Google Analytics

Wow. Regardless of their alleged world domination schemes and general evilness, Google went and did it again. Google Analytics is an awesome service that lets me monitor the traffic to my official webpage and extract all kinds of statistics, such as graphical region, source site, conversion rates etc, everything neatly packed and categorized. It's oh so simple (just copy-paste a scriplet into your html files), and yet has given me a complete new view of what good (if any) that my webpage actually does. So get in line and wait for that precious invitation today!

Ron Fedkiw interview at fxguide

There's a really interesting interview with Prof. Fedkiw at fxguide.com. He describes in some detail what's going on under the hood of those cool new water animations we see in the movies. It's fun to see what all this &#!?%$# math hopefully is leading up to!

Optimizing noisy 1-D functions

Who knew such a trivial thing as finding the maximum of a noisy 1-D function would prove an unsurmountable task to modern science! While some people are fusing atoms and creating anti-matter, others are screaming in frustration over non-convergent searches and galloping derivatives when trying to focus a simple lens system in a ray tracer. Stochastic sampling in all honor, but for a tremendously costly function (e.g. ray-tracing a focus area and computing its entropy) you don't want to risk wasting those precious samples in potentially all the wrong places. Yes yes, auto-focusing a ray-tracer using the same focus measures as a normal camera might not be the smartest field to invest time in, but school assignments usually aren't picky about realism. Also, I'm sure there's plenty of other applications of a smart search algorithm for noisy data. Golden Section can't reign supreme forever! Right?

My Best Friend's Band

While I'm at it, my friend Fredrik's band Veil has just released their first demo. Go to http://veil.angst.nu for some angst-ridden rock! 'Toxicate' is an awesome track, the rest I leave up to you.

New homepage!

Ack, finally it's done! I've finished the epic makeover of my school homepage, a masterpiece that's supposed to leave all the corporate people out there stunned by amazement (is that even a word?). If you're either looking for a CG/computational methods guy with Stanford experience, or just don't have anything else to do, check out http://www.stanford.edu/~bergbom/. Feel free to let me know what you think; I would very much appreciate it since the slightest detail could mean the difference between a glorious internship and... no glorious internship. Also a shout out to my man Martin who more or less knowingly provided me with lots of inspiration and... errm, code.