Month: December 2006

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Fast math ops

Just wanted to stash this little tidbit here in case I needed it for something.

This Slashdot article bringing up Origin of Quake3’s Fast InvSqrt(). The original article is a bit of a sleuthing expedition looking for the origins of this little code snippet and makes for an interesting read along with pointing to some other interesting sources.

The algorithm is a remarkable in the way it hides a lot of complexity in a simple looking package. All it does is calculate 1/sqrt(x), but does it very quickly using a cleverly written Newton-Raphson method.

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Collaborative writing made easier?

An abstract I wrote up for the little archive project I’ve been collecting data for got accepted as a talk for the SIIM 2007 annual meeting. One of the things they ask accepted presenters to do is to also submit a paper for publication in JDI.

Anybody who’s ever written a paper with more than one author knows that keeping track of all the revisions and changes from one author to another can be problematic, especially if both authors are contributing different sections.

This time I’m going to try something different. I’m going to try using Google Docs for the writing. At least for the content anyway. Google Docs has some neat collaborative functionality and revision tracking capabilities that will probably come in handy. My co-author and I can open the document at the same time, we can both write and even discuss online while we’re editing. Once we get things written, I’ll convert it into a LaTeX document for typesetting and submission.

This should be an interesting experiment.