Update
Sorry about the radio silence recently. I’m recovering from the art show, getting ready for Conduit and Comic-Con, and installing a test server. I have a lot to post, don’t I?
Art Gallery Preparation
I’m currently preparing art and descriptions for an art gallery appearance. It will be at Cafe Libertalia in San Diego. For more information see this site:
http://www.kinagency.com/
Yes, I know that the information’s not up yet. I’m writing it now.
Immature technology
The NVidia card I bought to render my fractals with CUDA technology works amazingly fast. An average fractal which previously took 2 hours to render now can take 15 minutes.
Theoretically.
Unfortunately this is immature technology, and so the CUDA renderers are so buggy that more often than not I’ll get a picture full of fuzzy blobs. That would be great if the fractal was supposed to be full of fuzzy blobs, but unfortunately it’s supposed to be dragons or Rorschach-esque bilateral figures or leaves or some such.
Just having the card, though, speeds up a render significantly. Instead of two and a half hours, sometimes I only have to wait one and a half hours. That’s still a thousand-word wait time, so stories and fractals are still coexisting nicely.
Quetzalcoatl Ourobouros
This is a cross between a business card, piece of art, and desktop publishing homework. Enjoy!
Quadro 600, 96 CUDA core fractal rendering geekfest
Today UPS is delivering an Nvidia Quadro 600 video card. Permit me to geek out here for a minute. This card is the lowest-end workhorse video card which uses the Tesla architecture and, most important to me, has a GPU with 96 CUDA cores.
So what, you ask? That means the fractals can be rendered with the cards graphics processing unit instead of the central processing unit. On an 8000×6000 picture, I expect my flame art rendering time to go from about 2 hours to about 15 minutes. I will post the results here once playtime is over.
Now this is good and bad. It’s good, obviously, because it not only cuts down on rendering time but warms my nerdy little heart to no end. I’m not going to gush about how long it would take to render fractals when I started in 2006.
It’s bad, however, for a reason you might not expect.
Currently, sometimes I will render a fractal and spend the 2 hours writing until it’s done. Then I will do a simple tweak on it, and rerender it for another 2 hours while doing something like printing manuscripts for submissions. That’s an excellent workflow for me. But now that I have a video card that basically hides a little supercomputer inside it, how am I going to keep the writing from suffering? Well, of course–I’ll have to start rendering those gigantic, true-3D Mandelbulb fractals. I’ll post those, too.
Back to writing.
FreeMind
I’m trying FreeMind as a visualization tool to assist with the problem I have in organizing and finishing longer works of fiction. Looks promising.
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
LTUE is This Week
Sign up for the Symposium.
http://www.ltue.org/LTUE_2011.html
If you don’t go, you’ll be missing Tracy Hickman’s Killer Breakfast. And Howard Tayler, who doesn’t want you to know he’s a killer sound engineer. Steve Keele, my art mentor, is the Art Guest of Honor. James Dashner is Writing GOH.
If you don’t go, you’ll miss David Farland’s writing education, and L.E. Modesitt’s object lesson on how authors should dress for public events.
I’ve now been cleared for participation, but since have made out-of-state commitments. So I expect reports and updates from those of you who go. Seriously.
A Study in Pink
Just saw the pilot for the new British rendition of Sherlock Holmes. I enjoyed it immensely.
It had an excellent example of subtext in dialog; if you come across the episode, be sure to pay attention to the Blanket scene. Holmes is describing the man who shot the gun, and then realizes exactly who it is he’s describing.
“I’m in shock. See? I have a blanket.”
Enemas
Spam
Wow–how did I get eleven thousand spam comments? My apologies to non-spam visitors.