Down by the Lake

CocoaHeads logo

Based on local interest, my coworker, Pete Johnson, has started a chapter of CocoaHeads to be based in Madison, WI. I'll be helping out as a speaker and organizer for the group.

Our first meeting will be on February 12th at 6:30 PM on the UW-Madison campus. We'll be in the Computer Sciences Building, room CS 1240. More details can be found here.

Read on for more about this first meeting.

LabAutomationLogo.jpg

Once again, I'll be exhibiting SonoPlot's microscale fluid printing systems at an upcoming conference. This time, I'll be at LabAutomation 2009 in Palm Springs, CA. We actually won our exhibit space in the Innovation AveNEW area of the show because we were seen as having interesting new technology. If you're at the show (from January 25 - 27), stop by booth #593A and say hi.

Unfortunately, this means that I might not be the most responsive next week. I'll be warmer than I would be in Wisconsin, though.

Trackball rotation sample

I've been doing a lot of work with Core Animation lately during development of my next iPhone application, and I came across an interesting way to optimize OpenGL ES rendering that I thought I'd share. This small improvement yielded a 14-25% increase in the triangles per second I was able to push in Molecules.

Read on for more about this optimization.

Molecules icon

Now that I'm back from the holidays, all immediate issues are taken care of here at work, and iTunes Connect is back up, I've submitted version 1.3.1 of Molecules for review (and updated the source code. This is a bugfix version, addressing the recent crashes when trying to search the Protein Data Bank. The PDB servers stopped responding to one half of the search query I was sending, which was a condition I had not anticipated, and Molecules would crash as a result. Unfortunately, until they fix the server response, the search results will no longer list the titles of molecules.

I apologize for any problems this has caused. I was stupid not to anticipate this kind of response.

Syndicate content