pvidler's comments

pvidler | 5 years ago | on: 2D Graphics on Modern GPU (2019)

You can always render the text to a texture offline as a signed distance field and just draw out quads as needed at render time. This will always be faster than drawing from the curves, and rendering from an SDF (especially multi-channel variants) scales surprisingly well if you choose the texture/glyph size well.

A little more info:

https://blog.mapbox.com/drawing-text-with-signed-distance-fi...

MIT-licensed open-source multi-channel glyph generation:

https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

The only remaining issue would be the kerning/layout, which is admittedly far from simple.

pvidler | 11 years ago | on: PaperLike: 13.3″ E Ink Monitor by Dasung Tech

Apart from the point in the first video when they click on a link and you can still see the smudge of the text column on the newly cleared screen. A close look at the text column while scrolling makes it look dirty compared to the rest of the screen as well.

pvidler | 11 years ago | on: C4 – C in 4 functions

Most of it was readable, but the printf on lines 57--59 made me retch. I see what it's doing, but it's not what I'd call easily maintainable:

  printf("%8.4s", &"LEA ,IMM ,JMP ,JSR ,BZ ,BNZ ,ENT ,ADJ ,LEV ,LI ,LC ,SI ,SC ,PSH ,"
         "OR ,XOR ,AND ,EQ ,NE ,LT ,GT ,LE ,GE ,SHL ,SHR ,ADD ,SUB ,MUL ,DIV ,MOD ,"
         "OPEN,READ,CLOS,PRTF,MALC,MSET,MCMP,EXIT,"[*++le * 5]);

pvidler | 11 years ago | on: Catch: A modern, C++-native, header-only, framework for unit tests

Because that's what makes it a unit test -- you only want the unit, the tests and any stubs/mocks in the executable. Anything more and you have an integration test on your hands.

Pulling a single unit out of a legacy codebase can be difficult, especially when you don't want to actually move, copy, or modify the source-files; stubbing out the dependencies and writing mock objects to verify your expectations of what the code should be doing are also very time-consuming.

Those are the hard parts of unit testing C++, and I wonder if anyone has found a good way of doing it (with a framework, or just a technique).

pvidler | 11 years ago | on: Catch: A modern, C++-native, header-only, framework for unit tests

It looks like a nice test framework, but it doesn't appear to help at all with the really hard problems you face with testing C++ -- isolating the unit under test for separate compilation, and the development and inclusion of mocks/stubs.

Anyone know of a really good (preferably simple and pragmatic) C++ mocking/stubbing framework to go with this?

pvidler | 13 years ago | on: In Europe, Speed Cameras Meet Their Technological Match

Average speed checks are awful — I spend more time looking at the speedo than I do the road, as I try to keep close to the limit while not hitting the car in front. And they are always for odd speeds that I find difficult to maintain (just the wrong pedal position).

Perhaps they make sense when everyone has cruise control as standard to rely on, but until then a mass rollout would drive me to public transport. Or is that the point?

pvidler | 13 years ago | on: freeSoC and freeSoC Mini

In fairness the TI launchpads are astoundingly cheap -- as far as I have seen, very few of the other competitors have dev boards at that sort of price.

The mbed board is similar to the mini, but with an online IDE (not a fan) and community. There's not much difference in price there, at least not from the mbed suppliers here in the UK vs the kickstarter prices.

pvidler | 13 years ago | on: freeSoC and freeSoC Mini

Just from the descriptions and photos, it looks like the mini will be breadboardable.

The bigger one almost certainly not -- it's arduino compatible and the gap on one side is visibly smaller than the other. Also, it's not clear if the big one will have pins dropping down below the board (just looks like female headers).

pvidler | 13 years ago | on: Samsung flew bloggers to Berlin, then threatened to leave them there

> Legal? - possibly. Ethical? - not to me. How is this not evasion of labor laws? That this is par-for-the-course is pretty dismaying.

Surely Samsung aren't doing this for the work -- there have to be cheaper ways to get people to demo your product than flying folks from India to Germany, getting them uniforms, keeping close watch on their activities, daily update emails in the beginning, etc.?

Why not just have their own employees do it? Or just pay native German bloggers?

It sounds to me like Samsung was trying to buy enthusiasm, but failed to adequately communicate the work involved and then massively overreacted when it went wrong for them. With decent management, it could have been better the alternatives -- the 'booth-babe and slimy salesman' or 'bored employee droning through a script' approaches.

I still prefer Apple's approaches to product demonstration -- either a big on-stage demo followed by relatively unsupervised hands-on time for a large number of reporters at once, or a personal demo by a senior executive for certain lucky individuals.

pvidler | 13 years ago | on: Apple v. Samsung - Meet the foreman of the jury

There is what looks like bounce back at around 0:36 onwards in this video review:

http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/samsung-nexus-s-at/4505-...

It's some sort of app list screen though and happens between what looks like screens of icons, so I'm not sure if it counts. For lists it looks like an orange glow effect, possibly with some small bounce, but that may be an optical illusion.

This might be enough to confuse a jury? I haven't checked the patent to see if it actually infringes or not.

pvidler | 13 years ago | on: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1: An Embarrassing, Lazy, Arrogant Money Grab

I see less of this on ios devices, but that may be because I keep up–to-date with newer hardware. I guess devs are targeting the older devices that are still in use -- together with the restricted multitasking on ios, this probably side-steps most memory problems.

(Except for the odd memory hog that occasionally gets terminated while in use, like the Facebook app).

pvidler | 13 years ago | on: Hack a Standing Desk from IKEA

I've been using the ikea standing desk from a few weeks ago -- the lack side table with a shelf screwed to it. I simply put my laptop on top and then use the rest of the normal height desk as a sitting desk. I just move my laptop across to switch. I already had the standard desk and chair, so the whole setup cost me about £10.

I leave the keyboard, mouse and power adapter on the standing side, as motivation to spend less time sitting. So far I can manage alternate hours sitting and standing, which isn't too shabby considering how out of shape I am.

pvidler | 13 years ago | on: Apple's CPU lead Jim Keller heads back to AMD

I think intel would bend over backwards to get their processors in an apple phone; it would completely open the mobile market for them. They already give apple some influence anyway -- there was something back in 2011 about apple 'persuading' intel to work on the ULV version of the sandy bridge CPU for use in the air.
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