It’s been a while since I last updated on this, but hopefully you’ve brushed up on your C and OpenGL skills. Here you’ll find the entire source code to a pong implementation in C and OpenGL.
Programming Pong in C and OpenGL – Part V
July 22nd, 2008Why I’m Falling in Love with Futures
July 11th, 2008It’s costing us more for everything. And as consumers, we’re finding ourselves harder and harder pressed to make ends meet. But there’s a silver lining in the thunder clouds of roaring inflation. Even though it’ll be a rough couple of years, the high price of gas and oil is already bringing about some change.
You see, in America, and much of the rest of the world, energy is currency. Without rehashing the standard chain at length: oil is gas, it is jet fuel, and it is used to transport, grow, heat, light, build just about everything.
But you know that.
Here’s the interesting thing that’s happened in the last 15 or so years, Read the rest of this entry »
Programming Pong in C and OpenGL – Part IV
July 1st, 2008OpenGL
OpenGL is the Open Graphics Library and it is maintained by the Kronos Group, which is a consortium of top-tier companies that include board members such as ATI nVidia, Apple, IBM, and more. Microsoft used to be on the consortium, but left and decided to make DirectX, a competing closed graphics library that only runs on Windows (at least without some sort of emulation layer or wrapper like Wine or Cedega).
Programming Pong in C and OpenGL – Part III
June 27th, 2008Sorry for the delay in this post, but here’s Part III.
For reference, you probably want to start out with Part’s II and I here and here.
Last we left off I said I’d get into some of the basic mechanics of GLUT and OpenGL, so let’s hit the ground running.
GLUT
GLUT, or the Graphics Library Utility Toolkit, is a cross-platform C library for generating windows and handling IO events. Basically, GLUT was written so you can get to learning OpenGL very quickly without having to spend enormous amounts of time learning how to handle mouse or keyboard actions in your current OS, or worse, learn how to setup a simple GUI just so you can see your work. On top of making these tasks simpler, GLUT is, as I mentioned, cross-platform. This means that you can take your code and recompile it on another OS as long as you have the appropriate GLUT library referenced in your IDE. There are currently versions of GLUT created for Linux, OS X, Windows, and probably even more operating systems.
So how do we create a simple window?
To Hell & Back – A Story of Windows Vista
June 16th, 2008I recently helped my nephew Peter do a massive overhaul/upgrade of his current PC. We basically rebuilt his PC and the only thing he kept was his recently purchased insane-o vid card and his hard drive. Several hours later we had his new PC up and running–hardware wise at least.
One of the orders of the day–much to my dismay–was to install Windows Vista. I advised him not too, but he got his aunt to get it for him for his birthday and he rationalized his defiance of my advice on DirectX 10. (Truth be told, I sabotaged myself by telling him it was one of the only neat features of Vista, outside of massive memory footprint and overall sluggishness.)
And so our journey began..
I’d like to tell you it didn’t take us in excess of 2 days to get Vista installed. I mean, I’ve been building PCs for years now and I’m a recent grad of Computer Engineering (I know the two aren’t the same, but still..). Piece of cake, right?
Wrong.