stephan mantler More »

More on the shader

I’ve just taken a look at the FX Shader Compiler’s output for the broken shader, and what changes when I comment a few lines so that it doesn’t crash my machine any more… and figured out what the problem is. Here’s a fairly minimal shader that crashes my machine: PixelShader = asm { ps_3_0 defi i0, 100,0,0,0 def c0, 0.01, [...]

…33 System Crashes Later…

Since the shader I crashed my system with does so extremely reliably, I decided to submit it as a bug report to NVIDIA. Which is a bit problematic, because this usually requires a ‘repro case’, ie. a piece of code which can reproduce the problem as repeatably as possible. Repeatability is easy - my shader [...]

Presenting: The Dupe Finder

…finally a tool that lets me check for duplicates on my laptop, my work pc, and the two external disks I am using for backups. Since all the tools that I could find either didn’t do what I wanted (check many locations for duplicates, and gracefully handle hundreds of thousands of files) or cost more [...]

The System Of The World

Currently reading the third part of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Circle… quite a thick book again, but in my opinion it’s very well written (see below) and an interesting mix of well researched history and nicely integrated fiction. How many sheep in England? And not just in January 1714 but in all the milennia before? Why had [...]

What you really don’t want to see a few hours before a deadline

…is a complete crash of your development system, right back to the BIOS self-test (no blue screen), followed by disk corruption errors that keep scrolling over your screen for several hours. Well, that pretty much put the nail in the coffin of our submission plans, and we decided to go for the next deadline (which is, [...]