Category Archives: Computer Science

Pixar Animation’s Joe Ranft Killed in Auto Accident

Joe Ranft, You Will Be MissedHoly crap, I spent the day at home today, and was scanning my usual blogs when I read this shocking article that Pixarian Joe Ranft had been killed in an automobile crash. While I didn’t know Joe personally, his infectious smile and humor were a regular feature of the halls at Pixar, as was his voice which would occasionally lapse into his Germanic Heimlich to good comic effect. He was only 45, and had many stories and smiles left to bring the world. The world has truly lost one of the good ones.

Cartoon Brew has some more recollections of Joe.

Holy crap, this sucks.

Addendum: My neighbor Sam sent me an email earlier today, asking me how things were at Pixar. I sent him back a routine email, since I hadn’t heard the bad news. Today was a scheduled group river rafting trip which I bowed out on, since I have had bad experiences with river rafting the last three times I’ve went. Only later did I realize what he was really asking, after I read the news on Boing Boing. Serious bummage.

Addendum2: Ronnie Del Carmen reminisces more powerfully than I ever could.

Fluid Simulation for Games

Every once in a while, it disturbs me that there are parts of the computer graphics world that I rarely delve into, and simulation near the top of the list. I did spend some time fifteen years ago trying to understand inverse kinematics and the like, mostly in the context of robot motion planning, but all that knowledge has long faded. Still every once in a while, I try to dust off my brain and read a few papers on topics I’m not comfortable with, and maybe even stare at some code.

Fluid in a BoxLuckily for me (and many others) there is a lot of good work being done and published. In the world of fluid simulation, some of the most accessible work has been done by Jos Stam, who kindly made his publications, notes, and code available on his webpage. His demo code is about 100 lines of C, includes nothing all that mysterious, and can be adapted to do more complex fluid flows. Check out this short movie to see it in operation. I’m thinking of adapting it to make a spiffy screensaver, mostly as an excuse to delve into its mysteries.

Best of Show from Renderman Users Group Meeting

Each year Pixar tosses a Renderman User’s Group meeting at SIGGRAPH. In the past few years, we’ve invited some of our users to present some of their techniques to a wide audience in a portion of the program we call Stupid RAT (Renderman Artist Tricks). Each year, there seems to be at least one presentation that really captures your attention, and this year the award goes to Hal Bertram and The Interaction Trick.

The trick was actually pretty simple: to use the raytracing capabilities of Renderman (essentially a batch process) in an interactive viewer. It’s brilliant really. Try watching the videos and reading the notes. We are all very impressed.

SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Trailer Available

Next week I’ll be leaving for SIGGRAPH, the premiere computer graphics conference. Today I’m trying to work through my agenda, make lists of papers that I want to see, figure out the reception schedule and the list of parties that I’d like to attend. While doing so I noticed that the Computer Animation Festival trailer was available online. This is even cooler than normal because I know the Computer Animation Festival Chair: it’s my next door neighbor and former Pixarian Sam Lord Black. Well done Sam, and I’ll be mooching party invites off you later. 🙂

Teaching a spam filter to play chess

Sometimes I’m amazed by webpages which answer profound or trivial questions that I’ve asked myself before. This time, I’m more amazed that someone would work to answer a question that has never and probably would never occur to me: can you teach a spam filter to play chess?

Laird Breyer wrote a program called dbacl to filter email using a Bayesian classifier. For the amusement of all, he demonstrates how this program can be used to learn elementary chess tactics, and hooks it to Xboard so that you can play chess against it. Nifty.

Anyone going to SIGGRAPH?

I’ll be trundling off to SIGGRAPH at the end of the month. Any attendees (who I don’t see everyday at lunch here at Pixar) want to get together and schmooze a bit? I haven’t been in a few years, so my dance card is likely to be pretty clear. Drop me an email and let me know what days you’ll be around and maybe we’ll try to get together for dinner or something.

Cell service shut off indefinitely in 4 NYC commuter tunnels – UPDATED

Boing Boing documents the quick imposition and then reversal of a cell phone ban in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in NY. Apparently they were concerned over the risk that remotely detonated devices presented, but (as the NYPD apparently pointed out) the idea of having a place where people cannot use their cell phones to inform fire, police or other agencies of emergency situations inside the tunnel is not not without its risks either.

How to REALLY handle spam…

Tom sent me a pointer to Jef Poskanzer’s notes on how he handles a million spam messages every day. No, that’s note an exaggeration, Jef gets hit by a million of them every day.

Holy crap.

Jef is a the author of the really nice thttpd, which I used to run my website for years before shifting to the Apache/PHP/Wordpress monstrosity that it is now. It’s really cool, if you need a low requirement bulletproof http server, check it out.

Best quote:

If anyone wants to volunteer to pie Bill Gates again, I’ll contribute to the defense fund. Or if you prefer, you could just kick him in the nuts.

Internet Explorer Security Plans

Courtesy of Scoble’s blog, here is a post concerning “Low Rights Internet Explorerer”:

IEBlog : Clarifying Low-Rights IE

Low-rights IE will only be available in Longhorn because it’s based on the new Longhorn security features that make running without Administrator privileges an easy option for users (User Account Protection). When users run programs with limited user privileges, they are safer from attack than when they run with Administrator privileges because Windows can restrict the malicious code from taking damaging actions.

My, that does sound innovative. Kind of like running IE inside a jail or something, maybe with an isolated directory, It’s good to see that Microsoft is on top of things.

VIA Technologies, Inc. announces the C7

This website runs on a VIA Nehemiah 1Ghz motherboard. I used to run it on a dual 400Mhz Celeron box I built on an Abit BP6 motherboard, but that thing sucked power and generated heat far in excess of its utility. Now my webserver runs quiet and lowpower. That’s why I thought I’d plug the press release by VIA Technologies, Inc. on their new processor: the C7. The C7 will run at peak power of 20W at 2.0Ghz, and idles at only 100mw. It includes bunches of features that make it excellent for home theater/PVR applications. Apparently they are going to start shipping in Q2. Processors like this seem more impressive to me than the dual core behemoths that AMD and Intel produce. The world needs more reasonable power consumption for our mundane computing tasks.