irclog2html for #brlcad on 20070123

01:13.55 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * 10brlcad/ (1348 files in 82 dirs): (log message trimmed)
01:13.55 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: Sweeping license updates. Documentation is fully relicensed to the BSD
01:13.55 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: Documentation License (a minor variant of the FreeBSD Documentation License and
01:13.55 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: BSD License). All GPL code (mostly application code) is converted to the LGPL
01:13.55 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: and now also specifically declares version 2.1, revoking the blank check to the
01:13.58 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: FSF. The intent of these sweeping changes are to simplify the licensing terms
01:14.00 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: and increase overall flexibility of use, both externally (to users for their
01:14.23 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * 10brlcad/src/ (409 files in 16 dirs): (log message trimmed)
01:14.23 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: Sweeping license updates. Documentation is fully relicensed to the BSD
01:14.23 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: Documentation License (a minor variant of the FreeBSD Documentation License and
01:14.23 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: BSD License). All GPL code (mostly application code) is converted to the LGPL
01:14.24 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: and now also specifically declares version 2.1, revoking the blank check to the
01:14.26 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: FSF. The intent of these sweeping changes are to simplify the licensing terms
01:14.28 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: and increase overall flexibility of use, both externally (to users for their
01:16.27 ``Erik O.O
02:10.42 Maloeran Confirmed by Mark, they did look into non-immigration visas too. Oh well, I guess it's time to get that degree paper thing
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10:02.52 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: 03d_rossberg * 10brlcad/src/other/libregex/libregex.dsp:
10:02.52 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: not a BRL-CAD core library
10:02.52 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: remove misleading multibyte-character support
10:04.43 clock_ What does -a mean in pix-png? It seems to not have a manpage.
10:05.01 clock_ Turn upside down? Or 16-bit input?
10:07.14 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: 03d_rossberg * 10brlcad/src/other/openNURBS/opennurbs.dsp:
10:07.14 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: ignore opennurbs_zlib_memory.cpp in win32-msvc build
10:07.14 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: we do not need the openNURBS wrapper functions zcalloc() and zcfree() since we're just letting zlib do it's own thing
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11:49.46 brlcad noir:~ morrison$ man brlcad/src/util/pix-png.1 | grep autosize -a autosize the input file to determine file image height and width
11:56.27 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: 03brlcad * 10brlcad/NEWS: write up a summary of the recent sweeping license changes. i.e. describe gpl->lgpl and gfdl/gpl->bdl as well as the motvations, impact, and intent.
11:56.39 brlcad basically -a means "try to figure out how big the file is", which is only useful if your image has "standard" common dimensions and it guesses correctly.
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14:08.03 ``Erik heh
14:45.20 ``Erik eh?
17:21.30 CIA-5 BRL-CAD: 03johnranderson * 10brlcad/src/librtserver/rtserver.c: Java Partition objects now include entrance and exit surface normals
17:49.39 clock_ lol Java
17:49.48 clock_ and BRL-CAD goes downhill too :)
18:15.39 Maloeran Woah, there's a Java interface for librt o.O
18:17.43 Maloeran Ah yes, it's for MUVES of course
18:19.33 Maloeran Don't worry clock_, I'll try not to let anyone write a Java interface for the new raytracer :)
18:24.38 brlcad clock_: that's been in there for several years, jni wrapper to a subset of librt
18:26.07 brlcad Maloeran: good luck -- that's actually the next generation muves 3 there that uses the jni interface, not muves-s2
18:26.49 brlcad but then with that interface, there's a *lot* more room for flexibility and marshalling of data in and changing/defining the api
18:27.28 brlcad that's certainly not on this year's agenda I'd have to guess though
18:27.57 Maloeran brlcad, it's just that it implies performing the "shading" in Java ; which, as you know, will make performance collapse
18:50.47 ``Erik the 'shading' being done in the C variant has no performance, so there's a possibility that a java version may be faster...
18:51.12 ``Erik not the one actually being worked on, but *A* version might be...
18:51.13 ``Erik O:-)
19:34.09 Maloeran Erik, can I "safely" assume floats are always 4 bytes and doubles 8 bytes? ( flipping endianess of floats between nodes )
19:36.14 Maloeran It checks if the floating point encoding is the same between the platforms of course, but I'm wondering if different widths exist
19:50.21 ``Erik I don't think the C spec makes any assertion on width of float or double?
