I have to apologise again that this one is a little late but I’m still currently on a Land Administration assignment in the Solomon Islands and not only is my available time after hours to prepare the VG limited, but the local tech support have given me internal mail here at the Solomon Islands National Land Centre at the expense of all my external/internet accounts (including my VirtualGeography account, no less). Needless to say there has been a lot of stuff happening in the background here. Not to say that I don’t enjoy it – the VG makes me keep up with our industry in the rest of the world, which sometimes, seems a very, very long way away, SARS and Iraq notwithstanding. 

VirtualGeography is a collection of interesting snippets from all over the shop, dealing with industry issues concerning the computer based visualisation of geography and a few other associated (or otherwise) interesting bits and pieces. You are receiving this either because you subscribed to VirtualGeography or you have had recent dealings with VizMAP Pty Ltd. If you do not wish to receive further instalments of VirtualGeography, just click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this e-mail. 

A new VirtualGeography is pushed out about once per month, towards the end of the month, which shouldn’t be too big a drain on your mailbox if you’re not already subscribed (of course it won’t be a drain on your mailbox if you ARE subscribed, either ). If you know of anyone who might like to get VirtualGeography, feel free to forward this to them and ask them to subscribe. By the way, subscription and unsubscription details are at the bottom (click here).

So, g’day to all you enthusiasts requiring to visualise and simulate both urban and rural geographic information (GIS), cartography, photogrammetry, remote sensing, digital elevation modelling (DEM) and general mapping.

By the spelling of "Visualisation" you may have already guessed that we’re not US based – that’s a good thing, or at least not a bad thing. This comes to you from Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia, where it’s beautiful one day and perfect the next. The link between visualisation and mapping may seem a little esoteric if this is your first encounter with this sort of stuff, but let me tell you, the bond is significant… but enough of that: on with the show… I hope you like it. Any feedback you might have is highly appreciated. E-mail me hereto make your comments. Enjoy… Graeme Brooke VizMAP Pty Ltd

P.S. You’ll need an active internet connection to view any images that are in the content. We’ve done it this way to keep the size of the e-mail to a minimum.

To help understand where scenegraphs came from, it’s useful to take a quick look at the evolution of graphics languages like OpenGL and DirectX. Early on, real-time graphics existed on special image generation (IG) hardware that contained entire visual databases in closed proprietary form. Modellers created their databases and loaded them onto the hardware IG. Programmers were generally limited to modifying elements of these databases, like the position and rotation of a helicopter or setting the time-of-day.

SGI introduced a more open and programmable option for image generation hardware and along with it, graphical languages that allowed more direct programmability of the image pipeline. OpenGL (from SGI’s original "GL") consists of a stream of primitive drawing commands (draw polygon, line, point, etc..) state settings (set color, texture, etc..) and matrix manipulations (push/pop to model-view or perspective matrix, etc..). But it contains very little information that allows the system to self-optimize and improve performance.

This was fine for drawing all sorts of scenes. But polygons that are out of view do consume resources – the hardware doesn’t even know they’re out of view until very late in the rendering pipeline. Unnecessary state changes, extra texture loads, and other common graphics procedures are best avoided if they don’t contribute to the final image. 
 

Intel Corporation and HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced that BP, one of the world’s largest petroleum and petrochemicals companies, has added new and additional computing capabilities to its advanced seismic research facility. The research facility will benefit from the addition of HP Intel® Itanium® 2-based systems running Linux, resulting in dramatically faster seismic imaging.

Based in Houston, BP’s advanced seismic research center now includes a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster of 259 HP rx5670 systems with more than 1,000 Itanium 2 processors, providing a total of 4 teraflops and 8000 GB of memory, running under the Linux operating system. The HP Server rx5670 is part of HP’s broad portfolio of industry-standard Itanium-based hardware for enterprise customers. Using HP’s Itanium 2-based systems running Linux as well as Intel and HP software, compilers and tools, BP has achieved a significant increase in computing power, resulting in clearer images of the Earth’s subsurface structures and the hydrocarbons they contain. 

"To achieve the most cost-effective and productive drilling procedure, we have to gather massive sets of seismic data and analyze them quickly and accurately," said Keith Gray, manager of BP’s HPC center. "The combination of HP Itanium 2-based servers running Linux and software tools and services from Intel and HP gives us the power to produce better-defined results in a fraction of the time."

"The BP seismic solution illustrates the growing momentum for Itanium 2-based systems in heavy-duty enterprise computing," said John Davies, vice president, Sales and Marketing Group and director, Intel’s Solutions Market Development Group. "By using Itanium 2-based systems to run one of the most powerful commercial computing centers in the world, BP is able to take advantage of the world-class reliability, scalability and power provided by the Itanium 2 processor."

All the example programs have been ported over from being based on GLUT to using osgProducer (osgGLUT can now be found in the bazaar section on the website). The move to osgProducer allows all the examples to scale from running on laptops up to multiple CPU and graphics pipe systems. The configuration of threading and multiple camera views can all be done via ASCII configuration files, no need to recompile. A number of new examples have also been added or revamped, bringing the total to 42. 

Also in the theme of increasing scalability there is support for 64bit Linux for both IA64 (Intel Itanium) and x86-64 (AMD Opteron) which compliments the existing support for Solaris and IRIX 64 bit compilation. 64 bit supports allows the use of very large data sets, and potential performance improvements. 

To help support development teams working with multiple build configuration, the makefile system has been extended to allow multiple build targets to be built from one source code base. All makefiles are also now named GNUmakefile which ensures that they are only run by gmake to avoid an confusion on system where gmake isn’t the default make tool. 
 

Sample still images from the completed dynamic visualisation database are displayed here. An active internet connection is required to be able to view these scenes.

Click on these small resampled images to view the full screen images on the VizMAP website. Bear in mind that these are just screen dumps from a dynamic, interactive, 3D "flythrough". 

Users can be deluged by unwanted emails 
The conference, organised by the Federal Trade Commission, was looking at the proliferation of commercial e-mail and exploring the technical, legal and financial issues that spam raises. 

Speakers at the conference painted a gloomy future for e-mail unless the problem of spam is immediately addressed. 

A Federal Trade Commission representative said things were worse than they had imagined and without immediate improvements, e-mail could be run into the ground. 

Internet providers said it was the sheer number of messages that posed the threat. 

Strategies

There were different views on the best way to tackle the problem of spam, which now accounts for more than 40% of e-mails. 

Many at the forum suggested new countrywide legislation was needed in the United States, but others said the only solution was to block spam with new technology. 

The forum brought together internet providers, anti-spam campaigners and Washington policy makers, but it also heard from e-mail marketers, who maintained that reputable operators only sent messages to consumers who wanted to hear from them. 

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