I've been busy between work and not work !

Recently I tried Google Apps for my father's web site. I like the Google Sites thing which is an evolution of JotSpot, a company that Google bought over a year ago.
Very easy to set things up, yet I still have to change th HTML to do certain things. All those WYSIWYG editors seem broken to me. It's usually very hard to place a cursor when one really wants, or to get rid of some formatting. Very hard to get rid of a link being assigned as text is typed and incredibly complicated to extend an hyperlink effect to text added before an existing hyperlink.
I also never quite understood the logic by which things get selected. For example even in MS Word, when I go select a line of text, the selection will snap to include the newline character. Or sometimes I select some text from bottom to top and a whole chunk of text gets selected !

In Google Sites I can't find a way to select a whole table while changing hyperlinks for a picture it doesn't really work with what I have.
Still it's nice to setup sites quickly, though I wish Google Apps would allow Google Sites to take over the domain, rather than redirecting to some complicated URLs.

Speaking of Direct3D 10, I've been using it for a while now. Nothing too special, but it's interesting the tendency to shift rendering properties, such as texture sampling and blending from the engine to the HLSL code. On one side it's a pain to try take over those stats over the shader (see Shader Reflection). Some complex passages need to be done to for example replace texture addressing.. but then again, maybe those things should be translated into shader permutations: even when starting from one generic shader, perhaps different shaders should be created depending on the material properties.

Recently I also tried to render a scene using points rather than triangles. Much to my surprise, points rendering (on NVIDIA GT8800 Ultra) was about 3 times slower.
I'm told that moder graphics cards are optimized for triangles but still.. rendering points should be so much faster !!
My goal was to speedup rendering of objects that are rather complex but that are being projected distant enough so that triangles are no bigger than one pixel.
Ideally then one would also take into account camera focus to use larger points in place of triangles when they are going to be smoothed by out of focus post processing.

mumble mumble