Talamathi

In a previous post , I detailed how to make a Mac screen saver that showed off your uptime. With the advent of Leopard , things have changed enough in Quartz Composer so that the Shell Command Patch does not work. When I get a chance, I’ll see about updating it, but for now it does not work. Technorati Tags: Mac , screen+saver , uprecords

I am not all that big about screen savers, what with the fact they don’t save screens any more. On the other hand, it can be a good warning that the screen is about to turn off if you do not actually want it to. As such, a nice simple screen saver can still be useful. Blanking to black is fine, but why not make it a little nice? For a couple of years (at least), I have used a screen saver called ShowOff . The whole purpose is to keep track of your best uptime, and shows your current uptime. There are a lot problems with it, though: It has not been updated since January of 2006. It only records uptimes when the screen saver is running Editing the font requires hand-editing the plist file. It occasionally records a random value, thus making it useless. To handle the last problem, I have been keeping a copy of the preferences and using it to replace the wrong one. Sufficed to say, this is less than optimal. So I decided to go about and make my own. I do have a goal of learning Obje...

For a computer graphics class , I needed to build PBRT . Being a Mac guy, I decided to build it for Mac OS X. In addition, I wanted to make sure I was using the latest version of at least PBRT (it's at 1.0.3 as of this writing). I also wanted to use Fink as much as possible for any dependencies. Getting the PBRT source code To do this, you will at least need to grab the source code for v1.0.3 from PBRT's downloads page . If you want to try and of the sample scenes, however, you will need to grab them from the CD that came with the book. After unpacking it, I moved the new folder to ~/pbrt . If you want it somewhere else, make sure to change the PBRT_SEARCHPATH environmental variable in the next step accordingly. Setting the environmental variables In Mac OS X, I believe that if a .profile file exists in your user folder, any .bashrc file is ignored. It could also be that .bashrc is just plain ignored. In any case, Bash in Mac OS X likes using .profile , so putting this...

This past weekend I had to finish up a lab implementing shadow maps and shadow volumes. I ended up finding a couple of useful resources for these, and thought they might be useful to someone. Shadow volumes : “ Tutorial - Stenciled Shadow Volumes in OpenGL ”. Shadow maps : “ Paul's Projects - Shadow Mapping Tutorial ”. Oh, and of course I should mention lib3ds for reading in 3ds files. Anyhow, check it out: Technorati: OpenGL shadow+volumes shadow+maps Powered by Bleezer