Jonathan Saggau's Blog

It's not just for icons. :)

There is some talk of resolution-independence these days, and for good reason. Them pixels is getting smaller.

Those of us who like to cheat and use 2D impostors for 3D objects get to be a little more careful these days as well. Luckily, thanks largely to information I got at the Big Nerd Ranch OpenGL class, one can easily make the 3D equivalent of vector graphics in something like (say) maya or wings3D and wrap them up in a display list in openGL for speed of rendering.

This makes one's visualization happily zoomable and resolution-independent without much of a performance hit. Just load your model in your initialization and wrap the drawing in a display list.

My pet project at a normal zoom level:

and zoomed waaaaay in:

Can you tell which part of the graph is still a stretched image + simple texture?

Posted by jonmarimba at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a quick post to state:
1. OpenGL GL_COLOR_MATERIAL is awesome. Making things shine is easy.

2. OpenGL display lists are wicked-fast.

3. Shark is still my friend.

4. GDB is still my friend.

5. Pass-by-reference is my friend, and my evil foe...

Things is getting prettier and prettier (and the drawing of this animates, too)

Posted by jonmarimba at 01:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently, when I'm a-runnin (er was runnin' back before I messed up mah hip), I like to know what's happenin...
and I pause a lot. It's because I'm a wimp. ok?

Little Icons:
? = Ask the nike+ for progress (how far, how fast)
! = Played the "powersong"
|| = pause workout (sometimes for stretching, mostly for going "can't breathe")

Posted by jonmarimba at 05:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been an informative few weeks. While I feel like I've been using very thick unwaxed mental floss, I have been learning some new programming (and some data smoothing...) toys. A review of the OpenGL class at Big Nerd ranch is coming this weekend. I have my reasons for delaying this review. It was a great experience (don't worry Rocco); I just want to see if I can actually use what I've been learning in Atlanta to make something.

So! Below is an openGL rendering of the run data you saw in an earlier post. I'm getting closer to figuring out their smoothing tricks! What you are looking at is a moving average with a 14 point window. This gets us much closer to the Nike+ online graph, but we're not quite there yet. Next I try two things:
1. Throw out (or somehow attenuate) aberrant points.
2. Throw a best fit curve in there.

My goal is to be able to reproduce nike+apple's smoothing relatively reliably so that I can then present options (preferences...) to the user for data smoothing style in my cool new run logging application...

Posted by jonmarimba at 02:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)