“General and Special Purpose Computers”, 1986

Government Attic released a heavily redacted copy of the report “General and Special Purpose Computers: A Historical Look and Some Lessons Learned” from 1986. Its interesting that a report from 25 years ago is still considered to have sensitive information that needs to be redacted in response to a FOIA request. (Unlike wikileaks, government attic obtains documents legally through the Freedom of Information Act.)

Agile Roundtable Notes for October, 2010

The Salt Lake Agile Roundtable meets the first Thursday of every month at the Borders bookstore in Murray, UT from 2pm to 5pm. These are my notes from the October, 2010 meeting.

AgileRoots 2010 Videos

Videos of the presentations at AgileRoots 2010 are up for free viewing on confreaks. If you missed my presentation “You Can Test Anything!” with Zhon Johansen at the recent Utah Code Camp, you can catch an earlier slightly less polished version at confreaks.

INETA Community Speaker

A while back I registered as a community speaker with INETA. They’ve now launched their community speaker site where you can browse speaker profiles and invite them to come to your .NET user group meeting to talk on a specific subject. You can check out my profile on there by searching for XNA and finding me in the list from Salt Lake City, UT. I’ve also added a “INETA Speaker” block to the sidebar of the blog to make it easy for you to have me present to your group :-).

Microsoft MVP for Another Year!

On October 1st, 2010 I was awarded Microsoft MVP status for another year of helping developers with Microsoft’s 3D related technologies of DirectX and XNA, although mostly DirectX. This marks the 9th consecutive year in which I’ve been awarded MVP status. In these past 9 years we’ve watched the PC’s graphics card make the transition from something that might not have hardware accelerated vertex processing to the array of parallel processors in the current generation of graphics cards. Besides the obvious addition of more shader cores on the GPU, what will the next 9 years hold for the PC’s graphics card? Will image-based and video-based rendering become commonplace and mainstream? Will 3D finally penetrate into the display, removing that pesky Z divide in the projection matrix? Its hard to say, but as always, it will be interesting to find out!

Need Tessellation?

Try libtess2, a refactored version of the GLU tessellation code from OpenGL. Brought to you by Digesting Duck.