17-Oct-09
Went fishing off the coast of Brighton this weekend with the usual suspects, Matt, Gary, and Rudi. Mackerel must be the dumbest fish on the planet. In about an hour (probably slightly less) I caught 18 and the others were not far behind. As with all these outings, we've turned it into a competition, which I won! This time it was winner takes all, so I bagged all the cash!
05-Sep-09
I've gone scuba diving crazy during my summer holiday so I am now a PADI Advance Open Water diver with specialties in peak performance buoyancy and deep dives. Had I not caught that nasty cold at the tail end of my holiday I would have probably finished my night diving specialty as well. People have told me that I can dive in the UK (e.g. Stoney Cove, etc.) but I can't bring myself to do it. I feel it'll be more exciting and there will be more to see if I gear up and dive in my toilet instead. It's only a couple of hours drive to Stoney Cove so I may give it a try someday if I get really desperate. If anyone has been (and has also dived in the med or the red sea, etc.) please drop me a line and tell me what it's like.
01-Aug-09
Today I went clay pigeon shooting with Gary, Rob, Rudi, and Matt. Gary was already one up from Matt's stag do shooting session so I was very pleased to bring the scoring back to level after today's event. It was a good day out and it was great to hook up with the ex-Climaxians again.
07-Jan-09
My book is out and you can get it from amazon (or a retailer of your choice). Just do a book search for "kostiadis" and it should come up. It's called "Learning to Co-operate in Multi-Agent Systems: Experiments with the RoboCup Simulator" and it rocks! For more information and links where you can buy a copy from visit the Publications page.
25-Sep-08
The mighty DC Panthers (i.e. Sunai, Wells, John, Pierre, Benoit, and me) won the annual BNP Paribas 5-a-side tournament. There were 4 groups of 4 teams taking part. The winners of the groups played in the semis and the winners of the semis made it to the final. We won all our games and did not concede a single goal during the whole tournament. Well done to everyone involved! Great effort and top result!
17-Feb-08
Yiorgos Anthony Kostiadis, was born on the 16th of February 2008 at 20:14. He weighted 9lb 9oz (4.32Kg) and was approximately 22.4inches (57cm) long. For those that can't pronounce Yiorgos, the English equivalent is George. Both mum and baby are well.
10-Aug-07
Today I have handed my notice in at Climax. It was kind of weird because I felt both sad and happy at the same time. Sad, because I've been at Climax for almost 6 years and during that time I've met, worked, and become friends with some very interesting people. Happy because I'm very excited and looking forward to starting my new job. Obviously I don't know all the details about my new job yet since I won't be starting until the 17th of September, but here's what I've found out during my pre-interview research. BNP Paribas is a French bank with 150,000 employees in over 85 countries. In the Forbes public companies listings they rank 14th in the world. Just to give you an idea of what that means, IBM are 42nd and Microsoft are 66th. They are the 6th largest bank in the world (and the 3rd in Europe) with a net income of EUR 7.3 billion (up 24.9% from 2006) and net banking income of EUR 27.9 billion (up 28% from 2006). I don't know about you, but those are the kind of numbers I like looking at!
09-Jul-07
This weekend just gone, a group of us from work have taken part in the Three Peaks Challenge for Action Medical Research. Our group consisted of 5 climbers (me, Mark, Rudi, Rich, and Rob) and 1 driver (Emma). Thanks to a lot of people that sponsored us, we've raised quite a bit of money that will go towards a very good cause. The Three Peaks involves climbing the highest mountains in England, Scotland and Wales. These are Scafell Pike, Ben Nevis and Snowdon respectively. You have to do the climbs one after another, so any sleeping, eating, etc. happens only during the drives between the mountains. The challenge felt pretty tough, but that's probably because we're used to sitting in front of a PC all day. Nonetheless, completing it felt really good!
23-Feb-07
I've redesigned the web site and all that's left now is to choose a nice colour scheme... Till then you'll have to put up with boring greys. As you can see the OpenGL and GP32 links are no longer there. This will serve as my personal site from now on. OpenGL and GP32 stuff will be under a programming subdomain. Till then, I've left the old opengl.shtml and gp32.shtml in case you need to download anything.
02-Dec-06
In the very little spare time that I have, I started looking at COLLADA for my engine and I have to say, I've been quite impressed so far...In very little time I managed to get Suzanne (the monkey primitive in Blender) rendering in my world! Quite nice API, and support for loads of stuff including skinning, morphing, animation, rag dolls, rigid body dynamics and much more.
09-Apr-06
Been a while since I've update this, but I've been spending most of my spare time with Amiee, so there hasn't been that much to report really...She was 1 a little while ago, and I can't believe how quickly this last year went by. She is walking around and doing all sorts of things now and keeping us all very busy. In my very little spare time, I'm reading poker books and doing very little computing related.
24-Mar-05
Our daughter, Amiee Ioanna Kostiadis, was born on the 16th of March 2005 at 21:09. She weighted 9lb 13oz (4.44Kg) and was just under 23inches (60cm) long. For those who don't know, this is a very large baby (especially since it was our first one). Apparently subsequent ones tend to be even bigger!!! Anyway, both mum and baby are well.
15-Feb-05
DIY at home is finished (well...for now at least). Made some progress with my OpenGL stuff and soon there will be a demo available for your viewing pleasure. At this stage it's nothing much, but it demonstrates a continuous LOD terrain meshing technique using adaptive quadtrees, per pixel lighting, and a few other bits. More info will be available from the OpenGL section that has been added (just click on the OpenGL link below).
18-Jul-04
Been a while since I've updated things, but I've been quite busy and I've also been on holiday so... Priority goes to DIY at home so all things computing related are running a bit slow at the moment. Anyway, as far as GP32 dev goes, now that I've got my libs ready, I'm just waiting for a good design doc to land on my desk and then I'll start cracking. Andy is working on it, and I'm hoping it won't be long before he gets something together. I've also started playing around with OpenGL and SDL. That's mainly for the PC, and I have to say, from what I've seen so far, SDL is very impressive.
7-Dec-03
At last! I've added the GP32 page... It contains StarDust v1.0 ALPHA, a free, open source, space shooting game. It also has a few links to useful GP32 pages.
22-Sep-03
I've finally got round to updating the layout of the site. CSS2 is great and I totally recommend it. Nothing better than separating content and formatting (especially if you have to maintain consistency across numerous pages). Still have some polishing up to do, but most of the work is done for now. I will be adding the GP32 pages next...