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Welcome to my little corner of the Internet!
I'll assume you're one of my legions of fans that have come from the Terrain Generation pages: https://ckempke.github.io/UnityTerrainGeneration with questions like "wait, you have legions of fans?" and "how do I actually find what's new on that site, anyway?"
You'll be ecstatic to learn that this is a much more traditional "Blog" format, with, like, dated pages and "most-recent-at-the-top" and all that cool stuff that was state of the art in the late 90's.
The Actual Blog¶
Artists aren't doomed, quite yet
There's a new generation of artificial intelligence-based art generators.
Procedural Language Generation
Generate "decent-sounding" languages procedurally
Asynchronous Runtime Navmesh Generation in Unity
Trying to make Unity's navigation AI system work for procedural environments.
Hello, World!
Hello, World!
If its "it is", its "its" is "it's"
The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.
Who Am I?¶
I'm Chris Kempke. Over my 30-year career, I've worked for a few consulting companies, MultiAd Services, HP, Microsoft, and Everbridge. I have a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Oregon State University and a B.A. in Computer Science from Carleton College. (Trivia: I graduated in 1989, and was the first declared Computer Science major at Carleton).
Now retired, I've been spending my time writing (both fiction and not), and learning some of those technologies I didn't have time for in my working life. I still have too many hobbies, and occasionally do a little consulting to keep my hand in.
A lot of my time these days is spent in Unity (the 3D game engine), mostly trying to make it do things that it doesn't want to do. I tend to write about those, too; I haven't yet made the jump to video like all the "cool kids" are doing these days.
My blogging software is adapted from a system more intended for documentation; it does not have a "comments" section, as you can probably tell by the lack of off-topic badly-written political rants. But if you have comments, you can e-mail them to me at my gmail.com address of "Christopher.kempke" and maybe I'll add constructive comments here, manually.
My own little rant is that I'm not a fan of most of the large social media apps: I blame their algorithmic, engagement-driven but truth-independent "filtering" for a society in which there seems to be no conspiracy or information so obviously, ridiculously, over-the-top-obviously false that about a third of supposedly rational adults won't still somehow believe it. So now that I have no need to integrate with these things for work, I don't. I have no (active, anyway) accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
I do maintain a presence on LinkedIn, primarily because it amuses me how their algorithms don't handle "Retired" as a status, and keep recommending to me hundreds of people at "my company: Retired" as close network associates. But if you need a temporary, part-time employee for a technical or documentation project, feel free to reach out to me. I might be interested.
About this Site¶
A few of you may have stumbled on my previous blog, with one of those hosting services that shall not be named. I'm not entirely sure how they continue to exist, but this one takes forever (minutes sometimes) to process every change, doesn't support Safari (mobile or desktop) with their main theme, and seems more intent on upselling various services than actually providing a web site. Ah, well, water under the bridge.
Very expensive water.
We're now hosting on GitHub Pages, which is free (for sites within reason), pretty easy for a developer to use (it's the same Git tools we use every day, and the content is just Markdown), and extremely performant.
This site uses the MkDocs publishing system, Material theme, and a blogging plugin from https://liang2kl.codes/mkdocs-blogging-plugin/. Material is supposed to support blogging internally later this year (2022) or early next, so the appearance of the site may change then.
I use KaTeX for mathematical markup, and Mermaid-js if I need graphs or flowcharts.
Editorial Policy¶
I believe there's some value in a "paper trail" of what people say. Information on the web is malleable; I can say today that I hate Honey Nut Cheerios, and tomorrow that exact same article can say I love them. (If it's going to keep you up at night, I'm actually rather ambivalent about them, and on the rare occasions when they're in my house, they're usually generic ones, anyway). There's no accountability in the face of the ability to retroactively edit. So while I'm a fan of "edit" buttons—because I mess up spelling and grammar, especially when I type quickly—I generally prefer the ones that have a short time limit before the entered information becomes immutable.
However, this isn't meant to be an opinion site. I mean, it is—all blogs are, I suppose—but it's not meant to be a place for public discourse. The opinions here are just mine or those I choose to present. And frankly, opinion pieces on the net, or elsewhere, tend not to change many minds, in my experience. So I intend to use this blog mostly to inform, amuse, or teach. And for those purposes, being able to clean up language, grammar, presentation, outright mistakes, images, etc. over time is invaluable, and tends to make the presented information more valuable, not less.
So you'll probably see small edits frequently, and large ones occasionally. Getting things right often involves a step of getting them wrong, first. If I find that something's wrong, I'll change it. And I'm one of those people that fiddles constantly with wording and grammar, can't ever get "it's" and "its" correct on the first try, and have an evolving, adversarial relationship with bold, italics, code case, and other formatting standards.
But if I actually change content in a significant way (correcting something that was originally wrong, or explicitly changing my mind or advice), I'll try to indicate that, along with the reason for the change.
Cookies¶
If this site uses cookies, I don't know about them. It's possible the underlying document presentation engine does. In any event, by continuing to use the site:
- You agree to all cookies, even the ones with raisins in them and even if you don't like raisins.
- You also agree to send me all your money
- You agree not to consult a lawyer about whether or not the previous clause is enforceable or not.
I don't want your personal information, and if I get any on me, I'll wash it off. However, I think that usage statistics are gathered here by some analytics engine or other. So if you're particularly paranoid about your IP address or something, be aware that someone's probably got it in a log somewhere.