Memory Diagnostic - Getting errors?

March 24th, 2008 by ReAn

So I’ve been having some issues with my desktop machine as of late, been getting some elegant crashes (read: swift). Recently some of my apps have been catching thier crashes before they dump to the inevitable Dr. Watson, and complaining about memory errors: Pointers to unreferenced memory, inability to read from this memory, etc.

Anyway, unfortunately for me, the problem wasn’t in my memory, but this wonderfull excursion in computer diagnostic process has led me to a wonderfull tool which I’d love to share with the world.

It’s called Memtest86+

http://www.memtest.org/

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Posted in Computers, Software | | 1 Comments

Professors and Handwriting

March 13th, 2008 by ReAn

It seems that lately a lot of older people (i.e. my father) are confused and shocked as to why handwriting is never taught/tested in school. They seem to think it’s an important thing to have in today’s digital world. Well I’ve noticed an interesting trend. The older someone is, the worse thier handwriting is. My father himself has some pretty neat handwriting, even his printing is particularly good. However, most older people i see have horrible handwiting, even worse than most of the younger folk, whom use computers much more frequently.

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Posted in Personal, Rants | | 2 Comments

Depth of Field - Simplified

March 11th, 2008 by ReAn

What is depth of field? Depth of field is the simulation in 3D graphics of a lens-based camera. Conventional rendering techniques model a pinhole camera paradigm, this means that all aspects of the picture share the same level of focus (the entire picture is in focus). With a lens-based camera, the rendered image will have varying levels of focus based on the ‘focus’ of the lens. Since we’re not using a ray-tracing engine, it’s hard to approximate the effects of light bending through a lens in the projection phase of rendering so we can ‘fake’ Depth of Field by breaking the problem down.
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Posted in Computers, Graphics | | 154 Comments

IE8 Beta - First Impressions

March 11th, 2008 by ReAn

Well let’s begin by pointing out, I’ve never been a huge advocate of Internet Explorer. I enjoy IE6’s extremely quick loading time and use it from time to time when a page just up and refuses to load in Opera (My current browser of choice) and aside from that, It’s wonderfull for embedding into your applications.

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Posted in Computers, Software | | 10 Comments