January 16, 2012
Sometimes the origins of technical terminalogy can be surprising. This article describes my experience with an aquarium, a squirrel, and a piece of glass.
December 6, 2010
But Only If You’re A Chicken. [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXUeO3auRZg&feature=player_embedded[/tube] This video has been around for a while, but there may be something to learn from chickens yet. Watch in amazement as this chicken’s head remains precisely located in space regardless of the motion of its body. Then be amazed that you sat and watched a chicken for […]
November 18, 2010
The main problem with developing working warp drive apparently isn’t the math. We’ve figured that part out. What we need, though, is an unimaginably monumental supply of energy to power the thing. The spokesman for CERN’s ALPHA experiment—Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University, Denmark—says that trapping these atoms was a bit of an overwhelming experience: What’s […]
October 12, 2010
A new technique developed by Germany’s Technische Universität allows elements to be removed from video images in real time. They’re purportedly working on a version of this that runs in Android, so I may be able to try this for myself on my Droid phone soon. Watch the YouTube video and be amazed. [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgTq-AgYlTE[/tube] – […]
October 11, 2010
Those of you who have read and enjoyed speculative fiction all their lives, take note of this newest development. The J. Craig Venter institute has created the first synthetic self-replicating species whose parent is a computer. It carries the names of its creators and its own web site encoded directly into its DNA. It is […]
November 17, 2004
I start another life drawing class in about a week, and I’m brushing up on my Maya chops. Soon I’ll be able to run with the big dogs. In the meantime, check out the code page – I’ve finally fixed the problem with the nGene source code that prevented it from compiling cleanly on Linux […]
January 22, 2003
The nGENE Here’s the source code and compiled binaries for my little OpenGL engine, which I have named the “nGene” after a suggestion by a coworker. It’s a little odd as engines go in that it loads Lightwave 6.x (or greater) scene and model files and renders them, and then lets you fly a camera […]
September 23, 2002
I am nearing completion of a small suite of plugins for a commercial client – what an adventure that’s been! I was writing Lightwave plugins to translate STL object model format into Lightwave model format, while preserving the materials attributes (raw STL doesn’t support materials). Then I had to write a new shader to render […]