Distrust Simplicity

One of the nice features included in the OpenGL 3.2 Core Profile is seamless cube map filtering, which (as the name indicates) helps reduce seams that can appear from sampling near the edges of a cube map face. It’s easy to enable:

If you’re a Mac user who works with 3D applications — SketchUp in particular — you’ve probably figured out by now that there’s nothing equivalent to the Nvidia/ATI control panels on Windows for tweaking graphics driver settings, e.g. forcing the use of multisampling/antialiasing. Individual applications have to enable antialiasing on OS X, and many don’t, SketchUp included. Even so, SketchUp does have a hidden (and unsupported) option for enabling the feature:

I recently found myself in need of a quick-and-dirty way to forward UDP packets from one machine to another. SSH port forwarding was out, unfortunately, as the source host was Windows machine and I wasn’t about to install Cygwin or MSYS, etc. After a brief and unsuccessful search for simple tools to accomplish this, I decided to whip something up myself. The project I was working on was already using python with the Twisted networking library, so that’s what I used. I tried to make it as flexible as possible, allowing forwarding to multiple hosts and name resolution, while keeping it as simple as I could. Here’s the result:

I recently encountered this list of terminal tips and tricks (for Mac OS X, but most are more generic) and, as often happens, learned something new: with the bash shell, the command C-x C-e opens the current command line for editing in the editor defined by the $EDITOR environment variable.

Previously, I’ve written about my fondness for Readability, a bookmarklet that makes reading online a more pleasant and less distracting endeavor by removing unnecessary clutter and improving typography. Well, a couple weeks ago Apple introduced Safari 5, which touts a new feature closely resembling Readability called Safari Reader.

While neither method is an efficient way to solve this problem, this is the kind of thing that just works in Haskell:

I was pleased with my Ruby solution to the problem of finding the last ten digits of the sum of 1 + 2² + 3³ + … + 1000¹⁰⁰⁰

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that OpenSSH has a number of very useful commands available via an escape sequence (the default escape key is ~ preceded by a newline, and can be configured with the EscapeChar directive in your ssh_config). The ~? sequence presents a list of available commands:

One of the developer technologies introduced in Snow Leopard is an extension to C/Objective-C called “blocks”, which adds anonymous (lambda) functions to the language. If you’re not yet familiar with blocks, I recommend Mike Ash’s excellent introduction to the subject.

I was recently faced with the simple problem of blending two textures in a GLSL shader and found no straightforward discussions of the topic, so I’ll try to collect my thoughts here.