Coding Multi-Platform Music Visualizations

Colored bezier connections

2011-10-06T15:50:00.001-07:00

Just implemented the colored beziers for connections.. nothing new I know, but still works well in realtime when zooming out. a lot better than my previous straight white lines for sure!

This is about half of the stuff open in the luna:reactivation demo.
Of course one zooms in and closes most of these boxes when working, but I wanted to see how well the bezier drawing stuff performed, and it's good enough.. red pipes are render, green is float values, blue is textures, orange is unit quaternions (rotations) etc.

VSXu bezier curve connections

2011-10-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

Still need to add color, but this looks promising.

Kinesis Advantage + Multi-touch Touchpad

2011-08-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

Running this in Ubuntu 10.10 with utouch and ginn:

Works for scrolling around in code, quite nice! No need to move the hand to the mouse anymore for scroll wheel... I'm going to attach it properly later on...

APIC tuning Linux for I/O performance

2011-04-11T05:13:00.000-07:00

Some handy links related to IRQ and I/O performance in linux:

http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/pci_irq_apic_tdm_ticks_te410p_te405p_noise.html

Setting IRQ SMP affinity, explanation, statistics:

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/servers/apic/

VSXu proof of concept on n900

2011-02-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

http://vimeo.com/20404897

From the video description:
"Concept is: Development in real-time of OpenGL ES 2.0 visual effects done over TCP/IP on any device that can run VSXu. VSXu is being adapted in the process to run on OpenGL ES, this is a work in progress in the early stages. If it works on n900 it'll work on more phones - android mainly. iOS won't accept shared libraries so that's a no-go.

What you see:
- running vsxu engine+server (same binary, network communication runs in a thread) on the n900 (OpenGL ES 2.0)
- cable is just for charging the device
- connecting over the w-lan to the phone from the desktop using the network layer in VSXu

Next step is to start fixing up all the modules for vsxu to run on OpenGL ES 2.0 using the n900 as a test/dev platform. The benefits from being able to manipulate shaders and graphics in real-time on a mobile device should be obvious when it comes to reducing development time."

Pmap to find real memory usage of linux programs

2011-02-05T15:02:00.001-08:00

As explained in this great article: http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html

You can use

pmap -d

to see the actual memory use of a process in linux. Quite useful!

VSXu on mac (update)

2010-11-09T09:05:00.000-08:00

We're working on it, and as it seems we're going to get an iMac for testing.

They now support OpenGL 3.2 (with ati).

Apple's laptops are still not that good in GPU performance, but imacs and mac pro's should do.

xen installation commands for paravirtualization

2010-10-03T08:33:00.001-07:00

To install a clean debian system with paravirtualization

virt-install --paravirt --name proxy --ram 1024 --os-type=linux --os-variant=debianLenny --file /domu/md0/proxy/disk.img --file-size 10 --nographics --location http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/ --network bridge:eth0

To detach from the machine, hit Ctrl+5

To later attach a bridged network card to the machine:

xm network-attach proxy bridge=eth1

Install common tools in the domu:

apt-get install sudo mc openssh-server

VSXu 0.2.0 out soon

2010-07-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

Just to let you know, v020 is due out soon.

All code is done, we're just tuning up the visuals.

gl_VertexID

2010-05-24T00:37:00.001-07:00

I had issues getting the shader to understand gl_VertexID.

This guy has a very nice tutorial:
http://blog.blackhc.net/2009/07/from-vertex-positions-to-packed-element-arrays/

VSXu on apple - current status

2010-01-31T12:42:00.000-08:00

I recently got a question about hardware and Macs in particular. The mac is a tricky platform which I will explain in this post.

We are working on a macintosh version of VSXu but most won't be able to run it.

First of all, VSXu won't run on a machine without _hardware_ supporting OpenGL 2.0 which counts out most macs in people's posession.

The upcoming version of VSXu won't even start on a machine that doesn't have OGL2.0. Currently vsxu assumes it's there and crashes if the hardware doesn't support OGL2.0 which is causing confusion. With more and more being done with shaders and even geometry shader support in the upcoming version, VSXu needs proper hardware to run.

