What a day… rainy, and very trying with most of the family sick… sigh…

Tomorrow is my first exam of this semester. Looks fairly straightforward, multiple choice + 2 scenarios, all for a UI Design course. Funny how the course itself seems to be a mixture of common sense and corporate marketing lingo… (Translation: bs). I have not really studied for it, but then again it is open book. 😉

Talking about corporate lingo, watched the third part of The Corporation. Very insightful film, and even thought some of the commentators were left-leaning, they do have some good points. Some aspects are downright frightful, and in a curious manner, interesting tidbits of history most people don’t even know about. Unfortunately, they didn’t come up with ideas that are radically are different then what I know already. Consumer pressure (the companies have to follow what the market wants anyways), governmental supervision (yeah right), and rebellion (last ditch desperation); all of these I knew about. I was hoping for something more insightful, subtle and cunning.

Finally, as for my hacking projects… I tried writing an SDL/pthreads program. Now the SDL part came out no problem, but the pthreads took over my system. Mind you 5 treads, that update the position of an object (used bounding rectangles that I moved and they blitted onto the screen); shouldn’t take over that much CPU. I think it has something to do with the redrawing of the screen. Also moving a particular object proved to be impossible by my implementation. In the end, I got a lesson in SDL… and now I have to find a simple application for threads. Yes, I know about SDL Threading… but I needed to practice pthreads specifically. Was going to post it online… but the whole code is a bit messy, and needs reorganization, and fine tuning.

Oh well, tomorrow is a busy day, exams and all. Wish me luck. 😉