brainwagon

Sigh. Things like this really depress me. Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption | CNET News.com A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent. From the PGP FAQ: Who uses PGP? People who value privacy use PGP. Politicians running […]

Courtesy of Mark Lentczer, have a gander at Context Free, an implementation of Chris Coyne’s design grammars. This puts me in mind of Alvy Ray Smith’a graftals or L-systems which I first read about 20 years ago. After a few minutes of playing, I came up with this: A few minutes more hacking resulted in […]

After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the […]

I’m always interested in raytracing and programming languages, so the OCaml Ray Tracer seems pretty cool to me. What’s nice about it as an example of Ocaml code is that it’s very clearly written, and reflects some of the niceties of the functional style.

Here is the usual page of links to SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers. Not many have been filled in, but as usual, I suspect that as time goes on nearly all of these papers will be available online.

Two subjects I’m fairly interested in, metaprogramming and the Fast Fourier Transform, are combined in this paper from lambda the ultimate. Basically once they had identified a number of axioms, their system generated two different and well known versions of the code, one of which was identical to the number of FP operations in FFTW, […]

I’m tinkering a bit with high dynamic range imaging lately, and decided to code up a simple tone-mapping program so that I could begin to display them somewhat reasonably. On the right you can click to see the tonemapped version of Paul Debevec’s high dynamic range environment of St. Peter’s Basillica. I implemented the simplest […]

Hitachi has a technical briefing the breakthrough Storage Technology which is used in their latest drives, destined for an mp3 player or cell phone near you. Did I mention that you’ll need Flash to view it? Link courtesy of Dave Slusher.

Apparently you really can patent nonsense. In United States Patent 5,533,051, we get the following intriguing claim: A second aspect of the present invention which further enhances its ability to achieve high compression percentages, is its ability to be applied to data recursively. Specifically, the methods of the present invention are able to make multiple […]

SD Times – Is Software Engineering an Oxymoron? The problem, then, is that programming has changed from the study and implementation of algorithms to the study and creation of complex documents. I just thought it was a nice quote. I agree only in part with Holub’s article though. He thinks that computer science is turning […]

Those gents over at Lambda the Ultimate have a nice list of online computer science archives. I read stuff like this for fun, so I thought I’d archive this here so I can find it again. Incidently, does the following character: — λ — look like a lambda to you? In Bitstream Vera Sans, it […]

One of the first scenes I ever raytraced, back in 1986 or so… Slashdot is running a story on a German group who is showing a 3D raytracing chip at CeBIT. This group has apparently constructed an FPGA based raytracing accelerator board, and is trying to convince companies like nVidia and ATI that they should […]

While digging around for more notes on game physics, I ended up back at the Pixar website and Baraff and Witkin’s notes on Physically Based Modeling. It’s hard to get there from the frontpage, so I thought I’d leave this note as a bookmark for myself.

I remember blinking a few times the first time someone showed me Duff’s device. It made me ask “is that really legal C”. Simon Tatham’s article Coroutines in C comes very close to provoking the same response. Wacky, wacky code.

I’ve been interested in codes and cryptography for quite some time. I find them at the fascinating intersection of history, mathematics and computer science: all topics that I like to read about and experiment with. Let me give you a basic crypto lesson, with a moral at the end. Let’s say that all your messages […]