Izzy from yesterday's Making Of JF Page said that OpenGL's fog is not good enough. Then I showed him my old DirectX8.1 fog and he said that it was amazing. Well, here is OpenGL's fog. Hahaha. They're very similar. Yeah. Maybe he didn't understand how to make OpenGL do what he wants to do. It has a lot of options: mode, start, end, color, and density. The mode is the tricky one: linear, exp, or exp2. Fog = color*(end-start)*density/(distance - start) ^ mode or something like that. What that means is that when distance = start, there is fog = 0, no fog. When distance=end, fog = 1. Between the two, it goes linearally, exponentially, or exponentially squared. For my Pentium 4 1.7 GHz GeForce2 in Linux, with a medium number of vertexes (10,000 at 60 fps), none of the three increase the frame rates. But... I hear that other computers do linear better.

Kelly Ozborne (Ozzy's daughter) was on Loveline tonight and the things I heard her say were quite beyond my comprehension. I guess I can attribute it to the MTV world. Like she said, MTV is f*cked. She's part of MTV's show, "The Ozborne's" and she says that she's doing it for the money. Realizing that her father is extremely wealthy and famous, why does she need money? She says that the doesn't want to ask her parents for money. Are they like my parents, followers of Ayn Rand's anti-inheritance philosophy? Or perhaps they put a price on their money. Many rich parents do this assuming that their children's lust for money will keep them in line. My first roommate was like that. His parents gave him a sizable trust for college which required him to not do drugs. I would have refused it had my parents offered. Don't get me wrong, I'm don't use drugs. They are simply unhealthy and are the perfect tool of a tyrranical government. But since I don't, I don't expect to be treated like a criminal. I'm a physicist, for crying aloud. So when I hear our government talking about mandatory drug testing for scientists to ensure national security, I pick up a chair over my head and call up Jerry Springer. Anyhoo, it doesn't make sense for her to use her parent's fame to get money so that she doesn't have to use her parent's fortune. Adam asks her how much she is getting. She says that she didn't ask, but she's getting 1/5 of the family's wage. Using this information, we can find her priorities: her ideal of love, her money, her parent's fame, and her parent's money, her brain. Okay, so I'm being kinda harsh and unscientific on her brain. But she's really not allowing any room for silence to hide her ignorance. I don't think that I'm smart, that's why I keep my mouth shut while I'm around people. Except for my website. My website is a very non-requisite rant thing.

These are the days where people need to speak up. I'm reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and I see a lot of interesting things happening. Bush is making an entire generation of socialists out of the younger generation and he's setting the ground work for a totalitarian one-world government (the UN) by establishing a fascist government by denying the Bill of Rights with the Patriot Act, Homeland Security Act, and Information Awareness Office. People who have read 1984 can certainly draw the connections. But Bush is not a totalitarian socialist like was portrayed in 1984, he's a capitalist fascist. He won't put businesses under the control of the government and thank f*cking goodness his Justice Department didn't penalize Microsoft. Note that only a socialist government like in Atlas Shrugged would. The only crime that Microsoft has committed is that of having older code and a huge market share. But just wait until the next democrat gets sElected pResident. People will cry for the fascism that Bush was so nice to give us. But he's setting us up for it. You have to be an expert at doublethink to not see that giving the government more power is insanity whether you are liberal or conservative. For some reason, years ago I thought that Republicans were smart enough to understand this because it was all they preached. I remember the Contract with America and they said that America would make positive changes towards expanding upon the freedoms and liberties of the constitution if only Clinton was gone. Darn that Clinton, the crack smoker he was. Now we have the heroin smoker Bush in the White House. Wait until the next meth/morphine smoker comes in.

There are two effective ways to fight a tyrrany. The first is more popular: non-violent resistance. Going to jail for not paying taxes for the war (see Thoreau's Civil Disobedience), sitting in, boycotting, marching, speaking out, negotiation (see Martin Luther King Jr.'s Autobiography), hunger-strike, writing, public education (see Ghandi), and opting out. You can note that none of the three historical figures accomplished their goal, while they did make amazing progress and inspire many to continue the struggle. If you want to follow the three historical figures, I will sit next to you when we get tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, beaten, tagged, and bagged. The fourth, opting out is an interesting choice includes deserting, draft-dodging, refusing to fight, expatriating (see Bobby Fisher), getting religious sanctuary, or joining a social communes. There are some very good ideas among these. Of course, don't just pick one out of a hat. Joining the wrong social commune may get you poisoned (see Jones' Cult) or religious sancuary may get you burnt to death (see Waco Massacre). You have a few months, so think about it four days a week. You'll figure it out. I'm learning Japanese at a terrific rate (expatriation is one of my top choices and I have plans for this August).

There is another less-popular solution to fighting tyrrany. That is to invent the solution to the tyrrany. Creating a product that empowers people (see Buckminster Fuller), devising an action that dissuades tyrrany (see Nobel, Manhattan Project, camcorder, and the internet), using the oppressor's own non-violent oppression against them (ie. direct competition with capitalists), and living the correct way. You have some good options there. I know quite a few people who simply live the correct way and are fighting tyrrany better than many who are getting arrested more often.

When I was young, my father dedicated a room in our house to his world: Language Space. It was more than a den because it was set apart by its devotion to positive idealism. Before I was born, he wrote a novel called "Language Space" and although I haven't read a single page, I hear that it is a masterpiece of knowledge. In his room he had the two only comfortable chairs in the house and the state of the art computer: Commodore 64, Amiga, and much later a 386 PC clone. He taught me Foxpro for DOS, Visual Foxpro, and Visual Basic between age 9-13. He joined Compuserve using a 2400 bps modem when it was just forums. Why? Back in the sixties, he predicted the invention of the internet. He told my mother that people would have information at their fingertips, that it would be text, images, video, sound, all communication between people, and that it would make the world a better place where people could live in happiness. His prediction has come true and I have grown up in the age of information at my fingertips. It is everything that he said it would be and maybe slightly more. He taught me programming because he knew that it would bring me immense happiness. It has and it will continue to do so. I am twenty-one years old and my programming has made my life much happier than it could have possibly been without. All the negative things that I have thought of that time is reversed by the knowledge that Language Space existed at one point and is not impossible. It is easy for me to lose hope on positive aspects of life while facing hardships. When I was 16, we moved into a mansion (bought by those Visual Foxpro programs he wrote in Language Space) where my father has his own office overlooking the river. My father predicted the internet before there was a computer that could fit inside a nuclear bunker, let alone a room in every middle-class family's house. Now it is my turn and I plan to similarly create what I predict. Don't ask me my final prediction yet.