Visual Acuity

Dear Chairman Hennessy, I would like to openly share a question that kept coming back to me in the past couple of days, and that gave me courage to write a short open letter for the first time in my life. While catching up with daily news I came across a couple of articles in the past week alone, namely on the world’s remaining wilderness areas that are under threat . That the Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than we’ve previously thought, that humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, that China has legalised rhino horn and tiger bone usage after 25 years, to calling for urgent action to develop technologies for negative emissions because our clean energy efforts won’t be enough. Here’s the question: is there actually a future for us, for your company, for humanity and our natural environment? What we do today will lay down the trajectory for our carrying capacity on Earth. Instead of investing in self-driving transportation and...

The reason for this blog post is to share a bit on a particular hard problem that I've encountered during my Master's thesis with a broader audience. I will try my best to write it in plain English, but as the problem is complex expect this to be a lengthy post with domain specific terminology.

In the global device market, there are still between 0.2% and 5.4% of phones that do not support Javascript, at least in these set of countries according to this site. In case your mobile website falls within this set than what do you do when you want to optimize CSS delivery by deferring the loading of some CSS but still serving the complete CSS to non-Javascript websites?

Sometimes it is handy to sort an edge list. In this case I needed an algorithm to test for concavity of a simple 3D polygon with just one face. You can also apply the procedure on 2D because it just sorts an edge list that could contain either 2D or 3D vertices. The polygons were made in Blender v.2.67 , so the script had to be written in Python and executed via the Run Script button in the text editor. I didn't want to use fancy algorithms to sort edges because we're dealing with simple polygons, so I ended up writing my own. As a side note, the edge-angle checkbox in Blender, which can be used to see if a polygon is convex or concave didn't work for me, so I had no other choice but to first sort edges before I can apply angle calculations on consecutive vertices. Suggestions for improvements are welcome and hopefully it helps someone else who had to deal with the same (or similar) issues in Blender!

Context: Facebook IPO Post Mortem – Killer – but not for the reasons you think ! I won't speculate at the reasons for Facebook's low IPO, I just wanted to add some positivism to reason number 4 stated in the blog post; the fact that more users are going mobile.

Before I start with the technicalities let me give first (for the ones that don’t know) a little background info on Komodo Games and Vogels!

Just a quick update. Recently I have changed the template and subject of my blog to fit more closely within my line of studies. A lot has changed since my last post from June 2009 (really a lot) but the idea of this blog still remains the same, namely to share useful information to others. So, as they popular phrase goes... will keep you posted :)