Raymes Khoury

Export eps from Visio

2009-10-08T09:28:00.005+11:00

Recently I had a question about how I exported Visio files to .eps files for use in Latex. I realised this wasn't really well known so I thought I would post the details for everyone. This is possible due to the wonderful Lyx project, which is an interface for Latex that is great for beginners and even more experienced users.

The steps for using your Visio (.vsd) files are as follows:

Save your Visio file as an emf file by selecting the .emf extension in the drop down box of the save dialogue in Visio.
Download and install the Lyx MetafileToEPSConverter.
You can use this from either the command line or there is a GUI. It's a bit undocumented but the command is: metafile2eps input.emf output.eps
That's it! You're done. You could now use the standard epstopdf command to convert to pdf format if needed.

If you use Lyx, this process is done automatically for you. All you have to do is save your Visio file as an emf and import it into Lyx.

Note that the MetafileToEPSConverter works for converting any emf or wmf files to eps. This is a great little open-source tool because other solutions on the internet require you to pay for an application or use post-script driver to print to a file which can result in low quality output. The quality of the output files is top notch.

Enjoy.

Powderfinger - Sail the Wildest Stretch Lyrics

2009-08-09T20:15:00.002+10:00

If you had your time over again
Would you do it all the same?
Down through all the twists and bends
Are there moments you'd erase?

Would you just leave me standing
In the doorway frozen through?
Waiting on the coldest comfort from you

And if your course could be reset,
Would you steer your ship my way?
Or would you sail the wildest stretch
Just to feel the force of the waves?

Would you just leave me waiving
On the dock as you pull away?
Savouring the bitter taste

And if the mirror don't reflect
The illusion you made
You could stop and take a breath
Feel the damages weight

Fade in the silence

If you had your time over again
If you had your time over again
Would you sail the wildest stretch?
If you had your time over again

Honours

2009-03-16T22:38:00.007+11:00

I've not posted here for a fair while and recently a few people have contacted me regarding this blog which has motivated me to make a post.

Over the last summer, me and Tim Dawborn completed our university project developing a query processor for SunSPOTs called Corona (formerly SSDQP). It is now available open source and I will provide further details on it soon. I also spent time over the summer working on a new website for my church, St. Aidans Hurstville Grove which is almost complete. I will post a link when its done.

This year I am doing honours at the University of Sydney. My thesis is in the area of highly parallel architecures (such as the Cell processor and general purpose GPUs). In particular I am looking at automatic parallelisation of matrix-based languages such as MATLAB and will be programming on the Playstation 3, which uses a Cell Processor. My supervisor, Dr. Bernhard Scholz creatively came up with the name PS³ for the project, which I personally think is very clever.

I am also currently working on a databases programming competition (SIGMOD) with some very clever people...more details to come if we have any success.

I will post up some of my more interesting work from the past year when I get the time (which I fear wont be until mid year due to my current schedule). It will soon be time to start looking for a job. On the off chance any Australian game developers read this...mail me please!

Java 6 on Mac OS X with SunSPOTs

2008-09-08T09:16:00.018+10:00

On a SunSPOT project my friend Tim Dawborn and I have been working on, we came across a challenging issue. Some of the Java Runtime Enviornment API has changed between Java 5 and Java 6. What this means is that for the particular code in question (contained in our host application), is that if it is written for Java 5, it MUST be compiled with the Java 5 JRE, or if written in Java 6, compiled with the Java 6 JRE. This might not be a problem for most Windows\Linux users who are probably running Java 6 but we have several team members running OS X which has only recently gained support for Java 6. As it turns out, of course, this 64-bit OS X version of Java 6 does not play nicely with the current SunSPOT sdk (purple) and the associated libraries.

We came up with several options, the nicest of which was to get SunSPOTs working on Java 6 with OS X.

The main problem, besides some bugs in the RXTX transmission library, was that the current squawk translator produces a segmentation fault when running under 64-bit Java 6. The solution is to use Java 5 for this part of the compilation process. We also include a fix to get Eclipse working under Java 6.

This fix applies to:

MAC OS X 10.5 Update 1
Java 6 - 1.6.0_05
RXTX 2.1-7r2
SunSPOT Purple SDK - purple-071018

1. RXTX Fix

Download the RXTX source from http://rxtx.qbang.org/pub/rxtx/rxtx-2.1-7r2.zip
Extract the zip file and enter the directory. Run the normal configure script once in the directory
```
$ unzip rxtx-2.1-7r2.zip
$ cd rxtx-2.1-7r2
$ ./configure
```
Open the generated Makefile. You need to make the compile work for all 3 architectures; this is required by 1.6. To do this add "-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc" to the "CFLAGS" variable, and also to all the "cc -bundle" lines.
Save and close the Makefile.
Open "src/SerialImp.c". The following diff's need to be performed< (*eis->env)->SetIntField(eis->env, *eis->jobj, jeis, ( size_t ) eis );
---
> (*eis->env)->SetLongField(eis->env, *eis->jobj, jeis, ( size_t ) eis );

< int result = 0;
---
> size_t result = 0;

< result = (int)( (*env)->GetIntField( env, jobj, jfd ) );
---
> if (!strcmp(type, "J")) {
> result = ( (*env)->GetLongField( env, jobj, jfd ) );
> }
> else {
> result = (int)( (*env)->GetIntField( env, jobj, jfd ) );
> }
Save and close the file.

Make and install RXTX:
```
$ make
$ sudo make install
```

Copy the new RXTX files to the OS X Java extensions directory (they're copied to the Linux directory)

$ sudo cp i686-apple-darwin9.4.0/librxtxSerial.jnilib /Library/Java/Extensions/
$ sudo cp RXTXcomm.jar /Library/Java/Extensions/

2. SunSPOT ANT Files Fix

The following changes also need to be made to the ant files in your "$SUNSPOT_SDK/ant/" directory. These changes were made to the purple release, and might not be the same on newer release versions of the SDK.

To the "<java" command in "run-spotclient.xml" on line 151, add 'jvm="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Commands/java"'
To the "<java" command in "suite.xml" on line 55, add 'jvm="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Commands/java"'

3. Java Fix

Make sure your System Java version is 1.6 by opening the /Applications/Utilities/Java/Java Preferences.app program, and setting both options to be Java 6.

