I was very pleasantly surprised to find out last night that Paul Heckbert had once cited a piece of software I created as an example of non-photorealistic rendering.

Now I don’t know if he was the person who actually wrote that, or if it was an assistant, or whatever, but I was swollen with pride regardless.

Oh, who’s Paul Heckbert? One of the pioneers of modern computer graphics.

Behind the Music spoofs have been done before, but none as well as Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black (first seen on MeFi).

I used to hate Cooper Black, really hate it. But now.. I don’t know, there’s something comforting about it. Maybe because I now know he’s old and sitting alone in his room.

So SIGGRAPH 2002 has come and gone, apparently without as many jaw-dropping announcements as usual. I think XSI was the only package to get a major new version.. well, that and Poser. The other applications with new releases appear to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

The realtime stuff seems to be where it’s at, with Cg from NVIDIA and RenderMonkey from ATI. I’ve worked with Cg and I like it, but RenderMonkey - with the ability to compile Renderman shaders - intrigues me. Of course, you’d have to have ATI drivers that were stable for more than 15 seconds.

Speaking of Renderman stuff, we find out that NVIDIA have bought Exluna and presumably helped settle their lawsuit with Pixar. Unfortunately, it is at the expense of their renderers, Entropy and BMRT. It’s a blow to lose BMRT, as it was one of the very few decent, free multiplatform Renderman renderers. The loss of Entropy could be a boost for AIR though. All in all, I expect to see some form of Renderman-like shading coming out on NVIDIA’s next cards.

I’ve been so busy this week, haven’t had the time nor inclination to post anything. But I thought I’d see how TrackBack works, so I’m giving it a shot.

Unfortunately, it appears it breaks XHTML validation.

And then of course we discover that Bowyer is staying. Which is tricky - he’s played really well for Leeds, but he’s a bit of a bastard and he’s said he doesn’t want to stay.. it’s hard to get behind someone who apparently doesn’t want your support.

Looks like I’ll be making some changes to my FIFA 2002 squad tonight..

You might think I’m overreacting, but the news of
Rio Ferdinand moving to the scum is heartbreaking. From out of nowhere, he started talking about not being happy without Champion’s League football, which really felt like a kick in the stomach - he’s either saying that he doesn’t think Leeds will qualify again this season, or that he’s too impatient to wait until next season. It’s petty, but I really hope the scum do badly and fail to qualify next season.

Well, I wish ill-will towards them in general, but this time it’s personal.

I’ve switched my main browser to Mozilla. I didn’t think I’d ever be swayed from IE, but features such as gestures, tabs, and selective blocking of scripts have tempted me. My move also prompted me to tweak the site design, as it just wasn’t looking good in Mozilla - I still have spacing issues but it’s much better now.

The only problem I have right now is that sometimes it’s not receiving HTTP responses correctly, and I have to click the link again, or whatever. This could be because I’m using the 1.1 alpha, of course.

Still some tweaks and changes to be made, and coolpowers.com as a whole will be updated, but I think we’re good to go on our new host, Alentus.

For any of you bookmarking, this is the new permanent URL for my weblog.

Hmm? Hmm? We on yet?

Please don’t let Amy see this. Please don’t let Amy see this. Please don’t let Amy see this.