Today I…

• Gave a presentation in my AStecs class that when surprisingly well.
• Had sushi for lunch.
• Discussed Ben Shneiderman’s 1996 paper “The Eyes Have It” with Uta for the AStecs/innovis reading group.
• Bought tickets to see Interpol. who are playing MacHall on Sunday April 22.
• Went to 6:00 pm yoga. Moksha!
• Watched an eposide of Death Note (the Anime)–which I never finished since it just like the manga– that began with a message from Konami which read: Not for Sale, Rent, or Ebay. I thought that was funny.
• Started reading Douglas Coupland’s jPod.

  

Links 234:

• Film: Everything’s Gone Green

Today I…

• Went to 6:30 am Yoga. I miss John’s classes…
• Decided to give Papers a try. Adios, BibDesk.
• Went to M. L. Cummings & Stacey D. Scott’s talk on “Decision and Collaboration Support for Time-Critical Unmanned Vehicle Operations”. Ah, US Department of Defense funded research.
• Over at djdownload.com, picked up Jukebox Buddha–fifteen tracks made using nine samples from a FM3 BUDDHA MACHINE.
• Figured out how to do my fancy PROJECTION / MODELVIEW matrix transformations. Thanks Mark for all your help!!!
• Met with Amanda.
• Watched the final episode of season three of BGS. Enough said.
• Listened to the new Modest Mouse album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. Sure it’s a bit over produced, but still pretty good.
• Did my AStecs book review for Sheelagh.
• Stayed up way too late.

Links 234:

• Music video of the day: Muse – Knights of Cydonia
• The Peer Review
• Normal Room
• IET Circuit

ATI’s X1600 which is found on the MacBook Pro offers support for OpenGL 2.0, but the Architectural Review Board extension ARB_texture_non_power_of_two is not supported by this particular GPU. This has been noted elsewhere [ iDevGames ].

Developers using the X1600 can use ARB_texture_rectangle which allows non-power of two textures to be used, however with some limitations:

However, non-power-of-two sized textures have limitations that do not apply to power-of-two sized textures. NPOTS textures may not use mipmap filtering; POTS textures support both mipmapped and non-mipmapped filtering. NPOTS textures support only the GL_CLAMP, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE, and GL_CLAMP_TO_BORDER wrap modes; POTS textures support GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE, GL_REPEAT, GL_CLAMP, GL_MIRRORED_REPEAT, and GL_CLAMP_TO_BORDER (and GL_MIRROR_CLAMP_ATI and GL_MIRROR_CLAMP_TO_EDGE_ATI if ATI_texture_mirror_once is supported) . NPOTS textures do not support an optional 1-texel border; POTS textures do support an optional 1-texel border.

NPOTS textures are accessed by dimension-dependent (aka non-normalized) texture coordinates. So instead of thinking of the texture image lying in a [0..1]x[0..1] range, the NPOTS texture image lies in a [0..w]x[0..h] range.

When using ARB_texture_rectangle with GLSL, textures are accessed in fragment shaders using the texture2DRect() function which returns a sampler2DRect data type.

Today I…

• Had pizza for breakfast. And dinner.
• Work on Book:
  • Tried in vain to determine the cause of the segfault.
  • Removed the Core Video Display Link and replaced it with a NSTimer, which is by far the poorer solution. The NSTimer that is. But hey, when you have no idea on why Objective-C is behaving the why it is, one has to resort to drastic measures.
  • After two weeks of fighting with the same issue, decided that Objective-C is all well and good, but it isn’t getting me anywhere. So I started porting the problematic components from Obj-C to C++. So Book++ was born.
  • Started using STL. Tim, you would be proud.
  • Replaced all the model components of Book‘s model-view-controller architecture with C++ code.
  • Plugged all the Book++ components back into Book. Crossed my figures and pressed “Build and Run”. And… IT WORKS. IT ACTUALLY WORKS!!1
  • Tar’d up some backups and called it a night.
• Music video of the day: Dr. Octagon – Trees

Today I…

• Sorted out the double instantiation of MyOpenGLView. I should really write a Cocoa tutorial one of these days…
• Went to ACAD.
• Picked up an iSight camera from Alan.
• Overhead quote of the day: “…’Nature‘ the tabloid of science!”
• Talked to Mark, Ed, Mike, et al. about the Age of Apocalypse, life after grad school, networking and HCI research juxtaposed, and NP-complete problems.
• Learnt about GLSL samplers. Wrote more of my shader. And bit by bit, I am constructing “a race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world!!” [ Bride of the Atom ]
• Attended the AStecs reading group. Thanks Sheelagh and Petra for joining us!
• Did my taxes.

Links 234:

• Nintendo Wiimote Library for C# (thanks Chris & RMS).
• Guice

If you’ve written shaders in Xcode, you’ll probably noticed that the .vert and .frag files don’t have syntax high lighting by default. Sure you can use the C syntax colouring for your shader files, but what about something more in tune with the syntax of GLSL or Cg?

