Making it happen
Archive for September, 2005
Half-Life 2 HDR
Sep 15th
VALVe rocks again: “The Lost Coast” adds HDR into their “Source” engine – it looks stunning and works with anti-aliasing too, even on SM2 hardware. And they somehow managed to get Paul Debevec helping them for that.
Next version of Office
Sep 13th
ATI will strike again
Sep 9th
We are getting closer of ATI’s new lineup of video cards – rumors here, here and here [theinquirer.net]. nVidia has the lead since about two months with 7800GTX, however ATI’s new cards are designed from scratch, being completely new generation ones (with SM 3.0, HDR, H.264 decoding and so on). I’m pretty sure about upgrading my PC now !
Translation
Sep 9th
I’m in charge of maintaining a localization-aware version of the product we’re working at. So besides taking care all the strings are in resources and all the controls load their text from them (this in VB only), I find it pretty hard and cumbersome to get each new version of the product translated (a translated version is a set of resource DLLs, one for each application).
Rather quick-and-dirty (not so quick actually) improvements would be to parse the resource files, build a dictionary and have a tool to automatically re-build them from the dictionary (so basically take the english version – these are the resources used in the EXEs and in the development, duplicate them and change the messages with the dictionary), also it could report un-translated strings. Still I would have to check the dialogs and slightly re-arrange the controls to fit the new text ( problem also reported here – didn’t solve it until now).
Firefox
Sep 9th
The new Firefox is very nice – features tab drag’n'drop and vastly improves speed when using back / forward (Opera had this caching for ages though).
