Tuesday 25 February 2014

My first OpenGL application

After a 2-years work in the field of 3D reconstruction, computational geometry and 3D modeling I've realized that I need to learn also a little bit of rendering as well. During my free time I have watched several online video lectures and started the online course "Interactive 3D Graphics" on Udacity.

I've decided to use OpenGL as rendering API, because it is multiplatform and easily extendable to the Web application thanks to WebGL and Three.js

The first thing to do is to buy the Red Book of OpenGl.Another useful way to start is the video lecture, available in the SIGGRAPH University program, called "An Introduction to OpenGL Programming".

After some reading and watching I've created my first application. Although I just started from the "hellogl" test I alredy reorganized the code in order to make it easier to add new tests and so on.



The next step is to create the "Hello world" test that could only be the rendering of the Utah Teapot!


PS: for the lazy people here's the video lecture that I mentioned before

Saturday 8 February 2014

Version control of OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents using git and Python

All my collegues in R&D department love Latex! Unfortunately it's not the same for commercial office people.

This is the reason why we write our manuals and documentations with LibreOffice. After the pain of a big revision on one of our manuals I've decided to introduce a version control also for the documentation as well.

Thus I wrote down a python script that generate automatically a Git-Friendly version of the ODT files.

Here's the link to the GitHub project and to a test project

If you launch the script with th -h option you will find how to use it:
odt_git_helper.py -h
usage: odt_git_helper.py [-h] [-v] [-c | -e] Directory ODT_File
Extract/Create an odt file in/from a directory.
positional arguments:
  Directory       target/destination directory
  ODT_File        target/destination odt file
optional arguments:
  -h, --help      show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose   increase output verbosity
  -c, --compress  compress into an .odt file
  -e, --extract   extract odt file into a directory (default)