One of the things that I love about Davis is that it’s blessed with a great bakery that makes excellent bread. Thanks to that I almost always have some fresh bread at home to enjoy with butter, cheese, or pate. The latter is the subject of this post.
Pate is a paste made of meat, liver, and fats. The most popular one is probably the one made of foie gras, but duck liver is quite expensive and very hard to find here, so I usually use chicken liver instead. Chicken liver can be found at any super market with a decent butchery; in the Bay Area PW Supermarkets is probably your best option, while here in Davis you can find it at the co-op or Nuggets.
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I’ve been biking around Davis since I bought my new road bike. It’s a very nice experience. There are many nice country roads around here (see this great map of the area) and the weather is always friendly. I really like biking towards the mountains, because I can easily see my progress. I’m now able to reach the foothills of the north coast range and next time I should be able to get to Lake Berryessa.
I love the feeling of being able to go almost anywhere just by the sheer strength of my legs. I’ve even been thinking about commuting to San Francisco by bike. I could easily go to Vallejo and take the Ferry to San Francisco, but a more ambitious route would be to go through the north bay, of course, I would do that on a Sunday, spend the night in the city and return by train.
I finally went on my first backpacking trip this weekend. I was a bit scared of spending my first night in the wild alone, so I decided to sign up to one of the guided backpacking trips organized by Outdoor Adventures.
Outdoor Adventures is a university outdoor program run by students. They organize backpacking trips and other activities, and also rent equipment at very low prices. I signed up for an “introduction to backpacking” trip for $52 and rented a backpack and a sleep bag for just $10.
It turned out that all the guides and participants were girls, except me and another guy who in the end did not show up. Initially I was indifferent about it, but I have to admit the situation made me feel a bit more awkward than I usually do, and of course, Mariana wasn’t too happy about it.
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Last Friday was my last day at NVIDIA. Next Monday I’ll start working with Jon Blow on The Witness. I’m excited to be back in the game industry and I’m hoping something really cool will come out of this.
In any case, I had a great time working at NVIDIA during the last 4+ years; I especially enjoyed the time I spent working on tessellation. I’ll definitely miss the great people that I had the chance to work with. Some of them are in the following picture of my last day at work:
In clockwise order: Aravind, James, Tianyun, Eric, Sarah, Ignacio (not me), Cem, Lars, Timothy, Philippe, Matthieu, Paulius and Tristan.
Naty Hoffman references a paper from Siggraph Asia titled Continuity Mapping for Multi-Chart Textures.
The paper provides a solution to a problem that I’ve talked before, that multi-chart parameterizations introduce seams over meshes, and that these seams can produce severe artifacts in some use cases such as displacement mapping. While the solution that I propose removes the cracks in the mesh, it does not eliminate the seams entirely, in only eliminates the holes, so for that reason I still suggested that the use of seamless parameterization remains valuable.
The most interesting thing about the Continuity Mapping solution is that it does not require a re-parameterization of the mesh, allowing you to preserve the uv-map created by the modeler, which is sometimes useful. It’s cool that they reference my presentation at Siggraph 2008, although I first proposed that solution a few months before at Gamefest, and more detailed descriptions of the technique are available in my blog.
In general, I agree with Naty’s assessment that the technique is likely to be inefficient due to divergent branching. Although it may make sense for some applications, it’s unlikely it will be adopted for use in games. Naty describes some other issues, but one that I think is important as well is that it’s unclear how their sewing technique can handle tangent space normal maps. None of the examples in the paper appear to use normal maps, so I suspect the authors may be aware of the problem.
With tangent space normal maps each chart has a different tangent space. Tangent frames are defined at the vertices and interpolated over the triangles, and the tangent spaces do not agree along the seams of the charts.
Per texel normals are then stored with respect to the chart’s tangent space. You cannot interpolate normals that belong to different charts directly. Instead, you have to first transform them to the same space and do the interpolation afterward. That’s generally done in the pixel shader (although it would be more correct to do it before texture filtering). However, their sewing technique introduces new triangles over which the tangent space is simply not well defined since tangent frames at opposite sides of the seam could have completely arbitrary directions and their interpolation would likely result in degenerate frames.
