mdk @ intarweb

Philosophomon

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 08:10:02 GMT

http://ds.nfshost.com/philosophomon/

Descartle, I choose you!!

New Music

Tue, 31 May 2005 03:18:17 GMT

What I'm listening to (albums):

Black Eyed Peas - Monkey Business
Common - Be
Hieroglyphics - Full Circle (ok, not new but new to me)
Quasimoto - Further Adventures of Lord Quas
The Frontline - Now U Know
Sway And King Tech Present - Back 2 Basics
Thievery Corporation - The Cosmic Game
Zion I - True and Livin

Game Consoles vs PC Gaming

Sat, 21 May 2005 09:22:22 GMT

OMG THE SKY IS FALLING! Ok, not really. But some console-exclusive game players think that new the generation of gaming systems announced and demo'd at E3 (PS3 and Xbox 360) have made the PC gaming scene obsolete. Here is my diatribe!

http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19074

Matrix Online

Thu, 05 May 2005 18:51:17 GMT

Fun for about 10 hours solo, 20 hours if you have friends. Good live events schedule is hampered by the reliance on being high level for interacting with the movie character event NPCs. Was buggy, but patches are coming out at a decent rate. Not really worth $49.99 if you don't plan on having a group of regulars to play with. I may revisit this in six to 12 months to see what has changed.

Psychonauts is fun!

Thu, 05 May 2005 18:45:44 GMT

I recommend the new fine game Psychonauts by Double Fine. I have been playing it on the PC using a PSX1 gamepad (ala USB adapter) and it is great fun. The game has a nice humorous tone to it, and there are some amazing tricks they are pulling off in the engine such as arbitrary changeable gravity directions, dynamic scale changes, etc. The Agent Nine's Shooting Gallery and Fred Napoleon's mind are specifically notable for these two things. I recommend the game, as it is only $29.99 on the PC.

spring break and stuff.. .and sick... :(

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 04:52:32 GMT

so yeah, spring break was pretty cool in general, flew to new york city with my fiancee where my parents live (in manhattan) and checked out the company my dad is working at now (Primus Financial) and took a side trip down to washington dc to do the tourist thing. every trip has its crappy downsides for me, which i suppose is just life, but getting a nasty cough and head cold right before school starts up again is pretty crummy. i lost the nice new diesel bag my mother gave me for xmas, which was containing my electronics (mp3 player, gba sp, digital camera) and magazines, on the amtrak on the way down to dc. ugh. so i called and wrangled and through a sheer stroke of luck nobody stole it and i got it back via mail. the bag was waiting for me at my parents place in nyc when we got back a few days later, minus the mp3 player-- one of those flash type iriver ones, i think it fell out :(

anyway, so i'm feeling kinda lame health wise with a persistent cough and medicine head, but i guess i can't complain too much-- it isn't like i have cancer or something...

i was asked by my fiancee if i thought that maybe starting to take st. john's wort would help my depression problems because it has been helping her out with her stomach (anxiety related)... dunno... maybe i should give it a try, because lately i've been feeling apathetic about life in general then swinging all the way back to feeling generally normal... which is good, because i wouldn't want to swing all the way to manic-- i have a friend who has that and man, that's a raw deal..

feh. poopie.

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 21:14:21 GMT

So I got an ECS i848 motherboard and all my problems went away. Heheh. Anyway, now I just have to get a better cooler for my video card at some point; the Vantec Iceberq 4 isn't that great, so I was thinking of getting a VGA Silencer copper slot blower-- they have had great reviews. I'm getting some random white dots sometimes along polygon intersections, that I think are being caused by rounding/truncation errors in the floating point math. Fortunately it is rather seldom... Also randomly once in a blue moon the widgets in Trillian's IRC client come up all wrong, not properly rendering the skin it should be using and instead doing some mangled standard windows widgets thing. A simple reload of the program fixes it... O.o

VIA and ATI -- They don't play nice =(

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 19:12:29 GMT

Apparently my VIA PT800 board (which I hadn't had any problems with before while using my GeForce4 Ti4400) has compatibility problems with the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. If I run the board at 8x AGP and fast writes enabled, the computer will lock up and/or reboot after playing 3D games for a random amount of time (sometimes it is right away, and sometimes it won't happen for 1 hr). Using the ATI driver feature SMARTGART in the control panel I solved this problem by disabling AGP (!!) and by turning Fast Writes off in the motherboard's BIOS configuration. Games aren't as slow as you might think, but it is discernable. I'm guessing it's about 20-30% slower, depending.

