Hezbollah

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2281184_3,00.html

Veggie Game

I'm not even going to look to see when the last time I posted anything here was. I've been... busy. Since the CS department here mostly has its students do simple command line Linux programs, I have been on a personal quest to create real Windows programs. For one of my classes last semester I created an "inpainting" program (to fill in holes in pictures). I really don't know what version that link is, but it's a real Windows program and that's what's important.

Recently, I just completed Veggie Game, to see if I could make a simple Windows game. It turned out rather well, I think, for a first version, and yes, there is a story behind it. You can download it here.

What's your high score?

Rex Lee Run

A friend convinced me last week to sign up for the annual Rex Lee Run, a 5K/10K run to benefit cancer research. I'd only gone on two runs in the last couple months before today and neither of them were very long (that's my excuse, anyway...), so I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do. I chose to run the 5K obviously, since I wasn't prepared at all and it turned out ok. The run starts off uphill for about a half mile and that wore me out pretty good but I managed to go about halfway (1.5 miles of 3.11) before I decided I'd better walk some if I wanted to make it to the end. So I walked for a while, then ran the last mile or so and ended up with a time of 33:12. Definitely not spectacular (I was beaten by a 70-year-old), but I felt pretty good about it since it was basically a dry run. I'm almost inspired to get in better shape and run the same route on my own and see what I get, but I don't know if that'll actually happen. At least I got a t-shirt out of it :) The official results of the 5K can be seen here.

Path Tracer Images

Here are some more images that I made for my graphics class. The last part of the assignment was to implement a technique called Path Tracing. It allows for diffuse light (light that bounces off randomly), which gives some cool effects. Unfortunately, it also takes more rays, thus time, to get a good looking image.

Simple image to test diffuse light. Sampled at 100 rays per pixel.

This shows how diffuse light causes color bleeding (the red and green showing up on non-reflective surfaces). Sampled at 529 rays per pixel.

Completely diffuse environment. Sampled at 1024 rays per pixel.

This tests diffuse interactions combined with reflective and refractive light. Notice the caustics (focused light), another feature of path tracing. Sampled at 1024 rays per pixel.

This image has no direct light source. It is lit completely by diffuse interactions with the background color. Sampled at 100 rays per pixel.

Diffuse and reflective surfaces. Notice the caustics. Sampled at 1024 rays per pixel.

Lots of polygons. Sampled at 100 rays per pixel.

Lots of polygons. Still the coolest 3D model out there. Sampled at 100 rays per pixel.

The last part of the project was to create our own 3D scene to render. For mine, I chose two well-known 3D scans from the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository and used a program called Maya to position them into this scene. I tried rendering a 1024-ray-per-pixel version, but after several days of computing, my program never wrote the output file. So here it is, sampled at 25 rays per pixel.

One of the downsides to path tracing is that it requires a lot of computation to get a good image. My custom image above took several days to render. Granted, my program probably was not the fastest, but another guy in the lab did his at desktop size and he used up to 10 computers for about a week.

The following images show how the image starts to improve with more rays.

Sampled at 1 ray per pixel.

Sampled at 10 rays per pixel.

Sampled at 100 rays per pixel.

Sampled at 1000 rays per pixel.

Ray Tracer Images

The big project for my graphics class has been a ray tracer and I've posted some of the images we had to render to pass off the project. It took forever to get it working, but it's fun to have such cool results. There's still one more step called path tracing that I'm working on right now. I'll try to post those when I'm done.

Shadow Tests - These images test soft shadows, interpolated normals

Lots of Spheres - These images test the bounding volume hierarchy (a speedup)

Jittering - These images test the effects of jittering: soft shadows, translucency, glossiness

Focus and Texture Map - These images test a simulated field of focus and texture mapping (the monkey)

Lots of Objects - These images test the speed of the program. The buddha has over 1 million triangles

Some Older Images - These are some simpler images from an earlier lab

Jeans

I realized a little while ago that unbeknownst to me, a new style of jeans has taken over. I take it as a sign that I'm getting old (no offense to you really old people) that such fashion trends can emerge, grow, and completely take over before I even notice them.

The epiphany came while riding the bus to campus. As I was sitting there in my standard blue jeans with the standard mottled pattern, I noticed that every other jeans-wearing person on the bus had on this new style. Not style of jeans, really, but style of denim. The fabric itself has the same diagonal, ridged texture to it, but instead of the mottled pattern it has subtle vertical stripes on a slightly predirtied denim blue color. It's a very minor difference, but obviously it has great importance, because everyone wears this new style with the exception of a certain oblivious blogger. Now that I've noticed, I've looked to see if others have been making the same gaffe, but apparently everyone else got the memo (or have girls present when shopping).

