Zowie van Dillen

I sometimes write articles about computer programming

Visualizing the floating point number line

In short, I made a program for visualizing all 32-bit floating point numbers.

Half-edges for triangle meshes

In this article I provide a fairly simple algorithm for deriving the half-edges for a typical triangle mesh. Half-edges are mainly useful for figuring out which triangles are each other's neighbors. I also write about underdiscussed fundamental knowledge you should have before getting into computational geometry, mainly about numerical robustness.

New blog site!

I made a new site for my blog and it was surprisingly little work. A fun idea if you're looking for a small DIY webdev project which is actually somewhat useful. Also: Does anyone use RSS?

Unix time is bad and needs replacement, not UTC

A few days ago, representatives from across the world voted to eventually abolish leap seconds from coordinated universal time, the world's most popular time standard. In this article, I argue that the definition of Unix time should be changed, regardless of whatever might happen to UTC in the future.

Ordinary Petri-nets can be used to compute anything a computer can compute

When Petri-nets were introduced to me, they were being described explicitly as a type of model that is not Turing-complete. While this might be true, I will prove in this article that a slightly generalized form of Petri-nets which allows for infinitely many places and infinitely many transitions is Turing-complete.

Boolean pairs: Simulating Boolean algebra with Petri-nets

In this relatively short prerequisite for my longer article on the computational power of Petri-nets, I’ll be discussing Boolean pairs, a technique for simulating Boolean algebra with Petri-nets.

A C++ codestyle for if you don't like the looks of C++

When discussing various programming languages, I've regularly heard people say that C++ is a rather ugly language. In this article I'll be discussing a C++ code style that doesn't resemble typical C++. Mainly, I'll be talking about the macros and other technical aspects that contribute to this code style.

Slicing 4D raytracer

I recently made a 4D raytracer of the slicing kind — meaning that it shows you a 3D slice of a 4D world. The gimmick of this raytracer is that it’s entirely in first person. You can scroll to rotate on the WY plane, turning the camera to look towards the fourth dimension.