So, I decided to order a new motherboard; thus began my adventure in figuring out what would be best for me. I have two sticks of non-matching RAM (one Corsair XMS PC3200 CL2, and one Kingston PC3200 CL2.5). Currently I run them at "By SPD" and Memtest+ 1.40 says everything is cool (ran about 7 hr 45 min with no errors, booted off a CD I burned from the .iso on their site). I found out that there is a chipset that is single channel based off the popular dual channel Intel 865PE, called the 848P. Tom's Hardware had some benchmarks showing that it isn't that much slower than the 865PE or the 875P. The PT800 is also single channel, so I'm probably not going to be having anything slower, in fact it may be a little bit faster (we'll see).

I found out that motherboards based off this chipset (848P) can be pretty inexpensive, as it is designed to compete directly with VIA's PT800 offering. I went on eBay and got an ECS board for $51 shipped & tax incl. that is an unopened box with everything included (for comparison Outpost.com had it for $51 without shipping or tax!). Hopefully everything works out with that transaction. I was annoyed that Paypal had an outage last night for "maintenance" from whenever (I was trying at 11pm) until "2:00 am". I'm also hoping that ECS doesn't have a spectacularly horrible failure rate or anything like that. Barring that, the chipset drivers are all by Intel so they should be a lot better than the VIA ones (*crosses fingers*).

Bleh. All this to get my Radeon 9800 Pro to work-- it was a steal of a deal getting it from my old roommate used but after sinking all this extra money into it I'm wondering if I shouldn't have just waited and avoided this whole mess of troubleshooting. Oh well.

Median Blur Complete

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 09:32:54 GMT

So I've finished my median blur. Wheee. Some results here.

Gaussian Blur Done

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 08:18:46 GMT

Some results from my gaussian blur program can be found here.

New Hip Hop Albums

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 01:15:41 GMT

Man... The new albums from hip hop groups, The Roots, De La Soul, and now solo Mos Def and Talib Kweli were all pretty disappointing. I listen back to a track like this one, where a classy downtempo beat set the vibe for some interesting top-of-the-head-and-consciousness lyrics, and wonder where it all went. I mean, I never really liked the Roots too much though, so I guess that's beside the point, but I expected more from De La Soul especially. I think there's a total of four tracks from the latter three worth saving... Bleh.

Danny the Dog (or Unleashed) soundtrack by Massive Attack

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 07:56:41 GMT

Very cool. New Jet Li and Morgan Freeman (!) flick called Danny the Dog (or Unleashed for US market I guess) with a Massive Attack soundtrack. I wonder if the movie will turn out as brooding and pensive as the music.

Some Notes about using GLUI

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 09:01:14 GMT

Make sure to use glutPostRedisplay() in all of your callback functions, as well as those functions that your menu items in GLUT call, etc. It seems that otherwise you will not be able to have any of these callback functions effectively do anything. I have no idea why this is! O_o

For CS Majors everywhere, especially those doing OpenGL

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 03:35:24 GMT

I wrote this page up on my GEAR wiki section for CSU Hayward, after my experiences with Dev C++ and trying to use it for homework. It's a bit of a manifesto, and it talks about why I use it and not Visual Studio 6, .Net, 2003, or any other commercially made software that has an academic version that has strings attached to the lower price. (Heck you can't get lower than a price of ZERO, and you will never have to pay more to release commercial software compiled with Dev C++)

I found DevPak for normal GLUT!

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 06:55:46 GMT

So, I was looking around for how to compile a library in Dev C++ and I found this by accident: Devpak for GLUT 3.7.6+.

