I just discovered that coursera had several courses about Scala, made by the creator of the language Martin Odersky. Functional programming: https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun Reactive programming: https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive I always wanted to try functional programming, and they seem to be a good place to start. I probably won’t have enough time to follow them through, but I started a small fractal generator in scala, using what I learned in the first few videos, and I really enjoy the language so far.

With my friend Clement we have been working on an exciting new project lately: Augmented reality on the smartphone. The goal is to show on the screen the landmarks you are looking at through the camera. Using your location (GPS), your direction (compass), and the location of the landmark (database), the program will show where the landmark should be on the screen. Unfortunately, for now, I am stuck with a problem: Even when correcting for the magnetic inclination, the compass measurement is off by a small angle….

I was having an argument with a coworker about the fastest method to branch in a code: lots of if/Else or a switch/case. I figured that the switch case would be faster, because the compiler would be less constrained than with the if/else, and could therefore use a better algorithm to select the right execution path. To check this, I made a new entry in my microprojects repo, the aptly named switchVsIfElse.

It is well known that accessing the memory in a non-sequential way is slower because it leads to a lot of cache miss. This micro-project was made to evaluate the difference in performance. An array of 10 000 000 elements (size_t) is created. It represents a typical data structure that you will access in your program. A random list of 1 000 000 offsets is generated. I compare the time used to fetch this million offset in a random order with the time used to fetch the same offsets, but in ascending (or descending) order.

Edit: there is a more recent post on this project. The new version has more feature and is finally able to render any STL. This is the follow-up on a project I started on November 2010. The goal was to code a very simple rasterizer in c++. I used the framebuffer provided by the SDL library to perform the rendering. In other word, SDL only provide a canvas on which I “paint” the model, pixel by pixel.

There were several bugs still present in this app, mostly under the new versions of Android. I started a new project on Android, so I took some times to make this app more resilient to errors, and to do some extensive testing for KitKat. Screenshot of the application The application is available on the Play store, and the source code is on Github.

Following my work on almost real-time fractals generation, I wanted to test OpenGL shaders. I have been really impressed with the results. You can render fractals in real-time on a full screen with an nvidia GTX 770. The shaders I have been using are probably not very optimized, but the results is great nevertheless. Access the demo Features: Julia fractal : You can change the values of c0 in the Julia function ( x’=x?

I’m currently working on the second iteration of my fractal drawing software. The biggest problem of the original one (see here) was that you couldn’t move around like in google maps. The goal of this versions is to enable you to move around, and the software will generate pieces of the fractal on the fly. Since it is not feasible, even on high-end hardware to generate 1080p fractal pictures in vanilla C# in real-time, i’m implementing a somewhat efficient caching system.

I needed a robust counter for my work, but none of thoses I found were good enough. So I made mine ! The features list is small, and the interface is primitive, but it works. I needed mostly a way to get the exact time of every action, the time elapsed since the last action, since the beginning, and a spreadsheet-friendly output format. And because it is always useful, there’s a programmer-friendly integer format converter too.

This program will create a mosaic image made from thousands of thumbnails, close to a reference image : WARNING: This is a small hack I made in a few afternoon, the code quality is pretty bad. 😔 You will need to provide a directory with the thumbnails used to generate the final image. How to generate it is left as an exercice to the reader.