Cleaning Out My Notes Inbox

I send myself a lot of reminder emails when I find things I want to review later or remember for whatever reason. For example, the Dakar parts post was based around one of these emails. So this post is just to get some semi-work-related things out of my inbox and into my working memory here on the blog.

First up, Seth sent me a link to a small (but well-known) games studio with a good blog on the procedural creation of buildings and cities. That is, the program uses a set of rules to automatically construct realistic buildings and city layouts. An interesting read.

Somewhat related is this link to an article about the Google-funded ViewFinder, software for placing photos into a 3D environment with the proper perspective and orientation. Watch the video. Its very impressive.

And finally I read a really good paper by Guy Steele from which the following is an excerpt:

a pattern is a plan that has some number of parts and shows you how each part turns a face to the other parts, how each joins with the other parts or stands off, how each part does what it does and how the other parts aid it or drag it down, and how all the parts may be grasped as a whole and made to serve as one thing, for some higher goal or as part of a larger pattern. A pattern should give hints or clues as to when and where it is best put to use. What is more, some of the parts of a pattern may be holes, or slots, in which other things may be placed at a later time. A good pattern will say how changes can be made in the course of time. Thus some choices of the plan are built in as part of the pattern, and other choices wait till the time when the pattern is to be used. In this way a pattern stands for a design space in which you can choose, on the fly, your own path for growth and change.

You may notice its somewhat oddly worded. You have to read the paper to find out why.