Books

Two books I enjoyed reading recently are:

Programming with POSIX Threads by David R. Butenhof (Addison-Wesley)

Very well written, concise and nicely layouted. Additionally to discussing the posix functions in detail, the second half of the book contains further material regarding worker thread pools, synchronization techniques, etc. Highly recommended.

Hacker's Delight by Henry S. Warren (Addison-Wesley, 2003)

Bit-twiddling to the max! This came in handy several times already, when needing to squeeze out some additional CPU cycles in innerloops.
See also: http://www.hackersdelight.org/

Check them out, you might also like them...

Assembly 2010

One of the best examples of creativity and skilled programming of GPU effects could be found at Assembly this year, you should definitely check out the released demos and intros.

ASD's "Happiness is around the bend" made 1st place in the competition:

Gamescom

My personal Gamescom highlight was clearly Enslaved by Ninja Theory. I just love the scenario, atmosphere and graphics! I hope the final gameplay will also be improved over Heavenly Sword, but let's see..

Here are some links and pictures:
http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/107/1079980p1.html
http://www.joystiq.com/tag/enslaved

Second highlight for sure were the FMVs of Star Wars The Old Republic - wow, they seemed actually higher quality than the films' CGs (except for the super-obvious matte paintings in the background during the first minutes)..
http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/hope-cinematic-trailer

But the game itself is not my cup of tea, though, I fear...

The rest of the show? Lost in the blurrines of decibels, Kinect hype, 2h waiting queues and hordes of people..

Ambient occlusion tests

Testing various features of the engine/3dsmax exporter: multiple uv-channels, ambient occlusion texture baking, etc.