Martin Geisler Online

We had a good New Years Eve yesterday — the weather was a bit foggy at first, but it cleared up just around midnight, so that we could see all the beautiful fireworks. We have a really nice view of the city from the first floor — it was spectacular!

The Party was really cool! thoooms gave me a crash-course in OpenGL programming — I have now made a program that builds and illuminates a nice cube with rounded corners — take a look at the picture at the right. The idea is that this cube should one of 27 cubes that would make a Rubik’s Cube. I think it would be really cool to have a real three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube — one that you can rotate and solve using your mouse…

When I told thoooms about my plans, he looked a little uneasy. He showed me a huge book, that he had got this Christmas, and turned to a chapter about something called picking. It turned out, that it was far from simple to figure out which object the user actually points at in the 3D world — the book had a whole chapter devoted to that subject alone! So it’ll probably take a while before my program will be able to do that :-)

But that doesn’t matter, as it’s really fun to play with OpenGL. I’ve also gained a better understanding of all the hard work that lies in the fancy games we see today — there’s a really long way from my simple cube to that! :-)

I would like to wish everybody who visit my site a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The last four months have been pretty busy for me: I’ve started at university and moved away from my parents at the same time. But they have also been some of the best months in my life: I’ve met new friends and I like my study very much.

But now I’m going to relax for a couple of days — until The Party starts the 27th :-)

I’ve finally made a Printer-friendly Version of my PHP Tutorial. I’m sure, that some would say that it was about time :-) The page is build from the actual pages that make up the tutorial, so it will always stay current — it’s actually pretty cool.

I’ll be attending The Party for the first time this year together with thoooms. I’m really looking forward to it — thoooms has told me so many exiting things about it.

I’m thinking about reinstalling my Debian system — they have a local mirror of all major Linux distributions… I also look forward to the many conferences. I’ll let you know how it went when I get home again the 29th December.

I’ve just uploaded my dIntProg-Browser — complete with color-coded sourcecode, Javadoc, and Danish documentation (the Javadoc is in English, and so are the other comments, so you should have a good chance of understand what’s going on.)

I’ve spend three weeks on it, and I’m very pleased with the result. The basic concept in the browser is a box. Some boxes, called flexible boxes, can contain other boxes, whereas some boxes, rigid boxes can’t. But regardless of the type, each box has the responsibility of drawing itself and any child-boxes. That system turned out to work very well. You can actually see the boxes if you run the browser like this:

$ java Browser -d

The flag -d turns debugging on, which makes some of the boxes draw their outline.

I hope someone finds this interesting — it was very interesting for me to try and make a webbrowser, as I’ve worked with HTML for several years now. This time I was the one who had to render the pages, not just design them…