@Wudan07

I’ve been a hobbyist programmer for nearly 7 years now, I started in late 2002.

Over the years I have worked on dozens of projects, most of them unreleased ‘tech demos’ as they might be called. Actuallly fleshing a project out and making it user friendly isn’t as much fun as messing around for yourself. Back in the early days (5+ years ago) I would share my work with my online friends, and a few online forums. I learned, the hard way, 2 critical things about the Universe through this process.

1. The Internet is full of morons, who find it rather easy to criticize, but who probably couldn’t do the same thing you are doing. If you can’t contribute a worthwhile criticism, you should shut the hell up.
2. The less time spent worrying about what others think gives you more time to worry about what you think. If it’s your project, it’s your project. If it’s your baby, raise it as your own. You’d be surprised how much the finished project (or, in my case, unfinished project) reflects your personality if you let it.

More importantly, I have learned that software development, when it is done for one’s own personal gratification, can be a deeply rewarding and cathartic experience, and I daresay that it has been a spiritual journey.

So why am I getting all philosophical about this?

Because, after a long hiatus from revision control, I have finally set up a small SVN and I vow to put my projects in the repository. In my main project, the ray tracer that I am fond of, I am cleaning the code up since I have already done an initial commit. Oh boy, it’s uggggggly. Lots of silly #if 0 comments and /* blah */ littered throughout, functions that don’t get called … YUCK. So it’s getting scrubbed down. Since I work on it so sporadically, so much testing and partial functionality – it makes me remember when I was working on things, it’s been like going through an old photo album. I remember what I was in to at the time, what music I was listening to, what games I was excited about playing (and ignoring, hence the programming), sometimes I get a faint recollection of what time of day or season. It’s been weird.

So, I have all this source code laying around. Nuts! Time to clean it up and figure out what to do with all of it. Some of it may end up being BSD’d, some has to be GPL’d because it uses snippets from other GPL’d projects, things like that.

I’m pretty proud of my 7 years of hobbyist development. I am proud that I haven’t taken a computer programming course, that me, the Internet, and some good old fashioned cleverness have gotten me by, even when the task at hand has been too big, I’ve always found a way to compile the uncompilable library (or find a replacement) or stumble across the answer, or even just ask someone who actually knows how to program which way I should go.

Last Thursday, Sukie and I went to the Johnson Mill up in Midway, Utah.

Around 6pm they called Sukie (we went after work on Thursday night) to see if we were going to be there to check in. You betcha! I thought it was weird since … who the hell cares when you check in. Well, they left us our key to get in and we checked in late, and …

So we woke up the next morning and I saw why they’d want us to have checked in before sundown – it is one nice lookin place! Breakfast was stuffed french toast with the other couples who were, as could be expected, not very talkative. I wore my Smokey the Bear shirt, prepared to say, “I FIGHT FOREST FIRES!” if anyone asked me about it, but unlike our previous Provo BnB experience, not much of a crowd. I guess, like me, people are just hardwired to love weekends, even when we have Friday off.

So, yeah, 10 years of being married to the Sukes. There’s a lot I can say about that, and with all the weddings in recent months and the pending 10 year WudaniSukieVersary I’ve had a lot of time to think about just what it all means. And I do mean to infer that I wax introspective.

In my head I keep trying to finish this sentence, “Marriage is …” but like all great universal truths it carries such weight that you can’t do it justice with words, or understand the truly complicated maze of it (or how beautifully simple it is.) So I guess the lesson here is, I love my Sukie more than the words can say. Oh ho ho, Cliche!

Won a very silly late night game of Ticket to Ride (one-hundred and fourty-two points, two stations, 6 routes – none of the 6 or 8 routes) followed by about an hour and a half of WordPress tweaking this morning. Now my blogroll works like Bloggers does, and tells me who’s updated recently. Snazzy, right?

It was good to hang out, eat a delicious burger, and play some Dalmuti. I was Jabuti for 3 or 4 rounds but it was not meant to last 🙁

Well, maybe not that big, but certainly, a post.

Guildilocks and Shinobi (er …xkordave) got married today in the Manti Temple. It was a sunny and windy day, and my first sunburn of the year. Sukie was injured in the process, but not literally in the process, since (for those of you who don’t follow along) Sukie and I are non-Mormons and certainly not temple-goers, by natural extension. But she did miss a step and fell down. It was (is) pretty bad. I think the road to recovery will be rough.

Anyway back to the happy couple. I remember bugging Shinobi about when he’d finally ask her to marry him, and even when he did the engagement was a very long one (well, for Mormon standards, anyway.) That I can think of I don’t recall one longer than two months, but that is unlikely to be the record, but 7 to 8 months certainly is a long time.

Anyway, so today they got married. There’s a lot to be said on the subject, since they are close friends (each) but I’m afraid there comes a point where I just don’t feel I am capable of the words so I just stop, clam up and get a strange look on my face.

Hopefully it will suffice to say that I feel very good about this union, and very good about the fruits it will produce.

