Abakia Project

• Order Of Operations in ActionScript – “The execution of ActionScript in a SWF running in Flash Player follows a specific order that can be helpful in achieving your tasks correctly, and effectively. This tutorial breaks down operation order of ActionScript into three parts: object life cycle, frame execution, and events.”
• Bytejacker – “Reviewing the best and worst in downloadable and indepedent games.”
• How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary – Interesting comprehensive manual on very important skills every good programmer should have to learn by the years.

• Megaman 8 Bit Deathmatch – Doom engine based mashup of Megaman. Very cool idea, awesome realisation. Even great to watch while others are playing.
• Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page – Louis Gorenfeld research and explanations on some pseudo 3d techniques.
• If philosophers where programmers – Amusing article about which philosopher would have invented/used which programming language and why he would do so.

Today I’m writing about a quite popular topic. At least it seems popular to me, because lots of my friends and many people whose postings I follow have mentioned it once or even regularly. I’m talking about so called life hacking literature. But in my opinion using the term life hacking is confusing and misconcepted. It promises to just fix all your problems by some easy to use “hacks”. As a software developer talking about hacks, isn’t very serious at all. A hack is just the ugly little sister of a beautiful solution. So I think it’s ways better to talk of productivity literature. At least who wants his life to be puzzled and glued together by lots of hacks. From nothing nothing comes!

Some time ago I myself wasn’t into these sort of books. Thinking about this subject bubbled up some strange associations onto my mind. It felt like something between spiritual new age philosophies mixed with a self-help group, finally bound to a paperback. So I never felt the need, to get in touch with those kind of books. But as you can see one day I changed my mind.

I became curious, because many people I appreciate started to read these lousy books. There were hundreds of different topics for several fields of life. As a sceptic I focused on subjects I am familiar with. Programming and creativity for example. I started out with The Passionate Programmer (Chad Fowler), followed by The Creative Habit (Twyla Tharp) and finished with an almost classic: The Power of Less (Leo Barbauta). This is not going to be a detailed review, because there are pretty enough recensions on Amazon or even on the net already. I’m more about to point out the similarities of these three and why each book is worth to be read.

All these books are about methodologies. They don’t promise worlds to you nor do they polish up your ego with bold shiny lies. Nearly the opposite case can be found here. Forseen of some exceptions the concepts seem very down to earth to me and are applicable for software developers as well as for designers or students.

The authors are writing about focus, serious work, skill training and skill development. Especially repetition is one of the major concepts. This may seem pretty boring to the most of us. But you definitely shouldn’t underestimate the value of good work habits. And habits can be developed the best, by doing tasks consciously and often. Just do them consequently for a while and chances are good, that even unbeloved tasks (like paper works, cleaning, rising up early in the morning) may feel comfortable soon. This type of conditioning also helps you to develop habits you don’t have to think or care about later. Managing your document folders for example. If you’re once are used to file them right away, you’ll never have to search for them later.

Well now. I didn’t want to start up yet another life hacker productivity blog, as there are yet enough of them on the net. This book tips just shall be my two cent to the nowadays global productivity movement. I especially enjoyed The Passionate Programmer because to be a developer is my passion, too. This book delivers many interesting positions on what defines a good coder and how to develop important (language independent) engineering skills.

I like The Creative Habit for inspiring me much when it comes to see creativity as a habit which wants be trained regularly. Even the rituals chapters were very interesting. But you’ve to bring in some stamina, because Twyla Tharp writes about and compares a lot with ballet/dancing/classics. Yet another interesting subject Twyla writes about is the loss of skills. Which skill would define you, if you would have lost you current major skill. Ever thought about that one?

The Power of Less seems to be a quite good instruction set, if you’re unhappy with your current way of organizing things. So if you seek guidance out of your personal office mess this book may be the right one for you.

Lately I spend some hours for a research on WebGL. It’s quite amazing in which ways internet technologies have evolved. I still remember times, when it was nearly impossible to render any graphics using JavaScript only. Nowadays it’s one of the minor difficulties since we have technologies like SVG or Canvas. Even after animated realtime graphics are nothing special anymore, there’s a new player in town: WebGL.

3d computer graphics in web applications seem to be still a topic thats is heavily associated with technologies like flash, shockwave or other plugin based platforms. This may become history soon. At least if the development of WebGL browsers will proceed as it currently does. If you already use a WebGL enabled browser and had a look at one of the several examples as they appear constantly on http://learningwebgl.com/, then you will figure out quickly what I’m talking about.

Beside the usual operations we are familiar with from nearly any 3D engine, the most Important part on WebGL seems to me that we are able to use vertex and fragment shaders in the usual native way. While the whole application code is written with JavaScript, the shader programs will be implemented in a C style shader code. In the end nothing special for OpenGL veterans. But hey! Exactly that’s the point! If you’ve ever developed your personal, most awesome shader ever, there’s the possibility to reuse or partly use them for WebGL. There’s an amazing experiment written by Inigo Quilez about this shader topic. It’s called Shadertoy (don’t forget to use a WebGL enabled browser). The Shadertoy website, currently offers you about 28 sample shaders of different kinds. All are looking very pretty and all are native shader programs, which are executed on the graphics accelerator. Hardware acceleration for Webapps: Just great!

The basic possibilities offered by this technology may end into enourmous impacts for webstandards. You already may have recognized the Flash Gordon Project of Tobias Schneider. His approach is to implement an open source flash runtime, written in JavaScript. Imagine this implementation, using the powers of GL rendering. Or ways better: a new runtime plattform using WebGL as rendering layer.

Enough of nerdy enthusiastic day dreaming. There are still some difficulties with WebGL. At first of course, the minor density of WebGL enabled browsers out there in userland. But there’s a silverline on the horizon: last September Mozilla announced to implement WebGL in future versions of Firefox. The current nightly builds yet implement it, but it’s disabled by default. So it’s just a matter of time, when WebGL will be available easily by default.

Second flaw: It is quite uncomfortable to keep track of all matrix transformations by yourself. Bare WebGL won’t do that job for you. Many examples on the internet (including the Learning WebGL lessons) implement their own helper functions for identity loading, by encapsuling Sylvester (vector and matrix math for JavaScript) routines. That’s a common but never the less hacky way to fix the problem. And even creating simple basic shapes still produces a lot of code. Many shaders are embedded directly into HTML code, like it is well know from CSS or JavaScript embedding. That feels pretty ugly, when you’ve a complex WebGL application in mind.

In my opinion, the best solution for this case is WebGLU by Benjamin DeLillo. This library is a set of frequently high usefull routines for developing your very own WebGL application. You can load externalized Shader code, enjoy the ease of a camera and many more fine features.

So if you are interested into WebGL now, you should have a look at Learning WebGL. It’s in my opinion one of the best and most up to date resources on the net. If you are interested in the papers and basics of the new standard, it’s the best to search The Khronos Group website for further information.

If you’ve any other interesting news or resources for WebGL, please leave a comment or message me on any of the known ways.