This however is not enough. Navigate to the directory "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions" and perform the following operations:

$ cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
$ sudo unlink CurrentJDK
$ sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK

Also, make sure the environmental variable "$JAVA_HOME" has the following value:

$ env | grep JAVA_HOME
JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home

4. Eclipse Fix

Eclipse does not like Java 6 either. However, to fix it requires a simple one line fix to its configuration file.

Navigate to your eclipse installation directory, and go to the following:

$ cd Eclipse.app/Contents

Open the "Info.plist" file, and at line 33, add the following line:

<string>-vm</string><string>/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Commands/java</string>

Save and close the file. Start eclipse then by going

$ MacOS/eclipse


.

Semester 1 2008

2008-06-30T12:28:00.002+10:00

You may have noticed something strange about my last post. That's probably because I didn't write it. Anyhow...now that I have a little spare time during the mid-semester break I wanted to post some of the work that I've done through this last semester.

For the record, the subjects I took last semester were:

DECO3006 - Principles of 3D Animation. It turned out not to be 3D animation at all. A lecturer who knew the software wasn't available so they got a guy in from Disney named Niel to run a 2D animation course in Flash. Turned out to be a decent subject.
COMP3608 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Speaks for itself really. This was an excellent subject that was very well planned.
COMP3419 - Graphics and Multimedia. Half of this course looked at the mathematics behind 3D representation, rendering and shading, as well as programming in OpenGL. The other half looked at encoding, decoding and compressing images, audio and video. This course was full of content I was interested in but the first half was delivered in an unbearably poor way.
INFO3220 - Object Oriented Design. More a course about C++ than OOD but a great one nonetheless. C++ is something I know I am going to have to use in industry and so it was great to be taught it well by an experienced academic.

Restarting this blog, and summer work

2008-03-31T21:53:00.004+11:00

Hi everyone,

Since I'd like to do I bit of blogging I figured I'd pick up this blog again and see if I could make anything of it. Of course, it's been while since my last post, so I'm effectively restarting things.

So... things for a blog that happened recently... Hmm. Okay, that's something.

During the summer holidays I spent a few weeks at CHAI doing some work on the Locator project. We were pretty much able to work on any aspect we wanted, so I chose to work on a visualisation of current and historical location data. It ended up pretty good I think from the short amount of time that I spent working on it, and I even managed to incorporate XML somehow for some reason. Anyway, James ended up doing some work on it (user studies and such), and we authored a paper entitled "Information Art Based on Community Activity in a Large Workplace". It was submitted to CAPC2008, and was accepted, which is great. I'll have to see what happens with presenting though. Glen also submitted something about the Nike thingys which was also accepted.

Alright, I think that should be enough to get this blog going again, I'm sure enough exciting things will happen to write about in the future. I may need to put ads on this site to make some money though...

Minisite 3

2007-10-18T15:11:00.001+10:00

I've done a fair bit of work on minisite 3 in the past week and it's pretty much complete. Here are the changes I've made since the last iteration:

Adding a whole bunch of new content and renders to the page. I've done a fair bit of work on the page since the last iteration and so there was a lot to add to the site. This included a new section for final renders that I've made.
The top banner is now context dependant on the page you're at. This was after a suggestion by Justin. In particular the modelling page has a wireframe render which turned out to be a little trickier to do in Maya than you would expect. To get a normal wireframe you could just take a screenshot in Maya but there are a couple of issues. Firstly, it displays all the lines of the wireframe which means that all the background lines interfere and it looks pretty dodgy. Secondly its un-anti-aliased which also makes it look pretty horrible. Fortunately I found a tutorial which shows you how to get around these issues.
The images on the side now popup in a div which hovers over the content on the screen. I found some example javascript to make a pop-up div and I modified it nicely to my liking. This involved changing the position of the div which was made exceedingly difficult by inconsistencies between firefox and IE. Both have different built in methods for positions in javascript. It also involved making a nice little function out of the code which took a single URL to an image and did the rest for you.
Other miscellaneous changes to the style sheet.

I may fix up a few other things before my submission however there isn't much left to do. The next thing I'll be focused on is touching up anything on my car before I have to submit/print it.

For your enjoyment... (i hope)

2007-10-14T16:24:00.001+10:00

Here are a bunch of renders I've done lately, some better than others:

I haven't changed much in terms of texturing, mostly just fixing up odd bits and pieces and trying out different angles.

Week 11/13!

2007-10-10T12:46:00.000+10:00

In the past week I've done a little on my final minisite and my 3d model however it has mostly been consumed with some work on a software assignment which, thankfully, is not nearly as nasty as the last one.

On my minisite I've added a fair bit of content and been deciding how to make it snazzier. I was originally going to make the top banner a slideshow in flash but since we're doing javascript in class I might do one in that instead. I found some code this is quite nice and I could use if I do decide to take that path.

With regards to my 3d model, I've been making some finishing touches and doing some renders from different angles. I did one last night which I will post but I don't have it on me right now.

High Res

2007-10-04T11:53:00.000+10:00

I thought it was time to post a higher res render of my car. This has had a few things fixed and tweaked. I'd say its really close to being as complete as I want it, maybe about 95%. So here it is (~500kb):

The next things I'm mainly going to be concerned with are getting some more good camera angles, tweaking a few textures, making a poster layout and printing it.

Headlights

2007-10-04T11:42:00.000+10:00

The final challenging bit left on the texturing of my car was the headlights. As you can see in the reference pics they have a plasticy cover sloped at an angle on the front and then the actual glass bit of the light is corrugated and set in:

The clear glass was obviously going to be easy to texture but the inner bit took a bit more work. After some searching I got some ideas from a tutorial on how to model headlights in 3ds max and appropriated them to my car and maya. For the corrugated glass I made a simple striped bump map and also cranked up the thickness and refractive index of it to give it a thicker, more blurry look (with raytracing turned on of course). Behind that glass I put a cone shape in and gave it the chrome texture which represented the reflector behind a real car light which focuses the light rays. A fair bit of tweaking later and I came up with something like this:

I'm pretty happy with the result and the parts of the car that are left are pretty minor (like fixing the badges up). I'll get to this over the next week.

