Tricks of the Trade

Everybody has their own favorite bunch of programming tricks. A few years ago, I started the Graphics Gems series of books to bring together lots of these handy techniques. The Journal of Graphics Tools (http://www.acm.org/jgt) has continued that tradition. In this column, I thought I would describe some little tricks of mine that are too small even for JGT. Small can be beautiful. Most of these techniques are so useful that I have bundled them up into little libraries. They include: the amazing expando-square, blob functions and multipoint weighting.