Happy 2011! Well, I’m back from the Christmas break. I had a lot going on last year so took some time out. If you posted an email or comment, I’ll get back you this week.

I spent a month working on a 3D terrain rendering engine that provides real time terrain and texture generation and can be used for ‘infinite’ terrains in real time at 100fps.It also uses multithreading to generate the terrain patches and shading so it can maintain frame rates while it fills in the geometry and shading information. If I find time to clean it up I may end up releasing it as it is part of a personal graphics library I use and I have some other mini-projects based on it such as a particle engine. Actually, I may end up incorporating the particle engine in with the OpenGL engine that the terrain engine uses. I often find I want to play around with some graphics based ideas and then need to spend time creating the boilerplate just to try them out. This way all the basics are in one place and I can just summon the libraries and code I need from Maven.

I’ve also got a couple of enterprise Java posts up my sleeve, and at the end of last week, I had a bit of an epiphany regarding some of my practices with the CDI and getting it to work with other frameworks, including in the Knappsack archetypes. I need to investigate it a little more but I think I’m on the right track.

As for blogging, this year I plan to add a couple more foodie related posts. My wife and I are fairly big foodies and we like to try out different recipes now and then, and since I use my blog to remember things that I normally would forget, like recipes, I’ll probably blog about them. Currently, I’ve been playing with the dutch oven I got for Christmas, and had great success with Short Ribs and Chuck Steak, some of which got made into pasties for the New Year with homemade shortcrust pastry. In the summer, I’ll probably cover my BBQ escapades.