My experience includes 3D graphics, both interactive and high-quality offline rendering, and Linux/UNIX-like systems as well as Windows. In particular, I have expertise in using OpenGL in applications and middleware, and in writing tests and benchmarks for OpenGL drivers in Windows and XFree86. My resume in PDF format is available for your review.

This year, at Burning Man 2011, I'll be camping with the Karma Chickens.

I have enjoyed the South Bay Folks' open mic night on Thursdays from 7 to 10 PM at the Mission City Coffee Roasting House in San Jose at 2221 The Alameda, Santa Clara, CA 95050. There are many videos of the amateur performers on YouTube.

Planet Granite has good indoor climbing.

Blog

Windows makes me sad ,Mon Nov 9 19:00:04 2009 Running wine fails with X Error of failed request: XF86VidModeExtensionDisabled ,Tue May 26 17:45:05 2009 GRUB "Error 2" May Mean Incompatible stage1.5, stage2, and ext2 ,Wed Mar 18 23:10:03 2009 Before you report you've fixed it, TRY IT ,Tue Mar 17 18:00:14 2009 Addiction ,Fri Feb 6 13:00:05 2009 Simple Serial Port Terminal ,Thu Feb 5 03:25:02 2009 omg! ,Wed Feb 4 19:40:05 2009 Shadow Image : Warning ,Wed Feb 4 19:25:05 2009 SGI Gourmet Bakery ,Wed Feb 4 18:40:07 2009

Tag List technology (9 entries) computers (8 entries) picture (6 entries) art (3 entries) signs (2 entries) obsolete (2 entries) linux (2 entries) tools (2 entries) funny (2 entries)

See All Brad's Blog Entries

Other Personal Writing

• I'm testing out the idea of using BlogSpot for my blog.
• Making the function (Fn) keys for volume, mute, and screen brightness work again on Ubuntu on my Sony VAIO SZ-340 (Mar 4th, 2010)
• My experience transitioning to Boost::shared_ptr (Feb 3rd, 2010)
• Divide versus Right-Shift (July 5th, 2007)
• Flebbenge (November 6, 2006)
• Geodesic Domes (October 1, 2006)
• Being honest with yourself (September 17, 2006)
• Fairness Considered a Dangerous Idea (August 15th, 2006)
• What's so special about 8549176320? (August 9th, 2006)
• My pictures from Burning Man 2005 (September, 2005)
• My first Burning Man (see also burningman.com) (September 18th, 2004)
• My experience with Lexapro, a prescription antidepressant. (August 15th, 2004)
• Back of the Envelope Calculation (October 25th, 2000)

Engineering

• I'm the proprietor and system administrator for the community server Plunk.Org.
• A long time ago, a bunch of friends and I ported BSD UNIX to the Mac II. We called it "MacBSD". Our code formed the basis for the mac68k port of NetBSD.

• In my spare time many years ago, I built a tristripping API called ACTC, which is being used by Lawrence Livermore in a visualization system and by Digital Anvil in game authoring tools, among other projects. Before that, I wrote a less flexible tristripping API called Meshifier, used by Ubisoft to create models for their game Ultimate Golf; ACTC fixes several problems in Meshifier and provides a better API.

• Lawrence Kesteloot and I worked for many years on a Z80 homebrew computer that we called the Alice II. We created some web pages documenting our adventures.

Out and About

• In 2005, with my friends and colleagues David Shreiner and Alan Commike, I filed patent 7,460,126, describing a multithreaded, multipipe media player. The implementation was capable of playing a uncompressed "quad HD" movie (3840 by 2160 pixels) directly from a RAID array of fiber channel SCSI disks. (The target was the Sony SXRD 4K digital projector, which had four inputs, one for each quadrant.) It was a pretty large chunk of code using OpenGL, OpenML, pthreads, and C++. I was kind of proud of the code; it was my first large-scale threaded application. It ran under IRIX 6 and the SGI version of Linux that ran on Itanium. It was, however, not user-friendly and required a pair of full-height racks of equipment. If I remember correctly, Sony declined to work with us after we provided a single demonstration of the technology streaming a short film. A few years later, Sony demonstrated the same projector with a "media block" which was essentially a PC streaming JPEG2000 compressed images to the projector.
• Around 1997, I was peripherally involved in patent 6,933,941, describing a scene graph called Cosmo3D. I think I was just basically the last person remaining at SGI who had worked on the thing at the time. Cosmo3D had features from IRIS Performer promoting performance and features from Open Inventor promoting ease-of-use and editing. (Says it was filed in 2001? What was the delay? I had quit SGI by 1999.) Cosmo3D was quite slick but never saw any real adoption by the industry or even promotion by SGI. (Not to be confused with Cosmo Worlds, a VRML viewer.)
• I appeared briefly in the movie "Revolution OS" playing Richard Stallman's "Open Software Song" (ugh) with "The Gnu Stallmans". I have an entry on IMDB, the Internet Movie Database .
• Back in college, my friend Lawrence and I competed with each other to write the shortest program that would ray-trace shaded spheres and provide an ASCII art image of the result. He made a web page describing our competition. The programs are very ugly and illustrate some things you may not know can be done in the C programming language.
• I organized and moderated a panel called "When Will Ray-Tracing Replace Rasterization?" at SIGGRAPH 2002 Interactive ray-tracing remains a hobby of mine, and it continues to make inroads on rasterization with the inevitability of the planets moving through the sky.
• I joined Dave Shreiner and our friends in courses at SIGGRAPH 2002, 2003, and 2004 on "Performance OpenGL".
• Neal Tringham fixed my old Meshifier triangle stripping code and used it to create an online optimization tool. Models in Ultimate Golf by Ubi Soft were processed with that tool. (I recommend using my ACTC package, mentioned above.)
• I presented part of and wrote part of the course notes for the SIGGRAPH '97, '98, '99, and '00 full day course called Advanced Graphics Programming Techniques with OpenGL, and also the SIGGRAPH '99 Lighting and Shading Techniques for Interactive Applications course.

You can send mail to grantham@plunk.org.

This page was last changed on Sat Aug 13 22:09:11 PDT 2011