Now let me explain what I more often call "the apple situation"®:

Apple tend to rip of their customers by using only the worst (cheapest for them) graphics chips possible, if your mac is a macbook (not macbook pro) you're out of luck unless
it's the latest version being sold now.

It barely supports OGL2.0 and the graphics performance is horrible - it's sharing RAM between the GPU and CPU which is typical for cheap low-end computers in the 200$ to 300$ range. As soon as you start throwing some work on it it'll drop to 10fps.

What to look for when buying a computer for VSXu/OpenGL is the same as for the latest games - a graphics card with dedicated vram.

So one would expect this from a Macbook pro then? right???

But no, even the graphics on the macbook pro's that are now selling is poor at best - I just checked.
They ship with nvidia 9400M - old graphics components not intended for high-end graphics - and some of the models also (imagine that!) use RAM instead of real VRAM.

So either way the performance on a mac laptop will be bad.

For the mac platform to run proper graphics, the only acceptable computer will be a mac Pro (the big over-priced lump of metal) with the _extra optional graphics card_ (the original one is also old cheap crap they get from nvidia almost for free which really does NOT suit the rest of the components in it and has nothing to do with being professional). And it can't even power 2 graphics cards from nvidia because of the under-dimensioned PSU. NOT professional at all! I mean - a Pro graphics machine should be able to run multiple screens with hardware accelerated graphics. But apple apparently don't care at all about graphics.

Conclusion: the mac (due to the bad hardware) is a truly horrific realtime graphics platform. It can do only the most basic things, the rest of the hardware world is like 2-3 years ahead of apple. Most likely you can't run vsxu on an old apple machine.

Now for the reality:

A "Sony Vaio" model CW2 CI3 has a pretty good graphics card (and costs the same as a regular macbook).

So, buy that instead of a mac and run linux (Ubuntu or Linux Mint) on it. Now that's a good VSXu computer, it has 512Mb of dedicated vram.

THAT folks is DOUBLE compared to the macbook pro for the same price as a macbook, plus it looks pretty neat - mac fanboys are usually a bit on the pink side of the world (and don't know what they're buying) so they might accept the design of this box since that is more important in such a situation than the hardware inside.

Or if you're looking at the macbook pro: get this instead (for instance) http://www.agearnotebooks.com/sagernp5797.html

Ka-CHING!

Valgrind helps finding memory errors

2010-01-17T10:40:00.000-08:00

I just want to strike a bell for valgrind - it identifies bad memory writes/reads as well as uninitialized variables in a very nice way!

Installing valgrind is easy, just go

sudo apt-get install valgrind

By starting vsxu like this:

valgrind --track-origins=yes ./vsxu_artiste.bin

Just look at this situation, the GL driver runs some code that uses an unitialized value which could definitely mean problems in some situation:

==12033== Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s)
==12033== at 0x49C7401: (within /usr/lib/libGLcore.so.180.44)
==12033== Uninitialised value was created by a heap allocation
==12033== at 0x40269EE: operator new(unsigned int) (vg_replace_malloc.c:224)
==12033== by 0x72504DF: create_new_module (in /home/jaw/vsxu/vsxu_0.1.18/_plugins_linux/render.opengl-lib.so)
==12033== by 0x423E2A0: vsx_comp::load_module(module_dll_info*) (vsx_comp.cpp:101)
==12033== by 0x4257B79: vsx_engine::process_message_queue(vsx_command_list*, vsx_command_list*, bool) (vsx_em_comp.h:10)
==12033== by 0x8054321: vsxu_draw::draw() (application.cpp:228)
==12033== by 0x8051C6B: app_draw(int) (application.cpp:316)
==12033== by 0x811AE34: main (main.cpp:286)

It even tells me where I allocated this memory! Awesome!

What's happening in the web and mobile industry?

2010-01-06T16:01:00.000-08:00

Also known as: The battle for the Realtime Hardware Accelerated web

Contenders:
WebGL vs Flash-hw-accel vs Microsoft Silverlight

As always with the world wide web, there are a bunch of large companies and organizations that compete and plunder and behave like pre-school kids.

