brainwagon

A discussion of how to properly handle liquid inside glasses in a raytracer made me look up the scheme that I had implemented once before, which I’m now stashing a pointer to just for safekeeping. Journal of Graphics Tools – Papers – Simple Nested Dielectrics in Ray Traced Images The reason that this is difficult […]

Over twenty years ago, I first read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which I still consider to be the most amazing computer science textbook ever written. I’ve known for a while that one of the author’s, Gerald Sussman has written a book on classical mechanics called (appropriately enough) Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. […]

I had the vaguest recollection of a SIGGRAPH sketch on creating an armature wired with potentiometers for creating an inexpensive motion capture setup. A bit of digging revealed that this done by Stefan Gustavson in 2002, and Tom was kind enough to run down this link to his page which somehow eluded by Google-fu.

I’ve worked on computer graphics for over twenty years now. Through some quirk of fate, I have spent nearly all of my time programming batch rendering algorithms that take minutes or even hours (days?) to render pictures. The last time I really did interactive work was before OpenGL even had the “Open” prefix, back when […]

It’s actually not just hard in the sense that you normally think of as hard. You might think that if you worked hard, you could figure out what programs actually do. Ed Felton shows that this simply isn’t true. In his simple Python scripts, he asks a question: “is there any combination of inputs to […]

Years ago, I read Gleick’s Chaos, and my recent diversion into calculating various numbers to high degrees of precision made me think about Feigenbaum’s Constant. While I didn’t write a program to compute this constant, I did recall how it is defined, on the basis of this logistic map: Feigenbaum’s constant is the limiting ratio […]

In between sessions of zelda (currently in the Lake Temple, total elapsed time just over fourteen hours), I’ve been considering just how cool the Wii Remote controllers are. For $40 (admittedly, quite a bit for a controller) you get a controller with the following nifty features: It communicates wirelessly via Bluetooth, which opens up a […]

Dear me. Macrovision has its panties all in a bunch over Steve Jobs’ recent “Open Letter” which has received a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Macrovision’s Response to Steve Jobs’ Open Letter It contains a lot of howlers, but I thought I’d bring your attention to a few of them. Macrovision admonishes Steve by […]

Yesterday Tom mentioned this article linked from Lambda The Ultimate the other day, and I finally got around to reading it today. Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast | Lambda the Ultimate The short summary: the regular expression matching in common scripting languages like Perl and Python are many orders of magnitude slower […]

Yep, Carmen stood in line for three hours at our local Toys R Us this morning, and now I have a Wii. Couple of quick notes: It does not like DD-WRT firmware on my wireless router. I could not get it to work with it at all. I reflashed my Linksys WRT54GS back to its […]

I went ahead and coded up a version of the spigot algorithm for computing e. It makes a nice three line .signature program. Here are the first 1000 digits (reformatted for legibility): 2.718 28182 84590 45235 36028 74713 52662 49775 72470 93699 95957 49669 67627 72407 66303 53547 59457 13821 78525 16642 74274 66391 93200 […]

Your results:You are Dr. Doom Dr. Doom 65% Apocalypse 64% The Joker 55% Mr. Freeze 54% Lex Luthor 50% Magneto 50% Riddler 44% Green Goblin 44% Juggernaut 44% Kingpin 42% Poison Ivy 41% Venom 36% Catwoman 34% Dark Phoenix 33% Mystique 28% Two-Face 20% Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity. Click here […]

Wired: Monkeybites Internet Software Blog from Wired.com There are still major issues. I haven’t had any stability problems, but there are bad memory leaks. Gran Paradiso, as Firefox 3 is code named, launches using about 33mb of RAM; after ten minutes of browsing that number jumped to 100mb and after a couple of hours it […]

This just so totally rocks… [tags]Robot,Amusement,Google Video[/tags]