I'm back

Long time no hear :)
I've been pretty busy lately and as a result this blog suffered accordingly. But at the same time, material was gathering and now I have quite a few things to say.

This post will just be an intro (to help me remember what I have prepared) :) so here's a kind of TOC tor the following posts:
1. First, I'll have to do a short rant on current economic crisis and the way EU + member governments are dealing with it. I just have to rant a little :D

After this I'll follow with some more useful posts, beginning with programming. Since I've had a request from a client to do a rather complex Excel application, I'll begin with that:
2. The first post will deal with Excel and using data queries in macros
3. The second will be about RTF to plain text conversion, also in an Excel macro
4. The third will be about multi line cell auto-sizing, since Excel doesn't quite cut it with it's standard functions
Although I had to research many aspects of Excel macro programming while I was doing this, these three seem worth publishing as the solutions for the particular problems were not readily available on the net.

5. Continuing with programming tips, I'll explain a rather simple method to increase data fetching speed from multiple SQL queries.

Last, but not least, I've been lax in posting about some hardware that I have tested, so you'll have my thoughts on the following:
6. Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 audio card
7. Zalman Reserator 2
8. Antec P182 computer case

9. To finish up, I have some code that allows one to sort huge amounts of data and still do it in their lifetime. I'm talking billions of records and hundreds of gigabytes of data. This one will take a bit since I have to clean the implementation specifics from the code, but eventually I'll post this too :). Bottom line with this code is that this code helped reduce some reporting from 48+ hours (data in SQL database) down to 20 minutes (data in custom files, but on the same server).

So here goes. Lots of work to be done. I'm hoping to have all these articles done in march, but one never knows :)

Raytracing revisited

I wrote about raytracing in my first article on this blog. At the time I believed Intel went for raytracing in their new discrete graphics part.
I was rethinking the issue and now I believe I was wrong. There's just no sense in creating a device that is so incompatible with existing devices that making it compatible would take such a huge effort.
Instead I am now pretty sure that their part will be just like ATI's or NVidia's. Hopefully faster, to create some new competition, but otherwise just about the same.

What I was forgetting at the time (writing the Intel raytracing article) was that all current generation graphics cards are also very powerful floating point processors. NVidia just recently enabled physics acceleration in their drivers and it wasn't long before somebody ported that to ATI cards. Custom floating point calculations have become a reality on today's graphics cards.

So where does this leave us with raytracing possibilities?

With all the FP power modern graphics cards offer it won't be long before somebody makes another raytraced Quake3, like these guys did. Only this time the calculations will be performed on a graphics card instead of 20 AMD XP 1800 processors. With an XP 1800 managing about 2 GFLOPS, a graphics card with potentially 1 TFLOPS should easily render the same scene at least as fast as that cluster of 20 XPs. Especially since raytracing lends itself nicely to batch processing.

So now we just need three things:
1. Some really general purpose APIs for utilizing the graphics card's processing power from all three major graphics card providers
2. A good raytracing API, something like Direct3D, capable of working with those card APIs (OpenRT reprogram?)
3. An enthusiast to rewrite the Quake 3 engine again

Slowly, but surely there will be more and more serious projects coming out untill finally there will be a commercial game.
By then, the cards themselves will also feature some genuine raytracing acceleration...

Car propulsion

In Europe average daily commute distance is less than 15 km. Even if we add another 20 for after work shopping, recreation and similar activities, we can still calculate that few cars have to go further than 50km on a typical day.
Internal combustion engines our cars have are known to perform the worst in these conditions. The engine is cold and there's a lot of acceleration and braking in the rush-hour congestion. Not to mention that the engine itself is never operating at it's optimal RPM.
This causes excessive oil consumption and pollution. Wouldn't it be a lot simpler if our cars had electric engines with just enough batteries to last some 50 km, coupled with a nice turbine to generate power when the batteries got depleted?
This way one could go to work, come back home and recharge the batteries in a standard power outlet. Longer trips would be sufficiently covered by the turbine and to top things off, the batteries could just as easily be partly charged by photovoltaic cells popped on the roof and hood of the car.
Instant halving of oil consumption, not to mention pollution...

Now wouldn't that be something?