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 as it introduces a bottleneck in the code when one just wishes to use it to call "eigs".  Unfortunately, all of the sparse eigensolvers with C interfaces that we stumbled upon required a ton of boilerplate code to set up and tear down the solver and to actually retrieve the eigenvectors.  Eigentools provides a nice wrapper for a very efficient large scale eigensolver (slepC), that uses the very nice Boost uBlas matrix formats for input and output.  Anyway, I hope that one or both of these projects may be useful to someone!