Robert Kooima

I get annoyed when gdb asks me to confirm trivial operations such as killing a program, restarting a program from the beginning, or exiting gdb altogether. A single line of configuration resolves these annoyances, but I tend to forget the syntax (and even the config file name) each time I move to a new machine. I end up digging around in the documentation for several minutes, an exercise complicated by the GNU Project’s “info” system. Apparently they’re too good for man pages, but won’t switch to HTML. “STFU” isn’t in the index, so I’m posting it here in order to remind myself once and for all.

In ~/.gdbinit

set confirm off

I’ve been writing software for many years, and a number of habits have become ingrained. Among these is a general desire to have as much code on screen as is possible. Moderating this desire is the requirement that all code buffers be exactly 80 columns wide. Setting up a development environment that meets these needs is one of the first things I do with any new system. Recently, I got set up with a Macbook Pro. [Read More]

I tend to spend a lot of time reading OpenGL extension specifications. It’s sometimes a pain to have to grab them one-by-one from the official extension registry, and I like to store the text locally for easy reference and searching. The registry seems to lack a single-file archive download (please correct me if I’m wrong), so here they are, current as of 20 October 2007.

glext-20-Oct-07.zip [1.9MB]

This article discusses a means to reduce the problems of near clipping distance and depth buffer precision by foregoing the usual near and far distance specifications and reformulating the perspective projection transformation in terms of the median of the scene. The result is a short GLSL vertex function that allows geometry to be transformed and rasterized arbitrarily close to the viewpoint, while maintaining an affordance needed by applications to influence depth buffer utilization. [Read More]