The death of an old friend - farewell Tondo, we will miss you Biology and IT C++ Computer graphics & realtime rendering: STATION 5 (c), ENG32/ELE (c), Aztec (c) Computer art Maths tools| A little function plotter for the Palm (Palm OS 3) can be found here: | MathPlot |
| A WEB enabled function plotter can be found here: | FuncPlot |
| An open source framework for easy scientific visualizations in C++: | MathFrame at SourceForge |
The death of an old friend - farewell Tondo, we will miss you
This site is dedicated to Thomas Tarody, who unexpectedly went away forever on July 20, 2007
Some
theoretical work about the C++ Standard (including STL)
My article about vectors of pointers in CUJ (C++ users journal)
Using STL containers with pointers to elements. (German)
Using STL containers with pointers to elements. (English - updated)
Biology and IT
My latest hobby and profession is biology - after having realized, how much biological systems (what we call
living things) and computers have in common and after having read the books of Richard Dawkins, where he elaborates
on his idea that genes by themselfes are living things and can act selfishly and where he gives a very impressive explanation
of evolution and its concepts I got utterly fascinated - I started studying biology. A few simple things that keep my mind busy:
*) The nucleus of ecariotic cells strinkingly resembles the filesystem of a modern OS -
whereas the DNA in a procaryote resembles a home computer filesystem
*) The coding principle of the DNA resembles closely a computer code where one word has 6-bits
*) Ants that form a superorganism have an architecture that strikingly reminds me of grid computers or computer clusters
*) Ants on the other hand exhibit lots of properties that make them comparable to a single cell of a multi cellular
organism - the development of castes should be closely studied by embriology.
*) Yet on another level single ants can be compared to proteins in a single cell - they need to be recruited, they
need to specialize to certain activites (and therefore have different sizes and different body shapes) - though they
do all (mostly) share an identical genome. The queen can be compared to the nucleus in this picture - it carries the
information for all the workers and soldiers. Like proteins, worker ants need to die early, to allow the ant superorganism
to quickly adapt to changing environment conditions (more soldiers or more workers needed). In a single cell, protein
digestion is necessary to allow for adaptive gene expression.
*) Horizontal gene transfer (via viruses, most notably retro-viruses) may have been terribly underestimated for higher animals -
it seems that big parts of the eucariotic genome are actually sleeping viruses (lysogenic), that have partially begun to cooperate
with its host, similar to mitochondria.
*) Very close symbiotic relationships like that of the figue and the figue wasp may be the beginning of the total fusion of the
2 organisms - sooner or later there may be generations of animals that are an integral part of certain plants. With viruses this
has already happened.
*) I assume there are way more species of bacteria than species of arthropods - though until now only around 6000 bacteria
species are known, while more than 1 million species of arthropods are known.
*) The species counts for plants and insecta resemble each other remarkably - this is not by accident; I assume that sympatric
species separation has led to the observed numbers of species in both groups; sympatric speciation seems to be far more important
than is known today.
*) The internet, computer programs connected to it one way or another and the viruses on the internet are an almost perfect model
system for the interactions of viruses with other living things in nature - biologists should try to closely observer how this
model system develops and what is going on there; specifically the theory of the selfish gene seems to be affirmed by this
model system.
*) More to come... I will soon dedicate a special page to these topics.
Did you know, that in Costa Rica only 20% of rainforest are left?
Pictures of my last journey to Costa Rica
If you want to make a difference, have a look at this page: www.regenwald.at
If you want to donate your free CPU time to a scientific, humanitarian project, go to: www.worldcommunitygrid.com
Currently the human proteome (all the human proteins) is processed by the grid - the task at hand is to find the tertiary structures of
all human proteins (that is the 3D folding of the proteins of which we already know the base sequences from the human genome project).
The outcome of this work is only for non-profit organizations!
If you like it you may as well join the Team "InfraSoft" there, of which I am the currently the lead - thanks in advance if you do.
Real
Time 3D Graphics (ENG32) / Games
Since 1995 I've been developing a Real Time 3D engine. The whole
project started just as a little game, and soon evolved into something big. The
engine is called ENG32 and has by now support for Hardware rendering (OpenGL and Direct3D) and
software rendering. The 1st game project I started was called Aztec
(see below) - currently a new game is beeing developed, which takes place on a space
station. The working title of that is STATION 5. The story behind
that game is kind of a space rescue mission - you and your team have to secure a space
station, which is known to be invaded by an alien force. Both games are right now in the
stage to mainly show the capabilities of the engine, which is constantly updated.
For technical details, see the the Aztec docu or the Station 5 docu. Keep in mind that Aztec is no longer
developed.
It is to be noted that the engine behind STATION 5 is a superset of that behind Aztec -
it has at least the same capablities and could be used for an enhanced version of Aztec as
well - its mainly for historical and time reasons, that I leave Aztec alone for now - my
main developing efforts go into STATION 5.
STATION
5
The current game project - a 3D Action Adventure. Its a work in progress - see a description and demo donwloads. Supports Direct3D and OpenGL.
ELE
The leveleditor used for STATION 5 - it is also currently in progress, but already exhibits all the main features and is used for creating the demo levels. A first version can be downloaded from the STATION 5 homepage - it is delivered together with the engine. To get look into its inner workings see this documentation - not quite up to date, but still covering the most important subjects of both ELE and the ENG32 engine.
Aztec
My first 3D gaming project; this one started as 16 bit DOS Programm, and later on evolved to 32 Bit DOS, DirectX through all versions (software only) and finally to Glide 2.X. Direct3D is not supported by this engine, but the Station 5 Engine, which evolved out of the Aztec engine supports Direct3D too. See a description and downloads.
Computer
Graphics
Follow this link, if you want to see some handcraftet spaceships
Some other work: submarines and snow balls.
Personal
Please follow this link, if you want to know more about the author of this page.
Feedback
Drop me an e-mail
Other interesting links:
Computer
Game Developers' Association Home Page
