BezierView using WebGL

My lab (SurfLab) manages a program called BezierView which is used for rendering different kinds of Bezier surfaces (triangular, tensor-product, rational, etc.). BezierView has not been updated for a few years, so me and a few other colleagues decided to update the program using WebGL instead.

Now instead of downloading BezierView to your own computer and running a .exe file, you can just run it online through a webpage. You can find the still-being-updated version here. For now you can view tensor-product, triangular and rational patches along with polyhedra. It is being currently updated to include a better interface and to have support for all types.

There are some shortcomings to writing BezierView in WebGL – the most obvious one is that Javascript is much slower compared to C/C++. And the online version cannot handle huge files which the offline version can. And since WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0, we cannot take advantage of the tessellator engine in modern graphics cards to evaluate parametric patches on the GPU (which results in a significant speedup). So all the evaluation is done on the CPU and the resultant vertices sent to the GPU. I guess we’ll have to wait for OpenGL ES 4.0 (or WebCL to be finalized – a Javascript implementation of OpenCL).

BezierView was developed using the excellent Three.js library. I highly recommend using it if you are developing a WebGL application.

The source code is available on GitHub.

You can find BezierView here.

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My Google Chrome extension – “Comment Save”

(UPDATE December 29th, 2012: Comment Save is now on version 0.6.x, and has support for filters (black and whitelist), timed deletion, Disqus/LiveFyre support, Google+, etc.)

Though I focus mostly on computer graphics, I also have an (amateurish) interest in web-design and web-programming.

Late last year a friend of mine brought to my attention a problem he encountered: he wrote a bunch of text in a textbox and when he clicked submit the server responded with an error. He had lost all he wrote which was frustrating. I thought it would be useful to have an extension which records everything you type in one of those boxes so you can recover it if you lose it.

Another friend suggested it would be nice if the extension kept a history of all your posts (if you are one of those people who comment across many sites a lot). And so I came up with “Comment Save” (which has roughly 500 users as I type this).I’ll let the description describe it:

As featured on Lifehacker!

http://lifehacker.com/5715657/comment-save-keeps-track-of-your-comments-on-the-web

Ever written a large post or comment on a website, click submit, only to see your comment get lost in the internet wilderness? Or your tab/window closed somehow before you could submit?

Or maybe you just like to keep track of all the posts you made on different websites.

Comment Save (CS) helps you keep track of what you have been writing as you type. Icon beside the address bar brings up a window showing you the last post you wrote alongwith a link to the page. Link in the window allows you to view your post history.

You can also filter websites where you don’t want any of your posts to be tracked.

Works on sites like:
– Youtube
– Facebook/Google+
– Gawker blogs (Gawker/Gizmodo/Jezebel/Lifehacker/etc.)
– Engadget/Techcrunch/etc. (Sites which use Disqus)
– WordPress/Tumblr
– Forums of all kinds
– Digg/Reddit
– CNN/New York Times/The Guardian/other news websites
– And lots more!

FEATURES:
——————
* Records your post as you type so you can recover it if you lose it.
* Keeps a history of all your posts along with a link to the page and the time.
* Allows you to add filters so you can disable tracking on certain websites.
* Simple checkbox in the popup window enables/disable tracking globally

The extension helped me learn Javascript more (and also helped me deal with HTML Web Databases). The source code for the extension is open-source and has been released under the GPL v2 license. The source code can be accessed on Google Code here. Feel free to look through it.

If you have any feature requests for the extension please let me know. Some features I have thought about adding include:

• Delete all comments after a set time. (User-specified time, for ex. 10 minutes, 1 day, 1 month, etc.) (UPDATE: Added in Version 0.5 on 9th August 2011)
• Search Comments: Within that include searching by website, within a specific timeframe, etc.
• Delete Comments by website

Any other suggestions would be welcome!