Thats cool

2007-10-04T11:40:00.000+10:00

I just skimmed the blogger front page today and saw a cool app they just made available called blogger play. It shows pictures that people have uploaded, as they upload them to their blogs. It's worth a look.

More Texturing

2007-10-01T08:48:00.000+10:00

With the lighting and environment fairly sorted, it was time to get onto texturing the rest of the car. Tires were the next on the list. They actually gave us a tutorial sheet on texturing a tire in class so I decided to follow that. Unfortunately it was really vague about some things which meant I had to do a lot of experimenting with different settings. One of the main parts of the tutorial is constructing the bump maps to get tread on the tire. I tried to find the kind of tire that the original 356's had on them and couldn't really find anything on google. Then I had a look on the tires of my scale model and they actually had the model number of the tire on them! They were Dunlop 5.25-16 and a quick search even revealed the tread pattern. Of course the scale model Porsche I have is an older one than what I'm modelling but I just wanted to get an idea. I constructed a bump map following the tutorial but using a different tread pattern and came up with something like this:

I also created several other maps for colour, specular roll-off and diffuse. Adjusting the other settings of the texture to look right took a while.

I also textured the road. For this I did the same kind of thing that we did when texturing the leaf in class. I started with a picture of the road I took when we were out getting background shots and created several maps from it, including a bump map.

Here is a shot of the tire, you can also see the road behind:

You can't see much of the tread but that doesn't matter. Next step is to texture the lights.

Environment Mapping

2007-09-26T18:36:00.000+10:00

A lot of things that we learnt in the tutorials I thought would be really useful for my model but when it came time to apply those things to my car it turned out that, for one reason or another, this was not so much the case. Environment mapping was one of these things. At uni we learnt how to put the reflections on a chrome pot by the reflected colour of the pot to a series of pictures of the environment the pot is in - a picture above the pot, below it, to the right, etc. This worked fine for the pot which used a standard blinn texture.

My snazzy new mi_car_paint_phen (car paint) texture, however was not happy having anything mapped to its reflected colour other than, well, a colour! This meant I had to do something else to get the reflections on my car. The documentation for the car paint shader mentioned something about reflections from HDR images being supported, so I continued down this path. From Wikipedia:

In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a far greater dynamic range of exposures (i.e. a large range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows.

Some further googling revealed you could use these HDR images within Maya to not only provide reflections of the environment but to, in fact, light your entire seen! I found this to be quite amazing and completely unexpected. Lighting from these images provides light from all directions in the right colour and intensity which results in a highly realistic render.

I found the instructions on how to use image based lighting in Maya help and followed them with some HDR images I downloaded from this cool website. I found one that roughly suited the background shots I took and my render started to look cool:

(as you can see I created a chrome texture using the tutorial for the tea pot, with a higher reflectivity value)

I toyed with the idea of creating my own HDR images that would match my background shots but it turns out that this requires some special equipment and a small amount of photography knowledge, neither of which I have. It would also mean I would have to go out again and take photos. I concluded that the HDR image I found was sufficient enough and it wasn't worth the trouble of finding a new one.

With this great progress made, the next step is texturing the road and tires.

By the way I'm purposely keeping the renders I show from here on low quality/resolution so I don't spoil the final renders.

Paint Texturing: Part 2

2007-09-26T16:00:00.000+10:00

As my search continued for car paint textures, I stumbled across a document describing a mental ray paint shader. The page was concerned with the properties that the shader offered and how to adjust them to achieve the desired look. It also described the complexities of faking car paint - one of the reasons the simple shader I built earlier looked so poor. I would later find out that this shader had been purpose built for distribution with mental ray because simulating car paint from standard shaders is so difficult.

So I found this page documenting the paint shader but I had no idea whether it was something you had to download or whether it was included in mental ray by default (and if so how to access it). I started looking for documentation on using mental ray shaders on the net and came up fairly dry (as has been the theme for Maya related material). A couple of forum posts led me to believe the shader was distributed with mental ray and so I started trying to find the damn thing.

Eventually I did - it can be accessed through the "Create" menu in hypershade (daa). I placed the shader on the model and after a quick render I knew it would be right. I spent a fair while getting the shader properties right - adjusting things like the flake size (flakes being those sparkly bits in the paint of the car), the colours and how they change, the glossiness, specularity and a whole bunch of other jazz - using the documentation as a guide. I got something like this:

I was really pleased with the results of this shader. Use of the shader forced me to switch to the mental ray renderer. At University we were taught using the Maya Software renderer which, after recent experiences and research, is vastly inferior to mental ray in quality. Our tutor at uni even suggested not to use mental ray. I don't really know what the reason for this was - maybe he was trying to hide the complexities of it from us. What I found when I was using mental ray, however, was that most of the advanced features were optional settings and using the default preset modes (such as preview and production) were more than sufficient.

In any case, I continued with my texturing. Rather than moving on to texturing a different part of the car I decided to get the paint work right first which meant getting those shiny reflections of the environment on it. A story for another post.

Paint Texturing: Part 1

2007-09-25T13:06:00.001+10:00

So with most of the modelling of my Porsche being complete (and being completely unmotivated to do any further modelling) I moved on to lighting my scene last week. I chose one of the environment pics I liked and figured out how to map it to an image plane that is attached to the camera. I then positioned my model properly in the image.

In order to get the proper sun-lit environment of the background images I took, I used a a directional light (which gives parallel rays from a given direction) to simulate the sun and also a low-intensity ambient light to simulate the large amount of light being reflected around the environment. After some tweaking I got something like this:

I was quite happy with this setup as the porsche seemed to be well lit and the shadows were sharp and well positioned when compared to the shadows in the background image. I realised I will have to model the ground as well in order to capture the shadows.

With lighting sorted for the minute, I proceeded to texturing the car. In one sense I am luck with texturing the scene - there are only a few materials that have to be textured. These are the paint work, the chrome parts, the tyres and the blinkers. I soon realised, however, that these few textures would provide me with many troubles.

