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by Charles Ying

Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Chocolux for WebGL = GPU raytracing in browser

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

I’ve just finished my port of Chocolux for WebGL (click for demo page).

Chocolux is a real-time recursive GPU raytracer using four spheres by Auld. Today, Chocolux now can run in your web browser.

The implications of this are pretty mind blowing. WebGL now allows compiled code to run on the GPU. Imagine what games, image processing, and applications will be possible with compiled shaders and general GPU computing (OpenCL?) now in the browser. And with WebGL gaining widespread adoption, it’s going to be here fairly soon.*

For more information about cutting edge fragment shader GPU raytracing and rendering, check out Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles (PDF).

*pending completion of a stable WebGL spec, naturally.

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Wuh Working Group

Friday, October 16th, 2009
cying: how is WHATWG pronounced?
cying: “what working group” ?
tantek: or “what double you gee”
Hixie: i pronounce it “whatwuhjee”
cying: Hixie: interesting… wuhjee?
tantek: Hixie, makes sense, like “wuh wuh wuh dot …”
Hixie: yeah
Hixie: or wuhwuhstyle for www-style
gavin: weird!
AryehGregor: “www” is remarkable, as an abbreviation that takes like twice as long to say as the thing it ostensibly abbreviates.
Hixie: it’s an abbreviation for writing
Hixie: not talking
Philip: AryehGregor: How do you get “twice”?
Philip: given that “w” is three syllables
AryehGregor: “like”
AryehGregor: Closer to three times, it’s true.
Philip: Two is not much like three
TabAtkins: I pronounce WHATWG as “what”+”wig”.
TabAtkins: And when pronouncing “www” I say “dub dub dub”.
TabAtkins: (A shortening of “dubya”, the texan way to pronounce that letter.)
• Philip pronounces WHATWG as “what”+mumble, because he never actually says it out loud and in his own brain he doesn’t need to pronounce the entire word to know what he’s thinking of
TabAtkins: I pronounce all of my acronyms as words. HTML is “heh teh mul”, CSS is “sess es”, etc.
Philip: TabAtkins: You’re weird
Philip: I thought everyone said “HTML” as four letters
TabAtkins: Philip: I save a syllable, and the leftover syllables are easier to say quickly too.
Philip: TabAtkins: If the primary requirement is saving syllables, you could just grunt
TabAtkins: But then other people don’t have a chance of understanding me. Plus my language organ isn’t trained to recognize or produce meaningfully grunting beyond the existing near-primal sounds we all make.

Does iTunes 9 use WebKit?

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

So, was John Gruber right? This is what I found while browsing the new iTunes Store (cool stuff, btw!):

User-Agent: iTunes/9.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8) AppleWebKit/531.9

Survey says: Yes.

It’s important to understand that iTunes is only using WebKit to render the iTunes Store and iTunes LP. The rest of the iTunes UI still remains native in Carbon.

Previous versions of iTunes had a custom native UI for viewing the iTunes Store and were definitely not WebKit based prior to iTunes 9.

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