Sneak Preview

A sneak peek at my new project, which I started today. Are you getting curious? Then keep an eye out on this blog, and see what this iPhone/iPad/iPod app will be all about. The still secret title will be revealed soon.

Performance Tracking

To track the performance of The little tank that could attends Panzer Class in different markets, see below. According to igamestats, it was even the nr 1 free iPad game in Russia for two days... hoorah!

topappcharts.

igamestats

Crib

As of today, we have a crib in our nursery. Amy and I are getting ready for the big event. We've been attending Pregnancy Classes to prepare for it. I'm still scared, but less so. We've also managed to find a nice stroller. And what do you know... it's Dutch Design optima forma. Many thanks to the grandparents who helped us to buy this fancy smancy stuff. Nothing is too good for this future Dutch Canadian Girl. I guess we'll put the remainder of the baby money into a savings account to pay MIT tuition in 2028. Or will University in Holland still be government paid at that time? Amy insists that I speak Dutch with the baby, and that the baby gets two passports.

So about the baby: a girl, due October 29. But as they told us in Pregnancy Class: there is no due-date, more of a due-month. So secretly I hope on a 10-10-10 baby with a binary birth date. The baby moves around a lot inside Amy, and health checks have been good so far.

- Bramy

Set of wheels

I saw this awesome set of wheels in Vancouver. The police force was doing a charity event, so I made a deal with an officer: I donate to the charity, and they let me get behind the wheel of this Ford Mercury. It has a manual gearbox but the shifting is done at the steering wheel, not on the floor.

Vancouver in Oranje

In Vancouver heerste er ook een flinke WorldCup fever. Door de vele nationaliteiten die hier aanwezig zijn zitten de bars vol tijdens de wedstrijden. Het feestje voor expats in Vancouver tijdens de finale was zo populair, dat het niet mogelijk was om binnen te komen. Het zag Oranje van de Nederlanders. Vlak voor de finale kwam ik Miguel tegen, mijn Spaanse ex-collega, dus dat was een mooie photo-op zoals ze dat hier noemen. Tevens op de photo: Bram pruilend na verlies, en Bram en Slavica voor het feestje van het consulaat.

Star Wars in Concert

Niets is zo overweldigend voor een 12 jarig jongetje als de Star Wars saga. In 1982 zag ik samen met mijn broer Robbert een dubbele vertoning van van Star Wars a new hope en the Empire strikes back in het Corso Theater in Castricum. Ik wist niet wat me overkwam. Sindsdien heeft de magie van de cinema me ooit nog zo kunnen overrompelen als toen. Een belangrijke bijdrage in de onderdompeling van het Star Wars universum was in de vorm van de muziek. De genialiteit van John Williams is niet veel minder dan die van George Lucas. Wat betreft George Lucas: ik heb altijd een hekel gehad aan die hetze die het publiek ging ontwikkelen omdat Phantom Menace niet Star Wars waardig zou zijn. Dit vind ik onzin. Phantom Menace is een goede film, en natuurlijk is de indruk van de film op een volwassene niet te evenaren als de indruk van het orgineel op het kind. Als de films in omgekeerde volgorde waren uitgebracht, dan had een flink aantal waarschijnlijk a New Hope verguisd.

Ik heb vanavond Star Wars in Concert bijgewoond in het Hockey Stadion hier in Vancouver. Gepresenteerd door Anthony Daniels, met een volledig symphonie orkest en koor. Wat een genot om die muziek live aan te horen, vergezeld met beelden uit Star Wars. Mocht de toer ook Europa aandoen, dan is mijn advies om dit zeker te gaan bekijken.

Burgerplicht

Wel, ik heb zojuist aan mijn burgerplicht voldaan. Daar ik nog niet bevoegd ben om mijn stem uit te brengen voor de Canadese verkiezingen, heb ik gestemd voor de tweede kamer verkiezingen in Nederland. Per post gaat mijn stem naar Den Haag. Zoals immer, stem ik puur op het programma, met de hulp van de stemwijzer. Blijkbaar is mijn gedachtengoed niet optimaal vertegenwoordigd in de politiek, want de partij waarvan het program het meest met mijn ideeën strookt, heeft slechts 20 matches op 30 stellingen. Ik ben het verst verwijderd van Groenlinks en de piratenpartij met 7 matches uit 30.

Fit

Is it me, or are the people in Vancouver just more fit than the average person? 50000 people are doing the Sun Run, including Amy's sister, Amy's best friend and a bunch of my Slant Six colleagues. I tried to spot Ben, who got seeded, from my balcony, but failed to catch him. However, here are some nice pictures I took. I really like the one of the shadows. It's a somewhat reversed from what you expect: the shadows are in normal perspective, and the people themselves are from a strange angle.

Liberated

It was 65 years ago that thousands of Canadians gave their lives so that my parents, both born under nazi occupation during WWII, would be able to grow up in a free and safe Netherlands. The Netherlands is deeply indebted to all the allied forces, but it was the Canadians that were given the task of liberating Holland. One such soldier who embarked on a long voyage from Canada to Europe to fight in Arnhem is depicted in this picture. I admire their braveness, their tenaciousness and their achievements. I hope I would have at least half their courage if I were ever to be in their shoes. For now, all I can do is gladly pay my taxes for an ever improving Canada, which has provided me with a wonderful new home. The True North strong and free.

