All day long I’ve had my hands full working on a personal project, I’ve been beating my brains out with an algorithm involving a couple of complicated calculations, in fact, I just got it done. The code (written in C#) seems to work good enough, I’ll have to clean it up a bit, though. There are still quite a few useless source lines of code. As I need to do some C# + OpenGL programming for my project, I’ve been trying out some available OpenGL bindings for C# like opengl-sharp that includes a Gtk# widget and GtkGL# that includes it too. Finally, I decided to use Tao Framework which is a collection of bindings to various native libraries (OpenGL, SDL, OpenAL among others), furthermore, it seems to be the current standard OpenGL wrapper API for Mono.

As Tao is not a Unix technology but a migration technology (from .NET), perhaps a whole bunch of people may think it’s not a good choice for building a GNOME application. Nevertheless, I, myself, think we’re in the real world and Tao is, for the moment at least, the best choice for developing cross-platform OpenGL applications.As part of my project, I’ve been using the F-spot’s source code, so I got a modified F-spot version (0.2.0) running on my laptop. My F-spot-0.2.2 (unmodified version) runs perfectly, but when I modify it with the same changes I made to F-spot-0.2.0, it simply crashes. I need F-Spot-0.2.2 to work with the new features I added to F-spot-0.2.0 (3D modeling from pictures) in order to continue my project so I’ll have to patch it once again. It seems that this may be due to a dbus-sharp problem (Managed D-Bus issue) which is the C# implementation of D-Bus used by F-spot-0.2.2 for single-instance detection. I’ve not had enough time to read the D-Bus API documentation so I haven’t the faintest idea how those lines of code work (within F-Spot-0.2.2). Anyways, the algorithm I’m working with for generating 3D human faces from pictures doesn’t work yet due to the lack of important features within the skin chrominance model that I use for creating realistic 3D human face models, in some cases it works but it takes up to 10 min of computing time ! so I still need to fix a bunch of issues.

In the future, I’d like to add some extra features like statistical modelling and host the project in a subversion repository. I started hacking on this project as an educational exercise, now I’m really getting so excited about it.

By the way, I wasn’t going to post a geek-oriented blog entry, why did I do it?

It’s been a longtime since I decided to use Xgl / Compiz as the default composite window manager for my GNOME Desktop. I tried it out just after David Reveman’s talk at GUADEC 6 (in Stuttgart, Germany).
When I installed it for the first time (about one year ago), I thought to myself, what a cool piece of software I just installed !
Although at that time, I had to get the code from CVS and it was a bit unstable, it worked very good, especially the 3D cube which is my favorite compiz plug-in. Now, since I can update it through Portage (from Gentoo Foundation’s mirrors), I think I will forget 2D window managers for a while (maybe forever).

I just read a couple of mails where some people ask me if I hate the American way of life, especially the American capitalism. Because of those who have misunderstood my last post, I’m going to make a few comments on it.Some Mexican friends have told me they dislike America basically for the next reasons:

- War in the middle east (Iraq, Israel).
- Oil and weapons of mass destruction.
- Pollution record (Kyoto).
- Patriotism.
- Discrimination (racism)
- Just jealousy

Anyways, there’re a lot of reasons, most of them involving American foreign policies which are enough to convince people in both the eastern world (Islamic or otherwise theocratic nations) and western world (developing countries) that anti-American hatred is justified. But are they really enough to hate America as nation? I don’t think so, after all, the US is a very young nation which has actually a child as a government.
Even though the US government doesn’t show the faintest sign of humility and modesty, it has nothing to do with most American people who do their best in order to reach their goals and are actually the true power of the United States.

I’m not someone who has anti-American feelings, in fact, I got a lot of American friends who have always been very friendly toward me. I could say I love America as nation.

By the way, a Mexican friend of mine made a comment into his blog on my perception of richness. He actually mentioned that richness is an unlimited resource. I agree, if richness is measured in terms of knowledge. We can measure richness in terms of money as well, but in this case richness is a limited resource. Given this situation, the “American Dream” could be true just for those who create knowledge for producing richness in terms of money (in most cases). Unfortunately, “American Dream” is all about richness in terms of money, that’s the way most people see it at least. In this case, richness is a limited resource, then the “American Dream” is not a reality for every single person entering the US since most of them cannot create enough knowledge to produce unlimited richness (in terms of money), they’re just the support of an economic model which cannot be seen in the way “American Dream” does.

If “American Dream” were true, how would you explain poverty in the United States?

Although, I think the US is a great nation, I do believe “American Dream” is utter nonsense. Probably your views on it are completely opposite to mine, which is acceptable as well.

As simple as the John Lennon’s song “God” says: “I don’t believe in American Dream, I just believe in me and that’s reality“.