A meeting with an old friend...

I was pleasantly surprised the other day to hear from Ian Hannaford. He wanted to benefit from what little wisdom I could muster. We had a good chat about his new role (thrown in the deep end as usual) and generally had a good old chat. Ian boosted my ego by telling me that he had directed other people to my blog (Hi other people!) and we gossipped about old friends and talked techie.

In the course of our chat, Ian told me about his pattern use but that he found the Gang of Four book a touch dry and academic. He suggested that I could at some stage write something to make it a little more approachable and relevant.

I'm going to think on this a bit and may start writing entries on situations where I have used GOF patterns and why I used them.

I'm going to toddle now and have me a bite of dinner (Teryaki beef, sticky rice and pak choi.).

P.S. I got LocoRoco on the PSP this weekend - at last I am using the PSP as a games machine instead of a mobile video player. LocoRoco is great!

GPGPU with JOGL part 1.

Well I've started tinkering with the GPGPU concept that I mentioned in an earlier post. I've landed on JOGL as it seems to provide me with all the basic functionality that I am going to need and is reasonably cross-platform.

I need to be able to bind a texture (representing an input array of data) into a buffer against which I will run a shader program (the function that I want to perform on the data) and place the outcome of the shader program into a buffer from which I can extract the output array.

I'm struggling with a few handicaps -

• I'm using my PowerBook for this and support for OSX by JOGL is still a bit flakey.
• I've never programmed using GL APIs before so I'm having to learn them from scratch.
• Once I've grasped enought of the APIs, I still have to master at least one shader language.

It's certainly a fun learning curve.

I'm going to struggle on and hopefully I'll have a bitonic sort algorithm implemented before too long.

Apple and Bacon Omelette

I was visiting with some friends the other day, enjoying a very pleasant evening catching up. As I was just heading out the door to go home and cook myself supper, Henry jokingly asked me whether there was anything that he could do with some apples that he had in front of him for his own supper. In short order we had determined that there was some bacon in the fridge and in front of the bemused eyes of his mother, we had rolled up our sleeves and proceeded to cook a new omelette.

We used two to three rashers of salted rindless back bacon, two to three eggs, half a cup of milk and a quarter of a Pink Lady apple per person. The bacon was cut into lardons and the apple was finely diced. The eggs and milk were beaten together with a generous pinch of black pepper. A nob of butter was placed in the bottom of a very large pan and gently melted, we then added the bacon and cooked it through slowly, avoiding frying it to crunchiness, the apples were cooked with the bacon until soft and the egg mixture was added. The low heat was kept on until the eggs were nearly cooked through, the omelette was folded over with a palette knife and then cut into portions and served.

It was extremely delicious.