NOT Dexter's Lab » Development

MITO: open source medical imaging software

Alessio Placitelli — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:07:58 +0000

My internship at the ICAR institute (CNR) gave me the opportunity to work on some interesting projects, one of them being a software named MITO (Medical Imaging TOolkit). MITO, as stated by the project website, is an opensource software architecture for advanced Medical Imaging. I’m always proud of the projects I work on, even more if those projects are contributing to the opensource cause and managed by some public funded research institute! You can find out more by following the links below.

MITO: ICAR Project Page

MITO: Sourceforge Project page

VC++ 2008 and CUDA (NVIDIA)

Alessio Placitelli — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:19:35 +0000

Let me guess: you just wrote your new, shining CUDA application to unleash all the horsepower of your GPU and you are getting some compilation errors in Visual Studio. Some really weird errors. Something like:

1>CUDA_myfile.cu_generated.c
1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\vadefs.h(52) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’
1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\vadefs.h(61) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(426) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(427) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(428) : error C2054: expected ‘(‘ to follow ‘operator’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(428) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(430) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘}’
1>C:\CUDA\bin/../include\cuda_runtime_api.h(79) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’
1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\crtdefs.h(485) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’

Right? This is your lucky day. After some struggling, I figured out the solution to this weird issue! Simply right click on the file in the “Solution Explorer” then selectd “Properties”. Now choose “Compile as C++ Code (/TP)” in “Configuration Properties->C/C++->Advanced->Compile As” and apply the changes. Compile your project and.. it should work.

Tired of windiff?

Alessio Placitelli — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:12:56 +0000

Well, if you are, consider yourself lucky to read this blog. I was tired of windiff, and I started looking for something more interesting, which could also be integrated with my versioning control environment (TortoiseSVN). I stumbled upon WinMerge, a very nice opensource software which has all the features from windiff plus a sober, functional GUI. Last, but not least, it perfectly integrates with TortoiseSVN. In a few words, a MUST have.

Handling multiple projects/repositories with one svnserve

Alessio Placitelli — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:27:07 +0000

Need to handle different projects/repositories using a single SVN instance and don’t know how? Need revision numbers to be project dependent? Or you just want your repository to look cleaner?

This (LINK) article by Thomas Guest explains you exactly how to do all that stuff in a simple and elegant way!

CryENGINE2? Nah, Excel does it better

Alessio Placitelli — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:10:18 +0000

I love experimenting: exploring the unknown (or proving the known), often just for personal knowledge. I guess that’s the reason why every wannabe game programmer tried at least once in his/her life to write a game engine from scratch. That’s not exactly the case of Peter Rakos, an expert, who wrote a 3d engine just using Microsoft Excel (and his brain).

Intriguing, isn’t it?

I seriously recommend you to give his article a read, trust me. You can find it here, at Gamasutra.

Running Subversion as a Windows Service

Alessio Placitelli — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:54:06 +0000

One thing programmers and software engineers know for sure (or at least should know) is that it doesn’t really matter how much time you spend on documenting, designing or keeping code clean: things may break and often will break. That’s a possibility that must be considered when working on an important project. Things get even worst when more than one person is working on the same stuff. Luckily, there is something we can count on to sleep peacefully: Subversion (SVN Wikipedia Page), a version control system.

This guide aims to help you configure a Subversion server on your Windows machine, running it as a service.

(1) To begin with, download and install latest SVN binaries you can find here. (2) Now right click on My Computer and choose Properties. Then, in the Advanced tab, click on the Environmental Variables button. A new window will pop up. In System Variables add a new variable called SVN_EDITOR with “C:\Windows\notepad.exe” as value. (3) Create a folder somewhere on your hard disk to hold code repository (example: F:\SVNRepository). (4) Open a command shell and type svnadmin create “F:\SVNRepository”. (5) In the F:\SVNRepository\conf folder, edit svnserve.conf and uncomment (delete the starting # character) the lines containing anon-access = read, auth-access = write and password-db = passwd. Save and close this file, then (6) edit passwd file. To add an user with write privileges to our repository, simply add a line to this file under [users] section, using the format username = password, so foo = bar creates user foo with password bar. (7) In the command shell type the following command to create the SVN service:

sc create svn.local binpath= “\”%ProgramFiles%\subversion\bin\svnserve.exe\” –service –root F:\SVNRepository” displayname= “Subversion Repository” depend= Tcpip

Please do not remove spacings since they are mandatory. (8) Open Control Panel, then select Administrative Tools and execute Services application. Look for the “Subversion Repository” service and run it. (9) To create a new project inside the repository, issue the svn create svn://localhost/myproject command. Feel free to write a comment in the newly opened notepad window and then close it. You will be asked for your password… et voilà

You can now use your favorite SVN client to do your first checkout, which will replicate SVN structure on your local project folder. I think that using TortoiseSVN will save you a lot of time

References

thecrumb.com – Running SVN as a Windows Service
Vertigo Software – Setting up a Windows SVN server

Where to get MTuxvision

Alessio Placitelli — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:59:31 +0000

MTuxvision was quite popular back then but, even if it’s old and unsupported, many of you are still look for it. The thread below holds all of the released MTuxvision versions and some FAQ. Hey, you’re just few clicks away from your favorite software

MTuxvision Thread on SI Forums

Ray tracing for gaming explored by Intel

Alessio Placitelli — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:22:34 +0000

A researcher at Intel has written an article that describes how real-time ray tracing for gaming is considerably closer than you might thing thanks to technologies like Intel’s Larrabee. The article compares ray tracing and rasterization and even shows how current titles could benefit from the technique.

Check it out!

Allegorithmic’s MaPZone 2.6 released

Alessio Placitelli — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:23:01 +0000

Latest version of one of the best texturing tool ever is now available for download! Most important thing, Allegorithmic’s MaPZone is also free of charge You can download it here!

Source: Gamasutra News

MTuxvision source code released!

Alessio Placitelli — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:09:47 +0000

I have received (and still I am receiving!) so many emails and PMs regarding one of my old projects, MTuxvision, that I simply couldn’t ignore them. I started MTuxvision project during 2004, starting from Bernd Scharping’s tuxvision excellent GPL code base (tuxvision development was discontinued because of Mr. Scharping’s tragic death in a car accident in 2003). MTuxvision basically allowed owners of a Dreambox to watch satellite channels on their PC and also to record the incoming streaming. Unfortunately, my house got stroke by a thunder and I lost a huge amount of data stored on my hard drives. Recently, digging over my CDs, I found an old backup which also contained an old MTuxvision code snapshot. I’m very happy to release this to the community, hopefully it will be helpful to somebody.

Please, download the source code package using your favorite torrent client (Azureus, uTorrent, etc.) and keep it seeding. Just in case it doesn’t work, you can use the direct link to the file.

MTuxvision Version 0.2 b 15 Source Code (Torrent)

Don’t mind if my code looks unorganized, rude and dirty: I’m sorry about that. I would appreciate (but not require!) if you could link back to my site in case you will be using this code. Also, thanks to everyone who supported me during this years of development.