[research] Video of our SIGGRAPH paper

Our paper on procedural textures was accepted at SIGGRAPH 2009!!!

We will release the paper soon, but in the meantime you can check out our paper's video on the project webpage.

[conference] Eurographics 2009

I am currently at EG 2009. Interesting papers, brainstorming, fun and - since we are in Germany after all - a fair amount of good beer :-)

Marcio Cabral will be presenting our 'Mesh Puzzle' paper, and I'll be sharing a talk with Li-Yi Wei to present our STAR report on texture synthesis; co-authored with Vivek Kwatra and Greg Turk.

Btw, don't miss the tutorial implementation of our Parallel Controllable Texture Synthesis algorithm (SIGGRAPH 2005).

[various] RotoPath

How much time do you spend navigating through folders every day? For me, the answer was: Way too much.

I decided to give a try to an old idea and created a very simple app to navigate through folders (folders only, this is not a file explorer!!). It presents folders in a wheel. A left click goes to the next folder, a right click opens explorer on the folder. The wheel can be displayed at any time by pressing Left-Control and Left-Windows simultaneously.

As can be seen some folders are shown in red: These are the folders you use most often. Hence, they are visually outlined so that you can quickly get to the places the most important to you.

There are three special icons in the middle: Open command line at current folder, Show favorite folders, Go back to the computer root.


RotoPath is brand new and will likely have a few bugs, but it already helps me a lot on an everyday basis. Maybe you'll find it useful as well.

[No longer available]
Enjoy!

[linux] Fedora saved my day!

Today I just lived what I consider to be a true computer technology miracle.

I was teaching in Paris today. The class involves powerpoint slides and then some OpenGL programming (each student has a computer to work with). As usual, I prepared my slides and the source code for the gl tutorials on my laptop. What was not usual is that I *forgot* to backup the files on my usb stick. 'So what?' did I think when arriving at the airport, it would really be bad luck if my laptop crashed today.

Guess what.

Windows soon refused to boot, chkdsk kept detecting more and more bad sectors at every run, and so on. The usual story. The dell repair tool only knows how to format the entire thing (I have a XPS M1330, and yes the NVidia card was faulty), and there was no booting windows. After the first battery emptied I felt very lonely, with my faulty computer, in the middle of the airport with no power plug in sight. 'If only I was home, I could boot from my Knoppix CD, access the NTFS drive and save the whole thing on a USB stick.'. And then I saw the light. Here it was, looking at me through the book shop window: The February issue of 'Planete Linux' - a French magazine about the Linux OS - and the distribution of the month was Feodra 10 Live with an included CD!!!

After spending 6.20 euros on the magazine - not a bad read by the way - I quickly tried it out. After a few minutes I had a full fledged Linux running! I was able to mount the faulty ntfs partition (with scary errors) and was able to retrieve my slides!

Arriving in the classroom, already feeling lucky enough, I was planning to ask a student for his laptop to display the slides. But, out of curiousity, I tried the included openoffice. It did open the slides with success! So, while I was at it, feeling quite invicible, I plugged the projector to my laptop-with-fried-hdd-but-working-Live-Fedora. And *it* *worked* *just* *fine*.

So here I was, with my CD-only OS, displaying my slides with OpenOffice on a DLP projector and all this for 6.20 euros when 2 hours earlier I was screaming over my dying Windows-powered fried-hdd laptop.

Needless to say, Fedora just won an unconditional fan!!!! I am actually writing this entry using the very same Fedora Live CD, through the included WiFi support.

Thanks guys for saving my day :-)

[code] SAPI

I recently rediscovered SAPI, the Microsoft speech API. I used it a long time ago, and basically forgot about it. Which is a shame, because it is a really fun tool to play with. It is extremely easy to make your computer talk. While the voice is a bit aging under XP, the Vista voice is reasonnably good.

For those interested, here is how to call SAPI from C#.

[code] Compiling on a share with VC2005

While trying to compile on a share (with all permissions) I got an error message concerning the opening of a '.rsp' file. After a bit of search it turns out to be a known issue.

To fix it, simply redirect temporary files to a local directory, such as:
$(temp)\$(ProjectName)\$(ConfigurationName)
(setting in Configuration Properties -> General, Intermediate Directory)

More info on
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=101276

[tips] Sharing a folder from the command line

Ever had a (windows) laptop screen or graphics card died? (ie. the 'headless' computer effect). Well it just happened to me. Now, here is where it becomes tricky: How do you get to the files without taking the laptop apart? (you don't want to void the warranty, you don't trust support when they swear your data will be just fine).

One idea is to share folders so that you can access the files through the network. But that does not seem too easy without a screen... Well, usually you can get to log into windows without visual feedback. It is also fairly easy to launch a command line (CTRL-R (run) on XP; on Vista use the 'windows' key, type "cmd [enter]" and your are in). But, how can you share a folder from the command line, so that it will show up on the network?

I found the answer here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295622. There is a command line tool, WMIC, which lets you do many things, such as sharing a folder, from the command line. In principle you can even create the shared folder remotely. In my case it did not work out (password was refused for some reason) but I could do it 'blindly' from the command line.

Hope it helps!