teunis at usa.net

oh!  that WAS my address    I’ve forgotten.    I’ve also had a yahoo account, hotmail and a bunch of others.   Currently I stick with either my own domain or gmail.com.    It makes things much easier.   (I do NOT monitor my hotmail account.   Not on any kind of reasonable basis anyway)

Well, that answers that.   It’s from the period where I was working with the S3 kernel driver in the GGI project.   I miss that project some, still.   That said – kernel structure has moved on and it looks like the X folks finally are following through with fixing the criticisms we had, way back when.   (ok not so much me.  I wanted cleaner 3D – and I’ve gotten it.   I also wanted easier to manage X server code to make it embeddable into a 3D app – and I’ve gotten that too!   Now to just figure out how to embed an OpenGL app into another OpenGL app… heh)

In another track – a chance remark in http://www.basementcoders.com/transcripts/James_Gosling_Transcript.html – caught my attention just now.  “Like QAing the math libraries. Like doing QA on sine and cosine, you absolutely have to have a PHd in Mathematics. Sine and cosine: it sounds really simple, but there is unbelievable amount of depths of subtlety in there. There are extraordinarily few people on the planet qualified to QA that type of stuff.” – I’ve been working with math on computers since before there was a floating point processor onboard (oh, the Apple II for instance).   It honestly didn’t occur to me that this was all that hairy, because I learnt how in high school.   But that remark reminds me – just because it’s obvious to me doesn’t mean it’s easy.   I know this is a complete segue but this is something I need to be reminded of, from time to time.

That said, I’m going to agree that the Java math code is beautiful.  It truly is – from what I last saw.   I’ve mostly gone for speed over accuracy but if I wanted accuracy I’d go with theirs.   (GIS demands accuracy)

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