tuesday sessions. Unfortunately for me, a lot of the meaty sessions were Wednesday through Friday. On the plus side, Glenda and Mark from Aspyr are there to catch those.

I met up with Richard Bannister for the first time, which was nice. We had plenty of chatting opportunities on Sunday and Monday, and I'm sure he got his fill of gossip from Aspyr. :-)

The keynote was about what I was expecting, but also in the end not really worth my time to attend. It was nice seeing the new Tiger features demoed - it looks fantastic. I had heard that starting with Tiger, Apple will be the largest user of OpenGL fragment shaders in the OS (CoreImage leans heavily on them), which indirectly is good for us. It means that all that code will be getting a pretty good shakedown by Apple, which should ultimately mean that it works really smoothly out of the box for games. That's my hope at least. :-)

I got to see Phil and Ken from Westlake, which was a lot of fun as well. It was nice to hang out with them, if only for a day. Excepting Suellen, it meant that the only "more-than-2-project" members of "old" Westlake not in attendance were Duane and John Butler, so it was a mini-reunion of sorts.

One interesting thing to note was that in years past, Apple has provided a variety of soft drinks and snacks in between sessions (free, of course). They did this year as well, but the selection was fairly different. There was a strong focus this year on healthy snacks - caffeine free Diet drinks were in abundance, and regular soft drinks were very hard to come by. Same with the snacks - you could get fruit (bananas, yuck!), goldfish and pretzels easily, but I didn't see candy bars, rice crispy treats and things like they'd had in years past. Perhaps they don't want to help slowly kill off their developers. :-)

I lived on the edge and took the subway ("bart") back to the airport from downtown. It worked out very well, and I anticipate using it in the future when I go to SFO. It only cost $5 versus $35 to take a cab, and was as clean and almost as fast.

Posted by bradman at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)