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Arrived at Boston and it’s a bit warm and humid – something different than the usual Pac Northwest I’ve grown so accustom to.

Did an overnight red-eye then hit the ground running when my brother arrived a few hours later.  We went over to Harvard (or Havhad if you please) and toured around.  Got to get our picture in front of Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe.  Wandered around the campus a bit and saw the sights, stopped into the bookstores/shops nearby and generally had a good time.

We also ran down to MIT and also saw the Good News Garage – the home of the Cartalk guys.  Fabulous.

I just saw that my trusty passport was expiring soon, and decided that since I wasn’t doing any immediate travel, to renew it now.  It was my first passport and had a bunch of stamps from my travels to Europe, New Zealand and so forth.  But time marches on so I dropped my new photo, the old passport and the form into the mail.  A few things:

1. The website seem to direct you towards getting a cheaper “passport card” that looks like a drivers license.  It’s faster to get and cheaper, but if you read the fine print you find it is ONLY good for traveling in/out of the country by land.  It won’t work for any air travel.  My guess is that’s because there are lots of commuters between Canada/Mexico and US.  But the not-good-for-flights restriction isn’t immediately clear – so beware and dig around for the normal renewal.

2. It only took about 2-3 weeks to get my passport with the regular mail-in service (not expedited) – much faster than I anticipated.  They mailed my new passport (which has new RFID embedded in it and a much nicer/glossier/protected photo page).  A day later, I got a brown, unmarked envelope with my old passport in it.  They’d punched a hole in my photo page to void it – but I had all my old stamps.  Cool.

Surprised nobody ran across this yet, but then again, makes sense.

When compiling either the freeglut and GLEW (packages nearly essential of OpenGL graphics development), both have the option to be built as libraries statically or dynamically.  When the libraries are built dynamically, you just include the lib in the link line then copy the dll’s over to your binary folder.  But when compiled statically, you need to specify GLEW_STATIC and FREEGLUT_STATIC symbols as compile-time defines when compiling the libraries (and be free of dll hell).

The tricky part is when you include those two libraries in another library and then try to compile that combination into a binary.  In the case of freeglut, the linker will complain that it can’t find “freeglut.lib”.  Which is strange because freeglut static compiles into a library named “freeglut_static.lib” and only the dll version compiles into “freeglut.lib”.   Hmmm, why is freeglut looking for the wrong lib?  Well, freeglut_std.h line 53 holds the key.   If FREEGLUT_STATIC is defined, then there is a pragma to include “freeglut_static.lib” otherwise the pragma points to “freeglut.lib”.  So, you need to include the -D FREEGLUT_STATIC in the link line of the final executable’s link line as well.

GLEW also has this problem, but if you forget the -D GLEW_STATIC in the link line of the executable, you’ll get errors about unresolved externals.

And there you have it.

(update: you must also put  GLEW_STATIC and FREEGLUT_STATIC in the link lines of the intermediate libraries as well.  The chain of libraries from freeglut and glew ALL need to have that compile parameter specified or you’ll get the same errors).

Hehehe – this is a great series about some folks that play far too much online gaming – and then try to get through real life.

http://www.watchtheguild.com/

Follow the links to the YouTube clips where you can watch the whole series online (for free)

While I was down at Siggraph, I got to talk with someone who is an extremely bright guy and I admire a good bit on a professional level.  While we chatted in a real informal setting, the topic of religion came up (the thread of all my conversations always goes: “how long you worked for Intel?  Really, why’d you have that gap?  A monastery/seminary?!?!  Wow, lets talk about religion…)  Anyway, this person said that they’d really enjoyed the faith and growth of his community church, but got really turned off by the whole ‘Church’ thing as he got to know the shortcomings and problems in the parish.  “I’m spiritual – just not religious.  God can be found everywhere so now I do my own thing.  I just got to the point of say ‘I don’t need this hassle’.”

