Idle minds ...

So it turns out I have a bit of a break between contracts again - i'm always happy to have extra time off, so there's nothing to complain about there!

I sat down on the weekend and yesterday to play with some socles code, but so far it's been really slow going. I just don't feel like getting too much into it and it's easier just to put it down if i hit a problem; I guess I really do need a bit of a break. I also have tons of crap to do in the back yard, shed, and even around the house as well; but i've been a bit lazy on that front the last year or so, as such I doubt much will happen there.

But yeah, I guess eventually over this break I will get the opencl ransac stuff sorted out in socles, and probably then re-visit jjmpeg to at least check in the code I've already done on the android stuff.

I tried the 12.6 beta catalyst driver yesterday - and thankfully it seems a lot better than 12.4, so far, touch wood, etc. At least it doesn't keep throwing up OUT_OF_HOST_MEM errors after a half a dozen code runs, AND the xinerama twin-screen desktop is back up to decent performance. So after finally getting a GCN GPU I would like to have a play with that and see what I can get out of it. I should probably try and come up with a specific application I want to try to implement and work toward it as well, rather than just poking in random algorithms to socles. The thing is, computers mostly just do what I need them to do (run emacs and a terminal in overlapping windows?), so i'm not particularly driven at this point.

I'm keeping an eye on the ARM stuff; the rhombus tech guys, the open pandora (who knows if i'll ever get the one i ordered - at least an email confirming the order and address once a year would be nice), but with a bunch of beagleboards sitting idle already it doesn't seem much point in me getting another dev board to poke at. Just not enough hours to look at everything that is interesting ...

On the RANSAC code, I pretty much have it done - it's just that messy testing to go. In this version I tried to do most work in the one kernel - I will see if that added complexity makes it slower, or the lower memory demands help it overall. I also tried to parallelise absolutely everything, from coordinate normalisation/result denormalisation to matrix setup. So far i'm getting a strange result in that just the SVD is somewhat slower than just the SVD I had before: although for all intents they are the same design. Once I have it going I will try double arithmetic to see if that generates better results.