Thursday, September 22, 2011

load01 09/22/2011

  • As the father of a teenage son with autism, I have coped with many challenges: finding the right school for a boy who can't sit still and has trouble connecting with peers; managing medications to help tame his anxiety and other symptoms; learning to negotiate endless one-sided conversations about my son's two obsessions — animated movies and animals.

    tags: culture

  • (CNN) -- Last week, the College Board dealt parents, teachers and the education world a serious blow. According to its latest test results, "SAT reading scores for the high school class of 2011 were the lowest on record, and combined reading and math scores fell to their lowest point since 1995."
    The reading scores, which stand at 497, are noticeably lower than just six years ago, when they stood at 508. And it's just the second time in the last 20 years that reading scores have dropped so precipitously in a single year.

    tags: culture

  • not bad (general) stories

    tags: fanfiction

  • tags: fanfiction

  • I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language doesn't feature polymorphism was especially interesting.

    In a lot of regards Quake II is a shining piece of software history since it is the most popular (in term of licensing) 3D engine of all time. Powering more than 30 games but also marking the gaming industry's departure from software/8bits color system to hardware/24bits color system that occured around 1997.

    For all those reasons, I highly recommend anyone that appreciate programming to dive into it. As usual I took numerous notes, cleaned them up and publish them as it may save a few hours to someone.

    I got a bit carried away with the "cleanup" process since there is more than 40MB of videos,screenshots and drawings in this article. In the end I am not sure it was worth it and I may just publish my raw ASCII notes in the future (I am thinking of Quake3 and Doom3 source), let me know what you think.

    tags: programming

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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