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Went on the freedom trail today – well, half of it anyway.  Time was a little limited and after mass, we only had time to take care of the whole Northside part of the trail – which was great.  Got to see the ‘little Italy’ part of town and attend mass there.

We toured Paul Revere’s house, the old North Church where the ‘one if by land two if by sea’ lanterns were placed.

Also saw the Constitution – the worlds oldest floating, still operational battleship

Overall, a great tour of Boston’s north end.

Probably the best day yet.  After dropping our sister off for her last day of work, we took off to Lexington/Concord.  We saw battle green in Lexington, and then traveled Battle Road to Concord.  At Concord we saw the North Bridge – where Patriot troops opened fire on British regulars and then a mob battle all the way back to Boston took place.

The visitors center about half-way down the trail has a really excellent video presentation of how the events took place.  Lots of stuff I didn’t realize about how this historic event took place.  It presents a great timeline of events and people involved.

Also along the very hikable trail are great preserved scenes and locations from the battle.  At one of the taverns where skirmishes took place, they even have musket demonstrations from a really great and knowledgeable staff.

So far, the most amazing thing so far is how close everything is.  You can drive one end of the road to the other in just 30 minutes – but the events that took place there ranged over a whole 24 hour period.  I would highly recommend this whole area if you have a chance to see it – and learn amazing things about the birth of your country.

Finally, we stopped by Waldon pond and saw the site of Thoreau’s cabin. Good times.

Ran up to Cranes beach and hung out for a couple hours enjoying the sun and surf.  Beautiful beach owned originally by the plumbing magnate Crane.  We drove up to the house but it was closed for a private event.

On the way back, we stopped at Salem, MA – the site of the Salem witch trails.  Also the site of Nathanel Hawthorn’s home.  We stopped by the House of 7 Gables and his own home (which was moved next to the 7 gables house when the original site was slated for destruction).  Great tour and definitely worth seeing.

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.