NOT Dexter's Lab

This post is a little bit late, but it’s better now than never! It took some really hard work to get this release out, but version 1.0 of the Point Cloud Library is finally here. Many different institutions contributed to this open source library which allows point cloud processing (with out of the box Kinect support through OpenNI!). What follows is an excerpt from the official 1.0 release announcement.

PCL is a large-scale, cross-platform, open project for point cloud processing that is free for commercial and research use. The PCL framework comprises state-of-the-art algorithms that have endless uses, such as filtering outliers from noisy data, stitching 3D point clouds together, segmenting relevant parts of a scene, extracting keypoints and creating surfaces from point clouds. With the 1.0 release, PCL is now a completely standalone library, using a few “system” dependencies (Boost, Qhull, VTK) with some extra third-party libraries (FLANN, Eigen, CMinpack, OpenNI). The release features a number of changes and updates to help you do more — and help you do it more easily. A few highlights:

• Full Linux, Windows and Mac OSX support. If you can connect an OpenNI camera to it, PCL can run on it
• Complete OpenNI interface for PSDK, Asus WAVI XTion and Kinect. Just hook up your camera and start hacking in 3D
• Complete Octree interface for point cloud compression, nearest neighbor search, change detection and more
• Lots of tutorials and demos – with more on the way

PCL 1.0 Release Announcement

I think I’ve looked almost everywhere on the net to find a good reStructured Text file editor. Most of the free editor I’ve found were outdated our required to much efforts just to install. I finally found UliPad, which also allows user to see a real time html version of the reST document. Funny, isn’t it?

UliPad Homepage

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

(continue reading…)