GLSL and Silly Brothers
This weekend started without any plans whatsoever. Still, ever-so-suprisingly, the time managed to fill up.

Shortly before the weekend, I wrote a one-line plugin to this blog that handles code sections and quotes better. Before, I had been using a combination of UL and BLOCKQUOTE tags. Now, I wrote a regular expression that parses a bb-code-like syntax for the relevant blocks and substitues them with something easily stylable. I also modified all the entries to follow that. Over Christmas, I hope to redo the stylesheet altogether. The current one is a lame modification of the default Blosxom look. I can do better.

My brother did something silly on Friday. He was to call my grandparents in Poland and tell them what he would like from them for Christmas. He spent 15 minutes talking. My mom called back later to see if they got the gist of it. They said he never called. Adam spent 15 minutes talking to a complete stranger thinking it was his grandmother. Apparently, the woman just kept telling him to talk louder. Wrong grandma. Oh, well!

With no other plans for the weekend, I figured tackling a known ATI crasher in Celestia would be a good thing. gdb shows that the crash is deep within the binary ATI drivers, only occurs when in the vicinity of Earth, and only with the OpenGL 2.0 render path. While a long shot, the goal was to analyze and poke at the GLSL code until it stopped crashing. Eventually, I tracked it back to a vec4's alpha element, which worked great if I explicitly set it to something less than 1.0 before using it. I guess it's being set to a bad value somewhere. I sent in the bug, hopefully someone more knowledgable can actually figure it out.

Finally, I took care of my Christmas shopping all in one blow. I'm happy with the types of things I got my family. Useful, not garbage, not terribly overdone. From the heart. I wrapped them up and put them under the tree. People can shake and try to figure out what they are at their leisure: being the bastard I am, I didn't put the "To" labels on them!