Nearly 3 months since my last post :(
Work has been exceptionally busy: In the last two months on top of my normal product maintenance and improvement duties I have prepared and filed a patent application, architected and largely completed a distributed, resilient document processing framework and found a bit of time to eat and sleep!
I've noticed other blogs in the raytracing / graphics / visualization space have been very quiet lately - maybe everyone else is also working like crazy?
Not a huge amount has happened in my raytracer and SPH projects although got some interesting effects running with a non-uniform mass particle system when I had time over Christmas. Screenshots soon.
I do have the beta release of Nexus (the NVidia Visual Studio plugin) but sadly it only runs on Windows Vista or Windows 7 which leads nicely on to my next point:
I am a bit irritated with Microsoft for two reasons: Even though I purchased a 64 bit Windows XP professional about 6 or 8 months ago there is no upgrade path to Windows 7... Secondly even though visual studio 2008 standard has a switch for openMP it doesnt contain the openmp headers. Only the more expensive professional version does. Not something that was immediately obvious from the documentation before I purchased...
Although I also run Linux (centos) I prefer to develop on a Windows GUI - less buggy and more responsive than gnome / kde in my opinion. For running code the Linux os does usually win though! I would really like to run Nexus so am a bit stuck about what to do.... Succumb and buy Windows 7 and get Nexus on Visual Studio? or just forget entirely about Windows development / environment and use Linux / gcc / Intel compilers instead? While the Intel compilers are great (if a bit expensive) for an IDE I really do like Visual Studio. Most of my code is cross platform and for graphics I mostly use openGL so could switch without too much trouble... But direct compute is so tempting.....
Arrrrgh what to do!
