I keep coming across variations of the same basic PHP coding error.  Last time it was a Joomla FTP installer issue, this time it’s a Drupal upload issue.  This is becoming a real pet peeve…

In Drupal 6.5 (and probably others), in the file “includes/file.inc“, the function named “file_save_upload()” does things out of order.  It is used to validate an uploaded file, but it tries to perform checks on the uploaded file before it calls PHP’s “move_uploaded_file()” function to move it out of the temporary upload area and into the user’s file space.
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Recently a customer of mine who uses Joomla to drive several sites came to me to see if I could help him with a problem. When he tried to install a new Joomla add-on using Joomla’s FTP installation option it would always fail with the error message “JFTP::store: Bad Response”

A google search turned up lots of other folks with the same problem. The only “fix” offered was to either switch hosting providers, or to disable the FTP option and use the direct install option.
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[I originally published this article in December of 2000]

Imagine you are writing a program that lets the user wander around in a virtual world that’s chock full of trees, buildings, cars, people, and all sorts of other objects. What would your main rendering loop look like?

The simplest and most obvious thing to do would be to loop through all of the objects in your world and tell OpenGL to draw each one. After all, OpenGL clips everything for you so you don’t have to worry about objects that are off-screen. Everything will look correct when it’s done.

If you only had a few objects, that method would probably suffice. But as you add more and more objects to your world you’ll find that things bog down pretty quickly. It won’t be long before your frame rate plummets.

Now, it’s likely that only a small fraction of the objects in your world are actually visible at any given moment. If you could somehow determine that an object will not be visible before you draw it, you could just skip it and avoid sending all that extra data down the OpenGL pipeline in the first place.

One way to do this is known as Frustum Culling.
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As if the world doesn’t have enough blogs already, I’ve decided to start my own. Likely it will go unnoticed by the world, the novelty will wear off, and I’ll lose interest in maintaining it (how many orphaned blogs are out there anyway). Or maybe not. Who knows with these things?

Mostly this blog is intended as a place where I can collect and post programming tidbits and sample code, and maybe even a personal opinion or two.

So here we go…
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