Coder Corner

Well. I still have viruses here. The Globat guys don’t bother answering anymore. I’ll drop those clowns ASAP.

I’m trying not to follow the trend around me. I’m trying not to succumb to the dark side. I’m trying not to say bad things about Spain. But seriously, there are a lot of basic things that just fail to work here.

This morning, I tried transferring some money from my spanish account to my brother’s french account. Something that took literally 5 minutes in Switzerland.

Here, it took 2 people and 30 minutes to tell me that “it doesn’t work”. They asked me to leave my stuff here and come back at 14:00. They seemed genuinely surprised when I told them I couldn’t come here at 14:00 because, you know, I have to work.

So I’ll try again tomorrow morning. Oh, and the only reason why I don’t do it online is because their website doesn’t work either.

Some discussions in the office about current issues on modern consoles curiously remind me of similar problems on the ST. A background loading thread that streams stuff from the DVD, where assets have to be carefully laid out to minimize seek times, is really the same as what people did in “trackmos” on ST and Amiga.

We didn’t use real “threads” with mutexes and everything, it was a lot simpler:

• the demo code was put in the VBL interrupt (One ASM line: move.l #callback_address, $70.W)
• the main code continued in the background, free to load, decompress or precompute the next effect, whatever was needed

No threads, but the end result was pretty much the same - although limited to one “main thread” and one “background thread”, granted.

We didn’t stream from the HD or the DVD, we streamed from the only thing we had: floppy disks. Properly storing your data in contiguous sectors on the disk was not only important to speed up loading times. It was also important to minimize the awful noise made by the floppy disk controller when seeking. With large seeks it sounded like the thing was about to break, so, yeah, we paid attention to those issues.

Those days I see some PC developers moving to consoles and rediscovering those problems, or cursing the next-gen consoles for those painful thorny new issues. But they’re nothing but new.

Well, apparently somebody posted a new run of Konoko Payne on YouTube… hmmm…

NEVER, EVER sign-up with Globat.

- they have a fucking insane “automatic upgrade program”, meaning they automatically provide you with “useful” upgrades. And charge your credit card for it. Automatically. You are given an option to opt-out if you click on some link in some email they send to you some days before the automatic update. I don’t understand how this can be legal. This is even worse than spam.

- they claim to be virus-free, but my website just got hacked! As a result, all pages from CoderCorner are now marked as potentially dangerous on Google. This is so fucking painful. I cleaned the files and requested a new review, but WTF, like I don’t have anything else to do!

- the spam on this blog is so freaking insane, it drives me mad. Yeah, yeah, maybe it’s not their fault, but still, it makes me happy to pretend it is, just to blame them a little more. I just added a “captcha“, as suggested by a smart reader, and removed the previous moderation options. It should hopefully help.

- unfortunately I lost some comments in the process. (Sorry Geyser, in particular). No clue how it happened, but… yes… I’ll blame Globat for that as well.

NEVER, EVER sign-up with Globat.

Iceland has hell, but Iceland also has heaven. If there is a paradise on earth, it might very well be the famous Blue Lagoon.

Once again, those simple 2-dimensional collections of lifeless pixels won’t really be able to convey the full force of the Blue Lagoon experience. It’s not just the marvellous, striking blue colors.

It’s everything you don’t see on the pictures. It’s the context, the mindblowing power plant lost in the middle of a huge lava field.

It’s the impossibly fresh air. It’s the temperature difference between the warm water and the cool air. It’s the relaxing warmth, the torpor that captures you there and makes you all sleepy, never wanting to leave.

And somewhere, never far away, it’s the light smell of sulphur reminding you that however paradisiac it may looks, this is Devil’s Beauty. You are still in Iceland.

So now, dear readers, fellow workers, I just hope you finally start to understand why I’ve been a huge fan of this country for years. No, it has nothing to do with Björk. It is just an amazing country where anybody can take postcard-perfect pictures with any cheap, automatic digital camera.

Iceland rules!

Finally, we reached one of the most impressive places I’ve seen in Iceland: the bubbling mud pots of Namafjall Hverir. This place is hell. If pictures can’t properly convey the beauty of Iceland, they can at least gives you some ideas. However there’s something they completely miss: the smell. For those mud pots, believe me, it’s a good thing. Two words: rotten eggs. To the power of ten.

Mind your steps here. If you walk past the safe areas, your foot might very well break the crust and land in one of those high temperature cauldrons.

Nonetheless, even in the middle of this mess, the surrounding landscapes are still gorgeous.

The earth is boiling, melting, cracking, smelling, hot steam continuously escapes from those emerging chimneys… This is the work of Vulcan.

The next day we took a small plane to the north of Iceland, and landed in Akureyri. From there we drove to lake Myvatn. This was a really beautiful day to visit this beautiful place.

We continued to Dimmuborgir, and to the Krafla Geothermal Power Station, a.k.a. Kröflustöd. On the way we saw this impressive ridge, cracking the earth open. Jules Vernes wrote that the journey to the center of the earth begins in the Snaefells, but I’d say that huge crevasse makes a good runner up!

Time for some action! Nearby the Golden Circle there’s a glacier called Langjökull. It is possible to drive a snowmobile there, and, well, that’s what we did.

On the way to the glacier, the landscapes are desolated, dramatic, a mixture of lava fields and rocky mountains. We went there while listening to Björk all the way

We had our shares of surprises with the snowmobile experience. Bad luck or Murphy’s Law, our machine broke while we were in the middle of the glacier. So we made a part of the ride along with the Activity Group guys, and let’s just say they drove a lot faster than us. Then, on the way back, we inherited one of their snowmobiles, which was a much much more powerful toy than the ones they usually let between tourists’ hands…………

A few kids joined for the ride. This one was eager to start a snowball fight on the glacier, but he was really alone for this one…

The “Golden Circle” is the classic tour that you make when you arrive in Iceland. It has 3 main components:

• Thingvellir
• Geysir
• Gullfoss

Thingvellir has many nice features, including some exceptionally clear water. This clear water is what makes the Silfra fissure, located nearby, such an interesting site for divers.

This is the classic view from Gullfoss.

Geysir is so famous I don’t think I need to talk much about it. Just enjoy the pictures from the two small ponds nearby, named Blesi. The first one is completely opaque like the Blue Lagoon, and the second one is extremely transparent - even though the two ponds are connected to eachother underneath the ground.

Geysir, the geyser that gave its name to all others, is not active anymore. The big active geyser here is actually another one, Strokkur, located just nearby.

The big game for photographers here is to capture the bubble just before it bursts…