As someone who has been battling for an evening and a half to get a minimal TeX implementation up and going on a web server can I just recommend MimeTeX as the solution to all the problems in the Universe. Now if only I found this before trying to roll my own distribution…
Archive for July, 2006
Public service announcement
Thursday, July 27th, 2006Brain… so broken
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006Now when young men reach that age where being a man with a mortgage, pension plan, long term girlfriend and ‘parties’ that end at midnight where everyone is an established couple doesn’t seem so far away they go through a kind of ‘third-life crisis’. During said crisis they find that suddenly there are a large number of younger attractive girls in tight tops and bubbly independent attitudes hurting their brain.
The specific hurt is that you know that you shouldn’t act like some sort of semi-sentient brains-in-trousers window drooler but somehow you can’t quite stop yourself from watching Look East just for Julie the weathergirl.
On to the subject of my post. I also know that we should admire these young ladies for their dancing and miming talents but I can’t quite stop my little caveman voice from suggesting I increase the ambient aquaeous ions[1] on my keyboard.
Also, just to really piss everyone off, I’ll include one of their videos via the magic of Google video.
[1] BOFH-speak for drool into it.
Update: It appears my blog-to-LJ cross-poster strips magicness so I’ll settle for a link to the video.
Browser stats
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006Well our site has now been hammered with 15GB of traffic. Luckily Google video have started hosting the vid so it should trail off. People might be interested in the browser and OS stats from the past 48 hours though. I have no idea what this stats software counts as a ’session’ though.
Radiosity 2
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006Well we launched our radiosity algorithm on the world at 9am this morning. It is eight hours later and our poor little web server has spewed 6.23GB to the world. We’ve already had people a) not believing us and b) thinking we’re using a popular algorithm (PRT) which we aren’t. For anyone reading this (and suprisingly the biggest referrer to our site is my blog!) here are some FAQ answers.
- Does it handle dynamic geometry?
- Not yet but this isn’t forced by the algorithm, just our implementation.
- Is it real?
- In that we just hand the model to our precompute + renderer yes. No tricks, all the stuff you see in the video is real in that it wasn’t authored.
- How long is the precompute?
- It depends on the scene, for the scene in the movie for a HQ precompute one would get some pocket change out of half-an-hour.
What oi ‘av been working on - Realtime radiosity
Monday, July 10th, 2006For the past few months at work we’ve been working on something which I personally think is quite revolutionary. We’ve been working on a real time radiosity algorithm. Modern renderers achieve their realistic look by not only modeling light coming direct from lamps (so-called ‘direct’ illumination) but also that reflected from surfaces which themselves are illuminated. It is this effect that gives subtle effects like a red ball making a wall it is next to appear slightly redder. Previous global illumination algorithms have been anything other than real time but now we’ve got one that works at nearly 100 frames per second!
Enough of this. Here is a pretty video. It should play in anything that supports MPEG4 (QuickTime on Windows and Mac and mplayer on Linux for example). I’ve poured blood, sweat and tears into this demo movie today trying to get all the various encodings right (and getting something that Windows Media Player might actually play out of the box). Have fun!
The image is a link to the video.
More pretty screenshots are available on my employer’s website.
Update: And there is a press release too :).