I joined the Davis Aquatic Masters (DAM) about four months ago, and I’ve been swimming almost every day since then, with the only exception of a few weeks that I spent in Spain during the summer.
I think that’s been helping me a lot. I’ve gained more than 12 lb and I feel in better shape than ever. I’ve been hiking again lately and I’ve started playing soccer with Nachito in the evenings. So far I haven’t noticed any signs of back pain, which means that the herniated disk is probably healing.
Swimming during the summer was very pleasant; Davis is super hot and jumping into the water at noon was very refreshing. I also have a great tan from swimming under the sun. However, it’s getting a bit chili now (~80º F). I wonder how hard it will be to swim during the winter; hopefully they will adjust the water temperature. In any case, swimming with others is very encouraging, it’s much easier to share the workout with regular lane-mates and a coach to urge you on.
Today we had a physiotherapy assessment test and just learned that my right shoulder is fucked up. It has a much more limited range of motions than the left shoulder and it makes cracking noises when rotating on certain angles. This summer I had a minor injury while swimming at the beach that kept me away from the pool for about one week, but it slowly recovered and after two weeks the pain was gone entirely. However, it’s very likely that I’ll have more problems if I don’t get that fixed. I should be able to change medical plans pretty soon, so hopefully I’ll be able to chose a decent physiotherapist.
We went camping last weekend. This was our second attempt; the first one last Autumn was a disaster. Nachito would not stay inside the sleep-bag during the night and he was going to get a cold outside, so at 1:00 am I had to pack everything and head back to arrive home three hours later. This time Nachito is almost one year older and his mom came with us, so we had more chances to success, and in fact, it went pretty well; Nachito behaved like a grown up this time.
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I don’t know what’s going on with me lately. Mariana and Nachito are in Brazil visiting Mariana’s family, so that leaves me with plenty of free time. I finally got an epidural injection, so physically I’m feeling great. In the past I would have taken this time to code like crazy and get lots of things done, but things are going much slower than I was hoping. Maybe it’s the heat of the summer, or that now that my body feels fine, I need some time to enjoy it and relax.
Anyhow, today it’s time for some more food blogging, and now that we are in midst of the summer there’s nothing better than Salmorejo. As soon as the tomato season starts, this is something that I have for lunch or dinner almost every day. It’s easy to cook, it’s fast, it’s refreshing, and it’s filling.
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One of the consequences of having insomnia is that you fall asleep when you least expect it. Today, while commuting to the office by train, I closed my eyes in Fremont and when I opened them again I was in San José. I had missed my stop in Santa Clara and I thought I would be stranded in San José for hours or that I would have to bike 8 miles to the office. However, to my surprise there was a Caltrain train leaving to San Francisco in 3 minutes! Time enough to buy the tickets and jump inside right before it closed its doors. The ride from the Lawrence station is a bit shorter than from Great America, so in the end I only arrived to the office 20 minutes later than I usually do. As much as I despise public transport in the Bay Area, I have to admit that sometimes it exceeds my expectations!
When I was a kid I lived in the city, but once a week we got a large milk delivery from the farm. The milk was raw and fresh. I remember we had to boil it ourselves and remove the excess of fat. One of the greatest treats of my childhood was eating the freshly skimmed cream of the raw milk mixed with sugar.
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A while ago I wrote about high quality shadow filtering, and in particular about how to approximate a Gaussian using bilinear taps. Today I just noticed the following in the third edition of Real-Time Rendering:
Alternatively, the Gaussian could be approximated by using a bilinear interpolated sample for every four texels, finding the offset that gives the closest approximation to the ideal weights.
So, I guess I was not saying anything new after all.
I’ve been thinking about writing about cooking in this blog for a while. Not just to share what I’ve learned, because, well, I don’t have much to share, but to get other people’s ideas and suggestions. While I may cook better than the average American and may be able to impress my wife and friends, I’m not really such a good cook. I know how to follow recipes, and I’m starting to get some sense of what works and what does not, but I have a lot to learn, which is actually fascinating; there’s a whole world of flavors out there and exploring it is a very rewarding experience.
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