Supreme Court Oxford Companion

It was a dark cold night. No stars were piercing through the clouds as I gazed up the sky for a few seconds and sighed as the cold spell continues on in the cold February air. People around were wearing thick, some wearing thin, as I walked past them going to the bookstore.

The store was about 15 minutes before closing. So I had to rush the ritual before they cut me off. So I raced through the aisles and went straight to the shelf where I was hoping to find the right book. Grabbed it and then headed off to another section.

 Then, it was time to go. The voice coming from the speaker warned about the impending doom, err I mean the few minutes left before they start kicking people out. The ritual was on its last few steps when another lady greeted with a smile. I smiled back at her in some form of cheerful counter-attack.

Lining up at the counter, my eye wandered afar, zooming in on some books that piled-up for collection. Then the book came into view. I knew that book from sometime back. Picked it up and held it face distance, saw the price: $9.95. “Hmmm, that’s a pretty good deal.”

That was several weeks ago. The book is now placed near the computer table for easy reach and quick reading. The book kept me entertained, though. I learned a lot about this country and how the supreme court and its justices agreed, concurred and dissented on various cases.

One thing I’d like to comment was how the book presented the padilla v. rumsfeld case. It sounded like this case was unprecedented. All the technical jargon surrounding this case was deliberate and singular, as if to point-out its uniqueness.

Matrix Multiply

I’ve been doing a lot of 3D programming in my spare time. Though parts of it were spent doing mostly in research and study.  Take for example the time I spent going through bits and pieces of information figuring out the details of Matrix Transformations, you probably know and can probably count the number of nights spent on it.

Anyway, with the help of a friend who badly needed a Matrix Transform lib written entirely in C, he’s trying not to borrow code from the Web so as not to get a lower grade, we finally sat down and wrote probably the shortest quick-n-dirty version of the Matrix Transform ever coded.

With most of the basic Transform functions squared-away, I finally got it added on top the OpenGL engine wrapper.  The first test was basically loading a 3DS mesh file into the world before rotating, scaling and translating it to a location. That test went very well, the Matrix Transform worked right away with no hiccups. I thought the model will come out mangled in knots, but somehow, the model got rotated, scaled and translated as planned.

The next test will start soon, though the elements needed to get the test going aren’t there yet. The B3D loader is still 50% complete and the slerp() function is yet to to coded. For some unknown reason, I somehow got hooked into B3D format mainly because of its completeness and simplicity.

 The B3D loader is LGLP’d and is available on SF.net.