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Typography For Lawyers

Reading through this website, I am reminded of just how common poor typography is.

Written by a former graphic designer turned attorney, these guidelines are actually great general rules. If anything, it is useful to read through the logical reasons behind each point. I especially liked the advice against centering text—alignment is typically underrated.

Flatland

Today’s XKCD:

Also, I apologize for the time I stepped down into your world and everyone freaked out about the lesbian orgy overseen by a priest.

Wow, didn’t see that one coming.

If you haven’t already, Edwin A. Abbott’s classic novella on the perception of dimensions is a great read, ignoring the dated Victorian sentiment towards women.

Emotional Business

“Steve Jobs of Apple Computer described his method of approving new products: you know a design is good if you want to lick it. Clearly, at Apple Computer, product development engages the senses before it gratifies the intellect.”

I’ve been reading this book by Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity and came across the above potent quote. The book presents the case for being more emotional in business and more business-like with your emotions. If you get a chance, it’s an interesting take on presenting yourself in all aspects of life and certainly worth a read.

Content-Aware Fill In CS5

Holy fuck! As Gruber says, this is “Indistinguishable from magic”.

You can find John Nack’s original post here. I’ll be eagerly anticipating the release of this feature, mostly due to the amount of times I’ve tried to remove lens flare … usually without success.

Installing NetRadiant on Snow Leopard

Radiant is tool for creating maps used in popular games including Nexuiz, Quake and OpenArena. Unfortunately, trying to get it to install on OS X 10.6 was a bag of hurt which is why I’m detailing the necessary steps below. I came across three different versions when trying to get it to install on my Mac but was finally successful with NetRadiant after trying GTKRadiant and MacRadiant. So if you need to do the same thing then here’s what you need to do:

Install X11

You can find X11 version 2.3.4 on the OS X 10.6 install disc under Optional Extras. The newer version 2.4 will not run on Snow Leopard so just stick with the one on the disc.

Download NetRadiant

NetRadiant is a stable fork of the GTKRadiant editor and is maintained by Alientrap software. You will find precompiled binaries at http://www.icculus.org/netradiant/files/. You’ll want version 1.5.0 revision 402. Download and install into you /Applications folder.

Patch The Libraries

Snow Leopard requires newer versions of certain libraries used in Radiant and luckily has them all in /usr/lib, so all we have to do symlink the files in the application to the ones in /usr/lib.

cd /Applications/NetRadiant.app/Contents/MacOS/install/
mv libxml2.2.dylib libxml2.2.dylib.bak
mv libiconv.2.dylib libiconv.2.dylib.bak
ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib libxml2.2.dylib
ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.2.7.3.dylib libxml2.2.dylib

If you start up NetRadiant, you should now see a splash screen and will be asked for a game engine. As an additional step, if you want to create maps for OpenArena, you’ll need a map pack for that which you can get here. Unfortunately OpenArena is not GPL compatible, hence it is not included by default.

All you have to do to install the pack is move it into the application like so:

mv oa.game /Applications/NetRadiant.app/Contents/MacOS/install/
mv games/oa.game /Applications/NetRadiant/Contents/MacOS/install/games/

Restart the application and select OpenArena as your game engine, then get mapping!

2010 F1 Season Off To A Slow Start

This slight dodgy article from The Times calls it as it is and I unfortunately have to agree that Sunday’s spectacle was rather a let down. The hype building up to this season had me thinking that nothing could go wrong, yet it seems that no matter how many rule changes, F1 is still stuck in somewhat of a rut.

I’m inclined to side with the following comment on PlanetF1, it’s not like we can un-invent aerodynamics so lets stop pretending we can:

“It’s the low budget aims of F1 that has brought it into disrepute. Scrap the low budgets & most of the new rules and lets get back to real racing again. this will have added bonus of getting rid of the riff raff that nobody is interested in anyway”

Never-the-less, I do expect the season to pick up rather quickly as drivers and teams adapt to the current state of play. I refuse to believe the immense collection of talent on track this season will fail to provide some top-notch racing.

Of course, I am particularly excited to see the return of my childhood hero Michael Schumacher of which Times reporter Giles Smith had this to say:

“All this plus the return of “Schumi”, who divides people like Marmite, the difference being that some people like Marmite.”

Not particularily true, but captures his reputation rather well! And finally, this passage made me laugh because I was thinking a similar thing:

“When Legard raised his voice to traditional heights to greet Fernando Alonso’s passage under the chequered flag, it was as if somebody had stood up and shouted at a funeral.”

I have never really been comfortable with Legard’s commentary, he always seems to be the awkward guy in the room.

Document vs Object Databases

This post from 10gen is a concise comparison between these seemingly similar technologies:

In a document store, we really are thinking of “documents”, not objects. Objects have methods, predefined schema, inheritance hierarchies. These are not present in a document database; code is not part of the database.

Decoupling Illumination from Isosurface Generation

Update: I gave an update to this talk following the completion of my project on the 19th May. The revised slides are available here

I gave a talk today to the Leeds VVR group outlining my project and the paper it is based on. Slides are available here for anyone interested.

Realtime Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination

This is an incredible result; full global illumination with caustics, penumbra and diffuse interreflection all rendered in at interactive frame-rates. Be sure to check out the video.

The full algorithm is described in the recent paper by Morgan McGuire and David Luebke, “Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping”