Hope you all had a merry christmas and will have a happy new year. It's coming up to midnight as I start this, so this entry will span two years :)

I'm still up here in little Kingeroy with my parents and youngest brother. The two grandparents each left a few days ago. It's been decided that I stay and help move back down to Bathurst. Oh joy of joys. That's next week. I'll only stay a little and then it's back to my lonely housemate in Sydney. I might relate her recent dramas in another journal entry. What's the consensus about how much I should write? I've been involved with both her and her ex for the last several years, but the split and stuff doesn't really involve me. Or maybe I'm just downplaying my part.

A slight correction since my last entry. The weather is actually quite nice this year. Apprently 'locals' have told mum and/or dad that last years summer was exceptionally hot. It's barely got above 30 degrees this year. The only problem remains that this house does not seem to be well ventilated. The partially-underground bottom floor is bad. The spare room that Scott and I have been sleeping in only has one small window. This computer room only has a small window into the garage. With three computers and at least two people in it, it can get kinda warm.

So what have I been doing? We travelled around a bit with the grandparents, but that always involves multi-hour car trips. Still, lots of scenery and photos taken. Here's a photo of me in front of Kingeroy, Peanut centre of Australia. You can kind of see the peanut silos behind me. So, am I as much of a mug as Interrobang?

I ended up playing lots of games on the familys' windoze computers. Little Linux geek me, I don't often play games. It's either StarCraft or TotalAnnihilation under Wine, or maybe even Loki's native Linux port of Civ:CTP. Anyway, lots of network TA playing with my 13 year-old brother (Scott). Then he introduced me to DiabloII on Christmas eve. By Christmas evening, my amazon was up to level 18 or something and kicking some ass. Maybe I shouldn't try to brag since I've never played it before and have nothing to compare my performance with, but it was a lot of fun. The only distraction was the almost constant crashing of windoze and/or DiabloII.

As the administrator of the familys' Linux network server, I've had a lot to sort out. Actually, not that much. But me being me, I end up breaking a lot of stuff before fixing it. LDAP, Samba, Cyrus, you name it. Samba has been a problem. For the life of me I cannot get the 3.0 alpha in Debian sid to work properly, even with an existing working config file. I would really like to use it because it has native LDAP support, instead of depending on the PAM-LDAP module for authentication.

Debian seems to have upgraded to version 2.0 of Postfix already, and that seems to have installed without a hitch. Email's still running fine.

I got to see LOTR:TTT the other day with Mum and Scott. I'd forgotten how long FOTR had seemed. Bloody good, but bloody long. The big battle was pretty awesome, but I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I had heard that it was big and everything. I kept watching it thinking "is this the big bit now?". Like many have said, the Gimli jokes started to wear thin after a while. He seemed to be more for comic relief than anything.

In preparation for seeing the second Harry Potter movie, I had to see the first one. My dad has managed to borrow a video projector from work for this christmas holiday. In the same "spare room" that Scott and I sleep in, they've set up a mini theatre. The picture is projected on a double bed sheet that is hung from a long (5m?) piece of wood and suspended from a drain pipe by a c-clamp. Unfortunately, this morning it decided to fall and hit me on the head as I was just getting up out of bed. We've also got a decent little stereo-with-sub-woofer speaker system. So it's not surround, but it's still pretty good.

Anyway, I got to watch the Harry Potter:The philosophers' stone DVD on this setup. It's interesting to see the contrast between the "hardcore" magical world of J.R.R.T in LOTR, and the "kiddy" magic in Harry Potter. Of course, Harry Potter doesn't even compare with LOTR, but that's not the point. It was very entertaining and a lot of fun to watch. And it's nice to hear some british/scottish accents on the big screen. Nothing personal, but the American accent gets a little annoying after a while. Don't tell anyone, but I think Hermione/Emma Watson is kinda cute, even if she does over-act some parts :P

Wow, this has been a long entry. I guess it shows how boring my life is the rest of the year. I might write more later, but this is the bulk for now.

Happy new year everyone!

Yes even though I am down here in Oz, I am dreaming of snow this christmas. But only because I'm heading up to Queensland to face 35C (~94F) heat. My family isn't from Queensland. My Dad got a contract job up there this past year and so that's where they've been. Although "they" is just Mum, Dad, and the youngest - Scott. I'm the eldest of four boys. Us eldest two have moved out, and the next one has been "minding" the family home in Bathurst while they're gone. They moved last year at the beginning of December, so this will be the second and (hopefully) last christmas spent in Queensland.

I know my Mum and Dad have about a million and one things for me to fix on the Linux server I've administered for them for over 5-6 years now. Being able to do things over a SSH link is great, but still not as good as being there. Especially when things go REALLY wrong. Recently the ancient 10G WD hard disk started failing and giving weird errors. Thankfully they got a brand-spanking-new 40G IBM disk in time. I was on the phone to my mum walking her through moving enough stuff over to get it to boot and get online, then I took over from there. The funny thing is that my Mum seems to be picking up the Linux CLI better than my Dad, as well as well as lots of hardware knowledge with upgrading memory and disks and things. The reason it's funny is that my Dad is an Electrical Engineer and from what he's told me, I gather he's had experience with computers since the 70's. And Mum is just an ordinary "house wife". way to go ma!

Anyway, I'm off on a train this thursday. It's a little earlier than I had wanted, but I left the booking a little late it's the only thing I could get. I get to spend 3 weeks with my family and my lonesome youngest brother. He's missed his big brothers since he's become a virtual only child. And I'm his favourite because I'm the nicest to him :)

How the hell do you kill 14 hours on a train? For a start, I'm taking my Discman and a good selection of CD's. (My personal stereo technology isn't up to MP3's yet. Hopefully by the time I can afford a new player they'll be some good Ogg Vorbis players). I'll probably put a dent in Cryptonomicron. Boy, I used to chew through books when I was working and had to commute on trains and/or buses every day. I've had Cryptonomicron a couple years now I think, and I'm only half way through it. Previously, I would have finished a book like that in a few weeks.

Tschuss!

Update: Damn, it looks like my Discman doesn't like 80min CDR's. It's only a few years old! I don't think I have any 74min CDR's any more. Oh well, I've got a good CD collection anyway.

LinuxToday is reporting that MS is going to be back "exhibiting" at Linux World Expo next year. Last year they were in the rookery since they were a first-timer, but this year they of course get to be out in the regular area. Let me join the chorus of people saying "kick them out".

Does MS make make a Linux distribution? NO.
Does MS make any product for Linux or the other Open Source operating systems? NO.
Does MS make a product based on Linux? NO.
Does MS support any Open Source projects? NO.
Has MS done anything for Linux or the Open Source world? You mean apart from opposing it at every possibility, and spreading FUD? NO.

MS has made it abundantly clear on many occassions over many years that it fears and opposes Linux and GPL licensed software in general. As many in the LT talkbacks opined, MS is just there to grab fence-sitting or opportunistic people over to their "side", and to try to improve their image. Don Brock's comment suggests they could even be trying to kill off the exhibition in the long-term by driving people away.

I remember a case earlier this year where the roles were almost reversed. A vendor was exhibiting at an MS-sponsored expo. IIRC, this vendor provided a mixed bunch of solutions, some of which were based on Linux. One of the employees attending the expo had stuck on the wall of their booth a bunch of pro-linux newspaper clippings. It was all set up the night before the expo, but the following day the clippings had been removed by one of the representatives of the expo. Does anyone else remember this incident? I can't seem to find it on LT.

Kick 'em out.

It was nice to see the response to my last journal entry in EnlightenmentFan's journal entry and the responses. It's nice to at least know that someone is listening and may be in a similar position. But now I'd like to do something different. I'd like to take a moment to write about the code I'm working on at the moment.

Early this year I started on a rendering system I called "PR" for Photo Realistic.... or Photo Render... or something. I can't remember exactly. It's a ray-tracer and I worked on it on-and-off for most of the year. It produced some good images and even a simple animation. But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. So about a month ago I decided to abandon PR and start on a new system using the lessons I've learnt from PR.

This new system, that I'm calling "Oktopus", will have some important changes. Whereas I originally tried to make PR as general as I possible, Oktopus will be more focused and purposeful. Among the changes:

