the final match of the guild wars world championship is tonight!  the winning guild takes home $50,000 and second place fetches $25,000.  not too shabby for playing a computer game! if you've got guild wars you can watch the match in game by clicking observe on the menu.  it starts tonight at 7:00pm PST.

every programmer should start his or her career at microsoft.  this is because once you leave microsoft you can join the microsoft alumni network (assuming you leave on good terms) and get microsoft software from the company store for cheap for the rest of your life.  speaking of which visual studio 2005 is pretty sweet.  it's a shame all the refactoring stuff doesn't work in c++ though.

this past weekend i watched the movie red eye. 
i adore horror movies and really love movies with scenes on airplanes
so i really really wanted to see this one but missed it when it was
theatres.  it was okay.  it's probably my favorite of wes
craven's movies now (most of them are terrible so didn't take
much).  one interesting aspect of the movie is that the bad guy
never really hurts anybody. 

anyhow if you want to see a really good horror movie, there are two i came across last year.  one is the dark hours and the other is the descent. 
for maximum effect, don't read anything about either of them ahead of time -- and that includes clicking
those links!

everytime 3dsmax crashes i'm reminded of autodesk's purchase of alias.  my prediction after the acquisition was that autodesk would kill or sell 3dsmax in two years or so.  it's got some nice features, but everyone who's used it (and especially those who've written plugins) knows that max is a mess. 

autodesk doesn't need two competing 3d modelling applications anymore than microsoft needs competing office products.  max is gunna die.  i just hope they move maxscript over to maya.

years ago i thought the radeon 8500 was a pretty sweet card. now it seems just... well... quirky. ;)

there was one problem where it would amuse itself by dropping random textures and substituting the color white.

maybe this was considered a great driver optimization. :) at one point i did a lot of work to ensure

textures get allocated in a nice order to speed up an nvidia card and that seemed to also mollify the 8500 so i

don't lose sleep over this one any more.

there's another problem though that still creeps up on me occasionally. the 8500 has an interesting hardware

limitation which is that it can't represent the number 0 in a pixel shader constant. 0 actually ends up as a

small negative number. when you feed that to a lerp you get quite unexpected results. a lot of hardware and

driver bugs are easy to work around (for example sometimes you need to set render states in a particular order

or avoid using some feature) but a general fix for this one is much more involved. i manually munge some

constants right now for problematic shaders, but if it sneaks up on me one more time i think i'll need to start

tracking all constants that are used as lerp inputs and munge them automatically just to please the 8500. uy.