What is new in 2010 is the fact that smartphones are becoming more of a standard, also that some people skip buying computers because smartphones can do everything on the web (mostly). The border between mobile and stationary is being heavily blurred out.

This trend will definitely continue and really take effect in 2010. The iPhone isn't new anymore, it's a set standard, and as such Android and Nokia's Maemo are set to compete for the consumers in this arena. Who will win?

The outfit that makes the programmers want to program for their device. So far this has meant that you have to dwell into various API's that are usually proprietary with the iPhone as the worst beast of them all even requiring an encryption key (something that took me 4 months to get from Apple because they're paranoid ignorant bastards).

Less idiotic is Android, but because of it's overly moronic non-standard Java GUI system it too is horribly single-platform *vomit*. Now Microsoft has a pretty open mobile platform, but they're going out of the market (yay!), and their OS is crap anyway and not up to standard. This is true as well for Symbian which will not break much new ground in the smartphone arena.

No, my hopes are out for Nokia's Linux-based Maemo system which proves to be the most open system yet, with a solid company behind the hardware and software. The new N900 is still just a proof of concept device that many won't end up buying, but I see it more as a software development platform which in feature-richness and simplicity for the developer will be quite grand. The results will be utilized in phones and devices to come. This is if you want to code natively for it, which considering the fact that it has support for "make" and a GNU codebase is very attractive.

However, many programmers will during 2010 choose NOT to code natively and will still be able to target more than one platform with graphics-heavy applications like games and design apps. How?

The answer is short and sweet: WebGL

What is this then? It's a truly platform-independent Javascript API that enables hardware accelerated graphics. Think Flash, but not proprietary; think 1080p graphics in 60Hz in your browser regardless of Operating System;

First let's look at the implementation planning status on the PC (et. al)
Confirmed browser status for WebGL:
- Microsoft: no
- Mozilla: yes
- Google (chrome): yes
- Opera: yes
- Safari (OSX): yes

About Microsoft: What do you expect from these shareholder-pleasing morons, they're still implementing CSS properties from 5 years ago and have a management that care NULL about this and more rather want to crush SAP (and or google) and piss on everybody as much as possible along the way, no they're pushing single-platform tools as usual (read: Silverlight). Don't be surprised though if near the end of 2010 they present a new Wonderful technology that only they could have invented: "WebDX" - DirectX for the web! Ok, a bit off-track here.. sorry..

Now on the mobile side it's still only N900 that supports it but Google Android might as well.

A year back there was an incident at Computex (I think it was) where Microsoft had Asus remove a "too cool" Eee PC from the exhibition floor because it outclassed the windows XP and win7 machines by a factor 10 to 1 in battery time and CPU power and made Microsoft look bad: this platform was and is called Qualcomm Snapdragon (ARM-cpu powered) and is the powerhouse in the new Google Phone. Long battery time, fast CPU, 3D realtime graphics. We'll see more of this and I'm pleased to see Qualcomm get this out in the wild.

In short: we'll see web-based rich content on both desktop and multiple mobile devices, so far the best effort for taking the web (not just one company's territorially over-urinated API) to the next level.

You might not see it right away, but WebGL could be the nail in the coffin for flash and silverlight if it is supported enough.

(Adobe can't code anyway... closed-source losers...)

What's cooking?

2010-01-06T15:37:00.000-08:00

Programming on VSXu is in full effect, and I've been working lately on features for an upcoming art project (It's a secret still!).

Many of these features revolve around animation, and in particular character animation and all the mathematics and stuff around that. But also tight sound synchronization. Something that should have been done a long time ago is finally done - a wav viewer in the sequencer.

The most well-developed feature so far in VSXu has been the particle engine, and now it's gotten a well-deserved overhaul to support per-particle shaders integrated into the existing particle renderer, 100% point-sprite support in combination with these shaders, and other under-the-hood optimizations that all in all boost particle performance by about 5-10 times. This means 25 000 particles still with a software pipeline (which is advantageous in some aspects) which enables quite a bunch of cool effects not possible before.

