Tiger and More

So first things first… The good news is that I finished my article and uploaded it around 10:30am this morning and I didn’t even have to stay up all night (went to be at 3, then got up at 8 for the home stretch). The bad news is that it doesn’t contain the results my advisor was hoping for. We have an extension until Monday night to make more changes, but I’m not convinced I can get those additional results in any good way. There’s just not enough time to carefully consider the new models necessary. To make things worse, adding these to the paper will make it stronger, but overall I still feel like the whole thing is rather on the weak side. One way or another, it has still been a good experience, since I was able to get the implementation, details and math down on paper. It will certainly come in useful in future work on this project, even if it doesn’t get accepted.

Earlier today I went to the departmental picnic. Talked to various people, had a grilled hamburger and a bunch of chips, avoided the rain which never seem to come. Afterwards, Jason, Sara, Casey and I went to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Jason was disappointed, but I thought it was ok. I wasn’t expecting too much though, given the way books always seem to turn out as movies. Of course, they left a lot of the details out and a lot of the humor fell flat without that context. Even still, it’s probably just one of those things that worked better as a book.

In other news, I got my copy of Tiger (aka Mac OS 10.4) yesterday. Unfortunately, I couldn’t install it yesterday since I was focused on getting the paper out. I tried to do it this afternoon as well, but kept getting a crypic “there was an error, please try starting the install again” error messages. After some investigation, it appears that my hard drive was in serious need of an fsck. Disk Utility is repairing the volume right now. I guess I just assumed that Mac OS would have done the same thing as operating systems like Linux and periodically run fsck or the equivalent. Looking back though, I can see why that’s not the case.

Hopefully, everything will go ok and I’ll be able to actually get Tiger to install before I head off to the WXYC 80s Dance tonight. I’m working a merch shift from 1-2am, but I think I’ll head over early. Now that there are these problems with this paper that I’ve invested so much time and stress in over the last few weeks, I really just need to take a break from the insanity for at least one night.

Website Weirdness

So, last week my domain name expired and the ISP forgot to renew it (even though I had paid to do so already). That caused the site to redirect to some error page. Even after they fixed things, that address was cached in the DNS servers of my cable ISP, which meant I couldn’t access the site (although practically everybody else not on Road Runner could). Very annoying, but things are working again more or less.

Lately, I’ve been scrambling to get this Pacific Graphics paper finished and out. I have a draft now, but I still need to produce some more screen shots and other diagrams.

The WXYC 80s Dance as well as the Departmental Picnic are on Saturday, so hopefully I can get the paper done in time to attend both of those. Then it’ll be on to more work to finish my remaining course projects.

Trackback Spam

Arg. I keep getting these weird spam trackback comments containing hexadecimal strings. Even though I turned off trackbacks earlier, that appears to be how they’re infiltrating my blog. Anyhow, I’ve totally disabled that script. Annoying for sure. Who writes these things anyways?

In other news… I have so much work to do. Project for Physically-based modeling, project for scientific visualization and a paper for Pacific Graphics 2005. Then I have a listening assignment for WXYC. Plus, I will need to work a bit during the 80s Dance at the Cat’s Cradle on April 30th, which coincidentally is the same day as the Pacific Graphics deadline. Well, at least I’m keeping busy, I suppose.

From the survey I filled out on a site linked from Kendra K’s Blog:

Who should I vote for?

Labour -22
Conservative -6
	Liberal Democrat 24
	UK Independence Party 17
	Green 24

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

You should vote: Green

The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Kickball

So I went to the annual WXYC/WXDU kickball game. Unfortunately we lost but fortunately I didn’t get out on a fly ball like Bev did (ha!). Much fun was had by all I think and the weather was really great in Durham today (sunny and in the 60s). Spring and fall are really awesome seasons here.

In other news, I’ve been on this new weird (or normal) sleep schedule where I actually go to bed at a reasonable hour and get up at a reasonable hour. For a while, I was being a lot more productive this way, but that seems to have dropped off a bit lately. None the less, overall I do enjoy being awake during the vast majority of the daylight hours, so I’m planning to stick with it. Also, I’ve been trying to get in at least 30 minutes of exercise each day by walking to school or just biking around. It has helped me fall asleep when it’s time to go to bed and also helped me deal with stress. Looking back, I should have started doing this a long time ago, but certainly better late than never. At some point, I’m planning on adding swimming to my regimen. I’d like to take some adult swimming lessons to better learn proper technique. As far as I can figure out, grad students aren’t allowed to take PE classes, which sucks since we obviously still have to pay the same fees and tuition. The YMCA seems to offer something though and that’ll probably work better in the summer anyways.

NSF

Well, it turns out I didn’t win an NSF fellowship this year, but I did get an honorable mention. $30K/year for 3 three years would have been very nice, but I guess I’ll have to settle for runner up. Why does that evoke images of that Simpsons where Lisa has a nightmare about playing with Garfunkel, Oates, and Messina their number two hit “Born to Runner Up”?

So close and yet so far. Oh well, I guess I shouldn’t be too bummed out since I do have normal RA funding from my advisor. A guy could do a lot worse.

OpenGL Madness

Arg. It’s 7:20am and I’m still awake. I spent the better part of the night trying to texture these spheres for my COMP 259 homework. Just as I was almost done, insanity set in: the spheres were rendering with their textures inside out. After much googling, I found some post from 2001 on some Apple developer site, but the responses didn’t resolve the question. I have come to the conclusion that gluSphere must be tesselating a sphere into triangles with a clock-wise orientation, which is the opposite of what the rest of OpenGL does. This might seem inconsequential to most of my readers, but it means that instead of showing the front of the sphere when you’re looking at the front, you instead see the back. I’m not sure if this is intentional or some obscure bug or what. For now though, telling OpenGL that clockwise faces are on the front seems to have solved the problem.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that I can’t find this really mentioned anywhere on the web or Usenet. The man page in gluSphere does mention that the normals of the generated sphere tesselation will point inwards unless a different setting is used (which doesn’t change the effects though), but never once does it say to change the face culling if you want it to work with the rest of OpenGL (and who doesn’t want that?). Strangely, the man page for glutSolidTeapot explicitly says you have to do the following:


BUGS
The teapot is greatly over-tesselated; it renders way too slow.
OpenGL's default glFrontFace state assumes that front facing polygons
(for the purpose of face culling) have vertices that wind counter
clockwise when projected into window space. This teapot is rendered
with its front facing polygon vertices winding clockwise. For OpenGL's
default back face culling to work, you should use:



glFrontFace(GL_CW);
glutSolidTeapot(size);
glFrontFace(GL_CCW);



Both these bugs reflect issues in the original aux toolkit's teapot
rendering routines (GLUT used the same teapot rendering routine).


I honestly wonder why this is the case. There must be some sort of story based on backwards compatability or something.