I digress, I wish them all the luck and happiness that life certainly has in store for them.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Final Fantasy tracks lately. It makes me really want to play those games. I’m currently going to try to accomplish more things in Kingdom Hearts II so I can unlock the secret ending (which is badass if you haven’t seen it on YouTube.)

I liked video games a lot as a kid, but Final Fantasy III (VI in Japan, as we call ’em now) made me love the video games. From the first scene where Terra is marching in her Magitek suit to the cave city, Narshe, to the encounter with the frozen Esper – all the way through to the end, it’s probably the best game ever made.

I’m totally serious about that.

March ’09 rocked our world and I heartily look forward to April. Guildy will clearly remember early in March I enlightened her about the true nature of March. Winter may be over (well maybe not, judging by the recent coldness) but in the spring thaw all minds turn to the actual year ahead and start to turn things over. In the spring thaw, we ask ourselves, what will we make of this year – what will it make of us? We ponder what we will do differently.

I myself have several plans for the year ahead.

Also, I think I will have to renege on the pact. I think it was an infantile response to an infantile fight. I’d call it an argument, or disagreement, but those words are too nice for what went down.

Last Sunday we had a rather pleasant evening, though I have to say I think I was rather abrasive and the neighbors downstairs must have appreciated my habit of stomping my foot on the floor when I’m having a good time. Thanks to Guildy for hosting the evening, which was a very excellent Fakesgiving.

Striker and I beat Resident Evil 5 last weekend as well, which, I have to say, is one of the funnest games I’ve played in recent memory. I think the old style of Resident Evil games is dead, but this new style definitely addresses the new arcs that the storyline has to take. It’s the kind of dangerous world that the first 3 games eluded to, and while the fourth game definitely seemed like it was way out there, Resident Evil 5 brings it back in line, and ties it securely in place with the rest of the series.

I declare a penis pact! If you have a penis, you are forbidden from getting involved in the women – fights.

This accomplishes 2 things:

First, your wife/fiance can confide in you if she is having problems with the womens. As men, we are, quite naturally, in a position to offer any and all advice. However, ours is a pact of non-interference.

Second, it keeps the diplomatic channels open. If I, a man, notice you engaging in the women’s conflicts, I may have to ask you, “I’m sorry, Do you have a penis?” To which the only natural response is, “Yes!” and backing down from the conflict.

Also, no more watching House. It’s rubbish.

When I get in a really positive mood, like I am this morning (haven’t gone to work yet,) I get little positive bursts of lyrics in my head.

like this one:
the fastest bullet in the world
can’t match a single beam of light

or this one:
you should never meet your heroes
you are better than each one
but you should really get that mole checked

They aren’t lyrics to songs, per se, as I don’t write songs, but there you are, the fodder of a bright outlook.

Did y’all see that shiz that went down on Lost?

The blogging has been hard to come by.

For one, I have become less comfortable expressing myself in such a public and exposed way. Being ‘online’ doesn’t mean what it meant 5 years ago, now there is much less distinction between online and offline, you are who you are. I’m me, you can find me on Facebook, on the registration for this domain, and you could probably pluck my phone number from Google. I’m aware that you can do all these things, but that you could also read about what I think has been bothering me.

I don’t blog about work, I don’t blog about friends because I just don’t want to offend. I’ve been mulling over making the blog private, but in a way I want people who are really curious about what I’ve been up to … to know what I’ve been up to.

Let’s face it, my blog has never been as popular as the other notable blocks in the family, Sukie (my wonderful wife, we are now in our 10th year of marriage) has an extremely well read blog, Theorb has been blogging less (his less is more frequent than mine here.) Since my last blog he’s started a relationship, and gotten engaged, and probably would have gotten married before my next blog.

His future wife is a very nice girl who loves him very much. If you don’t believe me, check out their Facebook status updates. After you’ve checked that out, you might want to have yourself checked out … by a doctor … for Diabetes.

I’m sorry I don’t blog that often, but I have my reasons. If I message you and ask how your day is going, then you can count yourself as one of the few people that I genuinely care about. If I don’t, try not to be angry, there are a lot of people I care about, and I can’t message you all.

As soon as I saw the original picture, I had a vision of a more malevolent version of Guildy, which I proceeded to bring in to being, unfortunately, has caused some controversy (Sukie says I’m mean for making Guildy look evil, I hypothesize that it will soon be David’s desktop.) CareBear says that it’s funny, but apparently there are wonderings about what the hell it is I should be doing with my free time. So, first, a picture from my raytracer when I was implementing Specular highlights (currently only shows if there’s a light in the direction of reflection. I did implement perlin noise, though I’m not sure if it’s to spec, but it looks noisy enough.

I basically painted the background black, created black blobs which I roughly shaped and then blurred the crap out of, it turned out pretty cool, methinks. Not meant to be photorealistic at all, but certainly doesn’t look too shabby.

For the render, the prismatic effect is completely incidental – as the sphere’s shadows block out parts of the rgb lights (there are nine, three rows of each color), the resulting colors form a rainbow. Neat!