Plaidophile

Today I went to APE with Pat and Mark. While there I met, chatted with, and bought things from the following cartoonists whom I admire:

• Shannon Wheeler
• Meredith Gran
• Aaron Diaz
• Keith Knight

and I also bought some stuff from a bunch of cartoonists I'd never heard of before. Also apparently I was sharing the same oxygen as Jeff Rowland at one point without realizing it. Oh well.

I also exchanged some words with Stephen Notley and chatted a bit with Andrew Farago and Shaenon Garrity.

After that I went to the Cartoon Art Museum's APE party and hobnobbed with some of the above, and also met Rob McCarthy, Jonathan Lemon, and a few other fellow monsters (whose names I forget, unfortunately), and most importantly, Jesse Reklaw who I have admired for a long time and who was probably the single most influential person when it came to my decision to start webcomics to begin with. As it turns out, he was glad to meet me too — he had been trying to find my email address so he could give me a copy of his first book, which had a strip I'd written back in 1999 (or rather, which my subconscious had written when I was like 5 but which I submitted to him in 1999).

Anyway, between all the merch I bought and the money I donated to CAM, I completely drained my checking account and spent nearly all of it. And it was worth every penny.

So, ever since the Logic 9.0.1 update went out, it's been wonderfully solid. Thanks, Apple!

However, there is still one issue with it which has been bothering me since version 7 at least (and maybe even earlier): it would be really nice if it were smarter about prefetching upcoming audio files, so that if I've, say, had a project open and idle for a few hours, it doesn't give me an "audio engine overload" error every single time the playhead touches a new uncached file for the first time.

The easy workaround is to just do an offline bounce but that's silly, and only partially solves it for extremely complex projects. Most of the time Logic is sitting there with an empty HD load indicator, so I know it could be better about actively prefetching assets. It's not like playhead motion is a Turing-complete problem or whatever (it only moves in one direction and usually doesn't even change speed that much).

Obviously, freeze tracks aren't the answer, since it just replaces a bunch of small un-cached files with a bunch of large uncached files.

Maybe there's a buried setting. It's not like Logic is short on obscure preference panes after 20 years of accretion...

Back when I was in grad school I was doing a lot of research on graphics, and had come up with an obvious-in-retrospect geometry representation format, which I called an "NMMesh," for an NxM Mesh of points; at the same time, X. Gu at MIT had been working on a similar concept, which he called a "Geometry Image." Of course, I never got around to writing any papers, whereas Gu had, and so his (much better) name caught on. For a few years they were a darling concept in the graphics research community.

Recently I'd been messing around with my research 3D engine for various reasons (mostly of nostalgia), and I came to realize that even now there are several things I had been doing with geometry images that still don't appear to be well-known for them. So, I'd might as well write some of it up.

One of the many reasons why I gave up on the Sidekick/Hiptop was because I didn't have any reasonable way to synchronize my data between it and other devices. (This particular reason was at the top of the list, although ongoing usability problems and aggravation with not-quite-there features didn't help any.)

So, of course, the worst possible thing happened, and many people (including at least two friends of mine) were lost without their data and any way to recover it. I'm sure that basically none of them had a backup, because Danger went out of their way to make it difficult to keep your data synchronized or backed up externally.

"Cloud" computing as a promise is nice, but in execution it usually means "having all your data held up under lock and key by a single provider." You have to trust that provider to keep your data safe.