19:50.47 ``Erik hm, k&r is showing bunches of different bitwidths for, uh, ... all C types
19:51.14 ``Erik I can't think of a machine that doesn't use 32 and 64 bits ieee754/854 for float and double
19:51.23 ``Erik a modern one, that is
19:51.42 ``Erik I mean, the honeywell 6000 used 36 and 72
19:55.58 Maloeran Ahah, cool.
19:56.23 Maloeran I know that C doesn't garantee anything on floating point datatypes, but I still need to flip bytes somehow
19:56.59 Maloeran I was wondering if some arch could have used 8 and 16 bytes floats/doubles, or the same width for both, etc.
19:57.23 ``Erik ieee754 is the standard that describes bit packing and width
19:57.50 ``Erik mebbe, I saw mention of "half precision" floats using 16b that might be going into ieee754
19:57.55 ``Erik and quad precision with 128b
19:58.42 ``Erik um, intel, amd, and ibm/ppc are all ieee754 fpu equiped...
19:59.10 Maloeran I have alternative paths to handle non-ieee floats anyhow, it's just the width I was wondering about
19:59.36 ``Erik (bear in mind, intel 386's usually came without an fpu, you have to shove in an x387 or get a 386dx for fpu hw, otherwise the c compiler faked it... common availability ofa n fpu is still pretty new)
19:59.49 ``Erik if it's not ieee754, then all bets are off on width
20:01.55 Maloeran It still requires storage in memory somehow, so it's likely to be some 2-4-8-16 bytes wideness
20:02.17 ``Erik most machines are these days... several were 36 bit words
20:04.05 ``Erik hrm, looks like the cell uses ieee... at least, they say it supports their rounding modes
20:04.27 ``Erik and since ibm has the modules for ieee754 for their ppc's, I can't see them not reusing it
20:05.02 Maloeran It's really just the width I was concerned about, non-ieee is already handled
20:05.20 ``Erik I'm going to imagine that for the target hardware, it's ok to make those assumptions
20:05.36 Maloeran The graph preparation code plays right in the binary representation of floats/doubles, if it's IEEE
20:05.42 ``Erik ieee specifies widths, so it's all good
20:05.43 Maloeran Right, thanks
20:06.22 ``Erik damn this code is retarded :/
20:07.04 Maloeran Are you working on the raytracing comparison framework?
20:07.09 ``Erik yeah
20:08.12 ``Erik loading a 'geometry' file in this thing involves setting up a new tcl interpreter, shoving crap into it, then deleting it... instead of using the one already running
20:08.30 Maloeran Strange...
20:08.44 Maloeran By the way, did Lee obtain the leave to complete his doctorate or not?
20:08.59 ``Erik it's still being looked at, heh
20:09.33 ``Erik someone had an ego writing this thing, too
20:09.49 ``Erik mebbe I should start doing that... struct mything_s *erik;
20:10.00 Maloeran Ahaha
20:11.02 Maloeran Have you considered stepping up to take Lee's place, if he leaves? I think you said you weren't interested
20:12.34 ``Erik <-- just a lowly db2, that's a db4 position
20:12.58 ``Erik also; I've pissed off the fucktards in mgmt as much as anyone else
20:13.22 Maloeran At the indian restaurant in Baltimore, Lee said he was looking for a competent person to take his place if he leaves, and he would gladly give it to someone like you
20:13.40 Maloeran Though I don't know, I'm not too aware of what's going there
20:21.31 ``Erik heh, there's political bs in the way *shrug*
20:21.56 ``Erik plus I d'no think I'd be interested in ever doing what he does... meetings and ties ain't mah thang
20:24.15 dtidrow_work what a heretical idea... ;-)
20:28.35 ``Erik blah->destructor(blah); stinks, I'd rather see blah_destructor(blah); :/
20:29.16 Maloeran Unless that destructor varies a lot based on the state of "blah", a function pointer does the job then
20:32.17 ``Erik blah is malloc'd, so you'd have to free() it after calling that destructor (or declare it on the stakc and pass &blah, which'd be much neater)
20:32.18 ``Erik imma rewrite all this shit in lithp one of thethe dayth
20:33.24 Maloeran By the way, is that blocking one-ray-at-a-time interface threaded? In that design, I would somewhat need an arbitrary pointer per thread to keep track of state on a per-thread basis...
