As mentioned in a previous post, I built a widget using Google maps that tracks a friends journey using GPS logs. This post is about how to build such a widget.

Lithosphere is a GPU driven terrain generator. It allows you to create and export material textures and heightmaps intended for use in realtime graphics applications.

This Linux Driver allows you to access CD Library 2 devices connected on the USB ports either via http or the filesystem. Below is a picture of such a device. Each device can hold 150 CD/DVD/Blue-Ray dimensioned discs.

A common approach to UV mapping terrain is to use planar mapping. This works well except with steep faces where the texture gets stretched. Solutions like tri-planar mapping can remedy this, but introduce other artefacts and are hard to get seamless. The picture below illustrates stretching artefacts with planar UV mapping.

sqlalchemy console allows you to connect to any of the databases supported by sqlalchemy and run an interactive database command line against it.

Sociograph is an opengl/physics application that acts as an IRC client. Relationships of people in IRC channels are visualized as a physical constraint layouted graph.

Pyasm generates runable x86 machine code and uses ctypes to execute it.

In order to light terrain, it is not enough just to cast self shadows. It is also important to light it according to sky/sun occlusion and bounced secondary light. Lumiscape allows you to compute a lightmap for use in interactive applications. The lightmap is rendered using a GPU accelerated variant of radiosity. However, it is still exceedingly slow for large terrain textures.

Pyglet is a fabulous opengl/windowing wrapper you can use to write applications in python. Gletools exposes advanced OpenGL functionality like GLSL, Framebuffers, Float textures etc. to programs using the opengl API of pyglet.

This optimizing brainfuck compiler is written in python using pyasm to produce x86 executable (elf) binaries.