- Bored. Full of home made kebabs but wanting entertaining this week. #
- Being a good boy and writing unit tests for the gobjectification of Firtree. #
- Good grief. GTK-doc is horrible. Why can’t there already be some nice CMake magic which makes the horror end. #
- http://tinyurl.com/cmakecuda <- Making CMake understand CUDA. #
- typedef struct { float x, y; } point_s; <- This must be the n-hundred-th time I’ve added one of these to a library. #
- #define POINT_IS_EQUAL(a,b) … <- and one of these. #
- Been at the Mitre having nice drinks. Had some strange green (as in colour) beer. #
- If anyone fancies giving me a big cuddle, I could do with one :). #
- http://www.khronos.org/opengl/ <- OpenGL 3.1 spec released. #
- Gently wibbly on homebrew. Not quite as broken as I have been. #
- Pleasing. Facebook chat is Jabber based… #
- http://tinyurl.com/55yyss <- Facebook chat with pidgin (or install the pidgin-facebookchat package in Ubuntu). #
- http://tinyurl.com/ch9k6m <- my machine wot I am making. Any resemblance to Johnny 5 is entirely coincidental. #
- Lordy. I am suprisingly drunk after regular Thursday Carlton Arms trip. #
- Curse you SSE2 for not having an ‘any’ and ‘all’ horizontal compare. #
- Making my code SSE-clean has resulted in a 30% speedup. Nice :). #
- http://tinyurl.com/cj825x <- Like dark magic. #
Archive for March, 2009
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-03-29
Sunday, March 29th, 2009Bidirectional path tracing
Saturday, March 28th, 2009Lalala. Procrastinating, moi? I added some bidirectional path tracing in which has doubled the effective maximum path length and also sped up the ray tracer by about a factor of two. Prettiness attached (note that the under arch areas are more filled in and that the image is less noisy).
Oh go on then
Saturday, March 28th, 2009Just because it was trivial, have a path-traced version. This uses the dumbest possible path tracing mechanism whereby a path is traced from eye out stochastically sampling BRDFs as it goes until it hits the light. The light is a uniformly glowing sky-sphere.
The simplicity of the renderer is reflected [no pun intended] in the fact that after 600 iterations/pixel it still looks noisy as hell :).
What else to does one do?
Saturday, March 28th, 2009I’ve been speeding up some things at work by writing (again) some code which lets an ordinary human get access to all the 4-way SIMD goodness of the various SSE implementations. Now, what does one do when one want to stress test this and is sitting at home? That’s right. You write a ray-tracer.
So a bit of hacking yesterday evening and this morning and I can finally call myself a man and claim to have written something that can render the ubiquitous Sponza atrium.
Of course this is just ray tracing. No fancy lighting or texture mapping for you dear boy.
Now I just need to resist doing some stochastic ray-tracing goodness with Metropolis Hastings.
Using the NVCC compiler with CUDA.
Monday, March 23rd, 2009Most of my personal projects now use Bazaar for source control and CMake as a build system. Recently I’ve been doing some CUDA stuff and had to add the support to CMake for nVidia’s CUDA compiler, NVCC.
In case anyone is interested, a simple tarball providing the CMake magic and an example of it’s use is available from my site.
Health warning: There is a big YMMV on this. This has only been tested on the machines here in the lab which are basically Ubuntu + CUDA 2.1. Patches adding support for other distros/OSs (e.g. Windows) welcome.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-03-22
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009- First practise for Edinburgh (An Improvised History of Absolutely Everything). Am now completely knackered after five hours of funniness. #
- Looked at all my old houses (and my current one) on Google Street View for Cambridge. Finished with it now. #
- http://tinyurl.com/cx723z <- What is the point in Twitter? Good question. #
Ding dong…
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009I’ll just leave this here:
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-03-15
Sunday, March 15th, 2009- Reading about the horror of Branch Delay Slots. #
- http://snipurl.com/awesomessd <- Best benchmarks evar! #
- Which geek wishes to become my 256th Facebook friend? #
Dear website operators
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009Dear 50% of the web,
The character ‘+’ does not make my email address invalid.
Love, Rich
In other news, congrats to Chris who narrowly got in before Ben to be the 256th friend :).
Calling all geeks (who are my friends)
Monday, March 9th, 2009The next person I friend on Facebook will become my 256th Facebook friend. Anyone sufficiently geeky to try for it? :)