20:34.00 Maloeran Single threaded, globals would do I guess
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20:35.25 ``Erik I was hoping to talk to lee about extending the interface to allow bundled shtuff
20:35.45 ``Erik and maybe feeding that back to the codemonkeys on the retarded side of the fence
20:35.55 ``Erik but he's out today
20:37.40 Maloeran Bundled, non-blocking with callbacks, letting me do the threading would be nice. An interface allowing intelligent management of ray sources and displacements would be a blessing
20:38.11 Maloeran Anyhow, I'll try to make up something that works no matter the interface you give me
20:39.00 ``Erik *shrug* the sales pitch was about integrating it into a specific program, so I'm gonna give you as close to their interface as I can
20:39.21 ``Erik changing it much is going to get them up in a knot and either fighting it or not using it
20:54.25 brlcad the initial approach of getting it working with the interface that is already in place, for better or worse, is still the best first step for various reasons
20:55.45 ``Erik *nod*
20:55.59 ``Erik this code makes me want to run away o.O
20:56.36 brlcad adding non-blocking callbacks to librt might be the next step, showing how it would change interaction with librt .. get them to understand/adopt those changes
20:57.28 brlcad now how non-blocking results would actually be beneficial to the various algorithms the other codes are using is where I could easily see there being big problems
20:58.28 ``Erik their fundamental design is very serial and it hasn't aged well :/
20:58.50 brlcad it makes sense for a ray intersection engine to answer asynchronously, but then ray-tracing in general can trivially compute asychronous as most of the computations are pretty much independent
20:59.48 brlcad their design isn't independent, just about everything depends on something else, very serial, very much a "how thick is this region" and they can't really ask any more questions or do anything without guessing blinding until they get that answer
21:01.59 brlcad part of it is their design, but part of it is also the domain and approach of the algorithms (which predominantly is neither their responsibility or in their domain of expertise to be designing)
21:02.56 ``Erik <-- thinks it could be just as parallelizable as raytracing if it were described in terms of shading opposed to what they do now
21:03.06 ``Erik *shrug*
21:04.00 ``Erik yeah, each ray would be a fair bit heavier to compute, but if ya shoot 10,000 non-interacting primaries, it should theoretically scale linearly on a 10,001 cpu machine
21:04.32 brlcad it probably could be, it correlates closely for some interactions
21:05.23 brlcad but you don't convince someone riding a bike about the benefits of driving a car by trying to force them into the seat and telling them how much their bike sucks ;)
21:05.53 brlcad there's plenty of downsides (from their perspective) that are entirely relevant
21:06.01 Maloeran Quite right, slaming a car door in his face is so much more effective :)
21:06.17 ``Erik mal: your bike sucks
21:06.18 ``Erik :D
21:06.27 dtidrow_work who's 'they', btw?
21:06.38 brlcad brl-cad's primary user
21:06.54 dtidrow_work heh
21:06.55 brlcad the vulnerability/lethality analysis developers
21:07.05 ``Erik heh, "vlad"
21:07.15 ``Erik dealing with the current crop sure does suck the life out of ya
21:07.20 ``Erik O:-)
21:07.25 Maloeran Non-blocking sure would be nice, but especially, processing of rays in batches
21:09.37 brlcad sure, Maloeran .. but when their entire problem-space is for a given algorithm is just a handful of dependent rays (done over and over, with dependencies at each step) .. it's like telling someone that's eating a salad at a local diner that they could have a much bigger salad if they bought in bulk at the local sams club
21:09.59 ``Erik s/analogies/ ...
21:10.01 ``Erik :D
21:10.01 brlcad they simply wouldn't care .. at all .. no matter how many heads of lettuce they can get for a buck
21:10.07 Maloeran Yes, I got the idea. If they need to know A before doing B, and B before doing C ; we should process 50000 A rays, followed by 50000 B and C
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21:10.40 ``Erik we get the same issue (sorta), mebbe WORSE in the "hall of mirrors" scenario
21:11.16 brlcad they can be convinced to change their shopping and eating habits, but that's a long-term issue frankly pretty much outside the scope of the project
21:11.32 Maloeran If we imagine global illumination where rays bounce around constantly, we don't want to follow one single ray until the end
21:11.56 Maloeran We could process the first hit for 4000 rays, second hit for the same bouncing 4000 rays, etc.
