Category Archives: Phil

Phil 1.12.12

8:30 – 4:30 FP

  • Talked to Dong about setting up a demo of communication between GWT and My test applet. Pleasantly enough, the JS2Applet webpage runs fine on Macs.
  • Cylinders and a hand next, then time to integrate with FLTK for the next couple of days.
  • MaterialCylinder is done
  • Hey! The Red Book is online! And the Blue Book. All at glprogramming.com under “links”. Nice site.
  • Put together a nicer applet for Dong. Starting on fingers now.

Phil 1.11.12

9:00 – 6:00 FP

  • Working on getting meshes working. I’m trying to use Matrix4f to position all the points. It’s tricky, but if I can get it to work, then I can get the inverse transform to provide me coordinates for collision detection in the world coordinate frame.
    • Just not getting there. Going back to basic formulas. Sigh. We loves the Wolfram, though.
  • Adding mouse interaction
  • Added a stage.
  • Added spheres. There is a problem where 16 divisions causes a null exception, but 18 does not. Need to check that out.
  • Cylinders tomorrow
  • Cool picture for the day:

Phil 1.10.12

8:00 – 4:00 FP

  • Hmmm. THis didn’t post yesterday. Odd.
  • Tom did not check in his work from last night. Waiting for a 9:00 show?
  • Porsche at 10:30
  • Worked on Command, Response and State. Also put together an example of Decision Process code in the base Controller class

Phil 1.9.12

8:30 – 5:00 FP

  • Onward with shaders…
  • Building a torous
  • Checking out FLTK from here: https://svn.easysw.com/public/fltk/fltk/branches/branch-1.3
  • Started on getting Tom’s code to work.

Phil 1.6.12

8:30 – 430 FP

  • Just for kicks, looking for Arduino communication from Java, basically ’cause I don’t want to fry my brain switching gears to C++ if I don’t have to.
  • From http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Java:
    • The Arduino IDE itself is written in Java, and it can communicate to the serial port via the RXTX Java library. That library is very similar to the Java Communications API extension. Internally the IDE remembers which port and baud rate you used last time. Unfortunately that internal implementation can not be considered public API you can reliably use. So you will have to keep your own settings to remember which COM port your Arduino card is using.
    • Getting the Arduino IDE for windows: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
    • Following along with the “Getting Started” instructions pointed to by the IDE. IN my case, they are installed with the software from the above step at file:///C:/Arduino%20IDE%20distros/arduino-1.0/reference/Guide_Windows.html
  • Installed Visual Studio – that took a while…
  • Working on hand modelling

Phil 1.5.12

8:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

Phil 1.4.12

8:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

  • Internet access is *slow* today.
  • Tried to get ahold of Clif today to see what I should be doing. No luck yet.
  • Deployed the lwjgl war to our servers. All seems to be working well.
  • Working on shaders.

Phil 1.3.12

8:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

  • My timesheet’s not working. Sent Sally a note with a screenshot. Turns out the system is shut down for the week.
  • Going to document all the moving pieces of the system – done
  • Shader example for LWJGL: http://lwjgl.org/wiki/index.php?title=GLSL_Shaders_with_LWJGL
    • I think the shaders are going to have to be stored as assets in the jar file? Or maybe deployed in the war?
    • Got the shader code working. That was easy. Not messing with making it an applet yet – I’m going to work on making some more sophisticated shaders. Starting here: http://www.lighthouse3d.com/tutorials/glsl-tutorial/
  • A physics library. How cool: http://jbullet.advel.cz/
  • And a 3D engine: http://www.jpct.net/index.php That also works in applets.
  • Installed RenderMonkey 1.82 for shader work.
  • Charge 32.5 hours to leave on this timesheet!
  • Trying to check in the sandbox project, but SVN isn’t asking for my password and as such, failing. Grrrr. Fixed.
    • The correct SVN client for Indigo (Eclipse 3.7) is the one that is can be reached at “Indigo – http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo” in the “Install New Software” dialog. Select the “Collaberation” component and get the SVN pieces. I installed the following:
      • Subversive SVN JDT Ignore Extensions (Optional)(Incubation)
      • Subversive SVN Team Provider (Incubation)
    • And that seems to work. I now have two SVN view categories that I have to choose between but I’m afraid to uninstall.

Phil 1.2.12

8:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY(?)

Phil 12.30.11

  • 8:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY
    • Going through the LWJGL tutorials here.
    • Got a window test up and running with keyboard interaction and (fast!) animation.
    • Added Applet capability to the above. It runs in the Eclipse Applet viewer. Now I need to get it to run in Tomcat…
    • Sun/Oracles Applet development examples
    • Deploying with the LWJGL Applet Loader 1 – Basics
    • Success! Using basicapplet.html in Phil/applet/lwjgl folder. Need to look at how to send data between the wrapper and the 3D app, since it’s going through the lwjgl applet wrapper.

