Whilst creating some slides on Volume Rendering, I finally found an opportunity to use this graphics-flavored version of a silly internet meme. Original found in Two uses of Voxels in LittleBigPlanet 2′s Engine from SIGGRAPH 2011, Advances in Real-Time Rendering. PDF here.
I guess I did it for the lulz.
You did it again.
Yesterday my new phone arrived: a Motorola Atrix 4G, which should be a real upgrade from my trusty old HTC Wildfire. I bought it for €239 in an iBood sale. Pros where the big screen, dual core and 4G support. A possible contra was the doubt that any official Ice Cream Sandwich Android distribution would be released for the phone, but I wasn’t planning on sticking with the official updates anyway.
I’ll say it again: the unnecessary customizations vendors are pushing onto Android phones is what really irritates me. Motorola came up with a network called MotoBlur. Sigh.
Vendors, I don’t want to create an account on your private cloud and link my phone to your little part of the web forever. It’s a good thing that Google’s now requiring the default Holo theme for vendor phones with ICS.
Anyhow, here’s how it went. My phone came with Gingerbread 2.3.4, and a carrier firmware version 2.3.4-4.5.2A-74_OLE-25. Instructions behind the cut!
I spent the morning watching this hugely interesting talk about the TOR project and the censoring problems it had this year.It has been an important tool for dissidents and activists trying to get the truth out in an oppressive regime. The talk was given yesterday at the CCC’s crypto event by Roger Ingledine and Jacob Appelbaum (worth following on twitter).
Read up a bit on TOR (The Onion Router), adn then watch the video embedded below. Don’t stop there though – donate some money to the project, help out in the development and/or set up your own TOR relay!
I’ve been reading a lot lately about using voxels in CG. I’ve always been fascinated by ways of moving away from the traditional polygon-based pipeline, and things are really starting to look good for voxels.
Sampling all geometric and texture data on a regular grid allows for unique content, theoretically. No more repeating textures, pieces of scenery, … artists can basically create a scene and add little customizations to every object, without sacrificing rendering budget, as long as you’ve got a good way of streaming the right data to the GPU. Interesting work is done by Cyril Crassin on Gigavoxels, a paper which shows a working implementation of the Voxels-in-a-tree concept.
Dinosaurs and babes. Videoclip of the year?
I love CakePHP. It’s a PHP framework with a clear and strict Model / View / Controller (MVC) separation and a great abstraction layer for reading, updating and saving objects to the database. Recently, the CakePHP team released CakePHP 2.0, and I started updating my projects to this new version. Since it was my first big version jump with the framework, and a lot of substantial changes were made compared to the 1.3.x branch , I ran into some quibbles, which I thought would be nice to document here.
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Here’s some recent game graphics talks I’ve been enjoying.
First one is Carmack on Quakecon 2011 – it’s a very technical talk, but very interesting on how they do texture streaming on consoles, compared to pc systems.
Possibly the best sociopolitical song of the last decade.
Today, two of Belgium’s biggest operators, Telenet and Belgacom, got a court order to block the website ThePirateBay.org, and about 20 alternative URL’s to the same site. The court ordered them to do a DNS-level block of the domain names, which is easy to circumvent. I’m writing this post because I’m against censorship on the internet (this sets a dangerous precedent), not because I’m in favor of copyright infringement or other illegal activities.
Update: In a bold move to demonstrate how silly this kind of censorship is, The Pirate Bay is now also reachable at www.depiraatbaai.be. All tips in this article can still be used to be able to access the bay from the old URL and prevent further blocks.
Sources: Torrentfreak, Tweakers.net
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