I first decided to texture the paint work since it made up most of the car. I did a google search for car paint tutorials and found one from digital tutors. The tutorial basically involved constructing a layered texture. The top layer was a clear blinn which was the reflective layer and the bottom layer was the lambert coloured layer. This was supposed to imitate the layers of paint on a car however as you can see, it did a less than satisfactory job:

The texture was still very flat and it didn't look like car paint very much at all. I kept searching for alternative techniques.

Hidden Helper

2007-09-25T12:59:00.000+10:00

One reference for my modelling project that I have failed to mention up until now is a 1/18 scale model of a Porsche 356 that I have. I was given the model by my Dad several years ago and it has come in really handy for this project, particularly when I was trying to model the shape of the body. Blueprints and photographs of the car are really helpful but having a physical model that you can pick up and look at helped a lot, particularly for modelling the front of the car which has some really cool compounding curves.

I was actually considering modelling the car using images of the scale model before I found blueprints. The model is a slightly older one than what I've chosen for the assignment.

IE hackz

2007-09-25T12:31:00.000+10:00

I mentioned earlier, when I posted minisite 2, that there were a couple of problems with its display in IE6. Unfortunately these bugs translated to IE7 giving sufficient reason to find work-arounds. The first problem was to do with the background image. It is currently positioned in the center, at the bottom of the page in the CSS. Firefox takes the bottom of any content you have in the page to be the bottom position of a body element. IE however has 2 different behaviors, however, depending on the page. If the page fits into a single screen of the browser, it will take the bottom of the browser to be the bottom of the body element. If not, it will act in a similar way to Firefox. This causes dodgy behaviour in IE if the page does not span at least a full screen of the browser:
To correct this I simply created an extra div which had its background property set to the image.

The second problem I had was that IE added some extra space around images in the page. A quick google search revealed that the images were being treated as inline elements that were vertically aligned in the centre, relative to text. The extra space was for letters. This was solved by simply adding img {display:block;} to the CSS.

It's funny how most people who have done a little HTML or CSS will tell you that it is easy (including myself). It seems easy at first and it should be easy but there are many complexities to it that mostly arise due to inconsistent rendering. If you want to be able to design websites that work, you need to understand how a browser renders a page and hence why something might work in one browser but not another.

Some people call it holidays...

2007-09-25T12:25:00.001+10:00

but really its just a week they give you to catch up on all the work you haven't done in the first half of semester. Well, that is, unless you do an arts degree. In the past week since I last posted I've been working hard on my model and it's looking quite good. In fact I'm not even going to post a pic of the progress so far because it's that close to completion that I think it would spoil it.

Anyway, all the focus on my model recently has meant there is a decent backlog of posts which I will hopefully make today. I'll try to find other kinds of visual aids to include.

Crest Badges

2007-09-18T22:32:00.000+10:00

Just an update on the badges I had made for youth group - they turned out quite well. The colour reproduction wasn't quite right but they looked good nonetheless:

The whole band night went swimmingly and we raised over $2000 for World Vision from that night alone. You can check out pics of the night on the website.

Minisite 2!

2007-09-18T17:51:00.001+10:00

Over the past week I've been working on my second minisite and it is now pretty much ready for submission. Here are some changes that have been made since the first minisite:

Separation of sections into different pages
Addition of a sub-menu panel
Addition of a panel on the right for pictures or other things
More content and pictures added
Styles modified slightly
The top banner has been converted to flash. This currently serves no purpose but is in anticipation of submission 3 in which it will play a dual role as a banner and a photo gallery.

It all validates properly but as usual that means nothing in IE. I've tested it in IE6 and there is a minor unavoidable bug but I am yet to test it in IE7 (I think it will be fine).

Environment Images

2007-09-18T17:35:00.000+10:00

Because I don't plan to model the background of my car it means I have to find sufficient images to place the Porsche in. As usual, my first port of call was Google Image Search however after tireless searching my efforts proved fruitless with most images being too poor quality (our render has to be submitted at 2000x1500) or from dodgy angles.

This prompted me to take my own pictures so on the weekend I borrowed my cousins camera, went down to Cronulla and took some snaps. I took my Dad along as well since he is a fairly design oriented guy (being an architect) and usually has good ideas. We took some pictures overlooking the water and used his car to get the right framing, angles and to help with proportions later. Here are a couple I'm likely to use:

Hopefully these will work well with the model. I'm considering modelling the road portion and texturing it so I can get shadows right.

I've just finished off a fair chunk of work from other subjects and so over the next week I'll be working hard to make progress on my model. The modelling of it is almost finished and then its on to lighting.

SOFT assignments

2007-09-12T00:09:00.000+10:00

Well I went from working on my model just about every day last week to not at all this week. The assignment we have for SOFT is quite annoying. It's basically an assignment of testing. I'm so glad I decided not to do QA.

Anyways its chewed up a large chunk (all) of my time this week and I'm really looking forward to throwing it in the can on Friday. I'm really dreading the next one if it is as involved. I then plan to knock out the modelling report so that I can concentrate on my model and minisite 2 over the week break.

Since my last post I have done some detail modelling on my model and it's at a stage where I need to decide on the camera in order to decide whether I need to model anything else. The camera angle is probably going to depend largely on the background image I find so I've decided this is my next step. Hopefully I will get onto this on the weekend but I can see it being one of those tasks where you do a lot of searching and come up dry unless you get really lucky. Anyway here are some shots of the latest renderings:

In other news, our youth group is having a band night on Friday and I designed some badges for it. I wasn't quite happy with the design but I only had a couple of hours to dedicate to it this week. I've never had badges made before but we'll see how they turn out. If they're any good I'll definitely be getting more for future events...youth group or otherwise.

Misc.

2007-09-06T15:59:00.000+10:00

In the interest of making additional posts to my blog: I checked out the million dollar homepage and it's quite cool. It's another thing to add to my list of things I wish I had invented.

Lazy with Blogging

2007-09-05T23:05:00.000+10:00

Once again I find myself arriving at the same point in the week with no blog posts. I would apologise but frankly, too few people probably read this blog to care.

