Adventures of Ian Parberry

2011-11-18T09:57:00.000-08:00

This week Google Scholar started a new service that allows scholars to track their citations: here's mine. I've been using Publish or Perish, and I probably will continue to do so because it offers much more functionality, but the Google Scholar list definitely has advantages, the primary one being that it is automatically updated. If you're not an academic, you're probably not aware of the trend of using citation measures to gauge the quality of academic publications, but for us it is a big deal.

One interesting feature of the Google Scholar service is that it shows you a graph of citations by year. Mine shows four distinct periods to my career, which I've labelled A, B, C, and D below.

Period A was my tenure-track period, in which I was a young assistant professor trying to get tenure in the 1980s. The number of citations to my work went steadily up, reaching a peak when I started to do neural network research which got noticed.

Period B was the period during which I discovered the possibilities of video games in academia and ramped down my former research program. My time was spent trying to learn game programming and to fix its place in academia. In this I was a lone pioneer.

Period C was a very difficult period during which I became seriously ill and was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. My publication rate dropped precipitously. The citations for my former work dropped too, as neural networks dropped out of vogue.

In period D I was able to come to terms with the limitations that MS put on my life. That fortunately came at a time when new academic game journals and conferences began to proliferate, so I was able to publish the results of my game research with a new and eager group of PhD students, leading to a strong late-career uptick in citations.

2011-08-12T07:50:00.000-07:00

Minion with the Force:

Naturally when she saw yesterday's blog post, my former minion Stephanie wanted in on the action. Her light saber is purple.

2011-08-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

What color is my light saber?
Now that I am no longer Department Chair, I am laying down my red light saber and turning my back on the Dark Side of the Force.

Now it's time for me to take up my trusty green light saber again, the light saber of the regular faculty member.

But maybe I'll trade it in for one of those newfangled white light sabers. You never know when it might come in handy.

2011-04-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

Erdös Numbers:

Mary Yingst, one of my graduate students, pointed out to me on Friday that there is now an automated Erdös number generator online at MathSciNet. I had forgotten all about Erdös numbers. I resurrected my By the Numbers page; by my best estimate my Erdös number is 3, calculated at least 4 different ways.

2011-04-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

Wordle Word Clouds:

Earlier this year I bumped into Wordle.net, a cool website for creating a word cloud from a document. In addition to being a cool piece of art, it's actually a very useful tool for getting a left-brain look at what you've written, which is useful because writing a research paper is essentially a right-brain activity. I've put a few of my papers through the process, and you can see the results here.

It's also useful for finding out whether the sense of what you've written is exactly what you've intended. I've found that when you proofread a paper, what you tend to see is what you were thinking when you wrote it, not what is actually there. What wordle does is present the same information that you can view more dispassionately.

Take for example the NSF proposal I put together with my research student Jon Doran this semester. The initial word cloud looked like this.

The thing that leaped out immediately was that we had overused the word "may".

An NSF proposal is not the place to be imprecise, at least not to this level. Looking at the places we used "may" we found quite a few places where there were holes in our argument that needed explaining better. We ended up with this word cloud:

Much better.

2011-04-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

A Dharma of Video Game Science:

For some time now I've been struggling with the idea that game programming research, being so new, is often at odds with the metrics applied by referees from the "old school" disciplines of Computer Science. My ideas crystallized this week in a document called "A Dharma of Video Game Science". You can read the 5-page technical report and the associated webpage.

2011-04-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

Higher Ed: The Final Frontier for Freedom?

Recently we’ve been seeing FaceBook and Twitter help fuel social movements that are bringing down tyrannical governments in the Middle East. That struggle with tyranny is unfortunately mirrored in microcosm in university classrooms across the country. Tyrannical professors, when faced with student insurrection in the form of questioning class values, or web-surfing and receiving cell-phone calls in class, often react by becoming even more tyrannical and autocratic. I was concerned to read earlier in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education of a professor who routinely refuses to let a student re-enter the classroom after taking a phone call outside.

Things are getting a bit out of control. Let me advocate that faculty emulate Egypt, not Libya.

Please lighten up on the cell-phone ban. I tell students that it’s OK to receive cell-phone calls in class, but to please take the resulting conversation outside (and I let them back in). When a cell-phone rings in class, we pause to rate the coolness of the student’s ringtone. Believe me, after that it seldom rings twice. Humor is a much more appropriate and useful reaction than anger. I take cell-phone calls and messages in class too. How I do that is of course a role model for my students.

While actually in class, it is high time to get away from the Talking Head model of teaching. Don’t just read from PowerPoints, or even worse, read from the PowerPoints that came with the text. Instead, adapt your class in real-time: visit websites, write things in real time, show what really can be done with the new tools that the internet gives us.

