Kurt's Weblog

Visu - Just ran into this program. Interesting screen shots. Earth science visualization. Err.. in French

Just finished Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card. Nothing beats the original ender's game, but still good.

How Things Are Made - a stanford meche website... could be cool.

I always forget address of the Students at SIO web page even if it is insanely simple.

The space shuttle 2003 accident final report came out today. Gotta see if it says anything interesting.

I always forget what books I've read. I just finished Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon. Also just read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Just joined friendster. Wee I officially have friends now.

Went to Magic Mountain yesterday. My favorite thing was the American Indian presentation. I was awesome how they mixed the person with overlayed graphics. How exactly did they do all that?

Nice. Gotta love it when a MicroSoft bug brings down the safety systems a nuke-power-plant. Here is the article.

Perhaps they could have used something like what SecureUX provides... some secure servers would be a good thing to have at a nuclear power plant even if you are behind a firewall. (My dad is VP of engineering!)

The Matrix special effects done right

roadnet is looking to have a realtime data display kinda like viz.

scons - a python based make system. Is it any good? I'm starting to go crazy with GNU Make. I'm really pretty good at makefiles, but arg!

more links... geovrml has a lot of good transform code in it at: geotransform

Just found out that I didn't make it to the semi-finals of the science of the Science/NSF visualization contest. They have yet to announce who won or have any samples of the projects, but when they do, they should be here.

Just met Dave Caress from MBARI. Dave was kind enough to quickly find and fix a bug in mbm_arc2grd for me... however, the moment was spoiled by the UCSD Police who gave his wife a ticket while she was waiting in the car. Anyway, the fix is grd2xyz in the mbm_arc2grd script should have "-H0" and not "-H6". That's it!

Also, got a glimps of his new 3D visualization tool. It's pretty speedy. One interesting component is that he doesn't let OpenGL do the shading. He does this himself before rendering.

I'm working on understanding exactly how the ani22 and ani21 code works for the KLY-2 Kappa Bridge. I remember now why I really do not like fortran. The land of gotos and line numbers. fortran reference for the Sun compiler.

AUV Competition

Spent yesterday with Sib at the 2003 AUV competition up a the SPAWAR pool. It was definitely a blast. I wish I had something like that available to me when I was an undergrad. I saw some really interesting designs there. I especially thought that the little PIC controlled bomblet was a clever design even if it turns out not to work. It was interesting that MIT used a frame as there overall construction unit.

I even got to help out a bit by trying to remember how to write Linux timing code to trigger off the 3 sonar pingers that are located at each of the 3 targets. Thanks to Alex and Dan for suggestions. Does anyone have some good (and simple) code to to IRQ based TTL edge detection on a parallel port? I tried parapin, but it hasn't been updated in three years, won't compile with current kernels, and it isn't clear how it does IRQ handling... I only found 2 lines that even have anything with IRQ in them. Where is it setting the callback function? Dan suggested Comedi, which looks powerful, but a little too much to whip up in a hour or two.

A note about timers! When using setitimer, remember that you can not use usleep at the same time. It uses the same timer. We also had some issues with the short time that we wanted to trigger the TTL pulse to the sonars. We wanted it short (like 5-10 ms), but with a standard redhat 9 with 2.4.20, we got about 25-26 ms as the minimum sleep time. Guess me needed the RML realtime patches to make it work. Sib instead used a look with sin cos in it to do a better delay. It now works great but it is now machine dependent with timing. outb is so unbelievably easy to use!

JP pointed me to dbSeabed and a book called "Ship Of Gold".

Band of the day: 4 Walls Falling. Tomorrow, Integrity is playing here in San Diego. Shea is about ready to pop.

Yesterday, I submitted a paper to IVS on -Core and Viz.

List Lizard
Death Assemblage

Lost in the land of data entry...

Just listening to an old CD... Bikini Kill. We'll see what I think. I've been listening to Madball a lot lately.

Just found old web snapshots from IMG that I'm going to put a portion of back online. I just submitted a paper on Viz to IVS on Friday, so I thought it would be appropriate to dig up some history behind it.

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