Anywho's, no blogging does not mean no work. I've done several things this week including getting a haircut and becoming obsessed with evil pop tunes. On the more productive side of things, we had a 40% multiple choice quiz for databases which was a piece of garbage and I've been working consistently on my modelling project. Check out my latest render, its looking quite good in my opinion:I'd say I'm about 80% through the modelling stage and with high hopes I plan to have that finished in the next week so that I can start tackling lights and textures.

The 3D modelling lecture and lab today were fairly boring for me. In the lab we constructed a polygon plane from a set of blueprints which is almost exactly what I did to get the shape of my car so I didn't even bother with it. Instead I worked on the porsche logo. It ended up being quite difficult to get right and I ended up using the text tool and a font that was very close to what was on the car. Its not 100% the same as the original but at its size it isn't that important.

I'm glad we have Friday off because I really must get started on this software assignment I have - I'm far too distracted at the moment with my model. Despite the cold weather I can feel the tug of summer and I love it. We need to start sitting outside on Monday's lunchtime.

Minisite 1!

2007-08-30T16:04:00.000+10:00

So our minisite 1 is due today and so far I have not made one post about it. Probably because instead of making posts about the site I was actually working on it. Anyhow seeing as it is our "first iteration" I refrained from making it excessively fancy. If I did I wouldn't really have anywhere to go for submissions two and three. I opted to keep it as a single page site seeing as I have only a small amount of information at the moment and in my next iteration I'll expand it to multiple pages and probably add a secondary menu.

In any case I'm quite happy with the layout and design which took me quite a while to tweak to my liking. Oh and I apologise, I couldn't refrain from adding the geeks touch to it. If it wasn't clear enough before, check it out here.

More Modelling

2007-08-30T15:16:00.000+10:00

In the past week I began modelling my Porsche in Maya. I looked up several tutorials (for a starting point) and found one (7mb pdf) that I felt comfortable with which is based on box modelling. The strategy for achieving the rough form of the car is basically to start with half a cube (you only model half the car because it is symmetrical) and place the vertices in positions which correspond to positions of the car. You then add edge loops (divide the cube) in the x- and y-directions, adding more vertices. These vertices are moved to add more detail to the car. The process is continued until sufficient detail has been added at which point the polygon is smoothed. Check out the screens below showing my progress:

As you can see, I now have the basic form of the car and after I get some more time (rediculously busy atm) I will get onto separating the panels of the car (doors, bonnet, windscreen, etc.)

Blogging

2007-08-28T10:28:00.000+10:00

In the past week or so I've had no time to put up posts in my blog so I've got a huge back-log. I've been doing a fair bit of work on my 3d modelling project so there is some stuff to talk about. Anyway I'm putting them up today (which includes the previous post on reference images).

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words (and four are worth a 3d model)

2007-08-23T16:43:00.001+10:00

This week I truely made an effort to get underway on my 3D modelling assignment of a Porsche 356. Having never really modelled something of any substance before it was never going to be an easy task. I started by looking for some reference images on the web and I honestly spent hours looking for good front- and side-on images but found nothing! Everything of any quality was from a perspective view. I did find some nice images though that I will use conceptually:

How awesome is that car! Anyhow, I gave up looking for reference images (because I honestly spent hours doing it) and tried to start modelling with what I had. Then I realised I really had no idea where to start. I proceeded to look up some car-modelling tutorials, and quickly discovered that the online community for 3DMax is far larger than the Maya community (at least in terms of available tutorials). Luckily the tutorials are really conceptually the same, at least in terms of the modelling.

After going through a few tutorials that seemed pretty dodgy I found a certain dodgy one which suggested going to http://www.onnovanbraam.com/ to find blueprints of the car they were modelling to use as references. I was pretty doubtful that they would have the Porsche but I took a look anyway and they actually did! In fact, the site is really amazing. It has blueprints for almost every build of car available, as well as other strange objects. So here are the Porsche prints I will be using:

As you can see there are front, back, side and top images, which is excellent and they even fit together nicely.

I proceeded to set up my Maya scene with the images:

Now I'm ready to start confidently modelling! Just how I will go about that I'm still not sure...

More CSS

2007-08-23T16:38:00.000+10:00

Today in deco2102 we learnt more CSS. In the lab I did learn something valuable about centering fixed width div's. Basically its a hack and its the only way to do it so that it works in all browsers. How great standards are! My ConCo tutorial is hilariously hard on the eyes though I could have made it even worse.

I will no doubt have to get started in my first minisite assignment this weekend.

More Maya

2007-08-22T10:32:00.000+10:00

Last week I didn't have time to play around much in Maya but hopefully that will change this week. Today in Maya we learnt about shaders - texturing, bump-mapping and the likes. I am going to try to start my car this week as well. I will post some of my tutorial files later in the week.

Validation

2007-08-16T16:09:00.000+10:00

We were forced to make our html for anything we've made so far in deco2102 validate as xhtml today. I cleaned up my page and created a proper style sheet however Flash uses the embed tag to put the movie in the page which isn't proper xhtml. I looked for a work-around and found one however it involves a lot of effort which includes modifying the Flash file so I'm leaving that for now. If you ignore those errors it is fine.

When we get the assesment criteria for the web pages I will start drafting out the website for this project.

Polygons

2007-08-16T16:00:00.000+10:00

Yesterday we had 3d modelling and it was more than the average dose of it. Due to the power outages last week, our tutor Steve decided we would have a catch up lesson on the same day as our normal lesson. This catch up lesson also went overtime by half an hour meaning 5.5 hours of 3d modelling that day! If I didn't enjoy the classes I doubt I would make it through the class. It is good, though, that Steve is motivated and enthusiastic enough to put on a catch up lesson.

We learnt about creating polygon models and lighting today. The model stuff I'm doing fine with since I had some practice at home but the lighting stuff I'm yet to play around with so I'm far from confident. All I remember at the moment is that a standard lighting setup contains 3 lights. On the weekend I'll get around to using Maya again and probably doing a tutorial to make a hammer. We have to hand in one tutorial in a couple of weeks and this one was suggested. It is just to do with polygon modelling. I might also try to start blocking out my idea for my project - a porsche.