I wish I had a nickle for every time I hear this (or felt it myself).  Despite all the good intentions of everyone getting along perfectly – dealing with the other folks in the church is hard.  Maddening really.  It inherently puts us into contact with folks outside our comfort, social, economic, philosophical, educational, behavioral and all other bounds.  I know first hand.  We’re a big, messy lot for sure.  But his statement stuck with me and I pondered it a long time since I felt this very thing many times.  I was driving home about a week later that the Holy Spirit kind of slapped me with:

Yep, you may be right – you may not ‘need’ this hassle.  But they might really need you.  Now go and be the Christ you are supposed to be for them and that will teach you what you DO need.

Intel’s annual developer forum is where they roll out a lot of our new stuff.  Anandtech covered the IDF (Intel Developers forum) keynote.  Turns out, my project made it to the keynote with the strange description of: “No need to sort for transparency demo. Sorry, that’s as well as I can describe it. Look at the picture.”.  The man has a way with words. 🙂 

Still, I am the sole developer writing the code for this technology; and nice to see my work in the keynote.  My technique is the 3rd picture down of the futuristic towers and glowing orb.  It was a really nice animation – but not such a great web/phonecam photo apparently.  ArsTechnica also have an article on Larrabee that you might find interesting (I’m not confirming or denying anything in their coverage – just that they have coverage)

Any rate – lots of good stuff coming out of the IDF (including a lot of really cool features in Nehalem/7i like Turbo mode, etc).  I must confess I don’t know more than the public press releases – but the feature of this new Nehelem core look great. 

Siggraph has arrived and we have released a very good paper on the Larrabee architecture we’re working on.  Here’s the article for you perusal:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1360612.1360617

I work with the paper authors nearly daily – amazing group of pioneers in the field of computer graphics.  Have a lot of ‘pinch me! Is this real?’ days.  Here’s a discussion of the paper on the Beyond 3D site:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=48314

I’m down at Siggraph 2008 in Los Angeles, and it’s been great so far.  Amazing talks – especially the revelations and talks about Larrabee.  However, there are some amazingly cool other talks going on as well.  I’ll post links as they get up, but wow – super cool so far.

I didn’t know that both Jamie’s parents went to Purdue.

Mythbusters come on at about 15 minutes in:
http://science.purdue.edu/centennial/MythBusters.wmv

As a perspective new home buyer – I’ve been sitting on the sidelines for about 2 years (well, saving up a good down payment anyway).  The prices during the boom were ridiculous, and as things are crashing, I’m waiting to see if were at a bottom (most experts are saying not likely till end of next year – but they’ve said that for 2 years now).  The latest national S&P Home price index keeps dropping but Portland has fared much better than most.  Lately, however, it looks like we’re no longer immune.  It reported that Portland average prices dropped a record 5% since last year.

Looking on forclosures.com and RLMS database the other night, I actually found several very nice condos and houses in my price range.  It was actually amazing/frightening/sad how many pre-forclosures were in the works.  And how many of those homes were in the 500k-1000k range (I thought rich people didn’t go bust?).  I did the same search about 2 years ago and got nothing but run-down shacks in questionable neighborhoods on the edges of my desired region.  Now I have 10 really good hits right where I was looking – one even had 2 garage spaces (kind of unheard of around here).

But when prices are dropping 5%/year -it definitely isn’t buying time.  At -5% a year, you seriously jeopardize the value of investing in a home.  The whole point of buying is to grow equity.  But, for example, if you have a $200,000 loan who’s home is losing only 5% value in a year, that’s $10,000/year you’re losing in real value.  If your mortgage payment is about $1200/mo, then you are just dumping about a years worth of money down a hole with nothing to show for it.  And any conceivable tax benefit doesn’t really offset that kind of loss.  Yes, if you really need a home, then you might jump on a good deal – but this is hardly a buyers market – even if the latest home stimulus package includes an incentive for first-time buyers (not very useful, it’s a $7500 tax credit that phases out based on income and you still have to pay back, just interest free).

So what to do?  Look for good deals.  Wait until we see some stability and/or growth.  I get the feeling things will keep dropping for the foreseeable future.  And so what if you miss the ‘bottom’?  Well, it doesn’t matter if you catch prices at the same point on the way down or the way up.  I’ll wait and keep saving a better down payment.