IRC log for #brlcad on 20100509

01:13.44 starseek1r Huh - Qt 4.7 will include something called QML - Qt user interfaces defined using XML
01:14.12 starseek1r wonder how that'll compare to gtk/glade
01:38.44 juub "lithp" club. Hah!
02:49.50 juub I'm loving BRL-CAD. Thanks for the great project. What timing, too. I'm on Gentoo, and just happened to start looking for Linux CAD solutions shortly after BRL-CAD made it to Gentoo, what luck!
02:50.24 juub I'm still learning it, though. I think I'm only on Lesson 10 of the Introduction to BRL-CAD.
03:22.40 brlcad glad to hear it juub
04:09.21 starseek1r ``Erik: sounds like a plan - when do they meet?
07:21.23 *** join/#brlcad Nohla (~jesica@201.255.244.117)
09:48.48 juub Creepy, the software speaks.
09:49.53 juub Hmm, since brlcad speaks, and brlcad makes changes to itslef... is BRL-CAD self-aware?
11:02.09 brlcad heh
12:48.02 ``Erik cept it likes to call itself BGR
12:49.34 ``Erik starseek1r: http://www.lisperati.com/fringedc.html
13:57.36 ``Erik grar, effin' teaball came open :(
14:01.46 juub I've noticed some discrepancies between the introductory lessons and what I see in BRL-CAD (mostly just GUI), how 'out-dated' are the documents from the army?
14:03.06 juub I mean, have the PDFs been updated over time as the project evolves?
14:07.50 ``Erik sometimes they're updated, sometimes they aren't... if you could submit documentation bug reports (or patches to fix the docbook), that'd be great :D
14:08.30 juub They're docbook? I'm talking about the Army PDFs.... Perhaps one in the same, I'm not sure.
14:09.07 juub Specifically the "Introduction to MGED.pdf" found here: http://brlcad.org/wiki/Documentation
14:10.17 juub Sorry if I appear obtuse, I don't mean to be, I've just been awake since 4pm (16:00) yesterday.
14:11.31 ``Erik yeah, they were originally written as LaTeX, starseeker put a lot of effort into converting what he could to docbook and setting things up to generate the pdf's (and html, etc), still some stuff that hasn't been converted yet, though...
14:11.48 ``Erik how did you install? from source, or using the gentoo package management shtuff?
14:12.31 ``Erik well, either way, the source tarball has a doc/ directory with all the docbook stuff in it :) *shrug*
14:16.13 juub Ah. I installed using Gentoo's package management tools. I have -doc set as a 'world' default, since it tends to exacerbate install size. Is the docbook online anywhere? I grabbed all those PDFs linked on that page when I first discovered BRL-CAD.
14:16.45 ``Erik in the 'browse svn' of the sourceforge page
14:17.57 juub ah, of course.
14:18.14 ``Erik in theory, those pdf's have the same content as the docbook and hopefully reasonably similar formatting to the PDF's generated from docbook... starseeker would be the one to talk to about the doc stuff :D I tend to be more of the "the code is the documentation" anti-user types ;)
14:18.31 juub :)
14:18.48 juub I would do well to be more of that type myself... I do appreciate a good manual, though.
14:19.51 ``Erik (even though I wrote a printed manual for some open source software I wrote a decade ago, and make sure there's adequate --help and manpages for everything I write... O.o )
14:20.07 juub :)
14:36.41 juub What is the general BRL-CAD consensus towards Blender?
14:40.35 juub if any
14:43.06 ``Erik how ya mean?
14:44.17 juub Know of it? Love it? Hate it? Indifferent? Thoughts on collaboration?
14:46.07 ``Erik *shrug* it does what it does, which is slightly different than what BRL-CAD does... we use it for some things, one of the BRL-CAD developers is putting together some blender course for something *shrug*
14:46.25 juub nods
14:46.54 juub How does its renderer compare to BRL-CAD's?