I just finished making a menu for my architecture webspace in Flash. It took me longer than it probably should have because I kept trying to take shortcuts instead of doing things properly. That'll teach me.

I like using Flash for a few reasons. Firstly there is none of this compatibility business and given that a user has a recent version of Flash (which is highly likely) the animation should render exactly how you designed it. No validation or unpredictable rendering and the like. Related to this is the fact that designing a layout in Flash is much easier since you can position things exactly where you want them and you know they wont get shifted around in different browsers/configurations. Then there are the obvious benefits like snazzy animations, embedded videos and sound and other magic.

There are, of course, then the downsides. The biggest, in my opinion, is reduced compatibility with hand-held and portable devices. Even if these have Flash player installed, which many new devices do, it is unlikely that a page designed for a desktop monitor will be easily usable on a small screen. Second, non-standard interfaces can sometimes stifle unknowing users. Finally, it is harder to properly integrate server-side applications into the Flash movie.

I still agree that for most business and corporate use standard html is the way to go at the moment and I will obviously be using it for my deco2102 assignment.

Architectural Anomalies

2007-08-11T00:01:00.000+10:00

Well it has been almost 2 weeks since I first attempted to get myself an architecture faculty account for deco2102/deco2103. On Monday they emailed me and let me know that it was available however I had to reset the password. I quickly found out that I couldn't do this through SSH - I had to log in inside the architecture building to do that. So I thought fine - I'll do that on Wednesday when I have my deco2103 lab. It wasn't to be so. Unfortunately, for some reason which is beyond my knowledge, the power wasn't on in the architecture building so no lab on Wednesday.

Later on Wednesday, while still at uni, I heard that the power was back on in the arch building. So I happily went into uni on Thursday for my 2102 lab/lecture and to my great joy the power was out again! No lab on Thursday.

Friday came and I went to uni for software construction. I thought I would stop into the architecture building on the way and just log in and change my password so that at least I could log in from home then and get my site up. So I did that and everything seemed to be up and running fine. I got home at about 5pm and SSH'd in just to see if it was working and it did. 10 minutes later I tried to transfer some files over and there was no connection it seemed the power was out once again!!

I got home from youth group about 20 minutes ago and when I tried to log in, it didn't work however I just tried again then and it seems to be up! I will probably put something up tomorrow (Saturday) but I wont be holding my breath.

Also, lets see if I can get some pics going in this blog in some future posts hey.

Assignment Topic

2007-08-10T10:32:00.000+10:00

Well I think I'm going to change the topic of my deco2102 assignment to the 3D Modelling project I'm doing in deco2103. I came to the conclusion that building a website documenting another website would be kind of weird, not to mention that all my passions regarding this modelling project will be fresh in my head and so I can accurately document them.

I should probably give the details of the project for the 3D Modelling (deco2103) course. The main deliverable for the subject is a photo-realistic render of a modelled scene. And that's about as far as the requirements go. The rest is up to you - the choice of scene, software...you're even allowed to photoshop it up till your heart's content.

Although we're allowed to use any software we wish to model our scene the ones they are offering to teach us are Maya and CATIA and I chose to use Maya purely due to its prominence in business and on the internet. We've had one week of tutorials for it so far (due to the power outages in the architecture building) and I've played around a bit with it at home and I'm slowly getting the hang of it. It is a fairly steep learning curve, however that should be expected for such a complicated and powerful piece of software. I started doing the lab that we missed this Wednesday, working off the sheet we were provided with. It took me roughly an hour to do the first page of the sheet comprising of 4 steps to model a key...I had to look up every step in Maya help. I understand that the sheets are meant to be used in conjunction with the tutor however it would have been nice if they included enough detail to allow you to get by unaided. In any case it certainly makes you learn things better when you're forced to look into them yourself and so I feel like I'm getting good grips on the basics of the software. We've learned nothing of lighting, cameras and texturing so far, we've mainly been concerned with the modelling part - creating the polygons which make up objects in the 3d world.

I'll work on more of the tutorial throughout the week when I have spare time. As I expected, the course isn't something I despise doing and if I have the remaining brain power I'm happy to play around with Maya when I've got the time. As for what I'm going to model for the project I'm not quite sure yet. I've had some thoughts like the front of a porsche 356 (one of my favourite cars of all time); looking down a street-lit path at night or some kind of cool train shot. As I get more practice at the 3d thing I'll decide which I'm most able to pull off and choose that.

Fedora

2007-08-06T17:13:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I decided to download and install Fedora, having never had a Linux installation before. In Software Construction they are adamant to expand our Unix knowledge and although I'm able to happily work my way around a bash shell I've never had the joy of tweaking, poking and getting bitten by it on my own box. In the past I've never had the need or desire to look past Windows (gasp). Despite all its criticisms it remains the most widely compatible OS and for someone who enjoys all of the flavours of the neopolitan ice-cream that is computing (all of them being 3D gaming) it is impossible to go by. And to all you hardcore Linux fans who want to yell things like Wine at me or other such garbage, please don't be silly.

Nonetheless, I agree that Linux knowledge is certainly important for industry and that's why I'm happy to become well versed in it. There aren't too many reasons why I chose Fedora. Choosing a distro for a noobie like myself is kind of like a teenager choosing a bottle of wine. They know it'll get them drunk but they don't know what it's going to taste like. I picked it chiefly for the reason that it's a very popular distro and despite suggestions from a friend to use Ubuntu because it is "better for beginners" I felt I could deal with the learning curve. Actually, I was surprised at how easy and user-friendly it is to install and get started with Fedora. It took me a couple of hours to get it set up happily on my hardware and get things like dual booting, dual monitors and hard drive mounting working. Over the next few weeks I'll be continuing to use it in tandem with Windows and I'll let you in on the fun parts.

Linksss

2007-08-03T10:49:00.000+10:00

I just added a link to the website for my youth group that I've been working on for the past month. If possible I will probably try to use this for my deco assignment cause it's all I've really thought about recently in terms of major work.

I will add links to my deco2102 assignment page when they get their act together and give me a an architecture faculty account!

