About (more...)
Here you will find the interests of Dwayne Robinson, including programs, documents, occasional epiphanies, and any other random creations that seem worth sharing. Primary technical interests include graphics, emulation, and music. Other interests include drawing, video games, foreign languages, and anime, so you might find anything here related to those.
Thoughts (more...)
2009-02-15: Genres that are NOT genres
Pop is NOT a music genre. It's a parallel classifier as irrelevant as the color of the album art. Unlike true genres, the definition of 'pop' is subject to the temporal whim of whatever fits on the radio station's charts. Considering that 'pop' twenty years ago was radically different than what is called pop today, I think this pseudo-genre should be forcefully cleansed from all MP3 tags. Admittedly, other genres do gradually shift and subdivide into others, but at least they are based on something meaningful, like instruments used, rhythm, and other song attributes.
The second most amusing 'genre' is electronic (note I don't mean the more specific EDM). Really, this is quite an irrelevant one, considering it is merely the method of audio production and doesn't really tell anything more useful about the song. I suppose a few decades ago, when anything electronic consisted of nothing more than FM beeps and bleeps, it may have had pertinence. Nowadays though, even modern rock songs, hip-hop, and soft new age songs make liberal use of synthesizers and post processing. So then, if all other genres are potentially a subset of electronic, what good is having it?
I really hope that Pandora's classification system clarifies this disorganized taxonomy we currently have (or, lack).
News (more...)
2021-12-09: BgMapper source code
Published BgMapper source code on GitHub.
2021-11-11: Tilemap Viewer 1.9.2
TileView 1.9.2
- Supports any element bit size 1-32, including 24-bit elements, and even non-powers of two like 3-bit or 12-bit elements.
- Press 'o' to cycle through all 8 possible 2D orientations (normal, horizontally mirrored, vertically mirrored, diagonal...).
- Press 'e' to toggle endianness between increasing(LE)/decreasing(BE).
- Press 'u' now to type unit size in directly by pressing 'u' instead of cycling through them all.
- Press 'w' now to type wrap width in directly instead of resizing (e.g. "64"+Enter).
- Removed 'Del' key to write new element value to file since it was dangerous (no save) and didn't work completely anyway (only supported uint8 and uint16).
- Included a very simple Windows port (consider it a preview, as it basically just wraps the old program inside a fixed size window so you don't need to run DOSBox, but no mouse support or menus or any other improvements, except larger window size).
- Added 1:1 pixels mode (not just 4x4 colored blocks).
2010-09-05: PAX 2010
Oy, a whole year with any updates -_- Well, at least I'm accomplishing things on DirectWrite.
2009-09-06: PAX 2009
Met djpretzel and crew from Overclocked Remix at PAX. That was neat. Hmm, should I ever finish Spc2Midi?
2009-02-22: Website refresh completed
Transitioned the last of the old pages (maps, programs, documents, music, and news pages). The site now uses PHP and Smarty templates to reduce tedium of synchronization for navigation bar. External links are now stored outside the HTML, so that updating them in one place corrects them all. Links can be tagged so that Related entries appear in the navigation bar, depending on the current page.
2009-02-05: Website 10 year anniversary
Piken's Pursuits has been around for a decade now, first starting at Tripod, then Oregon State, and now its own domain.
2007-06-10: GUI lives again
Ported my own little GUI from ASM to C++ to D to C# now, and this time it's on the Xbox 360 (graphics designed using PhotoShop 6, shaders are HLSL, code is C#)
2007-05-21: Fun with shaders in XNA
Having fun on the X-Box 360 using XNA (the screenshots are of course from the Windows compile, since Print Screen is useless on the X-Box). HLSL just feels cleaner than GLSL, and XNA is much easier to find functions and constants than both DirectX or OpenGL.
2007-03-05: Better painterly rendering
This time it does more than just follow the gradient starting from a regular grid. It smooths the tensor field and uses evenly placed streamlines. A nice extra touch is the normal mapping that makes the ink seem to lift off the canvas :) Just feed it an original photograph, tweak the variables, and it produces something that looks like a human painted it.
2006-05-07: Julia bumped teapot
Good old ripples, HDR, and Julia fractals, using GLSL from the shaders class.
2006-05-29:
Pilotwings - Maps - added collection by Graham Lackey
For more game maps...
Music page - directory fix.
All songs work now. Been broken on this mirror for a while, but nobody ever told me.