Saturday, July 30, 2005

Yesterday night , i went to the movies to watch the remake of Charlie and Chocolate Factory... My goodness , what was that??? I felt like all my inner ideas for making the first version (1972) better were used by Tim Burton! Johnny Depp plays Wonka in a divine performance!! Much darker with acid-personality. This version is closer to the original book than the old one... Jush Loved it!

Saturday is rehearsal day... and today was no different! The band is sounding much better now with a second guitar played by Moe. He joined us about one month ago and got the spirit pretty quick! The songs are getting great and i can't wait to play the new HOT SONGZ from our future setlist. It will kick the asses of the entire audience.

Got a new DVD in my collection! Queensrÿche's Operation Livecrime!!! What a band!!! It's the very first record from Queensrÿche that i own , and it's for sure , a state-of-art live show.
The Mindcrime album is played entirely with perfection , with Geoff Tate interpretating the story's main caracter with the feeling of a professional actor.
Wow , and i spent only 30 bucks (Brazil's currency..hehehe) on it!

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Today , i played alot with programming.... tried to create a GTK+ application in Windows , but had lots of trouble with those DLL's. Gotta find some sort of package that satisfies all the GTK+ dependencies (like Pango , for example).
I know that doing that in linux would be easier... but i dropped linux for a while after it burned all my patience while i was trying to make that PPPoe client work with my ADSL connection.

Linux is a great operational system , but configuring it can be as delightful as a S&M session.

I liked alot the way that GTK+ is written.... looks like literate programming!
The construction logic goes in a different way compared to Win32

Took some courage and put my hands on that Game Of Life problem too... Changed my mind about coding it using bi-dimensional arrays for two reasons :


  • Violent "growing" restrictions

  • Pain-in-the-ass range checking in every access

I've been reading about a implementation to this problem that uses a kind of Hash table.. Just know the basics about this data structure , so i'm trying to pick a combination of C++ STL containers that would fit in this situation.
If Bjarne Stroustrup recommended to avoid "reinventing the wheel" and to use the Standard library facilities , i think i should consider it , but "decode & decompress" the information in his C++ book requires thinking time of O P log(p) (where p is the number of pages that you've read)... hahhha , i'm not a 100% C/C++ dummie creature for god's sake!.
Sometimes it feels like reading the bible in its Aramaic version!

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Restarted my Computer Graphics study... I wanna have the chance to do at least one silly game!
Actually i'm using the AC3D for Modelling and the OpenGl for programming... it's a good match , cause it's hard to program 3d graphics without a "concrete" model.
It's difficult to me to have a 3D abstraction inside my head... so modelling first is a nice way to drown your brain inside the R³ space ....hehe
I'm using the OpenGL Programming Guide (also known as the "Red Book") alongside with the NeHe's OpenGl Tutorial (pretty famous for providing a very efficient way to introduce the API in a very clear way to Average Programmers).

I'm also reading the amazing Masters of Doom by David Kushner , which tell the paths that John Romero and John Carmack walked before and after the iD Software founding.
These two guys are my idols, cause they revolutioned the concept of computer gaming.

It's inspiring to see how everything began...

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

College Vacations are always welcome! Mine started 2 and 1/2 weeks ago and i'm loving it!

All i gotta do in my daily basis right now is :
- half-time job (morning)
- watch tv , sleep and play old games in the computer/videogame (afternoon)

When you don't have one of these hot videogames of the moment( PS2 , Xbox) neither a hot GPU like the NVidia Geforce 7800 , the only way to chill out is having fun with the great old-systems emulators avaiable around the net.

By the way , those dudes done a great job writing those programs! You gotta be a professional bit-fiddler to write them! I wish i could be one of these guys :(

Let's take the Zsnes as an example.The core of Zsnes is written in pure i386 assembly (they're porting to C at the moment) and it's scary to imagine the amount of instructions needed for performing the graphics and sound emulation with such perfection.
These two items are only the beggining... There are a lot of other routines needed to make the emulation experience complete : Proper imput handling, network gaming , chip detection, SRAM storage, Psychoacoustic stuff, blah , blah , blah...

All this stuff remembers me that it's been almost a week that i don't even touch my C/C++ sources... Got stuck while trying to write the "Neighbours Counting" algorithm at my Conway's Game of Life simulation in a two-dimensional array...
Just hate to write range checking functions in 2D arrays... but it's needed to avoid that freaking "Memory Violation Fault" or "Memory Segmentation Fault" exceptions...

Nerdy talk isn't it???

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Recording Notes - Part 1 of n

Well , for people that don't know me , i'm the guitar player of Impressao Analógica , a progressive-freak-pop-rock band(damn... i hate labels!) and lately we've been finishing the recording sessions of our first album named "MDB".

Most songs were composed by Lennon and Bia around 1998-2003 while they were working together in a acoustic project prior to the actual band.

I can't wait to see it released because the songs are great!!

Last Sunday i recorded the clean/acoustic guitar parts from "Lilith" and it was all right.
Just 4 hours building interesting chord blocks with Lennon and voilà!
I think i need to study some uncommon chord mounting around the guitar neck... i'm pretty rusted on this!
Oh yeah! Just got paid yesterday and soon i'll burn all my savings in some good guitar stuff...The Line6 POD XT is a strong candidate by now...

That's all for now!

Monday, July 11, 2005

Oh yeah.. here i go again!

Well , i forgot the amount of times that i started something like this...
I Think i don't got enough patience to keep any kind of log... Usually , after some time , my mind gets empty and i don't have a single damn word to write.
But the idea of keeping a weblog have been bugging my mind again in the last weeks , so....

Whatever.... i'm creating this blog for me and for the people who wants to know the ramdom reflections of a daydream fueled mind like mine(uff!).

In some posts (maybe most... but only time will tell) i'll write in english. I'll give ya two reasons for that :

1-) An opportunity for foreign visitors to understand the stuff i wrote
2-) An opportunity to exercise my english

So don't expect perfectly written posts!! :P

Welcome visitor!! Feel free to leave any comments