Someone might point out that the real modern demoscene productions use the GPU for such calculations which is true and awesomely great, but not as generalistic, such things require hand-optimized code. However I'm going to look at some way to do that generally as well.

Also Vovoid is on the lookout for a new 2D CG artist since the current one's gone totally MIA (not replying to emails at all). There are some candidates that fit our style, so stay in touch for the results.

Also several new mesh tools have been concieved, including a heavily improved (optimized) ribbon renderer that now takes a mesh rather than a particle system for input.

If you want a build for Linux32, give me a holler, otherwise these goodies will be in the spring release of VSXu: 0.1.19
Take care!

IRL Lecture by Vovoid

2009-11-15T08:03:00.001-08:00

Jonatan "jaw" Wallmander (Vovoid) and Robert "CoR" Wenzel (Vovoid) will be attending Visualisation-Festival in Germany 18-20 December to meet VJs and visualisation artists/installation artists and teach VSXu.

The presentation will be in 3 parts and is expected to take 2-3 hours:
Part one: Introduction to realtime graphics
Part two: VSXu and its features
Part three: QA, Installfest, Hands on

Hope to see you there!

Windows 7 - is it any better?

2009-06-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

One could have hoped that 9 years after Windows 2000 came out, things would have improved for the better with Windows 7. Sadly I see little of that happening with Windows 7 other than what is always expected of a new release - higher stability.

But that isn't news 2009.. And doesn't differentiate Windows from other platforms, it's something everyone expects from a new release and Apple have so far IMO a better track record in this regard. Anyway, here are some things with Windows that Microsoft seemingly will never care about, and with that they instantly lose me as a customer.

1. File locking. Windows supposedly has reference counted file nodes implemented in the kernel (like you take for granted on ALL OTHER operating systems) but it's disabled. FAIL!

2. Mounts can STILL not be done on different TCP Ports, and to my knowledge you can't run separate SMB servers within the same machine. All other OSes can do this. FAIL!

3. The system console is retarded, it doesn't scale when i drag the window and it halts at a width setting that you have to manually edit within the preferences INSTEAD of scaling automatically as it should. FAIL!

4. No software repository.

5. Notepad can't do syntax highlighting.. That should be enabled default, stuff like this is far more important than including all the new GAMES.

6. Solitaire is now HARDWARE ACCELERATED and if you don't have hw-accel, you can still play it at 1 frame per second. And they say Windows 7 is going to run well on netbooks.. FAIL! Luckily I use my computer to do work...

Are you beginning to understand where the focus within Microsoft lies now? Hardware Accelerated Solitaire is really what I have been longing for all my life.

7. Windows Powershell funnily has implemented some UNIX commands, but I don't see why - apparently not to satisfy UNIX users - since they removed all the usual parameters.
If you run ls -la you FAIL, and if you run ps -aux YOU FAIL. Microsoft FAIL!

8. The Magnifier is probably the lamest thing I've ever seen. Ctrl+Alt mousewheel in Ubuntu wins BIG time. Web development is a breeze thanks to that. FAIL! They have a hardware accelerated GUI, why not make use of it? In case you wondered, in Ubuntu the entire screen zooms in around the mouse cursor instead of a puny little area at the top of the screen.

I can really still see why people are switching to Mac or Linux. Windows is simply not improving at all. The good points with Windows Vista and Windows 7 is the corporate installation tools, but you have that in Ubuntu as well so who cares?

Next-Gen Laptops

2009-06-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

This is cool stuff!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD714v6owII

Of course it runs Linux.

Working on the new animation system

2009-05-14T14:02:00.001-07:00

This is the current progress of the animation tool in VSXu. It doesn't look much right now, still most of the stuff is backend, but it'll be possible to create small segments of animation (animation pools) and drag them out as time blocks which is what you see in this picture.

You can then control time in these over time - like scratching music, play it backwards or loop it or whatever which will be very useful when doing character animation.

Also this gives a lot more creative flexibility when working with music.

Can all be coders?

2009-03-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

It seems that it's not related to general 'intelligence' but rathar to talent..

It's hard to learn how to program and even harder to teach it!

So if you're struggling learning how to code and feel bad that you don't improve as fast as you'd like - don't fret, because it's something you just do.. From my point of view - mostly automatically..