Phil 12.29.11

8:00 – 4:00 VISIBILITY

  • Working through the C3DL tutorials
  • Looking for a good tutorial on doing JavaScript with eclipse and not having the best of luck.
    • Neat, somewhat related tool: http://www.ixedit.com/
    • Eclipse is building a web-based IDE for JavaScript called Orion. We need to keep an eye on this.
  • Mike tried getting jebGl to work on site but only got a big scary core dump. After pondering, I’m thinking that a valid direction would be to have our charting running in Applets that handle J3D, and the user interface is all GWT. Applets and JavaScript can talk to each other, so the communication shouldn’t be a bif deal. It’s possible that we could put some declarative xml together that would allow GWT to feed a chart template to a general purpose applet, so we could have a high-lever interface defining the presentation and interaction. Next steps are:
    • A lightweight “Hello World” 3D Applet that we can attempt to deploy. We can use Applet rather than JApplet, since we won’t have any GUI overhead.
      • Probably going to use LWJGL, since it’s been good to me in the past.
    • A web page that has JavaScript talking to our applet

Phil 12.28.2011

8:00 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

  • Watching the OReilly video OpenGL and 3D in HTML5. If you have an ACM membership, you can watch it from your Safari bookshelf. You do have your FGM-provided ACM membership, don’t you?
  • Looks like picking is going to be an issue, but we can do it old-school: http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=3336
    • If you use C3DL, picking is supported. Hmmm.
  • Learning WebGL cookbook
  • WebGL Cheat Sheet (API as of February 2010)
  • glMatrix (appears to be the fastest library?)
  • C3DL looks promising. It even explains why Mike’s firefox WebGL was turned off. Going to read this one tomorrow.
  • 11:00 meeting with Clif S. and his gang
    • Showed the various VISIBILITY apps. It looks like they should be useful
    • Discussed WebGL development option

Phil 12.27.11

8:00-4:00 VISIBILITY

  • It’s going to rain today and my new hardware aches. This “feeling the weather in the bines” thing might be real after all.
  • Working on a simple animated gwt app. I’m trying for this.
  • Having all kinds of problems with our server. Using vi on a 20 line file takes between 4 and 12 seconds to open. Tom is opening a ticket with Steadfast.net.
    • It appears that this is a problem with Steadfast. They are doing some hardware migration that is messing with us
  • I have the gwt app running in hosted mode, but I can’t get it running as a war file. I get an error saying that the app may need to be recompiled. Hmmm.
  • Did make contact with Clif – his folks are coming over Wednesday at 11:00. Didn’t get ahold of Tangie.

Phil 12.26.11

8:00 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

  • Happy Boxing Day!
  • Tried sending an email to Clif S. At all the various permutations of his name and none of them seem to be right. Hmmm.
  • fgmdev.com is still responding really slowly. http://www.fgmdev.com:8080 seems quick though, so the Tomcat server is running well, but lampp isn’t?
    • At 9:30, things are considerably faster.
    • At 9:31 things are slow again
    • Had to start up svn. What is going on with our server!!!?
  • Starting with the gwtgl documentation.
    • And while we’re at it, time for a new version of Eclipse (3.7.1 – Indigo). Trying a 64-bit version again… I also copied it to fgmdev/exchange/EclipseDistros if you don’t want to wait 17 minutes for the download
    • Tried the tutorial, which didn’t work (and from the comments, doesn’t work for many people). Checked out the code from https://gwtgl.googlecode.com/svn/. That kindof works…
      • Only check out GwrGl and GwtGl-techDemos. GwtGL-examples doesn’t seem to have anything in it, and competes for the same namespace as techDemos (which checks out as “examples”)
  • New version of GWT In Action is available on fgmdev/exchange/Books

Phil 12.23.11

9:00 – 4:00

  • Prepping for interview. It went well. They want to visualize lots of data.
  • In thinking about the above, I’ve started to worry about the graphing capability within GWT, which is not really even as good as Flex. I’m starting to think that we could use GWT for what it’s good at – text fields, comboboxes and such, while developing standalone charts in WebGL (3D). The reason for this is that once we’re in the 3D realm, drawing cool things actually becomes easier. Shiny is done with reflection mapping as opposed to layuers of vector art. Hardware accelerated 3d is capable of showing tens of thousands of points in a frame – orders of magnitude more than 2D systems
  • I asked Mike to try putting a gwtgl app inside jebgl to see if its possible