I thought about this for a while and I decided that I'm still too young to be like my dad and wear khakis with black socks and white tennis shoes, or today's equivalent: non-vertically-striped jeans. So I bought a pair of new jeans. They have that loose non-narrow leg look, that dingy brownish blue color, and most importantly the oh-so-important subtle vertical stripes. Now I can look forward to being cool at least once or twice a week. Until the style changes again, of course.

Ray Tracer

For my computer graphics class, the first assignment was to implement a ray-tracing algorithm with Phong shading to render 3D scenes. In English, that means to create a picture from numerical descriptions of objects (sphere, polygon, etc) by mimicking the way real light bounces off of objects. It's actually relatively easy (relative is, of course, a relative term) and produces some cool images. This was just the first assignment and we'll be improving upon it throughout the semester, so hopefully I'll have some cooler pictures to post later this semester.

Christmas Break Recap

Winter Semester 2006 has started. And that means the Christmas break must be over. It's amazing how fast time flies when you sleep it away. Actually, despite the wonderfully long bedtime hours, it was probably the most productive holiday I've ever had.

I decided to stay in Utah as anyone who is reading this no doubt already knows. It is expensive to fly home and with Dan & Hyde so close it gave me a good excuse to stay here. I went to their place in Layton several times during the break. Before Christmas I went up I think two weekends and we watched the Redskins win some games on their way to the playoffs. They have since won their wild-card playoff game :)

I spent Christmas with Dan & Hyde. Since I had come up Christmas Eve, I was able to be Santa Claus and put out the presents while they were all gone to a family event (Hyde's family). When they got home, the kids were of course very excited and in Guatemalan tradition they opened all their presents that night. I guess technically they were supposed to wait until midnight, but there was no sense in making the kids wait. I got a BB air pistol from my thoughtful parents and a Target gift card from D & H. The next day Hyde made a very nice Christmas dinner after morning church, and I stayed one more day while Dan still had work off. He has an identical air pistol so we shot up some cans in the backyard. Overall I had a very nice Christmas, but it was still kind of sad realizing I am essentially alone still.

After Christmas I stopped by to see my friend Annie. She was stuck in northern Utah (Centerville) at her parents' house and was begging me to come over and play. Plus, her family had volunteered at the food bank and I'd been wanting to do something service-like with all my free time. The food bank turned out to be quite enjoyable. We sorted two large palettes of collected food into smaller shippable boxes and made sure they were the correct weight. Once we got into a rhythm we really started moving some food. There was another group of people there and we beat them handily :)

For New Year's Eve I went to a little party hosted by a friend of a friend that turned out to be a lot of fun. I played a cool game I hadn't seen before called Blokus, and as a bigger group we played Boggle right up until midnight. The new year was celebrated with Martinelli's, Auld Lang Syne, toasting, and sparklers.

Just about every other waking second (hyperbole for sure, but that's what it seemed like) was spent in front of my laptop making databases. I'd had to put off my loyal customers for the last month or so of school to stay up with my schoolwork, so they were chomping at the bit with a lot more work. With the work I did over the break alone I earned more than enough to pay for this semester's tuition, thus the productive holiday I mentioned earlier. Since I already had about that amount saved up, I should be able to pay off my last three car payments now as well and be totally debt free. And they still have more work for me to do. I did some very nice work (I do say so myself, but I'm sure you'd agree if you saw it) and the money's nice but I'm sick of seeing Access even when I close my eyes. At least now I have school to use as an excuse to put it off :)

Speaking of school, it has started, despite convincing arguments from my brain that it shouldn't have. It has turned out really well so far, though, so I can't complain... yet. I'm taking two classes - CS 750 (Computer Vision 2) and CS 655 (Computer Graphics 2). Both are graduate level, which in some ways is bad (lots of greek letters), but in others is quite nice (less busywork homework). This semester I'm also going to really dive into researching for my Master's thesis. I will be TA for CS 100 for about 5 hours a week (like last semester) but instead of TAing another class I am being paid to "research" for 15 hours a week. I get to just read up on articles and papers and topics that interest me, try out some ideas, see what other people in my research lab are doing, etc. I'm looking forward to it. It's something I tried, and failed miserably, to do with a full schedule last semester, so having the time set aside will be great.

Vinsanity

A great article about the over-hyping of Vince Young: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/colleges/13584508.htm