PTAM on OS X 10.6.4

In the last two days, I've been working with Adam Clarkson on a PTAM idea. We've been exploring Georg Klein's PTAM software. Its been a bit of a struggle, but finally got the system compiled for OS X 10.6.4 (snow leopard).



Monocular PTAM is an exciting area of research with huge potential.

My notes on how to compile for OS X 10.6.4 after the jump...

Print Cost Tool

An update to my Z650 Print Cost tool. Download the latest release here. This version fixes a bug for prints that take less than one hour. (Source here.) For instructions, see this earlier post.

The print on the right was made of part of a proposed building. The data was shipped in 3DS format, and took >12 hours to build. The intricate structure was fun/tricky to keep in one piece.

Balvenie Signature Batch 3 Scores are in

As noted earlier, I was sent a 200ml sample bottle of Balvenie Signature Batch 3 via a competition. True to the Edinburgh Whisky Blog tasting notes, a resounding stamp of approval was made by five tasters here as a moreish, smooth whisky that is light and fresh. A contrast to the excellent Doublewood.

So, the final verdict? With an amazing system of scoring it out of five, it was rated 4.5. Statistically, that's brilliant.

The Balvenie Signature Batch 3

I don't win things, mostly. However, this little beauty landed on my doorstep yesterday.

I entered a caption competition at the brilliant Edinburgh Whisky Blog. Amazingly, I won, and Chris duly sent over this fine specimen.

Rather than immediately whisk the cork out and have a dram, I took a picture! Well, it was an excuse to look at some of the ideas I'd been reading in Light: Science & Magic - a great book on the fundamentals of lighting in photography. Now I admit to a little post-processing to tweak crinkles in the background/floor of the image, but here's how it was done:

Single flash setup with the 'model' on a piece of A4 (crinkled, bad choice), with a piece of white card as background. My light modifier was, a piece of A4, folded to make it stand up. To the right of the 'model' was a bit of shiny card (tin foil would've done) propped up by a gardening book. I'm quite pleased with the results of my 5min photo shoot.

I will be, I'm sure, quite pleased with the dram I'll be having later!

Useful digging (for coders)

.equals() and .hashCode()

Bored of writing lots of these by hand? Me too. That's when I found useful Apache Commons' (lang) classes EqualsBuilder and HashcodeBuilder. From here, I bootstrapped to a discussion on object allocation.

Object Allocation

I'm was on the brink of delving into what I thought might be a very useful optimisation exercise for the SynergyNet project. The problem? Being a 3D application, it makes a lot of use of Vector3f and Vector2f objects. The application, from a 'reading the code' perspective, creates and destroys a lot of them, very fast. So, what to do? I could spend some time adopting the jME approach of providing methods that either modify local objects, avoiding creating new objects, or 'return new stuff' methods that, well, returns newly created objects.

Then I read this. I had no idea of the kinds of optimisations that modern JVMs are capable of doing. I'm not sure how much optimisation impacts projects like SynergyNet and jME, but I'm now going to delay optimising for a little while. I guess it follows Jackson's mantra: "The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it."

Road Trip, Scotland

Our trip to Scotland was brilliant. Had a few opportunities to take some snaps, and not just of Ian and Morag's wedding, or Lyn and Sam. Well, here's Ian and Morag!

An amazing setting at Carbisdale Castle.

Here's a piper playing at Calgary Bay, on the Isle of Mull, who kindly agreed to have me grab a snap or two while he played. He was there to play for a wedding. Nice setting.

I would've loved to have stayed longer to take more and better images of the two boat wrecks that lie between Tobermory and Craignure but we were hurtling back to make sure we caught the ferry back to the mainland. Just a brilliant subject.

The light wasn't particularly great at the Falls of Falloch. I did enjoy trying different compositions. Here's one I particularly liked.

Usability Lab Update

While I've been away on an amazing trip to Scotland, our multi-touch tables have been delivered from Ness. These tables, for the SynergyNet project, are based on Evoluce's multi-touch hardware and software. After a big group effort, we've now got our lab almost ready for whole-class experiments to run:

Just got the machines to configure and cabling to finish up.  Looking good.