If your in this situation, a PhD. student by the name of Alexander Taliesin Streit has just the thing: Cg & GLSL Shaders Syntax Highlighting in Xcode.

Today I…

• Spent two hours at the Harry Hays Building trying to submit my passport application.
• Sent some faxes. Ya, it was pretty sweet.
• Attended Tim’s talk during today’s iLab meeting.
• Got my head around how NSOpenGLContext is meant to interact with NSView. With this new knowledge of the API, I changed my rip off of Apple’s Custom Cocoa OpenGL to something based on CocoaDev‘s CustomGLView but slightly cleaner. And double buffered.
• Meet with Sheelagh.
• Talked to Chris and Petra about colour.
• Finish all the fragment shader initialization code.
• Saw my one-line shader in action. Awesome.
• Tim’s bike was lifted!! The Death Penalty for Bike Thieves!
• Added the pedantic compiler flag. Discovered some issues the version of EPS–or should I say, EPF–that I’m using. Time to find the *lastest* version of the library.
• Went for dinner.

Earlier this week I…

• Monday:
  • Sushi for lunch!
  • (Well, this happened on Sunday…) FINALLY connected textures to Book’s scene rendering.
  • “CGPS_HI_testcube.fits” (the 800 MB FITS file) crashes Book during the [NSOpenGLContext flushBuffer]; method call.
  • Shortly before dinner, discovered a memory leak in Book. PAIN begins here.
  • Looked for memory leaks.
  • Just after midnight, started writing my first GLSL fragment shader.
  • While trying to fall asleep, which proved in vain, decided that a multi-threaded texture generator approach to Book isn’t appropriate. A fragment shader is definitely the way to go.
• Tuesday I….
  • Went to Alan’s Sound Pt. Two lecture for AStecs.
  • Started using the ARB_multitexture extension.
  • Read chapter eight, “Connectivity”, from Robert Spence’s book Information Visualization. Looks like the second edition of this title came out at the end of 2006: Information Visualization: Design for Interaction. InfoVis Wiki link.
  • Started refactoring Book–die threads, DIE!!1
  • Sorted out passport application.

Links 234:

• rand()% – “…is an automated net radio station streaming real-time generative music. All audio is generated by software written by sound artists and programmers.”
• Optimize your Mac.

Today I…

• Learnt of the death of Steve Rogers. R.I.P. Captain America, R.I.P.

• In other news… today is International Women’s Day.
• Helped Ed demo for today’s “media event”.
• Attended Smart’s groundbreaking at the Alberta Research Council Building. The mayor and the university president were also in attendance.
• Congratulations to Saul and Sheelagh on their iCORE/Smart Technologies Industrial join Chair in Interactive Technologies!
• Attended the AStecs reading group to talk about Do We Need Formal Education in Visualization? Yes we do!
• Talked to Sheelagh.
• Programmed more of Book.
• Did not stay in the lab until 11:00 pm.

Note: “Stab me in the face!” was said my the Mark while discussing The Aviator.

Today I…

• Met with Dr. Fung and talked stats.
• Developed more of Book:
  • Vexed by forward declaration problems (rea: me not understanding the point of “@class” in the objective-C header files.
  • Implemented a Core Video Display Link for wicked fast rendering timing.
  • Implemented Dr. Fung’s suggestion, on using a colour scale ranging from +/- two times the standard deviation of the global data set.
• Went to the airport

Things on my “To-Do” list:

• For Book:
  • Figure out where to control the time update logic from…
  • Add Mach Ports stuff for thread communication.
  • Do OpenGL textures stuff–at last!!
• Pickup Mac Mini RAM.
• Work on my brain age, which is currently 40.
• Get some spoke cards.

Links 234:

• Music video of the day: Fort Minor – Remember the Name
• Biking video of the day: Fixed Gear Spin

Today I…

• Went to class for AStecs. Successfully delayed Alan’s lecture on sound/MaxMSP until next week, such that Amanda can attend.
• Noticed that Adobe Creative Suite 2 was finally installed on my lab machine.
• Attended an impromptu iLab meeting concerning Smart‘s media event on Thursday.
• Finished reading Understanding Comics.
• Went to the reading group for AStecs to discuss Understanding Comics. A big thank you to Mark for joining us.
• Figured out what will be read next in the reading group: Chapter 8 of Information Visualization by Robert Spence, “Artifacts of the presence era: Using visualization to create an evocative souvenir” by F.B. Viegas, et al. from IEEE InfoVis 2004, and the last two “Best Paper” recipients from IEEE InfoVis conference.
• Started programming my threads for Book.
• Ordered four threadless t-shirts for $10 USD a piece ($12.75 CND): Caged, Tagged, Perpetuate The Stereotype, and Get Some Fresh Air.
• Went biking at my ill attended Club Racer program. Boy did I feel this last month away from the bike. <br />The secret to escaping the boredom: listening to podcasts on my iPod.
• Set up a meeting tomorrow with Dr. Tak Fung to talk stats.
• Listened to some Flunk.

