Yannick Grenzinger's notes

Web is originally and mostly an HTML world with page by page navigation. Oh yes there is flash but it is designed for graphist with massive website and it was always used for merchandising and promotion site. In business, in the better case, we had some techno like Struts for it's Model View Controller architecture. Sadly this was not a good looking user interface with old fashioned page by page navigation with maybe some css styling. Almost two years ago, a "new" techno appears called Ajax. This was the begining of revolution and what we call "Web 2.0". Why it was revolution ? because it enables changement in a page without changing this page thanks a little command and a good use of DOM model (the HTML model of a page). With the use of massive javascript, good looking UI for web appears like Dojo. But a problem remains, a techno problem because it's need to the developper to know very well javascript and html DOM. These techno are not known very well, not ...

http://www.silicon.fr/fr/news/2008/12/22/comment_le_gpgpu_va_revolutionner_le_calcul_parallele

I have already talked about CUDA after the GPU barcamp. Now it's time for OpenCL which specifications have been "officialy" launched a few days ago. Like they say : "OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is the first open, royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. OpenCL provides a uniform programming environment for software developers to write efficient, portable code for high-performance compute servers, desktop computer systems and handheld devices using a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, Cell-type architectures and other parallel processors such as DSPs." An article in french : http://www.hardware.fr/articles/744-1/opencl-gpu-computing-enfin-democratise.html Another article in english : http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081209-gpgpu-opens-up-with-opencl-1-0-spec-release.html

All has begun at this page : http://blogs.nofrag.com/Sebultura/2008/nov/17/41641-jeux-video-sparse-voxel-octree-part-2/ which references this post : http://ompf.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=904&st=0&sk=t&sd=a A very interesting discussion about the "new" possibilities of Voxel. Moreover, because I try to help on a game editor project, Voxel seems to be a good choice to create an easy-to-use terrain editor. So i look forward and i search post at gamedev.net. I have found these links : http://artis.imag.fr/Membres/Cyril.Crassin/ http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.8.6961 http://www.crs4.it/vic/cgi-bin/bib-page.cgi?id=%27Gobbetti:2005:FV%27 http://www.cs.unc.edu/~walk/hlod/ http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/publications/nrc-48126_e.html http://www.crs4.it/vic/cgi-bin/bib-page.cgi?id=%27Cignoni:2004:ATE%27 http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lindstro/papers/visualization2002/paper.pdf A tutorial : http://www.flipcode.com/voxtut/ Coming from theses two post...

I have worked one big year at Thales Service and I was so disapointed. I have worked on two very interesting project on paper : a radar system and a combat management system for a frigate. Technically they were, at the best case, moderately good. Sometimes awfull. But the worst was the "political" decisions ruining the progression, the quality and motivation of people working on this project. So when i see this : www.moonshield.com ... I want to cry or laugh, your choice. Maybe, instead of doing 'serious game', Thales can do 'serious project' ? And when you go here, www.jobs.thalesgroup.com . You can see the marvelous work of marketing and advertising. You can discover different careers at Thales ... and yes you can see, there is only one people who produce something (although it is mostly a searcher). The others are manager. And you now understand the problem. They put no interest in project development, in software engineer and, with only managers, you can...

I have begin to read some books from the Personnal MBA . First was getting things done. An interesting method of every day work and life management. You can manage this method with Google notepad ! The best thing I have learned so far is to clean my mind of "open loop" and note everything. I have read the book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" which describe six common things in people psychologie. Like PersonnalMBA says : Knowing these natural psychological tendencies will help you in two ways: (1) you'll become more persuasive, and (2) you'll be able to identify when these tendencies are present, protecting you from being misled in the future. I am now reading "how to win friends & influence people" and my next books will be : The unwritten laws of business, the design of every day things and Making things happen. I am an addict :)

To launch this blog, I will talk about my saturday at La Cantine with a GPU barcamp . I have seen many interesting and passionate people thanks to the planners : François Lagunas and Eric Mahé. I have seen some of the presentation after a small intro. Comprehensive Sensing first, which is a fascinating new way to capturate our world (from classic picture to spectral). More information on nuit-blanche.blogspot.com . CUDA , the "general" programming language for Nvidia GPU (waiting for OpenCL to have a common language for all hardware). It seems powerfull. However the language is a bit hard due to specifical programming of architecture, optimizations and parallelism. Like you see in diagram below, the architecture of CUDA is based on multiple grid running one kernel (program). Grids contain blocs which contain thread. One thread apply kernel on one data (for example a float). Warning : there is only one if else prediction by kernel. A very interesting note is that code run in...