After a year of not using XNA creator's club and being generally morally opposed to the whole concept I decided to cancel it. Long story short this requires contacting xbox support (weeee). The only truly annoying part is how hard it is to find out this is what you must do and what the phone number is you must call.
It seems borderline unethical to not have a mechanism for canceling your account that is as easy as signing up.
It occurred to me while debugging my 3d camera that rotations are far to rotatey. R^T = R^-1 = R(-a) which means if you have a bug it can be confusing and potentially work to some degree even though really your code is completely crazy. In this case I was uploading rotations into opengl that were row major when it is in fact column major. Another amusing thing is if your rotation is several rotations such as R = r(a)r(b)r(c) then R^-1 = r(c)^-1 * r(b)^-1 * r(a)^-1 which means your rotations are now going to be done in a different order in the opposite directions.
I would also like to thank my marvell yukon network card for failing at life. It was trying to offload checksum calcs in vista but doing a worse job than my CPU. So much so that it was causing team fortess 2 to be inoperable. Luckily these things can be adjusted.
ANTLRWorks is like crack. I am trying to build a bastard child of ml and ruby and maybe a little scheme mixed back in for good measure. One of my favorite features from haskell is the pattern matching which seems like a no brainer for adding to a scripting language.
I have also been picking up ruby lately and its surprising how good it is. Some people compare it to being similar to python. This is not the case--it has a lot more delicious features. Succulent indeed.
Then there is groovy which is subtly disappointing but sure as shit beats writing actual java but not by enough. At least java makes sense in its own crippled and ridiculous way.
Try passing a function as a value in groovy from inside it self. Sure it has whatever hack is needed for recursion but apparently it is only half-baked. Very disappointing. How am I supposed to use recursion in conjunction with higher order functions? I may post something somewhere so it can some how get fixed. Its kind of embarrassing to bring up so it seems more sensible just to make my own language (yup I am crazy).
Wont someone please think of the functions!
Anyways ANTLR is awesome and I am sleepy. I will probably post more of whatever language I cook up if it ever amounts to anything.
When you are coding what we might call language X and you ever think "yay it actually lets me do this non-stupid thing" such as map, filter or anything really a sane person might need when constructing software then you know you have a problem.
I am looking at you perl 5.
*glare*
Ruby,anything from ml,python,scheme,lisp... I can't count the number of better languages suited for most jobs perl gets used for still. I normally not a language zealot but jebus! If I see another perl hash with elements whose values are "1" because perl has not set data type I am going to vomit.
Perl is not regression in programming languages as much as it is a scripting language that is on life support. Its an old man clinging to life after a long and fulfilling life. Its time to pull the plug and let gramps die in peace.
OK I lied it probably was but lets just let it die in dignity. Perl was one of my first scripting languages so well I hate it slightly less than I should but still...
You know its bad when you would rather be writing java than perl. Actually its not too bad with anonymous classes. Why the hell they don't add anonymous functions I don't know. I guess they don't want to ruin the master piece that is java.
mmm rant tastic. I need to record my insane ramblings so that whatever future society goes through my blog (cause you know they will) gets the record straight. I am one of those scary computer scientist Larry Wall warns you about in programming perl--and I hate sunshine puppies and probably a lot other things. Especially kittens. I also eat metal scraps and speak in binary. In fact I often eat kittens for desert while speaking in binary.