Looking back, I can see it's been over two months since my last Direct3D tutorial publication. D'oh! Well, it was a busy two months, but don't worry - I haven't given up. My latest installment is finally ready. It covers IndexBuffers, an important part of the basics of Direct3D.
Hopefully I'll be a bit quicker about getting the next one out. As usual, feel free to email me with comments, corrections, complaints, and suggestions about the series.
BitWorking has this piece. Regardless of which side of the issue you're on, US citizens should be aware of this, if for no other reason than to be able to debate it with those that don't share your views.
How Do You Build a Police State?
The same way you eat an elephant. Is it even worth asking where the "professional" media is on this story?
On December 13, when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush not only celebrated with his national security team, but also pulled out his pen and signed into law a bill that grants the FBI sweeping new powers. A White House spokesperson explained the curious timing of the signing - on a Saturday - as "the President signs bills seven days a week." But the last time Bush signed a bill into law on a Saturday happened more than a year ago - on a spending bill that the President needed to sign, to prevent shuttng down the federal government the following Monday. [San Antonio Current]
My recent entry about my desire for a Wiki that thinks in XML instead of text/html led me to an interesting application. David Pickett pointed me at WikidPad. I've been trying it out, and I have to say I really like it. It's a desktop application that lets you build a series of linked documents in much the same way that a Wiki does on the web. To me, it's sort of like OneNote, except instead of pages and tabs and sections, you get hyperlinks, which is fundamentally more powerful.
I'm definitely going to be shelling out for this one. I mean, it's only $12, and the last release was just last month, so I know it's still in active development). Of course there are things about it that I don't like. For example, while the keyboard shortcuts are plentiful, there are a few more I'd like to have. But I imagine the devs will be hearing from me about all the little nits I don't like. :) And the app is easily powerful enough to tackle the particular task I have in mind for it, which is to organize the hundred or so pages of notes I have for a role playing game I'm running. (Vampire, if you must know.)
At any rate, while it's nice that I have a tool that's good enough (and good), I still haven't found what I was originally looking for, which is the fusion of typed information (i.e. XML), the Wiki build-by-accretion model, and a desktop (not web) application. WikiPad has two of those three, but it's still a collection of untyped (i.e. text) information. Fortunately, the storage format - while not XML - is simple and textual, so if I need to parse it into something else, I can.
By the way, if anyone out there is interested in building something like an XMLWiki, give me a shout. While I don't have time to write the darn thing myself, I do have time to share my vision and to provide guidance to anyone that would like to tackle it as a side project. I think it's a fascinating subject, if for no other reason than that it involves figuring out the right balance between too little and too much structure.
Dear PWSTM (People Way Smarter Than Me),
As I've gotten used to using my blog over the last year, I've been thinking more about managing my personal information. Lately, I've been pondering Wikis, a topic about which I know little more than the basics.
On the one hand, I like the idea of a Wiki for storing notes and ideas. In theory, it makes it easy to maintain relationships amongst various nuggets of information.
But in practice (the other hand), all the Wiki software I've seen has two drawbacks:
It seems to me that there's a sweet spot somewhere at the intersection of Wikis and XML. What I envision is an app that lets me specify a mapping between some piece of UI editing code (a form, generally), and an XML type. What I'd want is an app that lets me create new instances of those XML types, editing each one with the appropriate UI and then somehow linking them together, in the same way that a Wiki lets you link together HTML documents. If I could somehow get the version control that many Wikis offer, that would be really nice, too.
The advantage of this XML/Wiki hybrid is that it would lend itself very nicely to use for many purposes. Because of the reliance on XML rather than HTML as the fundamental thing that you're storing and editing, it would be fairly easy to have both a web and a rich interface for editing. Or a rich interface for editing, and a transform to produce static HTML read-only copies. And - done right - the mapping between XML types and UI that knows how to edit that type could make the whole thing pretty darn extensible.
As I've been running this idea through my head, I'm wondering if there's already something that does exactly what I want. A few things on my list of stuff that I don’t know enough about, but that might help or solve the problem, and that I really ought to look into:
1) There's already some Wiki software out there that does exactly this.
2) InfoPath already does exactly this.
3) Some other app already does exactly this.
4) Somehow some app that uses RDF solves this problem.
5) One of the above comes close, and could be made to do what I want with some tweaks to existing software.
6) I write my own when days finally have 26 hours.
I'm planning to look into InfoPath at some point in the near future (as soon as I install it again). But I'm hoping that one of you will be able to shed some light on this for me.
Years ago, I saw a neat application that would show you your disk drive usage as a series of nested rectangles. This makes it very easy to identify which folder, which subfolders, and even which particular files are eating your harddrive. I completely forgot the name of the original application, but today I ran across one that does the same thing: SequoiaView. It’s free, and it makes cool pictures like this:
I like it.
So we went to my biggest client's holiday party last night. First of all, I thought it was pretty cool that they even invite consultants. Second, the food was excellent (steak and lobster, if you must know ;)). But I was a bit surprised to find that the entertainment was the band Chicago - a far cry from the usual company band playing covers of old 50s dance tunes!
Daniel Sinclair, fellow DM instructor, turned me on to this very cool feature yesterday. Under Windows 2003 (and possibly other OSes – I haven’t checked), if you go to the properties for one of your local drives, you will see a tab labeled “Shadow Copies”.
If you enable the feature, clicking on the Settings button will bring you to a dialog where you can set up a schedule. The basic idea here is that every day/week/month/whatever period you select, the operating system will take a snapshot of your hard drive. Only it’s a smart snapshot – it only records the deltas, making for a much smaller image than if I had simply copied the drive somewhere, and it lets you specify how much space the backups should be allowed to take up.
The way you access the drive is via the network redirector. So you simply open up (say) \\localhost\c$, right-click on any file, and pull up the properties. There’s a “Previous Versions” tab where you can view the state of the file or folder you’re interested in at that point in time.
Obviously, this doesn’t take the place of regular backups, but it sure is a nice safety net, especially when I’m on the road and don’t have access to backup.
One caveat: Dan warned me that there might be a performance penalty associated with enabling this feature. I’m not sure if I’ve noticed anything yet – my hard drive is a bit busy this morning, but I haven’t tracked down what the source of this is yet. It could be something else. At any rate, subjective performance certainly hasn’t suffered that much, if at all.
Thanks Dan!
