digital home of MacSlow

By now I am well past writing only pure functional Haskell (besides, solving problems from Project Euler is a bit dry in the long run). Avoiding side-effects does not get you very far when you want to use a programming language for solving problems in the real world. Any kind of output (or reading non-deterministic input) shifts you back on the path of impure (aka effectful) programming. Me being me, the “effects” I enjoy writing the most are from the field of computer graphics. While not yet fluent enough for…read more

I’ve managed to finish the classification of all surface-intersections in my Cubical Marching Squares-implementation (aka CMS). As a small show-off, I have added support of displaying multiple iso-surfaces at the same time with different colors… Finally I’ve also started to test some CT- and MRI-volume-data-sets with my CMS. But that’s not fully working yet or rather not up to the visual quality I’m targeting. In the long run, I’ll add a dedicated ray-caster rendering-mode, which is the preferred method for visualizing that kind of volume data anyway. This is so…read more

A brief update on one particular thing cooking in my laboratory at the moment… I’m taking a break from offline 3D-graphics (my path-tracer BeamRacer) to implement my own version of cubical marching squares (aka: CMS) for a stand-alone visualization library, which has to be named still. The versions of marching-somethings I’ve seen outside of academic-paper implementations – in commercial applications in particular – are not very pleasant to look at. Only the games-industry manages to produce clean and elegant visuals, but lacks data-visualization details and precision on the other hand…read more

… yes that venerable old desktop-toy from years ago, has finally found a new permanent repository-home again… after enough people poked me about it. I also updated the related project-page on launchpad. In the early days it used to live on people.freedesktop.org/~macslow/cairo-clock (or something like that). Thanks to the wonders of git the whole commit-history is still intact. Looking at that code-base makes me want to redo it all… or update the build-system (CMake or Meson) and move to gtk+ 3.x at least. But maybe someone beats me to it…read more

Over the last few weeks, I’ve added new shaders to ToyShader. Among the most impressive ones is an interactive 3D-fractal. This shader implements the typical iterative term z = z² + c, but with quaternions instead of the usual complex numbers. Since quaternions are 4-dimensional vectors, one has to cut a 3D-“slice” out of the 4D-body in order to get something meaningful to the screen. Tweak the components of c and you will get different 3D-slices. That’s what’s making this funky animation possible… apart from moving the camera around with…read more