14:47.09 ``Erik amusingly, the NURBS stuff in blender, they were using the nurbana guts which was written by a former BRL-CAD coder, and they've switched to using opennurbs which is what we've been using... and I think a few of the BRL-CAD developers are irl friends of some blenders devs? *shrug*
14:47.25 juub Any plans to provide 'format swapping'? I.e. exporters/importers between the two?
14:47.32 ``Erik <-- doesn't know, isn't a blender user
14:48.04 ``Erik um, blenders 'format' is a blind swizzle (memory dump) iirc, we'd either have to write a blender plugin or just use an intermediate format
14:48.38 ``Erik we have a lot of importers and exporters for various formats, *shrug*
14:48.51 juub nods, "Yeah, I was looking at the PDF on that."
14:49.15 juub hah, I've never seen "blind swizzle" used to describe a memory dump. I don't know anything about blender's file format.
14:49.16 ``Erik which is surely out of date :D
14:49.20 juub =D
14:50.03 ``Erik um, I think 'serialize' might be a more popular verb for the technique these days
14:50.18 ``Erik http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer_swizzling
14:51.25 juub wow
14:51.45 juub I have a BSc in CS, and I've never seen the term Pointer Swizzling. Awesome ^_^
14:52.08 ``Erik heh
14:52.17 ``Erik but ya probably did your work in jabba or c++, not C
14:52.18 juub nice link, thanks.
14:52.23 juub C.
14:52.30 ``Erik oh, neat :)
14:52.38 juub K&R book is the only book on my programming shelf that gets regular use.
14:52.45 juub Well, C++ in school, but yea...
14:52.58 ``Erik mine was a combination of C and c++, with a few asm's, scheme, prolog, and a handful of others thrown in for fun
14:53.27 ``Erik and annoying the 'smart' profs with questions during office hours to try to learn more than the course material heh
14:53.34 juub I switched universities because they were teaching java instead of C++. I asked the prof why java instead of C++, and, I shit you not, "A lot of the students were finding C++ too hard, so we switched to Java." Left that semester.
14:53.55 ``Erik <-- kept hearing about quaternions, managed to corner the linear algebra teacher to get a quick lesson even though he wasn't in the dudes class :D
14:54.15 ``Erik damn, then they should find another major heh
14:54.20 juub You were taught asm in school? Our computer architecture prof "[didn't] want to teach it", so we weren't taught asm. :\
14:54.24 juub EXACTLY
14:54.38 ``Erik my cs class started at 330 and ended at 17, most went to CIS to learn java, javascript, visual basic and access... heh
14:55.03 juub :/
14:55.24 juub seems my school's CS department was more of a CIS.
14:55.39 ``Erik yeah, "assembly programming" was a mandatory class (286/dos), in arch we learned R2K (using spim), and then had to develope an ISA, write a program for it to solve a given problem, then design the circuitry in a design package (mmlogic, kinda like geda)
14:55.46 juub sad, considering it was the "IT" school for my state.
14:56.02 juub that's awesome.
14:56.07 ``Erik and this was in a podunk college in missouri, pheer....
14:56.43 juub I've dabbled in ASM, but nothing concrete... I have a book on it on my shelf, but it's a "programming from the ground up with asm" book --- so covering a lot I already know. Oh well, one day I'll bite the bullet and read it cover to cover quickly.
14:56.47 ``Erik the csab told them to change the requirements to have less math during my last year there... who knows what it's like now *shrug* it was difficult and I liked it O.o
14:56.47 juub Nice.
14:57.03 juub wow, less math in CS.
14:57.33 juub breeding a bunch of lazy programmers, what with their built-in garbage collection... fscking java...
14:57.41 ``Erik hey now
14:57.43 ``Erik pets his lisp
14:57.47 juub lol
14:58.05 ``Erik java is decent for what it does, but it's important to understand what it's doing for you
14:58.19 juub indeed
14:58.47 ``Erik I've seen horribly slow java stuff on powerful hw, I managed to make a java/swing program work decently on a 486 with I think 8 megs of ram?
14:58.56 juub I saw some mention of BRL-CAD potentially switching to Qt, know anything about that?