Last week I was surfing through the Apple site, and I came across this page about the Apple Developer Connection Student Membership (ADC) Student Membership., referred from the WWDC Student Scholarship Program. The ADC membership costs $99 USD and you get the latest version of OS X, an ADC hardware discount, monthly Apple snail mail, and access to the student scholarship program. Now I don’t know when OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is coming out, nor how much it’s going to cost, but if it’s less that $99, I’ll get Leopard via ADC.

Update: OS X usually runs for $129 MSRP.

Today I…

• Went to yoga at 6:30 am. My first post-challenge yoga practice. Ya, I took the weekend off.
• Software engineered Book a whole bunch:
  • Wrote my Statistician class.
  • Refactored–the DataHandler class is out!
  • Designed a multi-threaded texture caching system.
• Emailed Dr. Tak Fung about some stats help.
• Had two servings of Mac Hall food–vomit!!
• Read Understanding Comics.

On my “To-Do” list:

• Pick up Mac Mini RAM.
• Do my taxes–but I need those T4 slips first!!!
• Claim flight to CHI in PeopleSoft. Someone should really put together: www.PeopleSoftSucks.com Ah, only if there were more time in the day… then again if I had extra time, I likely won’t be making hate websites. Needless to say, PeopleSoft still sucks.
• Implement my multi-threaded texture caching system for Book.
• Watch some Battlestar Galactica.

Links 234:

• WIndows Vista Cracked by Paradox 2007
• Circular menu.
• Drug Dealers vs. Geeks – Oh, the similarities!
• Free and legal torrents.
• Things my boyfriend says.
• Music video of the day: The Killers – Read My Mind

DJ JELO + DJ CZECH
Friday April 13

Also featuring Horizon residents Domenic G, Special Agent, & Tyler C
Presented by The Warehouse & Fehrenheit Promotions

FREE cover before 10:30 pm!

Doors 9 pm – 7 am
$1.00 Hiballs until 10:30 pm
Members ($10 for a membership) and Invited Guests Only

…

This is going to be an awesome show. You can listen to some of DJ Czech’s stuff on his myspace page, but here is a tasty treat from Breakbeat Mountain: DJ Czech – Breakbeat Mountain – 17 – Outro

Saturday I…

• Booked flights to San José and San Francisco, and I’m not flying Air Canada!!
• Compiled EPS as a static library for OS X. No luck on the shared library.
• Book [Digital && Physical] is now using Objective-C++ and using the EPS library. Oh, ya.
• Put multiple pairs of jeans in the dryer–STUPID!!

Friday I…

• Went to yoga 6:30 am. The challenge is complete!
• Answered emails.
• Wrote my review of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud for the AStecs reading group. Why does it take so long?
• Read about connecting C++ libraries with Objective-C.
• Met with Amanda.
• Met with Sheelag, Floh, and Robin.
• Made plans for the West Coast Trail trip with Dave.

Links 234:

• Patrick Stewart Alphabet

Here is an amazing salad that I first tried this past new years eve, at Dave + Steph’s fantastic party. This last weekend, Dave + Steph hooked me up with the recipe and here it is. The photocopy they gave me was kind of cut off, but I think I got it right.

Grilled Tuna Salad

• 2 pounds fresh tuna steak, 1-inch tick
• good olive oil
• kosher salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• grated zest of 2 limes
• 6 tablespoons – freshly squeezed lime juice (3 limes)
• 1 teaspoon wasabi powder
• 2 teaspoons soy suace
• 10 dashes Tabasco sauce
• 2 firm, ripe Hass avocados, large-diced
• 1/2 red onion, thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup minced scallions, white and green parts (2 scallions)
• 1 to 2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

Heat a charcoal grill with hot coals. Brush the grill with oil.

Brush both sides of the tuna with olive oil and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Cook the tuna over the hot coals for about 2 1/2 minutes on each side. Remove to plate. The tuna should be seared on the outside and raw inside. Allow to cool slightly and cut into large bit sized cubes.

(If you don’t want to heat a grill, you can sear the tuna in a dry sauté pan over high heat. Heat the pan for 2 minutes, add the tuna steaks, and cook for 2 to 3 minutes on each side, until seared on the outside and still raw inside.)

For dressing, in a small bowl, whisk together 1/4 cup of olive oil, the lime zest, lime juice, wasabi powder, soy sauce, Tabasco, 2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Add the avocados in the dressing and then arrange with the bite sized tuna. Top with scallions and sesame seeds.