Rob's Musings

I've added two new links to the links section; both to small projects I've written myself.  The first, Atlasgen, is a simple python script to generate a texture atlas given a collection of small textures.  This was useful in the GPU based ray tracer we wrote in my lab; as Nvidia's texture atlas tool had a problem with combining 32,24 and 16 bit images.  The second project, Eigentools, is also used in my lab and is relevant to many of the projects on which we are working.  We had complained for a long time that there are no "nice" C++ wrappers for large sparse eigensolvers.  Matlab is a pita

I find it difficult to quantify precisely how dissappointed I have been with YouTube in the past few months.  I am greeted with a "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" message for literally every link I follow for a YouTube video.  It might be simpler for them to just replace the entire site with a message stating "We're sorry, interesting content is no longer available on YouTube".  I fully expect that there will be certain situations (particularly those involving copyright violations) where YouTube will have legitimate reasons for quickly removing questionable content.  However

This past weekend, I attended the I3D conference for the first time.  The conference was great.  There was a ton of really interesting work, and the keynote and capstone talks gave me a really fresh perspective on some of the aspects of computer interaction (graphical and otherwise) that we, as graphics researchers, often neglect or take for granted.  The talk by Austin Robinson, however, contained a completely unexpected "reveal".  Apparently, Nvidia has developed a raytracing/raycasting API (NVirt).

My current research requires me (among other things) to calculate some discrete differential geometric quantities on triangular meshes.  Mainly stuff like curvature and the cotan weights of edges.  I was looking for a good library to make this task as easy as possible.  I searched for a while for something for Python, but had no luck.  Once I accepted the fact that I'd be using C++, CGAL jumped to mind.  Don't get me wrong, CGAL is a great library; feature-laden and well engineered.  However, it's really heavyweight.  Even getting the simplest things running requires a siginificant committm

Those of you who've spoken with me on the subject know that I'm somewhat of a dyed-in-the-wool Ruby advocate.  Ever since I first used the language, I found it to be the most beautiful, elegant, and productive language in which I've ever written code.  Ruby also opened my eyes to the possibilites of using very high level languages for writing full applications (not just nifty scripts).  What follows below is in no way an abandonment of Ruby.  However, sometimes one encounters tools that are just too interesting to pass up.  This happened to me recently, and has begun leading me down a path

So the Khronos group, the consortium which took control of the development of the OpenGL API (and some other related tools), recently released the specification for OpenGL 3.0. After giving the new spec some time to sink in, I've decided that my initial feelings of extreme frustration and disappointment were, indeed, well founded. I'll copy here most of the content of my post on the GameDev.net forums (where I go by the handle gfxnomad).

So I just finished messing with this library I got online to do tensor voting stuff.  The website where I got the source code was last updated in 2002, as was the code itself.  After two days of fighting with C++, I've come to the conclusion that successfully compiling and linking a moderately sized library which makes heavy use of templates is akin to constructing a large building out of toothpicks and Elmer's glue.  I eventually got the code to compile and link, but spent about four hours struggling with one particularly annoying problem.  Apparently, i

So I recently sumbled upon this incredibly useful site, www.videolectures.net.  It's a collection of recored lectures on a large variety of different topics.  Their largest catgeory is computer science, and within CS, the largest number of lectures are on machine learning topics.  However, this is perfect as my current research  deals heavily with applying machine learning techniques and probabalistic models to computer grapics.  I must have already watched at least 7 or 8 hours of lectures from this site.&n

Welcome to the newest version of robpatro.net ... I think I'll stick with this one for a while!