1. Update to using GCC 3.2.
   PR was developed using the GCC 3.0 C++ compiler (g++-3.0 under Debian), so this isn't a very big change. Mostly just changing <iostream.h>'s to <iostream>'s, and adding using namespace std to a few places.
2. Use STL types instead of my own templates.
   So, use string instead of char *. Instead of PrList<type>, use vector<type>. And instead of PrHash<type>, use map<string,type>. It at least allows me to throw out a lot of shakey code :P
3. Remove some of the more "creative" elements from the renderer.
   In particular, the more powerful curves and animation functionality will be moved to a seperate animator. The renderer will do just as the name suggests, render individual frames. An animator program (possibly written in Perl) will pull in individual objects and evaluate animation curves. In the renderer objects will still have a transformation stack, but only linear interpolation will be used. Objects will now be in a tree structure, so transformations are inherited. And lastly a frame's timescale will be normalized to 0<=t<1 by the animator.
4. Forget about the REYES algorithm.
   For a while I was looking at implementing REYES alongside ray-tracing. But I've since changed my mind about REYES. I thought that it would be an easy way to render (true) displacement-mapping, but then I remembered reflections, refractions, and global illumination. Simply put, scan-line alogrithms are centred too much around the frame buffer. They have to render temporary images to even approximate reflections or refractions, or even shadows! For me, this is too much of a hack. I'd rather make a pure all-ray-tracer and focus on methods to accelerate the ray-object intersection search. Which brings me to the next point-
5. Use oct-tree datastructure to organize the scene - hence the name Oktopus.
   Borrowing from Radiance, hopfully the oct-tree datastructure will give me the speed and efficiency to throw around a lot of rays. However, borrowing from REYES I plan to slice objects into smaller pieces before putting them into the oct-tree. I hope that this will give the added efficiency to do expensive displacement mapping. I'm still not sure how to do DM with ray-tracing apart from doing a whole bunch of searching/scanning. I wonder if there are any little tricks to speading it up. Anyway, hopefully (I'm very hopeful aren't I?) the oct-tree and slicing will reduce the number of times that these expensive tests have to be performed on displacement-mapped objects.

I've just started on moving some of the code over from PR. I've got the Base and BaseMath parent classes moved over and cleaned up and I've almost finished doing the same for the math classes - Scalar, Vector, Quaternion, and Matrix. Come to think of it, I think I only needed the Scalar wrapper class for my template code that has now been replaced by the STL types, so I can probably remove that. I've also moved over the xml module and clean some of it up, but haven't tested it. *shudder* Now there's some messy code I need to clean up.

This is getting pretty long so I should leave it at that for now. I have a Centrelink form to fill out.
bye

That first entry was a little down, dontcha think? I was pretty down recently, but I'm not sure how much I should write here because it invloves my housemates. For this entry I think I'll try to be a little proactive.

Like a lot of geeks here on slashdot, I have pretty bad social skills. I'm so bad that my Mum is starting to ask the occassional question and my 7-year-younger brother has gotten himself a girlfriend before I have.

So I've identified three areas that I think I should focus on:

1. Improve my self-esteem and confidence.
   I'm not sure how to go about this, and will probably be somewhat of a catch-22. Perhaps I should try to think more positively about the things that I'm doing and have done. This could also be good for job hunting.
2. Improve my conversation skills.
   Try to listen to how other people handle conversations. Would TV interviewers be a good place to start? I'm a hacker, so learn to hack verbal communications. A little bit of social engineering, in a way.
3. Improve my body language.
   This could be the hardest to change. I had what I thought was an epiphany about this the other day. I realised that all the years of bullying and harassment at high-school had made me good at hiding and avoiding confrontations. Or, if not good at it, then I at least subconsciously try to achieve it. My eye-contact is bad. I've known that for a while but I think I'm getting better at holding eye contact when talking to people. If I'm to meet people, especially girls, I need to look aproachable.

Addendum: EnlightenmentFan followed this topic up with some good tips for geeks, and Interrobang had something to say about seducing geeks. Some good links in that last one.

Here goes my first entry here. I'm not sure how much I should include here, since I already have a quasi-news/journal bit on my own little homepage, plus my own private journal.

Perhaps i should introduce myself for the few people who consider me a friend.

My real name is Ian. I'll leave you to figure out my nick, apart from giving the hint "Vulcans". I chose my nick quite a few years ago and it has served me well. I use it in a number of places online, and it seems to be pretty unique.

Now, to myself. Imagine a bright, outgoing, successful person full of life and surrounded by friends. Unfortunately that is not me. For the last two years I have been unemployed. For the last 4.5 years I have rented a single bedroom in a house with an attractive but attached girl, and her charming but dim and unappreciative boyfriend.

Even at 26, I still don't have a drivers license or a car. However, walking is a helluva lot cheaper and I certainly need the excercise. In the time since I moved out of home (4.5 years), I have lost at least 20Kgs. Most of that has been due to getting away from my mothers' well-stocked fridge and pantry. Plus, having gall stones last year helped a lot. Nothing makes you cut fat out of your diet like the threat of incredibly painful attacks lasting 5-7 hours each. Pretty soon I might be described as simply being "pudgy" rather than "a fat bastard".

Like most geeks, I don't have a lot of friends. In fact, I have very few. I haven't talked to any of my highschool friends since I left. Apart from my brother and his wife, the only person in the Sydney region that I've kept in touch with is an ex-workmate. And I haven't physically seen him in over three years, it's all by email.

This has been pretty negative, hasn't it? Maybe that's because it's now 11am here and I've just pulled an "all-nighter" for no particular reason. I'll try to get some sleep now, and write more later when I'm not such a sad-sack.

bye for now.