FPT Toolkit and my first steps into win32

 The screenshot above is my latest little project, a windows based tool for the decomposition of image using my fast pulse transform (FPT) technique. It needed to have a few features like file IO, pulse selections and highlighting of pulses. I’ve never done any sort of c++ winapi programming before apart from some windows forms stuff in c#. I figured since i’m busy messing around with win32 in my openGL and directX adventures, i might as well just use that. :/

Probably not the smartest decision, since the bare win api is c based and not c++ based and so the way the api is structured is based on c techniques. I’ll be honest and it took me a day or two to get used to it and to figure out how most things occurs and now i’ve pretty much got the gist of it. Now it comes down to using the msdn docs to find out what the flag values i need are, and trying to figure out when specific messages are sent. I’ve got a very basic grasp of it at the moment. I wish i could spend more time messing around with it but i need to focus on this semester and finish learning directx 10. And even so once that is done, i think i’m gonna focus on learning MFC or windows forms even as it seems the bulk of development is done using these APIs. From what i can see most window game dev toolsets are developed in MFC.

So some last words about my app… i couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the fuck DIBs and HBITMAPS work (creating DIBs programmatically at least – the conversion from DIB to HBITMAP was simple enough) so i had to use openGL to display my 2D images (haha, oh well its not like people don’t have openGL videos cards these days). I just got the pulse selection and reconstruction saving working, just need to finish the highlighting section and its done (for now). I need to sit and think logically about what i want for the highlighting interface and then code it.

I have struggled these last few days trying to learn winapi programming from scratch using nothing more than google and the MSDN docs but at the same time I’ve learnt a lot and so its been worth it! OH and for a development environment: visual studio 2008 + vista 64 is a dream come true

Holiday Time? A trip to the USA

So we’re on our mid year break at college, tho i’m still required to go into work. It hasnt felt like much of a break to be honest. I’ve been crazy busy to the point where i’ve just got too many things on my plate.

At work i’m busy retrofitting a web system but the specs are as clear as mud so once i implement a change the way i was instructed to, a million other problems due to shortsightedness appear.  

A bit of good luck for me, i submitted a research paper i wrote on several applications of the fast discrete pulse transform we developed to the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, and it was accepted. This means now that I have to go to florida in december to present the paper at the conference ( and do some job hunting while i’m on the continent ),  this is really exciting news! I havent been out of the country in ages!

Otherwise what am i currently busy with, getting healthy for one! I caught the flu this winter so the last couple of days have been very snot filled. I’m busy learning DX10 programming using wendy jone’s “beginning directx 10 game programming” and so far that book has proved to be pretty poor. She barely covers anything in detail, skips over various topics and just seems to randomly choose her topics. Once a better book becomes available i’ll try and get hold of that. I’ve tried browsing through the DX DSK docs and they are pretty useless for a beginner too.

I’m going to be doing all my graphics work in openGL next semester so maybe learning directx is an exercise in futility, but its an exercise that i’m enjoying! it’s also giving me a good intro to COM programming concepts.

What else well i’ve nearly finished with my case mod, i’m so tired of it at this point i’m not gonna do any of the fancy stuff i had planned. just gonna stick my PC into it and leave it! I spent 3 hours last night making custom usb cables

I’m also doing vocals for a pretty established local metal band, i’m really enjoying it! The first 2 weeks was pretty rough having to rewrite the lyrics for all their songs and learn them but it was worth it. I’m also feeling really restless, my body is screaming for exercise and i’m gonna join a gym with a punching bag. I want to take up my karate again but my club has switched focus to sport karate and not traditional karate (which is what i’m more interested).

anyways i’m off to make a cup of coffee and carrying on with DX10.