walbourn

Was planning to spend the day doing a bit of recon on the "other side" of the industry. Spent the morning in a half-day course on OpenGL Performance Tuning. Sadly, the content was all really basic stuff that every game programmer has been doing with DirectX since version 7. This is definitely more a reflection of how far back in the dark-ages most academics and sci-viz people are rather than the state of OpenGL vs. Direct3D. This afternoon was supposed to be a course on Open Source from a legal perspective, but the lawyer never showed so the course was cancelled. The irony of the Open Source course being unreliable was amusing. Now, before I get any OS zealots spamming me, I don't have anything personally against the OS movement or it's products. I do think you get what you pay for with it in terms of assurances: i.e. nothing.

Between the two courses I attended the SIGGRAPH Keynote, which this year was George Lucas. He didn't give a speech, but instead did a Q & A with some industry media guy doing all the questioning. Interesting, but not particularly informative about anything relevant to my job. I was a bit disappointed at the complete lack of people dressed as Leia or in storm trooper armor.

My ticket to the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater was for tonight, and it was pretty cool as usual. The short Cubic Tragedy was a bit hit with the crowd (great for computer artists and art history geeks--that means you