Knowledge is no longer King; remember that there is a ready source of knowledge on the internet. What students need is help in navigating that knowledge, not by rote but by applying critical thinking. Make them part of the discussion, have them search the web on the subjects you are lecturing about, as you lecture, reporting back on the spot. Don’t take attendance; it is up to you to make your presentation so packed with information and relevance that they simply cannot bear to miss a single class.

We use a revision control system called Subversion so that I can monitor the amount of work that students do throughout the semester and give them feedback on the iterative process of design, creation, and analysis. Consider connecting with another class across the country or across the world using Skype video calls during class time so that students can get direct hands-on experience collaborating online with students who are very different from them. I’m trying that in class this semester with a colleague at Gallaudet University in DC.

My experience is that when you loosen up on the tyrannical behavior in the classroom, the result is not anarchy, but liberation. Join me.

2008-12-18T09:33:00.000-08:00

Fall 2008 Games Now Available

The game demos from my Game Programming 1 class are now available on the web. You can view movies and download actual versions of the game. This year's class was impressive, out of 12 groups, we got 12 playable games. See http://larc.unt.edu/demos/fall08/4210/ for full details.

2008-10-12T20:33:00.000-07:00

What happens when a snake meets a bulldozer? Fail!

2008-09-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

More on Discovery Park

I just discovered that we're not the only Discovery Park. Wikipedia lists several of them. Eastern Arizona College has one, as does Purdue University, so we're in distinguished company. I hope none of them has copyrighted the name. UNT had to change its School of Visual Arts to the College of Visual Arts and Design when it was discovered that the term "School of Visual Arts" was copyrighted and the owner threatened to sue. That would be unfortunate, given that the big sign out front of the Research Park was changed to read "Discovery Park" some time over the last few days.

2008-09-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

Discovery Park?

I saw this sign posted a few weeks ago in the building I work in at the Research Park (sorry, "Discovery Park"). Don't worry, it's in the public domain so the author won't mind if I reproduce it here.

Eureka! I found my publications!

I found my publications! Right there. Right over there. Sitting on top of that rock. Behind that bush, where no one else had looked yet.

Perhaps I am merely sensitive, but does the change from Research Park to Discovery Park seem to belittle what we do here?

Changing "Research" to "Discovery" seems to embrace the inexplicable American trend of anti-intellectualism. Did the word "Research" not attract the right kind of students? Was it too intimidating? It does seem to suggest an arguably unfair requirement of effort.

Discoveries, on the other hand, usually happen to someone by accident. To anyone, really, and usually that person was not looking for anything at all. Inspirational, I admit, and not at all intimidating. I expect peer reviews will relax to accommodate this movement: "We applaud your uncompromising resignation to luck, the cornerstone of discovery. You have the most tremendous luck of any of the authors, nee adventurers, who have submitted a paper thus far. Paper accepted."

I am not genuinely angry. I am confused. I am a little disappointed. When looking at all of the signs we now need to replace, I am thinking about how parking is no longer free.

Disclaimer: I have no publications, discovered or otherwise. I read email sent to (email address deleted so the student doesn't get spammed).

This document belongs to the public domain. It's yours.

I don't know how long it's been there. Signs like this usually get taken down quickly, so if anybody in authority notices this blog they will surely hunt down the sign and remove it.

The author has a good point though. "Discovery Park" is a weak name. It sounds almost as if some administrator went to a thesaurus looking for synonyms of "research" and picked "discovery". That's well and good, but as Chris points out, "Discovery" has negative connotations that were unnnoticed by the administrator involved.

But how important is this? What's in a name, after all a Research Park by any other name would smell as sweet (sorry Will). I don't think the choice of name will affect the quality of research done here or affect the chances of getting grants, or attracting new researchers. That's all in the hands of people like you and me, who value substance over image. They don't care about the name.

Administrators tend to value image over substance. To them the choice of name is important. It's unfortunate and ironic that that fact alone makes them unqualified to make the choice.

But I prefer to look on the bright side (call me "Brian").

I assume that no researchers were involved in the choice of the name "Discovery Park". The time that administrators took making the choice (which probably took committee meetings) could have been spent doing things that are actively harmful to research, such as making more rules and regulations. But it was spent doing something harmless and meaningless. Some administrator no doubt got a bullet point on his or her resume:

Named Discovery Park

Meanwhile, we researchers got time to do research while this high-level decision making was going on.

Sounds like a win-win situation to me!

2008-07-24T17:57:00.001-07:00

Of all the pictures I took at the beach this year, I think that one's my favorite. Click for a larger image.