Another beautiful evening in English Bay

What a beautiful spring evening in Vancouver today. English Bay is looking its finest. People are flocking to the seawall. Amy and I will probably move out of the neighbourhood soon, to get something bigger and more affordable. The west end, and English Bay in particular is my favorite part of Vancouver, but I'm sure we'll find something nice south of False Creek. We will definitely be renting again, as the housing market has not crashed here yet. I've heard that the disparity between house prices and incomes is nowhere so large as here. A hard hitting housing crash is exactly what is needed here. Last weekend I visited a condo tower near UBC called the Wesbrook that was selling two bedroom apartments for 1.4M dollar. Maybe a Hong Kong businessman can afford this.

Touch Flags

Just submitted to the app store and available soon: my latest iPad game Touch Flags. It is a flag pop quiz, with amazingly realistic multi touch interaction. You can drag, pinch, stretch, flip, fold and swirl the flags. It's so realistic, you can almost feel the cloth.

A nice thing about this puzzle game is that it is highly educational. Playing a few games will quickly give you expert knowledge on the flags of the world.

I am really proud of this game, I think it's a killer application of the 10 finger multitouch functionality of the iPad.

Superhero

I never got into superheroes all that much. So personally, I would not pick 'kick ass' as a movie to see. But Amy's colleagues were going there, and I was invited. Man... that movie is awesome. And as a bonus, I had a nice 'fiction meets reality' moment. In the movie, the bad guy goes to the cinema. Guess what cinema he goes to... the VERY SAME cinema I am at that very moment sitting in, watching that movie. How freaking weird is that? I can recommend the movie... funny as hell, a lot of suspense, and just very well made.

Pixels

Wow.... this video is an amazing piece of work. Everyone growing up in the digital age will be able to relate to it.

In the other news: last weekend I went to Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood Washington to pick up an Apple iPad. Amy and I took the Amtrak train from Vancouver, heading to Seattle. The Amtrak station in Edmonds has some historic items on display. Railroads have such a rich history in the United States, opening up the continent to the pioneers and new settlers. It's a shame that the US railroads have been ignored by the car owning masses and the governments alike. It's a shadow of what it once was. It deserves a better fate, because it can be very comfortable. I remember an Amtrak ride from New Orleans to Memphis, when we had a nice juicy steak dinner, white tablecloths and silverware included, on board of the train. And because the ticket was bought months in advance, it was unbelievably cheap.

My bid to AMD's 48 cores

This is my entry to AMD's challenge to use a 48-core computer.

OpenGL shading, DirectX rendering, Toy Story, Jurassic Park, Call of Duty graphics, ray tracing... it is all child's play, stuff from the minor-league when it comes to high quality rendering. These render methods are all very crude approximations of what light actually does. To do a faithful simulation of light, you need to solve what CG scientists call 'the Rendering Equation'.

The best known method for solving this is Henrik Wann Jensen's Photon Mapping algorithm. The concept is downright simple. Unlike ray tracing, where rays are fired from the eye into the scene, Photon Mapping shoots photons from the light sources into the scene. In a post process step, the scene is sampled for photon distribution. So how many photons are we talking here? Well, typically between 100M and a billion to get a noise-free high quality image. And after doing all that work, what does it yield? Well, you get things like Caustics, Diffuse Inter-reflections and Soft Shadows not obtainable by conventional render methods. The images below will illustrate my point (taken from Henrik's web site.)

In the field of parallel computing, a class of problems is designated as 'embarrassingly parallel'. Those problems are easy to divide up in chunks that can de computed independently from each other. Ray tracing is an example of a problem in this class. However, Photon Mapping is just as embarrassingly parallel, maybe even more so. When shooting let's say 480M photons into a 3D scene, it will be as simple as giving each core 10M photons each. After generating those 48 maps with photons, each can be sampled (with final gathering) independently, as there is no need to merge the maps. The combining of results can be performed in screen space (pixel basis).

Generating these physically correct images can typically take many hours per single image. A parallel algorithm will exhibit near linear speed ups. This means that 48 cores will render the same image almost 48 times faster than a single core would. In my previous job, I worked at the SARA super computing centre. While working there, I had access to 128 core Itanium and 512 core MIPS super computers. These were not clusters, but real shared memory supers, with all those processors running under a single OS image. During an occasional idle time, after work hours, I would test my photon mapping implementation, and I can confirm that Photon Mapping indeed scales linearly, even with a lot of cores thrown at it.

To summarize... if I had access to a 48 core machine, I would use it to investigate how feasibly it is to do Photon Mapping at more interactive rates at low photon count, and low screen resolutions.

Vancouver exploded in celebrations

Vancouver and Canada love the Olympic Games. But there is one thing they love above all: the game they call their own: Hockey, or as it is known in the Netherlands: ijs hockey. The town exploded when Canada clinched the gold in overtime. We took a short bath in the crowd on Granville street. Vancouver is in ecstasy over this win. It reminded me of the 25th of june 1988 in the Netherlands. The game against the USA was a lot of fun to watch. Judging from the Canadian player names, there could be quite a few with Dutch and German ancestry playing for Canada today.

Meeting the Prime Minister

The Ambassador invited me for drinks and meet the Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. That was such a big honour, I even got to shake his hand. I tried to shoot a picture of myself and the Prime Minister. It's my face in the foreground of the picture. There was also a professional photographer, so maybe I can get hold of a better picture. The PM made a nice speech, with some good jokes. He even made a really nice adlib joke to a heckler on Carnaval being a Catholic contribution to Dutch culture, not suited for a Protestant.

A big surprise moment was when the Prime Minister introduced the two times winner of the Elf Stedentocht Evert van Benthem, who is now a cattle farmer in Canada. On the picture, you can see him wearing his cowboy hat. He got a big round of applause of course, from the expats. I am now watching the opening ceremony, and am getting in the Olympic mood. On Sunday I will visit the Holland Heineken house, and the week after that I will be there watching the 1500m speed skating on the big screen.