Check this very intriguing paper:

The camel has two humps

OK, they used a very small group so personally I'd take this research with a pinch of salt, but it's still interresting!

The state of VSXu on GNU/Linux and sound APIs

2009-03-10T13:51:00.001-07:00

The status is: somewhat ambivalent. When implementing VSXu on Linux it's been hampered by the fact that ALSA (one of the competing sound API's) is hardware-driver dependent or something else, I'm honestly not sure, but the fact is that it doesn't work for recording the thing being played through the soundcard on my computer and thus: ALSA and VSXu will not function. Why? Because the best option with FMOD is ALSA. More about this later...

At this point I have 2 choices:
1. implement support for a music player and piggyback on it
2. implement support for an abstract sound API (software mixer)

I started with 1, but it's been going so-so when I found out that my main target application (Amarok) currently cannot support visuals in v2.x due to the lack of this functionality in Phonon (the new KDE sound backend which is fine otherwise). This might get fixed this summer under the Google Summer of Code umbrella so it probably will be done... Also there was some opensource politics which if such elements surface: I'll drop the project.

I started implementation VSXu for libvisual and I'm still not sure wether I should package + release that or not, in fact that depends on if I can maintain and improve libvisual on the way, which seems reasonable and possible but people are thinking they want something new... and since Amarok 2.x won't support it - it's not a universal anymore and then I'd have to target individual players anyway and in that case I'd start with Amarok anyway.

2 is in the works, for the PulseAudio API. It seems like the major distros (those that matter for desktop peeps) support it, namely Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse... So this will definetly be possible.

My original intent was using FMOD for playing and recording on all platforms, a lot of time was spent on implementing that, but sinse ALSA is only working in some setups - FMOD will get ditched since they don't support PulseAudio.. Sad really, I like FMOD for the free releases of VSXu..

Well that's it I guess, a bit complex... Currently all effort is spent on the iPhone version of VSXu, but after that is up and running PulseAudio comes next.

More info on Linux sound API's

2009-03-10T07:17:00.000-07:00

Asterix made a cool tutorial on VSXu, check it out!

Tutorial - vsxu particles from astrixstar on Vimeo.

VSXu iPhone FBO test

2009-03-04T13:49:00.001-08:00

FBO is working as well after some tinkering!
Frame Buffer Objects enable off-screen rendering to texture, very useful when doing dynamic textures and feedback loops among other things..

VSXu Lighting Test

2009-03-02T12:50:00.001-08:00

Mesh generation, camera, maths, is working as shown above!
Ported in 2 days! 90 out of a maximum of 198 modules ported so far, and some modules are never going to be ported as they're either shader-related or too CPU-intensive for a portable device..

VSXu iPhone texturing works!

2009-03-01T12:06:00.000-08:00

This is one of the test cases.. In 2 days I've been able to port in 20 modules (out of about 190) so soon I can do cool stuff!

Programming CellPhones - why most of the industry simply Don't Get It

2009-02-28T18:07:00.000-08:00

I have to admit, I'm an avid C++ coder. On all platforms (GNU/Linux, Mac, Win)

Until recently I've thought of programming for portable devices (phones, PDAs) to be a pretty boring and pointless task - their UIs are slow (Nokia, Ericsson) and they only support Java which is a very young language compared to the vast libraries available in C/C++. And we have of course Microsoft with an even younger and more complicated tedious language for their crappy Windows Mobile platform.

But since a while there has been the iPhone. It supports C/C++.

I see many bloggers that say "the iPhone supports Objective C only for its UI development" and that is almost true.

But when you make games, realtime graphical applications or sound processing (synthesizers etc) things are different. I'll go as far as to say it has been impossible to do it properly up until now.

I read about the developers of Spore being able to port a basic version of their game in about a week, and I have myself had the same experience in porting VSXu (http://vsxu.com) for it (this is still to be finished but progressing very well). Other developers in these fields can just take their code, mangle it a tiny bit and compile and: voilá - they're done!