2008-07-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

Signs of the Times

While on vacation this month the following signs caught my eye.

The first one, the white sign in the background (click for a larger image) says "no tress passing". My dictionary defines a "tress" to be "A long lock or ringlet of hair." Does that mean that we can't pass hanks of hair to each other on the beach? The sign in the foreground does manage to spell "trespassing" correctly, with only three esses.

The next one shows a complete and utter communication failure. It doesn't look like an invisible fence to me! Or maybe I'm just hallucinating the fence. The dog, however, does appear to be invisible. How appropriate.

That's a fail. Just like this parking meter.

2008-05-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

Student Evaluation of Instructor

My department has finally updated the evaluation form that students use to evaluate their instructor. The old 12-question form has been changed only once in the last 18 years as far as I can remember. The new form has only 6 questions.

I finally got the evaluations from Spring 2008 back this week. It takes a while for UNT to get around to collating the results. I've posted mine here. Not all professors post theirs, but I think that they should so that students can get full information on their future instructors. Mine are always pretty good so I have no problems posting them.

I'm a little annoyed at one of the comments in my 4220 class this semester though. It's more than a little skewed, shall we say. Since the survey is of necessity anonymous and completely confidential, students sometimes get away with writing the most biased things and we don't get to respond. This time I've decided to respond here.

Not many students have bothered to evaluate me on off-campus sites such as ratemyprofessors.com.

2008-05-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

Blast from the Past

I rediscovered this picture recently. (As one of my favorite quotes says "One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries", this from A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh.

It's a publicity photograph of me taken during my years as a young Assistant Professor at Penn State. I'm guessing it's from about 1985. I was in my mid 20s. It was a whole different world back then.

2008-05-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

How to Use a Digital Picture Frame

Many of the departments here in the nascent College of Engineering have big $1000 plasma screen TVs hooked up to $600 computers showing a promotional slideshow of their activities. I decided to spend around $100 on a digital picture frame to do the same thing outside my office. After looking at a few frames I decided to buy a Kodak Easyshare SV1011, the old cheap one without the wifi link. Of all the cheap frames I looked at, that one had the best image quality.

I got out my Dremel and bolted it to the wall hard enough so that anybody seeking to steal it will have to totally destroy it to get it off the wall.

I used a few photos I had lying around, and I used the "Save as jpg" feature in PowerPoint to make a few informational slides. If you buy another frame, make sure you check it out on some jpgs of text saved by PowerPoint, because it looked sucky on some of the screens I tried. I was totally unprepared for that, but I guess it figures that the frames are optimized for showing photos cheaply, and people are not going to notice the loss of resolution that really shows up on text.

Do you think any other faculty will follow my lead?

2008-05-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

Summer Time.

It's official, Summer has finally begun. Well, actually it started last week, but I've been too busy with closing off the end of semester business to notice.

We got some cool games from my CSCE 4220 class this semester, although unfortunately few of the artists from the Game Art class in the College of Visual Arts and Design were able to follow through with fully animated characters. Nonetheless, my programmers were able to adapt. See the movies for some of the games.

My topics class also generated some cool projects, some of which you can see here. There are several that are not postable yet though, so look forward to seeing those in the (hopefully) near future.

On the plus side, 4 alumni got jobs in the game industry this year, bringing the total up to 49. I'm still hoping to reach 50 this year. The full list is online.

2008-05-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

Are we surprised at the following? Probably not.

2008-04-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

University of Houston

I just got back from a day and a half at the University of Houston. I gave a colloquium yesterday on game programming classes and research. They took care of me very well, a driver met me at the airport and took me to the hotel, the hotel and meals were all paid for, and even the flight booking was taken care of for me. None of the usual paying for myself then waiting five weeks for a reimbursement. All I had to do is show up. Now that's how it should be done. My own department doesn't even have a budget for colloquium visitors.

2008-04-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

Game Programming Certificate

On Wednesday this week the university's Undergraduate Curriculum Committee passed my request for a Game Programming Certificate. This is the last step in a long process - first the Department of Computer Science & Engineering's Undergraduate Committee had to approve it, then the College of Engineering's Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, then the aforementioned committee.

Now I'm working on a brochure and a poster, with a webpage soon to follow. I'm stoked.

2008-04-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

Now I'm really depressed.

The US News and World Report ranks UNT as a Tier 4 National university. We're not in very distinguished company there. Bummer. I'm doing my part, what's everybody else doing?

2008-04-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

My Declining Career

I was depressed to find the Quacquarelli Symonds website, which hosts the Times Higher Education Supplement's World University Rankings.