21:12.28 ``Erik for optical, that's fine..
21:12.45 ``Erik but, y'knw, if an optical ray hits glass, you shoot two secondaries and mix the result
21:12.51 ``Erik they shoot several hundred
21:13.27 Maloeran I would have used probabilities to decide which way it goes, but that works too
21:13.50 ``Erik (but that's ok, they could do those several hundred in parallel, and they could do all their primaries in parallel)
21:13.53 ``Erik y'know, if they chose to
21:14.23 ``Erik *shrug*
21:14.39 Maloeran So the problem could be re-engineered, but it's not going to happen so we have to handle individual blocking rays. All right
21:15.25 brlcad this is like the bi-weekly bitch-fest isn't it?
21:15.34 ``Erik oh yeah
21:15.45 ``Erik if I gotta deal with their code, you'll hear me go off.
21:16.00 ``Erik and I gotta deal with their code.
21:16.08 dtidrow_work lol
21:16.41 brlcad you know, nobody really disagrees -- and it's not even a new idea to question the way they do what they do and point out how it could/should be better .. been that way for decades
21:17.13 brlcad but it's mostly pointless, or at least impractical without actually working hand-in-hand with them for weeks to make a change happen (and that just isn't going to happen either anytime soon)
21:17.14 Maloeran I realize you are tired of hearing it over and over, when you can't do much about it
21:17.23 ``Erik I know, and that's why everyone on the second floor is doing what they're doing
21:17.33 brlcad right, and that worked out great
21:17.43 brlcad :)
21:17.44 ``Erik but, y'know, they're wrong, everyone's a moron, only I'm right :D *duck*
21:17.54 dtidrow_work lol
21:18.22 ``Erik (my award winning attitude, that's why all the users adore me :D )
21:19.34 dtidrow_work brlcad: ``Erik's public lynching is next week, right? ;-)
21:19.35 brlcad attitude did more to the performance than java or the architecture itself ever did
21:19.56 ``Erik at least thte activity of exploration into what the old software does and why, with the documentation... that's a good thing.. a step in the right direction. when that's done, maybe an appropriate replacement can be started
21:20.52 ``Erik the architecture when viewed from orbit seems ok, up close it's ... nonoptimal
21:22.04 ``Erik probably a combo of too many people working on it too early and too much "ooh shiney" without the opportunity to assess and fix (or remove) some mistakes
21:22.05 ``Erik :)
21:22.22 ``Erik *gripebitchcomplain*
21:23.43 brlcad dtidrow_work: nah, he does enough to torture himself by not speaking out (at least tactfully) when it matters .. but then he's also partially escaped the sphere of influence so he doesn't have to be involved as much
21:23.56 dtidrow_work heh
21:24.50 brlcad riight, you're about as tactful as a box of tacks
21:24.58 brlcad :)
21:25.03 ``Erik trained attack tacks
21:25.10 dtidrow_work rofl
21:28.12 Maloeran As Caligula Ceasar walked among his lowly people anonymously, what a difference it would make if a manager were to listen here. He could even claim the ideas to "fix" these doomed projects were his own
21:33.00 Maloeran Erik, do you have any idea if Lee had plans for me after this task? No need to ask him, I'm just wondering because SURVICE apparently plans to keep me busy
21:33.03 brlcad not likely, because it's still not taking all the considerations into account that all become part of the issue.. mitigation of risks, not just doing things for academic purity (who the f*ck cares if it's not perfect, it does the job and does it well), the time/money/resources it would take to change it in a major way, documenting the new approach, *validating* that you really are 100% sure you didn't F-something up (the are-you-willing-to-bet-y
21:34.58 ``Erik mal: I'm sure he does, whether or not he can execute them is nto necessarily in his power... and competent coders aren't exactly a common beast, if they can figure out how to make money off of you, they'll try to do it *shrug*
21:35.34 ``Erik once ya got a little paid experience on your cv, it's not hard to stay working *shrug*
21:36.27 Maloeran Well sure, SURVICE has plans. I would personally prefer to work with you guys somehow, if you are fine with that
21:36.48 ``Erik <-- doesn't have any say in anything, one way or the other *shrug*
21:37.10 brlcad if you had a specific task in mind, that would make selling a point a whole lot easier -- I have several in mind myself that I could raise
21:37.50 ``Erik hm, the an/fsq-7 was kinda big
21:38.17 brlcad que?
