Let the Dollar Circulate

Here are some new "long tail" content for your smooth ears. This first video is a funk, soul tune by Billy Paul from 1976.



And the second video is the hip hop remix by 9th wonder, which is great also.

Virtual Crowd Research Papers on the Web

This post is the kind of ambitious post. The purpose is to list every research paper about virtual crowds that are available on the web.

Work in progress, trying to add 3 papers per day week. I'm already publishing this post even if it's uncomplete to keep motivation to finish it !

Kavan, L.; Dobbyn, S.; Collins, S.; Zara, J.; O'Sullivan, C. Polypostors: 2D Polygonal Impostors for 3D Crowds I3D '08

Reynolds, C. W. Big Fast Crowds on PS3 Sandbox Symposium '06

Dobbyn, S.; McDonnell, R.; Kavan, L.; Collins, S.; O'Sullivan, C. Clothing the Masses:Real-Time Clothed Crowds with Variation EG Short Papers '06

Dobbyn, S.; Hamill, J.; O'Conor, K.; O'Sullivan, C. Geopostors: A Real-Time Geometry/Impostor Crowd Rendering System I3D '05

Reynolds, C. W. Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters Game Developers Conference '99

Reynolds, C. W. Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model SIGGRAPH '87

Our Lab as Seen on TV !

Ok, you'll say the TV is dead, it is so not "long tail" ! But, hey, it's always nice to see your workplace on it, and this channel is kind of "long tail" because it's the official local TV channel of Valais.

Let's see if you can spot Helena, Barbara, Mireille or Jonathan in this video ?

An External Graphics Card for your Notebook

That would be neat ! Seen on this interesting interview of Tim Sweeney (founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal engines).

Work in Progress: Virtual Human Shape and Height Variety + Accessorized Animation

Here is some work in progress we're working on at the vrlab about real-time crowd variety. We're researching methods that allows to simulate varied crowd with a limited number of artists (in fact, currently one part-time artist !). The first part is about a simple and easy-to-use method for varying the shape and height of a few human templates. The second part is about creating variety at the animation level. Virtual humans are walking with accessorized locomotion cycles, carrying various stuff, like box (of beers!), pizzas, and ... mmmh ... flowers.

Install Subversion with Web Access on Ubuntu

For this post, I will just add my feedback on top of this very good tutorial. Here is my no-brainer feedback with Ubuntu Server 7.04 (you can also get this info by reading the comments of the tutorial).

• In the config file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dav_svn.conf, you also have to uncomment the #</location> which is located at the very of end of file.
  
  
• The command htpasswd2 is not present but htpasswd seems to do the job also.
  
  
• Your svn repositories that you want to access from the web should read/writable by apache, so don't forget to chown -R www-data:www-data /your_svn_rep.
  
  
• If you don't want anonymous access add this:
  AuthType Basic
  
  AuthName "Subversion Repository"
  
  AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd
  
  Require valid-user
  

Which is my best Side ?

Moustache with hair crown vs. hype wig with trendy nerd-serious-sam-too-much-washed t-shirt ?

I know, the small kid with the balloon in the background seems suspicious ;-)

Windows C++ Compilation: error C2065: 'WM_MOUSEWHEEL' : undeclared identifier

// Hack to avoid these errors:
error C2065: 'WM_MOUSEWHEEL' : undeclared identifier
error C3861: 'GET_WHEEL_DELTA_WPARAM': identifier not found

• Add this to your code ->

#define _WIN32_WINDOWS 0x501
#define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0501

Setting up the DNS of your Google Apps Domain Name

This post is for those who want to use a domain name bought before the google apps account creation. Indeed, if you buy a domain name with the google apps interface, everything will be working fine. The trick is to manually set up the correct DNS configuration. So either you use the DNS service provided by your registrar (you lucky guy !) or you can use a free DNS service such as xname.org. Here is the correct DNS stuff you need to add:

• A Records
  

@ A 72.14.207.121
@ A 64.233.179.121
@ A 66.249.81.121

• CNAME records (don't forget the trailing dot at the end)
  

www      CNAME   ghs.google.com.
calendar CNAME   ghs.google.com.
start     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
mail     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
docs     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
sites     CNAME   ghs.google.com.

• MX records (don't forget the trailing dot at the end)

MX 10 aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 30 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 40 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx4.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx5.googlemail.com.

If you have a blog on blogger, e.g., yourblog.blogspot.com, you can also add a blog subdomain, just add this line in your CNAME records (of course, you also need to tell blogger about this by digging into the configuration interface) :

blog      CNAME   ghs.google.com.

Hope that helps !