Square uses git for version control. Prior to joining I had used Perforce extensively and lightly used Subversion for home projects. Like a lot of people I struggled with git‘s steep learning curve – confusing terminology and commands with similar names to Subversion but an entirely different function (hello git checkout!). It was a rough [...]
February 2nd was my final day as a Google employee. That same day my wife and I left for a brief vacation in Costa Rica, and on my return I started as an engineer at Square. One month in and I’m loving it, very happy that I made the change.
This morning Google announced it’s Google Art Project (launch blog post). This is a really exciting project, utilizing Google’s Street View technology to bring art in front of a world-wide audience. For a while I was working on a 20% project with the team to store and render the building floor plans. On the surface [...]
[It's been a while since I updated my blog, and even though I have low readership I should blog more to improve my writing skills. Write that one down as a New Year's resolution.] In October of last year Google held an HTML5 Game Jam to spur game development in HTML5. I decided to attend [...]
I’ve put the source to my JavaScript raytracer up on GitHub. The version up there is more recent that the published demo, but most of the differences are not visible. I grew up using more traditional SCM software – Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe [1], CVS and Perforce – so I find myself on unfamiliar ground with [...]
In an earlier post (which I’ve since deleted to prevent incorrect knowledge from spreading) I claimed that JavaScript did not have a logical XOR operator and explained how to compute the parity of numbers. Turns out I was wrong on the XOR operator, and there is a simpler way to compute parity. Nathan Lucash pointed [...]
I’ve spent a little time on and off over the last few weeks implementing a simple raytracer in JavaScript. The implementation of the floor inspired the post about JavaScript’s lack of a logical xor. I wrote the raytracer to explore HTML5′s canvas capabilities and the computation performance of browser’s JavaScript engines (such as Chrome’s V8 [...]
[UPDATE: 10/13] The information in this blog is incorrect and mis-leading. I have written a new post with corrections. Apologies. I recently had the need for a logical XOR (eXclusive-OR) function in JavaScript. Unfortunately JavaScript doesn’t provide one, but from the operator’s truth table it’s pretty easy to implement: My use case required me to [...]
I recently came across a video for a new Ubisoft game called From Dust. It was co-announced at the recent GDC Europe by the lead designer and engineer who gave presentations on it. I’ve embedded the tech demo video below: What struck me as I watched this video was how similar it was to a [...]
In the mid 90′s I used to be fairly active in the PC demoscene. It was a heady mix of images, sound and impressive technical chops. There was something fun about working within the tight constraints of then current PC hardware – an 8-bit image display measuring 320×200 pixels (or 320×240 if you cared about [...]