Looking at the Top 400 Universities worldwide for 2007, I find that my undergraduate school, the University of Queensland in Australia, comes in at number 33. My graduate school, the University of Warwick in England, is a step down at number 57. My Assistant Professoring was done at Penn State, number 90.

I searched long and hard for my current employers, the University of North Texas in the Top 400 and in the next 100. But it doesn't seem to be there.

My career seems to be a long downhill slide. I wouldn't mind so much, but I'm underappreciated by UNT.

2008-03-21T20:40:00.000-07:00

Viva Spring Break!

This week was Spring Break. My wife and my youngest daughter promptly came down with the flu, not your normal measly three-day cold, but the genuine flu. My wife is a constant reminder that the German for "sick" is "krank"... she's constantly cranky that is. So my Spring Break has consisted mostly of hiding in the spare bedroom in an effort not to get sick, while emerging to cook meals and to nag the children to clean up after themselves, the latter a vital job that my wife is unable to do while she's sick, hence she delegates it to me.

Today she insisted that she was well enough to drag us all through the Turner exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. Which was well and good, I suppose, but my favorite part of the DMA is a small permanent exhibit on Sir Winston Churchill including some feathers from his favorite budgie. So here they are, for your instruction and edification, Winston Churchill's budgie Toby's tail feathers.

2008-03-12T13:47:00.000-07:00

Finally got around to publishing my Cruise Diary from GDCSE 2008. Enjoy! http://www.eng.unt.edu/ian/Cruise2008/

2008-03-06T18:52:00.000-08:00

Snow!

I headed to work today with my wife's dire warnings of snow ringing in my ears. About 11am it started sleeting. By noon it was snowing. By 1pm the snow had turned into huge snowy clumps a couple of inches across. Still the university did not announce closing. Finally at 2:10pm I got the announcement from the UNT emergency notification system on my cellphone telling me that the university would close at 2pm.

I would have liked to have gotten the notification before 2pm though.

It took over an hour to slog home through the snow. My thoughts go to the UNT employees who live further north, deeper into the snow. It's not like the university didn't know this was going to happen. At least, to hear my wife talk about it, it was pretty obvious.

2008-03-06T18:43:00.000-08:00

Here are images of UNT's front page with my happy smiling face on it, and the article about me. As predicted, they've taken me off the front page already. How fleeting is fame! Click on the images to see full-sized ones that you can actually read.

2008-02-25T15:01:00.000-08:00

What's good for Parberry is good for UNT

That's one of the headlines in http://www.unt.edu/newuntfeatures/parberry.htm. It seems that the publicity wing of UNT has become very interested in my MVP award this year, hence the above article and my happy smiling face on UNT's front page, http://www.unt.edu/.

Since fame is fleeting, however, I expect that this too will pass quickly. By the time you read this they will have probably removed it and moved on to other things.

I've always maintained that "What's good for Parberry is good for UNT", like the article says, but unfortunately my colleagues and my superiors at UNT very seldom see things in the same light. Not that I'm complaining of course. But it's nice to get a little validation. ;)

2008-02-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

It's just like I've said, it's psychologically unhealthy to suppress your anger, because you just end up hurting yourself. Instead, you should let it out where it can hurt other people. A recent study shows that my marriage is indeed a healthy one.

2008-02-06T10:01:00.000-08:00

Here are some more images from the show last week, courtesy of Max's camera.

Finally, here's a short Fraps video of the virtual Max being pushed around by my hand.

2008-02-01T13:28:00.000-08:00

I can't believe I worked a 16 hour day yesterday. I left home at 8am and met Max Kazemzadeh, the renowned new media artist, down in Fort Worth to prepare an exhibit for an art show.

My wife came down too, and helped Max unload his truck.

Inside the space we set up our interactive animation piece entitled "Max is a Pushover" in among the pottery, painting, clothing, and sculpture. One other Art professor and her student were preparing an interactive piece where you use a computer to figure out your carbon footprint and compute how many Earths we'd need if everybody used that much, then rip down the appropriate number of blow-up globes from the wall, blow them up, and put them in a heap. Interesting. We'll see how that one works out.

First we had to bring in all the stuff and construct the physical part of the installation, the computer, the video camera, and the projector.

Meanwhile I did some intense coding. The code consisted of some of the code from the Zach demo that you'll find earlier on this blog, with some different behaviours and some new images. Max videotaped himself yesterday and post-processed this into a series of sprites for me... this morning right after we unloaded his truck. He said he'd have them 24 hours in advance for me, but no pressure.

Max continues to cut wood...

Around 3pm the piece starts to come together physically. However, we're having trouble getting the DirectX and DirectShow User Runtimes installed on Max's computer, not to mention the drivers for the video camera. You see, his computers have been set up by the College of Visual Art and Design's technicians, and place serious limits on user access, even when they supposedly have "administrator" privileges on the machine.

