SIGGRAPH Day 3

Not much happening that I was interested in today.Saw Ton Rosendaal and others talk; resisted the urge to get a photo with him.Picked up my stickers from Studio; I shall definitely do more! Digital Domain's pre-vis for Speed Racer used the Top Gear intro music.
I went to the Computer Animation Festival. There was a long run of films from a French school (supinfocom, if I recall), all of which had a lazy animation style that offended my eyes. It was very much like being slowly crushed by rocks.The other films were good though.

SIGGRAPH Day 2

Sat in sessions in the morning, talked with people about my poster (and about gradient paint) in the afternoon.Brian Curless apparently has something coming out at ECCV worth checking out.Gradient Paint seems to impress and confuse people (though different people are confused by different parts).
In the art gallery, I came across a cleverly cut sheet of steel:

Then came TCHOW logo-stuff.

Thanks to emerging technology (and the guts of an old printer), one can enjoy a TCHOW-branded cup of coffee, as pictured above -- though, unfortunately, they weren't actually allowing people to drink the coffee.So one could look at it, at least.

That's a lenticular print of the tchow logo (that is, a flat image with a lens sheet over it allowing for different views per-eye). Sort of very much like a zig-zag-folded piece of paper really.Upshot being that, in person, it's 3d. Which is nifty!
Finally, I made some TCHOW stickers, but those haven't printed yet.

SIGGRAPH Day 1

Doing a fast-forward is a bit of an adrenaline rush, I must say.
Everything else was pretty much me just being sleepy and hanging out; Alex Evans was going to talk but he canceled (which was disappointing).
Ed's keynote was nice -- I need to catch up with him and see how he reconciles his commitment to produce the best possible content with being a profit-seeking public comapny.

SIGGRAPH day 0

Consider this the first of my SIGGRAPH reports.I figured I'd write things up this year to capture the event for posterity.
Approaching the building, I began to again meet the realization of the sheer enormity of the event.The venue (the LA convention center) is giant, just like all the other venues have been.Somehow I always forget this.
I was early for registration and thus about the third person in line for contributer registration.For some reason I never got the mini-guide that is so useful for finding one's way about the conference. I'll have to get one tomorrow.
Also, I didn't get the ribbons I was entitled to (I got "Paper Author" and had to ask for "Poster Contributer" and "Paper Reviewer" -- by number, in fact)The ribbon-accounting is relatively poor, so I could probably easily have gotten some other ribbons I wasn't quite entitled to (I recall that Wojtan may have managed something of the sort last year).Nonetheless.I think there might also be a speaker ribbon or paper presenter ribbon or something.Really, it's all just silliness anyway.
But, on a positive note, I did get the copy of the proceedings I was entitled to (unlike last year).Of course, maybe it would have been better not to -- given as I spent the next five hours walking around with it in my backpack.
I did manage to relieve myself of one burden: my gigantic 8'x3' poster barely squeezed onto the provided board. (I did see at least one 8'x4' poster already up, so while I was tied for maximum width I was not at maximum area.)I put some post-it notes nearby with a request-for-comments; I'll see if anyone uses this novel system to interact with the poster.
So that's about it for day zero: some items lost, some gained, some not gained that should have been and some gained that perhaps, more prudently, shouldn't have been.

On Milestones

When programming, it helps to have little goals to guide you along the way;for simple projects (like I suspect the server stuff for necklace should be)those goals break down well as:

1. It compiles: code made into object format with no warnings. Apparently all the syntax was correct. (Inevitably I'll find myself back here when I compile with VC++ instead of g++.)
2. It links: there's some sort of simple test program that exercises the code. Here's where I find out that I forgot to write certain functions. (Another way of looking at it is that link errors serve as a to do list.)
3. It works: there's a basic test driver working and things are going swimmingly.
4. It actually works: all the nasty corner cases have been tested (all that I can think of -- I mentally earmark as I'm coding).

I'm currently at the second step, hoping to get to the third eventually.Big systems aren't a cake-walk, and I'm enough of a realist to know that there will be bugs and they will be subtle.

PS3 Gaming

Ladies and gentlemen, the Playstation 3 gaming experience, for me:

Seriously, every time I turn this thing on, it needs to shuffle off to the internet for a few hours to update itself.Perhaps it could download updates in the background; then I'd only need to wait the interminable 15 minutes for the update to install.

Interesting Times

The previous two weeks have been exhausting.I flew to Dublin for the Symposium on Computer Animation, arrived back in the states, and catapulted into a glass blowing intensive class -- five days of nothing but sleep, eat, glass.
Needless to say, progress on almost everything TCHOW-related has been minimal.I am inching the necklace server code forward; in fact, as it stands, the game can submit high scores and learn if they are new.What is needed, however, is a cleaner design -- all this net code is getting confusing! The plus side is that a correct design should basically "drop into" other projects.
Time is running short, and there is research that needs to be done.