21:39.10 ``Erik old computer, 2000m^2 floor space (half an acre)
21:40.03 brlcad ahh
21:40.05 ``Erik and wifi to boot
21:42.23 brlcad Maloeran: the next thing I'd think would be cool to try and implement would be 1) a global illumination renderer using your tracer as a basis and 2) try to apply the same evaulation approach directly to implicit geometry
21:43.16 brlcad and perhaps 3) a variety of shaders maybe implementing the renderman shader interface
21:43.42 ``Erik heh, to see how bad bmrt's butt can get whupped? :D
21:44.07 brlcad maybe for starters :)
21:44.51 Maloeran brlcad, the whole raytracer was initially designed to solve high-performance global illumination, so I would be very interested in that
21:45.07 brlcad at the order of magnitude he's got, if it could be sustained, he could even potentially give some of the big names a run for their money
21:45.14 Maloeran It's really designed for that problem specifically. Though I wonder, what use would that be for the ARL?
21:45.28 ``Erik making pretty pictures?
21:45.39 brlcad Maloeran: signal processing, signatures, pretty pictures, pretty animations, etc
21:46.24 ``Erik adrt has "rise" for path tracing, and it cooked a good bit of cpu time here for pretty pictures :)
21:46.26 brlcad add support for multispectral energies and you can suddently generate real radar, infrared, microwave images
21:47.01 Maloeran All right. SURVICE wants traversal of tetrahedron graphs with per-tetrahedron ray refraction implemented too
21:47.06 brlcad rise was very much brute force, but very much "sells the cake" because the results look great
21:47.19 brlcad ew
21:47.20 ``Erik heh, yeah, and radiated energy distribution (like figuring out cell phone coverage, for example)
21:47.28 brlcad sounds finite elementish
21:47.54 brlcad i bet that's exactly what they want it for actually .. hm
21:48.07 ``Erik per-tetrahedron ray refraction? O.o
21:48.20 Maloeran It's to handle refraction of lasers mounted on aircrafts, going through layers of air of different density and temperature
21:48.25 Maloeran It refracts the rays a bit
21:48.27 ``Erik ah
21:48.37 ``Erik interesting way to cope with atmospherics
21:48.52 Maloeran It's rather nice, I hesitated for a very long time between a sector graph and a tetrahedron graph, so I'll be able to try the second way
21:49.04 brlcad that same technique can be used to propagate energies and forces, it's the basics of FEA
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23:24.12 Maloeran *yawn* Urgh, I didn't sleep well last night because I was too emotionally moved by the "death" of HAL-9000 in "2010: The year we make contact"
23:24.23 ``Erik heh, dork
23:25.49 ``Erik I'm dorky, too, though *shrug* read mccarthy's "the robot and the baby"
23:26.17 ``Erik http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby.html
23:26.28 Maloeran I haven't read that one, thanks
23:26.36 ``Erik it's very short
23:28.21 ``Erik (in case you're not brushed up, mccarthy was a move and shaker in the 50's and 60's with ai stuff... he was also the guy who axiomed the notion of programming computers and discovered lithp, invented things like function declarations and conditionals in programming, etc)
23:28.21 Maloeran Thinking about it, it's really weird to have even more altruistic feelings towards AIs than humans
23:28.42 ``Erik aiomized
23:28.45 ``Erik axiomized
23:29.13 Maloeran Ah I see, thanks. I was mixing names with Clarke
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23:57.34 ``Erik The C programming language requires that all memory be accessible as bytes, so C implementations on 36-bit machines use 9-bit bytes.
23:57.35 ``Erik neat
23:57.59 ``Erik (and a testament to how untrustworthy C's types are)
23:58.21 brlcad the sticky bit

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