14:59.01 ``Erik and win95 torching the resources
14:59.20 juub not bad, but you know asm ;)
14:59.26 juub so, that's like cheating ;)
14:59.41 juub mmm win 95. Good times.
14:59.41 ``Erik ehhh, the rt^3 stuff used qt and ogre as a notional replacement, starseeker and brlcad seem to keep talking about it
14:59.54 ``Erik the isst stuff either uses gtk+ or SDL
15:00.05 juub not familiar with the rt^3 stuff... or isst...
15:00.09 ``Erik qt is heavy as hell
15:00.17 juub I'm still in INtroduction to MGED
15:00.19 juub yes, yes it is.
15:00.30 juub I would love to be done with it, but VLC and Opera require it :\
15:00.50 ``Erik might end up doing the blender/lw/bryce/etc way and writing a skinny widget toolkit :D who knows O.o
15:01.12 ``Erik vlc does? hrm, wonder if that's just for linux or if it's stashed in my mac's VLC.app
15:01.34 ``Erik never been keen on opera, ff is ok, galeon was really nice
15:03.04 juub not familiar with galeon. Back in '03 when I switched to Linux (fully and formally), FF was leaking memory quite badly, and Opera had a smaller resource footprint: filesize, memory, etc., but now I don't know. I haven't checked.
15:03.15 juub But Opera is getting on my nerves... Might be my hardware, though.
15:03.24 juub VLC is the Video LAN Player, I think it's called.
15:03.46 juub "VidoLAN - VLC media player"
15:03.50 juub *VideoLAN
15:03.54 ``Erik videolan client, yes
15:04.10 ``Erik better than quicktime.app :D
15:04.12 juub client, right. *taps his nose*
15:04.15 juub :)
15:04.32 ``Erik mine uses the cocoa stuff, must be rigged up to use the 'right' one per os
15:05.02 juub could be, but if I didn't have qt installed already, then it should have had some POSIX default >_<
15:05.18 ``Erik pokes his new server with it's weird hardware :D
15:05.29 juub :)
15:05.30 ``Erik http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-openrdcdetails.aspx
15:05.58 juub I hate finding some cool app, but can't (read: won't) install it because it wants to pull in all of gnome.
15:06.56 ``Erik <-- prefers gnome to kde... jumped on the gnome bandwagon with 0.10, found it very awesome by the time 0.30 came out
15:07.07 juub Is Global Scale Technologies your company?
15:07.16 juub I prefer WM only, no DE necessary :P
15:07.16 ``Erik no, I work for the army research lab
15:07.19 juub oh neat
15:07.33 ``Erik heh, I don't run gnome environment stuff, btu the libraries are handy
15:07.43 juub nods
15:07.49 ``Erik actually, haven't ran X in quite a while, been all mac for the gui, ssh into fbsd, ...
15:08.25 juub still, it seems to fly in the face of all that makes Linux grand when you find something spiffy that requires much unecessary cruft --- granted that's more poor design on the specific application's programmers part, but you get the gist.
15:08.34 ``Erik qt had an awesome tutorial way back then, but gtk+ was a lot more fun to code in *shrug* new qt stuff looks pretty snappy
15:08.52 juub nods
15:09.12 ``Erik hm, linux quit being grand to me about a decade ago, too much kernel work, still have flashbacks o.o :D
15:09.25 juub Qt seems to change its look /often/; at least, that's the case when it updates on my system. Maybe it's some obscure preference I've overlooked.
15:09.39 juub lol, what kind of kernel work? Compiling?
15:10.04 ``Erik driver writing, fixing bugs in the network stack, etc
15:10.17 juub ah
15:10.46 juub I've never happened across any hardware that wasn't already supported --- or, at least, supported after some google searching.
15:10.55 ``Erik I got pretty good at compiling the kernel :D
15:11.05 juub :)
15:11.21 juub LFS will be my next foray into the Linux underworld.
