Welcome, 2014

So 2013 is finally over and it's been an energy-sapping year, business-, baby-, and building wise. Business. The stagnation that was present for pretty much the first half of the year and which forced us to downsize a bit, had been replaced by too many projects all at once in the 2nd half of the year. And while it was welcome since it saved us from closing doors, it prevented working on our private projects, i.e. our apps in the store, but also personal pet projects – let alone anything open source. Baby. After 7 horrible months between Lara Marie's...

2014-01-21

tabbed 0.6 released: download

Forth и шейдеры

Речь у нас пойдёт о поэзии. Минимализм языка программирования Forth и красота образов демосцены подтолкнули программиста Брэда Нельсона к идее Forth Haiku. Подражая японским хайку, Брэд писал свои первые программы из трёх строк, состояли они из пяти, семи, и снова пяти слов. Но в отличии от традиционного японского жанра, поэзия на языке Forth порождала картины не в воображении читателя, а зримо, на экране компьютера. Эта затея могла бы остаться причудой одинокого фаната компьютерного ретро (Forth прочно ассоциируется со старыми добрыми семидесятыми), если бы Брэд не воплотил её на самой что ни на есть современной платформе (WebGL) и не сделал бы...

Brainfind a Stranger in the Alps

In which is described an Inferno program that generates Linux/x86 executables, the design of a simple VM, and programs that generate programs (but all of it will be horribly disappointing).

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Dropping Feedburner

Just a quick note to mention that I’m dropping the Feedburner RSS feed in favor of a regular RSS feed. I’ll leave it around for some undecided amount of time, but you’ll want to update your RSS readers to point to http://debu.gs/blog/feed.rss when you can. The URL has been fixed in the nav bar and in the rel="alternate" link in the head tag.

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Learning Legendary Hardware

If you love software, you also try to understand the hardware to the deep down. It is not an easy task : There are many great programming books but few that explains hardware very well (as Michael Abrash once wrote: the Intel Documentation is "slightly more fun to read than the phone book"). In my quest for knowledge, I found two hardware books to be outstanding:
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.
Computer Organization and Design.
Those books are good for "current" hardware but there is a lot to learn from previous generations. The cult machine That Wouldn't Die,...

Decyphering the Business Card Raytracer

I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article "A Minimal Ray Tracer" from the book Graphics Gems IV).
The goal was to produce the source code for a raytracer...that would fit on the back of a business card.
Andrew Kensler's version is mesmerizing and one of the greatest hack that I have seen. Since I am curious, I decided to...

More Doom III BFG Documentation

id Software developer Jan Paul Van Waveren (a.k.a Mr Elusive) is sharing some more of the knowledge gained while working on Doom 3 BFG. This part focuses highly on the choice of data-structures and how paramount cacheline are to performances.

Doom III BFG Documentation

id Software developer Jan Paul Van Waveren (a.k.a Mr Elusive) send me his technical notes about Doom 3 BFG. I was especially interested in the "Compute vs. Memory" section which confirms that CPU are now so fast that it is often better to calculate something than fetch it from RAM.
Jan Paul was also kind enough to share a list of all the publications related to idTech4 engine (see bottom of this page).
More...

Second Reality Code Review

On July 23, 2013 the source code of Second Reality was released. Like many, I was eager to look at the internals of a demo that inspired me so much over the last 20 years.
I was expecting a monolithic mess of assembly but instead I found a surprisingly elaborated architecture, mixing several languages in an elegant way. The code is something like I had never seen before that perfectly represents two essential aspects of demomaking :
Team work.
Obfuscation.
As usual I have cleaned up my notes into an article: I hope it will save some a few...