Around 5pm we give up and plan to show the demo using my development laptop. I still haven't written the code. About this time the virtual Max will fall down in response to keystrokes, but there's no sign of camera input.

About this time I discover an obscure multithreading bug with DirectX and DirectShow and manage to exorcize it. Serious hair-tearing time for a while with the demo crashing faster than a 1960s Lada with very little debug information.

Eventually, around 10pm everything started to come together. After removing the last bug - using a video-space variable instead of a screen-space one - I'm able to put the finishing touches on the software and Max can clean up the hardware.

After a few "official" photos and videos by Max, we're able to hit the road after 11pm. Max drops me home at midnight. Day officially seized.

2008-01-29T11:39:00.000-08:00

A New Spin on Class Participation

In my game programming class last night I was reminded yet again that the world has changed since I was a student. I've set up a Subversion server in my lab so that the artists and programmers can keep a group repository of their developing game. During class I assigned a homework to be submitted on the subversion server, and lo and behold, as I was showing them on my laptop how to turn it in, I see that one of the students in the class had already accessed the repository from his laptop while I was lecturing.

This is a Good Thing.

Professors today need to remember that this is an "on demand" world and tailor their classes accordingly.

2008-01-21T14:48:00.000-08:00

I brought home something from the class that I wasn't expecting - the flu. :(

More later.

2008-01-19T09:23:00.000-08:00

Torque X Boot Camp: Day 2

This is the third day (I started numbering at Day 0). We briefly went through the process of adding delegates to a game object in our 2D games. Now we're looking at Torque 3D. There's no Builder, so everything is done in XML. They're working on a 3D Builder though, which will make the whole process much easier.

They're focussing on the Art pipeline. We're going to create an object in 3D Studio Max and bring it into the Torque 3D terrain demo. After that we messed with the code a little to make the player teleport to the place a grenade ends at. It's all quite simple code, as usual with this kind of thing the majority of the time is spent in deciphering the wrappers and figuring out which class has the responsibility we need, and then figuring out what they named the appropriate function. Sigh.

2008-01-18T08:19:00.000-08:00

Torque X Boot Camp: Day 1

Now we're working through a tutorial guided by the instructor.

Notice the coffee and banana for breakfast. Dilbert again. Here's a short video showing what we're doing - bouncy Garage Games logos.

Breakout!

Finally, Breakout with flies.

At dinner we broke up and a group of out-of-towners opted for steak, while my wife and I drove a small goup to Jinbeh in Lewisville, arguably the best sushi in the area. The cognitive dissonance of being served by two Mexican sushi chefs is made up for by the excellence of the food. We're not talking Fusion here, we're talking classical Japanese restaurant-style sushi.

2008-01-17T06:55:00.000-08:00

Torque X Boot Camp: Day 0

Up at 6:00am. Argh. I'm seeing the sunrise from the "other side", I'm getting flashbacks to being a graduate student again. Shower. Breakfast. The dog looks at me like I'm crazy.

The drive to SMU at Legacy is easier than I expect, less than 50 minutes. They have a reasonable breakfast set out, heavy on the bananas. Are they sending us a message here? I'm thinking of the Dilbert cartoon that says that Engineers tend to lose credibility when they're eating bananas.

There are about 17 students in class, and 3 instructors from Garage Games. Stephen Zepp and John Kanalakis are the instructors, Davey Johnson the facilitator. So far, so good.

Here we go...

We're going around introducing ourselves. There's a good mix, high school teachers and university faculty. So far everybody seems to be a newbie... some have industry experience and are new at the academic thing, and some are academics and/or teachers just starting out with game development.

That took a long time. The rest of the day discussed concepts. It might have been too long for those of us who already know what we're doing, but totally incomprehensible to those who don't.

Dinner was at Mi Cocina just around the corner from the Guildhall.

2008-01-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

Torque X Boot Camp, Day -1

Aspiring game developers among you will be aware that Torque is an incredible game engine that is available for newbies to learn the ropes of game programming, so to speak. Garage Games are holding a Boot Camp for teachers tomorrow at SMU's Guildhall for the upcoming Torque X, a version of Torque for Microsoft's XNA Express.

My first thought was that it's a little elitist. They're holding it at the Guildhall, which right away is an elite institution, charging upwards of $30K per year for a game development diploma. But at least it's pretty centrally located in Dallas, and it's a venue that adds a little pizazz to the event. Garage Games are charging $750 for the Boot Camp, $600 if you register early. On the face of it that's pretty damn good value for 3 days of training, but at my institution (which unlike Guildhall charges students $3K per year) if I have that kind of money I usually have more pressing things to spend it on rather than personal training. RTFM is free, after all. Fortunately, Davey Jackson was kind enough to let me attend for free if I write a review and give them pointers on how to improve the presentation.

