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Saturday, May 02 2009 @ 01:54 PM NZST |
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On Wednesday, I took part in the imagine cup NZ finals. I was technically team lead of PigeonGrape Productions, a team consisting of three other 3rd year software engineers: Shrikkanth Sreedharan, Jonathan Smith and Sutirtha Basak. I say technically because I think I pioneered a new leadership style: Lead by following*. Our industry mentor was Roger Ford of Innovise. To be perfectly honest, we didn't expect to make it to the finals, but the first round judges must have seen something they liked in our presentation. I have a feeling that, as much as anything, we made them laugh after a long day. In any case, we were one of the 6 teams that got into the New Zealand finals. So, we had to present in front of nearly 600 people. Which we did, wearing suits no less. We didn't place in the top 3, but did really step it up a notch for the finals. I think we can be proud of what we achieved, and we were crowd favourites (we made people laugh).
Our idea started off as a game for teaching physics, and gradually morphed into a play oriented teaching system based on community content and problem visualisation. In other words, we learnt how to talk things up. I might update this once there are some photos from the event.
* Believe it or not, there are actually advantages to "Lead by following". Everyone felt I was someone they could talk to about the project, be it good or bad. Even when team members hated each other, I would hear it from both sides. And I could usually get my way without people really noticing, if I actually wanted to. But most of the time I didn't. 1 comments
Most Recent Post: 05/21 03:06PM by BlindSide
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Thursday, April 09 2009 @ 11:04 PM NZST |
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Friday, January 02 2009 @ 11:08 PM NZDT |
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So I came back to my voxel renderer, played around with it a bit and had a hunch. I changed a 1 to a 2 and tada, sphere subtraction fixed! I haven't bothered to figure out exactly why, and maybe I never will. It currently doesn't keep the radii optimal or free any nodes that are no longer needed, so the more spheres you subtract the slower and more memory hungry it gets. But it looks right, and for minimal thinking and 0 effort, that's not bad!
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Sunday, December 07 2008 @ 06:19 PM NZDT |
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I've got normal vectors calculated in my voxel renderer again, and I'm working on the real-time sphere subtraction. The fact that it's a sparse volume makes that quite tricky. Rather than my typical hammering on the keyboard like a monkey until it works, I'm going to have to sit down and figure it out properly. But not right now. Right now, I'm going to show off some pictures.

This one is intended to convey that a 2048^3 volume is still freakin huge!

This one shows how sphere subtraction is still broken. Sadly.
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Saturday, December 06 2008 @ 11:50 PM NZDT |
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 I've had another attempt at sparse volumes for my voxel-like renderer. A bit late though, I've been thoroughly beaten to it. Not that surprising, considering how many years I've been chipping away at it (and, lately, just plain neglecting it).
This sparse volume is much simpler than previous attempts, and as such, works quite a bit better. I've got a 2048^3 volume working, with floating point radii, and it's taking around a gig of ram. And let me say this: You have no idea how big a 2048^3 volume is. Here's a picture:
You see each of the little squares on the left? They're 8 grid points across. Each 8^3 bunch of radii is coloured like a colour cube. There are artifacts, but I don't care at the moment. I'm tired. 2 comments
Most Recent Post: 12/10 09:25AM by Razor
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Sunday, November 02 2008 @ 12:16 AM NZDT |
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 So I've been thinking (boom). Not about the exam on Monday, no way that would happen. I've been thinking about how quite a few people live out of a USB memory stick/drive/key/dongle/whatever, especially at uni. Some people do it because they don't have a laptop and use a combination of lab and home computers. Some people do it even though they do have a laptop. For example me. To the point where I want to get a fancy shmancy memory card thingy that can still be used with USB, so I don't have an 8gb stick hanging off the side of my laptop all the time.
Money sinks aside, I see this sort of portable storage playing a big role in the near future of computing. It already is, you say? Yes, well, that's what tipped me off. But seriously, it's pretty limited at the moment. Most people don't put that many programs on their USB whatchamacallits. The reason for this, from what I've seen, is that a lot of programs just don't handle it very well. E.g. they use the registry (eww) or store stuff in your user or system directories that don't move when the program does. There's been some effort to sort this out, and half-assed operating system support for this kind of thing, but I ignored it all because it would take per-program effort. It seems to me the problem is being solved at the wrong level entirely.
The clean solution is to have an operating system on your USB, along with your user profile and so on, as a portable OS. Details after the break.
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Tuesday, October 14 2008 @ 12:10 AM NZDT |
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I figured out how to set up a subversion repository on my web host today. It was a bit tricky, because I use shared hosting which has no provisions for svn whatsoever. However, it turns out that ssh access to your server is all you really need to set it up. Host Monster does provide ssh access if you send them a photo of some ID, so it was all good.
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Sunday, September 14 2008 @ 09:32 PM NZST |
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I'd quite like to pretend the ACM programming competition didn't happen this year. But it did. We (One and a Half Engineers) came 6th in Auckland. I mean maybe that isn't bad, we solved 5 problems and the regional champions solved 7, but it's not what we've come to expect, and certainly not what we hoped for. We did better last year as first year underdogs (well, Chris wasn't first year). Life goes on I suppose, we still have a couple of years to win.
Update: Turns out there was some issue with problem C, which is pretty irritating for us - especially Iain, since it was his baby and we spent some time desperately searching for problems with it when we kept getting wrong answer back. Time that will never be refunded, even though we got it after rejudging. Anyway, that puts us up to 6 problems, 3rd in Auckland and 11th in the South Pacific. I feel much better about that.
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Monday, August 11 2008 @ 11:31 PM NZST |
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The New Zealand Programming Competition (NZPC) was held last Saturday (the 11th). This year my handsome team mates were Iain Dunning (again) and Jonothan Smith. We went by the name One and a half engineers. If I've told you about the results of this comp, chances are I've told you wrong. From the website:
Provisional Results
Top teams in each category are:
School - Whitespace Overloaded (from Hamilton) 52 pts
Tertiary Junior - Napoleon (U Canterbury) 52
Tertiary Intermediate - One and a Half Engineers (U Auckland) 182
Tertiary Open - Cantercoders (U Canterbury) 242
Open - solo (from ??) 183
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Sunday, July 27 2008 @ 08:34 PM NZST |
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 In my staggering around the interwebs, I found that the flipcode image of the day gallery is still online. The site as a whole died years ago. So I thought I'd share with you my only ever image of the day.
Flipcode IOTD
It's of the asteroids game I made for christmas 04. I wrote it almost from scratch, which was quite a feat and a great learning experience, but not the recommended way of completing a project quickly. Looking back, I'm proud of what I achieved back then, but I can't help but think: What would the me of then think of the me of now? He was secretly extremely arrogant (thought he was some sort of genius). He'd probably be fine with my job, if slightly disappointed it's not games related, and I doubt he'd have any qualms about my performance at uni. But I can imagine comments like "That's still your only playable 3d game? What the hell man! And don't forget who came up with your only good rendering algorithm". Yeah, well, stuff him. At least my unfinished projects don't leak so much memory.
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