Donnie’s Blog

Yay identity-theft!

Earlier yesterday, millions of bots, e-mail harvesters, and web-crawlers were disappointed to discover that donniepinkston.net was offline. (A few people might have cared too…?)

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This is the first time that my computer has ever been too fast for me!

I needed to come up with a good programming problem that would be easily parallelizable. So, I fell back on the old standard, the Mandelbrot set. I got the single-threaded version working yesterday, and much to my dismay, it was really fast. What’s the point in parallelizing a fast program?

Nonetheless, I love the Mandelbrot set. Here are some pictures I generated:

Most of these images only took a few seconds to generate. Back in 1995 when I wrote my first Mandelbrot viewer in CS3, it took several minutes to generate images this large. The parallelized version would still take 30-45 seconds.

So, since this is no longer challenging enough for modern computers, I’ll have to find something else. Volumetric rendering sounds pretty good…

I’m officially sick of Battlestar Galactica, mainly because it has officially turned into a soap opera.

No CG is worth enduring a soap opera for.

We wrapped up classes for the fall term last week. Yay for that. Now I just have to finish out the grading, and I’ll be all set. This term went surprisingly smoothly, all things considered.

Next term I’m in for it, though! I have two new responsibilities - a DARPA Grand [Urban] Challenge track for CS11, and an entirely new course: Introduction to Relational Databases. I’m actually pretty excited about both courses; they should both be a lot of fun. But I know it’s going to be a hard year.

Oh well. Next year should be the easy one!