I'm all over that like a rash. Thank you!

So far I'm not exactly a happy camper. Yesterday I received an email asking me to bring a laptop (no problemo) and to have pre-installed on it:

1. MS XNA 1.0 Refresh (Note: Torque X is not currently compatible with XNA 2.0, you must have the 1.0 Refresh build available on MSDN)
2. Visual C# 2005 Express (or other Visual C# compatible with MS XNA)
3. SP1 for Visual C#
4. Torque X
5. Torque X Builder (Full or Demo version)
6. Torque X 3d Beta

Right away I run into problems. Visual C# 2005 Express is no longer available. When MS released Visual C# 2008 Express they pulled all the 2005 copies off the web. So I download the 2008 version, but of course XNA 1.0 won't install with it.

I search (or rather, I have a grad student search) the computers in my lab for a cached version of the installer for Visual C# Express 2005, but they're all gone, thanks to Murphy I guess.

Unfazed, I drop the problem in Davey's lap and go to get the Torque downloads. I'm annoyed to find that they want me to create an account there - one more damn username and password to remember. Next I get given an activation key to save for later. One more annoyance. I get the installer, attempt to run it, and I'm damned if it doesnt fail because I don't have Visual C# Express 2005 installed.

Grrrrr.

So, I have two pieces of advice for the folks at Garage Games.

1. Don't make your classes depend on software that is unavailable.
2. If you do, don't notify your audience that they need it two days before class.

I'm assuming that these are easily-fixed bugs though, in spite of a certain amount of gritted teeth and raised blood pressure here. In subsequent versions of this Boot Camp I'm sure they'll have all their ducks in a row software-wise. Not to worry.

Fortunately I got a response from Josef Rogovsky from Garage Games within the hour. There's a version of Visual C# Express 2005 on the XNA Creators Club website: http://creators.xna.com/Resources/Essentials.aspx. Progress!

Turns out I should have just installed TorqueX 3D. It includes the other two. Duh. Uninstall Torque X, install Torque X 3D. Ready to rock and roll.

2008-01-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

I've shaken the hand of a man (Robert Terrence Holt, 1922-2007, my father-in-law)...

... who has shaken the hand of a man (John Harmon Rowe, 1856-1941, his grandfather)...

...who has shaken the hand of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).

Pretty cool, huh?

2007-12-16T12:02:00.000-08:00

The semester is over now, I've submitted my final grades, and I attended the College of Engineering graduation ceremony yesterday. My major task this week was meeting with groups from my game programming class and quizzing them about their games. Here's a picture of some of them hard at work in the lab:

The games from the class look pretty good this semester, given that Max scheduled the Art class at a totally different time without notifying me. See http://larc.csci.unt.edu/demos/fall07/. I worked on the LARC home page this week too, a test version is up at http://larc.csci.unt.edu/. I plan to make the slideshow images larger and to work on the code more to make it work in Mozilla. The Mozilla-specific code that I have in place now for the slide transitions doesn't seem to work as advertized. It works great for IE, but that's no surprise.

2007-12-09T17:39:00.000-08:00

This week was Dead Week at UNT, the last week of classes. On Monday the Undergraduate Committee of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering approved my request for two new game programming classes. On Tuesday we had the game contest in my Game Programming class with judges from Terminal Reality. Wednesday and Thursday I updated my web page, http://www.eng.unt.edu/ian, learning some Javascript along the way.

Friday was my wife's birthday, so I took the day off. I worked on updating the LARC webpage over the weekend to make up the time. It will have a Javascript slideshow.

My wife was hospitalized early this week for a day with a suspected heart attack. We're still not sure. She goes for a stress test early next week. Fingers crossed.

2007-12-01T14:13:00.001-08:00

The damn toilet upstairs overflowed this morning, sending water in a steady drip out the kitchen ceiling.

I ripped up the carpeting in the toilet and attempted to dry it out with a heater and a large fan. (What idiot puts carpet in a toilet? Don't ask me. The house was this way when we bought it.)

2007-12-01T14:09:00.000-08:00

While uploading images from my camera I came across an old one of my wife's dog after Kate spilled chocolate milk on him this summer. He's naturally brown and white to begin with, but those stains on his back are not natural.

What, me worry?

2007-12-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on research and teaching.

A new PhD student, Jonathon Doran, will be joining me in January. He pointed out that my UNT webpage hasn't been kept up-to-date recently about my game development research. In fact, it looks like not much is going on. He's right, my former PhD student Tim Roden used to say the same thing.