Face it, real coders code C/C++... You don't see any 3d engines for PS2, PS3, X-Box, Wii or any other game platform that were done in Java or possibly even in the joke environment from La La Monkey M$ Land (.NET)... I mean come on, it's not multi platform, why waste time locking yourself in?

This is why people code for the iPhone.

Also this means that you have the entire GPL open source repository of code to browse through and make use of, code and algorithms that are well tested and mature even dating back to the 70s...

OK, Apple are the worst DRM devils ever and they are in total control of their apps, but what has happened with the amount of games and applications written for the iPhone stands on its own.

I thought and hoped for that google with Android would realize this fact - especially since they're running a customized linux kernel, but no they didn't...

I'm not coding for them, nor nokia or Ericsson - it took 4 years to develop VSXu and I'm not going to re-write it in Java! It would be totally insane to even consider such a project, even worse to actually maintain it..

No, the iPhone integrates well into the already cross-platform coding/build system which already consists of Win32, Linux and Mac platforms.

Nokia, Microsoft and others are answering to the 'threat' of Apple by opening up their own App Stores, but what they should really do is support C/C++! They are missing the point, are all LAMERS and will get no support from real coders!

Why a homogenous computing environment brings agony

2009-02-28T17:45:00.000-08:00

Users with computers.
Consumers eating food.
Kids playing with toys.
Grown men comparing their cars.

These scenarios are written to illustrate the same thing - people are different!

If you run a business, say a medium-sized one, what would be most intelligent way to treat your users? Would it be forcing them to use something they don't like? A specific Operating System on their computers for instance?

Before answering these questions, you should need some backgrounds facts that you have to weigh against users' freedom and perceived freedom.

Let's look at how three relevant OS platforms of today scale:
- A Windows environment costs lots of licensing plus administration of licenses. Is totally incompatible (unless you tinker with it a lot) with the other two.
- A Mac environment the same, but it integrates better with the other two. Re-using cheap/old PC hardware is impossible as the software is bound to the hardware.
- A GNU/Linux environment has no licensing costs and no administration of said licenses, integrates well with the other two, it even runs most relevant Windows software with WINE which can be easily installed.

There's more that can be said about these platforms, but from an administrator's point of view - it's easiest to manage a GNU/Linux environment unless you're dumb and don't know English and or can't find your way in a system shell and in that case you should not work with computers in the first place: See This Wikipedia Article for some well-deserved self-indulgence.

So: obviously if you're a real sysadmin, you support ALL these platforms and you let people CHOOSE.

The order in which you present them is:
1. GNU/Linux
2. Windows
3. Mac

Why this order? Linux is cheapest for the company. Windows is not as cheap, but you can at least run it in a virtual machine. Most expensive and hardest to maintain is the Mac platform, it's mostly suited for the laptop people, no gain in using stationary machines there.

But there are people out there who can't live without windows or mac - so let them have it! But let them know what they're getting themselves into - that it'll be harder for them to get support. That it's more expensive for the company.

One company that has understood this is Google. There people can use whatever they like for a computer (or so I've read) and that is the same sound principle that I try to implement in the computing environment at the company where I work - about 60 employees.

We run GNU/Linux against a centralized NFS Solaris server with ZFS for backups, a bunch of Windows machines and a few macbooks. New employees are offered GNU/Linux and most accept it. Some even find it encouraging. So if you're stuc in one platform - consider beginning to use all platforms!

CSS Text-shadow and yet another example of M$ Retardedness

2009-02-28T17:31:00.000-08:00

So I read this cool article about text shadow support coming to Firefox 3.1.
I didn't think anyone was doing this, but apparently most browsers support it already! Great news. Makes FF3.1 seem a lot more interresting. And Cross-Platform.

And of course... http://www.microsoft.com are as retarded and monkey around (just like their lame CEO) as always (don't even try to follow any kinds of standards) and won't support it, instead they have their totally Queer DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow-stuff... WHAT? Wow. 30% of the browser market are not going to CARE at all because it looks like crap!

Anyway, here's the meat:
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/04/make-cool-and-clever-text-effects-with-css-text-shadow/
http://kilianvalkhof.com/2008/design/almost-cross-browser-text-shadow/