15:11.22 ``Erik yeahhh, some was partically supported, some was not supported at all, and some was just buggy *shrug*
15:11.38 ``Erik like my miro capture card had no driver at all, was before the video4lin project
15:11.48 juub well... that's the same of Windows. Don't know about Macs, no experience with them.
15:11.51 ``Erik and uh, a wave something soundcard/modem that wouldn't even recognize
15:12.11 ``Erik plus crazy shit I did with my breadboard (and I only managed to cook one motherboard)
15:12.28 juub nods
15:13.11 ``Erik and then porting stuff to fbsd, doing driver work to try to get the nvidia binary blob to work, I had to read up on the linux ioctl's and how horribly they completely botched things up
15:14.57 juub Oh? Do tell. I haven't looked that deeply into it. I've been quite negligent in that regard, actually. Hence the progression towards LFS (Linux From Scratch): or I could just crack my tanenbaum Operating Systems book --- ugh, I wish my OS class in school was /real/: what a joke that was.
15:19.08 ``Erik the gist is that the ioctl is supposed to copy X bytes in/out of kernel space, linux was just mapping without guards, so you can do an ioctl to read(orwrite) and go past the listed memory into kernel turf
15:19.49 ``Erik nvidia was abusing that, they'd read y'know, 40 bytes out, but ioctl to read 4 (EVERYTHING was 4 bytes) and just go past the buffer
15:20.22 ``Erik we wrote code to intercept those bad ioctl calls and substitute the right length in where we could, but they'd stashed some ioctl calls in the binary blob, not just the open source component
15:20.32 ``Erik iirc... O.o was a while ago :)
15:21.34 ``Erik http://fbsd-nvdriver.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/fbsd-nvdriver/fbsd-nvdriver/
15:22.33 ``Erik http://fbsd-nvdriver.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/fbsd-nvdriver/fbsd-nvdriver/preload_hack/ioctl_hook.c?revision=1.5&view=markup has some of the ioctl ugliness we did
15:23.03 juub wow, that's nuts. Do you know if the ioctl stuff still behaves that insecurely?
15:23.13 ``Erik not a clue
15:23.30 ``Erik at the time, I'd already decided fbsd >> linux
15:23.43 juub nods
15:23.49 juub What are your thoughts on OpenBSD?
15:24.19 ``Erik it's nice, not as end user friendly as fbsd, but has some really keen bits
15:24.47 ``Erik I tried to get permission to install an openbsd machine at work, was denied due to security concerns. wtf?
15:24.49 juub I haven't looked at freebsd at all, but I like OpenBSD. I use it solely as a server, though.
15:25.13 juub lol, yeah really. wtf. I use OpenBSD for my server /because/ it's notoriously secure.
15:25.31 juub maybe they were concerned it would throw the insecurity of the rest of the systems into sharp relief?
15:25.57 ``Erik (guy who made the call is anti open source, things windows is the bees knees, and has no responsibility for usefulness, exists solely in a CYA mode)
15:26.11 juub wow
15:26.17 juub what do you mean by CYA?
15:26.25 juub "see ya'"
15:26.30 ``Erik cover your arse
15:26.33 juub ah
15:27.10 juub Well that's asanine. Couldn't you point out how absurdly insecure WIndows is? Or is he fanboy?
15:27.51 ``Erik "it's microsoft's fault" vs "it's, uh, this guy up in canada's fault, we didn't pay for it so... *shrug*"
15:28.08 juub gotchya
15:28.34 ``Erik (so we cheat using parallels or vmware)
15:28.47 juub :)
15:29.57 ``Erik brlcad, starseek1r: rel .8 vs .10? O.o
15:35.23 juub well, it was nice chatting with you ``Erik. I think I'm going to take a nap.
15:35.29 ``Erik later
17:22.45 *** join/#brlcad Nohla (~jesica@201.255.244.117)
18:31.25 starseek1r ``Erik: hmm?
18:31.37 starseek1r what about 10? we just tagged 8
18:59.52 ``Erik yeh, but brlcad was wanting to fix something before a tarball upload, called thursday evening as a cutoff, I never heard what the decision was

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