Oddly Elaborate Apple Error Message

I just wanted to share this. Popped up today while initializing an NSDateComponents object.

components:fromDate:toDate:options:]: fromDate cannot be nil
I mean really, what do you think that operation is supposed to mean with a nil fromDate?
An exception has been avoided for now.
A few of these errors are going to be reported with this complaint, then further violations will simply silently do whatever random thing results from the nil.
Here is the backtrace where this occurred this time (some frames may be missing due to compiler optimizations):

So that was unexpected.

The Scandalous Yetizen Costume

There’s been a lot of chatter on the various blogs and news sites about the IGDA and Yetizen party incident. I’m not going to rehash that. See these articles if you’re not up to date on the whole controversy:
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/28/igda-party-features-dancers-prompts-controversy-resignations/
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/09/igda-defines-new-rules-for-future-industry-parties-after-gdc-mi/
http://yetizen.com/2013/03/30/official-statement-by-the-yetizen-ceo-on-the-yetizen-igda-gdc-party/2/
I will comment that I thought that the controversy was a wholly pointless manufactured thing and Brenda Romero’s resignation did not help anybody. That said, I was a little surprised to discover that the scandalous, allegedly inappropriate outfits that created all this trouble aren’t actually shown anywhere, in any of the news about the incident. At all. Not on Joystiq, not on the Gawker owned Kotaku, nowhere. I thought that was strange. Luckily I have photos of the Yetizen models from the previous year, so… here it is. This is the outfit that forced two IGDA members to resign.

Now you know.

A Glimpse of What I’m Working On

I’ve decided to focus a little less on complaining and a little more on the actual work I do. Here’s a teaser:

I had a substantial amount of help with the over-water environmental rendering (not pictured) from a friend of mine, Nauful Shaikh. See his site for some great graphics work.

This wall of monitors was graciously made available to us by the Computer Science department for a presentation to the President of the University as well as a healthy mix of department chairs from Neuroscience, Neurology, Brain Sciences Institute, Computer Science, and Electrical/Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins. I’m driving it at 60fps off a single 7970 in Eyefinity 6. It was supposed to be Crossfire but somebody’s driver is broken *cough cough* so I had to gut the render pipeline somewhat. Total resolution is 5760×2160 plus some margins for bezel compensation. The actual app is Kinect and PS Move enabled, and maybe I can share more about it this summer. The focus is a dolphin which we’ve developed with significant help and guidance from the National Aquarium in Baltimore, who let us work directly with their dolphins to better understand the animals, how they move and think, etc.

We’re planning to launch an iPad version this year on the iTunes App Store, and create a large scale interactive installation version for aquariums, hospitals, museums and similar at 4K resolution in stereoscopic 3D.