Coder Corner

I hate you. I truly, terminally, passionately hate you. You’re a fucking piece of insane, mind-boggling junk. Having used computers for more than 2 decades now, I can assure you that you are, without a shred of a doubt, the crappiest, lamest machine I have ever used. It makes me sad that you’re the one who survived, because you obviously deserve it the least.

And now for the question of the day:

• I bought a brand new USB memory stick. Looks great.
• I have been using it for less than a month, sharing files between 2 machines (Win2K, WinXP).
• And today out of the blue, I’m told that the stick is “write protected”. I can’t add files to it. I can’t remove files from it. I can’t even reformat the sucker. Google tells me that this is a common problem (!!) but none of the “solutions” I found online worked.
• Help? Anybody knows how to unlock that thing?

For all I can see, it looks like I wasted my money on one more piece of PC garbage, and I can just throw it away and buy another. This is fucking ridiculous. It makes my blood boil that this so-called “user friendly” PC is in fact a fucking clueless money-making bastard that couldn’t care less about users. If you would care about users you would allow me to install VC9 on Win2K, for a start!

My girlfriend broke her foot a few days after moving back to Zürich, just when we didn’t have a Krankenkasse. Thank you Murphy.

My Xbox died halfway through Wet. I suppose that game was too hot, since I got 2 red lights in the Red Ring Of Death. Overheating. I guess that is a noble death for a console. At least its life was useful. Maybe it will cool down enough to start again, after a while. In the meantime I used this as an excuse to buy one of the new slim PS3’s. Finished Uncharted 2, went halfway through MGS4, just started Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Now you know why there’s no time for updating that blog

Worked on a serialization framework for the PhysX SDK, something similar to this.

Started investigating “CSG debris” in my spare time. So you carve bullet holes in meshes via a CSG operation, generating debris pieces at the same time. Debris are then rigid bodies, etc. Currently playing with t-junction removals, retriangulations, all that fun stuff. The even funnier stuff will be to update all the PhysX mesh data structures after a CSG operation. Stan Melax has a brilliant demo with runtime CSG a while back, I guess that’s the inspiration for this small side project. I hope I’ll be able to include that in Konoko Payne if it all works as planned.

…and there’s probably a million things more to post, but I don’t have time…