Customising CSS

2007-08-03T10:31:00.000+10:00

...can be such a pain sometimes. It took me a frustratingly long time to vertically center the text at the bottom of the page within its container last night. I'm certainly no css guru but it seems to me that if something in a language is so unintuitive, so poorly standardised and there exists so many work-arounds to get it to work then there is a problem with it. It still doesn't work properly in IE6 (haven't tried 7) but I'm done with that for now.

This morning I stumbled over some code to remove the navbar at the top of this site. After looking into it a bit more I found out that it is questionable whether or not this is in violation of the TOS and that the general gist of things was that the people at blogger would prefer you not to. Still, it was a surprisingly small amount of code posted over 2 years ago and if they were that upset about it they would have disabled it. I think I'll leave it there at least until this assignment is done.

I'm about to head into uni for software construction - a 2 hour lecture with a 1 hour break in the middle of it. It's good though cause we all go for thai in the middle of it.

Moved Blog

2007-08-03T00:23:00.000+10:00

Well I just moved my blog over to blogger from WordPress after I discovered that WordPress forced you to pay to customise your blog beyond one of their standard templates! There were some nice things about WordPress - it was probably easier to set up and the templates it provided were much nicer than the standard blogger ones but I couldn't deal with not being able to customise my page.

Anyway i spent the afternoon at soccer training and customising my new blog. I don't know why Lemmings popped into my head but who could argue with it. It's one of those games that will probably be played forever.

First Post!

2007-07-03T15:32:00.000+10:00

I just set up my first blog! Despite the fact that I’m doing a computer science degree I’ve never had a blog before. Whether this is a good or bad thing I’ll leave upto you. Either way it seems like blogs are a necessity for software developers these days and everyone has one no matter how garbage it seems.

Currently I’m in the first deco2102 tutorial and now I’m going to go and figure out how to make this page pretty.

PS³ (Honours) (2009)

2000-11-09T14:15:00.003+11:00

NAME PS³ (Honours)
DATE 2009
LINKS poster (pdf) | thesis (pdf) | presentation (ppt)
DOWNLOADS N\A

DESCRIPTION
For my honours project at the University of Sydney, my research area was in parallel and multi-core computing. As a result of reaching the performance limitations of single-core processors, we are seeing an emergence of parallel chip architectures, such as multi-core
CPUs (e.g. Intel Core2), the Cell Broadband Engine (found in the Playstation 3) and GPGPUs. These architectures offer a significant boost in performance over conventional, single-core processors at the expense of increased difficulty to program for.

PS³ is a framework which facilitates the automatic parallelisation of scientific programs written in the Octave programming language for the Cell Broadband Engine. The framework was capable of achieving speedups in the execution of programs by up to 12 times. This framework formed a part of my Honours year project and consists of ~7,000 lines of C/C++ code. A journal paper on the project has been submitted to a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed systems for review.

My thesis is available for download and a poster of the work is also available. The source code will be made available shortly.

St. Aidans Website

2000-11-09T14:00:00.000+11:00

NAME St. Aidans Hurstville Grove Website
DATE Semester 1, 2009 to Present
LINKS http://grovechurch.org.au/
DOWNLOADS N\A

DESCRIPTION
I built a website for the church I attend at Hurstville Grove. It was built upon a WordPress backend which turned out to be really nice to work with. The site can be found at http://grovechurch.org.au/.

LAVAlamp

2000-07-03T14:51:00.000+10:00

NAME LAVAlamp
DATE Summer, 2007/2008
LINKS N\A
DOWNLOADS
paper - Information Art Based on Community Activity in a Large Workplace
slides (powerpoint)

DESCRIPTION
In November 2007-January 2008 I worked with the CHAI group at the University of Sydney on a pervasive visualisation called LAVAlamp. The visualisation is aimed at informing users of a workplace about activity in that workplace, and do so in a pleasant and artistic way. The system builds on the Locator and Personis systems that were previously developed at CHAI and collect, amongst other things, information regarding the whereabouts of people and devices. LAVAlamp then produces a display of this information, giving a sense of the activity of people in the building, both at as instant in time and over the recent past.

The display also serves to aesthetically complement the workplace environment.

James Constable performed a user study on the system with positive results. More information is available in the publication below.

SCREENSHOTS

PUBLICATIONS
James Constable, Raymes Khoury, David Carmichael, Judy Kay & Bob Kummerfeld.
Information Art Based on Community Activity in a Large Workplace
In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Context-Aware Pervasive Communities: Infrastructures, Services and Applications, Sydney, Australia, May 19 2008.
Available at http://torurg.org/pervasive2008/Pervasive2008-workshops.pdf

Regular Expression Engine Analysis

2000-07-02T19:22:00.000+10:00

NAME Regular Expression Engine Analysis
DATE Semester 2, 2007
LINKS http://members.optusnet.com.au/raymesk01/all/regexp/report/
DOWNLOADS report/test scripts

DESCRIPTION
In 2007 I took a course in C and Unix and one of the assignments was to verify the results of Russ Cox's paper entitled Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast
(but is slow in Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, ...) . The paper examines two approaches to regular expressions - a traditional approach (which he calls Thompson NFA) and the approach implemented in most programming language libraries (like Java, Perl, ...). What he finds is that in order to accomodate features like backreferences, the implementations in Java and Perl can potentially take exponential time to perform a match even on regular expressions that do not contain backreferences (as opposed to the Thompson NFA algorithm which performs in linear time). Cox suggests that "Today, regular expressions [in programming language libraries] have also become a shining example of how ignoring good theory leads to bad programs".

In my report I verify the statistical results of Cox's paper but also do some additional research. I analyse the performance of newer versions of egrep which turn out to use a hybrid approach (using both algorithms) to maximise performance. I also find that although the approach used in Java and Perl is slower on some regular expressions, in most cases it is not significantly slower (usually for pathological cases only). In my opinion, the improvement in speed that the Thompson NFA algorithm gives does not justify the features provided by new regular expression implementations (such as backreferences) which are very powerful (supported by their heavy use today). Whatsmore, the performance difference does not necessarilly justify the use of a hybrid approach (such as that in egrep) which is highly complex.