So this week I put together a new research webpage here. I'm not totally finished, this is the first draft.

On Monday my request for new game development classes goes before the Undergraduate Committee of the Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering. This is just the first step of a multi-committee process. I'm proposing a new class on Game Math and Physics, and a new topics class for game dev students. Once this process gets started I'll work on the Game Programming certificate that the Dean wants. On the plus side, my requests for graduate level classes were apparently approved. I need to work on a new website for the teaching side of my work too.

2007-12-01T13:14:00.000-08:00

November 15-18, 2007 we had a colleague of mine from Sweden, Mary Sheeran of Chalmers University, come visit us in Texas. On the weekend we took her to the Japanese Gardens in Fort Worth. I didn't manage to get any decent pictures of Mary, but these are my favorite ones from that trip.

2007-11-13T15:05:00.002-08:00

I made some major progress on Zack today. Firstly, I fixed the vertical jitter. It was due to the fact that the camera runs asynchronously and I made the mistake of zeroing out the height array on each video frame before computing new height values. Naturally the game rendering thread sometimes saw a zeroed out array, depending on where the video thread got interrupted.

I also made a first cut on some physics. Notice the new background setup, I can now pull the video camera further back.

2007-11-09T12:49:00.000-08:00

I've been working on getting Zack, my virtual character, to turn more smoothly using an animation sequence from the artist. That involved making a bunch of the code into real code, as opposed to held together with chewing gum and barbed wire as in the last video I posted. I also found that the edge recognition works better with a black background. I think that with another day's work it should be a solid enough foundation on which to build a cool demo.

2007-11-07T15:25:00.000-08:00

Interacting with a Virtual Character

Now I now have a virtual character who will interact with you in a simplistic way. He doesn't like heights, so he walks back and forth between drop-offs. You can use your hand to help him from place to place, as you can see on the video. There are still some height glitches, as you can see when I carry him from the left side of the pit to the right side, so I'm not claiming it's perfect, but it's still pretty cool.

2007-11-07T11:38:00.000-08:00

My Fan Club

Yesterday I had 4 (count them, 4) 120mm fans installed into Metalwolf. It looks impressive, almost the entire left wall of the case (the left side of the image above) is now made up of fans. So far today (touch wood) it seems to be running a lot cooler. Fingers crossed!

2007-11-05T16:29:00.000-08:00

Merging the Real and Virtual Worlds

For the last few weeks I've been messing around on a project with renowned digital media artist Max Kazemzadeh of the College of Visual Arts and Design (COVAD) at UNT to merge the real and virtual worlds. I've written an app that takes input from a webcamera using DirectShow and combines it with animation using DirectX. The final output is run through a pixel shader. The video above shows a character who walks from left to right across the screen across a line defined by the video input, in this case the edge of a magenta cut-out on a green background.

There are various toolsets around for doing this sort of thing, but I wanted the challenge of making one myself. I'm kind of obsessive that way. I want to know how it works under the hood.

The challenge is not just getting it done, but getting it to run at a decent frame rate, keeping in mind that the video camera delivers input at about 24fps, while the graphic card can in principle render at 60fps when tied to the vertical retrace. The result runs at about 30fps on my old 2GHz Toshiba laptop (shown) and upwards of 50fps on Metalwolf, my quad-core heat-generating monster uber-desktop, currently down for graphics-card melting repairs.

2007-10-31T16:58:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot, it's Halloween tonight! I know it's hokey, but I've got a great Jack Sparrow costume. Click on the image to see a larger version. Arrrrr!

2007-10-31T14:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I learned something. It's not a good idea to sandwich an Nvidia 5300 graphics card between two Nvidia 8800 GTX cards. This results in the passively-cooled 5300 becoming so hot that it melts solder. Look at the melted solder in the image above. Cool. Mind you, the rest of my computer is smokin' hot too, quad core, 4GB of RAM, 2.25 TB of HD.

So today I spent pretty much the whole day reorganizing my office so the Monster can sit beside my desk instead of under it, with better airflow all round. Of course, if I had a decent size office I could have done it in a flash, but that's what comes of being a state employee in a university that puts image (look at how parsimonious we are) before substance (meaning an office that's actually more functional than a hamster cage). Also I have too many cables, that might have something to do with it.

2006-06-12T21:12:00.000-07:00

University Administration

I found this picture online and added my own descriptions. It does seem indicative of university administration everywhere.

2006-04-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

Why should you choose me as a PhD adviser?