Awsome.

So now people can use GLUI DevPak properly.

Interesting Tidbit from http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Color

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 08:48:36 GMT

"Different cultures have different terms for colors, and may also assign some color names to slightly different parts of the spectrum, or have a different color ontology: for instance, the Japanese color aoi can be interpreted as meaning something between the Western color terms of "blue" and "green": green is regarded as a shade of aoi."

My homepage

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 09:04:53 GMT

I have a list of programs and other cruft on my Geocities account.

My last HW assignment for OpenGL

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 09:01:11 GMT

You can check it out here and see cool graphing thingy I made using OpenGL and OpenGLUT. Right mouse button click brings up a menu of options.

Cool beans! I wish i had a laptop with Wi-Fi.

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 17:21:18 GMT

Apparently Union Square in San Francisco already has free Wi-Fi and it is also coming soon to other areas of SF courtesy of Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Yummy.

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 02:44:14 GMT

Elder Scrolls IV Screenshots!

I set the one with the cathedral to be my new desktop wallpaper. Looks great!

It looks photoshopped, but it isn't...

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 01:53:43 GMT

Those Japanese love their kitsch. Sushi with USB!

A very old photoshop pic I made

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 09:05:33 GMT

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 08:19:50 GMT

Next on the agenda:

Gaussian smoothing/blurring algorithm over 2D images using OpenCV
3D function plotter with menus for several functions using OpenGL and GLUT.
Add a few GEAR users (including myself) to the GEAR wiki and apache.

Still not sure whether I will use FreeGLUT or Nate's old school Win32 GLUT, but leaning towards the former now that I found DevPak's for Dev-C++. Also, need to decide whether I want to do single channel (monochrome) or multichannel (RGB) for the Gaussian smoothing project, and whether I will try to implement 2D kernel for extra credit.

School Stuff

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 02:00:52 GMT

Things are happening at university these days, what with the new quarter starting and it being my first one as a graduate student. I was elected in absentee to be the system administrator for the GEAR research group, and managed to find the root password from one of the members. I just need to figure out how to set it up so I can log in remotely via SSH2 if I need to (Putty is your friend). Lastly on my agenda for GEAR is the continuing search for a research topic. I have to read a paper a week, in addition to any papers we have for discussion for the weekly meetings, towards the goal of trying to narrow down what my particular interests are for a topic somehow relating to evolutionary algorithmic work.

Courses are interesting this time around, with a undergraduate senior level graphics algorithms course taught in OpenGL, a computer vision and image processing graduate course, and a graduate level automata (aka theory of computing) course. I missed the course in graphics last year for my undergraduate elective, so when I saw it being offered again this Fall quarter I jumped at the opportunity. After all, the whole reason I became interested in computers was games and graphics are an integral and fascinating part of how they are made.

When the professor teaching the course (Dr. Morgan) mentioned during the first class that we would be taking a "platform independant" approach using OpenGL, I was excited with the possibilities. I had been hoping a somewhat more modern OpenGL + SDL or some other library combination in the effort to circumvent OS and machine specifics, but it simply was boiled down to a statement of "I will only support OpenGL + GLUT on Visual C++." Meh. He went on to say that we could do it in any platform using any combination of things but that would be the method of instruction in the class (but he would accept homework solutions and demos in other language bindings or toolkits-- as long as it was OpenGL and satisfied the requirements).

Vision seems like it could be fun, because of some gesture and body tracking demos shown during the first day of class and how they reminded me of the Sony EyeToy and similar products. They use some calculations about the ratio of red pigments in areas on screen to make a guess about whether there is a human there. I'm not sure if the EyeToy calculations are that different in this regard. The background can also be easily taken out by taking a set-up picture, then moving and taking another, and using the difference to isolate the background and remove it from further consideration. This allows the EyeToy (or other applications) to replace the background with something else. So, technically the weather man could be doing his work without a blue screen these days.

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 08:44:23 GMT

Horribly tasteless-- you'd think they wouldn't list this sort of "record."