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Tuesday, Feb 20, 2007 - 14:26 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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For Want Of A One

Its been an uncharacteristically long time since I last updated the ol' blog. Ten days! What negligence! To make up for it somewhat, here's a bumper post; Before that, a word from the administration:


He's on fire!

Let's see what I've missed out on saying. Last Sunday, the usual rare basketball cum street soccer. Had a genuine (right) leg cramp while jumping for a header, which took me quite a while to recover from even with some helpful stretching by the 4O guys. Now if I ever need to dive, I know what to do :P Reminded me of the last time in Primary Six when I had both legs cramping up one after the other in probably my first organized competitive match.

Monday saw a lunch meetup with a car-ing twc. Free riding! Free Milo at the Central Plaza too before that, and we loaded up on more than half a dozen cups each... which led me to think about all the times I plonked down $1.10 (yes, overpriced) for a 300+ml can. My personal subsidy, I guess. Thursday's attempt to break the record for number of plates of baked rice requested in a single order fell through as too many people didn't make it. Sad.

Fast forward to Friday... stayed home to code the A.I. Breakthrough miniproject. Yes, yes, it was the submission deadline (2359 hours, as in the Army), and by 5 p.m. me and zy were still sweating over why our alphabeta pruning implementation wasn't working. It was supposedly a straightforward understand-and-transfer thing. And the literally thousands of nodes churned out by the algorithm weren't helping.

After tweaking lots of stuff to no avail, I changed the return value of the recursion function to MAX_VALUE-1 instead of MAX_VALUE, more out of desperation than anything. And it just worked. I guess if you asked us we may have had some vague intuition of why it did, but really it reeked slightly of voodoo programming. Still, just hours before one loses 15% of the entire module's marks, capable witch doctors are welcome. May upload a Perl port of our code when the fancy strikes hard enough.

Back to Bedok for my annual visit to my paternal grandparents' place. Amusing start to the day, when the (probably) rubber soles of my almost unused pair of leather shoes began to crack apart. Barely made it upstairs before a large chunk just peeled off. Here's to posterity:


Out with the old...

Salvaged the shoelaces only. Seems like not only women have to worry about their heels coming off.

The little white doggie belonging to one of my relatives was back again, and this time it elected to lick my toe instead of my hand. Must remember to take a photo of it next year. Unfortunately, its year's over.

Some interesting sights over at the Eastern end of Singapore included some guy selling curry puffs and burgers from a cardboard box at the void deck, a mobile ice-cream vendor in the neighbourhood (why don't I see any in Jurong?), and a metal fork inexplicably plunged into the bark of a tree at the carpark. Hopefully no one got too hungry. Oh, and a single digit on a yellow licence plate vibrating when the vehicle it belonged to was in neutral.

Enjoyed three FA Cup matches in a row while going through my sister's Newsweek subscriptions and tearing up at the smoke pouring into the flat from outside. And Man Utd only drew while Chelski thrashed Norwich, so it wasn't that enjoyable anyway. Thankfully I suspended the $100 Challenge for the week.

Watched Just Follow Law (no, not you, law) with my family on the first day of CNY. What to say about it? After it ended, my mum commented that it "didn't have a coherent theme", and indeed some parts seemed contrived - but hey, it's not easy for Jack Neo to churn out a holiday movie every year. Actually, we wanted to watch Norbit or Epic Movie, but my brother wasn't sixteen yet. He's 5cm taller and around 10kg heavier than me, though.

Ah, and we were rather tickled by the sight of three guys posing for photos at the field outside JEC. They even used a parked motorcycle (which didn't look as if it belonged to them) as a prop, with one of them straddling it in a macho manner. Guess most bikes don't have alarms.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A few nice jibes in the movie - at one point, Gurmit Singh's character's young daughter shows him an exam paper for which she got 66.6 marks, to which he replies, "Good for the first time.". Ring a bell? In another scene, an old woman is recorded on CCTV as she asks for a form to register for a computer literacy course. Ding dong? Later, it is commented that Singaporeans "have a short memory, and if the media do not mention something, they soon forget all about it." Zing! Towards the end, an exposé on civil servants using their wives' names to register companies. Now that one I haven't heard of, but if true the spirit of law loses out to its letter again.

It's John Stuart Mill all over again, the conflict between "...(allowing) individuals to control their own destiny by navigating through a sea of ideas, instead of being forced to travel down a narrow river of thought, as mandated by a single authority." (as I used to conclude my essay last semester). Between a narrowly focused but generally reliable (controlled) press, and a much more far-ranging but less accountable Internet, which should be preferred? More on this soon...

A tiny tidbit from the papers - some people in China are complaining that they are afraid of turning down "Want Want" biscuits since its advertising implies that they bring fortune. Chalk one up for susceptibility.



Finally, here's a video of my 2nd and 3rd labs for CS5243. Some revision on generating and texture mapping terrains, then an exercise on including MD2 (Quake 2 model format) files. With a few more models and visual effects, a networking component and a storyline, we have the next World of Warcraft. Yeah right.

The most important part of the labs was probably view frustum culling, i.e. not passing to the GPU any object which will not be rendered in the final scene (yes, by default one creates all those objects and then dumps them wholesale to the poor graphics card to make sense of them). This is demonstrated with the AABBs, which are green when the object remains in view, and becomes red when it goes out of view. Nothing too hard with that, it was the dynamic 3D plane checking that took the cake.



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