The full report can be found at http://members.optusnet.com.au/raymesk01/all/regexp/report/.

Corona - SunSPOT Distributed Query Processor

2000-07-02T18:12:00.007+10:00

NAME Corona - SunSPOT Distributed Query Processor
DATE Semester 2, 2006 - Semester 1, 2009
LINKS http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~wsn/corona/
DOWNLOADS Paper - Efficient Time Triggered Query Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks

DESCRIPTION
Since 2006 I have been working with Dr. Bernhard Scholz at the University of Sydney on a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) query system. Our platform has been the SunSPOT, which allows us to program in Java. The system allows queries (written in an SQL-like language) to be issued to a wireless network of (SunSPOT) sensors and results collected.

Our research has been focused on improving the efficiency of such query systems and we have developed several techniques to address this. These include using a time-triggered mechanism to awaken and execute a scheduled query, giving sensors the opportunity to enter power-saving modes for a longer period of time.

The system has been released open-source for the public and is available at http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~wsn/corona/.

PUBLICATIONS
Bernhard Scholz, Mohamed M. Gaber, Tim Dawborn, Raymes Khoury, and Edmund Tse.
Efficient Time Triggered Query Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks.
In: Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Embedded Systems and Software (ICESS-07), Daegu, Korea, May 14-16. Springer Press, 2007.

Porsche 356 (Maya)

2000-07-02T14:15:00.002+10:00

NAME Porsche 356 (Maya)
DATE Semester 2, 2007
LINKS http://people.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rkho9564/deco2102/site3/
DOWNLOADS models available on request

DESCRIPTION
For a 3D modelling subject I undertook in semester 2, 2007, we had to create a photorealistic render of a scene of our choosing. I chose to model my favourite car, the Porsche 356. I used maya for the modelling and mental ray for rendering.

The scene is composited, using images from Cronulla beach as a backdrop. You can find an in depth description of the project, along with renders at it's accompanying website: http://people.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rkho9564/deco2102/site3/. There are also many blog entries on this site regarding my work on the project: http://raymesk.blogspot.com/search/label/3d%20modelling.

3D Programming - Deadman

2000-07-02T12:52:00.002+10:00

NAME 3D Programming - Deadman
DATE Semester 1, 2008
LINKS N\A
DOWNLOADS exe (windows) | source (c++)

DESCRIPTION
For a 3D programming course (COMP3419) I undertook in 2008, I wrote a simple 3D engine from scratch in C++ using OpenGL. It was a simple 3D world with a robot-like man who could be controlled. It included some fairly advanced features like shaders.

Features:

Animated robots walking around
1st person and 3rd person camera modes that act as you would expect
Importable objects through an OFF file loader (a simple 3D object file format)
Controllable robot that can push objects around
Anti-aliasing through use of the accumulator
Phong shading through normal interpolation
Fog
A cubemap shader
Use of display lists for fast rendering
Lighting with day/night
Use of textures and a skybox
Bounding box collision detection

Connect 4 AI

2000-07-02T12:15:00.003+10:00

NAME Connect 4 AI
DATE Semester 1, 2008
LINKS N\A
DOWNLOADS report (pdf) | exe (windows) | source (c++)

DESCRIPTION
For an Artificial Intelligence course I took in Semester 1, 2008, I had to build a Connect 4 AI. It was a very interesting project. My resulting AI was quite powerful and could easily beat an average human player.

I used standard techniques for the AI including the minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning, some basic move ordering and a transposition table with Zobrist hashing. My source code provides a clear implementation of these features.

The code is written in C++ and only a command-line interface is provided (sorry!). There are actually 3 AI classes provided (3 strategies). The first (strategy a) uses only minimax, the second (strategy b) adds alpha-beta pruning and the third (strategy c) adds transposition tables.

The report included provides a comparison of the three techniques and gives more information about the project.

X-Commander

2000-07-01T23:30:00.022+10:00

NAME X-Commander
DATE 2004
LINKS http://members.optusnet.com.au/raymesk01/
DOWNLOADS source | exe (windows)

DESCRIPTION
For one of my first shots at programming something of substance in High School, I developed a space-shooter game called X-Commander. It is a 2-player game where you control a customisable ship and need to shoot down the enemy's ship. Maps are destructible and the game comes complete with power-ups and a map editor.

The game was written in Visual Basic 6 (lol). A website I developed for the game contains more information: http://members.optusnet.com.au/raymesk01/.

Crest Website

2000-07-01T23:10:00.003+10:00

NAME Crest Website
DATE Semester 1, 2007 to Present
LINKS http://grovechurch.org.au/crest/
DOWNLOADS N\A

DESCRIPTION
Crest is a youth group for high school kids run at St. Aidans Hurstville Grove. I have led at the youth group since 2006 and in 2007 developed a website for them. I currently maintain that site. It features pictures, video, and news which are updated weekly, as well as information about the group.

The site is Flash-based. It does not currently have a database back-end for content management (due to time restrictions) but the hooks are available to easily attach one in the future. All of the Flash is original work.

The site can be found at http://grovechurch.org.au/crest/.

Animations

2000-07-01T12:44:00.015+10:00

NAME Animations
DATE Semester 1, 2008
LINKS
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=DrR1EOwamto&fmt=18
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=ba40uKUX4fA&fmt=18
DOWNLOADS N\A

DESCRIPTION
In semester 1 2008 I undertook a course in animation in Flash (DECO3006). In this course I created 2 major animations. The first was a textual animation to music. I chose to use Powderfinger's song How far have we really come from their album Vulture Street.

The second animation was a short skit which saw the characters from the game Super Mario Bros. being animated to the dialogue from one of the final scene's from the movie Training Day. The characters are situated at the last boss of the game (Bowser).

Super Mario meets Denzel Washington

2000-06-30T18:44:00.000+10:00

For my animation subject, DECO3006, in semester 1 2008, I had to create an animation for my final assignment. The animation could be on just about anything we wanted. I chose to animate the characters from Super Mario Bros. at the final boss of the game (against Bowser). I put this to the dialogue from the climax of the movie Training Day (starring Denzel Washington), with mildly amusing consequences.

The SWF is below or you can find it on youtube.