If you are serious about nextgen shader programming, you should have this book next to your pillow! This third volume of the best-selling GPU Gems series provides a snapshot of today’s latest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) programming techniques. The programmability of modern GPUs allows developers to not only distinguish themselves from one another but also to use this awesome processing power for non-graphics applications, such as physics simulation, financial analysis, and even virus detection—particularly with the CUDA architecture. Graphics remains the leading application for GPUs, and readers will find that the latest algorithms create ultra-realistic characters, better lighting, and post-rendering compositing effects
A complete guide to learning OpenGL. It covers all OpenGL functionality and goes further to GLUT. In the latest edition the book also covers the OpenGL Shading Language.
about 2 weeks ago I created a multilingual version slugify for django! You can find the code here.
What is slugify? It the function that gets us from “This is my post” to “this-is-my-post” and its used widely on the web to make human friendly URLs, where the data are not accessed by their numerical ID but by the human readable “slug”.
Django provides a function to automatically create the slug from a phrase. However that only worked for English characters. Any extended character in unicode was ignored, which resulted in empty slugs if the language was other than English.
The “downcode” function I provided maps characters in other languages to English ones. Which allows to use the slygify function that comes with Django!
Getting back from Symfony to Ruby-on-Rails was a big relief! There is no comparison between Ruby and PHP. Anything said on the matter is wasted. Anyway since I had my troubles solved by the hosting company, now I had my first RoR application running on the server. Then I tried to elaborate it, and like immediately found a problem. The problem was internationalization(i18n)! It seems that Rails was not developed with i18n in mind from the beginning and its current version does not support it! You have to hack your way to it. In my mind i18n is a big and necessary feature for web. After all it is the World Wide Web! It turns out that Rails has a major problem with i18n what goes down to the language itself. Ruby does not support unicode for string representation. (actually it does but with the use of a module, not natively). However in version 2.2 of Rails, which is currently the edge version, they included basic i18n support. This meant that I had to use the “unstable” branch of Rails - which I did! Checked out the way i18n support was implemented and found it very basic. This is by design. The developers of Rails want Continue Reading →
I spent the last week trying out web frameworks. I thought it was time to move on from my own hacked PHP scripts to something more elaborate. The first framework I was really eager to checkout was ofcourse the under every stone Ruby on Rails! The main reason was all the talks about it, along with the fact that I was very interested in the Ruby language.
I started by installing Ruby and then Rails on my system, and started following the famous Rails screencasts. I was going to create a Weblog application in 15min! So exciting! Unfortunately it just didn’t happen. Things started to get a bit hairy. It seems that there was a huge difference in the version the screencaster was using the version I was using. In version 2.0 of Rails the creators decided to change the scaffolding technique completely. So now you can’t follow the screencast. It is also very hard to find a tutorial to get you started, not to mention a good tutorial!
All in all I also completely scanned the internet for information but I didn’t find very good sources of info. The main site , other that the screencasts, has the Rails API documentation which is obviously not the way to start! I turned to books. The “Agile Web Development with Rails” I learned about Rails through that, even if that is also for the old version of Rails.
But going all over the internet, I got to find out about Zed Shaw. Continue Reading →
I was looking for older versions of my home page in the web archive when it occurred to me that I can’t remember how the Google search page looked when the project started! So I hit www.google.com and traveled back to 1998!
I had forgot how the web looked back in 1998… No CSS, no fancy layouts, images and graphics. Just simple HTML with a few images. Continue Reading →
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September 13, 2008 at 12:48pm
by Harry Kalogirou
It seems that hackers started to attack the everywhere-in-the-news-collider! According to this article they successfully managed to crack the cmsmon.cern.ch web site!
The headline of the site sponsored : “GST: Greek Security Team”, which advertises Continue Reading →
I am so excited to inform you that the video clip I was talking about earlier was released! As I said the video clip was created to accommodate the release of the song “Goddess” as a single. This single is the first taste from the upcoming album “The Universe Expands” from Dol Theeta.
The whole thing was done in my beloved Blender3D with lots of hard work and patience!
Here is the Vimeo version, but make sure you enjoy the DVD quality version that is included in the actual CD single!
December 10, 2008 at 3:50pm
by Harry Kalogirou 
