Monthly Archives: May 2006

Cool Fonts

I haven’t really posted much about my interest in typography (other than my page for Cannibalism in the Cars). I’m not sure this really qualifies, but here’s a link to some of my favorite fonts from MyFonts.com, that I would be interested in purchasing at some point.

The very favorite fonts I do own, are both made by Robert Slimbach for Adobe: Minion, and Myriad. Minion was used as the primary face in my favorite book on typography, Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, and Minion and Myriad are actually both used in Adobe’s published specifications for PDF and PostScript®.

My Favorite Kids’ Cartoon

I’ve been a fan of Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ) and Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎駿) from the moment I first saw Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫). For some time now, Disney has been releasing Studio Ghibli productions in the US.

Just this week, I had the opportunity to watch Pom Poko (平成狸合戦ぽんぽこ). It’s about a clan of tanuki (tah-noo-key [狸] raccoon dogs, frequently mistranslated as “raccoons”) who are troubled by the humans who are tearing apart their forest in order to make new suburbs. These tanuki possess powers of transformation, so they use these powers to try to scare the daylights out of the humans.

The movie has terrific animation (if rather Japanese-culture-oriented enough to seem bizarre to most western eyes), and the unfolding story is captivating to watch for both adults and children, but that’s not what I’m gonna talk about.…

A lot of the fun of watching this movie is the fact that, at all times, the male tanuki’s testicles are clearly visible. Not only that, but the male tanuki actually use their scrota to great advantage, by transforming them into weapons, or boat sails, or picnic blankets, or parachutes. (The Japanese are much, much more tolerant of anatomical references in literature and movies [including kids’ stuff]). Disney adds some western grace to it by consistently referring to them as “pouches,”, and the animation in most cases is not as obvious as you might think (at least, for kids), so there are some who have watched the movie without actually realizing what specifically was being used.

You’ve gotta love a kids movie with balls (pun intended). And the fact that Disney produced this in the US… that’s awesome!

Intellidiscs

Did you ever own an Intellivision video game system?

After our Atari 2600 got stolen out of our home, along with a guitar and camera, my uncle Gary bought our family an Intellivision, along with scads of games. That console makes up my earliest childhood memories of videogame-playing (I barely remember anything at all about the 2600; just a dim memory of playing Basketball with my dad).

Nightstalker was cool enough, and my best friend Laban (still is) and I spent hours discovering neat tricks in Utopia, like how to turn your PT boat invisible or make it travel on land, or sink a harbored fishing boat. But far and away, my most favorite game was Tron® Deadly Discs.

Tron® Deadly Discs mini-screenshot

I’d always loved that game, Continue reading →

Five Truths About Code Optimization

I discovered a terrific blog post on code optimization, through my friend Mars’s blog.

To summarize in my own words, the most important parts are:

  1. Start with unit tests, so you can be confident that the code worked in the first place, and that you haven’t broken anything in the optimization process.
  2. Never assume you know what the bottleneck is, even if it’s “obvious”. Profile first, code later.
  3. Reprofile after every code change, so you know whether the remaining efficiency issues are still in the same place, or if a new spot is the current big problem.

There are two more points in the post, but they are either obvious or much less important, IMHO.