Recently updated blogs

A recent paper of mine performs an intersection test in a ray tracing shader. To this end, I had to compute all real roots of a polynomial of moderately high degree (10 to 26). Overall, computing polynomial roots is an extremely well-studied problem where many highly accurate and reliable methods are available [Press2007]. However, implementations of such methods on GPUs are rarely found. After experimenting a bit with different options, …

Abstract Cixin Liu’s “Wandering Earth” is a more recent depiction of Earth being used as a Starship. Like Stanley Schmidt’s “Lifeboat Earth” (1976) it does seem like something of a rush job – the Sun was about to undergo the Helium Flash in Liu’s tale and – and so there was no time to create … Continue reading "A Work In Progress – Starship Earth"

Open Academic Publication Posted 10/28/2023 I’m currently at a workshop on open practices across disciplines, and one topic of discussion is how to change the academic publishing process to be more accessible to both authors and readers. I’ve also had a few friends outside of academia ask me how publishing research papers works, so it’s a good opportunity to write a post about the messy world of academic publishing. The …

The following piece was written months ago, right after the “We Are Developers World Conference” took place in Berlin. So far I have not been reached out to for providing feedback to the conference, and I am not expecting it will ever happen, so I am going to publish this (unedited) here on my blog instead. There are some (at least one) swearword in here, for those of you who …

I help maintain a couple of projects and one aspect I find surprising — and a bit troubling — is how often people ask for features without explaining their problem. Maybe it’s already in the name, “Feature request”. Despite asking for a feature, often it’s not what’s needed. What’s needed is a solution to a problem and many problems have more than one solution.

I have been working on moving a collection of about 20-30 AWS accounts from two different AWS Organizations into a new AWS Organization with Control Tower enabled. During the process I have run into a number of different blockers and issues which have not always had the most obvious solutions due to cryptic errors that the AWS Control Tower enrollment process shows. This blog post lists out some of the …

Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister, soft-cover book and slipcase (Phaidon Press, 2023). The book continues Sagmeister’s life-long interest how design can best speak to people and improve their lives. Initially conceived in 2020 as the world entered a global pandemic, Now is Better looks at quality of life issues through collected statistics and information. WOMAN I, from Now is Better. Percentage of countries in which women have the right …

Before this poster was created hardly anyone had seen the word "Fitzrovia" in print and virtually nobody would have recognised "Fitzrovia" as the name of a London neighbourhood. The origins of Fitzrovia's name begin in the late 1700s when Charles Fitzroy began developing family land in Fitzroy Square and surrounding streets. The Fitzroy Tavern, took its name from Charles Fitzroy's developments. It became popular with the artistic and literary crowd …

Léelo en español Years ago, I grew Stylidium debile in California. After a long period of not growing any carnivorous plants, a friend gave me this division, which just began to flower. Yes, yes, this is the most common Stylidium species in cultivation, and yes, it is exceedingly easy to grow. While that may reduce its cache with certain horticulturalists, it a pretty little plant. It features glandular carnivorous or …

The post Dieter Rams Braun Product Colour Palettes by Chad Ashley appeared first on Smithographic Logo Design All Original Content © 1996 – 2022 Smithographic.uk | Chad Ashley @cgpov has created these beautiful images of colour palletes created by Dieter Rams for the Braun product collection. Those colour buttons are just begging to be pushed, they are so yummy. ♡ Via: Present and Correct The post Dieter Rams Braun Product …

In the previous article we showed how to automate the migration from callbacks to async/await for Mocha tests using jscodeshift. We started from the jscodeshift-ts-template repo and added the final implementation to the ts-codemods repo. We know by now that not all code can be automatically migrated. So is there anything else we can do? If you happen to use some known test libraries or frameworks that come with their …

Would you like to become better at crafting pull requests and reviewing code? Here are the 13 tips from my latest book that you can use in your daily developer activity.

This blog post will delve into the details of each tool you need for plein air painting.

My first trip to Scotland was when I was sixteen. At the end of the summer term I was asked not to return to Lancing College, my boarding school, as I was deemed ineducable. My parents didn’t really know what to do with me but, somehow, my mother learnt of adventure training courses run by the Scottish Council of Physical Education (now Sportscotland) at Glenmore Lodge a Highland centre near …

Comme bien des montréalais depuis quelques années, des travaux sont en cours sur notre rue depuis deux semaines. Aqueducs, conduites d’eau contenant du plomb, remplacement de ci et de ça, la totale. Ce matin un camion avec tuyau articulé mêne un bruit d’enfer en pompant ou injectant quelque chose au fond d’un trou, je n’ai pas investigué. En revenant à la maison tantôt, autre camion au coin de la rue, …