Donnie’s Blog

A long time ago I was watching an episode of Good Eats all about squash (or “pumpkin” for my friends down under), and Alton Brown made these very yummy looking butternut squash dumplings. Since it’s the season for squash and we have a bunch of them floating around, I decided to give this dumpling recipe a try. Instead of using butternut squash I decided to use acorn squash, since we have a few extra acorn squash that hadn’t been spoken for yet.

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Lately I have been tinkering with a simple little 3D graphics program in my spare time. To support my various graphics and math projects I have put together a simple C++ math library including matrices, vectors, and the like. My matrices are stored in row-major order, like most matrices in C/C++ programs, but OpenGL uses column-major order. “Simple,” I think, “I just need to transpose my orientation matrices before passing them to OpenGL!”

But it just wouldn’t work. See if you can figure out why:

  template<class T, int dim> class SquareMatrix {
    ...
    /** Transpose the matrix. **/
    void transpose() {
      for (int r = 0; r < dim; r++) {
        for (int c = 0; c < dim; c++) {
          // Diagonal elements don't need transposing!
          if (r == c) continue;

          T tmp = getElem(r, c);
          setElem(r, c, getElem(c, r));
          setElem(c, r, tmp);
        }
      }
    }
    ...
  };

Guess what I saw at the Sydney Airport:

That’s the new Airbus A380! It’s one big plane! It can seat more than 500 people. Fully loaded it takes ~9K feet to get off the runway - nearly two miles, which is a little disturbing because the LAX airport runways are between 10K and 12K feet long. Not a lot of leeway there!

Well, everybody who knows me knows I’m already afraid of flying, so it’s not a big surprise that this thing scares me. But it is still really cool to finally see one up close!