techmangle

I'm watching this show on the DARPA Urban Challenge. Some team's truck, which is supposed to drive itself through a city environment, is hitting some wall. The team decide the sensors are functioning perfectly, therefore it's clearly a software problem. The software guy calmly informs his team that he can quickly reprogram the car and fix the shit. Then we see the guy inserting a line of code in some if () block. There's only one problem. The code is clearly using OpenGL to draw some lines. Whaaaaat? Nice.
This reminded me of another show I saw some years ago, where they were talking about realistically rendering moving water using computers. They took the Navier-Stokes equations that describe liquid motion and "simplified" them by either making them a puzzle and shooting out pieces, or by deleting the right hand side. This "simplification" supposedly allowed the simulation/rendering program to run at reasonable speed.

hmel

Part of any self-respecting ev0lvεd interf☺ce is an XML-based back-end.
I overheard the word "XML" in a conversation. It triggered the following thought: if the famous software is pronounced "teh", then how do they usually pronounce "XML" in Germany, or, for that matter, in Greece? achh em ell? och më lë? hmel? Kindly share the information if you have it. I'm really curious. Yeah.