Well, for a start, don't choose me unless you want to participate in all phases of research and publication. I'm currently in a College of Engineering, but I'm a scientist, not an engineer. Engineers tend to know exactly what they are doing. If you have an engineer as a PhD adviser, he or she will put you on a project and tell you exactly what to do. You will get your hand held, which is a good thing. But when you graduate and leave, you won't necessarily know how to work on your own. If you work successfully with me, I will make sure you have the ability to work independently after graduation.

My philosophy of research is like the quote from Werner von Braun: "Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing". I like to futz around on a number of different projects at once, not all of which will lead to publications or funding.

If you want to be my PhD student and you don't know what problem to work on, I'll start you out by reading papers and books to get background knowledge in whatever it is I'm currently thinking about. Eventually you'll discover something that you think you can do better than what you've read. Put enough of those things with a common theme together, and you've got a PhD thesis.

I'll teach you how to measure the importance of your contribution. It can be the first solution of a problem, or the best solution. In either case, you'll need to do a literature search to find out what research has been done before in this and related areas, and you'll need citations to those papers in your work to demonstrate that you are a contributing member of the scientific community. You will enter the "web of research", the interconnected network of papers connected by citations.

If your solution is the best, you'll need to set up the metrics by which you determine "best", and justify your claim. Is your solution of higher quality, or faster perhaps? Those claims can be justified either theoretically or experimentally. Experiments can be by simulation, or with a human audience. Either way, it is that measurement of the outcome that distinguishes academic research from the kind of development things that are done outside academia and are often erroneously called "research".

After you've done the research, there's the writing up of the thesis, the writing of the papers, the submission of the papers, dealing with refereeing and manuscript requirements. There's the giving of talks on your work at conferences and workshops. I'll give you advice on how to do that. (While we're on the subject, your name will come first in the author list of any publications we write together.)

I may even get you involved in writing funding proposals too.

Oh, and it may come as a surprise to you, but there will come a point when you will know more about your chosen subject than I do. That is as it should be.

I have high standards, which may scare you a little. I've had 5 PhD students, which is admittedly not many for 22 years in academia. I put high value on significance of research though, not just on the number of publications generated. What use is it writing 200 papers if nobody cites them?

My PhD antecedents go back a long way, you can read about them here.

For more information about the kind of research that I do, look at my publication list, and also look at the scientific papers that have cited my publications here.

For more information about me, you can always Google me to find out more.

2006-04-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

My personal philosophy is a blend of three modes of thought:

Stoicism: Relax, go with the flow. Whatever happens, happens. Enjoy the good times, suffer through the bad times, and above all endure. Bend with the wind, but never break. See clearly, and act from the heart.
Zen: The right path will open naturally. If you can't see the right path, then relax and let your feet find the way. Everything you need will be provided for you, but just out of your reach. It's up to you to make the effort to obtain them.
Viking: Sometimes you've got to put aside this philosophy crap, take up your sword, and fight for the things you value. Take joy in the fight, because fighting is living. Life puts challenges in your path, you show your worth by how you deal with them.

The problem is knowing which mode to be in, n'est pas?

Just don't bug me on a Monday morning.

2006-04-21T20:17:00.000-07:00

"God doesn't give you more than you can handle"

Everybody says that "people say that", but have you ever wondered where that saying came from? Even Google doesn't come up with much more than hearsay.

The closest I can come up with is this.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.
Marcus Aurelius

2006-04-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

Huckleberry Finn, where are you?

I named this blog "The Adventures of Ian Parberry" to make an allusion to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Any resemblance of mine to Huckleberry Finn is purely accidental though.

I do have great adventures, some of which I will describe on this blog in due course.

2006-04-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

A little about me.

I'm Ian Parberry, a middle-aged professor of Computer Science. Computer Science, yeah, that makes me a dinosaur, I know. I used the internet back when it was called the arpanet.

In 1993 I got bored and started teaching and doing research in game development. I thought I was a year or two ahead of the pack, but it turns out I was 13 years ahead. Game dev is insanely popular this year.

To find out about my professional life, take a look at my webpage at http://www.eng.unt.edu/ian. You should follow all the links, of course.

I grew up in England, emigrated to Australia at age 10, returned for my PhD at age 22, and moved to the US at age 25. Now I live in Texas. I can be recognized as a foreigner on three different continents. I own 4 parrots, 1 dog, 2 frogs, and a toad. I've been married for 23 years to the same woman, and I have three daughters, the youngest of whom is 7.

So google me if you want to know more. That's what computers are for, isn't it?

2006-04-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

This is me, Ian Parberry. This is my blog.

I'm the one mugging it with the redheaded superhero. And this is my dog.

Well, it's my wife's dog, technically, but I'm the one who pays his vet bills. Don't you love the stylish doggie footwear?