Memory Diagnostic – Getting errors?

March 24th, 2008 by ReAn

So I’ve been having some issues with my desktop machine as of late, been getting some elegant crashes (read: swift). Recently some of my apps have been catching thier crashes before they dump to the inevitable Dr. Watson, and complaining about memory errors: Pointers to unreferenced memory, inability to read from this memory, etc.

Anyway, unfortunately for me, the problem wasn’t in my memory, but this wonderfull excursion in computer diagnostic process has led me to a wonderfull tool which I’d love to share with the world.

It’s called Memtest86+

http://www.memtest.org/

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Posted in Computers, Software | | 1 Comments

Depth of Field – Simplified

March 11th, 2008 by ReAn

What is depth of field? Depth of field is the simulation in 3D graphics of a lens-based camera. Conventional rendering techniques model a pinhole camera paradigm, this means that all aspects of the picture share the same level of focus (the entire picture is in focus). With a lens-based camera, the rendered image will have varying levels of focus based on the ‘focus’ of the lens. Since we’re not using a ray-tracing engine, it’s hard to approximate the effects of light bending through a lens in the projection phase of rendering so we can ‘fake’ Depth of Field by breaking the problem down.
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Posted in Computers, Graphics | | 1,509 Comments