garote | Feb. 12th, 2005

Came up with an algorithm for sorting OpenGL textures of various sizes into blocks of VRAM for a Playstation emulator plugin, and filled a few pages of a notebook with the details. It's essentially the 'First Fit' Box-Packing Algorithm, expressed as nested doubly-linked lists, with a few cheap enhancements for deleting textures, tracking cache hits, and consolidating free space. Mr. Lex0r will be implementing a prototype, which he will then apply his hardcore optimization skills to.
Eventually it may become a series of nested binary trees of linked lists, but around that time it would also become very hard to profile without involving advanced theoretical mathematics, which is out of my league. Lex0r can probably tackle it tho. His emulator plugin will r0x0r your s0x0rs.
Talked about the effect that the size and flexibility of a given economic sector has on determining the most effective approach to legally regulating it. For example, in a large and flexible economy, minimum wage laws are detrimental to efficiency because they hamper the creation of 'fringe' jobs whose poor compensation matches their relative ease. But in a limited or monopolistic economy, minimum wage laws may be necessary to prevent the inhumane exploitation of workers who have no options.
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According to the audiobook I listened to on my walk home from work, this was an especially big deal in 1920's-era United States history, when Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a Supreme Court Justice. Holmes warned of a time when government and business would become so tied up in each others' interests that they would become inseparable, and the people would be victimized by their employers and elected officials alike, and no longer able to find protection in the law, because they had long ago traded their clear-cut civil liberties for an inscrutable tangle of loopholes and gerrymandering.
At the same time, Justice Louis Brandeis crystallized this need for restraint in the arena of government especially, when he wrote of a "fundamental right of the people to be let alone" as an extension to their right to pursue happiness, as well as an extension of the 4th amendment, and of the Common Law upon which the American Constitution is based. The combined opinions and judgements of Holmes and Brandeis eventually cemented the "right to privacy" as one of the most well established "secondary" rights accepted in United States law.
"Cocoa butter", an ingredient found in a many of my favorite chocolate bars, is the fat of the seed found inside a cocoa pod. On the tree, a cocoa pod hangs down much the same way that an avocado does. When the pod is ripe, it's split open to reveal a lot of slippery white pulp, separating a collection of seeds. The seeds are fermented for about a week, and then dried and roasted. While still hot, they're ground up into a thick liquid which can be poured into molds to create unsweetened chocolate bars. From here, you can also squeeze the bars very tightly in a press, causing all the fat to ooze out. The cakey substance left in the press is ground up and becomes "cocoa powder", and the fat is known as "cocoa butter".
Some chocolate bars just list "cocoa mass" as an ingredient, instead of chocolate, cocoa powder, or cocoa butter. Though the word "mass" sounds negative, they are not in fact referring to some cheap, low-quality muck, like "unsorted tea leaves" or "pressed peanut sweepings". They're simply referring to the cakey substance, before it's ground up into powder.
Strip clubs and go-go-bars are not for everyone. When I was younger I was annoyed with them purely because I considered their clientele to be nothing but drunkards and morons and criminals, and in general the kind of people I'd never want to be in an enclosed space with. Later on, probably around my first year out of high-school, I had to upgrade my opinion from "evil" to "necessary evil", because I reasoned that they provided an outlet for certain sexually dysfunctional types and certain otherwise unemployable, good-looking but vapid, women.
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The old PC game I'm playing, Alien Legacy, is an example of excellent game design. It is addictive and compelling even for me, which is enough to qualify any game as brilliant, but it also accomplishes this on hardware that's ten years out of date, so excellent design is all it could possibly have going for it.
Your task is to set up colonies all over a solar system, including asteroids, moons, and planets of varying geography. You also need to gather scientific data and resources, partially so you can research new technology, and partially because you need to solve a mystery.
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I talked with my next-door neighbor very briefly. Actually he drove his car by ours, with the window down, and apologized for his behavior the other night.
Last night he yelled a stream of foul language at my beloved and I as we were preparing to go on our nightly walk, because he was dissatisfied with our inefficient parking job. When I asked him, with voice raised, to stop cursing, he strode to within four feet of me and tried to pick a fight, cursing even more. I stood my ground and kept repeating my request that he stop yelling and calm down. Eventually he finished mouthing off and walked up the street, into his front yard, where his girlfriend then gave him a major chewing out for being such a jerk.
So anyway, today he apologized to us, and explained that he'd been having a very bad time at work and was a bit drunk that night, and that he wasn't really that stupid. He sounded sincere, and it made me feel a lot better.