I’m fascinated with junk food. Not such much eating it, but specifically weird mass produced, processed junk food. Some of the products are just down right bizarre and it amazes me how they make it to market.
Having moved country there’s a whole new range off weird food to explore, I’m ignorant of almost all of it.
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A couple of weeks ago I picked up a HP EX485 MediaSmart Home Server and an extra 750GB WD Caviar Greenpower Sata II. I brought all my data from England backed up on another 750GB (also a WD Caviar Greenpower Sata II, I like em) so one of my motivations was to be able to access my data again. I also needed a server for file sharing, remote access, Subversion, Apache, backups and anything else I fancied.
Why WHS?
The killer feature for WHS is the cluster level network backup with single instance storage. Restoring with WHS is as simple as booting the rescue CD and restoring your drive. Identical files on the same computer or multiple computers are only stored once on the server. It runs in the background and just works. Well, unless you’ve got bad sectors on your drive, in which case it hangs your system. I found this out on Rebecca’s laptop, a chkdsk /r on all drives fixed the problem. If there are any problems such as failed backups, CPU overheating, low disk space, or whatever, you get pop-ups on all your WHS connected machines.
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I’ve posted my Level of Detail source code, binaries and some sample data over here, to go with the Efficient Wedge Quadrics article.
The FCollada library included is patched for VS2003 and includes a simple orthographic camera fix so they work with StandardizeUpAxisAndLength correctly. There’s a readme.txt to point you in the right direction and project files for Visual Studio 2003, 2005 and 2008.
After I’ve finished hacking away porting Star Control 2 to the DS (or completed all the fun bits) I hope to get around to posting an update. I since found a couple of trivial model import issues as I further tested the loading code in other projects, but nothing major. The framework has evolved with more modules, unit tests, fixes and features as I needed them.
I’ve been playing around with various DVCS in the last week. I looked mainly at Bazaar, Mercurial and Git. Bazaar and Mercurial are both written in Python with Mercurial having some parts written in C for speed. Git is for the most part written in C. To save repeating the history of these projects they can be found on Wikipedia for Bazaar here, Mercurial here and Git here.
As Bazaar and Mercurial are written in Python, they operate on Windows, Mac and Linux without any problems. Git expects a Unix environment, so for Windows you can use Cygwin or there’s a native port called msysGit.
They all handle your work flow in slightly different ways. The Python project put together a use case analysis comparing the operation of all three in PEP-374, so that’s an excellent place to start.
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We’ve moved from the United Kingdom to Canada. Québec City to be precise. It all went remarkably smoothy considering we needed to ship our dogs to Montréal, then have them driven onto Québec. We still need to sell our house in the UK and ship some boxes over by sea. Mainly DVD’s and books.
We’ve only been here a couple of weeks and are still buying everything we need. I have basically no credit rating here and a zero balance bank account, so everything is going on my UK Visa, which doesn’t always work as many companies want a billing address in the US or Canada.
My new job is about a 20 minutes bus ride away from the town house we’re renting. Building up to a normal productive speed quite quickly, learning the code base layout, design direction, build system, and keyboard layout (oh, how I long for a UK keyboard). French lessons start next week, twice a week for 10 weeks.
Shopping vegetarian for Becs isn’t as easy as it is in the UK, but it’s certainly not hard as we though it would be. We found Skinny Cow ice cream, many Campbells soups are marked veggie and Quorn like veggie products called Ives at the local IGA along with the usual grains, salads and spreads. All the produce is nice and fresh, though we haven’t found any veggie marked cheese (so the rennet could be veggie or not, there’s no way of knowing) nor any free range or barn eggs yet. No Red Leicester, or decent sausages.
But of course, many more pastries, waffles and products I’ve never tried before!
The Easter weekend approaching so we’re planning to get out of the house and explore the area!
Update 11th April 2009:
Found free range eggs, and cheese marked with non-animal rennet from Jardin Mobile.
We’re relocating from the United Kingdom to Quebec and we’ve pretty much planned the whole thing collaboratively on Google Apps. Details of the move, important information, to-do lists, check lists, item manifests, and such like have all been managed in Google Apps. Often even created and editing by both of us at the same time.
All in all, it’s worked well. The applications aren’t fully featured but they’re a breeze to work with. Negatives are that even on Chrome they can be annoyingly slow. I like that Chrome is snappy, and while the whole fast JavaScript interpreter war is cool, seriously, they’re not a good solution to the shallow, limited, user experiences.
Back to the point.
The main motivation was that we didn’t intend to take any of the desktops, we’d be travelling at different times, and were dismantling the home network piece by piece, so we really needed somewhere central to work. Perfect use case really.
We used a 32 GB usb drive for vital secondary backup, an existing 750GB drive for primary backup, and a DropBox account for online backup and vital documents.
I didn’t have a laptop, so I got a nice light Samsung NC10 netbook with 2GB of memory. Nice storage, surprisingly fast Atom processor, web cam and mic, movies, TV, Civilisation, runs productivity apps nicely, photo editing, perfect for travel and chilling in bed.
We officially live in the future, you can get Croissants from a tin!
Well, a cardboard tube with tinned end caps.
You twist it open, roll out the dough and pop it in the oven for 15 mins, lots of fun to make!
These two papers recently caught my imagination. Maybe not practical for this generation of hardware, but these areas are really getting exciting again.
Parallel View-Dependent Refinement of Progressive Meshes, presents a parallel algorithm for updating and rendering VDPM representations of models.
Imperfect Shadow Maps for Efficient Computation of Indirect Illumination, presents a solution for rendering lots of shadow maps when using Virtual Point Lights for radiosity approximation.
The Stonemaker Argument #1 contains such a funny and straight forward explaination of a non sequiter logical fallacy that it could only ever be achieved by a comic.
The comic takes its name from this first issue, which is a humourus rebutal to the Watchmaker Argurment.
There’s a lot that contributes to a robust level of detail system. Like dealing with t-junction and degenerate triangles, managing memory, dealing with triangle shape, and avoiding meshing problems. In this post I’m going to discuss a small but important aspect, how to efficiently solve the Quadric Error Metric for multiple wedges and multiple attributes. I’ll provide an overview and then dive into the practical details with some pseudo code.
QEM Overview
First let’s provide a bit of context with a quick QEM overview.
We define a quadric for the triangle plane 
Where r is the triangle area, to weight the quadric.
We then define 
as the sum squared distance from v to the contributing triangles planes.
The vertex position vmin that minimizes Q(v) is found where 
which can be obtained by solving the linear system 
as 
To add Hoppe’s extended metric for scalar attributes, obtain a gradient plane for each attribute by solving the linear system:
Where pa,pb,pc are triangle vertices and sa,sb,sc are the attribute scalar values at those vertices.
Sum 
into the quadric and then extend with the attribute plane constraints:
